Chapter Text
Part I - Another Ghost, Another Day
Nathalie bent over the bathroom sink, retching. Her lungs blazed within her chest, her ribcage ached from the exertion of coughing the life out of her body, and every expulsion of air sent a stabbing pain through her like a javelin. Blots of crimson mucus clung to the walls of the sink. Thinner droplets of blood trickled down towards the drain, and when Nathalie finally finished, her head throbbing like the tick of a time bomb about to explode, she turned on the faucet, and let it all run away.
Spots of darkness coated her vision like TV static. When Nathalie finally peered up into her reflection, she watched her two tired eyes converge into one at the center of her forehead before she stopped seeing altogether. Her feet failed to hold her up any longer. As Nathalie's knees buckled, she grabbed the edge of the countertop and sank slowly to the floor, laying her body across the fluffy bathmat below that felt less like a bathmat now than it did a plot of dirt, grainy and old and like she could be buried in it.
"Oh…" she heard herself say. Her own voice sounded as though it was coming through the floor. A persistent ringing in her ears drowned out all sound, including the faucet still running above her.
But once she had been laying there for a minute, her vision began to clear. The panic she'd felt as she wondered if she'd been going blind faded away. Nathalie's fingers curled into the fibers of the bathmat. Each breath she took was rough and heavy as though the air had thickened with sand and smoke. She ached from head to toe, weary down to the bone.
She hadn't processed the first couple knocks at the door. But when she failed to react and the person on the other side called out her name, she forced herself to sit up. Nathalie's head whirled in response to the elevation, throbbing to the beat of the next several knocks.
"Nathalie?" said Gabriel, sounding worried. "Nathalie!"
"I'm alright, sir," she answered. She tasted blood.
"Are you sure?" The locked door handle shifted as he rested his hand on it from the other side. "You've been in there for…"
Ten minutes. A glass of water hadn't been nearly enough to tame the wave of faintness that crashed over her while she was sitting at her desk that long ago. She dismissed herself to the bathroom to splash some water on her face and gather some more toilet paper to cough into when she felt those thorns sprout through her chest. But Nathalie had been shocked to look in the mirror and find her face so pale, her eyes so sunken in, leaving such heavy gray shadows. Her illness worsened all at once. She doubled over, coughing. She coughed until she couldn't breathe. She coughed until she spat blood out at the mirror, and then into the palm of her hand, and then into the sink when she finally felt weak enough to stop.
"I'm okay," she said. "I'll be out in a few minutes."
She didn't hear him pull away from the door. He stood there, waiting, perhaps, for her to emerge.
Get back to your feet, she told herself. Nathalie reached up to set her palms on the countertop. Her grip painted a streak of blood across the white quartz. Nathalie grabbed a washcloth and soaked it under the running faucet, which she then promptly switched off. She cleaned up the mess she had made, wiping thoroughly, and scanned her eyes across the bathroom for any spots she may have missed.
Get back to work, she thought next, and threw the washcloth into the trash bin underneath the counter. She hid it with some toilet paper. It was best not to leave any evidence of the episode.
Nathalie turned too quickly towards the door. Her head rushed to catch up with her movement, and she stumbled forward, grabbing the doorknob with too much force.
"Nathalie?" Gabriel said.
She unlocked the door, rapidly blinking the dizziness out of her eyes before she came face to face with him.
"You look…" he said, grabbing her by shoulder.
"I'm sorry, sir, I'm just a little tired. I'll be fine," she insisted.
"Unwell," he finished. Gabriel stepped aside so she could finally move out of the doorway. His hand trailed against her body as she walked, bracing to catch her as if she was in danger to fall. "Perhaps, you should retire early."
"No, please. I only need to distract myself," she replied, not sparing him a glance. "I'd prefer to go back to work."
"The battle today was longer than usual, Nathalie. I can see that it took a great toll on you."
Nathalie self-consciously wiped her lips with the back of her hand. Had there been any remaining blood there, he would have already noticed, but the move was a rather reflexive one as she was reminded of the akuma attack that had stretched from eight o'clock that morning to three in the afternoon. She hadn't been transformed all that time, having only entered the fight herself several hours in to provide some extra force, but Mayura was beginning to withstand less and less exertion. She knew she pushed herself today.
"Sir, I'm fine," she told him. They emerged into the atrium together, now on their way back to the atelier. Nathalie glanced over her shoulder at him, and Gabriel at once drew his hand away, returning it to his side. "We lost a considerable amount of time today due to that attack. There's a lot of work to catch up on."
Gabriel did not argue with this, though the force with which he sealed his lips indicated that he wanted to.
"Don't worry," she added softly, hoping this would put him more at ease. She wasn't sure how many different ways she had told him something similar.
When Nathalie was back at her desk, she spent the majority of the next hour catching up on all the emails she had missed throughout the day. Luckily, the episode had seemed to pass out of her body, and though her head was still in a fog and her body still aching, she at least felt confident that she wouldn't have another coughing fit before she was finished. Nathalie sat in her desk chair with her spine ramrod straight and her shoulders rolled back, attempting to appear as attentive as possible to the man standing agitated across the room.
His concern had always been touching. The way Nathalie saw it, Gabriel didn't have to care for what she was willing to risk. He loved Emilie enough that didn't matter. Ultimately, wishing his wife back to life was more important than any sacrifice she had to make to ensure that was possible. For months now, Gabriel had been becoming increasingly more worried for her health. Nathalie knew that it couldn't be easy for him, to watch somebody else succumb to the same pain and exhaustion that had dragged Emilie under. When his blue-gray eyes peered across the atelier to watch her, Nathalie reminded herself, the reason he didn't want to see her this way was because he couldn't afford to lose her alliance, the same way he couldn't afford to lose a stellar employee. Nathalie knew both sides.
He needs my help. If she believed her participation in battle wasn't going to lead them closer to victory, then she would find another way to assist him. The worse her health became, the less she'd be able to don the transformation, but Mayura was too valuable an advantage to exhaust. She provided where he fell short. She gave when he could give no more. She was the arm he could reach a little further with, and the leg he could stand a little taller with, and the heart that beat in a steady rhythm, urging his to slow.
There would be no Mayura if Nathalie was too weak to embody her. When her lungs cleared and her vision ceased spinning, that was always the fear hardening her mind. Every time she was asked how she felt, she answered, "I'm fine," but she knew she was dying. She knew her time was limited, and that meant Mayura's was as well. Nathalie thought through fog and breathed through brambles, and each and every one of those beats was a reminder that she could only offer her help for so long.
Gabriel was afraid of that too, she told herself. Many times, he'd insisted that he could no longer bear to see her hurt like this, but he always came back around to hand her that miraculous again. Nathalie didn't blame him. The painful part of all of this was the reminder of what that power had taken from him before, but the worse danger was losing the opportunity to take it back, an opportunity he robbed from himself each time she relinquished the brooch, and restored when he pressed it back into her palm.
But Nathalie should have been giving him more credit than that. It wasn't only Mayura he dreaded to let slip away. Gabriel was a good man, and he didn't want to watch Nathalie suffer any more than he wanted to lose his ally. In the worst moments, she couldn't even feel his arms around her, not while she was fighting to remain conscious; but most of the time, his touch warmed her through her blood. As he drew her into his chest or squeezed her hand between his own, Nathalie's pulse fluttered. Because he did care. About her. It flowed out from the lines in his palms and the breath on the top of her head.
Gabriel had been caught on crossroads before, torn between persistence and surrender. He was a man hanging uncomfortably close to the balance of paralyzed inaction, tipped more so one direction by a love falling further away from him and an assistant seeking his long-awaited contentment. As the latter of these two things, Nathalie felt at times that she was betraying her own mission by melting into his touch, by listening when he asked her to stop. If she gave up, she feared he'd be more likely to dangle passively in his misery than pursue fulfillment elsewhere. She couldn't let that happen. She couldn't let him yield to despair when there was yet a chance of changing everything.
So, when at the end of the hour Gabriel approached her desk as she was signing off her last belated email response, she glanced up from her computer screen and smiled at him brightly. "I'm feeling much better now, sir," she told him. It wasn't a lie. Whatever pain sat with her now was nothing compared to coughing up blood. But she needed to be as convincing as possible to soothe the ache of guilt that surely incited him to approach her now.
He didn't return her smile. A grave expression aged him by ten years. "Nathalie," he said. "I believe that now, but please, I ask of you never to hesitate to tell me if something is wrong."
She dipped her head at him. "Of course, sir."
"I'm relieved you are better now, but I know you were in pretty bad shape earlier. Is there anything I should know?"
Nathalie hesitated, not as an indication of her deceit, but to hold his gaze sternly for a moment of meaningful silence before she answered, "No, sir."
Gabriel winced. It was barely perceptible, just a shift in his gaze rather than a movement in his body or face. A darkening of the blue-gray shade of his iris, as though it was taking on the weight and the gloom of a storm cloud.
She lifted one of her hands off the keyboard and reached it across her desk. Her fingers came to a rest on the glass, pointed out towards him, while she continued to gently smile.
Slowly, Gabriel's hands came undone. They appeared from behind his back, and he had to take two steps forward in order to lay one of them down on top of hers. Just overlapping her fingers with his.
She was the first to pull away, a simple, soft movement that she paired with a nod, as if to say, See?
And he answered, turning away, "Okay."
It was June. As Nathalie entered her bedroom after her shower, the moon pierced through the sky, slicing through the spaces in her blinds and casting blades of light over the floor and her bed. The weight of the day's loss hadn't fully set in until she had returned to her apartment that night, the hours between their defeat and then being spent trying to distract both herself and Gabriel from her sickness. Once she had closed the apartment door and locked it behind her, she felt as though she had been struck by some invisible force, the disappointment of failure having finally acquired the opportunity to make itself known. Nathalie had leaned back against her door, taken a deep breath, and proceeded right to the shower to wash away her weariness. She'd taken one that morning, but she always felt she needed another after a transformation, like there was still some blue skin to rub away.
Nathalie stood in the center of the room, taking her damp hair down from its towel, and staring out at the glaring summer moon. At this time of the year, it glowed vaguely yellow, making it look to her more like a sun failing to set the sky in a blue blaze. She hung her towel and climbed into bed. When she faced the window, she could still sense the light faintly illuminating her visage on the other side of her closed eyelids.
She got used to it quickly, but a few minutes later, as she had fallen halfway asleep, there seemed to be an explosion of light in her room. Nathalie shot up. When she opened her eyes, she had to close them again right away, lest she be blinded by the flat white circle of light, the diameter of which stretched practically from the floor to the ceiling of the room.
Nathalie jolted as a hand clasped over her mouth. The darkness returned just a second later, and she opened her eyes to stare into the face of a red-haired superhero hovering above her.
"Please, don't scream," she said. Nathalie listened, glaring into the intruder's darkened face. "I apologize for showing up like this, but I needed to find you alone, and you have very rarely been alone lately."
Nathalie recognized the tall ears sprouting out of the heroine's hair. As her eyes adjusted once more to the moonlit room, she could also make out the pale blue shade of her costume, and the umbrella that had been dropped on the bed beside her. This was Bunnyx, the rabbit miraculous holder of the future.
"There is a problem. A big one," said Bunnyx, carefully removing her hand from Nathalie's mouth. "I need your help."
"My help?" Nathalie echoed. Bunnyx withdrew, stepping back several paces and grabbing her umbrella once again. Before asking any more questions, Nathalie reached for the lamp beside her bed and switched it on. Her hand was shaking as she pulled it away, as now that the initial shock of having been intruded upon at night was fading away, she was realizing that she was alone in the room with a miraculous holder, a miraculous holder from a future where Hawkmoth's mantle had been taken up by somebody else, and Gabriel and Nathalie may very well have been found out, defeated, and thrown into prison. Although, if that was the case, Nathalie couldn't imagine what would be the use of traveling back ten years to confront her. She tried to push down the panic bubbling within.
"Get dressed," Bunnyx said, tossing Nathalie the clothes she had laid out on top of her dresser for the next day. "We don't have a lot of time."
Nathalie snatched her sweater out of the air and rose to her feet, glowering at the younger woman viciously. "Bold of you to appear in a flash of light in my own bedroom this late at night to begin with, but to offer me no explanation upfront?"
"As I said, we don't have much time. I'll have the opportunity once I get you into the future." retorted Bunnyx. She turned around, facing the bedroom door, a signal that she was expecting Nathalie to change.
"You are taking me to the future?"
"That's the only reason I would be here, that or a time-traveling akuma, and I don't think I'll have to deal with another one of those anytime soon."
Bunnyx wasn't budging, so Nathalie got dressed. Once she had pulled her sweater over her head and untucked her still-damp hair, Bunnyx opened the time-gate, creating another disk of bright white light that Nathalie squinted her eyes against.
"How do I know I can trust you?" Nathalie asked.
Bunnyx's lips curled into a smile. She gave her umbrella a twirl. "Oh, well, I suppose I didn't expect you to question me. I always thought the citizens of Paris were pretty well-aware of the various heroes they've met over the last year – right, it's been a year at this point? I at least would anticipate they'd find the time-traveling bunny-themed superhero rather memorable. Unless of course, you have a different reason not to trust me?"
Nathalie's blood turned to ice. The knowing glint in Bunnyx's blue eyes confirmed her fears, that the heroine knew exactly who she was. Nathalie stepped back, away from the gate, nearly running herself into the wall behind her. She stopped the trembling of her hands by linking them together behind her back, and she forced her voice to remain level, when she said, "I don't want to go with you."
"I'm not going to do anything to you," insisted Bunnyx, her tone softer now. "But believe me when I say there isn't enough time to wait around like this. Your future is in danger. The entire future of Paris is in danger if you don't help me now. I would not have come to you if you were not the only person capable of fixing this."
She extended her hand to Nathalie, who hesitated for several seconds, wondering if she would somehow be led to her doom either way. Had Bunnyx decided that it would be best for Paris if she interfered with the past to bring Hawkmoth and Mayura's reign to its premature end? If not, maybe would she threaten to use her knowledge as leverage to get Nathalie to comply? Nathalie's thoughts shifted back and forth, her fingers folding and unfolding multiple times over the ten seconds of silence that passed. She was ready to decline again, for Gabriel's mission was too important to so willingly risk like this.
"If there is one thing I know about you," Bunnyx said with a smirk, before she could speak, "it's that you are very capable of playing the hero. I need that side of you now."
Nathalie exhaled shakily through her teeth. She didn't have the peacock miraculous with her to defend herself, but the longer she made Bunnyx wait, the more the heroine's inviting countenance hardened. Soon, Nathalie was looking at a very worried young woman, who's smirk curved in the opposite direction and whose brow pinched above eyes dimming with doubt. Bunnyx flexed her fingers, a clear indication that she was desperate for Nathalie's acceptance.
"Please," whispered Bunnyx.
Nathalie shut her eyes. She took a deep breath. At last, she raised her hand to take Bunnyx's, but they never made contact. Nathalie's eyes flicked open to watch her fist close over empty air. The rabbit miraculous holder's hand flickered out of existence, and her eyes stretched wide to see that her right arm now ended just above her wrist.
"We have to go," she said. Her left hand, which was still intact, grabbed Nathalie by the forearm and drew her through the gate. They passed swiftly through the burrow's interior. All the while, Nathalie was too overwhelmed by her surroundings to speak, all of those circular windows depicting so many different moments in time that she could not process any of them. Bunnyx led her to another gate and pushed her through.
A wall of frigid air struck her as she emerged on the other side. Nathalie's scalp went ice cold as the wind tossed the wet strands of her hair behind her head. She folded her arms across her chest and curled her toes within her slippers – she hadn't even brought real shoes!
Bunnyx stepped ahead of her, closing the burrow with a wave of her umbrella. "Sorry," she said, "I would have told you to grab a coat, but I already wasted a lot of time just trying to get you to come with me."
"How far are we into the future?" asked Nathalie.
"Six months."
They were standing at a familiar intersection, one that Nathalie always passed through when traveling between her apartment building and the Agreste mansion. She was used to seeing it crawling with vehicles, but now it was completely empty, and down both streets there was not a car to be seen, not even parked on the side of the road.
The more she looked around, the more uneasy she began to feel. It seemed that she and Bunnyx were the only people within a considerable radius. The buildings flanking the streets seemed empty. Windows that were intact revealed no Parisians on the other side of the glass, but many, many windows had been shattered apart. The sidewalks were littered with shards, and the curbs were catching glass like they caught leaves in the fall.
Nathalie had never in her life heard the city so quiet.
She felt like she was standing in a video game.
"What happened in six months?" she murmured.
Bunnyx started walking, and Nathalie followed behind, constantly shifting her eyes back and forth to gawk at the destruction and emptiness of the city. Paris had been completely hollowed out and stood before her a cold gray shell. "Well," replied the time-traveler, "you know how powerful akumas can be."
"An akuma did this?"
"What else?"
It was silly of her to expect another explanation. Nathalie supposed there was just something about all this damage that felt more permanent than the havoc wreaked by any of Hawkmoth's supervillains. The longer she walked, the less she could fathom that so little time had passed. To her, it looked like the city had worn away, that its scars were deep and ancient. Whatever akuma this was, it looked like it had dealt decades worth of destruction in such little time.
Nathalie rubbed her arms. "I don't understand. I thought you came from the future. A different future. One where Ladybug and Chat Noir are still the heroes and everything is – relatively normal. How is this six months from the present?"
"Time is…fragile," Bunnyx replied, glancing down. "You'd think it be as simple as everything moving in this continuous, unbreakable loop, like in movies, but…for the sake of keeping it simple, let's just say it's more like a train track, and there are certain factors, certain very rare factors that can derail the train. Usually, my kwami is the one who sets this stuff straight, but with particular situations, a human influence is essential."
Nathalie's slippers were loose fitting and she struggled to keep them on her feet as she walked along. She flexed her toes and ground her hands together and blinked at Bunnyx shyly. "Why me?"
"You are the only person who can take down this akuma."
"But how? I don't have a miraculous."
"That's for the best. This akuma can track miraculous. Every single one in Paris has been seized with the exception of Ladybug and Chat Noir's, who have been in hiding for months. I'm in serious danger out here. Soon enough, the akuma's minions will track me down, which means I need to get you to the Agreste mansion as quickly as I can."
Nathalie, despite Bunnyx's words, came to a sudden halt. Continuing to press ahead, Bunnyx merely threw a glance over her shoulder and waved a hand for Nathalie to catch up, evidently serious about not having time to waste. Nathalie blew a warm breath into her palms and caught up again. "Why the Agreste mansion? Is that where the akuma is?"
"Sancoeur," Bunnyx said gravely, "this isn't some everyday civilian we're dealing with here. The akuma isn't being controlled by Hawkmoth – the akuma is Hawkmoth."
If she hadn't been freezing already, Nathalie certainly felt as though she had been plunged into ice water now. A shiver rippled through her body. The cold, dry air had already been tightening her lungs, but for a moment, she felt the oxygen being squeezed out of them. She pressed a fist to her mouth and coughed, flinching at the stabbing-pain that lanced through her chest.
"Hawkmoth?" she rasped. Her heart lurched.
Bunnyx took her by the shoulder and pushed her along, eyes glimmering with concern. "Something happened in your present that set off a divergent chain of events leading to Hawkmoth akumatizing himself to track down the miraculous. This never happened under the correct timeline of reality, and now everybody's future is in danger. You are the only person Hawkmoth trusts, which means you are the only person who can fix this."
"Do you know why he akumatized himself?" asked Nathalie. He'd done it before, but not like this. Nothing she had seen so far could have possibly been the work of Scarlet Moth. Her breaths became shallower and shallower as her mind raced with questions about how all of this had gone so wrong. Despite knowing Bunnyx was fully aware of her identity, Nathalie still found herself reluctant to ask, "Is he okay?" Fear won over caution, however.
"I haven't had the time or the ability to investigate. Shit—!" Bunnyx cursed, as her foot went out from under her. Like her right hand, it vanished, leaving only one leg to hop on. "As you can see, my entire future hangs in the balance, and you can probably assume yours does too, so as much as Hawkmoth is your partner in crime and you want him to succeed, you're going to have to have to undo this."
"But—"
Nathalie had no chance to speak before a low moan echoed down the empty street from behind them, sounding like a discordant series of many overlapping voices. Bunnyx's face paled.
"It's them."
"Who?"
"Hawkmoth's minions. They're coming for me."
At once, Nathalie set Bunnyx's arm around her shoulders and started to lead her quickly away from that cacophonic chorus.
"We're not going to outrun them," said the rabbit miraculous holder, but Nathalie pressed forward. She made a turn around a corner, on the street where the Agreste residence was found. It was still several blocks away, but they were getting closer.
Nathalie jolted as something flew above their heads, something larger than any bird she'd ever seen, soaring from one rooftop to the next. Their pursuers seemed to see it too, as they all released a joint call that resounded through the streets at a bone-chilling volume. Nathalie nearly tripped as she lost a slipper, but there was no time to retrieve it. She moved on, the frigid surface of the ground stinging her foot with every step.
Then, something descended and landed on its feet several meters away from them. Nathalie froze, taking in the unbelievable sight in front of her. From the neck down, they looked like a totally normal civilian, in spite of the small rips in their clothing and their missing shoes, but Nathalie was staring fearfully into a face that was the color of ash and eyes that had lost their pupils, clouded, swollen, and a very pale sickly shade of green. Antennae sprouted from their temples, and a pair of gray, flat, leaf-like wings lay in a triangular shape across their back.
"What is—?"
The moth-like person let out a deep groan, and from behind came the response of countless other minions copying the unsettling sound.
Bunnyx shoved Nathalie, who toppled to the ground near the sidewalk.
"Go to the Agreste mansion, find Hawkmoth," she urged Nathalie, unfolding the umbrella. "They won't follow you. You don't have a miraculous. They want me."
Nathalie watched as a crowd of moth-people began gliding towards them. Inhuman shouts rattled the disturbing emptiness of the city, filling it instead with something sharp and cold and full of grief. Nathalie felt as though those voices carried weight, weight that sank against her now, pinching her shoulders and shooting down her spine.
Bunnyx opened her burrow. "Go! It's up to you."
She leaped into the light and was gone.
Nathalie didn't wait to see what the moth-people would do next. She staggered to her feet and ran. She tripped and fell once more a block later, losing her second slipper, but she pushed forward still. She ran blocks without stopping, though her body screamed at her with every piercing pain through her chest, through her ribs, through her head. She wasn't meant to be pushing herself like this.
The voices started to fade behind her, but Nathalie kept running, and when the Agreste mansion came into view at last, she ran faster. She narrowly missed a pile of shattered glass. She swore when she kicked a pebble with her toe, sending it rolling into the curb where a trash can had been tilted over, possibly having lain there for months undisturbed. Nathalie's ears and nose stung at the cold. She ran against the wind.
When she'd made it, Nathalie clung to the bars of the front gate. Her legs trembled, barely strong enough to hold her up as she coughed around the needles in her throat. The world titled back and forth around her. For a moment, her consciousness faded in and out, vision going dark and then light again. She started to slide towards the ground. Nathalie dug her fingernails into the palms of her hand. She dug hard enough to break the skin, desperate to keep herself awake.
Go, she told herself. Go.
The gate was hanging ajar. Nathalie pulled herself off her knees and dragged it open, panting as though she was moving a boulder with her bare hands. She slipped through once the gap was wide enough and stumbled when she no longer had anything to hold on to. Nathalie passed through the courtyard, ignoring the drumming of her head and the heart pulsing in her throat. She tasted blood on the walls of her esophagus.
Nathalie climbed the stairs slowly. Her legs quivered with every step, until they had nearly gone numb. She leaned against the door once she had grabbed its handle, taking fast and deep breaths while she pressed her forehead against the wood.
I'm coming, Gabriel.
The door was unlocked.
She entered.