Work Text:
"Alya, babe, my best friend, light of my life, I love you, but I do not have time for another Ladynoir fanfic."
Alya pouted. "But — I know you're busy, but this one is really good! Please, just give it a read. It's worth it."
Marinette grabbed the phone and rolled her eyes. "If I read this fic, you have to promise not to make me read another one for at least a week. I know it means a lot to you but I just do not have the time."
Alya sighed. "You can't just read it to get it done with, though. I actually want you to pay attention."
Marinette glanced over the words. "Okay, fine. Here's the deal, Césaire: Every week, I will read one fic, and exactly one fic, and have an in-depth conversation about it with you. No more, no less."
Alya grinned. "Deal."
“Is this person’s name Chat Noir?” Ladybug asked as she strolled along a rooftop.
Chat Noir’s eyebrows furrowed. “Not... legally, no.”
Ladybug rolled her eyes. “I can’t believe you chose yourself.”
“I can’t believe you got it in eight questions.”
Ladybug’s grin was almost as wide as her partner’s (not quite). He had that look in his eye that he always did when one of them won — he never had it when she lost, in fact, and she could never figure out why that is.
“Alright, your turn,” Chat said.
“Alright, let me think...” She looked around the city for something, anything really, to spark her creativity. Patrol was coming to an end, meaning she was tired, and so her brain power was shutting down rapidly. “Got it,” she said when she’d thought of something suitable.
They’d started playing twenty-one questions pretty quick into their patrols. It was a fun way to pass the time, there were unlimited things they could do, and their choices only got more fun as there were fewer things to choose from, so it never became uninteresting.
“One: Can you touch it?”
“Yes.”
“Two: Can I see it?”
“Not currently, no.”
“Three: Can I carry it?”
“With super strength? Yes. Without super strength? No.”
“Maybe I could lift it. You don’t know how strong I am.”
“Alright, without knowing what this mystery thing is, I want you to make the bet that you could lift it.”
He sucked in a breath. “Okay, fine. I concede, I can’t lift it.”
Ladybug smiled. “Fourth question.”
“Four: Have I touched it before?”
“No? Maybe? Fuck, I can’t remember.”
He walked forward so that he could turn around and look at her as he walked. “I feel like that doesn’t count as an answer and I should get my fourth question back.”
“I feel as though you’re not going to no matter how big those kitty eyes get.”
He pouted, then joined her back at her side. “Fine. Alright, five: Have you touched it?”
“Yep.”
They went on for a while, and Ladybug felt pretty confident around question eighteen until he asked:
“Was it a Lucky Charm?”
She froze for a moment before sighing and continuing on. “Yeah, it was.”
“Ha! Was it the giant donut you got when we fought baby Auggie that one time?”
“You know, I heard there’s a hot air balloon race coming up soon. Are you planning to enter with that giant hot head of yours?”
He rolled his eyes. “You’re just jealous ‘cause I’m better at this game than you, bugaboo.”
She stopped walking and smiled at him. “Trust me, if I were jealous of you, you’d know it.” She unhooked her yoyo from her hip and stepped to the edge of the roof. “I think this is where I go, kitty. I’m tired. You can keep going to finish our route or end here if you’re getting tired, too. Bug out!”
It was a normal day. The next day, she hardly remembered it.
Alya and Marinette’s deal lasted, coincidentally, half a year exactly. Twenty-six weeks and twenty-six fanfics. It worked out great. Marinette put an hour or two aside to read the fic on Sunday, and she and Alya would discuss it at lunch all week. She even learned to take notes as she read, and had a separate sheet of paper for critiques that only Ladybug could make. (She figured she might be able to give them to Alya one day. Or at least Chat.)
For twenty-six fanfics, Marinette read through different versions of herself doing different things. Sometimes it was more realistic than others; often, they bungled Chat, making him less important to the battles or more goofy or less competent than he truly was. She didn’t care much unless she felt he would mind.
On this particular Sunday, she was reading a fic by user incatnito called stare into a crystal ball (and only see the past). It was a fake akuma battle, which was a fairly popular genre, but Alya rarely recommended them; she claimed they were largely vent fics made with self inserts. Marinette was excited, in fact, to read this one; it was a change of pace from the recent rabbithole Alya had fallen down of fluffy moonlit dates on the top of the Eiffel Tower.
The akuma was a prophet character, of sorts, whose powers were essentially the ability to predict Ladybug and Chat Noir’s movements. Her name was Delphi, and the story took place from her perspective; how she was an autistic girl with a special interest Greece and Greek mythology, how she had few friends in school, just her older sister at home, how her sister was about to move out and go to university elsewhere in Paris, and how they were both anxious for what would happen, and how that turned into an akumatization.
All very kind and well thought out and well-written, even. Marinette found herself impressed at the prose, the dialogue, the action; it was equal parts true to life and entertaining. (As much as a fanfic could ever be true to life, anyway; she still found herself writing down places where Chat Noir was a bit too irrelevant to the fight or where Ladybug realistically would have asked for more help.)
After an hour and a half of reading, she was happy to be getting to the ending; not because she wanted it to be over, but because the story really was that well written and she was excited to see how it would wrap up.
“Pound it!” Ladybug and Chat Noir said as I woke up into the bright sun, squinting my eyes at the light and covering my face with my arm. I didn’t remember any of what just happened, but I knew instinctively that I’d been akumatized. I didn’t feel sadness or anger as Ladybug approached and held out her hand to help me stand up, though. I felt... not really relief. Catharsis.
“It seems like you’re anxious about what’s gonna happen,” Ladybug said. I slowly, tentatively took her hand, grateful for the fact that her super suit had gloves attached. When I was on my feet, I pulled my hand back.
“I... Yeah,” I answered. Too much going on for me to say anything more.
“It’s okay to be worried. But talk about your worry with the people you love instead of bottling it up inside, okay? It’ll be better for everyone.”
“Oh paw-lease,” Chat Noir said, standing just behind his partner. “We’d love to save you again if you get akumatized. My dear Ladybug just doesn’t want to see me use my sweet moves to save you. I think there was a video caught of this backflip I had to do while fighting you — you were pretty awesome as an akuma, too. Put up a good fight.”
I looked down and smiled, so I only heard Ladybug as she said, “Hey, kitty. I heard there’s a hot air balloon race coming up soon. Are you trying to make your head even hotter and bigger so you can enter?”
—Wait.
Marinette’s eyebrows furrowed when she read that line, and she turned toward Tikki, resting on her shoulder and reading along. “Did you see that? I said almost exactly that same thing to Chat Noir a couple weeks ago.”
Tikki floated up and blocked her face from the screen. “I’m sure it’s a coincidence. It’s not like it’s the most original thing you’ve ever said.”
She made eye contact for a moment more with the kwami, silent but intense, and until she sighed and floated down. Marinette clicked to incatnito’s profile.
Whoever this was — Chat Noir or not — had over two-hundred fics in the fandom Parisian Superheroes RPF. The list of fandoms was long, a lot of it anime based on the way it had Japanese names listed after the French one. Also a fairly concentrated fourty fics in Video Blogging RPF that she was not brave enough to look into.
She hit the profile button instead.
Joined: 2011-11-18
Bio: Hi! I write fanfiction a lot. Like, a lot. Mostly about whatever I care about the most when I write it. Feel free to comment, I love talking to people! (they/them)
Marinette’s eyes went wide at all of this, and she picked up her phone to call Alya. As it rang, she looked through some of this writer’s fic; they had lots of fic, mostly one-shots and other short fics. And all of it, she noted, was rated Gen.
Interesting.
Alya picked up.
“Hey girl, what’s up?”
“I just finished the fic you sent me.”
“Normally we wait ‘til lunch to talk about it, but if you want to talk now —”
“I just had a couple questions about the writer, actually. They were really good at capturing Ladybug and Chat Noir, and there were just a couple lines in specific that I could really imagine them saying.”
Marinette could just imagine Alya sitting up a little straighter in enthusiasm. “I know! This is one of the more popular writers in the fandom, they’re so good at capturing their voices. And they’re really nice, too! I tried getting them to write a piece for the Ladyblog but they said no.”
“So, do you... know them?”
She sighed. “No, no one really knows who they are, just that they have some of the first fanfics in the fandom and they’re the most popular writer by far. And that they bookmark Ladynoir fanfic all the time but have never actually written it.”
Marinette stayed silent, trying to put this all together. If this was Chat Noir — and it made sense for it to be on paper, at least — then there were a lot of revelations to be had at once.
And Alya must have mistaken her silence, because she tentatively said, “...You saw the Ladrien fic, didn’t you?”
Marinette blinked. “The what?”
“Oh, you — you didn’t. Okay. Well, the other weird part about the fact that Incatnito never writes Ladynoir fic is that they’ve written Ladrien fanfic — you know, Ladybug and Adrien. Our Adrien. It’s kinda a niche thing that not many people like and they were actually the one who popularized it.”
“Uh, I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later, okay?”
Marinette hung up before Alya could respond and stared into her screen, not looking at anything in particular.
This was a lot to take in.
When Ladybug went into that patrol that evening, she had a plan, a plan which truly hinged on being transformed because Ladybug was a lot better at not being a stuttering mess than Marinette.
Chat didn’t know anything was up. Of course not. But to Ladybug, everything felt different.
Once they said their hellos and got on their way, Chat opened the conversation with, “Twenty-one questions, milady? As I remember, it was my turn when we left off yesterday.”
“Actually, I wanted to start tonight, if that’s okay? I have something really good in mind.”
“Alrighty then, you can start. Uh, one: Can you touch it?”
“Nope.”
“Two: Can you see it?”
“Yep.”
“Three: Can you hear it?”
“No.”
“Four: Can you feel it?”
“No.”
“Five: Is it a piece of art?”
“Yes.”
“Ooh! Okay, six: Is it in the Louvre?”
“No.”
“Seven: Is it a painting?”
“No, nothing like that.”
Chat paused and turned to face her as they walked. “You’re being weird tonight. You never give me more than a yes or no answer. What’s going on?”
She was being weird, in fact. Because she wanted to lose. Needed to lose, in fact, or else she’d look like a jerk and this would be wasted.
“Nothing,” she said. “I just thought of a really good one, so I guess I’m off my game.”
Chat quirked an eyebrow but joined her by her side again. “Alright, then. Eight: Is it... something you can read?”
“Yes.”
“Nine: Is it a book?”
“No.”
“Hmm. Ten: Is it online?”
“Yes!”
“Eleven: Is it fictional?”
“Yes.”
“Twelve: Have I read it before?”
“I think so, yeah. I’m not positive though.”
She looked over to see him looking down and squinting.
“Thirteen: Is it something I would read in school?”
“No, nothing like that.”
“Fourteen: Is it a long story?”
“No.”
“Fifteen: Was it written in the past year?”
“Yes.”
“Sixteen: Is it written by a professional?”
“Probably not, but no one can be sure. Except the person who wrote it, of course.”
“Seventeen: Is it poetry?”
“I already said it was a story.”
“Poems can be stories. I’d argue that poems are stories, actually, but we can discuss that later. But I’ll take that as a no.”
Ladybug nodded, and Chat didn’t flash the usual smile that came when they made eye contact.
“Eighteen: Is it fanfiction?”
“Yes, it is!”
“Nineteen: Was it written by incatnito?”
“Now you’re getting there! Yes!”
“Twenty: Is it named after a song lyric?”
“Yep, it is. Last question, kitty.”
Ladybug heard a quivering breath. “Is it the king i once was?”
Chat was looking at the ground, and Ladybug’s were curled into a satisfied smile. “Oh, there are multiple stories that fit the bill? Interesting.”
“Damn it. I might have had plausible deniability if I didn’t get it wrong. Which one is it?”
“It’s um... the one about the prophet? I don’t remember the name.”
“Hmm, yeah, that one’s called stare into a crystal ball (and only see the past).” Chat’s eyes kept to the floor. “You wouldn’t have figured it out if I didn’t steal that line about the hot air balloons, would you have?”
She shook her head. “I can’t believe you write fanfiction about us, kitty. If anyone found out it was you they’d go bonkers.”
Slowly, green eyes looked up to Ladybug, maybe a little bit afraid but mostly just confused. “You’re not... mad?”
She smiled just a little. “No, just really surprised. You’re a good writer and you use that to write stories about me. You could write stories about subjects infinitely more interesting.”
Grinning, Chat let out a somewhat breathy chuckle, as though in disbelief. “No subject more interesting than you, milady. Besides, I didn’t mean to get popular. I just... did. And then I kept going because it was fun. I never write about us being together, of course. That would be a violation, and I know that. Usually I refuse to write in my own perspective at all.”
Ladybug reached up and scratched behind Chat’s (cat) ear, head leaning into her hand like it always did. “I trust you to hide your identity, and based on what I saw, you’re mostly really respectful. A little harsh on yourself, maybe, but we can tackle that later.” She took back her hand. “The one thing I noticed, though, was your pronouns? You aren’t — You can tell me anything, you know.”
Chat sighed. “Originally it was just because it made me more anonymous and I didn’t want my — anyone I knew in real life to find out about me. And then it just... stuck. I realized a little while ago that I preferred that, but... I didn’t want to tell you because I’m not ready to tell everyone else.”
Ladybug put her arm around their shoulder. “We don’t have to tell anyone if you don’t want.”
They smiled and looked to their partner. “Thank you.”
“You don’t write fanfiction about your friends that you know out of the mask, do you?”
They stopped in their tracks for the briefest second before saying, “Of course not.”
Ladybug wasn’t convinced.