Work Text:
Victim
noun
- a person harmed, injured, or killed as a result of a crime, accident, or other event or action.
The people of Paris, France got used to hearing the word ‘victim’ as though it was something natural, something that just happened every day.
It was a given, that there was to be at least one akuma attack per week — although this was more like an attack per day at some stages.
It was normal for Paris, but was it really normal?
It was the cause for much debate in Paris — by her people — and even out in the rest of the world, the places that were not tormented day in and day out by a middle-aged man who dressed up as a butterfly to try and steal jewellery from teenagers.
The debate was long and drawn out, it should have been obvious — an akuma victim was anyone who had gone through pain and suffering at the hand of Hawkmoth’s akumatised puppets.
A victim, by definition, was a person who had been harmed, injured or even killed as a result of an event. But thanks to the Miraculous Ladybug cure, all harm caused by Hawkmoth was erased — so did that mean that there were no victims?
What about those people who had felt the pain caused during those attacks? The people who had been injured and harmed and even killed? Just because the cure had brought them back to their original health, their trauma didn’t just go away.
Their trauma was just as real and just as valid as any other types of trauma.
These people who had drowned to death, who had been burnt alive, flattened by falling buildings, crushed in the fray, their pain and their suffering, and yet it was so often dismissed because they had ‘survived’ in the end.
Somehow they had to have their voices heard. Because they were not suffering alone, surely not.