Spoilers for the most recent episode of season 4.
Alya Cesaire typically burst into any room with fire and flair, radiating a wild energy that bloomed and frizzled like her hair. She took up space, crushed and bull-rushed everyone else out of the way, and exploded like fireworks, knowing what she wanted and locking on like a heat-seeking missile or a dog on a sumptuously meaty and marrowy bone, dripping with fat and juice that she could squeeze for one of her stories.
Maybe that was why her parents and Nora, even her younger siblings who were too busy bouncing in front of the television and scrambling over their older sister, wrestling her to the ground, didn't even notice when she slouched into their home and slunk towards her room.
They shouldn't have notice her, and it was a comfort that they hadn't really.
All she'd done for hours was listen, really listen, perhaps for the first time in her "friendship" with Marinette, and the words had been crushed and beaten out of her, along with all the tears that she had left, as Marinette poured out, laid down, all her burdens.
Ladybug, Luka, Kagami, Adrien, and the Kwami.
All those burdens of care and love.
After that, she didn't have a voice left. Didn't have the right to speak or talk to anyone, and now she understood one one-millionth of Marinette because all she wanted to do in that moment was collapse into Nino's arms and vomit up everything.
She didn't though. Like Marinette, now, she couldn't, and somehow, she made it to her room, easing open the door, sliding inside, and locking it behind her.
Her room was really the worst place that she could be.
Majestia and Ladybug posters lined the walls; her screen saver flicked between fan-art images, mostly LadyNoir, while her phone, she only now realized, buzzed in her pocket periodically as she stood there, Ladyblog notifications going off every few minutes.
Every bold red and blue and black, all the contrasts and vivid technicolors, was washed out.
All of her life had been oriented around super heroes, and even becoming one, despite her fai- oh God, she'd failed Marinette and Ladybug as both Alya and Rena Rouge.
Super heroes had been her life, but never real heroes.
Comic books; never reality.
In shreds, her posters – all of them, from the limited edition signed version of Majestia and Ladybug in New York that had been part of a charity dirve, to the one that she'd waited in line to have signed by the cast and crew of the Ladybug and Chat Noir movie – littered the floor before she even thought about what she was doing.
Chest heaving, she couldn't get enough air; it only stoked the fire that was raging unquenched.
Had she screamed?
Her fingers were smudged with ink, and she slicked them over her sweaty forehead and cheeks, finding her hair, digging into the roots and clawing, tearing.
It was good to destroy fake things.
Marinette had lived with this feeling for months, and was still living with this feeling.
That meant that she had been betraying Ladybug and Marinette alike for months, ever since Lila had arrived at the school. The pitiful defenses that she'd raised to try to avoid Marinette's expulsion, and the juvenile investigation that she'd launched, were nothing compared to the full-bodied world war that should have erupted to protect someone who had already been suffering so, so much.
Throwing herself to her mattress, she rummaged about in her desk drawer in search of the MP3 player that Nino had given to her for her last birthday. She needed the music. His music. Songs that had been carefully selected, edited, and remixed by her talented boyfriend just for her.
Marinette's tear-bruised eyes battered her mind even as she slipped in the earbuds and cranked up the volume to unhealthy levels.
It wasn't helping; that much was obvious. There was no respite or escape from the weight and reality of her failure.
For all her proclamations regarding justice and her idolization of Ladybug, she had completely ignored the human being behind the mask, and the human being who sat right next to her- was sitting right next to her until she-
She had forced Ladybug out of her seat, stripped away the agency and authority that her best friend had surely needed just to feel like she something stable in her life, all for...
Lila.
That ... bloody witch.
Worse still, even though it was only now that she realized it, she forced Marinette, her supposed "best friend," out of her seat.
Marinette should have always been more important than Ladybug.
Through the music, a resounding base drum with synth-wave oscillations and an erratic, atonal undercurrent that dug into her gut, her snarl echoed. Surely her parents must have heard her too.
In the end, was it even Lila's fault for the pains and sorrows heaped upon Marinette? No. You didn't blame the scorpion for stinging you; you blamed the frog for her stupidity, right? Trust misplaced when the reality should have been obvious to a friend.
She betrayed Marinette.
She started crushing Ladybug underfoot.
Her bed-sheets crumple in her fingers, and the pale ceiling offers nothing but the plastered glow-in-the-dark 1/4 scale Ladybug and Chat Noir sticker that she'd put up with- with Marinette, gushing over Chat Noir's luminous eyes and the way that an acrobatic leap emphasized Ladybug's lithe figure.
God, how could she even look at her?
It was her fault.
So she had to make up for it all, even though Marinette assured her over and over again that there had been no evidence to convince Alya of her best friend's claims, and that she wasn't responsible for Lila or Hawkmoth.
It was still entirely her fault.
But Alya was, in her heart, a doer. She knew that. Marinette was always the planner, however ludicrous they might have been. How was it that she was to make amends? Fix things? Expose the girl who had so bitterly abused her best friend with her complicity?
Above all, she had to make certain that Lila paid for this, was revealed just like Marinette had splayed herself open, so beautiful and pained, for Alya! Because of Alya's own mistakes!
It was-
Her hands froze over her earbuds, the electostatic cling and clamminess that she'd felt time and time again - before Lady Wifi, before Oblivio, and before Rena Rage; so many times she'd given in - bursting along her cheeks.
Oh, God, no.
"Exposure, you wish to-" There was a strangled gurgle and a gasp, then sickly crawling glee like a filthy oil slick, replete with sludge, while she pounded at the sides of her head, the faint purple outline in her peripheries scalding her fists.
The voice was grinning.
"You wish to reveal Lila Rossi's true nature, punish her for hurting your hero... Marinette Dupain-Cheng. I can give you the power to do so, if only you'll do one, small thing for me in return."
He was laughing. Wherever he was, she could tell that much. Like her screams that had her parents pounding at her locked door. It resounded and echoed within the confines of the cavernous space, the vaguest impression of which flickered through their connection.
But he didn't need to breathe to speak into her mind.
This time, there was no stopping herself. What was the point, after all? He only had to touch her mind for a single moment to win.
One thought askew, one moment of weakness, and he'd already won.
"Bring me the Miraculous of Chat Noir and Ladybug... No. Bring me all of the Miraculous."
Her last thought as Hawkmoth's guttural laugh echoed inside her skull was simply Marinette.
Author's Notes
Just a quick scene that popped into my mind after learning of the spoilers from the episode earlier today.
Rushed, unbetaed, mostly unedited, and, well, highly depended on "unreliable narrator" Alya.
This work could be deemed "salt," but Alya's depressed self-perception is a twisted reflection of reality, a condensation of fandom perspectives. Also, yes. Alya has now fought off akumatization under unique circumstances, but she has also been akumatized a half-dozen times. That seems an unwise individual in whom to invest a secret of this magnitude, especially when she now has to bear the burden that has nearly broken Marinette as well. All it takes is a flutter of butterfly wings against her mind, and everything is undone; it won't matter if she fights off Hawkmoth, who is no longer spreading his effort across multiple akuma.
It is good to see Marinette breaking down and acting irrationally, which is a realistic and meaningful basis for dramatic tension, coupled with the potential for character growth and forward motion in the plot.