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Day 1: Crash out
Marinette Dupain-Cheng lived a totally normal life. She had two wonderful parents, ate delicious sweets from her parents’ bakery every day, was friends with most of her amazing class, and had, like most normal girls, a crush on Adrien Agreste. Of course, she was Ladybug at night, but really, someone had to be, right?
She was totally not a former spy and forgotten heiress to an underground empire of villainy. Or the daughter of Batman. Nope. ‘Cuz that thing ain’t normal. And Marinette was synonymous with normal.
She was stalking Adrien, as normal people tend to do with their crushes, when she stumbled, quite literally, into Kagami. She was still in her training gear, but her mask was off. She greeted Marinette with a stiff nod and awkwardly asked about her day.
“How—yeah, uh, I’m fine, Kagami. How about you?” She stumbled over her words a bit, but who could fault her? Kagami was literally on her way, and she had lost sight of Adrien. She tried discreetly—read: not at all—to angle her body so she’d see her crush without leaving Kagami and seeming like a weirdo. Because stretching yourself like a pretzel to look behind the person talking to you is not at all weird, thank you very much.
“I am adequate.” Kagami reminded her a lot of Damian, and that, selfishly, was the main reason why she chose to avoid her. Normal girls did not have twin brothers living in Gotham, unaware of their continued existence. “If you are looking for Adrien,” She said pointedly. If Kagami were anybody else, Marinette was sure her lips would form into a rueful smile. “He is speaking with a champion from the United States of America.”
“Oh?” That caught her attention. She had never heard of that sort of thing before. Did her school participate in any transfer programmes?
Sensing her confusion, Kagami added, “Seven of them have come for a duelling championship happening the day after tomorrow. They chose to train with Monsieur D’Argencourt.”
“That sounds fun. Were they any good?” People who would come all the way from the USA to France for a fencing tournament must be pretty darn good, but Kagami was happy to answer.
“Yes, they were sufficient opponents. It will be an honour to fight against them in the tournament.”
“You’ll be there, too?”
“Yes,” Kagami nodded her head stiffly. She was looking very intently at Marinette. Her eyes had narrowed slightly, and her hand was elevated as if she were about to touch a curl from her face just to examine it under a better light. It was not the way normal girls were looked at. And Marinette was normal, above all.
“Is there something on my face?” She tried to joke, but it fell flat as Kagami continued to gaze at her with her whole attention.
Only after it started getting uncomfortable did Kagami finally look away. Marinette’s shoulders loosened, and the stress left her. “You just look so much—” Kagami went to say, but shook her head as if regretting opening her mouth. “I am sorry. There is nothing on your face.”
Marinette nodded and cleared her throat in a clear effort to banish the awkwardness. It seemed to snap Kagami out of her reverie, thankfully.
Her mother’s red car raced past them and stopped almost a block away. With what could resemble an apologetic smile if you looked really hard and were fifty percent blind, Kagami bid her goodbye and raced towards the vehicle.
Marinette, a girl on a mission, returned to her main objective: spying on Adrien. The whole discussion with Kagami, stilted as it was, had resulted in what would probably turn out to be a headache of epic proportions. So, she must move fast and as discreetly as possible. That spy training had to be good for something. Marinette could be stealthy if she wanted to.
Ducking under a bench to hide behind a trash can was probably not her brightest idea in hindsight.
She saw Adrien in her peripheral vision talking to a tall, black-haired individual. Their conversation did not seem very lively, and Adrien was the one doing most of the talking, but both participants appeared unwilling to abandon their dialogue.
She did not necessarily need to hear the topic of their discussion, but what was stalking for, if not getting to know people? Normal girls, much like Marinette, learnt about people’s interests.
With silent steps that her mother had once praised her for, Marinette trudged toward them inconspicuously. She was planning on just strolling next to the boys at a slow pace, far enough not to look suspicious, but near enough to hear them clearly.
“...I’ll ask my father about it,” Adrien said to the black-haired boy. There was something eerily familiar about him, but for the life of her, Marinette could not figure out what. She decided against thinking about it for long, since her headache was getting worse and worse the more she tried to concentrate on it.
“Tt,” The familiar stranger articulated.
“Hey, maybe I’ll see you in the tournament on Thursday.” Adrien smiled, but the boy did not return the gesture. Much like Kagami had done earlier, he shook his head up and down stiffly, as if a kink was bothering him. Adrien took no offence to this, just like Marinette hadn’t to Kagami. He was probably as socially awkward as her.
Adrien patted him on the arm and went to leave when he caught sight of Marinette strolling next to them like any other normal person. “Marinette!”
Just as she was about to jovially and very nonchalantly wave back at him, the familiar stranger’s eyes snapped to hers, and the world stopped existing.
It was not what the movies portrayed it as. It was not a moment where everything fell into place, a domino effect in real life. It was a hyper-focus on one specific, oh-so-familiar person that made goosebumps rise on her arms like a little spider weaving its web. Looking in those green eyes, which reminded her of past greatness, Marinette had the sudden foreboding feeling that she was about to be caught in the spider web.
Adrien, maybe urged by fate or by the uncomfortable ordeal of two people who were supposed to be strangers staring at each other with such concentration, left them after a muttered goodbye, but Marinette’s objective had changed utterly. She was no longer that normal girl who had a crush on Adrien, two loving parents, and most of all, an ordinary life. Face to face with the person she tried to forget most of all in the world, Marinette could not imagine what a normal life could be like.
She was back in Nanda Parbat, a sword too heavy for her small hands, the grip coated in blood, both her own and someone else’s—not a rival’s, nobody had been good enough to be her rival—but a victim’s. Just as she had once been in the cruel hands of her mother.
“يا أُخْتِي! "
His voice was a whisper, and Marinette’s heart began to race. She needed to get out of here.
Her thoughts were jumbled and her mind a mess, but her feet knew how to run—she had been running from her past all throughout this jig of a normal life—and so she did, with no destination, as fast as her legs could hold her. But, much like the past she could not escape, Damian was hot on her trail and, as always, he was just as fast as her.
She had been running for what felt like hours, darting through annoyed Parisians, using any skill in her domain to escape her hyper-cognizant brother. She had an advantage; she knew these streets better than anyone, had run through them on late nights fighting villains with a partner who was not here to help her now;—despite all his promises—stealing from people’s pockets as she had done in Pakistan; she had slept in these streets, and she had lived in them. Damian would not catch her.
But maybe she had grown too rusty, maybe she’d forgotten what Damian was really like, or maybe she’d completely overestimated her capabilities, and the next thing she knew, she was on the outskirts of a city getting tackled by a boy almost twice as big as her.
There was no escape.
It could have been exhaustion or perhaps a blessing from the universe because Marinette, once Damian had gripped her arm with a hand as steely as iron, fell on her knees and hacked.
Damian had never been good at comforting. She had always been an independent girl, and she rarely needed such comfort. It must have been quite the awkward situation her brother had found himself in, running after a sister he had thought dead through the streets of Paris, managing to corner her on the edge of civilisation, only for said sister to start hacking up a lung in front of him.
She must really be out of shape if a run out of Paris winded her this much.
Gently, with the sort of reluctance that comes from years’ worth of separation, he patted her back. Marinette was too busy spiralling and coughing to notice.
Eventually, she calmed, her head pounding in tandem with her racing heart. She leaned against her brother’s chest, resting her head on his shoulder in an imitation of years past. But like all good things in life, it had to come to an end.
"ظننتُ أنكِ ميتة."
He said it with such forced casualness that Marinette had to wince despite her headache. There was hurt somewhere hidden in his voice, but it was masked, while once it would have been clear as a hippopotamus’ footsteps for her to hear.
“I can speak English, you know,” She told him, if only to break this ice that had settled over them like a heavy coat.
“I know,” He answered, annoyed at her interruption of what would surely turn into a dramatic speech about betrayal, grief, heartbreak, and revenge worthy of Shakespearean damsels. She huffed out a tired laugh despite herself.
She saw Damian close his eyes for a brief moment and felt her strands of hair move with a long exhale. “Why?”
There was no reason to ask what he referred to; it was obvious by the get-by. His voice had turned melancholic, and Marinette feared what this conversation may lead to. All her life, she had been adaptable; couldn’t she be selfish just this once? Couldn’t she want normalcy just this once?
“I just—” She struggled to articulate her thoughts. There were so many of them, and her mind was so fuzzy from the lack of oxygen and the headache building in her skull. “I needed to get away.”
His face twisted as if he could not believe that this was her only answer. “So, you left me to watch the destruction of our home j-just out of a selfish—”
“Selfish, Damian?” Her voice was eerily quiet, colder than she had expected it to be in the face of her rising anger. He wanted to call her selfish? The pampered prince who could do no wrong in the eyes of his mother and grandfather? The perfect weapon who was so brainwashed, so easily molded into the ideal vessel for grandfather, to actually think for himself? Damian called her selfish? While during their whole childhood, he stood on the sidelines as her mother reprimanded her for no other cause than being born ‘defective’ in the face of her favourite’s brilliance; as grandfather ordered her flogged for daring to have a semblance of morality. “I am the selfish one?”
The always-eloquent Damian Al-Ghul, rendered speechless by yours truly; what an honour!
“I, who suffered the wrath of our family, when you were too comfortable up on your high throne to care for the lowly girl you called a sister? I, who cared for you despite your insistence on belittling, despite your need to put down everyone else in order to feel better about yourself? I, who loved you, damnit, despite our opposing morals, who thought there was good in your heart of hearts? I, the only one who saw you, not the heir to the demon’s head, not the son of Batman or Talia, not the mindless assassin they had made you to be, but as goddamn Damian—my twin brother? You call me selfish? When I sacrificed my morality to make you happy? When I became a killer to please you? When I took blows meant for you? I knew you were a murderer, Damian, but I never took you for a hypocrite!”
Her rant left her breathless and her head cloudier than before. The lack of oxygen from all the running, in addition to her long speech, left her winded, gasping for air. She gaped at Damian, trying to inhale air faster than was recommended, vision growing fuzzier and fuzzier until… everything went black.
Marinette woke up slowly. Feeling started coming back to her with the sensation of a numb arm. She was sitting on top of it, it seemed. Her legs found surface immediately. The ground seemed easy to scuff at, so she was in the wilderness or somewhere with grass. She was still wearing the same clothes as before, and someone was holding her.
Lethargically, she opened her eyes only to find her brother. He was flipping through his phone, absentmindedly swiping his thumb across the screen. He looked surreal with a phone. It was a sight she’d never thought she’d bear witness to.
Something—probably her change of breathing—clued her brother into the fact that she’d awoken. He looked down on her with a glint in his eye and wet his lips in preparation to say something.
“I’m sorry,” Marinette told him, shame curling in her gut as she started recalling the awful things she’d shouted at her brother. While it was true she felt that way, it was not Damian’s fault that she found life unfair. Even if he was complacent in the League, he was still the same age as her, and he could not have done much against their mother or Ra’s.
“I—” He swallowed, and nervously he swiped a curled strand of blue hair from her face. It hadn’t always been blue. When she’d first come to Paris—a scavenger and street rat—her hair, a matted and sweaty mess, was as dark as Damian’s. She wanted to separate those two lives when Sabine and Tom took her in, and what better idea than dying her hair blue? Blonde would make her too pale, red reminded her too much of blood at the moment, and brown had not felt right. Blue had been it. “I’m sorry.”
Marinette blinked at his admission. In all her years of life, it would be an exaggeration to say that Damian had apologised to anyone who wasn’t their Mother or Grandfather more than twice. She never thought she’d be on the receiving end of it.
“I have been… learning. With father’s and our siblings’ help.” He said with deliberate slowness, as if afraid she would not hear him otherwise. “I am beginning to understand why you were the way you were. I recognise that it was not the weakness I thought it to be, but a… strength I must cultivate. So, for that, you have my apologies.”
“It’s alright, Damian,” She told him, a small smile flickering on her lips. And really it was. He may not be the best at showing it, but Damian did care about her. For why would he have gone to all this trouble—run across Paris chasing her, sit with her while she was passed out; God, that was embarrassing to say; and admit his mistakes otherwise? Father must really have done good work with him.
Marinette attempted to sit up, but only the effort exacerbated her headache, which, despite passing out, had still not gone away. Lights were suddenly becoming too aggressive, and the humming of birds grated against her ears.
“I think you have a migraine,” Damian shouted—or, well, probably spoke at a normal volume. To Marinette’s sensitive ears, it sounded one and the same. She hummed in response to his statement.
Night was arriving soon if the fading dusk was anything to go by. They should probably head home. She was too comfortable to even think of voicing such a thought.
Perhaps Damian had also acquired mind-reading powers along with some semblance of compassion in his time at Father’s place, because he asked, “Would you like to camp here?” He sounded uncertain, but that was all a show. Damian Al-Ghul was never uncertain.
“Yeah,” she drawled out, snuggling more deeply into her brother than she ever had before. He was not big on affection, that much she remembered, despite how hard she tried to suppress the memories. But after such an emotional conversation, Marinette thought she deserved it.
And so the two siblings sat, under the moonlight cascading over the edge of Paris, resting, uncaring of the world around them for perhaps the first time in their lives.
Life was not fair. But Marinette thought that, mayhaps, this was an apt reward for her devotion to morality.