Chapter Text
Robin tried hard not to fidget impatiently.
It wasn’t that he didn’t understand that the Paris situation was important, or that he didn’t want the Bats to help the Parisian duo. He just didn’t think that they needed this many of the Bats for this discussion. They had Batman, Red Robin, Spoiler, and Red Hood; Robin was unnecessary, in his opinion.
Unfortunately, everyone else disagreed because “you’re the one the same age as them, they’ll connect better with you.” Which was ridiculous; he’d met Ladybug all of once, and the cat was clearly much closer to Nightwing, who wasn’t even here tonight.
His arguments had not swayed his father, however, and so he was stuck waiting for the cat and bug to portal in. Instead of sitting at the Batcomputer trying to come up with new ways to search for his missing multiversally-displaced twin sister, which he felt would be a far better use of his time.
Robin and Red Robin hadn’t shared what Talia had told them with the others; both had agreed that Bruce would take it very badly to learn that his daughter had existed in this world as well, but been murdered by her own grandfather as a child. He still had enough guilt about not knowing Damian had existed for the first ten years of his life; the news about this world’s original Amari could wait until after they’d found the Amari who hadn’t died.
But it meant that Robin hadn’t been able to fully process the emotional fallout of that discussion. To know that he had a twin sister—that they’d been inseparable—and the memories were deliberately taken from him… even if he understood why his mother had done it, he grieved for the things he should know and didn’t. And he was still angry at her for her decision to steal his memories of his sister.
And because they’d agreed not to tell the others yet, Robin couldn’t even try to talk through all of this confused tangle of emotions to anyone but Red Robin, who was generally too distracted to be a good sounding-board.
So instead, he’d turned his attention and energy to trying to oversee the myriad searches that Red Robin and Oracle had concocted to comb through every corner of the net for any evidence of Amari. Not that the searches had turned up anything useful yet; she was seemingly either going by a different name in this world, which seemed likely, or else she’d come to Gotham via unconventional means. So far as the combined skills of both Drake and Gordon had been able to determine, there was no ‘Amari’ on any passenger manifests going in or out of Gotham since a full month before the rooftop encounter.
Even widening the search to find even the loosest matches for the name ‘Amari’ only turned up dead ends where the ‘mari’ portion matched; two ‘Marianne’s, a handful of ‘Marie’s, one ‘Marion’, and one ‘Marinette’. None of them had panned out. They’d met the ‘Marinette’ on the list—the cat’s civilian girlfriend, who was on the passenger manifests for the Parisian students’ flights in and out of Gotham—already, so were able to immediately cross one name off of that list. And the others bore absolutely no resemblance to the missing girl; most were adults, one was a toddler, and the only one of the right age was a vapid blonde internet ‘influencer.’
Robin cut his train of thought short when one of the Parisian’s magical portals ripped into existence nearby. Moments later the cat and bug stepped through, the bug stripping the secondary transformation off and removing the glasses as she did so.
Though the cat had been to the cave a few times before, the bug never had been. So Robin had braced himself to expect all the usual tedious gushing about being in the famous Batcave, but the bug seemed to be trying to take it all in stride and not stare at the collection of bizarre trophies and Bat history that surrounded them. Robin grudgingly had to respect that professionalism.
Though he did wonder at the muttered “…so inaccurate.” he heard as she glanced at the animatronic tyrannosaurus rex.
“Ladybug. Chat Noir.” Batman’s greeting was as brusque as ever. “You said you needed to meet.”
Chat Noir winced. “Yeah. Looks like I’m going to want to take you up on that talk you said I could have with one of yours, because my dad is absolutely our unfriendly neighborhood emotional terrorist.”
“Big oof.” Spoiler’s tone was sympathetic, though. “On the plus side, you can join the Villain Kids Club; meetings are every other week on Wednesday evening. We have cookies.”
“My civilian self is dating the daughter of two of Paris’ best bakers,” Chat Noir pointed out in a dry tone. “I’m already spoiled for good cookies.”
“…never mind, you can bring the cookies to the meetings,” Spoiler amended, earning a somewhat strained laugh from the cat.
Ladybug stepped forward, straightening as she approached Batman, though not quite looking him in the eye. “That’s not the only reason we wanted to talk. Once Hawkmoth is gone, I think Chat and I are going to need to disappear for a bit; the news of the Paris situation will spread more widely once it’s no longer an active concern, and news of the Miraculous will attract… problems.”
Red Robin glanced at Batman, then stepped forward. “You want us to help you find a place to hide?”
Ladybug shook her head. “No. Chat and I can deal with that, but he’s… high profile out of the suit, as you know. And it’ll only be worse after his father’s unmasked. We’d just like the excuse that his civilian identity stumbled across his father’s activities, and reported it to both us and the Justice League, and that’s why we were finally able to identify Hawkmoth and gather enough proof to act. That’ll keep Chat’s civilian self from being dragged in as a suspected accomplice without his needing to unmask.” She took a breath, still not directly meeting anyone’s gaze as she seemed to be gathering her thoughts. “Then the Justice League can say that he was put into witness protection, and no one will question why he vanished afterwards.”
“And you?” Batman asked. “You’re around the same age, aren’t you?”
“Let me worry about my cover story when I vanish.” Ladybug shifted position slightly, looking away at the display cases containing older suits spanning the history of the Bats. “My civilian self is… not particularly noteworthy. At least as far as news sources are concerned. I have some things already sorted out.”
Red Robin hummed, regarding Ladybug thoughtfully. “You’ve been thinking about this quite a bit, haven’t you?”
Ladybug’s answering laugh lacked much humor. “Planning is sort of my thing. I make plans for every contingency, until I almost spiral into a panic attack imagining the worst things that can happen. And then something unexpected happens and I have to make another plan on the fly anyway, so I’m honestly not sure why I bother. But yes, having to vanish with the Miracle Box is definitely something I’ve had a notebook of plans for.” Then her tone turned more somber as she turned back to face Batman, dragging her gaze away from the varied Bat suits arrayed against the cave wall. “But that’s not the only problem on my mind—now that we know who Hawkmoth is, I worry what will happen to everyone who worked at Gabriel. The company, I mean. They’re a relatively major employer in Paris, and the economic impact could be pretty bad. But there’s only so much I can do there.”
Batman grunted. “I can speak to the Wayne family. Maybe they can buy the company after you take Hawkmoth down, fold it into the Wayne Enterprises corporate umbrella. It wouldn’t be the first outside company that family has bought as an investment.”
“I’d hoped you might have an answer like that.” Ladybug’s smile was relieved, a little of the tension in her shoulders vanishing. “And Chat Noir’s civilian identity?”
“The Justice League can cover for his disappearance,” Red Robin assured them. “Though where will you be going?”
Ladybug hesitated, worrying at her lower lip with her teeth for a moment in what had to be a nervous habit. “It’s… probably best that we don’t tell you. It’s not that I don’t trust you, believe me! I trust you all more than anyone else in the mask community.”
At first that struck Robin as unusual; most of the masked community regarded the Bats with some degree of suspicion, given their proclivity to keep secrets. But as he thought about it more, it made sense: the Bats were the ones who were helping the Parisians, so it was natural they’d trust them more than the rest of the costumed community.
“The more people who know, the weaker any protective or hiding spells will be. It’s…” Ladybug hesitated, seemingly trying to find a way to explain this that would make sense to those not versed in magic. “It’s like trying to cover something with a blanket, but then you go and poke holes in the blanket. The more holes you poke, the less effective it is at hiding anything. So the more people who know, the easier it will be for someone to see through the protection and try to scry out the location of the Miracle Box.”
“Magic is terrible.” Red Robin’s tone was one of resignation.
Ladybug only offered a rueful shrug in answer. ”Right now it doesn’t matter; everyone knows it’s in Paris and since the box is sort of like a small nuclear explosion, magically speaking, it’s too bright for anyone scrying to really narrow it down much more than what city it’s in, at least without a Guardian staff. But once we take it somewhere else for safety…”
“You’ll need as much protection as the spell can give you,” Robin concluded. “Tt. Inconvenient, but understandable. Still, none of this needed to be discussed in person.”
“Well, the in-person meeting is because there was one other thing we wanted to talk to you about.” The Parisian heroine cleared her throat, turning her attention to the helmeted vigilante leaning against one of the railings nearby. “If we’re going to go to ground for a while, I thought we should make that offer to Red Hood one more time—to try to remove the Lazarus Pit taint from him before we go. Because it might be a while before we have another opportunity.”
Batman frowned. “I’m still concerned about the possible risks invol-“
“Yes.” Red Hood didn’t even let the Bat finish his sentence before he’d stepped away from the railing. “If you think you can get this shit out of me, let’s fucking do it.”
“Hood…” But whatever Batman was about to say, it was halted by the way Red Hood turned to face him, fury written in every line of his posture.
“Fuck off, old man! This is my-“ But then Hood cut himself off, visibly quashing the momentary anger and folding his arms against himself protectively. When he spoke again, it was far more quietly. But despite the defensive and almost vulnerable posture, Robin could read tension in every line of the man’s body, as though he were holding himself rigidly under control to be able to explain without shouting profanity or resorting to violence.
“B… I need to do this. This stuff is eating away at me, hollowing me out. Every time I sink into the green, it feels like a little less of me comes back afterwards. I…” Hood took a deep breath, steeling himself again. “Someday, probably soon, everything that makes me me will be gone, nothing left but the Pit madness wearing my skin like a costume. It’ll be heads in duffel bags again, but this time with no me left to come out the other side.”
“’Heads in duffel bags’?” Chat Noir mouthed the words near-silently to Ladybug, his eyebrows raised. Ladybug ignored him, instead watching Red Hood as intently as though his explanation was the single most important thing in the world to her at that moment.
“Hood…” Red Robin started, but then couldn’t seem to figure out what to say next.
Red Hood shook his head, now looking down at the floor as though unwilling to see what emotions might be visible on anyone else’s face. “I’ve already been making plans to leave, so that I’ll be less danger to you all as it got worse. Figured I’d go try to do some damage to the League or something, set myself on a crash course and let the monster wearing me like a suit go out in a blaze of fucking glory, maybe even do some good on the way down. But… if there’s any chance…”
The other Bats didn’t seem to have anything to say; even Ladybug looked horrified. Robin was shocked as well, though he tried not to show it; he knew Todd had been struggling with the pit rage, but not that it’d gotten this bad. The fact that the older Bat had been making plans to just… leave them all behind? To throw himself into some suicide mission? It hurt. Both that he’d leave without telling them, and that he hadn’t even shared that it had become this bad.
Then again, Robin had to admit that were it him, he would have tried to deal with it all on his own as well. Maybe he and Todd were more alike than he wanted to admit.
When this had finally sunk in, Batman merely nodded, though there was a new level of tension—guilt or grief, perhaps—to the movement. “It’s your decision. If you’re willing to take the risks, we’ll support you.” But that tension, and that worry, were both still deeply apparent when he turned back to look at Ladybug.
“I can’t promise this won’t kill him.” Ladybug’s tone was quiet, but she spoke firmly. As though she needed the Bats to see how serious she was. “Even if it doesn’t, it’s going to be very painful for him. If I knew any other way to do this, I’d offer. But if it does kill him, I will bring him back, and he’d come back without the madness. One way or another, this works—it’s just a question of how unpleasant it’s going to be.”
Red Robin frowned. “From what the cat told us, casting the cure without an akuma as an external battery is pretty rough on you. Are you…”
Ladybug straightened to her full height (such as it was), finally meeting Red Robin’s gaze head-on. “I said I will bring him back, and I meant it. If anything goes wrong, I will bring him back. If there’s a cost to be paid, that’s my concern, and my decision to pay it. Not yours.”
Chat walked over to place a hand on his partner’s shoulder. “Trust me, the bug doesn’t make promises like that lightly.”
It felt to Robin like there was something significant in that statement, but when he tried to put his finger on it the thought slipped away like water.
“If you want to do it now, we can.” Ladybug looked over at Hood, the resolve on her face cracking just slightly, as though she were afraid that he might have second thoughts. “Then Chat can go speak with Spoiler about terrible parents, and I’ll wait here with Hood. Just to reassure everyone.”
Hood’s reply was immediate and vehement. “Fuck yes I want to do it now, if that’s an option. Get this shit out of me. If it kills me along the way… well, I know what you did over at Wayne Enterprises after the little French lunatic fucking killed someone. I trust you more than I trust the pits.”
At mention of Lila, Ladybug’s expression soured. “We should probably eventually talk about her, too, but I don’t have the energy to do that tonight. Not if we’re going to tend to Hood.”
For all that Robin still wanted to get away from this gathering and continue the search for Amari, this—cleansing Todd of the pit madness—was something he did feel that he should be here for.
Once the decision was made, it didn’t take long before everyone was either in the medical area of the Cave, or hovering at the doorway if they were judged ‘unnecessary’ to be actually present in the room. Hood had laid down on the medical bed with his helmet removed, as Ladybug had suggested that the level of pain Hood would probably experience might make it difficult to stay motionless; it would be easier if he was not also standing or sitting at the time. The cat and bug were each standing on one side of the bed, while Batman had insisted on being in the room and so lurked in one corner, trying to stay out of the way.
Robin, Red Robin, and Spoiler were thus the ones stuck lingering at the doorway, watching from outside.
“I’m going to just… have this ready, in case.” Ladybug murmured a quiet ‘Lucky Charm,’ and a moment later a small red-and-black spotted object fell into her hand. From what Damian saw, it appeared to be a stylized crescent moon with a bat dangling in the empty space. Ladybug barely glanced at it, holding it tightly in one hand. “Whenever you two are ready.”
For all that Chat Noir was often energetic and full of forced humor in a way that Robin found exasperating, the cat appeared dead serious as he nodded at his partner. “Alright. Here goes. Sorry about this, Hood—it’s definitely going to hurt.” Then, with a murmured ‘Cataclysm,’ that unsettling dark energy of pure Destruction gathered around his hand. Rather than touching Hood directly, however, the cat held his hand a short distance above the man’s chest and closed his eyes in concentration.
At first, nothing happened.
Then suddenly Hood let out a noise that sounded more like an animal shrieking in pain than anything Robin would’ve ascribed to a human. His hands clenched on the sides of the medical bed and he went absolutely rigid. After a moment, he began retching, and an… ooze began to drip out the side of his mouth. It was a green so dark that it seemed to absorb light, and something about the oily sheen it had just screamed ‘toxin’ to the observer.
Batman began to step forward, clearly intending to halt things, but Ladybug shifted position to block him. “It’s working.” Her tone was fierce, and for all that she was small she had the air of an immovable object. “That stuff he’s coughing up? That’s the pit residue. Chat’s destroying the bonds tying it to him, and his body is rejecting it. We just need—“
With another pained scream, Hood suddenly bucked on the bed, arching his back in a way that brought him into direct contact with Chat Noir’s active cataclysm. Tendrils of black rot began to snake across the vigilante, rapidly eating away at him. Chat Noir cursed, jumping back, but it was already too late; the vigilante on the table let out one last tortured noise and collapsed into a pile of ash.
“Ja—“ Batman began to cry out, and Robin was sure he had been about to heedlessly cry Todd’s actual name. But before the Bats could even react further, Ladybug threw the keychain into the air with a loud cry of “Miraculous Ladybug!” that drowned out Batman’s words.
The familiar swirl of ladybugs they’d seen on countless akuma fights quickly coalesced on the table, spinning around in a glowing magical maelstrom. When the magic bugs dispersed, three things were apparent.
First, there was now a puddle on the medical bed and floor around it consisting of a substantial amount of the pit… muck was the only term Robin could think of for it, though the muck immediately turned into ash as they watched, and then even the ash vanished.
Second, and most importantly, Hood was back on the medical bed, breathing heavily. His eyes were wide, but he seemed alive, well, and presumably lucid given the impressive stream of profanity he let loose with that drew from several different languages, followed by a much more prosaic “…holy fucking hell that fucking hurt.”
Thirdly, Ladybug collapsed to her knees on the floor, visibly wilting.
Robin was in the room and at her side before he really consciously decided to do so; something about being there for her just felt right. She tilted slightly to rest her head against him, as though she lacked even the energy to stay fully upright and was desperate enough to find even his acerbic presence comforting.
“Hood… should be fine now,” the bug murmured quietly, seemingly having to struggle to get enough air as she spoke. “I just… need a moment… to get my energy back. Then Chat and I… will need a private place to… detransform and recharge.”
“We already know who the cat is,” Robin pointed out. “And he knows who we are.”
Ladybug didn’t look up, but despite the thick air of exhaustion and the way she kept having to stop to inhale sharply, she still managed to sound a little dry. “Yeah, but… you don’t know me. And Bats, of… all people, do not… get to lecture me… about keeping identities secret. Unless you… all plan to unmask… for me too?”
Robin didn’t really have an answer to that. And before he could think of anything to say, his attention was drawn back to the medical bed as Hood sat upright, looking around the room in what appeared to be disbelief. “Holy shit. I feel like I can breathe again.”
The reply slipped out almost reflexively, cutting remarks Robin’s habitual defense when he felt overwhelmed, off-balance, or vulnerable. “Tt, of course you can. Because you’re alive again. Breathing is part of that.”
“Fuck off, demon spawn,” Hood replied, effectively demonstrating that even without the pit tainting him, some aspects of his personality would evidently remain unchanged. “What I mean is I feel like I haven’t been able to take a proper breath since the pits. Metaphorically. Like there’s been something pressing down on me. Living every moment with a low-grade panic attack like I’m suffocating, and everything triggers a fight-or-flight response. Except there was only ever ‘fight’. And it just kept getting heavier and heavier. But now…”
“Now you can breathe.” It was Batman who spoke, much of the usual gruffness missing. He spoke quietly, as though afraid that noise or movement would somehow shatter this moment.
“I can. And it feels fucking great.” Hood swung his legs off the medical bed, moving to stand and pace the length of the room once, as though testing that all his parts still worked. Despite having been the one to just undergo the procedure, he seemed full of energy—moreso than he had before.
“Are there… side effects?” Red Robin seemed to have noticed the same thing Robin had, eying Hood’s burst of energy.
“No…” Ladybug raised her head enough to look over at Red Robin. “But think of the pit rage like… training weights strapped onto… his arms and legs, except it was strapped onto… his soul. Or brain. Thinking, feeling anything except rage… he was working against those weights.”
“And now those weights are off,” Chat Noir added, moving to Ladybug’s other side and taking her arm to help her up.
“And it feels fucking fantastic.” Hood finally turned his attention fully to the Parisians and seemed taken aback when he realized just how drained Ladybug looked. “But… bug, are you okay?”
“I will be.” Ladybug offered a slightly strained smile as she got to her feet and let Chat help her towards the door. She still looked absolutely drained, but Robin was pleased to see she now seemed to be able to speak without having to gulp for air quite so badly. “Don’t feel guilty; like I said, my choice to pay this price. The faster I react to something like that, the less it costs me, and I was pretty fast. Being physically and magically exhausted for a few hours… is a price I’ll willingly pay.”
Robin watched Red Robin lead the Parisian duo off to a private spot to detransform and recharge, and realized abruptly that if the Parisians had truly saved Todd from the green after having snatched Richard back from the jaws of death…
Even if Ladybug had been willing to accept the cost, he wasn’t sure how the Bats could repay that sort of debt.
❖
Ladybug looked slightly better by the time she collapsed in one of the chairs in the Batcave beside a small table used for planning. But even ‘better’ meant she was still slumped over towards the table as though she wanted to fall asleep.
Red Hood watched her with some concern, and after a moment he vanished into the storage area for medical supplies, returning with something he placed on the table next to the heroine.
“Is that a juice box?” Chat Noir sounded mildly bewildered. “Like in a little kid’s lunch?”
“Getting juice in you is good if you’ve lost blood,” Ladybug murmured, taking the offered juice with a nod of thanks towards Hood. “Like when you donate at a blood drive. No need to sterilize a glass this way, and if you have a small fridge, the boxes stack neatly.”
Robin was mildly impressed; he was used to other members of the masked community having a similar reaction to Chat Noir on seeing a Bat with a juice box; Ladybug was the first he could think of who had immediately pegged why they had them. So all he added was “Your partner is correct.”
“Oh.” Chat seemed to consider this. “That does make sense. I guess we’ve never needed to really set up a medical kit because of the Cure.”
“Be thankful for that,” Robin muttered, thinking of the number of times one of the Bats had been benched with an injury after some encounter with a Rogue, or when they’d had to call in medical assistance when something was beyond Pennyworth’s triage skills. “Weren’t you going to go speak with Spoiler? Hood and I can watch your partner.”
The cat hesitated for a moment, watching Ladybug. When she nodded towards him, he took one of her hands to give it a squeeze. “We’ll get you home soon, Bug, and you can rest properly. I’ll try to keep my talk quick.”
Ladybug made a ‘shoo’ motion at him, and then poked the straw into her juice box. Robin watched the cat cross the Cave to where Spoiler stood, then turned his attention back to the heroine in front of him.
The heroine in question, meanwhile, had apparently noticed the number of search windows up on the Batcomputer. The content of the searches was all obscured, but a mere glance was enough to tell that many searches were running simultaneously, and she was staring at the screen.
“That looks pretty serious. What on earth are you all looking for?” Ladybug sounded genuinely bewildered, as she turned her attention back to the vigilantes.
Robin swiftly moved to the computer to hide all the searches that were desperately—and so far, fruitlessly—seeking any hint of where Amari al Ghul Wayne might have gone after they’d unknowingly chased her away. “Tt. Nothing that’s your business.”
Ladybug looked mildly hurt by this, and even Hood had an air of ‘what the fuck’ as he looked at Robin. After a moment, even the youngest Bat realized that Ladybug hadn’t deserved that response, and offered a somewhat grudging apology. “You did not deserve that. But it is a… sensitive personal matter, and one I am not comfortable discussing at present outside of the family.”
“Oh.” Ladybug watched quietly as Robin finished hiding all the search windows, then offered a sad smile. “I suppose that’s fair. I guess I’m just in the habit of trying to help.”
“Tt, indeed.” Robin moved back to where Hood and Ladybug were gathered. “After all, we seem to be in your debt again.”
Ladybug looked momentarily confused, as though she hadn’t even considered that what she’d done was something that needed to be repaid. Then she seemed almost flustered. “Well… I mean, the Lazarus Pits were created by the Wish, so you could say it’s sort of our responsibility to try to clean up Lazarus-related messes?”
Hood cleared his throat. “Not that I’m not thankful, pipsqueak, but… just because someone else did something shitty with your magic jewelry centuries ago doesn’t make it your responsibility.”
“It’s not like anyone else really has the tools to deal with it!” Ladybug countered. “Someday, I hope we can actually get rid of the pits themselves.”
“No.” Robin knew his tone was blunt, as brusque as his father could be at his worst, but he wanted to make certain the Parisian knew how foolish that would be. “The League of Assassins are dangerous. You have no knowledge of how they operate, and taking a Miraculous into their territory would be like going into a bear cave with raw meat strapped to you. One of their leaders, Nyssa al Ghul, is eager for any magic. Her mother had the gift of innate magic, but none of her descendants inherited it; the al Ghul line must rely on artifacts of power instead.”
Though Robin had to admit silently to himself that wasn’t strictly true; one of their line had inherited his grandmother’s talent. It was merely that his grandfather had killed her before learning of that fact.
Ladybug looked over at Robin, her eyes narrowed. “You know, you don’t know what I know.”
Robin took a moment to parse that, then decided he couldn’t quite work out the grammar of that sentence. In the end, he managed only a flat, “What.”
Even Ladybug seemed to take a moment to parse her own words, and then offered a weary sigh. “Mon dieu, I am more exhausted than I thought. What I mean is, I’m the Guardian, I can talk to the kwamis. I know more than you might think about the League of Assassins and the al Ghul family.”
Something about the way Ladybug phrased that seemed slightly off to Robin, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
“Even if you had a fucking encyclopedia covering the entire history of the League and a signed autobiography of Ra’s al Ghul, that still wouldn’t be anything close to fucking enough to be ‘ready’,” Hood retorted from his position half-seated on the table beside Ladybug’s chair. “I was trained in the League, and the demon spawn here was raised there. And neither of us is eager to go up against the League if we don’t have to. So as much as I’d love to see the world’s worst health spa shut down, trust us when we say, going against the League is not something you want to tackle. Not even to get rid of the Pits.”
“Mm.” Ladybug frowned, her gaze drifting across the varied bizarre trophies that lined the cave walls. “You know, the League is probably going to come after the Miraculous as soon as everything in Paris is done and word gets out more widely. So while I won’t go start that fight—yet—if they come find me, I’m definitely going after the Pits in return.”
Hood made an exasperated noise, but Robin recognized the sentiment. He glanced at Hood, then back at Ladybug. “Don’t be the one to start a fight, but be the one to finish it. Is that what you mean?”
“Exactly. I have enough other things to deal with first, but if they make themselves problem number one on my list…”
This wasn’t an argument they were going to win, Robin realized. And he had to grudgingly admit that it wasn’t even as though Ladybug was wrong; the League would come after her, and asking her not to act against them in return was foolish. “Then I request that you contact the Bats when they do. No one associated with the Justice League knows more about the League of Assassins than we do. Consider the offer of help a way of repaying you.”
“That’s fair, I suppose.” Ladybug fell silent after that, as though she didn’t quite know what to say next. So the three of them just sat in relative silence, punctuated only by the occasional sound of a ‘slurp’ from the juice box.
In the end, it was Hood who eventually spoke up. “So, I have to admit, I was a little surprised it was the cat who was healing me. Isn’t mending stuff more Creation’s thing?”
“This again? People always seem to think it’s so black and white. Creation is good, destruction is bad! That’s just…” Ladybug made a frustrated noise and a vague gesture, as though waving away the argument. “Neither of them is good. Or bad.”
Hood shrugged. “Well, yeah, you can’t really assign morality to most abstract concepts—“
Ladybug cut him off. “What happens when your cells start growing out of control, making more and more of themselves when they shouldn’t?”
There was a moment’s silence, and then Robin gave a one-word answer. “Cancer.”
“That’s creation, unchecked.” Ladybug shook her juice box once, and upon realizing she really had gotten every drop of juice she possibly could, put it aside on the table with a little sigh. “And when you operate? Cut away the cancer?”
Hood had caught on now. “That’s destruction. What you’re saying is that either of them, on its own without the other, is bad. Too much order is stasis, but too much chaos is anarchy. Too much creation is cancer, but too much destruction is desolation.”
Ladybug gave him a nod in answer, a faint smile creeping through her fatigue. “Exactly. That’s what I mean when I say neither is ‘good’ or ‘bad’; they both do good things, and they both are bad in excess. And different situations are best addressed by different concepts. In this case, you needed a surgeon to try to cut away—or burn away—the pit residue. That’s why Chat was the one to do it: you needed destruction. My only option would be to recreate you without the residue, which is far more involved. And magically expensive.”
“Tt. You ended up doing so anyway,” Robin pointed out.
“Yes, well… as we can see, that wasn’t what I would call the ideal outcome.” Ladybug waved at herself, indicating the fact that she was half-slumped in the chair. “So it was definitely not the first plan. Especially since recreating something means it needs to be destroyed in the first place anyway. And using raw destruction to kill Hood was not something we planned to do.”
“Yeah.” Hood shuddered. “That was… not pleasant. It was faster than the first time around, but I think it might’ve actually been worse. Last time it was just broken bones, this was feeling things inside of me turn to fucking ash. You cannot imagine how horrible that felt.”
Robin refrained from replying that he didn’t want to know how it felt. Just imagining it made him somewhat queasy. The queasiness only got worse, however, when he heard Ladybug murmur something to herself so quietly she likely didn’t mean them to overhead it: “Oh, I can.”
Hood was the first to find his voice. “What… what the fuck. You’ve been cataclysmed before?”
“Not in this timeline?” Ladybug seemed startled that she’d been overheard, but tried to recover quickly and offered that qualifier as though it somehow made it better. In Robin’s opinion, it did not. “We snipped that timeline off so now everything’s totally fine!”
Then another thought occurred to him, and Robin’s eyes narrowed as his gaze snapped back to Ladybug. “You said you had died five times, depending on if you counted alternate timelines. How many is it if you do count them?”
“…more than five?” Ladybug offered sheepishly, clearly unwilling to commit to an actual number. Which, given that she’d been reasonably forthcoming about many other things, did not give Robin a particularly good feeling about what that actual number would be.
Chat Noir, whose enhanced hearing apparently meant he was part of this conversation even if Hood and Robin hadn’t realized it, shouted across the cave, “Try five digits!”
Ladybug glared over at her partner and shouted back, “Desperada doesn’t count because I don’t remember those ones, kitty! Besides, not every one of those 25,913 loops was one I died in!”
All the Bats—even Spoiler, Batman, and Red Robin across the cave with Chat Noir—could only listen in horrified silence as Chat retorted loudly, “It was still five digits! I counted, Bug! You died in 23,572 of them!”
Ladybug made an irritated noise. “Yeah but you told me most of those were just getting turned into a glittery sticker on a guitar case!”
“Transformed into an inanimate object counts! Your rules, not mine!” Chat Noir delivered this in a triumphant sing-song manner. “Isn’t that what you tell me when you say for me not to throw myself into the line of fire?”
“Okay, using my own words against me while I’m still recovering from a valiant lifesaving effort is just unfair!” Ladybug did her best to glare across the cave at her partner. “Go finish your conversation, chaton! I want to go home and sleep for a week!”
The cat offered her a jaunty salute and then turned his attention back to his (much quieter) conversation with a now slightly shell-shocked Spoiler.
“What… what the fuck.” Hood just gestured helplessly in the direction of first Ladybug and then Chat Noir. “Twenty-three thous— what the fucking hell?”
“Like I said, I don’t remember any of those, so it’s fine. They don’t count for me.” Ladybug sobered, and added, “But Chat does remember watching me die, because he was the one using the snake. It’s why I hate bringing that one into play. Second Chance is incredibly useful, but it’s really rough on the wielder.”
If Robin felt vaguely nauseated before, now he genuinely felt outright ill at the thought of dying that many times. Even without remembering any of them. And the idea of seeing any of his family—or Jon—dying that many times seemed even worse; it seemed like the sort of thing that would absolutely break someone.
(He brushed aside the thought that while seeing anyone he considered an ally die that way would be traumatic, out of everyone he knew outside the family it was specifically and only Jon he thought would entirely destroy him to see die repeatedly that way. He wouldn’t let himself dwell on why that was. Or the memory of what Power Girl had said about the relationship between their counterparts.)
Robin had always thought the Parisian heroes were holding it together surprisingly well. Now he began to wonder if they actually were, and how much of that was all just an act. How much was just a show they put on for the benefit of Paris, to preserve the city’s confidence in them and their eventual victory.
Seemingly oblivious to Robin’s internal turmoil, Ladybug continued on. “Anyway, that’s why Chat and I banter about it like it doesn’t matter. We have to act like it doesn’t, because if we take the time to even start to process any of that…” The heroine sank further in her chair. “…then we lose. But we’re both so tired.”
“Well, at least it’s almost over.” Red Hood clenched one hand into a fist. “And as soon as it is, I’m going to go over and do something really uncomfortable to Hawkm— hold on, he’s Gabriel Agreste.”
“Yes, we all knew that. That’s why they’re here.” Robin’s tone was scathing. But insulting his brothers was familiar ground, and far less distressing than dwelling on the Parisian trauma. Or imagining watching an endless loop of the death of someone he cared about.
Hood shook his head. “No, I mean… I figured when this was over, I’d go to Paris and kick Hawkmoth somewhere sensitive, and then make a second stop to punch Gabriel Agreste in the kidneys for the way he treats Raps. But they’re the same person; I can just give him double the beatdown.” With his helmet still off, his grin was visible… and downright feral. “I guess when I do, I’ll also thank him for making it so convenient for me.”
“Thank you!” Ladybug sat up a little straighter in her chair as she threw both arms out in Hood’s direction as though to highlight his remark. “See, joking about it all helps! But really, I joke about Desperada more to help Chat than me. Like I said, I don’t remember any of that.”
Something occurred to Robin at that moment: the way Ladybug had phrased it, she had said she didn’t remember the specific set of time loops that Chat Noir had mentioned. The ‘Desperada’ incident.
But she never said she didn’t remember any other deaths outside of this timeline.
Narrowing his eyes again, he turned his attention back to the Parisian heroine. “Counting other timelines, how many do you remember?”
“…seventeen.” This was offered very reluctantly, before Ladybug froze as though something had occurred to her. She stared at the floor with an almost haunted expression. “Maybe eighteen. I don’t really know if I died in that one, technically, but I remember feeling like…” She trailed off, her voice suddenly choked with grief. “Anyway, that one was bad. It was the first time, too.”
Hood looked like he wanted to either hug Ladybug or kill something, possibly both. “Bug, you… that’s not okay. I thought five was bad.”
And then Robin was struck by yet another troubling thought. “The cat said he’d died twenty-nine times to your five. If your five was not counting other timelines… counting other timelines, how many times has he actually died?”
Ladybug fell silent, and glanced over at Chat. Then she wrapped her arms around herself and said very quietly, “This discussion is done.”
And wasn’t that a reply that said far more than Ladybug likely wanted it to.
Because while Robin wasn’t as good as Orphan at reading body language, even to him that reaction screamed that Chat Noir didn’t actually know the true full tally of his own deaths. And moreover that Ladybug didn’t want the cat to know, presumably because it would be trauma beyond what they could safely joke about. And considering that twenty-three thousand deaths was not a number too high for them to make jokes about…
Hood and Robin glanced at each other, and with a nod, both silently agreed to drop the topic.
“I’m good to go, Bug!” Chat Noir called this from across the cave, thus drawing an end to the discussion anyway. “If we stay any longer, Spoiler’s going to keep trying to convince me that I’d look better in royal purple!”
“It’s eggplant!” To Robin’s mild dismay, this remark came not merely from Spoiler, as expected, but simultaneously from Ladybug as well.
“Thank you!” Spoiler shouted. “No one ever gets that right!”
“That’s because Gotham has no fashion sense,” Ladybug called back. “Just look at your rogues! I’m from Paris, the capital of fashion!”
“Uhm, have you seen your akumas?” Hood offered this in an amused tone. “Sorry, but Riddler’s got nothing on… what was he called? The Bubbler?”
Ladybug whirled to give him a Look. “The akumas have their designs forced on them; your rogues choose to wear those eyesores of their own free will. That makes them far worse.”
“Oh my god.” Red Robin’s expression was one of absolute horror as he moved to join them near Ladybug’s chair. “Oh my god, I just realized... Hawkmoth is a fashion designer. How does he live with himself?”
Ladybug’s demeanor shifted to something more professional again, as she seemed to actually take the question seriously. “Actually, we think that might be a deliberate attempt to mislead. No one would expect world-famous fashion designer Gabriel Agreste to be responsible for the akumas given…” She seemed to flail about mentally for a moment, trying to find an appropriate way to describe the akumas. Eventually she settled on “…the aesthetics of the situation.”
Chat Noir scoffed as he reached out to offer his arm to Ladybug for support. “No, you think that. I think my dad’s just gone completely off the rails after mom died, and the increasingly eye-searing akuma designs are an unconscious sign of his deteriorating mental and emotional state.”
“Eh.” Ladybug shrugged as she let the cat help her up from the chair, evidently too drained to bother with a debate over the topic. “We’re going to kick his ass either way.”
“Yeah.” Chat Noir sobered slightly. “It’ll be good for this to be over, even if…”
Ladybug reached over to give his arm a reassuring squeeze, then fished the glasses out of her yo-yo in a blatant violation of physics. She held them out towards her partner with a rueful smile and an “I’m spent. Could you…?”
“Yeah, I’ll drive.” Chat took the glasses, snapping them open with a flick of his wrist. Placing them on his nose, he summoned a portal and then made a gallant bow. “Your chariot awaits, my lady.”
“You are such a theater kid at heart,” Ladybug murmured, her tone fond. Then she turned to offer a tired nod to the Bats. “Thank you again for all your help. It’s because of you that Paris will soon be free.”
And then, before the Bats could say anything more, the duo were gone and the portal closed behind them. Robin watched the last glimmers of the magic fade with a frown; something in the evening’s interactions had left him uneasy, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.
But the thought slipped away like water through his fingers. He had other matters to attend to, after all.
And so he turned his attention back to the Batcomputer, and the many searches running there.