Chapter Text
Marinette knew even before she woke up that it was going to be a bad day. She rolled over in her bed and tried to sink further in her sheets. She shuddered, a chill going through her entire body. She kept debating if she should just feign sick and stay home from school. Not that there would be much lying involved. It was barely seven am and she already wanted to throw up.
She distinctly wondered how she was going to survive June 30th this year.
Tikki hovered over her ear anxiously, she had never seen her holder like this. How could she? She didn’t know the whole truth about her.
Nobody did.
“I don’t want to do this, I’m not a monster.” His voice taunted. Marinette shut her eyes tightly, trying to get his grating voice out of her head. She desperately wished she could sleep till this cursed day was over and she could go back to her life.
“But when exterminating a weed, you take out all of its roots.” Her head was pounding. She wanted air. She needed air. Scrambling out of her sheets, she yanked the skylight above her head open and breathed in the polluted Parisian air. She tried not to notice her shaking hands.
“Marinette” Tikki said cautiously, “Are you okay?”
“Of course I am Tiks, why wouldn’t I be?” She tried to flash a smile but it came out all teeth.
“Will you die on your knees like your grandfather?”
She braced her hands on the iron railing, trying to ground herself to her present and not in the past. The cold sting helped, a breeze blew her a few strands of her hair in her face. Her heart beat hard enough for her to feel it in her palms. She tried to steady herself, tried desperately not to cry.
“Like your mother? On her feet, defending her child?”
She ripped her hands away from the railing and ran back down in her room. Flinging open her bathroom door, she barely made it to her toilet in time and threw up. Tikki held her hair behind her head as she retched up last nights dinner.
Marinette leaned her head against the cool tiles, sweat clinging to her entire body. She was shaking, burning up, she was going to combust into flames and no one would ever realise. She was going to burn up this entire building and everyone inside it. She was going to blow up the world.
Tears escaped her eyes, and slipped down her face, marking her failures down into her flesh. She brought her knees up to her chest, trying to make herself as small as possible. A hook had caught her heart, and it was going to rip it out of her chest, and she would be helpless. She hoped it would take out her heart. At least maybe then she could breathe again.
Marinette couldn’t remember a life without the hook, a life without breathless lungs and emotionless brains. A life without spending every day in constant agony, guilt, shame, and grief. She had failed them. She had failed every single one of them. Her entire family. Marinate sobbed into her hands, she screamed into her body and she collapsed inside her mind. She couldn’t hear the next line. She knew what was coming, she had heard once, it had broken her once. Her traitorous mind repeated it every day, every waking moment was spent in agony because of fifteen words. Fifteen words, when strung together had shattered her entire world. She clamped her hands over her ears, as if drowning out sound would prevent the torment in her head.
“Or will you die like your precious Damian, he whose last thoughts were about you?”
Sound, smell, sight and taste went black as she collapsed on the floor, unable to control as her shaking body crashed on the floor.