Chapter Text
I.
On the checkerboard floor of Alya’s bathroom, a girl was waiting to die.
She was clutching her chest, curled up like a worm slowly shriveling as the sun bakes it into the pavement. The blood seeping between her fingers was black and viscous, lethargic in a way that was decidedly not reassuring.
Alya had grabbed a katana from Nora’s room to convince herself she could take on a robber if anyone had actually tried to break into their top floor apartment, but she had honestly been expecting a bird and not a girl.
The girl hadn’t acknowledged Alya’s presence, too busy gasping for air with all the desperate panic of a fish out of water. Her blood pooled in canals between the tiles, the slowly advancing spider web creeping towards Alya’s toes.
Alya scrambled back from the doorway, dropping the katana. “Holy fuck.”
The girl’s eyes locked on her, blown wide in fear.
She knew this girl. Everyone in Paris did, of course, but no one else had spent months analyzing every step, every hesitation, every breath. She knew this girl better than she knew herself.
“Alya?” Ladybug whimpered.
Bile rose in Alya’s throat, strangling the breath from her own lungs. Indecision pinned her to the wall.
What should she do?
What could she do?
Ladybug’s voice quavered with fear as she whispered. “Please- Help.”
She was crying. Alya realized this with a numb sense of dread. Ladybug was sobbing on the floor of Alya’s bathroom, trembling from fear and exertion and pain.
Alya had the first aid kit out from the cabinet under the sink before she had fully processed what she was doing. Although ‘processed’ was the wrong word for it. None of this was past tense. Things made no sense in the present. There was a supervillain cowering on the floor of her bathroom and there was blood on the floor and now the first aid kit was open on the counter.
Everything was happening too fast. Alya couldn’t keep up.
“Prop yourself up against the shower,” she ordered a little too harshly. Everything was too harsh for a dying girl, but Alya wasn’t sure where the supervillain ended and the wide-eyed girl began.
Ladybug didn’t move.
Alya crouched down beside her. “If you want my help, I need to be able to see.”
“My hands are a bit occupied at the moment,” the supervillain snapped. “Feel free to sweep me off my feet if you’re so inclined.”
“Fine,” Alya shot back, bending down to cradle Ladybug in her arms, straining to lift her from the floor–
And the noise.
Some unholy strangled combination of a whimper and a howl tore itself from the girl’s throat. Alya nearly dropped her as she writhed in agony.
Gently depositing the girl to the ground, Alya clenched her eyes shut as she attempted to ignore the sound of Ladybug’s frantic sobs.
She sucked in a deep breath, and got to work.
Kneeling on the hard floor, she tenderly peeled back Ladybug’s fingers to get a better look and immediately had to remind herself to stay conscious.
The wound went straight through her lower chest. Not a small wound, like a bullet that had found its way out the other side. No, this was a gaping hole, roughly the same diameter as Nora’s katana, punched all the way through to the other side.
Alya could see the rapidly staining shower curtain through the other side.
How had Ladybug not passed out from the blood loss?
Someone had slammed something through Ladybug’s chest, and pulled the object back out, leaving her to bleed out– apparently all over the bathroom floor.
The reminder spurred Alya into action. They didn’t have time for her to try not to vomit. She had to stop this bleeding.
Pressing two unused towels to either side of the wound, Alya glanced up at Ladybug. Her eyes were glazed as she tried –and failed– to keep her focus on Alya. She blinked, looking more and more woozy by the second.
“Here,” Alya said gruffly, in the hopes that it would keep the panic from her voice. “Hold these steady.”
She had to guide Ladybug’s hands to the towels, ignoring the way that crimson was already bleeding through them.
“So bossy,” Ladybug snickered, her head lolling back. She winced as her attempt at a laugh triggered her wound.
She hadn’t stopped crying, but they both were pretending they couldn’t see it.
Alya wrinkled her nose. It was easier to be contrary than to panic. “Feel free to crash land into someone else’s bathroom if you don’t like the service.”
She rifled through the first aid kit to find a linen bandage or wrapping or something. This first aid kit wasn’t stocked to deal with a fatal stab.
It was fatal. The realization once more hit Alya like a runaway bullet train. There was no way Ladybug could possibly survive this. Glossy crimson blood was streaked all across the floor and the edge of the shower and across Alya’s knees.
She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t watch a girl bleed out on her bathroom floor. She couldn’t stop the inevitable finale of this gaping hole with a pair of hand towels and a few ketchup packets worth of antibiotic ointment.
“Toilet paper,” Ladybug wheezed out, lucidity hitting with the waves of pain as she spoke. In her clarity, she glanced around the room at their bleak circumstances. She frankly seemed more at ease with the whole prospect of dying in Alya’s apartment than Alya quite knew what to do with.
Fumbling to get a few clean rolls from the cabinet, as well as reinforcements of hand towels, Alya began to wrap it around and around the supervillain’s chest. Some numb part of herself, the kind she was currently hiding behind to just keep moving was deliciously amused at the way her chest looked like it was in the process of becoming mummified. She bit down on her tongue to try and stop herself from gagging as the toilet paper clung to the blood streaked all across Ladybug’s suit.
The first line of towels against the wound were almost completely soaked through by now, so Alya just kept wrapping and wrapping and wrapping.
Finally, she sat back, watching blood spread from the towels and into the toilet paper, staining the faux belt of toilet paper with a sickly pink.
It seemed rude to lie to a dying girl.
“I’m sorry,” Alya choked out, keeping her gaze on the wound and not on Ladybug’s face. “This isn’t working.”
Ladybug reached for her, but Alya scrambled back, until her shoulders were pressured up against the toilet bowl.
Dropping her hands limply back to her sides, Ladybug murmured. “Thank you for staying with me.”
Stumbling to her feet, Alya launched herself towards the door. “We have to call 112. I should’ve –fuck– I should’ve done that right away.”
With a startling speed, Ladybug lunged for her ankle. They both cried out- Ladybug from the pain and Alya from the startling shock of the force grip of warm bloodied fingers as they dragged her down to the floor. With all the clarity of a shard of glass to the eye, Alya recalled her conversation with Nora only a few hours before. Her older sister had been busy delivering a family-wide lecture on the dangers of rescuing someone who is drowning.
“So we’re just supposed to stand there and watch them drown?” she had asked, wrinkling her nose incredulously.
“You don’t have to jump in after them,” Nora had pointed out, stealing one of Etta’s stalks of celery. “You could throw them a life preserver or hold out a long stick they could grab onto.”
“What if they’re too far out?” their father had retorted, also stealing one of Etta’s stalks of celery. Etta hadn’t noticed yet, even as he dipped his prize into the ranch on her plate. She had ben too engrossed in her conversation with her twin sister. The rest of them had tried to hide their laughter in their sleeves.
“That’s the problem, isn’t it?” Nora had asked finally, a sobering note to her voice. “A drowning person will grab onto anything in sight, just to get their head a little higher out of the water. It’s involuntary. It doesn’t matter how much they love whatever, or whoever it is that they’re dragging under. All their brain can think of is how to get one more gasp of air.” She let out a long breath. “You’re the only one who has any agency in the situation. If you choose to put yourself in their reach, you are going down with them.”
“You can’t,” Ladybug gasped, her fingers as strong as iron in the midst of her death throes. “They won’t-”
“They will help you,” Alya asserted. “Much better than I ever could.”
“They won’t make it in time.” A tense smile, ragged with pain, swept across Ladybug’s lips as she patted the tile beside her. She sounded so incredibly young as she whispered, “Please don’t leave me.”
Far be it from her to deny this girl’s dying wish. Alya slid to the floor beside her, reaching out to interlock their fingers together.
Alya wrung her free hand. “Do you want me to do anything?”
Ladybug tightened her grip, not quite enough to hurt. “Just stay with me. I’ve never been alone for this part before.”
They both stayed there for a long moment, Alya was focused on the rhythm of Ladybug’s pulse beneath her suit.
Lazily, Ladybug turned to grin smirk in her direction. “You know, you’re actually quite chivalrous when you’re not trying to expose me.”
“Don’t make me regret this,” Alya said tersely, closing her eyes to try and count the beats.
“Nah, you’d miss me,” Ladybug teased. Her head lolled back against the shower, words slurring with an awful sort of certainty. “You would.”
Alya tried to get her head on straight again. Ladybug would not be distracting her from her counting.
It was strange that the rhythm seemed to be getting more consistent with each and every inhale and exhale.
“You’re so sweet,” Ladybug hummed, reaching over to tuck a hair back behind Alya’s ear. She smeared blood all across Alya’s cheek. Her eyes crinkled as she witnessed it. “You would look so good in my colors.”
At that, Alya’s own heartbeat missed a step on the stairs.
“You would look even better without them on at all,” she shot back.
Ladybug choked and Alya wasted a solid minute panicking as she tried to make sure the wound was still covered. At Ladybug’s flushed cheeks, such a fierce contrast from her earlier blood-drained skin, Alya finally pieced it together.
“You know what I meant,” Alya rolled her eyes. Where was she even getting the blood to blush. It felt like there was an Olympic swimming pool-worth smeared across the bathroom walls. Her gaze snagged on the arrogant curve of Ladybug’s well-toned calves.
She might need to rescind her own correction. Ladybug was built like a cathedral, towering elegant arches and curves that had withstood centuries.
Alya tried to skip around the idea, but her mind was like a tape on replay.
Ladybug was not smug under her scrutiny, instead seeming more and more flustered with every second that passed.
Whatever energy was powering her miraculous seemed to be thrumming through her veins, pulling her slowly back from the brink of death minute by minute.
She abruptly lunged forward, tucking her wobbly feet beneath her. “I should go.”
Alya reached out an arm to catch her, and Ladybug tumbled to crouch before her.
There was a distracting streak of crimson across her chin, and Alya once again found herself transfixed by it. She wasn’t sure why she was so magnetically caught in Ladybug’s gravity. That was the problem with creatures of power. You could never quite seem to let them be.
“Here, you’ve got a little–” Alya licked her thumb, reaching over to smudge the edge of blood from the edge of her lower lip.
Ladybug had been attempting to stand, but under Alya’s fingers she froze. She was tense like a violin string wound too tight. Her distracting umber eyes traced every tremble of Alya’s fingers, transfixed as Alya unconsciously lifted her finger to her lips and licked off the sharp tang of copper.
Consciously, Alya knew that this couldn’t be sanitary. The practical part of her was screeching at her with reminders of blood-transmitted illnesses and all the possible ways this could lead to her swift and painful demise. Besides, who knew what kinds of bug diseases she was carrying.
The subconscious part of her squirmed under Ladybug’s gaze. It felt like she had been caught doing something far more intimate. Ladybug studied her like a vulture examining the exposed entrails of a deer on the side of the road- impressed, allured and certain it would eat well tonight.
She grinned. “Thank you for your help.”
With a pained flick of her wrist, Ladybug sent her yo-yo back out into the open air. The string went taut as it hooked on something Alya couldn’t see.
Miming the tipping of a hat, Ladybug’s eyes flashed with laughter. “I owe you one.”
Holding up a finger, Alya stepped to intervene. “Hold on a second-”
“Can’t wait that long,” Ladybug saluted her. “I’ll see you around.”