The Bug, the Bird and the Bats ✔

Chapter Twenty-Three

A Curious Danger

"Hey Mari, it's okay." Adrien Agreste attempts to comfort her, hand on her forehead even though Tim warned him not to touch her. He, obviously, didn't plan to listen to that. "We'll get you fixed up, okay? Can Tikki hear me?"

"I-I don't know, I don't know." Eyes still glowing a bright pink, Marinette's hand snaps up to grab onto his wrist, and instead of glowing red... something else changes within Adrien. "Plagg?"

"In a bad mood, he can tell something's wrong."

Answering, the model easily pulls away from the vines as they move with him, as is reading his mind. She already seemed better, and was able to talk at the very least.

"I promise I'm not hurting her, but I have to do something. Don't interrupt us."

Suddenly his eyes were locking with Tim's, and it took him a moment to realize why it made the hair on the back of his neck stand up.

Instead of being his light green, sparkling with happiness and having a cocky smile crinkle the corners of it, his eyes were pure black. No sclera, no pupil. Just black.

And it was bleeding through his veins, just getting to his jugulars when he turned -about to shoot through his system.

He's not human either, Tim realizes with shock, the hero immediately stepping back into Kon's arms.

Without meaning to, he realized he's already classed Marinette as sub-human. As a danger. A curious kind of danger that he wasn't all too afraid of, but a threat nonetheless.

He didn't know if he trusted Adrien to help Marinette much at all, but at the same time, something told him he didn't have much of a choice and he wasn't willing to involve his boyfriend in a useless fight.

-

Adrien had put his hand with a glistening, power-filled silver ring on it above Marinette's heart and then a black energy burst out of his system.

It seems to wrap around them like a storm, pushing Kagami Tsurugi against the wall, she hits it with a heavy thud but her eyes stay open; watching.

He knew that Kon had turned, hiding Tim behind his back but he didn't know how Kon wasn't much affected by the powerful blast of energy like Kagami was.

Right now he couldn't afford to question it.

And it was a storm, kind of, it swirled and grew, and grew and the energy continued to grow until his hand finally touched Marinette's chest and -and it dissipated.

It dissipated but Adrien's eyes didn't go back to normal, it dissipated, it left, the energy was gone, but then Marinette's skin seemed to move as if flame was curling underneath it.

Then she was screaming.

A blood-curdling scream that made tears prick at the corner of Kon's eyes, a scream that others heard before.

It was pain, pure pain. Or shock. Or horror.

And then pink energy pushes back, exploding into the space and everything- -silence, frozen bodies, glowing red and green particles- -hangs in the air for a silent, tense moment before Adrien groans in pain and collapses against the floor.

-

Tim would have been the first one to move, he really would have, but Kon was panicking at the moment and held him painfully tight -the hero knew his boyfriend was moments away from flying them both out of there; for a half-alien himself, he seemed a bit freaked out by all of this.