Chapter Text
Marinette wakes, and she is home.
“Home” isn’t her soft, lofty bed with a gentle spring breeze bringing her back to consciousness. It isn’t the loving, yet caging looks from her father just before he tells her to do everything at her leisure, and never to stray too far. It isn’t the countless meadows where she’s spent her time, or the nymphs who keep her company and braid flowers into her hair, or the songs about spring and new life. It might not even be the sun to her anymore, or those few moments when she gets to see it. Not so much, anyway.
Home—now more than ever—is her head nestled against a cool chest in the dark, and quietly laced fingers, and the heavy blankets that pool at her waist when she sits up and tries to comb her hair back into place. It’s the lazy mouth at her waist, and then at her wrist, all the way up her arm to her shoulder, it’s the feeling of foreign, loving hands on her skin, and then it’s the gentle tug of her body on top of another’s.
It’s the sleepy, contented smile Luka gives her as he swims into vision, and squeezes her hands before his own travel up and up and down and down, and he tells her in earnest, “I think I’m beginning to like this view of you.”
Her husband.
Stars and seeds, he’s her husband.
And it’s the smile she returns as she catches him by the wrist and kisses his palm, just before he beckons her down to meet her lips with his own.
“Are you leaving?” Luka asks her. He’s busy brushing her hair from her shoulders, raking her over with his gaze, revering her all over again in spite of the flickers of worry in his eyes. “To see your father, to tell your attendants…”
He’s cradling her cheeks, but Marinette manages to shake her head anyway. “These souls are my attendants now,” she tells him, and attempts to crawl off to grab her still-stained robe from the floor. “And I should go pay them my respects.”
“Stay,” he says, and tries to pull her back into his arms, and she doesn’t particularly resist. It’s hard to, when a charming deathbed is so conceivable now.
“We have things to do,” she reminds him. “A land to rule, spirits to attend to…”
“And yet I still made time in all this,” he says, “to attend to you.” He’s slipped into a grin now, coaxed her back down to him and the covers over their heads. “And I know exactly how I want to use that time.”
It takes a while, getting used to being called Your Majesty, or anything else so formal. She’s gotten accustomed to My Lady, simply by virtue of being her father’s daughter. My Lady was sweet, and innocent, the dainty address of those who knew her family and not her, who sang to her and giggled in her presence and blew her kisses, who sought to protect her instead of letting her live. Your Majesty carries a weight to it, a responsibility, and seems to come almost naturally to all these wandering spirits. No matter whether she walks along the river or among the orchards in Paradide, as soon as they see her, they freeze in place, knowing something deep inside themselves without knowing how they know it, and they bend to her, and weep for her mercy. And they call her their queen. Majesty.
They’re such pitiable, wispy little things, and it takes a certain kind of strength for Marinette to soothe them back to their feet and whisper, “Rise. You don’t need to bow to me. This is your home, and I am your caretaker, and I will let nothing harm you.” And it’s all they need to be a little less aimless, a little more assured in their wandering, a little less hollow in the way they weep for themselves.
Sometimes, she can feel Luka’s proud gaze boring into her back. Other times, she feels nothing, because he’s left her to herself. She calls it a privilege, an honor, a breath of fresh air. He calls it a right, and common decency, and he tells her to find all her places, to find whatever makes her curious and gives her purpose and makes her happy. Nothing will take her away here. Nothing will close her in.
The spirits tell her their stories of all the ugly things she’s never known, and may never will: loss of children, a lover’s painful rejection, miscarriages and war and disease, pride and jealousy and self-destructive wrath, mind-numbing despair and plagues of the brain that tempt people to their own demise. Sometimes they don’t need to say anything; sometimes they only kneel at her feet and vibrate in their own sadness. Sobbing. Sometimes they stumble toward L’Oubli in front of her very eyes, drink deep from their hands and disappear back into mortality for another chance at existence, without ever letting her say goodbye first.
As long as it takes to get used to all this heavy-handed deference, it takes longer for her heart to stop breaking for all these mortal regrets.
In the shadow of Marinette’s care they come to call her a number of things, which seem more respectful than her name and yet not as stiff as Your Majesty. “Caretaker.” “Guardian.” “Mercy.” “Death Mother.” Even Juleka—her sister-in-law, yes, that’s right—picks up on them from time to time, whenever they cross paths. They’re the sorts of names that align with what her father’s been called all these years. The sorts of epithets that are best accompanied by an altar she does not keep, and a priestess who hasn’t quite grasped all of her secrets, and offerings she would have no use for. The sorts that people write poetry about, and she’s sure she hasn’t gotten there, and probably never will.
It matters little to her. What she has here—the rivers, the orchards, the palace—is enough to please her.
And, as she’s noticed, whatever is enough to please her is enough to please Luka in turn. He tells her so in the private company of his palace, or of their bed, when they huddle close and she tells him about the stories she’s heard, the corners of the Underworld that she’s visited, the fingernail-sized blossoms that betray every path she takes. He gives her his full attention, with awe sparkling in his eyes and tenderness in every touch, and calls her “my queen” at any teasing opportunity. But it works well enough when she calls him “my lord” right back, and practically glows any time he laughs and pulls her close.
Death is lovely when he laughs, Marinette decides. Even if the sound is hollow, and strikes unnameable terror in the hearts of others. Even if it’s inconceivable. He laughs when he’s around her, he laughs only for her, and she cherishes it as closely as the crown upon her head, as closely as the name she’s earned.
“Do you ever get homesick?” Luka asks her once, when the world is quiet and they only have to focus on each other. “All this dark and regret and sorrow. You aren’t tired of it?”
“Is Adrien tired of the sun?” she asks. “Is Lady Anarka tired of the sea?”
He smiles and nuzzles her shoulder, perhaps in remembrance of his mother. “You haven’t answered my question.”
It’s partly because she doesn’t want to, and partly because she doesn’t feel like she needs to. He’ll find his answer soon enough, when she’s meandering through Paradise with a bittersweet expression and swirling life around her feet. Or when she’s got her hands in the dirt in every attempt to bring forth real trees and real roots, just to see the elated, grateful look on his face when she brings him homegrown food. Or when she tips her head toward what she hopes might be the sky, only to see grey and more grey, and the gemstone forest glows just a little brighter in sympathy, like the trees are trying to copy the sun for her sake. She chalks it up to muscle memory, these sudden drops in her heart—lets herself miss, and then lets the missing go.
For now, she only pulls him closer in the night, and tucks his head under her chin, and just before his arms snake around her waist and his lips find her collarbone, she murmurs, “I am home. This is my place, and that is my crown, and you are my lord.”
He squeezes her hand. “And you are my queen.”
This is the way for what must be months. She doesn’t know how long, exactly.
All she knows is when it stops.
When her father’s voice echoes down the cavern, and leaves her ichor running cold.
“Who is it?” Luka asks, but he looks like he doesn’t want to know. Like he wishes she didn’t know.
Marinette’s starting to think she wishes she didn’t know, either.
The voice comes again, barrels down the steps from The Border, cold and sharp and almost scared. It stops them both on their stroll along La Haine, and even the spirits around them don’t dare make any sound. Like something might snatch them away, in a moment where, for once, they might not want it to—as though the snatching can only happen by their own consent.
She’d rather enjoy the irony of it all, if she weren’t so rooted to the spot. If she weren’t shaking at Luka’s side.
“Who is it?” he asks again. “What’s happening?”
Marinette draws in a breath, gives his hand a squeeze, and lets go. “Stay here,” she whispers. “I’ll go on my own.”
“And what if something happens to you?” His voice is as resolute as the hard gleam in his eyes. “I couldn’t live with myself if that happened. I couldn’t be stupid enough to let you go alone.”
“Do you trust me?”
Luka studies her carefully, from the black robes she’s claimed for her own to the withered flowers on her head—a keepsake from the first time she visited the Underworld. His gaze softens, but only a little, and he nods before reaching into one of his pockets to pull out a bronze ring. It’s a signet, decorated with garnets to look like half of a pomegranate, and he takes her hand in his to slide it onto her finger and kiss the jewels.
“You’ll come back to me,” he murmurs, and Marinette can’t tell if he’s making a plan for her or reassuring himself.
“I’ll come back to you,” she whispers back—a plan, a promise—and squeezes his hands. And lets go. And she tries not to think about the branch that snags in her robes and tears them on her way toward the cavern. She’ll have them mended later.
The pathway to The Border is half-familiar, only because she can’t remember the last time she traveled this way. She almost wonders, for all the time she’s spent here, if it’s worth remembering anything and everything she left behind, when she has a whole world at her fingertips. If it’s even worth climbing these steps at all, or if her father would very well descend in to Hell just to get her out.
No, she tells herself, rubbing the garnets under her thumb and gathering up her robes, rips and all. She’s coming back. She is queen, and she’s coming back. She’ll explain everything at The Border, and her father will attend to his land and his mortals, and she’ll attend to hers and what’s left of them, and all will be well. All has to be well.
All this, until she squints into the light, and freezes in place, and starts to tremble all over again, at the sight of her father’s burly form in the cavern entrance. And the grey. And the snow. And the dead white blossom, limp against the rocks.
Marinette doesn’t know what to do first: try and fail to nurse the blossom back to life, or gather her robes around her against the cold, or stare into her father’s pale, gaunt face. Has he ever looked so… hollow? Like someone scooped all the life out of him? Has he ever looked so alone? So… scared?
“Papa,” she breathes, and she isn’t sure if she’s relieved to see him, or overwhelmed by being found, or—horrified—at the wasteland behind him. What is this place? This isn’t the meadow she’s so used to. That place was full of life and color and song, sweet girls and unraveled braids and soft petals from fruits that came so naturally. This… this is nothing. This is what Nothing looks like. The trees are little more than gnarled black branches, void of all their leaves, let alone their fruit. There’s no grass to be seen, under all this white, and the Earth feels like it’s cracking, and everything looks like it could attack her, if she isn’t careful.
This isn’t her Earth. This isn’t her home.
And maybe this isn’t her father, if he’s staring at her like he doesn’t recognize her. If he’s staring at her like she’s got smudges of death on her hands and can’t wash them out.
“Marinette?” he says, like he’s searching for her—no, like he’s searching for someone he used to know in her. Like he’s waiting for that someone to spring out, and say she’s missed him, and beg him to take her home. But whoever that someone is, Marinette isn’t sure she knows her anymore. Or wants to.
She takes a step back, and clutches at her dress, right along the tatters from the stray branches, for some kind of nameless security. “Where did you—how did you—?”
“You’re all right,” he says, like he can’t believe she ever could be, and crosses The Border, and gathers her up in his arms. And for some reason, he looks all the more alive for it. “Oh, thank everything, you’re safe. Come, he can’t get you anymore. He won’t take you away again.”
“What—” Her heart sinks in disbelief, and it seems like the more she tries to struggle or tell him to let her go, the tighter he holds onto her. And he tells her to come along, and it sounds too perfect, and not at all inviting. It’s the kind that tells her he might very well never let her out of his sight again. The kind that says she’s supposed to belong here when, maybe, he doesn’t know the first thing about her anymore. That if he only remakes her in the right image, she’ll be herself again. She’ll make everything right again.
She shouldn’t have come. She shouldn’t have left. It was only that she didn’t know, she didn’t know what would happen if she didn’t. If he’d come down himself and yank her away from her own land. Her land. Her home.
She wants to go home. She wants to go back. She told Luka to trust her. She promised she’d come back.
She presses her thumb to the ring, and the flowers on her head come sickeningly back to life, and she starts to cry, and she starts to scream. And her father holds her closer against the cold, and he tries to soothe her, and he says, “I know, I know, I’m taking you home.”
It’s as she’s wiping her eyes that she tosses her head toward the now-colorless sky, and in the few cursed moments that Adrien passes overhead, he smiles knowingly, with his hand to his heart, and gives her a salute.
Marinette wakes, and she is not home.
She doesn’t quite know where she is at first.
She doesn’t quite know who she is at first.
The first morning, it takes her ages to open her eyes, because she stayed up impossibly late, clutching the ring to her chest and weeping. She hoped, stupidly, that it might open some line of communication to the Underworld. That she could tell Luka exactly what had happened to her, and that she could be rescued, really rescued. But it didn’t matter what she did, how hard she rubbed it, how much she cried. Her chamber was quiet, and Luka didn’t come, and he probably never could. Probably never would. The night comes flooding back to her, and she can’t bring herself to move. She can’t even bring herself to cry properly. The tears simply leak from the corners of her eyes until she decides to rise, and then they merely trickle down her cheeks, springing fresh no matter how many times she tries to wipe them away.
The first morning, there’s a chill coming from the windows, and as she moves to close them, she catches sight of the crocuses peeking through the snow. The frost beginning to melt away. The faint color spilling into the sky.
Spring is coming back, life is starting again, and for the first time she’s aware of, she doesn’t want much to do with it.
So she shuts all the windows, and draws all the curtains, and scorns the daylight for shining through. And she sits in her bed, in the pastel, flower-adorned robes she left behind, and tries to mend the ones that make her queen. And no matter how much she stitches them, no matter how much she tries to make them look as good as new, they never really feel whole to her. They’re little more than a void of rumpled fabric, and she can’t bring herself to hide it away. And she can’t bring herself to put it on again, because garments like these are not for the Earth.
Someone like her is not for the Earth.
The mornings that follow feel the same. Every day, a little more frost melts away, a few more blossoms poke out to greet her and thank her, a little more blue fills the sky and keeps the sun company. And every day, she closes the curtains and paces her chamber and rubs the ring in longing, as though this might be the time Luka can come get her, can connect to her and tell her exactly how to come back to him. Her father always checks in on her all the same, and thanks her for bringing life back into the world with a kiss to the top of her head, and encourages her to go outside and see the nymphs who haven’t visited in so long. Because, really, it’s not as though he’s keeping her locked up in here, even though she supposes he very well could.
It’s just that he’s keeping her locked out of her home, pleading her to never leave his sight, because he couldn’t bear to lose her like that again, and that’s just as bad. And she doesn’t want to risk sneaking to The Border on her own again, in case it becomes cyclical. Or in case he—or worse, Gabriel—did something to keep her from getting back in.
So there isn’t a point.
And so here she stays.
What an odd way to kill someone who cannot die.
It must be months before all the snow clears away, and the birds start singing at the windowsill, and Marinette finally dares to open the curtains to a world she used to be so familiar with. Her attendants are waiting below—they must have been coming every day, just hoping for her to see them and come to them. They laugh and cry and call to her, beckoning her down, these beings she called her friends once upon a time, when perhaps she only thought them so because they were the only ones to spend time with her. And though her body feels like lead and the flowers feel so fake, she goes down to meet them. They gather her up in their embraces and in their tears, and lead her down to the meadow hand-in-hand, and they sing her their welcomes, and she tries not to cry all over again, because Luka might hear it.
Something in her itches to go to The Border. Just to try. Just to see what would happen. It’s right there, in broad daylight. If only she could…
But they never let her out of their sight. Don’t even let her look toward it. They’ve missed her too much, they say. Doesn’t she know how long she’s been gone? Hasn’t she noticed how short the days were, how beautiful they are now that she’s back?
She pauses, with irises in her hair and her hands folded so limply in her lap. “How long was I gone?”
The girls look among each other, but it’s Alya who speaks. It’s always Alya who speaks. “Don’t you know?” she says. “It was something like six months.”
Six months.
Six beautiful months of surveying her land and soothing her spirits. Six beautiful months of toeing the riverbanks and springing fresh food from the ground and finding solace in the gemstone trees. Six months of unlearning all her empathy as she walked past the Torture, and falling into it all over again when she peeked into Paradise. Of comforting the weeping ones, and bidding farewell to those too impatient for their own mortality,. Of balancing a crown of permanent flowers on her head, of being the guardian and the childless mother, of bedding Death Himself and whispering all his secrets back to him among laced fingers and tangled sheets.
Six months that Luka didn’t have to wait for her at The Border, or long for her in the daylight, and only whisk her away at night for a few hours at a time. Six months that she didn’t have to worry about what her father would do when he woke up.
How many months did Luka spend waiting for her before? Would he wait for her now?
…Is he waiting for her now? Has he been, all these days, all these mornings or nights, and did she simply miss him out of her own grief?
When her father’s attendants—her babysitters, perhaps she should call them—aren’t looking, she steals one glance at The Border out of the corner of her eye. And then another. And a third. All these small bursts, just to search for the shadows of her husband.
Her husband who isn’t there, when she looks just a little too long.
And she rocks back and forth and begins to hum, almost manically, every song she’s ever heard him play. Like if she does it long enough, he’ll hear her from below, and he’ll finally come to his senses and bring her back.
Alya is the one who notices her eyes welling up, and follows Marinette’s gaze to The Border, and pulls her close, unable to follow the melody but soothing her all the same. “I know,” she says, threading her fingers through her hair, careful not to dislodge any of the blossoms. “I know you were scared. But you’re safe now. You have us, and you’re safe now.”
Scared?
When was she ever scared?
“Look,” Alya says, nudges her, points a reassuring finger upwards.
Marinette does, with all the notes stuck in her throat now, and above them is Adrien, golden as ever and guiding his chariot across the sky. He waves down to her with something like a relieved expression, and he doesn’t take his eyes off her except to control the fiery steeds ahead of him and the sun just behind.
Before, her heart would have fluttered, and she would have thought about it all day, carried it with her into her dreams while the attendants cooed around her and reinforced all her fantasies the way they do now. She would have sung about spring and sunshine and wished to be up there beside him. She would have held his hand the whole time and perhaps stolen a kiss or two and looked down on how small the world was, waving down at everything she knew.
Now, she feels… nothing. Almost nothing. Except for maybe her heart sinking deep into the pit of her stomach. And the music dying away before it ever reaches her lips.
And a curiosity, for what he must have said or done.
And a dark, fiery, angry longing, for what he took away.
Her hands clench into fists, as small and tight and powerful as she can make them. And she rises to her feet, still looking between The Border and the sky and there’s power in how Alya’s grip on her slips.
Adrien passes, and she watches him disappear into the distance, and she has to go home. There are new robes to put on. There’s a story to tell, and trust to gain, and somewhere to go.
And Luka’s already told her exactly where.
Marinette supposes that when these mortal folk talk about following one another to the ends of the earth, they don’t mean it literally.
And she supposes that when she felt the same about Adrien, once upon a time, she didn’t mean it that way, either.
It took nights of silent appeal for strength and stealth in front of the fire in her chamber. She pleaded, and begged without words, and she rubbed at hopeless angry tears until her mother appeared in the hearth at twilight, and covered her as she doubled over crying. Her mother lifted her face, steadfast and patient and holding all the welcome of the world, and in the few moments she was there she waved a hand behind her, then clasped both of Marinette’s and told her to go. There was no protest, no argument, nothing but a knowing support and a closeness of the heart that no god or father could break. Nothing but, perhaps, the love a parent should have given. She only looked to her mother once, and waited for the nod, and stole into the almost-dark in her mended royal robes.
Luka took her to The Medium once, and only once. The resting place for those who have done neither good nor bad, or too much of each. The place where they wait and wander, with no punishment and no reward and no second chances, with all the dying stars and the silence of space to accompany them.
The place where, for a few critical moments a day—moments that are neither blessed nor cursed—the sun and the moon meet.
She’s never been since—made it a point, really, to avoid the place, and never cross the nameless river of the Underworld—but her body seems to know where to take her all the same. It’s as though she’s known her world so much that the place comes to her naturally. She doesn’t know how much of the Earth she’s crossed, how many clouds she’s had to push through. She only has her eyes on the horizon, and her skirts billowing behind her, and she feels much more like the queen of the death of day than the death of all things, but she’ll take it for all this ugly despair she’s had to carry all this way.
Marinette takes a breath and kisses her garnet ring, and crosses the river that feels more like a sea without an end, and steps into the end of the world.
The first thing she notices is how deafeningly silent everything is. It’s as though she’s dipped her whole head into the river instead of simply crossing it. There’s no breeze in the atmosphere, no rustle or crackle in her footsteps, nothing but the low rumbling of the cosmos that she can only try to replicate if she closes her eyes too tight. Even when she gasps, it’s like the land takes it away. It must be, she thinks, the remnants of what everything used to be like before Tikki and Plagg came together.
The Medium was a blinding black void, more solitude than any other part of the Underworld, when she stood outside of it with Luka. All things considered, she might have fit right in if it didn’t make her so uncomfortable. Now, it’s a blend of reds and pinks and oranges that are slowly dying away—a bath of sunlight she has to reach before it’s gone. It’s just bright enough, now, to see those few-but-far-between souls, the ones that are good for something but not the best, pacing in their own nothingness. Wandering. Waiting.
How many times have they seen the sky like this? How long have they been listening to the beginning and the end of everything?
With the ichor pounding and pulsing under her skin, Marinette takes one step forward, and then another, and then she breaks into a run. She doesn’t care how much she stumbles over herself and has to gather her dress and try again. She only knows that she can’t slow down, that the day is ending and the night is coming and she can’t bear to wait all the hours it will take for Felix and Adrien to be together again. She has to chase the light. She has to get to it before it goes.
A spirit notices her, and then another, and out of the corner of her eye they come at her. She’s never seen anything move so fast, or latch onto her so hard, or stare at her with such sunken, desperate, needy eyes. She screams, and no sound comes out no matter how many times she tries it, and she’s left mouthing at them.
It’s only when she shrieks, “Unhand your queen!” that the silence breaks, and they let her go like they’ve been burnt.
She sprints away, and they sprint after her, reaching for her—these wispy hands in the almost-dark—like she could ever save them somehow. She runs until the world gets brighter and darker, and brighter and darker again, and she shield her eyes and closes them and—
And there’s Adrien. Tending to his horses, golden as the day he was born.
And there’s Félix. Sharpening his arrows, so cold and ethereal in the way he glows in the dark that Marinette can’t help but stare.
“You’re here,” she says, her voice echoing into oblivion. It feels like she’s tearing through existence as she comes to them, crossing through a glass where the spirits who clung to her can only stop short.
Instantly, both boys look up from their handiwork; she can’t tell if they’re horrified or relieved to see her. They might even look like they don’t recognize her. Adrien is the first to drop his brush and run to her, and he stops short just like those spirits. Like he doesn’t know if he can touch her. He never has before.
His hand twitches, and his fingertips brush against her knuckles, and he feels like sunlight. “You’re safe,” he murmurs. “I was so scared for you.”
He reaches to cradle her cheek, and though his touch is soft, and tender, and everything she’d ever hoped it would be, she has to swallow down a sick feeling that rises in her throat. It’s Adrien, sure, but Adrien is not her husband. Adrien didn’t show her the world and everything it has to offer. Adrien didn’t sing to her, or beckon her out, or cherish her. He only…
He only…
He didn’t do anything.
She takes a step back, trembling, just as Félix languidly approaches them, his hunting dog at his side, and slings his quiver across his chest. He looks at her like she should be grateful for something, but she has no idea what. “Why?” she asks. “What do you mean, I’m safe?”
Adrien and Félix share a look that Marinette can’t quite decipher, but the one they give her is full of pity. “You were taken,” Adrien says. “You were abducted into the Underworld by… Luka.” He wrinkles his nose at the name, but looks like he’s trying to pretend he didn’t; it isn’t lost on Marinette. “Félix saw everything. He told me to tell your father, since I could reach him better. Though if I were him…” He shoots a glare at his brother. “I wouldn’t have waited until I was asked six months later if I knew anything.”
She looks over to Félix, who’s looking bored as ever and rubbing his nails against the sash on his cropped robes. “You’re welcome,” is all he says. His dog curls up beside her feet, loyally wagging his tail, as if to tell her he’s bound to protect her, too.
“It’s okay, Marinette,” Adrien says, getting her attention with his hand on her wrist. “You’re safe here. You’re home. He can’t get you, unless…”
Her chest goes tight, and she freezes at his touch. “Unless?”
“Unless you ate something,” Félix cuts in dryly, examining one of his arrows like he intends to threaten her. Or worse, threaten Luka. “But I don’t know what kind of rotting flesh would be so appetizing down there.”
Marinette holds her breath, and her thumb digs into the garnet seeds of her ring. Her nose starts to burn, and her hand unravels from Adrien’s grip, and she sinks to the ground in tears with her face in her hands.
Instantly, Adrien is kneeling at her side, his hands on her shoulders, squeezing so gentle it makes her sick all over again. “What is it, Marinette?” he asks, so softly she’s not even sure Félix can hear. “What happened to you down there?”
She’s shaking so much she can barely speak at first, and she cradles her ring close to her chest. “Thank everything,” she shudders. “I can go home.”
Félix looks at her incredulously. “What are you talking about? Stars, he must have messed up your mind worse that we thought. Adrien, don’t worry about this anymore, I’ll take her back and—”
“You’ll do no such thing!” she screeches, so loud that nothing can swallow it up. Behind her, she feels every spirit go still. In front, Adrien and Félix are stunned into silence.
Marinette staggers to her feet, fists clenched so tightly her knuckles are going white and glittering with her own essence. She must look so wild to the two of them, the hair-raising, maddening Queen of Death she truly is. They’re scared of her, cowering before her, and she revels in it. “Understand this,” she hisses. “I don’t want to be here.”
The twins look to each other again, then back at her, like they’re afraid of speaking and of incurring her wrath by not speaking all at once. Only Adrien is brave enough to do it, in the end. “No one wants to be here,” he says. “No one likes The Medium.”
“No.” Marinette is hardly calm, and her face is pleasantly streaked with tears. It feels like destruction is crackling in her palms, and she wonders how much of it her husband endowed upon her. “The Earth. This land isn’t for me. These fields aren’t mine when I can make my own somewhere else. My season is mine, and I will take spring where I want it. And I will take it below, where it will be loved, and cherished, and where I will be, too, where I can make it. I am tired of fashioning something out of what’s given to me. I’m tired of everyone else’s expectations—no, don’t touch me, Adrien!”
His hand curls back, like he’s been stung, but he doesn’t speak. Félix almost looks… impressed.
But this isn’t for Félix. And this isn’t for Adrien.
“This,” she seethes, “is mine. Not some fate I’m resigned to. And you will let me have it.”
Both boys stare, dumbstruck, and barely find it in themselves to nod.
Her body begins to relax, though only a little, and she turns to Félix with all the hardness in her eyes instead of in her stance. “Lead the moon,” she says softly, her voice cracking with fatigue, “and take me to my father.”
She doesn’t want to know how one gets to Earth from The Medium; it’s a blur she doesn’t remember, or is sure the twins have repressed in her memory, and it’s one secret she’s happy they keep. She’s already been there long enough for any god’s lifetime, and she’s sure by the time she’s out of there that she pities all the spirits she left behind far more than anyone in Torture. At least their end is definite. At least they don’t have to wait for anything.
Félix is silent the whole journey back to her father’s home. She’s never really known what to make of him, in all the time she’s known him. He’s cold and brooding most of the time, wild where his brother is refined, black-and-white where Adrien is warm and gold. Silent in the way he whisked her away, and staring when Adrien shrunk back and couldn’t bear to look at her when she bade him goodbye. Still, he must trust her so much to never once look back and ensure that she’s following him, all the way to the fields in front of her father’s modest temple.
“I’m sorry,” he says, folding his arms tight and staring at the ground. “For misunderstanding.”
“You didn’t know,” she tells him. “And I wasn’t exactly around for you to ask. You did what any worried one would do.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
“Ah,” she teases, “so that’s why you waited six months to tell them.”
It takes a long time before he looks at her. “You love him so purely, it’s almost sickening. Father only knows how many times you’ve sung late into the night just hoping he’ll look at you for more than a minute. Waste of time, if you ask me.” He shrugs. “But I wouldn’t be a brother to him if I didn’t give you a chance. If I didn’t do what I could to give you both that chance.”
For all her chaos before, Marinette goes soft at the edges. She bends, only to pick a white morning glory—the kind that only bloom under the slivers and wedges of moonlight—from a vine winding around her ankle. “I did,” she says, tucking the blossom into his robes at the chest, “but not now.”
Félix plucks the flower and breathes in deep, then puts it back on full display. “You have so much love in you,” he murmurs, quiet in the night but oh-so-knowing, and she’s sure it’s the softest she’s ever heard him. “You would have gone hand-in-hand with him if you’d only had the patience for him.”
“Perhaps,” she says. “But I had too much of it, and he had no time to give. And I can’t wait anymore. But it isn’t so bad.” She twists the ring on her finger, and her heart goes still. “Death waits on me now. I’ll be going to him soon enough.”
“Death must really be something,” he drawls, twirling an arrow between his nimble fingers, “for you to want to go to him so badly. Just don’t forget your father, too. Don’t leave him so abruptly, we’ll be stuck in a wasteland all over again.”
Marinette smile sadly at him, and unwinds the vine from her foot. “Goodbye, Félix.”
“Goodbye, My Lady.” He pauses before he goes, just long enough to take her hand in his and kiss the back of it. And if he weren’t so stiff in the way he left with his hunting dog at his heels, and if he didn’t scorn Kim’s arrows as much as he did, she would have thought that once upon a time, he might have been in love with her, too.
She waits until he’s disappeared into the forest ahead before she cuts through the grains and slips into their home, walks the simple marble tile that greets her like an old friend and passes her hand over the columns she used to weave in and out of when she was too young to know anything outside of them. She goes to where her father is still sleeping, graced by her mother’s influence. She pulls his covers back, and kneels at his bedside with her hands in her lap, and she waits, too. Except it won’t be long, and she knows what’s coming at the end of it.
Truthfully, she’d be lying if she said she didn’t miss him in these last months. Perhaps it was merely the distance that made her understand it.
She doesn’t know when he became who he is now. She only remembers times when she was young, perhaps a century or two old, when her father would carry her on his broad shoulders as he did his daily work. Or when he took her to the meadows for the first time, and told her all this land would be hers to inherit one day. She never had to ask for it; she simply had to grow, and it would all be hers. She could relax as she pleased, give life wherever she wanted to, sing as many songs and braid as many braids and keep as many girls company, so long as she was safe.
Or when she asked, “But what if I want to do something else?”
And her father gave her a confused smile, and ruffled her hair, and said, “But why would you ever want to?”
Maybe that explains everything, in the end.
In the quiet, she thanks her mother for her aid, and her father stirs beside her, the sleep lifted from his eyes. He looks to her, and smiles, and brings his hand to her cheek. “My daughter,” he murmurs. “Have I told you how wonderful it is to finally have you home?”
This touch doesn’t leave her feeling sick. Instead, she nuzzles into it, holds his broad, callused hand close, as much as her heart starts to sink under its own weight. “Papa,” she says, and shifts to light a candle or two by his bed. “Death has crowned me and made me a woman.”
Something in her father’s expression shifts as he sits up. Maybe it’s disappointment now. Maybe it’s confusion. Maybe it’s even fear. “Death can’t get you here,” he says, still holding her face as she kneels before him.
“I need to go to him,” she tells him, and gives his hand a squeeze before he brushes her loose hair away from her eyes. “I want to. He’s fed me, and crowned me, and I let him do it. I asked him to. I wanted him to.” She closes her eyes, and bows her head, and this time, she refuses to cry. “The Underworld is my home. And this is my path. I have to go there as much as you have to keep the Earth fresh. But I’ll visit, I promise. Those who are living it deserve to feel life as much as those who don’t have it anymore, and…”
She doesn’t tell him about L’Oubli, or about those she knew once upon a time are somewhere roaming this land now; that seems like a secret best kept to two deities.
Her father looks like his mind is in a whirlwind—no, that it is a whirlwind. He’s quiet for a long time, processing by candlelight everything she’s told him, but the first thing he says to break the silence is, “Since when did black suit you so well?”
She laughs, softly, and draws her robes in with pride. “Since I decided to become queen, Papa.”
“And when was that?”
The heat of her ichor rises to her cheeks, and she’s sure he can feel it. She presses her thumb to the jewels in her ring again, longs to taste the fruit she’s come to love. “Since the first seed he placed in my mouth. That was when I knew.”
Her father’s eyes widen, and his gaze drops to the ring, and slowly he puts two and two together. “Then,” he says, “stay with me until the pomegranates are ripe, and then go to him.”
“And until nightfall.” She probably answers him too fast, but she’s too eager to go back to care. “You’ll have me during the day the rest of the time, and I’ll go to The Border at night.”
“The nights will be colder without you,” her father warns.
She smiles, and holds both hands to her face this time. “The nights will be fine,” she whispers, “and so will you.”
Her father strokes both her cheeks with his old, weathered thumbs, and watches her with something loving and bittersweet. He only looks away long enough to peek out the window, and then he turns back to her. “Four hours left until morning,” he says. “Go to him.”
With an elated sigh, she throws her arms around him, kisses all over his face, and promises she’ll be back by dawn. She gathers up her robes, and blows out all the candles she lit, and she runs out of the temple, as fast as her legs will carry her, with little regard for the memories of these temple halls. She’d probably run all the way to The Border if not for the golden deer waiting patiently outside the field.
Marinette breathes out.
Félix.
She mounts the deer, and it darts without fear across the land, all the way to the clearing she knows so well. She’s sure to thank it with plenty of kisses, too, and time to graze when they finally reach the meadow. Because if she’s out of breath from clinging to it, then she can imagine how tired it is from running, no matter how holy. And she stands on her toes at the mouth of the cavern, clinging to the rocks and willing that single white blossom back to life and humming, humming every desperate lyre song she knows so that it echoes off the stone, anything for Luka to come back, to see her, to find her—
It’s halfway through the second song that Luka emerges from the dark and freezes on the steps. Without the volume of his cloak he looks more gaunt than usual, like he hasn’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in months. Like he needs to cling to everything around him just to survive the nights. He stares her up and down, and his hands start to shake, and he runs to her just as she’s starting to collapse.
She crosses The Border with a single step, and the flower she left behind so many moons ago curls to life just as Luka throws his arms around her waist and holds her close, his crown tumbling down the steps into the void. Nothing else is worth question or thought; the only thing she wants to register is how his fingers curl with a deadly grip in the robes he gave her, how warm it feels when he breathes relief into her neck, how his mouth burns as soon as it meets hers. “You’re here,” is all he whispers, so frantic in the way her lip catches between his teeth, and then he’s ripping off his gloves and grabbing at her clothes and pinning her to the cavern wall, kissing her and hoisting her up as she eagerly jumps into his arms. She clings to him, digs her heels into his back and yanks at his hair, and they make love toeing the line of her life and his, of night and day. And when they’re spent he lowers her slowly, and she slides to the cavern floor with a sore back and a hazy mind, and he slithers on top of her, still holding her close, still panting against her skin.
All this, from but a man who was once so afraid that he might kill her with a touch.
He did, she thinks, but only in the right ways.
“What are those?” Luka asks once he manages to catch some breath, nodding weakly toward the spread of red-black blossoms decorating the entryway.
Marinette’s still cradling the back of his head, sighing at every lazy kiss he drops where he can reach. “Dahlias,” she whispers. “But I’ve never seen them that color before.”
He crawls between her legs, and latches his arms around her again, and grins against her jaw. “Lovely work,” he says.
"How long was I gone?" she asks.
"I don't know. I don't want to know." And then, “Come back with me. Tell me everything. Don’t go.”
She does tell him everything, holds him close at The Border and threads her fingers through his hair. She gives him all the details about the misunderstanding, and The Medium, and the conversation with her father. Right down to how it felt when Adrien touched her for the first time. Right down to when Félix took her home. And he listens with rapt attention, still clinging to her, sometimes pausing to press his lips to the ring or to her cheek. By the time she’s done and their conversation starts to die away, the dawn is starting to peek over the horizon, and the look she gives him is nothing short of melancholy.
“I’ll be back tonight,” she promises, with a hand on his cheek. “keep my crown and wait for me then.”
Luka’s eyes are glittering with something sad as the dark recedes from the mouth of the cave. “Must you do this?” he says, and it makes her shiver and want to throw everything to the wind.
“It’s not that I must.” She thumbs the wrinkles from his forehead and the frown from his lips, as much as she can. “It’s that I will.”
His expression melts into something adoring, among the flowers and the dew. “That’s why I adore you,” he murmurs as he helps her stand. “All your power lies not in what you do, but how you choose to do it.”
In a passing of hands, she presses one of the black dahlias to his chest with the promise that it will live with him, and slides her arms around his neck in a farewell kiss, and he waits for her to whistle for the golden deer.
There are three things she sees before she takes off toward home: the way Luka cradles the dahlia close to his heart and admires the ones at his feet, and the way he begins to hum the song only she has ever heard, and the slow ascent of a chariot she pays no mind.
The Earth is starting to waste away before Marinette’s even left the temple. It would be amusing, how her father mourns for her so early, if it weren’t so sad.
For six months, she’s kept her agreement with him. She’s used the days to survey the lands surrounding and help them flourish while he does the utmost to feed his people and bestow greatness and secret knowledge upon those who would worship him and his daughter. She’s taken part in the mysteries that lead her mortals to peace in the afterlife, combed the land for those she’s lost to forgetfulness and reincarnation and brought them back to her. She’s kept her usual company, and taught them the songs Death used to charm her, about stars colliding and the all-encompassing universe, about love and pain and everything The Medium could have sounded like, if it ever could make sound. They beg her for stories about the Underworld and about her husband, but she keeps them sealed behind a knowing smile and lulls herself through the afternoon with the memory of his lyre and his touch—comforts herself with the reminder that it’s coming again soon.
In the nights, once her father was asleep and unable to miss her or dread her going, she slipped out to the meadow she knew so well, where her husband was waiting for her so faithfully with her crown in his hands. They shared soft words and melodies among the flowers, and he held her for the few hours she allowed herself to sleep, and when she woke it was already daybreak, and the chill of the night reminded her to head home again. Sometimes he would bring her a black dress or two, fashioned by her subjects, to remind her as much as the ring did that she was as much from below as she was from above. Sometimes he would come with a pomegranate hidden in his pocket, for them to share and drink from, to admire the juice as it dripped to the earth and dyed her black dahlias red at the edges. Sometimes he would invite her down to the Underworld, just to check on her keep and put everything in order, but it was never for very long. Never long enough to grow much, or to join him in their bed. The morning commanded everything, and by the time it came she remembered very little of what had come before.
It’s an agreement, to be sure, and her initiative to boot, but it’s never gotten easier. Especially when her father begins to miss her long before her time, and the nights only shorten because of it.
It’s never gotten easier, but she’s learned to make it work.
On the day of her departure, her father already has tears in his eyes. He isn’t weeping, like he must have been in all those months she was missing. He only sits at his throne, quiet and solemn, while he keeps his tabs on what the Earth can bear in these remaining hours before the despair hits him. He only lifts his gaze to her when she approaches, dressed in black and wearing her ring and withered flower crown with pride, and she stands before him and waits for him to speak.
There’s a sad smile tugging at the corner of his mouth, and his hand curl just a little too tight around the armrests. “I never really knew what to make of you from the moment you were born,” he says with a chuckle. “You always wanted to push the rules. You always wanted to ask so many questions. So many what-ifs. So many experiments, so many new things. You just couldn’t stand things being just the way they were. You were always looking for the reasons in everything. You wanted something to change… just because you wanted to, or just because you thought it would make you happy.” He rises, and descends the steps to her, and cradles her face in his large, working hands. “Now I understand.”
Marinette closes her eyes and leans into the touch, reaching up to hold his wrists. “Understand what, Papa?”
“What you were meant for, all this time.” Her father presses his lips to her forehead. “You were meant to stand in two worlds and bring them together, Marinette. You were meant to find what you could cut out for yourself. It’s the only thing that could ever make you happy.” Another kiss, this one to her crown, and another to the hem of her inky black robes—the closest he’ll ever get to death himself. “I’m sorry. I only wish I’d known that before. I wish I could have given you what you wanted, instead of leaving you so unsatisfied with everything around you.”
This time, she’s the one to tear up as her eyes flutter open again, and she helps him stand. “If you did,” she tells him in a whisper that echoes off her childhood walls, “I never would have been able to find it for myself.”
He lets her go because it’s the right thing to do, the necessary thing, and she leaves him with a single, undying pomegranate for his altar, and one of the wilted flowers from her crown. Tokens of her memory, and the reminder that she’ll return to him soon enough. It takes ages for her to finally turn her back on him, but she takes the sight of him smiling as a parting gift.
There’s a certain power that comes with leaving ice-cold decay in her wake, even though she isn’t sure whether it comes from her father’s longing or from the death she wields herself. All she knows is that with every slow, graceful step she takes toward The Border, the land feels a little colder under her feet, and the grass looks a little more shriveled. The Earth cracks under her feet, and the flowers die away as soon as they bloom, and she swells with pride and does nothing to hide the fatal curl of a smile on her lips.
The golden deer is waiting at the edge of the fields, ears twitching patiently and eyes glittering as much as its fur. She’s never seen it in broad daylight, but she adorns it with a kiss, and tells it to take care of Félix and her girls, and lets it go to the sound of a whistle above her head. She looks up, and there’s Adrien, driving his chariot across the sky and waving down to her with a dopey, almost apologetic smile. She gathers herself up, and draws herself to full height, and blows him a kiss farewell. He makes a gesture as if to capture it, and sits back with his fist to his heart, and he rides alongside her as she journeys home.
He blows her a kiss as they part ways at her meadow, and she stores it somewhere in her heart. She doesn’t bother to look up again, only walks among the dahlias and the white blossom on the rocks—the only things to stay alive as she crosses them—and begins her descent. She’s never walked this path on her own, but it’s as though the stone makes it easy for her, as though the dark is greeting her and keeping her safe as it swallows her up. She finds flat ground soon enough, among the grey light of her domain, and everything one has ever felt about death, and every reason one could die, bend to her in reverence. Her skull buzzes with the murmurs of their welcome, and she rests her hands on the great seal holding her back from home.
Clockwise. Anticlockwise. Clockwise again.
And the gate to the Underworld parts.
There is so much she needs to see.
There is so much that relieves her as soon as she sees it.
The ground is cool under her feet, and the wandering spirits come to her like moths to flames. They kneel, welcome back their guardian, their Death Mother, and she helps them rise, one by one. The tepid waters of the rivers continue their flow, as though they were never bothered by her presence or her absence. She follows each of them until they touch another, and she changes her path, consoles the weeping souls of Le Sanglot, holds only pity for those inhumane folk on the other end of L’Enfer, bids another goodbye as she drinks deep from L’Oubli.
She isn’t sure if it’s at La Haine or at La Douleur that she comes across Juleka; it really could be either. But she pauses at the riverbank, and Juleka stops her boat and her charge. She digs her oar into the ground, brushes her dark hair back from her eyes. “Sister,” is all she says in greeting, flipping her latest coin and pocketing it, and she’s gone down the river as leisurely as she came.
Marinette smiles, and continues on.
She’ll tell Luka, sometime in these months, that she has given the outermost river a name, and it is La Fin. But sometime isn’t now.
He’s exactly where she thought she would find him: strolling among the gemstone trees, trying to fashion one or two more out of emeralds and topaz and peridot. They bend to his will, and he rises with them in height, and it isn’t until she kneels and murmurs, “My Lord,” that he turns toward her. His eyes light up, just like the jewels, and she’s risen just before hs gets to her, and he embraces her like he’ll never get to again—like this is what he fears now, instead of killing her—and sways back and forth with her in this artificial forest.
“I’ve been starving,” he says, and lifts her up.
She beams down at him, her arms slipping around his neck. “Not literally, I hope.”
He fumbles, and sets her on her toes again. “Nothing’s tasted the same since you left,” he confesses. “It isn’t as good as what you’ve brought. Not even Paradise comes close for me these days, and…”
He kneels, like every spirit, like every feeling, like every reason, and presses his mouth to her palms in a hungry respect. “I’ve craved you,” he whispers, cracking.
How exquisite, to have Death on his knees for her.
“Come,” she says, and lifts his head. “There’s more I need to see.”
They go, hand-in-hand, across the rest of the Underworld—even to La Fin, even to the darkness of The Medium, though they only stay on the outside, because Marinette prefers some volume in her silence over a complete void. She peeks into Paradise again, runs among the orchards that remind her of her father and waves down the mute swans gliding across the lake, and it isn’t until Luka catches her cheek and turns her head that she dares to look back.
There are flowers there. Glittering behind her. Swelling in her soul.
What good is dependence on fate and her father’s despair, and her own exclusion, and her longing for the sun, when she commands all this?
“You seem happy,” Luka points out, and reaches for her hand.
Marinette lets him take it—“I am happy”—and smiles in his direction as he leads her toward his palace, blossoms in her wake. It isn’t until the doors are closed behind them, and she feels all the confined familiarity of the columns and carpets, that she turns to him.
“What would you have me do now?” she asks.
Luka squeezes her hand, and lets it go to cup her chin. “Whatever would make you happiest.”
“And if you would make me happiest?”
He blinks a couple of times in surprise, and withdraws his hand. For a moment, she wonders if she might have upset him, or if she’s said too much. But then he tugs off his gloves with his teeth, one at a time, and holds her face in his cold, fragile hands, and he says, “Then I would consider myself far luckier than anyone dead or alive.”
Her smile only grows under his touch, and she closes her eyes just as he presses his forehead to hers. The bones of his crown tangle with the flowers of hers, and she takes in every breath he lets out. And there’s no one around to hear them, but he still keeps his hollow, rumbling voice to a whisper when he says, “Come. Would you let Death take you now?” He squeezes her waist, and takes back every gasp. “Would you honor me?”
The Border is far from their bed, but the Earth hears her consent.