Chapter Text
The day Lila Rossi was ruined was the day she fell in love. Though she would vehemently refuse to believe that it was love.
After spending months crafting the persona of Lila Rossi, and a delightful year of sucking up to the foolish students at Dupont High, wrapping everyone around her fingers, her expertise was challenged by an annoying girl named Marinette Dupain-Cheng.
Marinette had been the first to see through Lila’s lies.
Maybe Lila did make the mistake of cozying up with Adrien Agreste a little too much. She saw the obsessive stalker hanging over his shoulder, blue-haired and mooney-eyed. Lila only wanted to push Marinette’s buttons a little, then quickly back away, flustered, promising she would do anything to help a friend get her guy. Lila had no interest in Agreste whatsoever. He was just a blonde playboy-prop with a smile that could charm all of Paris, and a connection that could get Lila to his father, and into a fame-filled industry (which she eventually did).
Marinette never bought it. And that’s what surprised Lila.
She was actually a little grateful to Marinette, at first. Lila could finally drop her cover. Lying was second nature to her, sure, but it still took work to craft intricate stories, charm the pants off fools, and defend herself from hot-headed clowns like Marinette who poked holes at her tales with every breath. It was refreshing to be free of a character just for a moment to taunt Marinette as her real self.
Until it became annoying. Marinette never backed down. She never stopped trying to bring down Lila. She even got Agreste to turn against her. To Lila, Marinette was like an annoying bug that wouldn’t stop flying around your head, and she couldn’t catch it, no matter what.
The day of her downfall, Lila was pulling the strings over Chloe and Sabrina, trying to get Marinette in trouble, but it was in fact Marinette who had pulled the lever in the end. Her little one-way-bathroom-mirror scheme exposed Lila’s lies to the entire class. Bravo, Marinette. She had won.
But had she?
Oh, Lila already knew that Marinette would get her one day. But it was exciting to see how Marinette exacted justice. .
Lila ached to relive the moment when Sabrina hit a little red button, and the mirror behind her was replaced with a portrait of everyone’s shocked faces. Blood rushed through Lila’s head. She had been caught. A little fox in a net.
Lila was pestered, but in truth, she wanted to laugh. She wanted to laugh in their faces.
Look at you idiots. Did you believe for a second that I was your friend?
And there was Marinette, right in the front, a triumphant smile plastered on her face. She was adorable. Lila barely remembered what Marinette had yelled at her, only remembered the pounding in her heart, the glare in Marinette’s sapphire blue eyes that felt like a thousand bullets, the contact of warm skin as Marinette grabbed Lila’s wrist, roughly.
Marinette saw Lila for who she was, and that set off an akuma in her stomach.
But Lila had one last performance to give. Lila looked enraged when she was expelled, but she already got what she came to collect. An alliance with Gabriel Agreste, who was Hawkmoth, and a puppeteer’s handle on Chloe Bourgeois, daughter of the mayor of Paris.
After that, she moved on.
“If you get attached, the only one you’re conning is yourself.”
Her mother’s rules always surfaced in her head every so often. Her real mother. A conniving, snake of a con artist. Lila hated her, but knowing the life of a liar now, she could respect the woman her mother was. Though she was ruthless, swindling millions from idiodic men, she stayed true to her mantra. She never got attached, not even to her own child. Not a cent of her cheated money ever touched Lila.
Every woman for themselves, her mother had said.
Lila had let herself be adopted by grieving mothers, out of spite to her own birthmother, but Lila had never felt any obligation or fidelity to them. Lila hadn’t seen her own mother in five years. She could be dead, after conning the wrong person, or living a life in luxury, having forgotten the seething soul she’d brought into this world and abandoned.
It didn’t matter. Her mother only sought wealth, which was foolish. Lila was looking for power. Money was easy to steal, but it was also easy to burn. Power, you had to lose to gain, but once it’s in your grasp, it’s yours to shape and bend to your will.
So Lila removed the auburn wig for her naturally short brown hair, stepping back into her previous identity as Cerise Bianca.
She tried to move on. Tried to forget her life as Lila. Forgetting Dupont and her dim witted classmates was easy. But forgetting the blue-eyed girl with blue pigtails was not. Her whole life, the game of lies she played was as easy as breathing. But Marinette made it fun.
For the next six months, as her plan was falling into place—gaining attention through the Agreste-Tsurugi Alliance Rings—a certain figure still haunted her dreams every once and a while, and Lila would find herself awake in the hours of the night, staring at her ceiling, heart hammering.
Then, Hawkmoth was defeated. Gabriel was narrow-minded, desperate, and trusted his own work too much. Lila easily swiped the butterfly miraculously after the battle.
Now, what was intriguing about the end of Monarch’s reign was that Ladybug kept his identity a secret. She had lied to all of Paris, and to Adrien Agreste, portraying Gabriel Agreste as the hero who defeated Monarch. How interesting…Luckily, the press kept Ladybug too busy to hunt down the lost Miraculous. The fate of the Agreste empire was in the air, and Lila hoped to see it crumble.
Lila lied low for two years as Ladybug believed the butterfly Miraculous was destroyed in the battle, hoping it wasn’t found by someone else. Paris’s guard was down, lulled to a sense that they were finally safe, and Lila herself was preparing for the war ahead.
So, yes, Marinette was just a little blip in Lila’s life. She ruined her flawless plan, but no, Lila was not ruined. Far from that. Lila pulled out a dark velvet box, opening it to reveal a small purple brooch with colors that seemed to swirl under the light.
In the dim catacombs underneath Paris, a butterfly was breaking out of its cocoon.