Chapter Text
“Cataclysm!”
The word is followed by the sound of something breaking. A scream of anguish rings painfully in Ladybug’s ears. Wait. Isn’t Ladybug supposed to fix things when they break?
“Time to de-evilize,” Ladybug croaks. She weakly attempts to toss her yo-yo towards the direction of what is presumably a fight, only to find that her arm won’t move. That’s odd. With a great deal of effort Ladybug opens her eyes.
Oh.
Paris is on fire. The eiffel tower has fallen, its wrought-iron beams reduced to the rubble which surrounds her. The broken pieces of the rabbit miraculous are strewn across the ash-covered pavement and Alix lies motionless nearby. Ladybug struggles to turn her head and is met with the sight of the rest of The Miraculers trapped in a candy-colored prison. They are missing both their miraculouses and secret identities. Chat Noir– where is Chat Noir? There is no sign of him or the villain they had been fighting. Ladybug attempts to sit up but finds that she still can’t move. She looks down and discovers that her body is trapped under a metal beam from the tower. Strange, she can’t even feel it. For some reason this makes her laugh.
“Get back here!”
A blurry Chat Noir runs past Ladybug. He is quickly followed by Chrysalis. Right. They had been fighting Chrysalis and her latest akumatized victim, Candy Witch. From the state of the fight Ladybug can guess that they lost. This thought makes her laugh even harder. A year of fighting Hawkmoth. Two years fighting Chrysalis. Just to be beat by a fucking akumatized toddler named Candy Witch.
Chrysalis stops at the sound of Ladybug’s laughter, giving up her pursuit of Chat Noir.
“What do we have over here? It seems like I’ve caught a bug,” Chrysalis approaches Ladybug and pulls the beam off of her body. Ladybug gasps as the removal sends a sudden burst of pain through her whole body.
“I never thought it would be this easy,” Chrysalis gloats as she removes the earrings.
Where is Chat Noir? Marinette tries to maintain consciousness but without the protection of the Ladybug suit’s supernatural protection it proves impossible.
The last thing Marinette hears before the world goes black is Chrysalis incredulously saying her name.
There is something crawling on her arm.
She opens her eyes slowly but is immediately forced to close them again as the sun filters through the leafy canopy straight into her retinas. Groaning, she raises her hand to cover the brightness and opens her eyes again. The sensation on her arm ceases as the ladybug which had been crawling on her flies away into the dense jungle.
The jungle?
She sits up and the whole world spins at the sudden motion. After regaining her bearings, she looks arounds properly for the first time. She appears to be at the edges of a rainforest, with a beach visible through the trees to her left. She doesn’t know how long she’s been laying there but she’s already covered in a layer of sweat from the humidity. She takes off her blazer– who wears a blazer to the jungle?– and throws it to the ground where it lands next to a knife in the sandy dirt.
She picks up the knife and removes it from its leather sheath. The approximately five inch steel blade is mostly straight but curves to the tip and is affixed to a smooth wooden handle which has the name Marinette carved into it. The letters are painted over in gold. She supposes that Marinette must be her name, since she can’t seem to remember it herself. Panic starts to creep in as the realization that she doesn’t know who she is hits her at full force.
“Help!” her voice comes out raspy and quieter than intended. She clears her throat and tries again. It comes out much louder this time but there is still no response. Marinette feels her heartbeat quicken and her breathing becomes labored.
“Calm down, Marinette, panicking won’t help anything,” she mutters to herself. Hearing her name spoken out loud sounds right and this comforts her a little. She is still scared– who wouldn’t be in this situation?– but now is the time for actions, not feelings. With some difficulty she rises to her feet. She looks around the area where she found the knife but doesn’t find any more clues to explain her existence. She glances in the direction of the beach. The beach! Maybe she was just on a beach trip with her family and hit her head a little too hard. Maybe she’ll walk onto the sand and immediately be swept up in the loving arms of the parents she can’t remember. She tries not to dwell on the way her outfit is completely unsuited for a day at the beach.
Upon arriving at the beach, her sandcastle-hopes are washed away with the tide. The place appears to be completely deserted, with not so much as a single footprint maring the sand. There are no boats on the water, no children collecting seashells, or surfers paddling out to the waves. Only a small, rocky island not far from shore obscures the horizon line. Marinette turns back to face the way she came and spots mountains in the near distance, untouched by any signs of human life. The beach seems to stretch for miles until it is eventually hidden by the treeline. If Marinette had to guess, she’s on an island, although it’s hard to know for certain.
Okay.
Judging by the sun’s position in the sky, it is about noon, which only leaves a few hours until the sun starts to set. There is no one here to save her so Marinette needs to lock the fuck in. The first step of survival… is it to build a shelter or a fire? Building a fire seems quite arduous right now so she decides to start with the shelter. She heads back to her origin point, which seems as good a spot as any to build her shelter. She’ll have to worry about finding a water source soon so this living situation won’t be permanent. Searching around for materials, she finds a small grove of bamboo growing nearby. The faintest recollection of a memory hits her– a pink couch, watching survival shows on TV with people whose faces she can’t remember…
“Bamboo! Clean water!” she exclaims incoherently as she unsheaths her knife and repeatedly taps it against the segmented internodes of the bamboo stalks. Pretty soon, the tapping comes back dull instead of hollow and Marinette excitedly carves a hole at the bottom of that section. Water begins to trickle out and she hurries to drink it. The taste is pure, slightly sweet, and very refreshing in the heat.
Marinette decides that the first order of business is to build a sleeping platform. She’s already been bitten by a few mosquitos and who knows how many dangerous bugs could be roaming the ground, not to mention snakes. Luckily, bamboo is the perfect building material. Marinette takes her knife and begins cutting down stalks of bamboo, drinking the water out of them as she goes. Once she’s cut down enough bamboo, she drags the stalks back to her camp. She retrieves her abandoned blazer from the dirt and cuts the sleeves off to slice into strips of fabric she can use to tie the bamboo together. Four short pieces of Y-shaped branches are cut and sharpened to be staked into the ground as the legs for her makeshift bed. She places two rocks slightly shorter than the height of the platform underneath the middle to keep the bamboo from buckling too badly. Marinette lays on her new bed to test the strength and to her delight it easily supports her weight. The curves of the bamboo feel a bit strange on her back but it is a lot more comfortable than expected. Before sunset, she will collect leaves to cushion it a bit better.
Judging by the sun, Marinette only has about an hour left until the sun starts to go down. She’ll have to worry about constructing the roof of the shelter tomorrow. For now, she drinks another section of bamboo water and heads down to the beach to collect tinder and kindling for a fire. She tries to ignore the growing hunger pains in her stomach.
The waves crash pleasantly against the shore. In any other circumstance Marinette would love spending the day on this beach.
“HEY!” at the sound of a distant voice, Marinette drops the dry coconut husks she’d been collecting. She looks around but sees nothing except the empty beach.
“I’m over here!” the voice calls out again, and this time Marinette is able to pinpoint it as coming from the rocky island right off the shore. A person is perched on a rock, waving their arms wildly above their head. Their only visible feature is a head of messy blonde hair. Marinette’s heart rate quickens– she’s not alone after all.
“Are you ok?” Marinette calls back to the person.
“I’m stuck!” they call back.
Marinette thinks of the bamboo bed she had spent hours making, “Hold on, I’ll go get a raft!”
“What?”
“I said I’m going to build a raft!” she calls back louder. Without waiting for confirmation, Marinette rushes back to her camp and attempts to remove the bamboo platform from its legs as smoothly as possible. She has to retie a few sections but pretty soon she has a functional floatation device. The bamboo is a little too small to be used as a proper raft, but once in the water she is able to lay on her stomach and paddle it like a surfboard. The water is surprisingly cold, especially for an island which is definitely somewhere on the equator. Marinette suppresses the panicky voice in her head nagging her about the fire she hadn’t built yet. After all, there’s no time to panic right now. Someone needs her help.
A salty wave hits her in the face, filling her mouth and lungs with water. She coughs it out and keeps paddling, hoping that her raft is strong enough to support two people’s weight. As the sun gets lower in the sky, the tide creeps up the beach and every wave is rougher than the last. Marinette feels exhausted. After almost a full day of chopping bamboo with only her knife and no food at all, a swim against the current is the last thing she needed. Just as she starts to feel like her arms can’t take another stroke, she reaches the island.
The person reaches out their hand and helps drag Marinette out of the water. She sits for a moment, gasping for air and gagging as the ocean tries to escape her lungs. Not the most attractive look for meeting this stranger.
“Thank you for saving me,” he says, once Marinette finally stops coughing up sea water.
Marinette startles and lets out a mouselike squeak, having momentarily forgotten that she wasn’t alone. For the first time, Marinette raises her head to meet his bright green eyes. The verdant shade matches the greens of the jungle in a way that seems almost unnatural and his blond hair glows amber-gold in the now setting sun. He’s pretty– in the way that a girl is pretty– and overall seems far too put together for someone who has spent all day stranded on a tiny barren island. His wind-blown hair is almost chic and other than the mild sunburn on his nose and cheeks, he seems ready to step out onto the runway at any second.
It’s absolutely infuriating.
“I don’t know where I am or how I got here,” his words go in one ear and out the other as Marinette can only focus on his too-straight teeth, too-dazzling eyes, too-perfect skin. There’s not a single tree on this island for god’s sake, how does he have only the mildest of sunburns and not even a single bead of sweat? Out of curiosity, Marinette sniffs the air and recoils when she discovers that he smells like old camembert. At least he has one flaw.
“Are you ok?” His delicate features are painted with what seems to be genuine concern.
“I’m sorry, just exhausted, did you ask me a question?” Marinette asks.
“I asked what your name is? And if you know where we are?”
“Oh it’s…” what is her name again? “Mar… MARINETTE!” the boy flinches as she shouts her name.
Marinette feels her face go red with embarrassment. All day she had been coping so well with the stress of her unfortunate circumstances. Why was talking to another human proving to be more difficult than anything else?
“Sorry. Um... I just learned my name this morning. It was written on a knife.” she continues.
His eyes light up, “Oh! My name was written on this pot,” he holds up a metal pot with the name Adrien written in the same gold lettering as is on her knife.
“Adrien. That’s a beautiful name,” of course he would have a beautiful name to match his stupid, perfect, freak of nature face. Was he like a designer test tube baby or something?
“Thanks! Marinette is really pretty too!” Adrien smiles and Marinette feels a stab of guilt for thinking so negatively about him just because he happens to be genetically blessed.
Suddenly, Marinette remembers that they’re on a bit of a time limit. She looks to the sun, which is now dangerously low in the sky.
“Oh, we need to leave now if we’re going to make it back to the beach before dark.”
Despite moving with the waves this time, the swim proves much more difficult. The bamboo platform struggles to stay afloat with the added weight. Marinette and Adrien are forced to cling to the raft and kick their feet behind them while Adrien’s pot takes the VIP seat. Marinette’s arm muscles are on fire, she had some time to rest on the rocky island but it wasn’t nearly enough to recover from the fatigue caused by the first swim. Luckily, they catch a few waves and make it back to shore in half the time with much less salt water in their lungs.
Marinette recovers quicker from the swim than Adrien does, despite having swam twice the distance, causing her irritation against him to bloom again. The sun is nearly under the horizon and they need to make it back to camp before they can’t see a foot in front of their own faces.
“Ok, I’m sorry but I need you to get up. We don’t have much sunlight left,” Marinette pulls Adrien to his feet and practically drags him and the raft through the sand and up the hill to her campsite. Because of the impromptu rescue mission, she never had time to even attempt to make a fire.
“This is going to sound weird but I need you to take your clothes off,” Marinette says casually as she begins affixing the bamboo platform back to its posts.
“W-what? Why?” It's hard to read Adrien’s expression in the twilight but his stammer and scandalized tone of voice says it all.
“We are soaking wet with no fire and temperatures are starting to drop for the night. If we stay in these wet clothes, we could get hypothermia. I don’t want to either but it’s a matter of survival.”
Adrien hesitates for a moment and then wordlessly begins removing his clothes. Marinette is thankful for the low light so she doesn’t have to see his no-doubt obnoxiously perfect body. She turns around and removes her own clothes, then hangs them to dry on a tree branch. She turns back to take Adrien’s clothes from him and is met with a sight she never, ever wanted to see.
“Oh Jesus Christ , Adrien, keep your underwear on,” Marinette silently thanks whatever god put her in this sick and twisted situation for the small mercy of low light.
“You told me to take off my wet clothes! My underwear was wet!” he says defensively before he seems to remember the concept of shame and covers himself, “I’m sorry.”
Marinette puts her head in her hands. She needs to sleep for one million years, “Just wring it out or something. I’m going to bed.”
Marinette lays on the damp bamboo bed and tries to ignore the sticky salt water feeling on her bare skin. She can hear the sound of Adrien wringing out his underwear and putting it back on, then laying down in the dirt.
“What are you doing?” She asks.
“I wasn’t sure if I was allowed in the bed with you,” Adrien says. At least he’s polite.
“You’re allowed. It’ll be better if we share body heat,” Marinette sighs as he climbs in next to her. Adrien’s camembert scent mixed with the smell of the ocean water is repulsive and almost makes Marinette gag. Truly she has never smelled anything worse in all her seven hours of remembered existence. Unfortunately, the bed was only made to support one person so personal space is very limited. They lay back to back, clammy skin sticking to clammy skin. Regardless, it really is better to share body heat so she will just have to push through this night and make a bigger bed in the morning.
Marinette hopes and prays that she’ll fall asleep and all of this will have been nothing more than an awful, awful dream.