Chapter Text
China was gone.
Ladybug and Chat Noir stood huddled over their communicators atop the Eiffel Tower.
“India and Pakistan are gone too,” Chat said in a hushed whisper.
The air around them seemed to have gone still, as if a pall were settling over the whole world. Ladybug continued to listen with a terror that seemed to mount higher and higher, eclipsing anything she’d ever felt before.
“The world’s heroes have united under Majestia’s banner,” Nadja relayed hurriedly. “It is a coalition of superheroes and supervillains never before seen. They are taking the owl jet and approaching what many are now calling the Golden God. Battle will be joined in minutes.”
“Russia’s being wiped off the map,” Ladybug said faintly.
It went without saying that Poland, Belgium, Germany would be next. And then, France.
“They’re calling it the stilling,” Chat muttered. He flexed his hand compulsively as though he could claw at the monster that had annihilated half of humanity in the past twenty minutes. Wherever the golden beam passes, everything ceases to move.”
“Maybe they’re not really dead,” Ladybug whispered. “Maybe they’re just out of phase or something.”
“Shh, they’re engaging.”
The two teenage superheroes watched as swarms of superheroes and supervillains brought to bear the mightiest powers on Earth to stop the serenely floating figure. Majestia struck it with a mountain shattering punch. Night Owl used particle-wave disrupters. Techno-Pirate tried to absorb it like technology.
Tears began to slip down Ladybug’s face as she watched the Golden Horror grab Majestia by the throat with one hand and drive its fist into her head with the other.
She couldn’t watch this. She couldn’t watch the people she adored – the people she looked up to – be brutalized so carelessly. As though none of them mattered. She buried her face into Chat’s shoulder.
“We need to be ready,” Chat said hoarsely. “It’ll be our turn soon.”
“Chat,” she wept, her whole body shuddering in time to his. “I – I love you. I’m so sorry.”
She didn’t know why she was apologizing, only that now, in their final moments, she began to regret all the years she’d lived with this fear inside her – a fear that had kept her from being happy with the one person in her life she’d trusted above all others.
“Shh,” he soothed, stroking her hair, claws slicing through the ribbons to let her pigtails loosen into the open, flowing strands he loved so much. “We’re not out of the fight yet.”
On the horizon, a golden glow began to shine.
Ladybug had a sudden premonition of doom. Where was Bunnyx? Why hadn’t she come to warn them?
“Don’t go,” she cried, clutching his arm. “Let’s use Kaalki and flee.”
It was a ridiculous idea. She knew it was. Yet the feeling of Chat’s impending death did not leave her.
Chat looked at her with love and sorrow. “You couldn’t live with yourself if you did that, my lady.” He raised one hand into the air, but before he could utter a word of power, she placed her fingers on his arm, arresting him.
“Second chance.” Only then did she step back to allow him to continue.
He nodded once before turning sharply and sighting his target – a tiny golden figure in the sky.
“Cataclysm.”
In a move too fast to track with mundane eyes, he launched himself across the dozens of kilometres.
Ladybug counted the seconds until he made contact. She watched black and gold collide. Watched the Golden Horror disintegrate into motes of light. Watched Chat fall to the Earth below, staff extending to break his fall. Watched the Golden God reform overhead, and watched as a golden beam chased her partner to the ground.
“Second chance.” The moment timed rewound, Ladybug was saying, “Cataclysm didn’t work. I’ll try.” She threw her yoyo, letting Chat digest her words as she herself shouted out, “Lucky charm!”
Power gathered from all ends of the universe and conjoined overhead to have a shovel land in her hands.
“Maybe you could hit it on the back of the head?” Chat suggested.
Her expression grew more forlorn. A shovel meant things of the earth. Graves, tunnels. Either die or hide.
The golden horror kept approaching. It was close enough now to make out features on its body. Too close, she thought.
“Second chance. Lucky charm.”
Again, power gathered, but the result was even worse. A single blank piece of paper.
“Bug,” Chat said uneasily. “It’s getting closer.”
Ladybug looked up and did a double-take. Their enemy was closer than it had any right to be. A dark and disturbing thought prickled at the back of her mind, but she refused to acknowledge it. “Second chance.”
Everything in the world rewound. Ladybug could see it in the look in Chat’s eyes, in the crackling static and panicked, frenetic commentary still playing on the news through Chat’s phone. Everything in the world had reset except her… and it.
“Second chance,” she whispered. “Second chance, second chance, second chance.”
The figure advanced serenely, sedately, arrogantly ignoring the time resets.
“Why isn’t it working?” she whispered. There had to be a way. “It’s not working… oh God it’s getting closer. Lucky charm!“
Then suddenly, it all seemed to be over. He was there. The Golden God. Floating overhead, gazing down upon them with sadness, her lucky charm caught in its grip.
Any other fight, any other day, Ladybug’s mind might have raced for a solution, but with their greatest powers neutralized, Earth’s heroes vanquished, half of humanity dead, her mind blanked. She knew, deep down, that she had nothing that could protect herself, her city, her kitty.
A golden glow began to form, brightening, sharpening, expanding until it eclipsed everything else in Ladybug and Chat Noir’s world.
Her last sensation was of Chat Noir clasping his hand around hers, one last comfort. Her world briefly filled with golden light, and then went dark.
#
Past the lunar orbit, dozens of tiny Gods gathered, and waited.
In a swirl of red and green sparkles, Tikki and Plagg joined their siblings. As one, they turned to gaze at the marble-sized blue-green orb they’d all come to call home. The place where so many of their kind had been born. Where so many now died.
“What is that thing?” Fluff asked in a whisper, magic carrying its voice through the void to the other kwamis.
“I don’t know,” Tikki said.
“How can you not know?” asked Wayzz plaintively. “You are the oldest and greatest of us. All of creation falls within your domain.”
Plagg’s gaze sharpened as he studied his partner. “So it’s come to pass then.”
Tikki nodded solemnly. “We’d always wondered. Ever since Kaalki and Fluff were born. Ever since we heard the humans talk about it.”
“You’re referring to other universes,” Wayzz realized.
“We are Gods here in our reality. Infinite save for one rule.”
“That we are bound to this universe and this universe alone,” Plagg added.
“And so this abomination has come from another universe?”
“It has to have,” Plagg said finally. “My holder cataclysmed it. I sensed it be completely destroyed.”
“The only way it could have survived is if it was able to flee elsewhere.”
“It circumvented the power of the second chance,” Tikki added. “Only a being that exists outside our universe could do such a thing.”
Further murmurs broke out amongst the kwami, an unfamiliar emotion susurrating through them - fear. Many of them had watched the birth of stars. Many of them would watch them die. But this… a being of power outside anything their billions of years of collected experience had ever taught them.
“Will it be content with just one planet?” Kaalki asked.
“Why? Are you thinking of moving to Eclyptia?” Duusu asked. “I remember they used internal viscera to make very pretty banners.”
The other kwamis shuddered. “Not the Eclyptians.”
“We could hide in the Interdimension?”
Other kwamis began piping in, voices clambering to be heard.
“Silence!” The void of space rippled with power at Plagg’s command. He and Tikki turned their green and blue eyes onto the still turning world of Earth. “The destruction is complete. Nothing survived.”
“What about plants or microbes?” Tikki asked, tone flat with compressed rage.
“Nothing. The destruction was total.”
“This will not stand. We are the kwami. Earth was-“ For all her years and all her experiences, she found herself at a loss. Earth belonged to her in a way she couldn’t articulate. Despite having been born at the dawn of the universe, her first interaction with mortals was with humans, and the majority of her time since then was spent on Earth.
“This universe is our domain, and I refuse to allow this interloper to hold any sway. We will not run. We will face this monster with the full might of our power.”
A silence heavier than that of the space they occupied descended about the kwamis.
Eventually, Wayzz breathed in a hushed whisper, “Do you mean…? But there’s no telling what cosmic power on that scale – to be used directly without mortal avatars – Tikki, Plagg, you could undo everything. Are you certain?”
“Would you rather live on with the fear that this monster could come back?” Tikki demanded. “Does not your kwami blood sing for vengeance?”
Seeing no further objections, Tikki held out one paw to Plagg, who took it. There would be no coming back from this. Together they would become more than the sum of their parts. As with all the lucky charms ever cast, Tikki would have no say in what would emerge, nor would Plagg have any say in what would be destroyed. They only knew that their plea would reach to all ends of the universe, and that the universe would respond in kind.
With one final glance, tiny paws trembling, Tikki and Plagg intoned in unison, “Lucky cataclysm.”
Reality broke, and was forged anew.