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ninjashadowdragon · 4 months

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Vigilante Marinette AU

Due to extenuating circumstances Marinette isn't Ladybug and there's someone else using the earrings. Marinette ends up unintentionally becoming a hero, just without a Miraculous. (For now).

• Marinette isn't trying to get involved in the Akuma attacks, she actually avoids them at first but she just happens to get caught up in them all the time and disguises herself as best she can before jumping in because a) safety first and b) she doesn't want to have Hawkmoth after her for interfering. Without super powers she isn't able to jump across Paris all the time. She can't be at every fight and if it's an easy opponent that has nothing to do with her she just stays out of it completely. This gives her a bit more time to try tracking down Hawkmoth. There isn't much to go on but she does lots of research and keeps a record of everything she can.

She works out and trains hard, even memorizing building evacuation routes and learning parkour and martial arts to make sure she's capable of helping instead of getting in the way. She has gear too because she over prepares for everything. Definitely durable and protective clothing, homemade smoke bombs, a skateboard and a grappling gun. Possibly other stuff too. She makes a lot of it herself but also uses whatever random nearby objects happened to be convenient when things get really crazy.

Marinette doesn't want any publicity, especially since she isn't really a superhero, but that doesn't mean she isn't going to help. After too many close calls with one or both of the heroes almost losing their miraculous she decides to take a permanent support role. She mostly uses insane traps or Rube Goldberg style contraptions to do long range tricks but has also snuck up and hit supervillains with a frying pan. She does her own short patrols looking for a potential secret lair in areas Hawkmoth might be likely to use.

It eventually spreads to non-Akuma incidents and she starts investigating actual crimes. She mostly tries to get evidence and turns it in to the police anonymously but occasionally gets tangled up in muggings or gang fights. Only now there isn't an Akuma so the superheroes don't get involved and there's no cure to fix everything in the end. Marinette sees so much violence and other messed up stuff on top of all the Akuma stuff. She has nightmares all the time and frequently gets injured.

• The other ladybug holder isn't nearly as good at making plans (what am I supposed to do with a water bottle?) or at being patient others. They love being a superhero, but they have a very hard time with all the pressure that comes with it, having to drop everything and fight a supervillain at random, unpredictable hours AND be polite to everyone, no matter how annoying they are. They either hang back and let Chat Noir do the fighting while they attempt to figure out how to capture the Akuma or try to use brute force.

They hate the random person who constantly comes up with crazy plans that somehow work or points out a weakness they didn't notice. It's infuriating how someone without powers somehow manages to outdo them at their job. They have enough trouble as it is without dealing with a civilian getting in the way.

• Since Chat Noir does more fighting and for longer periods of time he's constantly exhausted, especially with all the other extracurricular activities he has as Adrien. He still flirts a bit and makes way too many puns. He has a newfound freedom as a superhero and wants to let loose and have some fun but it ends up being a lot more work too. Sometimes he doesn't take it quite as seriously as he should because there isn't a lot of leeway in battles. One minute everything is going fine and the next he's about to lose his miraculous. It's difficult for everyone involved.

Whenever the vigilante helper shows up things get a lot easier for him because there's an actual strategy involved instead of just wearing himself out trying to beat all the villains head on. She's amazing and he's very happy to have her even if his spotted partner hates it.

• Alya doesn't look up to and admire the other holder as much as she would with Ladybug. They aren't as strategic and they struggle a lot so she's worried sometimes. When a superhero frequently scolds her for getting too close to fights and posting videos of them in difficult or potentially embarrassing situations despite her mostly posting actual footage it puts a damper on her respect levels.

She doesn't notice the vigilante at first, but once she saves Alya directly she tries to learn everything about her. It's almost impossible to find anything because the new broadcasts never catch more than a brief glimpse and even then the focus is still on the heroes. She's really good at hiding, especially when there's cameras involved. No one even notices she's there unless she wants them too.

Once Alya finally gets some footage of her the vigilante sneaks up behind her and snatches her phone right out of her hand and disappears before she realizes what happened. The vigilante immediately deletes the video and types a note saying that she doesn't want any publicity since she isn't a superhero, that her actions might cause others to start acting recklessly and put themselves in danger and how one of her biggest advantages is that she's unexpected and being public may hinder that. Even superheros have secrets for a reason. She doesn't tell Alya to stop her blog though, she points out how it's a great way to get information for those who need it, to focus on the heroes and try to find other ways to help without constantly putting herself in danger.

The phone is returned to Alya's pocket without her even noticing. Being Marinette has the distinct advantage of being able to get really close to her without raising any suspicion. Alya has to respect the message because it's a good point. But just because she isn't going to post anything about the hero without powers doesn't mean that she's going to stop trying to learn all she can.

• Master Fu doesn't know what's going on at first. He watches the news and begins to wonder if he made the right choice. If he should consider either giving out another Miraculous or reassigning the ones already out to new holders. The ladybug holder isn't doing as well as he thought she would and Chat Noir is clearly having trouble too. They aren't as good at teamwork as he hoped and they are just kids. He keeps a closer eye on the heroes, even watching the fight up close a couple of times in case he has to step in.

Then he sees Marinette out of costume during a battle (she doesn't always have it with her or have time to change immediately and sometimes she has to be Marinette) and realizes that she didn't get the earrings as intended. Did she think she wasn't the right choice and give them to someone else? Did someone steal them!? He and Wayzz immediately start looking into everyone around Marinette to see if it could be them, and double check that Chat Noir is Adrien, but they aren't having much luck. Good thing there's a vigilante helping the heroes. He considers giving her a miraculous but he has no idea who she is. There are a couple of times when he has to help them out despite his age.

• The people of Paris don't have as much faith in the heroes because it's very clear that they're struggling. They don't know if the heroes will win or lose so everyone is stressed out and afraid. There was always the belief that Ladybug would win and then fix everything but this holder isn't Marinette. People don't trust them quite as much and that leads to more fear in general resulting in more Akumas.

There are frequent instances where the vigilante has to evacuate civilians and eventually some people start recognizing her. There are online rumors about her existence which some people don't believe, but others realize that they've seen her too. There's a bit of unofficial merch which is hard to make because unlike the heroes her outfit changes a lot.

• Hawkmoth comes close to winning multiple times. He doesn't know what happens when he practically has the heroes in his clutches only for something to go wrong and he loses anyway. Natalie eventually figures out that somehow, someone else is helping them which infuriates Gabriel to no end. He ends up making a lot more Akumas out of people who are just moderately angry even if they aren't as powerful or easy to manipulate.

• This AU has a darker vibe than cannon with consequences for actions and more violence, but that also means Marinette gets to hit criminals with a baseball bat.

#Vigilante Marinette AU #Miraculous Ladybug AU #V!Mari AU #Miraculous Ladybug #Lady AU

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very-much-here-there-everywhere · 1 year

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The Beasts Have Eaten It (Chapter One)

To read on Archive of Our Own click HERE.

Paris is burning under a scarlet sky.

Marinette tears through Champ de Mars. Pont d'Iéna crumbles behind her. All she hears is sirens blaring, louder than any cry. When Marinette feels broken tarmac scrape against her sole, she realises she has lost a shoe. It is not all she has lost.

“Manon,” she screams.

Her throat is too dry. No, wet. She tastes blood. Smoke.

“Manon,” she screams again.

“Marinette,” she thinks she hears, though she cannot tell from where.

She cannot distinguish one movement from the next. People pour into the park alongside her. They all run from the epicentre, where she sees red akumas surging into the sky. Like a broiling evil, like a murmuration, they are one liquid mass hung above them.

Time dilates between the pressure of bony elbows and people at her back. It seems too long before Marinette makes it to the centre of the park. She skirts the ring of trees surrounding Place Jacques Rueff, calling out. In her head she is hoping, praying. She is not sure if she has ever prayed before.

Marinette thinks she hears her name again, but the mob heaves around her. She is jostled and loses her footing.

Now she is scrambling on hands and knees. She thinks of every time she crawled to hide for fear of embarrassment, of every time Adrien nearly caught her doing something dumb. Here: the hard press of shoes come down over her. They barely notice the girl beneath their feet.

Through the tangle of legs, she sees her. Manon is crouched low in the underbrush, set off the path Marinette is prone on, fearful eyes locking with her own. Marinette may have wept for it, if she knew there would never be a spare moment for crying again.

“I’m coming,” she wants to say, so she can comfort Manon, but the crowd batters her. Marinette has read somewhere that people can die like this, under the crush of the masses running for their lives.

Marinette pulls herself along the ground. When she is lucky, people manage to hurdle over her. When it is bad, they fall and she has to drag herself out from under the weight of them. She has made it so close to Manon; she can almost reach out and touch her.

Marinette cries out as someone stands on her hand. The force of their heel is only there for a brief second, but it reverberates through her like a thunderclap, up her hand and arm. Something snaps, something grinds, and then she is floating.

Time no longer dilates, it pauses, in a way she though only possible with the power of a Miraculous. For a moment, she wonders. But no, there would be no miracles for Marinette again.

She lives through a beat of full-body numbness and, like a nightmare, time is moving as it should be. There is blinding pain, pain that makes her want to vomit. This is the pain that makes her feel like the world stopped turning, even for an instant, just for her.

She had never known true pain, in all her clumsiness; her miraculous had always made her near invulnerable. If only, she thought, hating herself.

If only.

Marinette sees Manon, with the sweat and grime caked on her too-young cheeks, the pinprick of her anxious stare, and bites back the pain. She drags herself—one last pull—and rolls into the undergrowth with Manon.

Marinette lies on her back, short of breath. She could taste blood earlier. She tastes more now as she bites her lip to hell and back.

“Marinette?” Manon’s voice—and she is so used to it pitched high and whining—is like a whisper here, caught under the density of leaves and branches.

They could be a world way, in one of Manon’s fantasy lands that Alya had helped her make up. They could be somewhere with an enchanted forest, and unicorns, and fairy princesses. Somewhere safe.

“I’m okay,” she lies.

Manon had always been small, but Marinette is only noticing how small now. Her purple overalls look too big. She fits too neatly under these shrubs, where Marinette is all caught and tangled in them.

Marinette notices Manon is still clutching the Ladybug and Chat Noir dolls she had lent her for today. Completely clean and untorn, Manon has kept the dolls in better condition through the chaos than she has her own clothes. She does not expect it to be as bitter a sight as it is.

Marinette rolls onto her side, and presses up on her forearm to get a good look at Manon. “Are you hurt?”

Manon looks down at her arms and considers the small scratches and bruising. They are minor injuries compared to the gash across Marinette’s brow and her bare bleeding feet, but she is only six. Nevertheless, Manon shakes her head.

What a big girl, Marinette would have told her, on any other day.

“Did you see anything weird?”

“Weird? Everything is weird,” Manon rightly points out.

“I mean something strange that came near you,” Marinette explains.

“You said to stay in the park and hide,” Manon says in answer.

“I did, and you did so well”—she presses a hard kiss against Manon’s temple—“staying here all this time. Good girl.”

“I’m the best at hide and seek in my class.”

“I know.”

“Will you tell Maman I did good later?”

“Yes.” Marinette is lying again.

“When I behave for you, she gives me a treat,” Manon tells her.

“You deserve it,” and here Marinette finds it hard not to choke, thinking of Nadja Chamack, of how she always takes her news crew to where the danger is thickest. “I’ve let you have Buginette and Minou all day, haven’t I?”

Manon pulls the dolls closer to her chest, as if to remove them from Marinette’s reach. Marinette wants to laugh, in a kind of hysterical overwrought way, as she remembers that these handcrafted dolls had once, for one day, been the bane of her existence. They had been the catalyst to Manon’s first akumatisation into the Puppeteer when they had been taken away from her.

Marinette does not dream of taking them back now. They are quite possibly now the best defence against Manon becoming akumatised.

But, bon sang, she hates those stupid dolls.

“I need you to keep looking after them,” Marinette says.

Her wide-eyed gratitude is too much. “Really?”

Far too much.

“Yes, you’re good at that, aren’t you, Manon?”

Manon looks at her the way all of Paris looks—looked—at Ladybug. But Manon saves these looks for Marinette. It is breaking her heart. She does not deserve the faith she places in her. Not anymore.

“We need to go.” It comes out as more of a whisper than she intends. She tries again, voice thicker, fuller, lest Manon notice she is succumbing to fear, as a drowning man succumbs to the cold depths. “Time to go, Manon.”

Marinette helps Manon out from below the brushwood and to her feet. The crowd has thinned out now. Some stragglers still run through the park. Others are against the ground, moaning, or unmoving, not quite as lucky in the eddies of the crowd as Marinette had been.

Manon sees this and catches Marinette’s hand in her own. Her hand is small, but her grip is tight, and Marinette hisses in pain.

Wrong hand.

Manon notices, flinching away. “Marinette?”

She recovers, inconspicuous, she hopes, moving herself to Manon’s left. She recaptures her hand with unbroken fingers. Marinette smiles down at Manon, best she can. Manon looks back, frowning.

Is this how she learns I am a liar? Marinette thinks, I have always been a liar.

It is unfair. Marinette wants to smooth out her pinched brow. Manon is not meant to look this way. She wishes her lies could hold out for just a little longer, if only Manon does not have to look like this.

“Why did you have to go, Marinette?”

She means earlier, Marinette realises. Back when she had caught the first wind of danger and had taken to that perilous breeze like a bird of prey on the hunt. It was instinct at this point, with not a care for what—who—she had left behind. When Paris is in danger, Marinette goes running.

But then she had stuck Manon in a bush and had hoped for the best. With what she knew now, she may as well have been leaving her as akuma-bait.

She had been lucky, but she could no longer rely on luck.

“I needed…”—she cannot find the right words—“I wanted to help.”

If she were older, perhaps Manon would have realised it was not the whole truth. Perhaps she would have realised how awful a babysitter Marinette was in leaving her unattended during an akuma attack. Manon’s safety was her responsibility.

But Manon merely nods, because of course Marinette wants to look after people. That is the only Marinette she has ever known.

Marinette’s lies are safe for one more day.

They make their way out of Champ de Mars. Marinette cannot take them North, from where she came. The danger lies in that direction; the looming shadow of the Eiffel Tower is at their backs. Once a beacon of light—and a home for so many memories—it is now outlined in the red of this new Parisian sky.

Marinette takes them southeast, past the École Militaire, down Avenue Duquesne. The streets ahead are growing quieter; the crowds have thinned. There are stragglers, latecomers, those who cannot run.

They pass a family loading up a car; the mother throws heavy bags out the window of a third-floor apartment to the father who piles it atop the laps of their children who sit in the backseat. An elderly woman with a cane lingers at the curb, unwitting in her senility, waiting for the traffic lights to turn. A dog rummages through toppled bins, its leash dragging behind it.

Ladybug would have stopped to help any one of them, but Marinette pulls Manon away, onwards. She passes each with no more than a glance.

Earlier, she had been part of the masses running down Avenue des Champs-Élysées. She cannot forget the sound of the Arc de Triomphe falling apart atop the crowds. The feeling of being unable to do a single thing to help felt like a scorch mark against her heart.

The guilt is her brand to bear.

She wonders who had not taken the emergency alert alarm seriously enough. She wonders who cannot be saved. She wonders whose luck, like her own, has run out.

The streets are too empty. She does not like it.

Marinette tugs Manon closer. “Don’t slow down.”

“I’m tired,” Manon complains, but quickens her pace.

They pass the green strip of thoroughfare that makes up Esplanade Jacques Chaban-Delmas. Where the space is normally filled by sun-seekers sprawled on the grass and the hum of passing cars, the park is silent and stagnant. Noise had engulfed Marinette not but ten minutes prior. She had been so focused on Manon, of the sound of her own blood rushing in her ears, that she had not noticed when the sound of a city being sieged fell into a hush.

“Where is everybody?” Manon asks.

Marinette pretends not to hear, although there are few other sounds to which she could claim distraction. Manon does not ask again.

Halfway down Rue de Babylone, they find a familiar face.

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng!”

She knows that voice. She often hates that voice but, in this moment, she is ever so grateful to hear it. It goes to show how much this quiet scares her, that this sound is welcome reprieve.

Chloé Bourgeois power walks towards them, looking like a girl a couple of hours out of time. There is not a hair out of place in her perfectly quaffed ponytail. She looks as if she has been enjoying the balmy weather; having replaced her preferred style of designer capris with a yellow sundress, and has traded out ballet pumps for a pair of low heels. They clack loudly against the pavement as she approaches.

There are about ten boutique bags jostling at her sides. Marinette is not sure she has ever seen Chloé bother to hold something heavier than a phone before.

“It’s your lucky day, Dupain-Cheng,” Chloé says. “You might finally be good for something.”

Marinette blinks, caught off guard by the mundanity of Chloé acting the bully. She cannot find the words to respond in any correct way; she does not think there is one.

“What?” she says.

“Honestly, I’m doing you a favour. Don’t look so aghast. You should close your mouth before you swallow a fly.”

“You’re doing me a…”—the bright yellow of the beau monde before her, the sky cast in red behind—“What?”

Manon leans backwards to peer up at Chloé, nose wrinkled. “Who is this weird girl?”

Chloé narrows her eyes at Manon, then looks back to Marinette, unimpressed. “Come on, I know you’re not exactly as intelligent as me, but you’re not dumb, Marinette. My bags?”

She holds her arms out, shopping bags proffered. Marinette stares.

“Uh…”

“Hello? Earth to Dupain-Cheng; my arms are falling asleep. The aliens called and said you’re acting super strange. Well, stranger than usual.”

Chloé laughs, her standard inauthentically refined laugh. She goes to raise a hand to her mouth, but remembers the bags she holds. She sags under their weight, but seems in no mood to drop them.

Looking closer, Marinette thinks she sees a stiffness in Chloé’s bearing, a tension in her jaw. It is as if someone had left her attitude out in the sun to shrivel. Her rudeness has none of its usual bite; instead, it feels brittle and about to snap.

“Have you seen any akumas?”

“Yes, obviously, dipstick. Look up in the sky.”

“No,” she says, grasping Chloé’s shoulder, “have any touched you?”

This question brings back Chloé as Marinette knows her. She juts her chin out and scoffs in full force. “Ew, no. I’m not about to let one of those icky bugs get one over on me again today. Not while I’m wearing this outfit.”

“Then we need to go,” Marinette tells her, beginning to move. Manon lurches, still tethered to her by their clammy clasped hands. She hears the rustle of tissue paper, of Chloe digging around in her purchases. There is a pause, a snap.

“No.”

Marinette swings around. Chloe has put on a new pair of sunglasses. Their price tag dangles off the temple. “No?”

“No,” Chloé says again.

Marinette looks at Chloé, really looks at her: still clutching at her shopping like a grounding rod—and in Marinette’s mind, it is less ludicrous in this moment that Chloé is holding shopping bags, but more that she is the one holding them in the first place. She thinks, maybe for the first time (not because she is moonlighting as Ladybug, not because of Adrien’s goodness, not because she has this insistent need to be the bigger person), of how alone Chloé seems. A person in good company would not be at a loss for what to do when Paris is under attack.

“Where’s Sabrina?”

“How am I meant to know?” Chloé’s tone is defensive, but her lip quivers.

“She’s always with you.”

“I was trying on shoes in Le Bon Marché. Sabrina went off somewhere, probably to the bathroom or something—I don’t know!”

“You didn’t get the public alert on your phone?”

“I did, but I couldn’t just leave,” Chloé says, like she is stating the obvious.

“Why?”

“I couldn’t carry all these bags.”

“But you are…”

“Yes, because everyone else disappeared!” she exclaims, voice cracking. “I don’t do this by choice.”

“They’ve declared Paris to be in a state of emergency.”

“Ladybug will fix it.”

“Chloé…”

“Ladybug will fix it,” she insists.

Marinette goes quiet; she closes her eyes—breathes.

“We’re wasting time,” Marinette says. “We need to leave.”

“But—"

“You’re holding us up; we need to leave now, with or without you.”

“My shopping…”

“It will slow us down.”

Chloé pushes her hands up under her glasses, wiping at tears. Marinette looks away, feeling an unpleasant lump in her throat, but her own eyes are bone-dry.

She cannot let Chloé cry. It is a risk.

A plan begins to take shape in her mind.

The last text she got from her parents was after the public alert was broadcasted. Her mother told her that they were packing necessities and that she should take Manon outside the city and they would meet after the crisis, once the superheroes had saved the day. Her mother does not know that Ladybug has lost her miraculous; she does not know that Chat Noir is missing in action.

Marinette knows.

Marinette is the only one who knows: the only thing that can save them now is the Miracle box hidden in a dollhouse, in an ordinary girl’s bedroom, atop an unassuming bakery.

“Look,” Marinette says, “I know you want to find Sabrina, but we can’t just wait here. I’m heading to my family’s bakery. It’ll take us past our school. Maybe Sabrina went there.”

“I suppose that’s not your stupidest thought,” Chloé admits, sniffling.

“Right,”—Marinette does not have time to acknowledge her rudeness—“so, you’ll follow us there?”

Chloé straitens up and breathes deeply. “I’ll take one bag,” she declares.

True to her word, Chloé drops all but one bag onto the pavement. They began to move and Marinette looks behind. The akuma cloud has grown larger still. It is not yet upon them, but there is the feeling of it nipping at their heels, a slow impending pursuit.

Marinette tries not to think of the time they have wasted here on Chloé. If Marinette still had access to her miraculous, she would have just scooped Chloé up alongside Manon and swung to safety through the Parisian city skyline. There was a reason she and Chat Noir had always said leave it up to the heroes. Civilian gallantry is a danger.

But it was never once a thought in Marinette’s mind to leave Chloé here.

Manon has been quiet for the most part, even throughout her exchange with Chloé. Marinette is grateful, but finds it strange she had not piped up to agree with Chloé when she mentioned Ladybug. Manon has always adored Ladybug.

If this is the moment that changes, she cannot blame Manon for it. But it feels to Marinette the final nail in the coffin of her intrepid double life and the onset of a punishing solitary existence. In this lay the terrible anathema of knowing things will never be the same; anticipation is a stone’s throw away from sinking into dread.

Today, dread seems a death sentence. To anticipate is to mark herself prey.

She tries not to think of Manon’s quiet pliability. Marinette will keep thinking of how she is appreciative instead.

They continue down Rue de Babylone. Paris seems larger on foot. The street stretches, longer than it ever did when she was late for school.

There is a strange proprioception that haunts her every step; it clings to her like a thin layer of film over her skin. As a superhero, she had never stopped to think of her next move because it came so naturally. As a normal girl living a normal life, her body was everchanging and evermoving—so clumsy but so full of routine. Here: every step feels like she is missing a step, every action so starkly a reaction. She has never been so aware of her own body and how it may fail her.

Marinette hears herself breathing, the swish of Chloé’s dress between her knees, Manon’s uneven tread. Her hair sticks to her forehead. Her left hand is numb. She is still missing a shoe. She wants to call Alya, but cannot bring herself to let go of Manon’s hand.

“Marinette…”

“Not long,”—it’s a reflexive response; she is not sure what actually comes after the not long—“It won’t be long.”

“No, I think I hear something,” Manon says.

Chloé slows down, listening. Marinette sees the moment her brow furrows when she looks up to meet her eyes. “I hear it too.”

They do not make it to the school.

A sound is approaching: like applause, or thunder and hail, the sound of the hunt. At a distance, Marinette sees them. There are people running, hell-for-leather, in their direction. They emerge around the side of a building; the first indication of wrongness is the way they hold themselves—the strangeness of running and no screaming, of faces that stare only straight ahead.

Chloé’s hand is at her wrist. “Marinette—"

These few quickly become the many. In their hundreds, the mob runs down Rue de Babylone. They are not running from, but towards.

“Run,” Marinette says. “Run!”

They fall over themselves; Marinette is scooping up Manon under one arm, Manon’s hands scrabble for purchase across her face—fistfuls of fringe—and Chloé is stumbling in her heels. They sprint with a desperation Marinette did not know she had. Losing her powers has flicked a switch in her head, like there is a furnace inside her made for self-preservation that has previously gone without fuel.

Manon’s sharp little nails press into her neck. Chloé seems to want to scream, but she is breathing so hard her fear leaves her as susurrating squeals. Marinette just runs; she has no plan.

They turn down Boulevard Raspail. It is normally a crowded street, but Marinette only sees a smattering of people now. When Marinette yells at them—her side is burning and she cannot even manage the word ‘run’—they turn to look at her. There is a moment of inertia where nobody takes action, but Marinette can see them registering the sound of the crowd’s approach, the terror on their own faces.

The lingering few evacuees break into panic. A young man in a Université PSL pullover fiddles desperately with his bike lock. Two women fight over an e-scooter. A group much like their own, a boy and his younger brother, hammer their fists on an apartment door. The mob turns the corner; their appearance is met with horrified cries.

Marinette does not look back. She runs like she has never run before. It is like every time she was late to school was a moment made for now. There is gravel embedded in her foot but it is barely a thought. Her attention is split in about ten different directions. She scours their surroundings but sees nothing useful.

For once, she is unable to see a way out. There are no miracles. Her world is grey and broken.

“I’m sorry,” she chokes out, to Manon, to Chloé, to Paris.

Paris does not answer.

Instead, the screech of car tires echoes down the boulevard. Manon points to a van skidding around a bend. It tears up the road towards them.

“Help!” Manon cries, locking her legs around Marinette’s side to wave them down.

Marinette thinks she hears Chloé rasp, “Thank God…”

Marinette holds onto Manon tighter. They run to meet the van, as do the other evacuees. The van comes to a stop as they begin to converge.

The front seat window is unwound and inside they see a shock of choppy purple hair.

“Kids!” Their science teacher, Ms Mendeleiev, sits behind the wheel as a sight for sore eyes. She leans part way out of the window to yell, “Dupain-Cheng, Bourgeois! Bring the girl and get in the van right now.”

Ms Mendeleiev’s authoritative tone usually spelt trouble at school, but now Marinette appreciates the direction. She hoists Manon higher into her arms and calls to Chloé, “Come on!”

The van’s side door flies open; the people running ahead of them make it to the door and outstretched hands help them inside. She sees the university student leap up, soon followed by the two brothers. There are others but they are just as far away as them.

Chloé is struggling to keep pace and the mob is nearly upon them, but they only have a couple dozen yards to go. Although Marinette’s arms burn, she finds the power to tear her left hand—the bad hand—away from Manon and use it to pull Chloé along by the very shopping bag she refuses to let go of. “Come on, come on,” she says through gritted teeth.

They are so close. She can see the fearful faces inside the van peering out at them. They are faces they know: Max Kanté, Nathaniel Kurtzberg, Marc Anciel, and Aurore Beauréal.

Their schoolmates scream encouragements at them. The streets of Paris narrow to a pinprick. All Marinette sees is the dark unknown of this open van and where it may take her, with friends within who might not even be her friends at all. If the akumas have gotten to them—if this is some trick—it is a risk she has no choice but to take.

Her world is shaken apart as Chloé falls against her. The shopping bag handles are ripped from Marinette’s grasp and Chloé tumbles to the floor.

“Out of the way!” she hears as the bulky figure of Bob Roth pushes past. He is followed by his nephew XY, who shoulder checks Marinette while she is still disoriented. They both look worse for wear, but prove that even in a crisis they have the energy to behave without regard for others.

The van is ahead, but Chloé is behind. Marinette sees the akumatised mob closing in on Chloé, but with Manon in her arms it seems like she is holding up the weight of the entire world.

“Marinette,” Chloé cries.

Marinette makes a decision that does not feel like a decision at all. She sets Manon down, gives the small of her back and push and says, “Get to the van.”

She looks up at her with her too-wide-eyes. “Marinette?”

It is still far too much…

“Go!”

Manon is stumbling towards the van and Marinette is already turned around and sprinting towards Chloé. Old habits die hard. A civilian in need is like a need of her own. She is running into the fate she deserves—the mess she made. If the mob swallows her whole and she lets it, disguised by one last act of heroism, then it is meant to be.

The miraculous were a pretty lie, one told to her by Master Fu, by Tikki, by herself. They all had it wrong. There was no balance, not where Marinette was involved.

In the end, in her hands, the power of creation was just another tool for destruction.

“Chloé, I’m here,” Marinette says, falling to her knees besides her, linking her arms under Chloé’s shoulders.

Chloé cries as Marinette pulls at her. The tarmac has cut scrapes up the side of her face and legs. She looks small and sad, a stain of yellow against the grey of the road. Her arms wrap around the bag from Le Bon Marché, wrinkled and torn.

“It hurts,” she says, face wet with tears.

“Yes,” Marinette gasps, because it does. Chloé is right. It hurts—she hurts all over, body and mind—and she is about to reap what she sowed.

The mob’s footfall thunders. The front of the crowd surges like the tide. Marinette clings to Chloé tight.

They are upon them, bearing down. Their mouths are stretching open, with small white-pink wriggling things inside, larvae dropping out and falling at their feet, then—

“Princess!”

An extended staff spins overhead. They hear the dull sickening sound of metal meeting flesh. Akuma-touched Parisians are knocked away and Marinette is frozen in place at the epicentre of this chaos, like she is caught in the eye of a hurricane, barely breathing.

The way Chat Noir fights now is a familiar yet alien sight. He is above them fending off their attackers with a feral intensity Marinette has never seen. There is no display in this, no artistry, nor fanfare. She does not see her friend, the masked boy, the cat, a hero. She sees a creature making a final stand.

“Chat!”

Their eyes meet in a second’s lull, a moment where their foes have been pushed just far enough away to allow them this. His eyes are acid and flame and they threaten to burn her like the sky above them burns. This is not the way she wants to remember these eyes. She wants to remember them warm and attentive and half closed in laughter.

She knows what he is about to say. She knows what he plans to do. Of course she does, they are two halves of the same whole. She had been about to do it herself.

She wants to plead with him, but with what time and on what basis. In this moment, she does not hold the authority or familiarity of Ladybug. She is just Marinette.

When she speaks her voice feels thick and slow. “Don’t,” she tells him.

He sucks in a breath, expression crumpling. But his eyes—they still burn.

Momentum catches up to them and Chat Noir’s attention is drawn away as he cracks the butt of his staff into someone’s skull. He says, “I’ll hold them off.”

Chat Noir is drawing blood; Marinette has never seen him hurt an akuma-victim like this. This means something—it spells the end. Chat Noir has lost hope, because he knows what his lady lost. He sees their doom spelt out in the beat of his own heart. Marinette hears it too.

But he will never know: it is Marinette. She is his lady and she is the one who ruined everything so catastrophically. She is the one who backed him into this corner, who forced him to the point of no return. It is Marinette who lost her Miraculous to Hawkmoth.

She does not deserve to be saved.

She feels Chloé shifting, gathering strength. She is pulling backwards, but Marinette refuses to budge.

“Chat Noir, please…”

He does not look at her. “Go!”

Without his eyes keeping contact with her own there is nothing to hold her still, nothing to force the air from her lungs. She can breathe and she can move and Chloé is pulling them back.

“Marinette, you idiot, you idiot,” she chants. “Move!”

She does as Chloé says.

Marinette scrabbles with Chloé, crawling between the legs of the mob. They stoop to grab at them, more larvae dropping around them, but Chat Noir is quick to cover. He bats them away with a skilled couple of swipes, but where he is guarding their escape, he has left himself open to attack. The mob grasp at his arms and back, and where he pulls away another fills the void to strike.

The mob is distracted—Chloé and Marinette make it out of the throng of bodies—but Marinette is too. She cannot help but stare at Chat Noir, caught all alone in the midst of a doomsday. What crisis has come that he and Ladybug have not faced together? He has been abandoned by his lady; Marinette cannot stand to know this will be his last thought.

She allows herself a lingering look, because she knows this might be it. This might be her only closure.

She watches Chat Noir’s back grow small, the narrow plain of his boyish shoulders vanishing into the akumatised hordes. The sleek leather of his suit stands out amongst the sea of faces. His staff is moving faster than she can track.

“Eyes on the road.” Chloe’s nails are pinching at her bicep as she drags her. “If you get me akumatised, I swear…”

One of Chloé’s heels are broken and she runs with a lurch, clinging on to Marinette for balance just as hard as Marinette holds her for the same. Ms Mendeleiev’s van is rumbling, beginning to move, anticipating their arrival but needing to leave as the mob notices Marinette and Chloé’s departure. The siding door is still held open and Max is leaning out with a hand for them to reach for. Manon is at his pant leg, gripping on to his side, and shrieking at Marinette like she is the one about to be caught by the crowd.

Marinette’s heart is beating so fast she thinks it will burst. They are hobbling more than they are running. They can barely keep pace with the van. Chat Noir’s distraction cannot keep the mob, in their hundreds, at bay. Marinette hears rapid footfall behind her and although she feels she is made more of pain than she is of flesh and bone, she pushes them through this final sprint.

She shoves Chloé forwards first, watching Max take hold of her arm and drag her into the van. Finger tips are brushing against Marinette’s neck, looking for purchase. They will not get her. Marinette seizes the side of the van and pulls. Her side burns; her arms feel like they might be yanked out of their sockets. Manon’s little hands are over hers, desperate but useless.

“Marinette!”

Nathaniel and Marc move Manon aside as she screams and replace her hands with their own. Marinette feels her feet leave the ground and suddenly she is in the arms of her schoolmates. The van is crowded with evacuees; Marinette lies squashed against Nathaniel and Marc, for a moment, just breathing.

But it is not over—she senses it will never be over now.

Hands appear where Marinette’s just were. The evacuees are screaming. Marinette gets up and holds herself at the open sliding door. There is an akumatised Parisian latched on, staring up at her. She watches its expression change—morph; like a mirror—until it is reflecting the same wide-eyed fear on Marinette’s own face.

“Help me,” it begs.

Marinette feels cold terror run through her. It was almost human—so close to capturing and projecting her own anxieties back at her that in any other scenario Marinette would have mistaken it for just that. A civilian in need.

But this is not a civilian. This is not a person. This is devilry.

Aurore is knocking at the partition wall between the back and front of the van. “Ms Mendeleiev!”

Their teacher calls back, “We good to go?”

“Drive!” Max says.

Ms Mendeleiev floors the gas and they go flying. The passengers yelp as they are jostled about. Marinette would have fallen from the van if not for Marc snagging her by the hem of her t-shirt.

Marinette looks down and there are still hands. The akuma-victim is dragged along, knees tearing against the road. It does not let go.

It has let its imitated expression fall away as it stares up at Marinette. Its cheeks bubble. Marinette sees pink caterpillars peeking out from between its lips. It looks like it is getting ready to spit.

“Get rid of it,” comes a cry from within the van.

Marinette hesitates for a moment, before bringing down her foot on its hand. Although it had gone numb some time ago, her own hand flashes with sympathetic pain. She watches the devil go tumbling away from the van, rolling to a stop before the rest of the mob. They do not pause to check on it but surge over and forwards, continuing their pursuit despite their growing distance.

Marinette looks out into the crowds, hoping to catch one last glimpse of her partner. But she sees nothing but the end of her world. Chat Noir is gone.

Marinette pulls the van’s sliding door closed, sealing them into semi-darkness. They sit without speaking. Marinette joins them, sliding down to the floor. She bows her head against her knees. Manon crawls close and curls into her side.

Ms Mendeleiev drives on, away from Paris and all they have ever known. Marinette sinks into the depths of her own mind. It is somewhere beyond fear and it is somewhere beyond despair, because she can no longer allow herself those. It is like hitting an internal bedrock and, while she is there, she can only think of one thing.

Hateful as it is; it is not her parents she thinks of in The Fall. Nor Tikki. Nor Alya. Nor Adrien. Nor Paris.

She thinks of Chat Noir and how she let him down.

I shout from pain, rage and anger

and I cry

carried by the crowd that pushes ahead

and dances a mad farandola

I'm carried away in the distance

I clench my fists, damning the crowd that steals from me

the man she had given me

and that I've never found again

— Édith Piaf, La Foule

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