Summary: Ladybug and Chat Noir are called into battle against an akumatized child, delaying Adrien's effort to offer Ladybug her gift. He has to wonder what's got his Lady so upset.
The next day is relatively uneventful, a temporary truce having been declared, it seems, between Marinette and Lila. Apparently, there is to be some kind of hiatus between releases in the Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla series, much to everyone's relief; that franchise was getting a little bit overwrought by this point.
The disruption to Adrien's carefully-planned meeting with Ladybug, which includes an offering that might genuinely demonstrate just how beautiful he believes her to be and reduce any lingering resentment on her part, if not extinguish it outright, comes just after he returns home for the evening.
Child akuma are objectively the worst villains Chat can conceive.
Their mercurial temperaments and nativity made for a fascinating interplay. Endowed with super-human powers, a child tended to be just as capricious, formulating dangerously unpredictable stratagems that were wholly rational to the tangled maze of a child's cognition, as the akuma was easily manipulable.
The worst aspect of engaging a child was just how abhorrently unheroic it was, though. While Ladybug could set right the worst of injuries, even ripping a soul back from the bony clutches of the reaper, he left every altercation with a child-akuma feeling like sweat and filth had caked his skin. Oh, he punned and flirted and made a dopey mess of himself all the while, but fighting hurt children was ugly.
Fortunately, in this case, the princess, hermetically sealed in some strange form of humanoid blister packaging that emerges as a shield whenever they attempt to land a blow on her, is not one of Hawkmoth's most formidable akuma. The little girl appears driven by a fixation on finding "that mean man," which is all the information that she's willing to divulge regarding her akumatization, beyond sealing up anyone who catches her ire inside unbreakable action figure packaging (with air-holes, fortunately) and stripping them of accessories. MP3-players, cell-phones, purses – anything other than the clothes on their backs – disappear.
A generally morose temperament leaves her distracted, and the quick and efficient battle that doesn't even require the use of the Miraculous power has the little tyke flattened, de-evilized, and safe in only about twenty minutes.
That's not at the heart of the problem, though, as a roughly six year old girl is left in place of the villain who had been bent on wreaking havoc on the city.
A wailing, lost little girl whose piercing cries cut right through any mental defence that Chat could hope to erect, and stab so deep through his mystical leather uniform that he wants to vomit.
He's functionally paralyzed and broken, gummed up with model cement and shattered into pieces, bereft of any cogent idea as to how he should approach the little girl. In the past, he's dealt with children who just needed a friend, or someone to distract them or play with them, but a little girl who's nearly wailing in the middle of a Parisian street?
There's no tool in his modelling arsenal or his non-existent super-hero training that's left him properly equipped to deal with this.
As is fitting, he's saved by the intervention of his partner. For a moment, the expression on her face sets into a grimace; her visage all disgust and righteous outrage unlike anything that he's seen since she shot down Lila when she first appeared, but without even a hint of joy.
For the child's sake, she smiles softly, closing the distance between them.
"There, there, baby." Scooping the sniffling child into a hug and wiping the dribbling snot from the girl's nose, Ladybug coos in the most heart-stoppingly maternal of ways that leaves him caught within a phantasmagorical and eerily visceral daydream of her cuddling a clutch of cat-bugs seated on her lap. He clings to that image like a child's fleece blanket, just so the plaintive voice won't make him remember... so many things that he'll never hear or feel again.
... too late.
Watching her fly to the distraught child's side, he realizes that this is the moment.
This is the moment that both he and his Ladybug really learn to hate Hawkmoth.
What kind of man could ever leave a child like this? Rip her away from all of the people who love her and leave her an emotionally-traumatized mess, feeling completely isolated because some callous and distant and utterly repugnant man had inspired, fostered, and preyed upon her pain? A child had no means to process it, and lacked experience enough to understand a world that was just too wide and complex for her infantile mind. She needed someone to support her; instead there was only an abuser, ready to dig his fingers into any wound, twisting and exploiting.
What kind of man could do that?
He's crying again.
He blinks them back, but doesn't stop.
That's okay.
Chat Noir can cry.
As she strokes the child's cheeks, rocking the little body in her lap, her embrace looks so warm. Adrien knows hugs as only someone who cherishes them does.
It's the antithesis of the perfunctory, functional, and coolly professional manhandling of his design team or mock-intimacy or levity of a photoshoot – the image of a simulated couple or a joyous teen, airy and ethereal as in that advertising campaign for Adrien: The Fragrance – cultivated for public consumption.
"You're okay, little one," Ladybug reassures, letting the girl cling feebly to her neck. "We're here for you; and we're going to keep you safe."
"C-can I get my mommy and daddy?" the girl sniffles, arms limp.
"Absolutely, sweetie." Her gaze shifts towards him, even if the sympathetic pain is crystal clear."Chat will go get your mommy and daddy."
"Really?"
"Mm-hm," Ladybug hums, her smile so earnest that who in the world wouldn't reciprocate? Not Chat or that little snot-nosed bawling girl, so brave as she nods and returns the toothy grin with a watery attempt. Of course. Ladybug is inspirational; she makes everyone want to try. "Can you tell me where you live? Do you know your address?"
Apparently, the girl had conscientious and concerned parents, who made certain that she did.
He's just about to pole-vault off into the sky to track down "mommy and daddy" - would that it were so easy to find all parents – when from the crowd of onlookers Roger Raincomprix, who had been assisting a cohort of other officers in their efforts to hold back reporters, hungry for an interview, emerges, waving him off.
A quick thumbs up, followed by a flash of five fingers reassures Chat that the police in this city are heroes in their own right. Even more than him, if not Ladybug, since they do their jobs without super-powers.
"What happened?" Ladybug asks while he turns back to watch, awe-struck like the civilians that are crowding her. "You can tell me, and Chat and I will do anything we can to help, okay?"
"I – I shouldn't tattle, right?" Rubbing at her swollen red eyes, the girl looks up at Ladybug with a watery expression and Chat's stomach and heart are suddenly an odd-couple, roommates trying to share the same space.
Ladybug simply strokes her hair, a vague petting motion that she picked up from dealing with him. "If you're sad, or if someone did something that hurt you, you should tell someone you trust."
"O-okay," the girl gulps and laves snot from her nose, blowing the excess into her sleeve. Gabriel would likely faint or vomit, but Ladybug appears unperturbed, a mere glance in Chat direction sending him delving into the crowd to pluck a pocket square and even a small portable packet of disposable facial tissues from a generous civilian.
"Mommy and daddy took me to the store, 'cuz I wanted a Ladybug doll," the girl begins to explain, and then smiles, showing my friend off a few baby tooth gaps, at the woman holding her. "You're my favourite hero."
"That's very kind of you- what was your name?" Ladybug asks, her tone soothing. "I should have asked."
"Marie."
"I like that name, Marie," Ladybug encourages, wiping the sheen of tears from a plump cheek with the tissues he's just handed over. "Can you keep going?"
"Well, mommy let me go into the store with my birthday money, and daddy was there too. He was watching, even though he was trying to hide." She cups a hand to the side of her mouth and only Chat's enhanced hearing lets him pick up the ensuing whisper. "He still thinks that I'm a little kid."
"Okay, so you took your money into the store, and you were going to buy a figure." With a brimming fake smile, Ladybug settles the child more firmly on her knee, setting it bouncing slowly.
"Mm-hm. I got there, and saw all the dolls. Chat Noir was there, and the knight, and that man with the guitar, and then there was just one Ladybug left, but she was really high," the girl rambles as Chat admires that simple juvenile ability to get lost in memory and story, to forget present pain, feelings turning on a dime. "I thought i could reach it if I could climb, and I did!"
A hand smooths over the child's hair, but Ladybug is serious if not stern when she speaks. "That was very clever of you, but next time, you should ask an adult for help."
"I know, I wanted to get it for myself to show daddy I could. Then the man came over." Shadows pass over face, and much as Chat wants to surge forward and beclown himself to ward off the clouds, he can't.
Instead, he paces, watching helplessly and it feels worse than it should for reasons he can't identify: the helplessness.
But the girl continues in a breathless burst: "He was really big and looked really mad, and he had two Ladybugs but he wanted mine too. Then he grabbed my toy and I fell and hurt my leg. I cried and daddy was trying to get me. He was talking but so was another man. He sounded really scary but kind of funny, and he told me it was okay and mean people who steal toys shouldn't get toys and then I woke up."
Ladybug has never looked more terrifying and indulgent at once, and just like that, he has to move.
The concerns that he's had regarding Ladybug's forgiveness, his own errors of judgment and inability, despite his braggadocio, to properly attend to the dictates of contract law and fine print, even Marinette's unmerited favour – all of it pales in comparison to the sight of this little girl whose simple dreams had been crushed by a careless adult, who intended to twist a child's plaything into an ugly vehicle for profit.
Adrien isn't one to judge others too severely for whatever they might do for a living; he's never tasted poverty or want, and had every physical need and transient whim satisfied by attentive caregivers. If a scalper wanted to make money, and had an adult collector willing to pay exorbitant fees to add some treasured item to his collection, he hadn't seen the harm. After giving away his two Ladybug figures to Marinette and Ladybug, he'd intended to pluck one off eBay for himself, funding the disreputable practice.
This girl is the real snotty, red-rimmed eyed, gasping and sobbing victim of adult cupidity, a little piece of innocence chipped away by the cruelty of some random civilian with dollar signs in his eyes, rather than a spark of human compassion.
He's not going to be buying from a scalper, not matter the cost.
Neither Chat Noir nor Adrien are going to stand for this, and with a perfunctory nod in Ladybug's direction, he's off, ripping his baton from his belt to go bounding into the sky without a word.
Sweat pours from his brow as he pushes himself and his lungs are aflame, even though he's not tired; the suit enhances his endurance to the point that he can sprint the distance without true exertion, even when he tests the utmost limits of his speed, but he's trying to outrun something.
Recrimination catches up so easily, the little voice that tells him that those tears are his fault; he sold his rights, their rights, to make those figures.
And, more than that, the little girl, crushed so cruelly under heel by an adult who should know better...
His throat burns, but he makes it to the rooftop cache he'd set up for a rendezvous with Ladybug later that night, and returns to the scene of the akuma battle just in time.
Ladybug is there, handing a now-sniffling and grinning child over to a clearly distraught and relieved couple, the somewhat swarthy man large enough to give Tom Dupain a run for his money. Cupping her daughter's chin and fussing over her, the woman's light fingers tremble. The adults mirror their daughter's tears, the man's skin a hearty caramel that's the spitting image of the little girl who reaches out her short arms and clasps at his shoulders.
Keeping the crowds at bay, Roger and the rest of the officers stem the tide of curious reporters and fans as he lands on the pavement with a *th-bump.*
"Wait, uh, Marie?" The gaggle turns towards him. Idiot; he's such an idiot, but there's no time to stop now that he's bounding towards them, his precious cargo outstretched. "I have something for you."
Her face brightens immediately, and he's going to have kids, when he's older of course, just so he can see that every day.
He will see that every day.
Why is it so important?
He only has time to ask the question; no hope of answering it.
The little girl coos at the sight of him, or, more precisely, what he's carrying.
No one would ever look so happy to see him.
Her eyes are a brilliant blue, filled with longing that he understands more than he'd ever wish to admit, and she cups her palms, not greedy or grasping, but in awe as she receives his gift.
"You didn't do anything wrong today-" Well, not quite. He laughs and rubs the back of his neck, ignoring the gurgling sound from his Lady because for this one moment, this little girl is more important even than her. "Other than trying to climb the store shelves. After everything that you've been through, you deserve this."
Turning to Ladybug because the gleam of sunshine off the girl's teeth is nearly painful to take in, it's so bright, he only just manages to suppress a whimpering snarl.
Maybe he was terribly mistaken in his efforts to repaint the Ladybug figures.
That ashen complexion and chalky skin, marred by a strangely incongruous flush splashed over her cheeks, is just about an exact replica of the paint-job that he had so painstakingly obliterated.
"Ladybug, are- is everything alright?" he asks, letting the girl pull the much beloved action figure to her chest so that she could give the little toy a hug, embracing it as her parents smother her in turn.
"Thank you, Kitty," the girl scream-coos loudly enough for him to turn from his Lady and pet the little girl on the head. Once again, she's more important than Ladybug; just for now.
Her eyes are shimmering with a different kind of tears. She's crying, and as the mother and father cradle her and dry the few droplets from her cheek, he doesn't know why that hurts so much and so good. "She's so pretty! It's even better than the one that I saw in the store!"
"Only the best for Ladybug's fans," Chat assures with a flourished bow, hamming it up so hard that he nearly face-plants.
Then, she's reaching out one chubby little hand, coaxing him forward on instinct so that her fingers curl into his hair and with all her childish might, his head is enveloped in a perfectly awkward and perfectly beautiful side-hug, made all the weirder by the parents who are looking down at him as if they're... proud of him.
Proud of what he's done for this little girl and even more proud – maybe it's wishful thinking – of him.
Just him.
God, what is wrong with him? They're random people off the street!
They part, the girl giggling when her arm falls from his cheek because he's twitching his cat ears, almost instinctively.
All those hours of work? The money that he had to invest in his painting supplies while braving the dangers of discovery by his father?
Giving away his gift to Ladybug?
1000% worth it. 10/10. Would gift again.
In a heartbeat.
"Chat?" Ladybug coughs to draw his attention.
"Yes, My Lady?" He's at her side. The pallor to her cheeks bespeaks some grievous error or terrible realization, a horror beyond anything that he can imagine, but it must be his fault. She seemed perfectly fine in every way, perfectly herself, before he returned.
"Where did you get that?" Her voice trembles, but her gaze is all steel as she clutches his shoulder and forces him to turn.
"I-well-"
"Where, Chat?" she insists, fingers bruising even through his padded shoulder armour.
The family is just standing there, seemingly lost just like him.
"I- I made it," he admits awkwardly.
His furiously palpitating heart drops right into his gut when her ashen face twitches, mouth flapping to expose teeth that range through grins, grimaces, curved expressions of shock and a dozen different contortions that he would have thought possible only of a melting wax dummy.
Not his Lady's finest moment as she jerks as if caught in a seizure and nearly trips into his arms while staring at his – his apparently hideously-painted action figure.
"It was... supposed to be a gift ... for you," he offers, taking a step forward because he needs her close – closer than she's ever been now that she's looking at him with such horror.
Despite the hissed intake of air through her clenched teeth, the mist is clearing from her brilliant sapphire eyes so that they focus, whipping between his mussy hair to his chin to his chest which he doesn't even have the wherewithal to puff up or flex, and finally to his eyes.
"Are you okay?"
And then a sound unlike any that he's ever even imagined.
A trilling mousy meep mingled with the searing whistle of a tea-kettle puffs from her mouth, alongside what just might be, in a cartoon, a gout of steam.
"You're fine and I'm fine because why wouldn't we both be fine but I have to go now because my planet needs me!"
He had been unaware of the fact that his Lady was an alien, but before he can pose even a single query regarding her potential extraterrestrial origins that seem like a suspiciously familiar and incoherent deflection, she's off, launching into the air with a toss and jerk of her yo-yo.
She's leaving him.
And she does.
Leaves him standing there in the middle of a Parisian crowd clustering around him.
What has he done?
What has he done wrong?