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Every once in a while, Marinette will remember something.
Soft pillows and pink walls. Bandaging up bleeding fingers. The feeling of love, drowning and all-encompassing. That was what Marinette had been all about when she had been alive, huh? She had been a lover, not a fighter. She doesn’t remember much else.
She might not have even been named Marinette at all. She used to know her full name, back when she had first moved over. Now, that has faded into the background, along with how old she'd been, what her parents look like, and if she's an only child. There's no way to speculate anymore. That information is just... gone. At least she is conscious enough to realize that she is forgetting everything. Someday, she might think that this is the way that she had always been, and that is a terrifying thought.
Sometimes, on the bad days, Marinette questions whether or not she was ever alive. The “memories” that flit through her consciousness now and then could not be hers at all. It could be someone else’s present. A stranger’s.
Most of the time, she drifts from place to place. Sometimes, the drifting is so instinctual that she does not even realize that she is doing it. She has never been able to find the room with pink walls. There are other places that she floats through that fill her with some sort of something, tight in her chest and painful. The school building had made her feel like she was drowning. The statue of Ladybug in the park had felt like a book she'd been forced to put down.
This time, she barely knows where she is drifting until she gets there. There are three people in the room. Two girls are sitting on the floor, cross-legged. One of them is short and blonde, with nervous energy thrumming within her. The other girl, the taller one, seems calmer. Marinette cannot tell what there is to be nervous about.
There’s a boy on a chair with blue hair. Something about him seems familiar, but she cannot tell what it is. His face shifts into a variety of different expressions, but Marinette has not remembered how to read those for a very long time. Nonetheless, she gets the impression that he is sad. She feels that the others are sad, too, but none of them are as sad as him.
“I don’t know if this is a good idea,” says the short girl with blonde hair. She is bouncing on her feet. “It was so recent… I feel like we could all get our feelings hurt.”
“It’ll be fine,” says the purple-haired girl, touching the sleeve of the blonde girl's shirt. “It… it’ll either work or it won’t, but either way, maybe it’ll help.”
The boy is silent. Maybe he always is.
“Alright,” the blonde girl says, not sounding 'alright' but not putting up much more of a fight. “If you’re sure, Juleka.”
“I am,” the purple-haired girl replies. She opens a drawer and pulls out a box. “Besides, I do this all the time. Nothing ever happens.”
“Until it does,” the blonde girl says. She watches nervously as the other girl opens the box and removes its contents. There’s a board in there, with letters written all over. There’s a triangular piece too, and somehow, Marinette knows that it’s called a planchette. Maybe she had used one of these boards too, once.
The three of them put their hands on the planchette. The blonde girl looks nervous, and the boy looks like he doesn’t want to be there, but Juleka looks determined. Maybe she’s their group leader.
“I’ll ask the questions,” Juleka decides. “Let’s start easy. Is there anyone there?”
Marinette watches curiously. The planchette doesn’t move.
“It’s not moving,” the blonde girl says.
“I know that, Rose,” Juleka replies. She hesitates for a moment, and then says loudly, “I am calling upon a spirit to answer my questions. Again, is there anyone there?”
A spirit. That’s Marinette, isn’t it?
Oh! Are they waiting for her?
Is she supposed to touch the planchette? She has not touched anything in a very long time.
She kneels next to the three of them and touches the planchette with hesitant fingers. She cannot feel it, per se, but she knows that she’s touching it due to the strong connection that she feels to the other three. The second that her fingers touch the planchette, the three of them straighten up. Maybe they feel what she feels.
“Juleka…”
“Babe, please don’t say anything,” is the response. “I really don’t want to scare it off.”
It ? Is Marinette an it now? She used to be a person. She used to be a girl.
Nonetheless, she pushes the planchette over to yes. She expects more anxious questions from Rose, but the girls both go as silent as the boy. The boy looks more awake now than he had before.
“Thank you for telling us that you’re here,” Juleka says. “Can you tell us your name?”
She certainly can.
M-A-R -
“Oh my God,” Rose says.
I-N-E-
“I’m not moving it,” Juleka insists. Well, of course she isn’t. Marinette is.
T-T-E
At the last letter, the boy sits up promptly, taking his fingers off the planchette. “You’re both so mean,” he tells them. “How could you do that to me?”
“We didn’t do anything,” Juleka insists, but the boy starts to leave the room anyway. “I didn’t move it, Luka. Please don’t go.”
Luka…?
Maybe Luka is familiar for a reason. Maybe she’d known him once. Maybe she’d known all of them once, but for some reason, Juleka and Rose aren’t clicking in her brain the way that Luka is.
A memory pops up, then. Hands on her shoulders. He was wearing some sort of armor. He told her something. What had he said?
Marinette remembers, so she moves the planchette.
“It’s moving,” Juleka says. Luka hovers in the doorway. Good. Marinette doesn’t want him to leave. Not yet. Maybe he can talk to her.
C-L-E-A-R
“Clear,” Juleka says, after reading out each individual letter. “It says clear.”
A-S A
“Asa… as a?”
Luka turns around. There’s a new energy coming from him, underneath the sadness. He hopes so strongly that Marinette can taste it. It tastes sugary sweet.
M-U-S-I-C N-O-T-E
“Clear as a music note,” Luka says. There’s a tone in his voice that Marinette can’t decipher, but it’s different than how he had spoken before. He had been so angry so quickly. But anger is a secondary emotion. He must have been so sad to speak to them like that.
“What does that mean?” Juleka asks. “Does that mean anything to you, Lu?”
“Yes,” he replies. “Clear as a music note, sincere as a melody. It’s what I said to her when I told her I had feelings for her.” His reasoning surprises Marinette. Had he really said that under those circumstances? Is the reason that he is so familiar because she had loved him, once?
“Did anyone else know about that?” Juleka asks. “Because if it’s just between you and her…”
“It was,” Luka says. He walks back over to the board and sits back down. He puts his fingers back down on the planchette. “I want to ask the questions now.”
“You just broke so many ouija board rules,” Juleka says, sounding stressed.
“Not today, Satan,” Luka mumbles in response. More clearly and loudly, he asks, “Marinette, is that really you?”
Well, who else could it be? Especially if he really had said it under the context of having feelings for her. She moves the planchette to yes.
“Luka, I hate to even say it,” Juleka says, “but as the practitioner of the three of us, I feel like I have to tell you that it might not actually be her.”
“It is,” he says. His hope is so strong that now it feels more like determination. “Didn’t you feel it? Right before the pointer moved?”
“Yes,” Juleka says hesitantly. “But demons are really good at masking this sort of thing.”
“D-demons?” Rose asks. Her fear is so loud that Marinette can barely hear anything else. Do they really think that she could be a demon? Is she hurting them more than she’s helping? They haven’t asked a question, but all of their fingers are still on the planchette, so she decides to ask her own.
A-R-E Y-O-U S-C-A-R-E-D O-F M-E
“It’s going too fast, I can’t keep up,” Juleka says. “Maybe I should get a pen.”
“No,” Luka says, apparently not having the same issue. He sounds insistent. Desperate. “No, Marinette, no one is scared of you. Don’t worry.”
Good. Marinette doesn’t like the idea of bothering people who used to be her friends. Luka follows that up with a question. “Are - are you okay? Wherever you are?”
How can she be okay ? She barely knows anything anymore. She could forget about this entire interaction by tomorrow and never know any better. Hell, maybe this has happened before. She wouldn’t know.
I A-M F-O-R-G-E-T-T-I-N-G W-H-O I A-M
“You’re Marinette. You - you were so nice to everybody, no matter what the circumstance. You baked some killer macarons. You liked art - all kinds! Graphic design, fashion design… all of that.”
That makes her hesitate. Macarons. They tasted sweet. The raspberry ones were her favorite. She doesn’t remember what graphic design is. A question pops into her head, though her fingers are growing tired. Trying to be concise, she asks: P-I-N-K W-A-L-L-S W-H-E-R-E
Luka laughs, but nothing seems funny. He seems panicked, as if she’ll disappear at any moment. “Your bedroom walls, they were pink. You liked the color pink a lot. Said it was the happiest color.”
Oh. That… that sounds like her. Or maybe she only thinks that because he is saying it and she barely knows who she is anymore.
“Luka,” Juleka says. “Usually conversations don’t last much longer than this. It’s not that she’d want to leave, but she can get tired.” Maybe they're right. In the beginning, Marinette had been able to see the room clearly, but now the edges of the walls have begun to fade away.
“That’s okay,” Luka says, though his energy waves show that nothing is okay at all. “She could come back, right? Talk again sometime?”
“Maybe,” is Juleka’s response. She seems hesitant, and Marinette understands. She barely knows how she found the three of them. She has no clue if she could do it again.
“Marinette,” Luka says, her name safe in his mouth, “will you come back?”
I W-I-L-L T-R-Y
“Good,” he says, slumping back. “Do you need to leave now?”
The room is half-melted now. She can barely read the letters on the board, and it'll only be a few moments before she's unable to communicate with them at all. Marinette moves the planchette to yes.
Luka doesn’t talk after that. He and the others all move the planchette to goodbye, and then he leaves the room.
Marinette wants to follow him and tell him that everything is going to be okay. She wishes that she hadn’t died. Not when death is like this - following your loved ones around, forgetting them as they cannot forget you.
Marinette forgets how to get back to the room with the spirit board. She forgets the names of the two girls, though she knows that they were important to her, once.
She remembers blue eyes, the fact that hope tastes like macarons, and the fact that she is still loved. She remembers that her bedroom walls are pink, though she cannot remember what they looked like.
She remembers Luka.