Chapter Seventeen

Right before the Sorcerer had fallen to the floor, Ladybug's very first thought upon seeing her face was, She's tall.

Probably about 1.9 meters if she had to guess. Tall for a woman. She wasn't standing very straight now, being held up on her feet by Hawkmoth and Mayura, but Ladybug thought she was at least taller than Chat Noir standing beside her. He stared open-mouthed at the scene unfolding in front of him, blinking at each struggle the Sorcerer made to free herself.

Her apprehenders backed away, and she dropped against the wall in tears.

Mayura whispered, "Anaïs?"

Anaïs?

Anaïs Who?

But then Ladybug felt as though the floor had shifted right under her feet, her entire center of gravity being warped. She grabbed Chat Noir's forearm, who unlike her, felt so steady that he might as well have turned to stone, but Ladybug couldn't glance at him right now. Her eyes were locked on the woman, on that face that she realized resembled Nathalie's so strongly, there was no denying that it had to be the face of her daughter. It simply had to. There was no other explanation. Nose and jawline were identical. Brow was identical. The only thing that wasn't a practically perfect reflection of Mrs. Agreste was the pair of eyes, round with horror and shiny as dinner plates, yet bearing striking similarities to Hawkmoth's typically focused stare.

Ladybug shut her mouth with a loud click of teeth - she hadn't even noticed it fall open. Holy shit…

The young woman hadn't apparently heard Mayura utter her name. She sat there trying to regain her breath for a moment before she lurched forward onto her hands and reached for the many shattered fragments of her mask.

"There's no way." Ladybug finally looked up at her partner, who watched with an expression twitching in disbelief. "That's not...but she's…"

Ladybug closed her grip around his arm firmer, to remind him that she was present. He looked halfway in her direction before quickly looking back again.

"But it can't…"

It could, though. Maybe it was the sheer possibility of the situation that imbued Ladybug's mouth with this sour taste of upset shock. Maybe if there truly was no conceivable way that this was happening, she'd feel a lot blanker right now, a lot colder. The problem was this was possible, and it didn't even go as far as the numerous confounding things the Sorcerer accomplished with their strange magic. Time travel was real and sensible to them as any other super power Ladybug had handed out to the palms of her trusted allies.

Even if it hadn't been her first or second guess, it was almost stupid that she'd never even considered it before.

"Is that really you?" Hawkmoth asked in dismay. The Sorcerer was stacking the pieces of her mask in her hands, and when she heard his voice, her movements seized. Her eyes blew wide open and gazed towards the floor.

"I don't have a…" she murmured. "I don't have a - a name."

She sounded just like Nathalie. Her voice was only a little deeper.

"I don't have a face," she added. She selected one of the fragments with a shaking hand and pressed it over her right eye. It clattered back to the floor the moment she let it go. "No, no. I don't have a face."

She laid the fragments on the floor and attempted to rearrange them. Her breath was frantic and her fingers even more so. Eventually she peeled the gloves off her hands and threw them aside, as if that would make it possible for her to adhere the pieces together again. A lot of the skin around her nails had been torn away, leaving patches of bright red on her fingers.

Mayura spun around, and Chat Noir immediately stepped towards her, breaking out of his rigid stance. His step-mother was pale and her expression was that of someone who was seconds from throwing up. She likely would have collapsed had he not made it to her side in time, wrapping an arm around her waist and using the other to hold up her shoulders. She held her hands up to the side of her face, blocking her peripheries, forcing her glassy pink gaze to only view what lay ahead of her. She looked at Ladybug, only to find the heroine's disposition to be nearly as troubled as her own. With a series of trembling breaths, Mayura let herself be eased down to the floor by Chat Noir.

"Breathe," he was telling her, once she'd landed on her knees. "It's fine, it's -"

"Oh my God," she panted, clasping her hand against her chest. Her breathing became only more erratic until it broke out into a sob. Mayura bent forward, letting her forehead hover inches from the floor, while Chat Noir rubbed circles into her back. He looked to his father, as if searching for assistance, but Hawkmoth stood watching the Sorcerer continue to try to finish the puzzle that was her shattered mask.

Half a minute went by, and as those seconds pressed on, she started working faster and faster, the scowl on her face deepening and then twisting with terror. She'd arranged the fragments into a recognizable shape eventually, but appeared to be missing a chip, for she started dashing her eyes wildly around the floor.

"Where's it?" she asked aloud. "Where's it?"

Hawkmoth shifted his foot, and revealed the lone shard under the toe of his shoe. The Sorcerer caught sight of it and paused, sucking in her breath. She then tilted back her head and looked up into his face.

Ladybug couldn't see his expression, but she could guess it was filled with anguish.

"Anaïs," he murmured.

"No," she replied.

He stepped forward, and she drew away, dragging the pieces with her. She fell onto her tailbone and kicked a leg out, giving an additional protest.

Ladybugs's heart was aching, because if she gathered anything from the Sorcerer's reaction, it was that Gabriel must have done something wrong to her. But Hawkmoth didn't seem to arrive at that same conclusion. He came even closer and crouched down to her level. There was this frozen, uncertain kind of fear in her face, like she was seeing a ghost.

"Wings fall."

The transformation withered away. Nooroo swirled into place above his holder's head, pressing his hands together nervously as he watched the scene below him.

Gabriel set his hands on his daughter's wrists and her fists unclenched, dropping the fragments she was holding.

"Anaïs, Baby Girl -"

She flung herself into his arms.

Nothing in the world had the ability to settle the troubled spirits of everybody in that room, but some of the tension melted out of Ladybug's body seeing this distraught woman finally take some comfort. She sobbed into Gabriel's shoulders, clinging to him like he kept her head above water. It seemed that she was trying to speak, but Ladybug couldn't make out her words through her heavy outpour of emotion.

Gabriel was tense under her arms, hugging her back rather weakly. Ladybug supposed that knowing this sorcerer was his daughter did not make the embrace any less shocking. She couldn't imagine what was running through his mind, since her own was only starting to process the fact that Anaïs had not materialized out of thin air in the place of the soulless Sorcerer, but that the two were the same, that Anaïs had been hiding behind that mask all that time and that she was one Ladybug and everyone else had tied to chair and questioned. Each time she tried to force herself to reconcile the two, either the Sorcerer lost all humanness in her mind, or the woman hanging on to Gabriel became a nameless stranger.

They are the same. They are Anaïs.

Chat Noir nudged Mayura softly, urging her to look. With enough encouragement, she raised her head from the floor and dared to turn her gaze back towards her husband. Still however, the sight seemed too much for her to bear, for she shut her eyes and faced forward once more.

"We're going to figure this out," Chat Noir assured her, pressing her hand. "It'll make sense, it'll make sense. We all just need to…" His voice broke and he cleared his throat, choosing to say nothing else.

Gabriel took Anaïs by the shoulders and gently pushed her back. She gave him this long, amazed look,

"I knew it was you," she said through tears, "But is it really you?"

"Yes, it's me. Now let's calm down," he replied. "Let's talk."

"I can't. I just can't, don't you get it?"

Mayura brought her hands up to her ears. Breathlessly, she cried, "Make it stop."

Gabriel stood up. A hand reached out for him, grabbed at his pant leg as he turned around and started walking away. Anaïs asked him where he was going, but he wordlessly went to the chair she had been tied to minutes ago and brought it back. He told her to sit.

She didn't move.

"Sit," he snapped

His firmness upset her. Hurt flashed in her gaze. She did as she was told and cradled her head in her hands.

Only now did Ladybug feel like she was capable of moving. She took a few small steps forward, wondering if the shift her weight would somehow tilt this fragile space. When the quiet persisted and the room stayed still, she went to Mayura's side and helped Chat Noir lift her back to her feet. Ladybug could feel her shaking.

"I think we all need a moment," she said to Chat.

They took one. Ladybug held on to Mayura through the next few minutes, during which nobody in the lair uttered more than the sparse, quiet exclamation of shock. Gabriel was silent until he eventually chose to transform once again, and seeing him do this, Anaïs appeared to mellow as well. Her distressed body language relaxed. She ceased to cry, though her eyes remained bright red and swollen and her silence was frequently broken by sniffles. She stared at the ground, at the scattered mess of silver fragments her fingers twitched at but never touched.

Once Mayura was able to stand on her own, both Ladybug and Chat Noir peeled away from her. "Are you ready?" Chat asked.

She shook her head.

"That's okay. I'm not either."

Ladybug approached Anaïs. She didn't know what the future had in store, but she could only assume that of everyone else in the room, she was the person Anaïs would be least anxious to face. She paused at Hawkmoth's side and exchanged a glance with him, seeing his face for the first time since the revelation. He looked horrified.

She nodded her head towards Anaïs, as if to ask, "May I?" This went unacknowledged, so she began, praying her voice would not tremble, "From how far into the future did you come?"

Anaïs tossed her shoulders.

"How old are you?"

"Twenty."

Mayura gave a sharp breath behind them, and Chat Noir took her by the arm again. At Ladybug's side, Hawkmoth studied his daughter with this new information in mind. He wrung his hands around his cane, the only clear sign of his consternation, for he otherwise forced his countenance to be calm.

Ladybug asked next, "How did you get here? Were you escorted by Bunnyx?"

"Bunnyx? Oh…" Anaïs crossed her feet and gripped the edge of the chair. "No. I came alone."

"And does anyone know you're here?"

"At least one."

"And how do they feel about it?"

To this question, Anaïs raised an eyebrow, her entire demeanor cooling. Anxious that asking the wrong things would cause her to go as silent as she had been with the mask, Ladybug let this question slide for now. She dismissed the expectation of a response with a firm wave of her hand.

Instead, she asked, "Why are you here?"

"I need the ladybug miraculous," Anaïs told them, though she didn't say it as if she was answering the question. Her words ran over Ladybug's, jumping out of her mouth as though she'd long been holding them in.

"But why?"

"I can't -" Anaïs shook her head and sank her teeth into her lip.

"There's a lot that isn't adding up here," Ladybug said, coming a little closer. She kept her tone as gentle as she could manage without being mistaken as patronizing.

"Good. You can't know."

"If we don't know, then we can't help you," rumbled Hawkmoth. Anaïs's eyes darted towards him. Each time she looked at him seemed to be the first, judging by the way her face would shift, subtly, like sand under feet.

"You weren't…" She swallowed and looked away, "You weren't meant to."

Ladybug, fearing the worst, set her hand on Anaïs's shoulder, and got exactly the reaction she expected, for the woman to jerk away from her touch and glare with warning. It was already very clear; Anaïs hadn't come back to them from a world that was about as pleasant as they could hope. Anaïs wasn't just anxious or frustrated to be confronted by the younger examples of her own family - she was devastated. She seemed to Ladybug a very broken person likely come from a broken world. And it was a world Ladybug didn't know if she was meant to fix.

"I'm sorry," she murmured, giving the woman space. "Listen, I understand that with time travel, you ought to be very careful of what you reveal to figures of the past."

"So, you'll have to trust me," Anaïs growled, eyes still blazing from Ladybug's touch.

"But we can't," Ladybug emphasized. As complicated as this had to be for Anaïs, she was certain it was far more alarming for the people of the present day. She'd hoped her trepidation would give Anaïs pause, but something vibrant and dangerous flickered across Anaïs face. It reminded Ladybug of the way Nathalie had looked at her the night before, when she realized Adrien and Marinette had been hiding the truth from her. More neutrally, she added, "We don't know your intentions."

But this was still the wrong thing to say. Anaïs shot to her feet and seized the chair. With a gutteral shout, she threw it at the wall, where the sound of its crash frightened everyone in the room, including Lila, whose existence Ladybug had utterly forgotten about since the mask had been shattered apart. She screamed and curled in on herself, hands wrapping around her own throat as if trying to protect it.

Apparently the chair was not enough, for Anaïs drummed her fist against the wall as well. "That's what you do!" she yelled. "You're all so afraid of making the wrong choice that you'd - that you'd sooner think me a villain than as the one person trying to make things right!"

"No one called you a -" Ladybug cut herself off right there. What she was about to say simply wasn't true.

Hawkmoth had a hand over his brooch and a faraway look in his eyes. His miraculous must have been overwhelming him with the emotions in the lair. Ladybug already felt like she could be knocked off her feet by the sheer madness of the situation; Hawkmoth, and Mayura for that matter, might as well have been caught in the winds of some torrential storm, brewing in the jewels on their chests.

"Just tell me this," Ladybug murmured slowly. Anaïs still faced the wall, panting from her outburst and leaning on her clenched fist. "If you need the ladybug miraculous now, the only thing I can assume is that the one in the future isn't available. Has someone stolen it? For some reason, are you not allowed to use it?"

"Not allowed," Anaïs repeated bitterly, her voice a growl in her throat. "Not allowed. You do think me a criminal."

"No," Ladybug said with vehemence. "No, that's not what I was implying. There could be a multitude of reasons you aren't able to use it."

"Do you really want to know?" she snarled. She turned her head a bit, though the strands of her dark hair shielded the glimmer of her eyes from view. "Is that what would convince you?"

"Only one way to find out," murmured Ladybug.

"Fine. Fine!" she exclaimed, throwing up her hands. "It doesn't exist."

"What?"

"It doesn't exist!" she repeated, clawing at the wall. "It's been destroyed."

Ladybug's heart dropped into her feet. Everything dropped into her feet. Her upper body felt light as a balloon.

"Destroyed," Chat Noir said. He released Mayura, who seemed as steady as she could be right now, and took a step towards his sister. "How?"

"What's the only way to destroy a miraculous?" Anaïs asked. She slowly turned to face them completely, dropping her head against the wall. "Cataclysm - poof."

They were silent.

For a long time.

Ladybug hadn't even noticed that she'd sat on the floor until Chat Noir came to kneel beside her. She could see the struggle in his face to bring his emerald stare up to hers for a reassuring glance, but ultimately, he couldn't tear his stare away from the floor. He was the first to break that long stretch of quiet as his voice quivered out from the back of his throat, hoarse with shock. "Did I…?"

"No," Anaïs said. "Not you."

"Then who?"

A pause.

"Her."

It wasn't Anaïs, but Hawkmoth who gave the answer, turning his body away from his daughter for the first time since she had been unmasked, to face the girl left to rock back and forth in the chamber of fear the Sorcerer had built within her mind. Lila wasn't aware that the attention in the room had shifted to her, for she did not lift her forehead up from where it rested on her knees or skip a beat of her gentle forward-back sway. But everyone was looking at her now, everyone including Anaïs, whose glossy, pale blue eyes sharpened.

A chill fanned through Ladybug's nerves, for something murderous glinted on their surface.

Hawkmoth fingers twitched around the butterfly miraculous. A surge of hatred towards Lila coming from his daughter like the swing of a sword answered Chat Noir's question for him. Anaïs's silence and deepening scowl answered it for everyone else.

"But that means…" Ladybug murmured, feeling for her own miraculous as if they could disappear from her person at any moment, "She had both the ladybug and the black cat at the same time."

Anaïs started laughing. She laughed until she was crying again and had to scrape tears away with her red and bandaged fingers. Nobody moved in the meantime, still processing the conclusion Ladybug had reached, wondering if there was any way for her to have been completely wrong. Knowing she couldn't be, Ladybug herself spent the next several moments waiting to wake up from whatever miserable dream she'd been trapped in for what felt like eternity now.

Anaïs doubled over, setting her hands on her knees as her laughter transitioned into a series of sharp, shallow breaths. "What the hell?" she gasped. "I already broke my promise, didn't I? I might as well tell you the whole fucking story, since you're all just dying to - desperate to know!"

They were, weren't they? But they were terrified too. Mayura especially seemed to teeter back and forth between intrigue and dread, but she was walking a tightrope to keep herself from falling apart again, and either side she chose would mean the same dangerously high plunge. Many times, Ladybug had witnessed Mayura ill, severely, physically ill, but she believed now that this was the worst she'd ever seen her.

At last did Hawkmoth go to her, cupping her bloodless cheeks between his hands and asking if she was okay to stay to listen. She agreed, but not without hesitation, and not without clinging to his arms and accepting his subsequent embrace. Anaïs appeared to be affected by this sight; however, it was difficult to read what emotion it was that was stirred, given the way she forced her lips into a thin line and swallowed.

"Tell us, Anaïs," Hawkmoth said. "Go slow. From the beginning."

"Are we sure about this?" Chat Noir cut in. "Is time not - fragile?"

"That's the hope," Anaïs quipped. Sullenly, she uprighted the chair she'd thrown and leaned over it, folding her hands together over the back and sighing. She took multiple seconds to collect herself before beginning the story, her tone low with defeat. "It wasn't my original plan to steal the ladybug miraculous. I was told to keep as low a profile as possible. I didn't even use the rabbit miraculous, because I promised not to. I had one potion. I wasn't even sure how much I'd made. As long as I'd gone back longer than three years, I didn't care. This was too far back, but if I was to keep my promise, then I needed to get this right. I couldn't jump around and hope I'd landed in the right year...

"What I'd hoped to do when I arrived was use her as a distraction. If only you knew how perfect it was, for her to unknowingly play a hand in the justice against her." Anaïs's lips curled into a joyless, unsettling grin. "All I needed was for her to attack as Volpina once while I retrieved the miracle box from Marinette's room. I didn't even need the whole box. I needed one miraculous. The butterfly. There was no use for it. Not anymore, and for me, a small price to pay for what it would give us back."

Hawkmoth's eyes widened. "You tried to destroy it. The first time we met."

"The first time…" Anaïs echoed. "Yeah, I suppose. I did try."

"How could you do something so drastic?" Ladybug wondered. "To destroy a miraculous, to prevent the destruction of another, that's -"

She was cut off by Anaïs slamming the chair down on the floor. "Drastic?" she roared. "You haven't a clue!"

Silenced by this flare of temper, Ladybug sealed her lips. Anaïs continued, "I would have just...taken the butterfly if it was there. But it wasn't there. It and the peacock were missing. I don't know how I'd ended up with such terrible, terrible luck to show up on the one day they weren't in the fucking box."

Ladybug felt like she'd just taken a blow to the chest. She couldn't believe it. She'd taken the butterfly miraculous with her to dinner on the same night the Sorcerer had come to steal it. She pressed a hand to her mouth.

"So I took the box. I'd only brought a couple of potions with me, and I would need more if this was to go on longer than a night. I gave Volpina the fox miraculous of this time - she already had the one from the future. I fused them together, and with two fox miraculous she'd be able to create two illusions at once. One, whatever it was she wished, the other, Conspiracy."

"You were right, Mayura," Ladybug whispered, too low for the older woman to actually hear. "There were two."

"I needed him because I needed to force the butterfly into use. If it and the peacock were the only miraculous available to the guardian, then they'd have to be given away to provide aid against a large enough threat. I'd made a black cat potion before I traveled back. I thought I could use it to destroy the butterfly, but potions are never as powerful as the miraculous themselves. The black cat ring could have reduced the brooch to dust, but a potion wasn't sufficient."

"So, you went for the earrings as your Plan C," Hawkmoth murmured gravely.

"It was all I had left that would be guaranteed to fix everything. I didn't want to use the wish. I'd been talked down from it so. Many. Times," she grumbled spitefully, "but it was the only way now."

"Anaïs," he said. She winced each time he uttered her name, but looked to him eagerly. "That doesn't explain everything. I asked you to start from the beginning. Why do you want the wish?...you must know how dangerous -"

"I know!" she exclaimed fiercely, nearly dropping the chair. "I know! I know better than anyone in this room!"

"What happened to you?"

Everybody looked to Mayura. It was the first time she had spoken directly to her daughter, and she hadn't done it without a tremor in her words. Anaïs blinked at her, eyes hardening.

"What happened to me?" she said. "What happened to - what happened to me? What, is this not what you'd hoped would become of your child?"

Mayura had gone still.

"You must be so horrified I didn't grow up to be a coward like you."

"Anaïs!" barked Hawkmoth.

"You want to know 'what happened to me'? I'll tell you. She happened." Anaïs pointed at Lila. "She stole the butterfly miraculous and spent ten years of her miserable life vying for revenge she didn't fucking deserve." Another humorless laugh rippled through the air. "She'll call herself Chrysalis."

Briefly, there was a stillness in the room that was suddenly shaken by a realization that dawned on Hawkmoth, Ladybug, and Chat Noir all at once: the memory of their first encounters with time travel, the akuma Timetagger who served as proof of the butterfly miraculous continuing to be wrongly possessed. Ladybug had believed that Gabriel's surrender two years ago had set them all on a different path - a better path, judging by the lack of Bunnyx's interference. She'd misinterpreted. Timetagger hadn't been sent back by the Hawkmoth she knew, but by a new Hawkmoth, a Hawkmoth she was understanding had actually won.

Anaïs's hands curled around the chair. Her knuckles were bruising, but they turned bone-white now.

Lila raised her head. From all the way across the lair, sitting against a dark wall, she looked tiny and helpless, far from the conniving rival Ladybug had always known her to be. Her eyes shifted from face to face, and her voice stammered out:

"W-why are you all l-looking at me?"

"Can't help but stare at monsters," Anaïs said. Lila went white as sheet to hear her respond, but the unadulterated terror she emanated did little to satisfy the woman on the chair, who looked about ready to toss it a second time. Fresh tears spilled down her cheeks. She sat down and released a shout, hands moving as if she was trying to wrench the wood apart.

"I could have done a lot worse than - than stealing a miraculous," she snarled. "I could have done a lot worse than destroying one. I hate this promise you had me make, Marinette, and you've made me break it too."

Ladybug whispered, "Your promise was to me?"

"You were the only one who seemed to understand. The only one!" cried Anaïs.

"What happened?" There was certainly a lot more to the story than this. As much as it horrified her to hear that the ladybug miraculous was to be cataclysmed in the future, it was vividly clear to her that much worse would happen than that when Chrysalis obtained the earrings and the ring. Surely, she would know the power they hold when used together; surely, she would…

Anaïs shook her head. "Don't make me tell you that too."

At the corner of Ladybug's eye, both Hawkmoth and Mayura flinched. As blood spreads through water, raw horror diffused identically through their appearances, not before they'd spent a pair of seconds to recognize the emotion that must have pulsed through their miraculous. It hit them both at once, quite visibly. Across from them, Anaïs brought her hands up to her face as if covering it would provide the same magical barrier as her disguise, the same wall around her heart.

Of course, it was too late. No move, no objection she could make would prevent her parents from sensing her emotions now. Hawkmoth bit his bottom lip and grappled for the brooch under his throat like he wanted to remove it, but he paused. He'd noticed that beside him, Nathalie had already thrown hers to the floor, that a sapphire light was streaming down her body with a high-pitched whirl while her miraculous clattered away from them, rolling past Ladybug and Chat Noir kneeling on the floor and coming to a stop among the pieces of Anaïs's shattered mask. He noticed she'd rejected the coarse dismay that had taken them upon naming Anaïs's troubling emotion and fought it with anger. Nathalie looked furious, but she also looked like she was trying to be. Her fallen brows were twitching, her lips aquiver, eyes shiny and gradually becoming redder.

"It's not true," she murmured. Anaïs froze. "I won't believe it."

"Nathalie," said Hawkmoth thinly.

Like she'd forgotten he was right there, holding her, Nathalie jolted, head snapping to look up into his face. "Oh-!" she gasped.

"What's going on?" asked Chat Noir, half-rising. Ladybug replicated his movement, with the additional act of setting her hand instinctively on her yo-yo. She had a sick feeling about whatever was happening now. The temperature in the stifling lair felt to have plunged, and she shivered.

Anaïs stood up again, pushing the chair away. Without removing her hands to look at any of them, she released a scream. A high-pitched, blood-curdling scream teeming with grief and wrath. Ladybug might as well have been wearing a butterfly miraculous herself, for she felt the pain in the scream rushing through her blood.

They didn't know what to say.

The rain had paused. But it began again. Each beat of a raindrop against the window was like a pang in her heart.

"You're going to make me tell you," said Anaïs.

They waited.

"He's dead."

The weight of that word; for a split second, Ladybug felt that her lungs had been crushed beneath it. When she realized she could still breathe, she drank in a long inhale.

Behind them, Nathalie's fingers went limp and her hold on Hawkmoth dropped away. The anger she'd been trying to maintain drained out of her, and she seemed as precarious to fall as a house of cards.

Chat Noir was on his feet now. "Father?" he chirped.

Hawkmoth had his eyes closed, his fists balled at his sides, standing like he was waiting for a pain to pass.

"I'd sensed it," he grumbled. Anaïs's shoulders rose at his voice. "Your grief."

She told him, "Stop. Don't speak."

"At least three years, you said, you needed to go back," he went on. "I've been gone - that long?"

"God," Nathalie breathed.

"You waited to do this for three years?"

Anaïs scrunched her nose. "How does that change anything?" She turned her head to Chat Noir and Ladybug, who were slightly off to the right. "Is this enough justification for you?" she asked Ladybug bitterly. "Will you listen to me now? Will you give me your miraculous so I can finally put an end to all of this?"

Ladybug was speechless.

"Do not refuse me now. I just told you everything. My dad was murdered by that psychopath with your miraculous and then one of them was destroyed. Isn't it fucking clear? Isn't it - it obvious? I'm trying to get justice - justice! Why are you just standing there?"

She could not answer. Ladybug pinched her earlobes and tried to imagine what her life had looked like three years ago. She was fourteen then, still a new superhero, getting used to the frightening circumstance of having two super villains to stand against. Master Fu was with her then, and at the time she would never have dreamed of being handed the guardianship so soon. Even though one half of her life, the "normal" half had stayed nearly the same, she still felt as though everything had transformed in the last three years. These earrings were the only constant in that deluge of change. Even the person they'd been pierced to was not the same anymore.

Had she known then what she knew now, she might have gone to Fu, she might have told him that she didn't want to be handed the guardianship if it meant losing him. She would have told him how scared she was that he would forget about her or be forced to leave her behind, with little else than her instincts to guide her, which she learned now could be wrong, dangerously wrong.

But she hadn't known.

And if she had the option now - tears stung her eyes and she took a deep breath past the lump in her throat - she wouldn't bring herself to go back and tell him.

Ladybug didn't doubt that things could be better.

But she was responsible for the life she led now, for the relationships she had built, for the person she had become.

She couldn't change it.

However, coming to this conclusion, she kept silent but for the cries she let pass quietly between her lips. She'd underestimated how many times her role as the ladybug miraculous wielder would force her to hold another's life in her hands, and the thought of speaking another word filled her to the brim with dread and guilt, as though her voice could shake the room.

She couldn't give in to Anaïs, having just learned the world was three years into its new age, an age where people, some people, had learned to live on.

She couldn't deny her, knowing she'd be saving a life that wasn't meant to be taken. A life she and all those around her cared about.

She looked to Hawkmoth.

He seemed hardly willing to help her, but understanding that this was his life on the line, he sighed and spoke out, "Anaïs, I wanted to use the wish myself a long time ago -"

"I know," she snapped.

"We told you…"

"Of course."

"And I…" Fingertips grazing along the edges of the brooch's decorative white wings, he dipped his chin towards his throat. His expression darkened with memory. "I know...I know how complicated this choice is."

"No, it's not," she insisted.

"It is. It is, I promise you." Ladybug hadn't seen Gabriel cry more than once. The last time she witnessed him at the point of tears was the fateful night be had hers and Chat Noir's miraculous in his palm, the night he nearly fulfilled the promise he'd sought to keep since his beloved wife had fallen into her endless sleep, the night he decided against it to spare everything in his life he could still hold dear to him. And now, his silver gaze was wet with the disturbance of that recollection and the pain of an equally heavy choice being dropped unto his shoulders. "If Lila wished me...wished me dead than there was something that she had to have brought back, and-"

Anaïs seemed utterly bewildered by this. "Why do you care about that?"

"No, my point is-"

She cut him off again, pale with shock, "How you could think the life of some - some irrelevant person more important than yours -"

"That's not what I'm saying."

But she didn't want to listen. She paced back and forth along the wall, slashing her fingers through her dark hair. "We never found out who it was. And it doesn't matter, don't you - don't you get that?"

"Ana-"

"Whoever it is, they should have stayed dead," she hissed. "There's someone out there breathing your air, unless they were revived in a fucking coffin and suffocated to death. I don't care."

Ladybug was disturbed by Anaïs's words, her stomach rolling, and no one else appeared any more comfortable. Hawkmoth in particular was quite unnerved as he stared at his daughter, fists tightening around the hilt of his cane. And then, face contorting into a frown, he pounded it against the floor, making Anaïs jump.

"Listen to me," he growled. "Lila, or anyone else, might not have cared for the life she was bringing back from the dead, but the wish is only half of the power you're asking for."

"Any other half will be worth it."

"You don't understand. It was the exchange that I wasn't willing to make," he replied, reaching back and grazing Nathalie's fingers. Feeling his touch, she grasped onto him tightly, and broke apart. "If you don't know what Lila gained in exchange for her wish, then we can't anticipate the cost of your own. Are you even thinking as far as to consider the consequence?"

Anaïs looked as if she'd been slapped. "What?" she said hollowly.

"It's already questionable, that someone who might have lived three years of this new life could be sentenced to death once more, without knowing why," Hawkmoth explained, "But you can't be certain of that outcome. They might have been the exchange for Lila's wish, but why should they be the exchange for yours? In bringing back a loved one, don't you understand, it's possible you could lose another?" He brought Nathalie closer to him, and she pressed her face against his shoulder. "And I don't want that."

"But what about you?" Anaïs cried. When Hawkmoth couldn't answer right away, she advanced towards her parents, extending a hand. "No, you're not thinking straight! How could you? You must think I'm crazy, but I'm not. I know what's right. I've been working towards it for years. You're not going to die. I'm going to help you."

Chat Noir shifted his weight, looking as though he was thinking about placing himself between his sister and her parents, but he paused, eyes darting frantically between them as the space began to close. Hawkmoth shielded Nathalie, who was shaking against him.

"Why are you…?" Anaïs stopped in her tracks, noticing the protective movement. She dropped her hands. "Why are you acting like this? Like I'm going to hurt you? How do you not understand? I'm doing this for you. I'm doing this for our family."

There was a spark of horror in Hawkmoth's gaze, cold and silver, but he blinked it away, dragging a hand over his mask to dry the tears off his face. "Ana, you...you remind me of myself."

Ladybug's heart lurched as she watched something dark come over Anaïs. Darker than the storm clouds brewing outside. Darker than the rigid shadow she cast on the floor. Darker than the corner in which Lila crouched, where her olive eyes went wide as if she was seeing something she recognized and wished she didn't. Her hands struggled against the wall as she pulled herself to her feet, chest quickly expanding and collapsing with panicked breath. Anaïs never took her piercing stare off her father, who was realizing he had made a mistake by speaking those words, but Chat Noir noticed Lila rise to her feet, noticed her scoot step-by-step against the wall as if she stood on the edge of some very tall ledge, where below her, some awful fate awaited her. And that fate might have been in the hands of the dark-haired woman whose raw fingers had shut tightly into shaking fists, whose breath entered sharply from between her teeth, and exploded in a violent cry of outrage.

Lila shrieked. She placed a hand above her throat and used the other to point to Anaïs.

"She'll kill you!" she wailed. "She'll kill you!"

Anaïs's eyes landed on her.

"Like she killed me! She killed me! Fuck-" Lila pressed her hands to the sides of her head, her expression haunted and tightly wound with mortal fear. She stared out to some distant place, some distant time.

"Anaïs?" muttered Chat Noir.

Her gaze was bright and colorless.

"Don't let her…" Lila pinched her eyes shut and threw herself against the wall. "Don't let her, please. Don't let her kill me. I'm sorry."

"No, you're not." Anaïs's voice shook with rage. "You'll never be."

Ladybug had never felt this paralyzed before. She didn't know where to look. This creeping dread worked its way around her scalp. A dizzying panic confused her.

The moment Anaïs took a step - sharply, and in Lila's direction - Chat Noir surged forward and wrapped his arm around her waist.

"If you don't-" She struggled with her brother, trying to push him off of her "-if you don't want me to make a wish, then I won't! Fine! Fucking fine!" Her hand snatched at his baton and slipped it out of his grip. "I broke my promise already, I can break it some more! I can fix this another way! I can - I can ensure there will never be any Chrysalis to ruin our lives!"

Chat Noir hissed as Anaïs struck him in the face with the baton. Hawkmoth rushed towards them, letting go of Nathalie who reached back for him, calling "Gabriel."

Before he made it to the sides of his children, Chat Noir, after sustaining a second blow in the shoulder, lifted Anaïs off her feet and tossed her onto the floor. On impact, she grunted in pain, the baton sailing out of her grasp. She glared up at Chat Noir with betrayal deepening the lines between her black eyebrows.

"Figures," she spat.

Before anyone could make another move, Anaïs scrambled to her feet. Chat Noir didn't touch her this time, and Hawkmoth came to a halt, seeing that she was moving in the opposite direction now, away from everybody else.

But Ladybug was seized with fear.

"Chat!" she called. She unlatched her yo-yo, began spinning it. "The miraculous!"

He didn't realize what she meant at first, but then it hit him. The peacock brooch, laying amongst the fragments of the Sorcerer's destroyed mask. He started after Anaïs again, but she'd already made it.

Ladybug tossed her yo-yo, but Anaïs, the brooch clutched in her fingers, dove out of the way. With a bang, the yo-yo struck the wall and tumbled to the floor, scattering the silver fragments in every direction. A crack split through air as Chat Noir's boot slid over a shard that had tumbled his way; meanwhile, Anaïs pinned the miraculous haphazardly to her shirt, hissing as she pricked the tip of her finger.

Duusu flared into view.

"Stop!" Ladybug called.

Chat Noir had just managed to take Anaïs by the wrist when she commanded, "Duusu, spread my feathers!"

He let go, because she jumped to her feet faster than he could be taken with her. She was a blur of indigo as she moved, evading Hawkmoth's capture and sailing effortlessly under the dull light of the window. Ladybug just barely caught sight of her brilliant red gaze as she braced to leap, sweeping a final glance across the room.

And then she was gone. She burst through the loose panel in the window, letting in the rain. Her footsteps pounded on the roof until she leaped away.

Ladybug couldn't move.

Hawkmoth exchanged a distraught look with his son. "Adrien, we're going after her."

"Father…"

"We're going after her!" Hawkmoth searched about the lair, and finding Ladybug standing frozen behind him, he jabbed an index finger her direction. "Marinette -"

"Holy shit," she said under her breath.

"Marinette, take care of them, understand?" He gestured towards Lila and Nathalie. His wife, having been motioned towards, sank slowly down to the floor, glassy-eyed and a little green in the skin. Hawkmoth approached her, kneeling down and setting a hand on her face. "My love, Nathalie."

She said something, too low for Ladybug to make it out.

He embraced her and kissed her hair. Nathalie clung to him, but kept her eyes wide open, like his arms provided no comfort at all. He told her, "I'll help her, okay? I'll help her. We'll figure this out. It'll be fine. I promise, Nathalie."

She didn't seem capable of even deciding whether or not she believed him. Hawkmoth pulled away eventually, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear, before he motioned for Chat Noir to follow him. They soared out into the rain.

Leaving Ladybug.

Feeling powerless of action of any actual usee, she spent the next several moments slowly winding her yo-yo to return it to her hip. Once latched again, Ladybug took a series of deep breaths, feeling the way her lungs seemed to drop out of her chest with each inhale. But everything evened out over time, and as conviction returned, Ladybug first approached Lila, moving as non-threateningly as she could manage.

"Do you trust me, Lila?"

Her bangs swept wildly across her eyes as she shook her head. "I don't know who you are."

Ladybug could not be surprised anymore. "That's okay. I'm going to help you. My name is Ladybug and I'm a superhero of Paris. I'll take you somewhere safe, alright?"

"Don't let her near me," Lila begged.

"I won't. I promise. You'll be safe while we figure this out."

Lila trailed behind her cautiously as she went next to Nathalie, still sitting on the floor with her head tilted up towards the window. She did not react when Ladybug placed a hand on her shoulder.

"Mrs. Agreste, we should go elsewhere."

No reply.

"I know this is upsetting. I'm sorry." Ladybug felt the pressure at the back of her throat that comes before tears. She bit her bottom lip and sighed. "I'm so sorry."

Nathalie sniffled. A few drops of rain fell beside them and she swept her palm across the floor, wetting her skin.

"What do you want to do?"

"I have…" Nathalie turned to Ladybug. She watched her own fingertips smear the moisture on her hand as she gathered the energy to finish her sentence. At last, she whispered, "I have an awful feeling about this."

"It'll be okay," Ladybug said, not knowing what else she could offer but that cruelly uncertain line.

"No, it won't." Nathale grabbed Ladybug's hand. She traced the black spots with her thumb and softly murmured, heart breaking in her very words, "Take me to my baby."