#i was plagued by thoughts of older Adrien talking to Gabriel's grave
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They started talking a lot more often 💜
#i was plagued by thoughts of older Adrien talking to Gabriel's grave#y'know after everything is out on the table#after some long years of therapy and all that#i think this would be a great coping mechanism<3#trust me <3#miraculous ladybug#ml spoilers#mlb#my art#lily doodles#adrien agreste
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engarde to the graveyard (send the people our regards)
They’re nothing more than children, arrested in their growth. They’re the adults of the future, a future that they loath. They’re secret keepers, mysteries, people made of histories too big for their skin. They’re never going to win.Â
Happy @felinettenovember​, y’all! Or honestly, at this point, not very happy but you know what? There’s catharsis. @emzurl​ coerced me into it and @musicfren​ held me to it, so there is... an amount. No further promises, though! This is a complete story as of this post.Â
Part 1 complete. Part 2 complete.Â
Their delight was palpable, tangible in the stiffly shifting smirks that shuffled from person to person when Marinette walked hand in hand with Adrien into the classroom on a Monday morning. In the way Bustier grinned slyly as she announced a permanent seat change that brought Marinette shoulder to shoulder with him every day, holding herself firm in the full force of his lovestruck besotted gaze.Â
Even at his sappiest, Felix had always looked at her with weight behind the fluff, with respect and admiration as the scaffolding to cotton candy sugar. Marinette thought of the way she used to sink into beanbag chairs, swallowed whole in the vast endlessness of it, completely lost to herself when she returned from its maw.Â
Felix found himself next to a girl he had already broken up with and knew immediately the rumors (the truths) hadn’t spread far enough yet.Â
Their teacher reminded each of them, quietly, after class that she was there to keep them safe and happy, and as their guardian she was happy to make the changes to allow them to sit where they would be most productive.Â
Neither of them had been productive in weeks. It didn’t seem to matter.Â
Akuma fights were almost better. Chat still tailed her, kept her back secure. He took more blows meant for her than he used to, and Marinette stayed awake at night playing them over and over in her head, guilt curdling in her gut like spoiled milk, souring the bitter realization that flooded through her veins when she thought about the way he used to throw himself at her to push them both out of the way, and the bittersweet relief of not having to touch him like that, not getting to touch him like that.Â
She shivered in the naked air over her suit and didn’t lean into his shoulder. He twitched in repressed anxiety and didn’t curl his tail around her waist.Â
The worst days were the ones where the akumatized was a child. The thing was, adults had long been trained, practiced in the habit of learning how to handle a breakdown. Teenagers had learned what to expect, how to cope, because akumatization was nothing more than more of the feelings they’d already learned to function under the crushing weight of. No one believed them anyways, right, when they said they were hurting, that it was too much, that they needed help.Â
To the teenagers of Paris, Ladybug and Chat Noir were heroes not because they defeated the akuma but because they stuck around, held their hand, swung past their window at night and winked, stopped by with cookies and hot cocoa and a hug.Â
They were heroes because they were friends, mask or not.Â
Children hurt, and it was all they could know for as long as a butterfly plagued them.Â
Felix was losing more and more of himself to this charade they had going on, and Marinette was more duct tape than person, and Chat and Ladybug looked at each other in the aftermath of an akuma attack that left another child sobbing inconsolably in the middle of the street, and watched teenagers (fifteen, sixteen, older than either Felix or Marinette could imagine being, now) who remembered too well what it was like to feel that helplessness come forward to rock this child to sleep because their guardian was halfway across the city and wouldn’t know what to do, anyways.
There were no words left to exchange. Chat’s ring had a minute longer than her earrings, so he stuck around to watch the child while she detransformed in a flash of pink. Marinette walked out, and the teenagers (children, all of them, anyways) parted for the now-familiar face around post-akuma emotional wreckage. Marinette untangled the child’s fist from around Chat’s tail, which he had been flicking gamely if only for a momentary reprieve, and pulled the child into her embrace.Â
They burst into sobs, soaked her shirt.Â
Me too, bud, she thought. They didn’t hear it. Felix might have (heard, listened, understood), but he had slipped away already.Â
There were too many children who had stopped being children for this. It needed to end.Â
There was something about working together for as long as they had that meant they didn’t have to talk about it. Maybe they should. Maybe they couldn’t. But they knew, and they fought for it as if everything they had been doing was little more than a play-fight, a mock reenactment of a battle, never mind the slaughter strewn through their lives.Â
But Marinette started training at nights, and she came to school looking like the way she feels, which was broken and exhausted and in pain, but she studied harder and started goading Hawkmoth through their masks, and set up traps for fake miraculi and tried so hard not to cry.
Felix made a chart of everyone who's been akumatized, because Hawkmoth has admitted between one of Ladybug’s taunts and the next that he's been akumatized, in some perverted, sick kind of boast. He started interviewing people and following butterflies, and writing class notes in duplicate to slip under her door because he's studied all this before. She hasn't.
They turned heroes to detectives, because what was another mask to wear?Â
They found him, and it was so anticlimactic.Â
Gabriel wasn’t arrested. Emelie was already dying, disconnected from her preservation container (coffin, Felix scoffed under his breath, and Marinette snorted at the truth of it). It didn’t make sense to rob Adrien of both guardians at once, even if he had assumed he’d lost one of them already and was rapidly losing the other. It seemed kinder for everyone involved just to let her go. Instead they pushed Hawkmoth into therapy and broke patient confidentiality just enough to make sure the therapist reports that he’s showing up. Felix lost another guardian in all but the paper trail, and knew how not to flinch this time.Â
Ladybug and Chat Noir, or maybe just Felix and Marinette, stood hand in trembling hand, surveying the battlegrounds of a war waged by a guardian of two children and two miraculi he had no right to, the bloody remnants of a childhood visited by trauma and responsibility, the conniving burden that it was, leaving them destitute and on guard for a threat that always, always came.Â
There was no funeral coming for what they had lost, no mourners or witnesses for these alter egos finally laid to rest. There was no one coming to save them save the people they had become to save the world, the people they had become to sacrifice the best parts of who they used to be. They stood there in the wreckage of everything they have been and have become, not sure if there's enough of them left to feel whole again.Â
But he held her hand, and she could feel his pulse fluttering, an echo of her own barely-there heartbeat but present, so present, still alive.Â
There was something to be valued here, even if it took all the half-broken pieces left behind in the two of them combined, and the rest of their lives.Â
Because they had that, now: a rest of to look for. A rest to look for.Â
There was still so much left to do. Marinette broke up with Adrien, or tried to. He held onto her, grabbing onto one part of her and then another while she extricated the first. Eventually it wore on her, exhausted her, between his befuddled, bewildered refusal to accept her decision and the heavy judgemental glares of the classmates gathered to watch this spectator sport.Â
We did this for you, Marinette. We wanted you to be happy. What are you doing, Marinette? Why are you throwing it all away?Â
Don’t we matter to you as much as you matter to us?
Yes, she thought. I don’t matter to you at all. She bit off whichever part he grabbed onto, left it behind, another sacrifice, another memorial at an unmarked grave. May this be the last, she hoped, and cauterized her wound with rage.Â
Felix was there, a phantom in the audience, ghostly pale and nearly translucent under the yellow fluorescent lights.Â
He caught her eye, and didn’t stop looking.Â
It felt like, for once, for the first time, the right choice.
#Notte Writes#Fanfiction#Miraculous Ladybug Fanfiction#ML#Miraculous Ladybug#Miraculous: Adventures Of Ladybug And Chat Noir#Felix#PV Felix#Felix Agreste#Chat Noir!Felix#Marinette Dupain-Cheng#Felix/Marinette#Felinette#Guardians Of The City Of Love#Graphic Imagery In Metaphor#They're So Young#And So Hurt#Angst#Felinette Month 2020 Day 6#Felinette Month 2020
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