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anna-scribbles · 1 year

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was about to read chap 2 of call it even but ao3 decided to self destruct anna how will i go on

that is so tragic that i will just have to post a whole sneak peek of ch 2 for you here!!!!

Adrien loved Ladybug.

He loved the smooth timbre of her voice and the firm set of her eyes, the way her mouth would dig its way deeper into a scowl the more she tried not to laugh at one of the rare jokes he managed to pry beneath her red-and-black spotted armor. He loved the way she spoke of justice with such reverence, of peace with such passion. Adrien loved the idea of Ladybug, at least—the thought that there could be a person who embodied so much of what he cherished, the grace and goodness and compassion of his childhood. He loved what Ladybug stood for. What she pretended to stand for.

Sometimes, Adrien thought that he could have loved Ladybug if he didn’t hate her so much.

There were times, though—like now, her red fist redder with his blood, cold disdain smeared across her face—when Adrien thought that he’d have hated her regardless, this nameless thief who masqueraded around his city as a hero. There were times when Adrien was certain he could never have ended up anywhere but at the other end of her fist, if only so that no one else would have to bear the brunt of her brutality.

“Get up,” his father’s voice hissed into his earpiece. “Don’t just lie there like an invalid. Take her miraculous!”

“Me-ouch,” Adrien wiped some of the blood off his face and grimaced, rising to his feet. “I guess your pledge to protect the citizens of Paris from danger doesn’t extend to animal cruelty.”

Fury lit up across her face, instant and red. Of all her buttons he’d learned to press, none ever worked quite as well as calling her out on the hero facade. And today, now that he was getting a good look at her, she was more agitated than usual, all her movements impatient and sharp.

“Don’t you talk about danger and cruelty,” Ladybug spat, setting her yo-yo spinning in a razor-sharp circle of light. “That misunderstood-tragic-kitty act is as fake as your stupid smile. We all know you could put an end to the danger anytime you felt like it.”

“Then you have misunderstood me, my lady,” He watched the time-worn nickname worm its way beneath her skin, upheaving a vulnerable, messy sort of frustration. Adrien lengthened his baton and lowered his stance. “This can’t end until I have your miraculous.”

Ladybug let out a yell and swung her yo-yo in a blinding arc at his torso. Adrien intercepted it mid-air with his baton, pulling the staff loose from the wire and scampering past her to the other end of the rooftop. He would do almost anything to avoid getting entangled in that thing; it was near indestructible and Ladybug wasn’t usually very keen on treating her captives kindly. His father, also, was not very keen on his cataclysm being used outside of their specific battle strategies. Adrien, in general, was not very keen on making either of these people any more angry at him than they usually were.

“Eat up, my angels!” M. Pigeon yelled up from the sky, riding atop a massive cloud of pigeons. “Taste the delicious cuisine you were always meant to have! No longer will the pigeons of Paris be resigned to breadcrumbs and cat food!”

“Hey!” Adrien yelled indignantly. “Nothing wrong with cat food!”

Ladybug made a sound that could almost be taken as a snort, but when he looked back, her expression had schooled itself back into righteous anger. She lifted an eyebrow, challenging him, but pulled herself into more of a defensive stance. She always liked to take everything in before she made a move.

“It’s okay to laugh, you know,” Adrien grinned wide and assumed a jovial stance, taking stock of the angle of her feet, the aim of her gaze. She was smarter and stronger than him; he’d always known that. But he was quicker with words and knew where to aim them. “It must be an incredible drain on your energy to keep pretending you don’t find me funny.”

“You sure think a lot of yourself for someone who just admitted to eating kibble,” Ladybug scoffed, eyes trailing the flock of birds passing over their heads.

“Don’t knock it until you try it, my lady,” Adrien said. “For a hero, you’re incredibly quick to judge.”

“For a villain, you sure do love stupid small talk.”

“Well,” Adrien mused, “Maybe there’s more to both of us than meets the eye.”

“Doubt it,” Ladybug said lightly, and she spun out her yo-yo, knocking Adrien’s feet out from under him and leaping to the roof of a neighboring building.

Just then, a fleet of pigeons swooped down from the sky and descended onto a nearby outdoor restaurant, littering the rooftop with feathers in their wake. Pulling himself up, Adrien watched with a measure of horrified wonder as the pigeons devoured all the food on the tables in a matter of seconds like a pack of feathered piranhas.

“Are they supposed to be, like, carnivores?” Adrien yelled, the image of a pigeon tearing through a sausage burned into his mind. Ladybug, predictably, didn’t answer.

He vaulted after her, trailing her from rooftop to rooftop as they both dodged the swarms of pigeons terrorizing tourists and stealing every bit of food in sight. Sometimes, the akumas remembered that they were on Adrien’s side and actually tried to help him take Ladybug’s miraculous. But just as often, it seemed, they were more interested in general destruction and chaos, causing as many problems for Adrien as they did for Ladybug. The pigeons, Adrien tended to think, were more of a personal handicap than anything.

“ACHOO!” Adrien sneezed, his still-broken nose sending an unexpected jolt of pain through his system. “Ow,” he groaned.

“Ha!” Ladybug spun around and kicked him in the chest, flinging him several meters back and over the edge of the rooftop. Slamming into the side of the building, Adrien dug his claws into the brick to slow his fall, pulling himself back up. When he finally made it over the ledge, Ladybug had her feet planted firmly and was throwing her yo-yo into the sky.

“Lucky charm!” she yelled.

In a shower of luminescent pink and white light, a polka-dotted Easy-Bake Oven landed primly in Ladybug’s hands. The way the hope sort of died on her face was almost enough to make Adrien burst into laughter, and it was really only years of media training that kept his expression schooled.

“Happy… ninth birthday?” Adrien offered, and the glare that Ladybug shot him honestly made the whole thing worth it.

“Shut up,” Ladybug snarled, and then she turned her gaze back to the battery-powered confectionery oven as if it might start speaking to her. “How the—”

“On your right!” Adrien yelled, and Ladybug glanced in his direction as a swarm of pigeons slammed into her from the left, knocking the lucky charm out of her hands. Adrien quickly scooped it up and vaulted to the next building.

“You menace!” Ladybug growled, swinging behind him in swift pursuit.

“Name-calling!” Adrien tutted over his shoulder. “Not very heroic of you, I have to say.”

“I’ll show you heroic,” Ladybug muttered, and then Adrien felt a sharp tug on his left ankle. He’d only just looked down to see her yo-yo line wrapped around his leg when she sent him flying backward through the air, the toy oven flung from his hands as he braced for impact.

Adrien slammed into the pavement, pain rocketing through his shoulder. His baton clattered down next to him, and he blinked the black away enough to see Ladybug standing up on the roof again, staring at her lucky charm like it was a math problem she was trying to solve.

“I, for one, am loving this game of kitty-in-the-middle we’ve got going,” Adrien called up at her. He extended his baton and vaulted back up to the roof where she stood, ignoring the splintering pain in his muscles. “My turn next?”

Ladybug groaned, shoving the oven under one arm and setting her yo-yo spinning with the other. She swung it out at him and he jumped, almost stumbling when he landed on his throbbing ankle. He could try using his cataclysm to disintegrate the roof and make her lose her balance, but he wasn’t supposed to activate it until she had three minutes or less left on her timer.

“Get it?” Adrien asked, swiping his baton at her legs. Ladybug jumped deftly away. “Because we’re throwing the lucky charm back and forth? Like, monkey-in-the—”

“I get it!” Ladybug snarled, wrapping her yo-yo line around a nearby balcony and tugging, hard. Adrien had only seconds to lift his baton up in a makeshift shield when the bricks all came clattering down on him, along with a few tables and chairs and plates of food.

Suddenly a swarm of pigeons separated from the huge flock in the sky and descended upon them, devouring the sandwiches and chips at alarming speeds. Adrien’s stomach panged with hunger—while the rest of him panged with pain—as he remembered that he hadn’t actually gotten to eat lunch.

“Hm,” Ladybug said decisively, like the feeding pigeons had imparted some sort of divine wisdom upon her. “Yeah, okay.”

She was gone before Adrien could dig himself out of the rubble, swinging away with her magic Easy-Bake in tow and leaving him to deal with her mess.

“What are you doing?” Father yelled into his ear. “Follow her! Don’t let her out of your sight!”

“Of course,” Adrien muttered, unearthing an arm from the mess of rubble and feathers. “Resident bug-catcher, on it.”

Loud-mouthed and brightly colored as she was, Ladybug could disappear when she wanted to. And, though he’d spent the better part of his teenage years committing her habits to memory, Adrien could swear that tracking her never got easier.

Sometimes, when she’d do this—try and shake him off while she figured out her lucky charm—Adrien would spend the whole five minutes looking for her, tearing through the city until a wave of light flooded the world and let him know that he’d lost without even putting up a fight. Those were the times he’d be punished the worst for losing. The punishments had only gotten worse as he’d gotten older; Adrien had a lot more to lose these days.

After the seventh or eighth building or alleyway Adrien had ducked into, he started to feel the familiar tug of dread in his gut, mud in his veins. There couldn’t be that much time left, now—he’d been stupid, and reckless, and now it would all have been for nothing. His father’s silence in his earpiece was deafening, ice-cold and heavy. He was doing it again. And especially now, especially today, he couldn’t—he swallowed down his panic.

On a whim, Adrien landed on the roof of a pavilion near the park, circled with concrete pillars and backed up to the brick wall of a building. He ducked his head in and bit down a gasp when he saw a flash of red inside. She was—she was here.

He waited, breath frozen in his lungs, but the attack didn’t come. Ladybug was murmuring to herself, fussing over what he presumed to be the lucky charm. Ladybug was here. And she hadn’t seen him yet.

“Cataclysm,” Adrien whispered, setting his palm alight with inky destruction. And then he charged.

In one swift motion, Adrien used his baton to knock both the yo-yo and the lucky charm from Ladybug’s hands, sending them clattering across the pavement as he slammed her body into the wall. She growled and pummeled her fists into his face and gut, sending stars of pain shooting through his vision.

Adrien extended his baton and smashed one end into the pavement at their feet and the other diagonally into a concrete pillar of the pavilion. He shoved the length of it as hard as he could acoss Ladybug’s torso, pinning her against the wall. She coughed and spluttered, ripping at the baton and hurling expletives his way.

It wouldn’t hold her for long, but maybe for long enough that he could—

Adrien lunged for the lucky charm—that stupid, polka-dotted Easy Bake oven—and scooped it up with his left hand, hovering his right palm in the air just centimeters above it.

“Careful,” Adrien warned, and Ladybug’s eyes widened.

“You evil, idiotic, worthless waste of breath—”

“Yes, fine.” Adrien waved her off. “I’m not interested in that. I don’t want to fight. I think we should talk.”

“What are you doing?” Father snarled in his ear, and Adrien winced. “End this and take her miraculous!”

Ladybug looked like she agreed; the glare she leveled at him sent ice down his spine.

“Talk,” Ladybug laughed humorlessly, fists still tight around the baton. “Right. You always want to talk.”

“I want to talk,” Adrien agreed, keeping his composure level despite the anxiety in his bloodstream and Father’s voice in his ear. He even threw in a smile for good measure. “Obviously we both know how this”—Adrien gestured to Ladybug and himself, and then to the greater generally-in-shambles city—“goes. And I imagine that it involves many more people than we’d both prefer.”

Ladybug looked at him with some intense combination of anger and bewilderment.

“Are you… trying to apologize right now?” Ladybug asked. “For being a terrorist? The thing you’re currently doing?”

“No,” Adrien said, taking a great deal of effort to keep the frustration out of his voice. “I’m not apologizing. I’m just recognizing that you seem to care about the safety of civilians, and so do I, and so I think we should be able to find some common ground and settle this in some way that doesn’t involve them.”

“The only reason they’re involved at all is because you keep attacking their city!” Ladybug shouted, her voice a lit flame. Her earrings beeped—two out of five. “What are you talking about?”

“Adrien,” Father growled dangerously in his ear, “stop this immediately.”

“Don’t play dumb, Ladybug. We both know you’re smarter than that,” Adrien pressed on. “There’s no one here to fool. If you give back what you stole, this can all end—”

“Adrien, stop!” Father yelled.

“You’re insane!” Ladybug shouted. “I never stole anything, and—and the very last person I’d ever trust to talk things through with is you.”

Adrien’s temper rose hot beneath his skin, his ears flat against his head. A rumbling began to shake the ground beneath their feet.

“And this is what you want instead?” Adrien shouted. “The whole city in danger? Us fighting like this, forever?

“Adrien!” Father seethed.

Something shifted in Ladybug’s gaze, her eyes set with an infuriating self-righteous zeal that dropped a rock in Adrien’s gut.

“I think forever is a gross overestimation,” she said. “In fact, I believe you’re already out of time.”

Ladybug smirked, and a high-pitched ding sounded in Adrien’s arms.

The Easy-Bake Oven exploded with popcorn all over the pavilion, and a torrent of pigeons descended on the microwaved feast, choking the air in beaks and feathers until cracks splintered through the pillars. Ladybug wrenched the baton from the pavement and jousted it into Adrien’s stomach, sending him gasping to the floor, but not before he kicked at her legs and took her down with him.

They tousled for a few seconds before a feather sauntered down through the air to brush right up against Adrien’s nose—he could swear his nose was like a magnet to the godforsaken things or something, seriously—and Adrien, with all his might, could not stop the earth-shattering, full-body sneeze that followed.

The sneeze—understandably—loosened his grip on Ladybug, who—also understandably—used the opportunity to pull her knee up to her chest and kick him in the stomach, sending him flying several meters into a pile of pigeons.

Adrien blinked, Ladybug’s red form hazy in his watery eyes. Why did the allergies have to happen, like, instantly? Why did it always have to be M. Pigeon?

“A ‘bless you’ would’ve been fine,” Adrien remarked, feeling around for his baton with his non-actively-cataclysming hand.

“Hmm. I’m not really in the mood to bless you, I think,” Ladybug said. Adrien blinked again, and she was closer than before, yo-yo spinning triumphantly at her side. “I’m thinking you could bless me instead.”

In a swift motion, she lassoed him by the waist and hurled him through the air, several seconds of freefall before he made contact with something warm and firm. He felt the moment his cataclysm was released and panicked for a second, thinking that he might have accidentally touched a person. But, no, when Adrien opened his eyes, he only found the ashy remnants of M. Ramier’s pigeon-feed bag in his palm. Despite himself, Adrien sighed with relief. Awful as she was, Ladybug was reliable. She’d never manipulated his cataclysm to hurt another person, only to deakumatize people. Though he knew Ladybug wasn’t above hurting innocents, she’d always seemed to care about her public image.

“Chat Noir!” M. Ramier screeched, now that all the black bubbles were gone. “What are you doing here?! Help! Ladybug!”

“Hey, I’m not gonna hurt you!” Adrien put his hands up, placating. M. Ramier’s eyes were still wide with fear. “Let’s get you down from here, okay?”

“You’re safe now, M. Ramier,” Ladybug landed firmly on the rooftop, polka-dotted Easy-Bake in tow. She snapped her yo-yo around the black butterfly and gave Adrien a pointed look. “He won’t hurt you anymore. Stray cats know when to scram.”

“I’m harmless as a declawed kitten,” Adrien told M. Ramier, pointedly ignoring Ladybug. “I wish you well.”

read the rest on ao3 (when it comes back up)

#call it even #asks #ch 3 tomorrow!!!!!#(if ao3 permits)#ty ao3 workers u are the strongest people on earth #ml #miraculous ladybug #mlb

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