LADYBUG WAS VERY CONFUSED, AND very disoriented.

Following Alya's instructions, she called her Lucky Charm—it gave her a gas mask—and pulled it on. She didn't remember how she came to be in the middle of the street, surrounded by fog so thick that she couldn't see her own hand in front of her face.

She wanted Alya to tell her that Chat Noir was on his way, that Hawk Moth had created a villain that stole people's memories, and that she just had to find the poor akumatised person and de-evilise their akuma. Just like normal.

Instead she said, "I don't know where Chat Noir is. I don't know if he's coming. At the end of this block, get under the manhole and into the sewers. I'm watching you on my sensor network; I'm trying to get you out of the fog."

"Okay." Just as Alya said, there was a circular metal grate on the pathway at an intersection.

Squinting through the haze, Ladybug had to swerve around cars left empty and running in the streets, apologise for bumping into people aimlessly walking around. Ladybug lifted the manhole cover and stepped down the ladder, sliding it back over her head.

Alya sent information and clips of her footage to the news stations, to the disaster response units, to the police. The message would be out there within minutes, transcending breaking news level. This was a public health emergency.

"Where is Nino? Where are you?" Ladybug wondered, taking corners through the dimly lit underground as Rena directed. The gas mask rasped as she breathed. It was truly impossible to see anything. "Where's Adrien?"

"Nino's in the cafeteria, keeping a watch over our classmates. I'm in the girls' bathroom. Adrien is in Le Grand Paris." Apparently, Alya was consulting a spectroscopic feed—whatever that was, however she had access to that—to see the extent of the fog, which was seeping into the streets of the city like something spreading its fingers, and calculated an exit route.

"What? Why is he in the hotel?"

"We don't have the time to talk about that," Alya said, threads of her composure snapping under the blade of extreme concern. "I'm sorry, I know you don't remember. Take a left here."

Ladybug launched her yo-yo and swung across the water, landing on the far walkway. "Okay. Just tell me how to defeat Hawk Moth and I'll do it. Has a villain shown up?"

Alya spoke with an uncomfortable, hesitant tone. "Hawk Moth is out of action. This is the Peacock Miraculous holder—I think this fog is a type of sentimonster."

"Alright. Then how do I find Mayura?"

"It's not Mayura," Alya admitted. "I don't know who. No-one knows."

"So..." Ladybug spluttered. "What do I do?"

Give her a distressed civilian to comfort. Give her a supervillain to confront. Give her an object to break, a token to purify, a city to save. Don't say I don't know.

"I'm just trying to get you to safety. And then we can regroup and figure out what to do. There are other people in the fog, all losing their memories. I don't want it to get so bad that they start endangering themselves. Or forgetting how to breathe."

"Can humans forget how to breathe?" Ladybug said, her blood running cold.

"Let's not find out."

"B— but what am I supposed to do? We don't know who is responsible, or which object we need to find. And I can't remember anything before... what month is it?"

"January."

"What?" Before Ladybug could freak out at the lost time—it was September, school just started, right?—she leaned back against the smooth concrete wall and slid into a sitting position. "Okay. If I used my Lucky Charm on this mask, I need to de-transform and feed Tikki."

"You don't," Alya said. "You've been able to sustain your superhero form for over half an hour, post-Lucky Charm, for months now."

Ladybug put a hand over her mouth, trying to stay calm. "Okay. Well, I don't know if I remember how to do that. So I'm going to feed Tikki and ask for her help. I'll keep you on the line." She withdrew the earpiece, took off her gas mask, called, "Spots off," and put both items back on her body.

Alya said, "Adrien is safe. He just replied, and he said the hotel staff have really polished their emergency response procedures after the last sentimonster attack—

"—the last what?"

"—and he's currently entertaining a pair of security guards, who are sealing his doors and windows with tape and towels and shit and looking after him." Alya took a breath, and made a surprised sound. "Oh, and Chat Noir just texted the MM group chat. He can't make it. He feels really bad."

"Wow," Marinette huffed. She pulled a macaroon from her purse and fed it to Tikki, who was rubbing her temples, face crumpled into a frown. "So we're on our own."

"My head really hurts, Marinette," she whimpered. "I think the fog is affecting me, too."

"We'll fix this soon. We have to," Marinette said, even though she had no belief that they would. She felt like a failure. "Tikki, how can I find the amokised object? Every sentimonster has to have one, right? Even if they don't look like typical sentimonsters?"

"Correct. But I don't know how to find it."

She checked her cell phone. The news studios must have decided that a birds-eye view of the ninth arrondissement blanketed in uniform grey smoke was no longer interesting, because the live broadcast from the helicopters panned into a small box in the upper right hand corner of the TV screen. Nadia Chamack commanded attention once more, repeating the health authorities' advice. Stay inside. Wear masks or scarves. Close windows. Seal doors and vents.

Marinette let out a cry of frustration and put her eyes onto her knees. She hated that everyone in the city was just losing their memories and she was hiding down here, clueless as to rescue them. She hated that Chat Noir wasn't here to help her. Tikki tugged at her pigtail until she raised her miserable face.

"It's okay to not know what to do," Tikki said, floating lower until she could graze lovingly against Marinette's cheek. "In absolute uncertainty is when the powers of Creation excel. I knew nothing when I was born, and because I knew nothing, everything was possible. There's always a solution."

Solutions, solutions.

A year ago, she had a concrete solution for her entire life: she needed to pass her final exams and gain entrance to her dream fashion design course at ESMOD. She then wanted to become a renowned fashion designer and make enough money to support her parents in old age. She wanted to stay friends with Alya forever, and she wanted to marry Adrien, get a house, have kids, and adopt the hamster.

Now?

Now that existence felt a little quiet, a little tight-fitting to Marinette. Worse still, it was starting to feel like a daydream. The world and its people were so much bigger, more dangerous, than she had anticipated when she was sixteen. According to Alya, a lot had changed in five months. Everything about her adolescent future fantasy was still attractive, undoubtedly, the calm and the stability and the warmth—but... did she really need what she thought she needed? Did she really want what she thought she wanted?

What if there was some alternative pathway out there, some completely uncharted possibilities where she let herself be simultaneously stronger and weaker than she ever had? Be brave, surrender, hold firm, fling everything to the wind.

"Tikki, spots on."

Glistening points of pink light and sparkling waves of magic swept down her body.

When the Ladybug suit returned to her, it felt different. She felt every fibre and panel more finely. Like she could imagine the threads, the polymers in the threads, the atoms in the polymers, the energy stored in the bonds of the atoms. Like she could pluck at these building blocks and make materials of a different persuasion, make whatever she wanted.

Something to find this villain. Give me something find them.

"Lucky Charm," Ladybug called. A compass fell into her hands, needle spinning slowly on a well-greased axis. "Alya— Rena," she corrected herself. "Where is north from here? Relative to this tunnel."

"Perpendicular. North is your nine o'clock."

So, this compass was either totally broken, or exactly what Ladybug needed.

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Ladybug emerged from the sewers on Rue de la Moyenne Ronde.

She clipped the compass to her new utility belt. Her eyes had to accustom to leaving the dimly-lit but visible environment of the underground, stepping back into a ghostly Asphodel. As she'd been travelling through the tunnel networks, Rena Rouge had been updating her memories. Hawk Moth was Gabriel, Nathalie was Mayura. Adrien was in the hotel awaiting the trial, and there was a new Peacock Miraculous holder that no-one had any leads on.

As the minutes ticked on, Ladybug kept touching her earrings, feeling for the gentle piezoelectric pulses that matched the blinking lights. If she was truly on a countdown until she turned back into her civilian form, there would have been some indication from her Miraculous. But they were still, silent, and she felt more connected to herself and her surroundings than ever. She felt like she could reach for the fog and turn it solid in her palm.

She was Creation incarnate. She could do anything.

"Wait," Rena Rouge said through the earpiece. "This is where Nathalie's hideout apartment was, and where Chat Noir was directed by a previous Lucky Charm of yours."

"So we're on their tail," she whispered. A flash of shadow came from above, and Ladybug looked through the lenses of gas mask at the rooftops across the street. Very faintly visible through the haze, a figure moved—just a patch of slightly darker grey on a canvas of lighter grey—and Ladybug acted.

She threw her yo-yo from the ground, smirking in triumph when it connected with a body and coiled tight, around and around. She pulled with all her might.

Rena gasped over the line. "Are they going to get hurt?"

"No," Ladybug answered. "Just incapacitated."

The figure, the new holder of the Miraculous, rolled off the gutter and fell towards the concrete, the thread of the yo-yo falling taut over a brass ornament welded to a balcony railing. Preparing to slow the fall of the masked villain, Ladybug's weight shifted, heels dug in.

The villain expanded a blue fan in their hands, which loosened the yo-yo thread enough for their body to start writhing, hands clawing away the metallic string. "Don't," Alya exclaimed, "don't let them get away!"

Ladybug was already running toward the point where the villain's feet would touch the ground, noting the dramatic tail of their cobalt blue blazer, the clicking of deep blue boots, gloved hands. She didn't reach the pavement in time. The Peacock Miraculous holder shook free of the yo-yo, but didn't notice a small object dropping from their coat.

Ladybug chased when they started sprinting, quickly picking up the dropped key and tailing their movements. They leaped with superhuman strength onto a lamppost, then onto a rooftop, and then away. She wanted to follow, but the fog was too dense, she couldn't see clearly. Once the pursuit led onto a new street with more people—now sitting on the ground, either unable to walk or unable to remember a motivation for walking—Ladybug lost the bastard.

On the rooftops, she uselessly scanned the horizon for the villain. No luck. She looked at the indigo key in her hand and threw it to the tile.

It cracked in half, and out came a blue feather. The fog started lifting, in a flat layer, floating off the ground and above the city and to the clouds above. The blue sky returned.

"Time to de-evilise!" Ladybug announced, enclosing the feather in her magic yo-yo. God. Was it her lost memories, or had she not done this for a long time?

When the feather emerged clean and white, Ladybug took the gas mask and the compass—two Lucky Charms at once, and no transformation time limits? That was new—and threw them upwards. They winked out of existence with a pink sparkle, and then flurries of magical ladybugs swept through the city. They picked up fallen elderly, reunited separated families, realigned the disorderly vehicles on the roads. Restored the people's memories.

Ladybug remembered everything. She was spearheading an investigation that had captivated the world; she was managing a team of some of the most powerful individuals in history; she was learning and losing and adjusting.

She'd applied for fashion design schools, but her consciousness suddenly swerved to the possibility of her travelling during the year after high school, going alone to China and visiting all of her mother's extended family. She could finally learn more Shanghainese and explore the city, on her own, as an adult.

Or she could do the exact opposite, and simply spend the whole year in Paris, working full-time in the bakery. She and her father could hold things down and send Sabine back to Shanghai, so she could finally return to the place that raised her. Ladybug knew how deeply her mother missed China, how much she had sacrificed for this peaceful, loving family of theirs.

She understood now, what Tikki had been trying to teach her. The randomness of it all, the multiplicity of all the Creations that existed in the universe, the rare gift she had of being able to navigate those.

Alya would excel in journalism school, attract internships and graduate roles en masse. Her talent and courage would carry her into foreign wars, or the American presidential campaign trail, or lush jungles and undiscovered waterfalls, documenting everything for the less intrepid viewers at home. Always travelling, never with a consistent WiFi connection.

Adrien would marry a gorgeous British movie starlet and pop out ridiculously attractive triplets. Marinette would always stay fond of her first love. Perhaps in her future family's living room, she would laugh gleefully, pointing at the TV screen when Adrien Agreste appeared, and tell her own beloved children that, many years ago, they'd been very dear school friends.

Maybe, at the end of all these years, Chat Noir was the one waiting for Ladybug, all playful eyes and a mouth that'd become so stern as of late, a mouth she'd kiss until the frown lines disappeared into laughter. If she could find the courage to lift her mask, they could be together.

She might finally be able to love, slowly and surely and vulnerably.

Could she do that? Could she confess like that? Ladybug took a step back from the edge of the rooftop and put her hand over her mouth. There were tears swelling in her eyes from daring to imagine the things that she once thought would devastate her, the impossibilities she had told herself were true.

She pressed her face into her palms and laughed, wept, screamed. Anything was possible. Anything was possible.

Below, the city was starting to roll back into usual rhythms. The news helicopter left the skies, heading back towards the CBD. As the helicopter passed Ladybug, it blinked its spotlight once in thanks. Raising her hand, she waved jubilantly.

Ladybug glanced down at her hands and the magic yo-yo. Of course, she ruminated, shaking her head with a light chuckle. Her body still felt ready to climb mountains, none of her own energy going into maintaining the power of the Miraculous, which seemed to hum within her skin like a gentle sun.

Of course I could do this.

How had she not grasped it earlier?

Creation could do anything, this and this and that, and more—so much more.

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a / n :

i've had the last scene in this chapter in my head for over a year, before i ever saw everything, everywhere, all at once but after i watched that film (the best of all time, i sobbed so hard) i knew exactly which lessons applied to marinette, exactly how to write the philosophy of Creation compared to the philosophy of Destruction. 

the latter is often tied to chaos, but (you might have noticed) plagg stressed restraint and moderation, and tikki has been the one advocating for a bit of charmed chaos. adrien, who has spent his life being controlled and controlling himself, took to plagg's teaching pretty easily. but it's been hard for (and satisfying to write) anxious marinette, with her one-track mind, surrendering to the unknown.

(just a little behind the scenes for ya <3)