Miraculous One Shot Compilation

How Backwarder Should Have Ended

A/n - I've had this prompt lying around since Backwarder was new, can you tell? Also, do you think the wedding the Agrestes and Tsurugis were invited to was supposed to be Harry and Meghan?

Hawkmoth watched his akuma through his mind's eye. In front of his two natural eyes he saw nothing but the bathroom wall. He tuned out his surroundings and watched his akuma touch a civilian jogger. The jogger ran backwards across the street and straight into traffic. Backwarder then touched a crying child with a scraped knee. The child flopped momentarily face first into the sidewalk, then got up without any injury and ran away in reverse.

"Interesting," Hawkmoth mused. "So having time stolen from you can heal the body. Backwarder, return to my lair at once - but be careful you aren't followed. I will return soon."

--

Gabriel emerged from the train bathroom and looked for his son. "Adrien, we're leaving... Adrien?"

"Your son went running off quite a while ago," Tomoe informed him. "You don't keep very good control of him."

"Every time there's an akuma, Adrien disappears," Gabriel muttered. "Could it be...? Never mind, I already ruled that out."

--

"Okay, she can't survive long with the lid up - so when I open it, tap her quickly, but gently, then I'll put the lid back down. Understand?"

Hawkmoth watched as Emilie was reversed. It didn't look like much of anything happened, but he'd seen the scrapes close on the child's knee. He was confident the same was happening internally in his wife. They could rewind her back to the time before the damage had been done and, somehow, set her into forward motion again. He wouldn't make the same mistake twice and would keep her from falling into her coma.

--

The akuma had given Ladybug and Chat the slip. They could not find her anywhere. Eventually they had to focus on repairing the damage done; at least, Ladybug did. Chat's skillset didn't allow him to do much other than locate and safely detain civilians who needed to be unreversed. Ladybug's pink swarm of magical ladybugs did most of the hard work, healing every victim they found. They did not, however, find Emilie. The dark presence of akuma fluttering in the surrounding chamber effectively cloaked the chamber from detection. When the ladybugs finally returned to rest, Emilie was still regressing quietly in her coffin.

--

No one heard anything of the akuma in the next year. Citizens were perplexed, sure, but most happily shrugged it off. They weren't going to complain about not being under attack. Gabriel, meanwhile, carefully counted down the days of his wife's coma. He expected the number of days between falling asleep and being reversed should naturally be equal to the days between being reversed and waking up. So as not to alarm Adrien, Gabriel had secretly hidden away Emilie in the dead of night on the evening she "disappeared" -  so, when he deemed it time, he completed the trip in reverse, returning her to their bedroom.

In the morning, Adrien was in for the startling of a lifetime. ".gninrom eht ni uoy ees ,neirdA ,thgin dooG", his mother greeted him, backing her way down the stairs. He froze, glancing around for any clue to what seemed like a ridiculous prank, then followed her into the dining room. There was his mother, removing unchewed food from her mouth and arranging it onto a plate. To Adrien's lesser surprise, his father was there, observing as though this were completely normal.

"Are you seeing this?" Adrien asked him.

"Up until now, your mère has been in a coma," Gabriel explained, "but the final akuma has returned her to health."

Adrien's mind whirled with all the implications of this. He questioned how his mother ended up in a coma, and why his father had hidden it from him. He was excited to see his mother again, but there still wasn't much interaction to be had with her in her current state. With so many questions, he somehow settled on "Now that she's awake, shouldn't we find a way to release her from the spell?" He was convinced he could get Marinette and Tikki to help him with this. Once sufficiently satisfied that the akuma epidemic had ended, Ladybug had finally agreed they could share their true identities - but only with each other. The result had been just as he hoped. The secondary school student, fashion designer, and semi-retired superheroine was his girlfriend now. It would be a small favor for her to summon and dispel one lucky charm, but it would mean the world to him.

"We cannot do that yet." Gabriel pulled Adrien out of his daydream. "She may not look it, but your mother is still ill. If we unreverse her now, she will fall back asleep within days. She could even die. We must rewind her to before the damage was done."

--

"Something on your mind, Dude?" Nino asked.

"I'm just worried about my mère," Adrien answered truthfully.

"Oh, sorry," Nino apologized. Adrien's mom was a topic that they really didn't talk about. "It must be tough not knowing what happened."

Adrien clamped his jaw shut. He knew now, at least somewhat. His dad was still pretty tight lipped whether or not they even knew what Emilie was afflicted with and if she had ever gone to see a doctor about it; but he at least knew where his mom was now. He and his father had locked her in the bedroom for her own protection. Stuck in reverse, she had no sense of reason of her own and would likely walk into oncoming traffic if they let her. At home they had carefully removed any dangerous objects in the room, so she could just bump around into the wall and not do much to hurt herself. Boy, he couldn't wait to let her out, but that still couldn't be for a few months.

--

"Mari, I've got to let you in on a little secret," Adrien said nervously.

"What is it?" She jumped just after she said that. Something had just thumped against the other side of the door. In the moments that followed, the door continued to be pushed against its frame.

"We're going to need Ladybug for this," Adrien explained. "We found my mère, but she's still under the control of Backwarder. We need the use of lucky charm to set her free." He didn't mention that from his perspective she was found months ago, and that from his father's, she'd never really been lost at all. He opened the door and his mother nearly bowled them over, marching backward out the door.

Marinette watched, momentarily stunned, then snapped herself out of it. "Tikki -"

--

"How's your mère?"

"Disoriented. She's lost several years of her memory, but she's recovering. We're almost back to the way things were before. However, she and père are both acting strange any time I ask how she got sick."

"Maybe that's their secret to keep."

"And mine to find out!"

"Adrien..."