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“I’m Marinette,” she whispers to her reflection, there’s a stiffness in her expression and the light doesn’t reach her eyes. “Just a normal girl with a normal life.”
The words punch out of her mouth, caught up on the pucker of her lips, but she ignores the bruise. “But there’s something about me that no one knows yet…”
She takes a deep breath and pulls her smile tighter back, hoping that if she says it enough times it’ll be true. “Cause I…” she trails, the words pause at a screeching halt and the sentence left behind only leaves burn marks in her throat.
Cause I have a secret she wants to say. Marinette knows exactly how each word sounds, used them in a variety of other combinations before and they have always come out fine.
Why can’t you just come out?!
Her reflection stares back at her and she can see no softness in her face and not goodness in her heart. All she can see is red and black as it smudges at the edge of her vision, reality distorting the longer she tries to recall a happy grin.
But she settles for the truth.
“Cause all I tell are lies.”
This time, however, the truth doesn’t heal the scars that have crawled up her esophagus and on her tongue. It tastes like ashes from previous failed attempts instead.
Because after all, I’m just a liar.
Stitched and sewn with lies in every single thread of her being. Little excuses that become white lies that turn into false stories that almost become truth. And she hopes that if she tells them enough that maybe one day they’ll be true too, but…they don’t.
They scorch and they burn and they leave cuts on her skin.
There’s a girl staring at Marinette in the mirror, a girl with a mask wearing red and black spots, and all she can see is everything she’s not.
There is a tightness in her smile, a strain as if something is slowly trying to make the muscles in her face pull apart. She knows that saying says that it takes more muscles to frown than to smile, but they never talk about how the soul feels in such a moment.
Tumultuous emotions are rising up inside of her, two waves crashing of burning red and inky black to only twist into a whirlpool. A never ending cycle red, black, red, black, red–no escape, no breath, no reprieve to even see something else, feel something else.
And she can see that it’s not normal, not the way that Chat Noir keeps looking at her, with his brows slightly furrowed and a question pouring from his lips.
“What’s wrong, Ladybug?”
And the words are out there, words she’s been avoiding for days, been running from, been pretending don’t exist are out in open and all she wants to do is scream. Because can he not see how right she’s feral and angry and her smile is only a thin line that ties up chaos that she is inside?
But it takes less muscles to grin, so she pulls it back even tighter despite that there is a vice grip on her heart.
“Nothing, Kitty, nothing’s wrong at all.” Ladybug says.
A part of her is screaming–the part named Marinette because Marinette tells lies, she lives, she does them and here is letting them spill from her lips like water from a glass.
But the smile remains and in a blink, Ladybug’s in control the smile feels almost real, almost true as she cocks her head to side and starts to pitch her yo-yo far away. “You coming or what?”
She has the audacity to laugh them, let’s the sound ring in the air as if happiness is strum notes. It’s almost as if the blue in her eyes is really the sky and not blue of someone’s lips when breath doesn’t fully take.
Yet it’s so effortless and so easy to just give into this fake facade, to let it wash over her and pull her underneath. Marinette tumbles and tumbles into a sea of red, with her eyes screwed shut because if seeing is believing, she doesn’t want to see at all.
Not yet.
That night she lays in her bed, eyes blinking up at the cieling as her heart weights like lead in her chest. She has to get up.
Tikki is sleeping and does not know that in this moment, Marinette is splitting herself into two. She reaches up to the center of her forehead and zips down her body until all the red can step safely out.
Standing face to face, Ladybug and Marinette stare back at each other.
I thought you don’t like me, Ladybug says. Her teeth are perfect and white.
“I don’t.”
Then why did you call me out?
She can hear her clock ticking in the corner as Ladybug grins, the pristine teeth turning sharp. Her eyes are eletric blue and Marinette feels like she’s being fried alive.
Well?
Marinette grits her teeth–less sharp, less dazzling teeth. “I like what you make me.”
By now, Ladybug’s grin has turned into a smirk and it doesn’t look exactly right on a face that looks just like her own.
What do I make you then?
The words fall freely from her lips and she takes refuge in how true they actually are. “A person made up from lies.”
And that’s the way we ought to be.