Candle In The Wind - Miraculous Ladybug Movie Rewrite

Chapter 15: When the light turns and the cold times arise

As Adrien staggered forward, he used Ladybug's widened azure eyes as a beacon. As a motivator to fight against the gallons of cement in his body that wanted to turn him to stone.

All he had to do was reach her. If he could just do that, then he knew he'd survive. Even if the world crumbled down around him twenty more times.

"Chat, wait! I'll... Hold on!" Ladybug broke into a run and rushed to meet him halfway, so that he wouldn't have to drag himself quite as far.

His arms rose towards her like a gravitational pull, longing to draw her into a fierce hug. But as her personal space spilled into his, all he had the strength left to do was fall against her, the last of his marionette strings snapping apart.

Ladybug squeaked and quickly threw her arms around him as he collapsed.

Still equipped with her supersuit, she was perfectly capable of holding him upright. But instead, she fell down right alongside him, and they both sank to the rubble-ridden ground in a heap of tangled limbs.

His head landed on her chest, weighed down by the mass of an ocean. But it didn't matter if her sharp clavicle bone prodded uncomfortably into his cheek; because the pulse of her steady heartbeat thrumming through his own skin was all he cared about. It filled him with a sense of relief. Of safety and solace. And Adrien never wanted to move again, even if he could.

"Oh my god." Ladybug gently cupped his face and tried to pull him up to meet her eyes. "Chat, are you...? Oh shit!" Her hand fell away. "Right, okay. Hang on, kitty. You're gonna be fine - I just need to..."

He heard the tell-tale sound of her yo-yo unspooling as she held it up toward the sky, before belting out her preeminent healing spell. A shower of neon ladybugs swept over him, warm and gentle, as they mended the breaks and bruises he was riddled with.

Adrien barely felt the difference.

He watched as the insects took off into the ravaged city, deftly circling around broken houses and windows and bridges and parapets. As if time had been set backwards, the piles of debris fled from the streets and melded together into distinguishable, undamaged architecture. The fires were washed away by the sea of red, and the reformed streetlights all flickered to life before the city could be plunged into darkness.

Instead, they were only plunged into silence.

The change was whiplashing. Now there was almost no evidence at all that the macabre disaster had even happened in the first place.

Almost.

Ladybug's arm dropped back down and joined her other one, both encircling him in a tight embrace.

"Better?" she asked. Her quip, as always, was more for the sake of endearment than any actual confirmation. She knew her ladybugs never failed.

Adrien tried to offer some sort of reassuring reply. But the words knotted themselves in his throat, and all that came out was a choked sob.

Ladybug had fixed him. There wasn't so much as a scratch on him anymore.

So why did it still feel like everything inside him was ruined? He still ached with the agony of that one thousand foot drop. The fire had hollowed out his gut, but the blackened wasteland within him was still burning.

Once the sobs started, he couldn't really get them to stop, and his chest heaved with enough intensity to shatter his ribs all over again. (Because he was just such a broken record, wasn't he? So beyond repair, that not even magic could rebuild the muddied mess within him.)

Without saying a word, Ladybug pulled his trembling form closer and let him cry his broken heart out. He cried until his face was caked in the tears that the ladybugs had tried to wash away. Until his mouth tasted like a foul mix of iron and salt. Until his tear ducts ran dry, leaving behind the scars of an arroyo: barren and vast.