#lowkey wanna write the precursor to this where lb and cn take down hm but im lazy

[consumeconstantly]

Not a Saint or a Hero

Summary: To civilians, Ladybug is a hero. In the eyes of the law, Ladybug is a vigilante at best, and a villain at worst. 

______________________________________________________

Conquering the Parisian underworld is child’s play for Ladybug and her partner, Chat Noir. The ex-boss of the Parisian underworld, code name Hawkmoth, may have been good at pushing drugs and ruining people’s lives, but he was woefully incompetent at... basically everything else. Which meant that other than Hawkmoth and his direct underlings, there really wasn’t much of a structure at all that Ladybug had to be worried about. No cohesive unit, fighting as one, just easy pickings and an even easier way to convince the drug dealers, homeless, illegal fight rings, and various other under the radar activities to band together to topple Hawkmoth’s empire. 

Ladybug, after all, had experience with overthrowing established mafiosos. She did it once in Wenzhou at her mother’s side, another time in Beijing because somebody made the mistake of trying to push her into prostitution, and twice in Italy with her grandmother, code name Befana.

“Do you really have to leave, m’lady?”

Ladybug shrugs. “I trust you and the team to keep things up and running. We had a good run, but there’s a good structure in place now and Befana wants me to go with her to another country.”

Nobody says no to Befana, not unless they’re bullet proof. Ladybug may have high quality Kevlar sewn into every outfit she wears, but even she isn’t the biggest fan of the impact of a bullet. Depending on the gun, broken ribs are a kindness.

“I know you don’t get along with Queen Bee, and almost everyone else is out of the country, but you’re not going to say goodbye to Rena or Carapace?”

“It’s not like I’m going to be gone forever. Just a few months. A year at most.”

“Promise me you’ll come back, m’lady?”

Ladybug puts a hand on her partner's shoulder. “You know I can’t make promises like that.”

Chat pauses, dull thud of the rave music filling in their silence. 

He swirls the whiskey in his glass. “Stay safe, Bug. Play it smart.”

“I always do.”

#

It comes as no surprise that Befana dumps her in the middle of one of the most crime infested cities world wide without a backwards glance. Her granddaughter is grown up now, after all. 

“Have fun, darling. Black Mask is particularly nasty, make sure to watch out for his assistant, she’s very sharp.” Befana pulls away from the nonexistent curb— nonexistent because there’s no sidewalks in the slums of Gotham, at least, not many of them in good enough conditions to have curbs or whole piece of cement to walk on— and leaves Marinette all on her lonesome with a backpack, a key to a cheap apartment.

Marinette eyes the broken bottles leading to the entryway of her new building and the boarded up windows. Across the street, there’s two women smoking and conversing in hushed tones.

“Well,” Marinette mutters underneath her breath, shifting the straps of her only worldly possessions. “It’s definitely quieter than I expected.”

“Hey, new girl,” one of the women in the group calls out to her. “What’re you in for?”

“School. This is the cheapest apartment I could find.”

The woman exchanges a glance with one of her friends. 

“You’re better off finding a more expensive apartment elsewhere. This isn’t a place for someone like you.”

An excellent line for Marinette to begin to fish for information. “What do you mean by that?”

“This is disputed territory, now. If you can’t afford to stay somewhere else, you better stay with whoever just dropped you off.”

Marinette fidgets. Gina is long gone. Grandmother or not, even though Gina is undoubtedly loyal and will never hurt her, she believes that the best way to inspire growth is through adversity. Like now. The only information she got out of Befana was that she had to figure out a way to keep Gotham in line… whatever that meant. “She’s not going to come back. I guess I’ll just have to try my luck.”

“You really got nowhere else to go?”

“No. I’m from abroad.”

“That explains the accent,” says the one holding a beer bottle. “Then listen up, girlie. If you wanna survive, there’s three rules you’ve gotta learn. One. Don’t cross the Black Mask. Two. Don’t cross Red Hood. Three. Don’t sell to children.”

“Sell to children?”

“Well, I don’t suppose you’d be doing it anyways, given the whole,” she motions to Marinette’s body with a cigarette, “but Hood goes after anyone who sells drugs to kids real bad. Worse than if you fuck him over with anything the Black Mask’s doing, anyways.”

“Red Hood doesn’t sound like that bad of a guy, then.” Maybe she’ll look into a collaboration with him.

The woman with the beer bottle laughed. “Oh honey, you’re a saint. Don’t go fostering any dreams. You just stay away, hear?”

“I hear you,” Marinette says.

But they got something wrong. 

Marinette isn’t a saint, and never has been.

#

The walls of her crappy one bedroom apartment are thin enough to hear the baby upstairs scream at ungodly hours. If it’s not the baby waking her up, her neighbors in the apartment to her right are fucking very, very loudly. The apartment below her blasts rock music at all hours, the apartment to her right is likely selling drugs, given that she sees at least fifteen different people come in and out each day, and they always have a vaguely dazed look in their eye. She hasn’t heard anything from the apartment across, but she’s sure they’ll start up some noisy activity that Marinette doesn’t particularly want to hear soon enough.

She really got pampered in Paris, didn’t she?

Marinette lived a life of relative luxury whenever she stayed with her parents, instead of Gina. While in Beijing and Chongqing with Tom and Sabine, Maman did all of the heavy lifting for her. Well, Beijing had ended rather disastrously, and they had to make a quick getaway, but at least in Chongqing, Sabine managed to get rid of the prostitution ring. 

Back in Wenzhou, Catania, and Bologna, Gina took the reins, and it always turned out to be a sink or swim sort of situation. First off was her mother’s birth place, which had an astonishingly high crime rate and definitely explained why Sabine Cheng was so adept at self defense, and once they were there, of course they had to reform the fight rings. In Catania and Bologna, Gina practically threw her at two of the lowest rank mafia groups and told her to use them to bring order to the warring mafias. During those years, Gina didn’t make a front like Sabine and Tom did, purchasing a bakery and running a business to aid their more behind the scenes work. No, with Gina, it was either war of peace, and there was nowhere in between.

Which, of course, meant that Marinette rarely got to stay in nice rooms or pursue hobbies like sewing or drawing or anything, really.

Now that she is of age, Marinette could potentially try to wrest herself out of Befana’s influence, but that’s almost a laughable thought. Befana has eyes and ears everywhere. If she wants to escape the rat race of reformation, Marinette needs to gather power. 

The best thing she can do for now is try to figure out the situation in Gotham. If it’s not particularly bad, maybe she’ll have an easy time of it, and figure out how to disappear herself. She’s not totally opposed to the whole making-criminals-act-within-the-bounds-of-morality thing, but it’s gotten pretty tiring. Not repetitive, necessarily, but after experiencing an almost normal life in Paris, Marinette does want to have the privilege of not having to worry about her life every hour. Maybe she can even start up a little boutique. 

Marinette dumps most of the contents out of her bag, only leaving her wallet, a knife, and her trademark yo-yos. 

“Maybe I can go back to Paris, eventually.” She has become very fond of the city; the first place where she took fate into her own hands, where her mother and grandmother didn’t push her to reform the underworld. The first place where she chose to change the world around her. The first place where she saw things through from start to finish. The first place she formed her own team. 

The power of change is both incredibly addicting and terrifying. She sort of gets why Befana roams the world, looking for the next place she wants to shake things up in. But Marinette can’t get addicted. This is going to be her last city, then she’s going to return to Paris and settle down. She’ll leave city beautification to the so-called vigilantes that almost every city has acquired, save Paris.

Oh wait, she supposes that Ladybug and Chat Noir were-- and Chat still is-- a type of vigilante back home. But as it stands now, it will be more correct to refer to them as heads of the Parisian underworld; they definitely don’t work on the side of the law, but she and Chat made sure that drug deals were more… regulated. That deaths and the induction of children into such a dark world were curbed. That if people really wanted to get out, they could.

All of that doesn’t matter. Not in the eyes of the law at least. Parisian citizens love the duo for helping keep crimes off the streets and for banning the particularly strong strain of drug that Gabriel called AKUMA off the market, but the Parisian police? She and Chat both have targets on their head. Their whole team does.

She eyes the apartment across from her. There’s blood on the door handle. It’s a good thing that Sabine and Tom never tried to instill those odd customs of ‘house warming’ and ‘getting to know her neighbors’ that most other people teach their children. In good neighborhoods, it’s important to have a cordial relationship with whoever’s living next door. In neighborhoods like these? It’s even more important.

But rule number one of pissing people off? 

Coming over uninvited.

Marinette doesn’t bother locking the door behind her. 

#

“New to the neighborhood?”

Apparently, it really is bizarre for her to have moved into this apartment complex. She’s come across a grand total of five people during her week here, and every single one of them stopped whatever they were doing in order to take a closer look. 

Marinette knows that this is a disputed area. She looked into the two women’s words the day she arrived. But, for a disputed area, everything is remarkably quiet. No fights, nobody on the streets, most people keep indoors, unless they’re out for a smoke, to throw out the trash, or are going to or coming back from various activities outside of the block.

What’s even more odd is that all of her neighbors seem to know each other intimately. Or at least, intimately enough to know that she doesn’t belong there.

“Yeah,” Marinette says, ready to leave this conversation behind. She doesn’t bother getting information out of the people who are in her apartment complex or on this block. To be more accurate, she tried with one of the first people she came across, but it was apparent that someone encouraged them to be tight lipped with information. 

Given the current information she has, she thinks it’s more likely that the one who gave that order is Red Hood, rather than Black Mask.

“Been here a week.” The guy lights his joint and breathes out. “Not so new anymore.”

Over the years, she’s gotten used to the smell of marijuana, though she can’t say she likes the scent. She’ll take cigarettes over weed any day.

“You could say that.”

“Don’t suppose anybody’s laid out the rules for you yet, have they?”

Maybe this will make things easier for her. Mostly, she’s just settled into her apartment over the past seven days. There's no need for her to immediately get to work, and she does enjoy comfort. Taking down criminals is hard work. She wants to come back to an apartment that doesn’t look awful and lets her relax. So what if she spent most of her money on an expensive mattress and a coffee machine? She’s an adult now. Nobody can tell her what to do. (Except for Befana.) “No, not really.”

“Tina and Audrey give you a crash course?”

“Mostly just warned me not to sell to children.”

The man barks, smoke spitting into the stale air. “Some of the best advice around. Let me tell you, Black Mask might have more manpower, but Red Hood has rage. Cross Black Mask by gypping him, he’ll send a lackey after you. Fuck with children, Red Hood himself will come for you.”

He pauses, evaluating her appearance. 

“Though you look like a child yourself. Mighty pretty too. lucky girl. Hood will protect you if you stay around these parts, but if you go south on the diagonal, you’ll be in bad territory. Plenty of prostitution rings around there.”

“Thought this was disputed territory.”

“Not really. Anywhere Hood has claimed is said to be disputed because Mask hates his guts and keeps sending goons to these areas. But anyone who’s dealing under Mask aint gonna take the risk of their lives just to branch out to these spots.”

“Sounds like Red Hood is pretty well liked around these parts, then.”

Perhaps she’ll look into working with him. From what she’s heard of the guy and what she’s found trawling the dark web, his morals seem to align with her own. A little bit more temperamental than she’d like, a little too quick to kill, rather than apprehend, but Gotham prisons seem to have jailbreaks every other week, so she can understand why it may be easier just to make every encounter a one and done.

“Liked?” Blunt finished, he flicks the stub into the dirt, crushing the embers under foot. He wipes his mouth with the scarf around his neck. “Like isn't the question in Gotham, Frenchie.”

Marinette inwardly cringes. She’s tried to minimize her accent because it makes natives distrust her, or think they can take her for a loop. Most people she’s come across accept her as one of their own, but apparently she hasn’t been doing as well as she thought she was. Maybe this is why people seemed a little more reluctant with any information.

“When it comes down to it, liking means nothing. It’s who you trust to watch your back.” He fumbles in his pockets, pulling out another blunt. Marinette notices that his fingers are fairly heavily bandaged and that the man is shaking slightly. Medicinal marijuana, maybe. “Wouldn’t trust that Mask farther than I can throw him. And he used to be a wrestler, so he’s a fat bastard. At least you can trust Hood not to cross you as long as you don’t cross him first.”

Lighting the tip, his eyes sharpen. “You seem like the trustworthy sort. Active, too. I’ll leave you with one more piece of advice. If you ever run into Hood? Don’t mention two things: the Joker, and Batman.”

“I doubt I’ll ever run into him,” Marinette lies. 

The man laughs. “I’m a Gotham native, Frenchie. I can tell what kind of person you are. You’ll be meeting him soon, I know. Hood needs someone to watch his back, and you? You need someone to keep your head above water.”

He flicks the ash off the blunt and turns his back on her, and Marinette can’t tell whether he’s showing her respect or belittling her.

#

 Two weeks into her stay in Gotham and Marinette has finally collected enough information about her surroundings to feel confident about going out as Ladybug.

Guns are infinitely more available here in America than they were back in France, which means she needed more than one costume, and an upgrade to her current one. High quality kevlar is good and all, but it’s heavy, and not everyone in Gotham is high off their minds using AKUMA. Replacing kevlar with polythene, now that it’s available to her, is only a natural decision. She has to be more careful here in Gotham. Not only does she have no support network, she’s also highly inexperienced with the terrain. She’s at a disadvantage here.

With a combo polythene and kevlar bodysuit, a crop top with her signature ladybug embroidery on the backside, an all black domino mask, and a utility belt with two yo-yos , knife, and emergency medical supplies, she’s as ready as she ever will be to witness the nightlife first hand.

And just like in Paris, Wenzhou, Beijing, Chongqing, Catania and Bologna, she doesn’t have to go far to find the trouble.

Befana has told her multiple times that Marinette is like a lucky charm for problems. Judging by the amount of time she’s gotten herself into sticky situations unintentionally, she’s inclined to agree, though she’d call herself more of an unlucky charm.

She doesn’t bother speaking, instead hurling one yo-yo at the guy who’s trying to tie up a girl half her age and the other yo-yo at the wheels of his car, to make sure he can’t make a quick getaway.

Ladybug may not use guns, but she never said that her weaponry wasn’t tricked out; yo-yo knocks the guy up the head, sending him down for the count, and yo-yo two slashes through the rubber tire. The man waiting in the car rolls down the window to shoot. Ladybug rolls her eyes. Dumb and dumber. She’s not sure whether he’s trying to preserve his windows or doesn’t realize that rolling down his window leaves him open for her own attacks.

Reeling back in yo-yo one. She hurtles it through the window, presses a button, then ducks. The head of the yo-yo detached and shocks the driver.

“Need help getting home?” Ladybug asks the girl who’s currently edging away from her. 

“Who are you? Why did you help me?”

Ladybug shrugs. She’s never been particularly good at explaining herself; Chat took care of most of the conversions within Hawkmoths retinue. She’s good at making the occasionally public statement and making sure people she’s close to don’t stray, but strangers? Most people back in Paris just trusted her blindly, and she never had to think about how to present her reasoning.

She takes two sets of zip ties out of her pack, then restrains her first victim. After she slaps a patch on the tire-- if she is going to take this girl home, she certainly doesn’t want to walk her back in this neighborhood, and judging by the size of the van, there are probably a few people in the back she’ll need to free as well. Ladybug moves on to tie up the guy in the car, back towards the girl. “If you don’t want my help, that’s fine too.”

As soon as she turns, there’s a sharp intake of breath. “You’re with Hood, then.”

Not yet. “M not, actually. Never met the guy. What makes you say that?”

A bout of nervous, high pitched laughter. “The red, maybe. Or, I don’t know, the fact that he’s here and not knocking you out?”

Ladybug whirls, trying to see where the infamous vigilante is. True to the girls word, he is just a little ways down the alleyway they’re currently in, looking, for all intents and purposes, not about to kill her. How pleasant. Better than she was expecting; his temper precedes him, and she was expecting to have to fight with the guy before even dreaming about having a civil discussion with him.

He doesn’t have his hands on his guns, which she takes as a good sign. Taking a good look at him she’s almost surprised that he’s calming himself the Red Hood instead of the Red Helmet, but she supposes the former sounds better.

“Let me finish tying that one up,” Ladybug says.

Red Hood grunts in response.

“So you are working together,” the girl concludes.

Ladybug shrugs again, tapping another button to reattach the head of her yo-yo and grabbing the keys and phone from the driver’s pocket. She pops the back of the van. There are three girls tied up in the back. 

Her knife makes quick work of the bonds that restrain them. The girls take the duct tape off their mouths themselves; she feels a deep disgust of the men that are currently knocked unconscious. Not only are they traffickers, but they’re new traffickers. Inexperienced. Duct tape isn’t used most times because it damages the goods. Either that, or they’re organ dealers, because people don’t need the bodies to look pretty when they just want the innards. Judging by the fact that all of the people in the back are girls, she’ll put money on the first one.

“You going to let me drive these girls back before we have our talk?”

“Fine,” Red Hood bites out, moving to sit shotgun. “You move one finger out of line, and I’ll shoot.”

Ladybug tosses the unconscious body out of the driver’s seat.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

@jasonette-july-2k20