Work Text:
While Marinette had no small amount of experience curating her social media platforms and managing her online stores, particularly after the massive influx of followers and commission requests at exorbitant prices due to her promotion by Jagged Stone, Ladybug was a strictly business heroine.
Like a sensible young woman, she was firmly confined to the real world with its magical giant purple gorillas kidnapping smoking-hot, drool-worthy male models and witches on Harley Davidson brooms terrorizing major metropolitan centres.
What a time to be alive.
So, no need to pile onto that with e-drama.
No Instagram, twitter – thank goodness, because that place was a cesspool, and she wasn't about to buy a blue checkmark, Elon! – Facebook, or Myspace page, whatever her civilian alter ego was able to achieve by leveraging her media presence, making sales through etsy and insta as she took on only the most personally satisfying commissions that enabled her to finance more experimental projects of her own.
Rather, Chat Noir was their media representative, and more than adored it, delighting in the creation of a robust online presence. His twitter – no blue checkmark either, but he'd had the thing long enough that the fans knew that his identity was confirmed – veritably overflowed with cute cat videos, as insipid yet adorable accounts were pretty much all he followed other than the Ladyblog. Still, communication with other members of the platform was rather common, particularly in the form of banter between Chat Noir and celebrities ranging from Jagged Stone, to Clara Nightingale, to Adrien Agreste, whom the cat especially enjoyed tormenting with puns and weirdly flirtatious ribbing. Almost like Chat was fixated on the model (which, you know, fair – totally fair) though Marinette's clandestine, and then open, boyfriend never responded to the gags, puns, and innuendos fired in his direction. Not like he could if he even wanted to, though. His account, which did, indeed, sport a blue checkmark, was operated by a PR team.
Oddly enough, those little winky and Toothless lip-licking gifs from Chat were only ever directed at Adrien Agreste, which, again, was fair because even if the feline hero was straight, he could still totally have a crush on Adrien.
Surely, there wasn't a man alive who wouldn't go gay for him.
In Marinette's detached, impartial, and wholly objective opinion, at least.
Of course, that low-key flirtatiousness had shifted slightly into florid and excessive lauding of “Adrienette” when they came out to the public about their relationship. If it weren't for the occasional weird thirst-tweet that Adrien brushed off when she asked him about it, she'd have figured Chat Noir for the world's biggest Adrienette shipper.
As it stood, she had to think that he just wanted a threesome.
Maybe testing the waters to see if they were warm to poly.
Again, fair.
Most of Paris would want a piece of that Agreste-action.
Ladybug never took part in the online shenanigans, or Chat-nanigans.
Until the sleeplessness got to her.
Yep. She blamed the sleeplessness.
And the seven cups of coffee with espresso shots, various catastrophes provoked by Lila's mere existence and Chloe's quasi-racist bickering and heckling, and the stress associated with a test for which she hadn't studied in history class.
They were all against her.
And responsible for her poor life-choices.
They were rather artfully shot, really.
The photos resulting from her poor life-choices, that is.
Even the stress wouldn't have been enough if he hadn't insisted that the fans – which he quickly amended to 'the innocent civilians of Paris in need of emotional comfort' – could possibly benefit from some levity to help stave off akumatization.
Just a little bit of rooftop frolicking and ridiculousness in the form of two images and a short video clip.
In the first, Chat Noir had Ladybug hiked up on for a piggyback ride, her thighs in his hands, and her arms wrapped around his shoulders as they both threw peace signs. Staring at that wide-fanged grin and the creases of laughter that spread across 'Ladybug's' face, her eyes pinched up with mirth on that rooftop, the city behind them, Marinette had to bite her lip to suppress ... wayward thoughts.
Chat had very... powerful back muscles.
But, then again, so did Adrien.
Not like Chat could compare with that.
And from behind, with all that beef and blondness, he'd kind of looked like a tussled Adrien, so that was bound to provoke feelings of a certain kind that certain girls, when they reached a certain age, and found a certain special someone, could certainly feel without guilt or shame.
Unless you asked the man-o-sphere on Twitter, but that was just another reason she never used those platforms as Ladybug.
She couldn't get political.
It was beneath her.
In much the same way that a cockroach might be.
Or one of those guys under Ryuko's boot.
In the second image, she was seated on his knee like a little girl playing horsey with her daddy, although the way in which she was stretching out the aches in her shoulders, costume pulled taut over delicately feminine musculature and the compact curves of her bosom, the light catching her at just the right angle to cause the sliver webwork pattern woven into the mystic fabric to gleam and glitter, did conflict with that wholesome image.
More like... a Daddy and a baby girl.
Egh.
Not her kink.
Though the size difference kind of was since she was still... around five feet tall, and Chat – according to him, taking after his father – nearly seven.
Just because Adrien was also so massive that he looked like he could eat her alive and still have room for a Multimouse platter.
And, no, that wasn't her repressed vore kink at play.
All Adrien's fault.
Marinette was really good at divesting herself of responsibility for things.
When she wasn't taking responsibility for every thing.
Golden middle?
Never heard of her.
And, lastly, the video.
The one she was starting at as it played, looping, on her cell phone screen right now during their lunch break. Not that students weren't always on their cell phones, but today, everyone had clustered around the glowing screens, the din of the lunchroom almost completely silent. Even that weird guy one class over who didn't own a cell phone, never seemed to speak, and was a first row teacher's pet was huddling into a throng of other students to watch the thing play over and over again.
Slouching low onto the table, scattering her lunch as Alya and Nino both patted her back, Marinette nearly wept as her eyes rolled in circles, tracking the movement on screen.
Because this item, in addition to being “lastly,” was also “worstly.”
She'd had no idea what he was going to do with the thing, a video clip that displayed a four second loop of Chat Noir standing behind her and grinning at the camera. His hands, broad enough to encircle her entire waist, rested on her hips – she didn't shiver at the recollection of the pressure of his claws against her belly and the small of her back, just above the curve of her rump – hoisted her giggling into the air and began to -
(Warning: music)
You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round
Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
You spin me right 'round, baby, right 'round
Like a record, baby, right 'round, 'round, 'round
Aaaand someone in the cafeteria had their cell phone's sound on, subjecting them all to... this.
Probably Chloe.
Or maybe Lila, just because she wanted to boast about being the girl who inspired Pete Burns to write the song when she'd gone back in time after Ladybug entrusted her with the Rabbit Miraculous.
Bitch.
Although, at the moment, Marinette's feelings towards Lie-la were just about on the same level as those she had for Chat Noir.
And, yes, juxtaposed to that Cat-Bug spin was the mochi-spin gif.
This was also Chat Noir's fault, she affirmed to herself as chatter started up and then rose to an utter cacophony and the likes and comments on the Instagram post began to explode.
Bloody cat.
Said bloody cat was found later that evening on a rooftop that overlooked the Arc de Triomphe. Marinette's immediate inclination on swinging in for a landing was to lay into him immediately, only half serious as she, admittedly, catstrophized. Venting to someone openly, who would listen and bear the burden of your pain as his own, was a privilege. There were only so many people who could handle a regular, self-debasing spiral.
The once-molten salt came out in a bitter, choking cloud of coughs when she took in the sight of her partner.
Expectations based on prior experience had been that he'd await her with a grin, opening up his heart and letting the sunshine out as he rolled around on the rooftop, tearing up with laughter while reading off random comments. The flurry of tweets and the general media sensation surrounding any of his more successful antics always set him into giggling fits that caused the sculpted curves of his broad shoulders to nearly vibrate with suppressed guffaws.
Those shoulders were slumped.
Like those of a child bent over and huddling into himself. Shivering in a forgotten corner. The only warmth that he ever felt came from the few flames that hadn't been doused and snuffed.
“Hey, Kitty,” she began tentatively, spooling up her yo-yo and attaching it to her hip, her eyes never leaving the shaggy mop of blonde hair, his face turned away from hers. That was ... his right. He never had to talk to anyone, or say anything, if he chose not to, but something like a muscle spasm rocked her belly, as if she'd just been punched in the gut as she sat down on the ledge next to him, letting her legs dangle over the edge.
“Hello, Ladybug.”
Feigning interest in the distant staggered rows of billboards and tiled, gable roofs, she watched him in her peripheries, trying to get some sense of his emotional state. Normally, he wore his heart on his sleeve, but his features were implacably calm. A queer war of shadows played on his face. Two light sources from the ambient glow of Paris' skyline and the advertisements and illuminated landmarks washed out his features, while shadows stretched over the tops of his eyes, and above his chin and jaw from the radiance of his baton screen. The weapon was clutched in a loose grip, displaying his twitter account, shards of light scattering and breaking along his cheeks.
“Are you... alright?” she asked, setting a hand to his forearm and giving it a stroke with her fingertips. Even through two layers of fabric, she could discern the warmth of his skin. If he tried to flee, all she'd have to do is tighten her grip.
“Me?” A grin wobbled on his face and he turned to glance at her, not meeting her eyes. 'I'm always good.”
“Kitty,” she offered in warning and plea, trying to catch his furtive, shy gaze.
“I ... don't really know how to put it, honestly,” Chat said slowly, fiddling with his baton.
“If it's got you feeling like this, you should talk about it – work through it – but if you're not up for that, I'm always ready if and when you are.” Which was more important than silly memes and cat-videos and being spun right round, right round.
Laughter erupted from him, then, but not of any sort that she'd ever heard form him before – something hollow, or reflected, like a metallic echo. Without further explanation, he proffered her his baton.
The display depicted his twitter account, specifically the tweet that both contained a short version of the repetitive, looping video, the photographs, and a link to his Instagram.
And the tweets in response:
What?
Over eight-thousand likes.
Eight thousand.
What the heck?
That simply wasn't possible.
How was this child porn?!
"Literal" child porn?!
Scrolling through the series of responses to that tweet, and then reviewing the retweets, didn't afford her any comfort. Seemingly a thousand other posters were convinced of precisely the same thing, blathering on about “minor-coding” and exploitative images, and pandering to... left-wing groomers.
What the hell was with this “okay, groomer” thing anyways?!
That really didn't matter, though.
Resisting the feminine urge to chuck his baton off the roof, an action which would have forced her to bridal carry him home if they couldn't track the thing down – Though that did sound like a pretty appealing idea at the moment. – she slapped it down on the roof and then turned to her kitty. A crooked smile twisted up his lips and her heart all at once.
“That's -” What was she supposed to say? That's just the internet? Moral busybodies who got off on bullying people? Easy virtue, gained without sacrifice, without labour?
“I shouldn't have posted them, I know.” He scratched absently at his thigh, looking like two-hundred pounds of pure, concentrated human-feline awkwardness.
Not a sight you saw every day.
She was about to interject, correcting him, because joviality so easily gave way to something dark and furtive deep inside him – maybe not so deep, really – but he cut her off before she could marshal the reaction.
“I'm sorry for – for exploiting you that way,” he finished, threading his fingers together on his lap.
That stalled her out completely as she simply gaped at him, literally feeling her jaw flop. Not quite dropping or drooping, but falling slightly as her mouth contorted through several abortive half-responses, nothing more than a grumble erupting in place of words.
“I kind of pressured you into taking those photos.” His throat undulated as he swallowed like he was gulping down a spiny golf-ball. He just looked so sincerely apologetic, hands grinding together and legs quivering with nervous tension. “It- it was wrong of me to get you to ... put yourself out there when you didn't want to.”
“Chat,” she breathed, genuinely feeling touched by that sentiment, even as it, in equal measures, provoked fury. “If I had a real problem with it, or with you asking, I would have told you.”
His head shook, almost violently, and she couldn't discern whether he was afraid to look at her, or whether he was caught, gummed up, staring off at something she couldn't see in the distance.
“They all said-”
“To hell with that!” she nearly shrieked, giving him a bonk on the distant crown of his fluffy golden-haired head, just a rap with two knuckles.
If he didn't learn, it'd be his baton next.
“Ow,” he deadpanned, glaring at her without any heat while reaching up to rub at his head.
“That's the internet, Chat,” she insisted more gently, now, though her tone still dripped with venom. LadyNoir brand PR agent or not, the poor dumb cat wasn't fit for the internet; he was too gentle a soul. “This is exactly why they say such... disgusting things.”
“What do you mean?” His nose scrunched, all adorable, confused kitten, which was far, far better than beaten puppy.
“To try to get to you.”
The precious boy-in-a-man's body only appeared more befuddled, as if the thought simply couldn't slide into the cracks of his grey matter. Like she was trying to shove a floppy disk into a CD rom drive.
“Why?” he asked, blinking slowly, his sclera wide. “Why would anyone want to do that? I mean... they think that, don't they?”
“If they're idiots, yeah,” she admitted, sliding her finger under his chin to keep his gaze locked with hers. “But mostly it's because hurting other people means you have power over them. Power to control how they feel, and what they feel. When ... when you're weak and need affirmation and – and for people to notice you, hurting others is the easiest way to make you forget that.”
“That's... kind of sad.”
Leave it to her kitty to feel pity for these people.
“I guess that it is, but it's also hateful and wrong to – to gin up spite and – and anger and outrage just to make yourself feel or look like the better person when you're anything but,” she hissed through gritted teeth as she watched him process, faintly luminous eyes growing darker without losing their intensity. “It doesn't have anything to do with you, Kitty, but them.”
Like he was plucking up a little ladybug that had crawled onto his shirt, intent on depositing her safely back to an aphid-laden leaf, he captured her hand in his. His thumb traced over her knuckles, and the motion was soft – he was soft, even through the fabric of her costume.
“I - I still shouldn't have put any pressure on you to take those pictures,” he said in a quavering tone, expression so painfully earnest in nearly had her eyes misting. Only rarely was Chat genuinely serious, absent any play or affectation, and that's when he made her, well, not regret her life choices, but imagine that the road not taken would have been so easy to tread, without remorse, never looking back. ”It's never right for someone else to ... try to own your body, or – or put it on display.”
Man, if he talked like this to Adrien, he might just get that threesome he'd kind of been angling for on twitter.
Empathy for all those slivering shards of Adrien's fragile heart, crushed underfoot by his father time and again, made her boyfriend utterly weak.
And for someone who was so strong, endured so much without breaking completely, it was a treasure to be weak, and a privilege to be the one to see it.
It still was.
“You asked,” she said simply, provoking a watery grin when she used her free hand to boop his nose, but not push him away. “And I said yes.”
The smile turned sour before it disappeared, the boy nuzzling her palm, a few rapid breaths hot and moist, and then pulling back.
“Sometimes,” he began, and she realized that he was mulling, teasing something out of himself like stitches and sutures being unthreaded. “When people say yes, they... they don't mean yes. They just mean that they can't say no and they have to say something, so – so it's easier to think that they have a choice, rather than letting it be made for them.”
Her immediate impulse was to brush off the claim, to assure him that posing for some silly Instagram shots wasn't serious, that it hadn't affected her, but for whatever reason into which she couldn't pry, it was serious to him.
That was all that mattered.
“Chat, has ...” she paused to measure her words, because they felt all too heavy, the shape of them amorphous and threatening. Giving voice to malformed thought so often was. To reassure him, she reached out for his broad shoulder, relief flooding her and causing the knots in her belly to start to untie, when he leaned into her touch. “Has someone made you feel like you ... couldn't say no?”
“My... civilian father.” Even after the pause, he stumbled over the word.
“He's asked you to do things that made you ... uncomfortable?” Such a small word. Maybe all words were small when you were talking about big things – thing so large that they could subsume the entire universe and eclipse every one of those uncountable points of light.
“It's – the family business is really important to him, and sometimes he asks - makes-” he tossed his head, sending his hair flying into a even worse mess than its usual floppy tangle. “Yeah.”
What on earth did that man do for a “family business?” From the way that Chat was squeezing out his response like he was working over a tube of already-dried-out superglue, she almost didn't want to think about it.
“You know, Chat,” she began slowly, rubbing circles along his back, fingers catching on the nearly invisible strands of short blonde hair along the nape of his neck. “You have a right to be comfortable. And you have the right to tell your father no, if that's what you feel. Maybe – maybe he wouldn't listen, but – but you deserve to be able to say that what he asks of you is wrong, because if you feel that it is, it is.”
"Heh.” Tilting backwards, pulling free from her light clasp to splay out on the rooftop, eyes to the distant sky, he chortled. One hand curled behind his head, which he tried to resettle several times before, rather than finding a comfortable position, he just seemed to give up and settle.
“You know,” he began softly as she settled in next to him, propped up on her elbow while laying on her side so she could still have a good angle on his face, “my girlfriend says pretty much the same thing, sometimes.”
Maybe Ladybug should have been the one angling for a threesome with Chat's girlfriend. Had a good head on her shoulders, and darn good taste too.
“She sounds like she's pretty smart.” Ladybug eased an inch closer, setting a hand to his chest. If it had been anyone else, she'd have recoiled, or castigated herself for such an open display of intimacy, but while Adrien was still fire that heated her blood and ruddied her cheeks, Chat was the man who'd delve right into the flames with her, drown in them for her.
Something that children couldn't understand was that there were different, and no-less special, kinds of love in this world, and variations of intimacy just as intense as one another.
Chat got a faraway look in his eyes, reaching up to scratch, in almost a bashful gesture, at the edge of his mask. “The smartest person I've ever met.”
“Present company excepted, of course,” Ladybug teased before her heart took a one-way elevator ride on the defunct Tower of Terror right into her belly.
The answer was no, even if he didn't say it.
“I...” His smile became a rueful thing, nostalgic in the curve of his lips, the quirk of his jaw. Whether she was feeling nostalgia for some experience or sight that she couldn't quite dredge up from the depths of her memory, or experiencing it vicariously through him, it was impossible for her to tell.
“She's just brilliant,” he breathed like it was his first and his last word, the awe of novelty, the boundless possibility, and the end to all things in his world.
Damn.
Lucky girl.
Adrien would absolutely be a sucker for someone who could talk like that. Feel like that.
“A little bit caught up in her own head, sometimes,” Chat amended with a chuckle as he drifted further away from her, floating up, up and away into the clouds like the romantic dork he was. Enough to warm her heart, and leave her endlessly grateful for his at-times mercurial mood and for that faceless queen who managed to pull him out of that mire, even if she was half a city away. “And she can make assumptions a little too quickly – jump to conclusions without really putting herself in another person's shoes, but ... I think she might be even more – more -”
“Clever?” Ladybug supplied.
“Genius than you.”
“High praise indeed.” Ladybug mock-pouted, finding it hard to keep it in place considering the severity of his father's ... assholishness, which they'd just skipped over, and the unadulterated bliss that the smitten kitten was exuding. “Should I be worried about you replacing me?”
“Not possible,” he retorted with a cocked brow, reaching over to poke her in the ribs. That one, she let him have, just this once. “I wouldn't be able to get by without my Ladybug and my Everyday Ladybug.”
Oh.
Wait.
An asshole father who imposed on him in service of the demanding family business, leading to anxieties regarding bodily autonomy and physical exploitation, conveyed by a nearly seven-foot-tall green-eyed blond with an Everyday Ladybug girlfriend who got caught up in her head and jumped to conclusions about people like sensitive, sheltered friendless male models who wouldn't know the first thing about internet culture and its cruelties because they had PR firms handling their social media.
And impeccable back muscles.
That actually made more sense than Marinette would care to admit to herself.
Which she acknowledged after a bit of a psychotic break that involved her stalking around her room, screaming gibberish at Tikki and Alya in turns, and then composing an overly-meticulous plan, with itemized steps and myriad contingencies, to murder Gabriel Agreste and make it look like an accident.
For the first time, Adrien actually wrested control of his official twitter account from the Gabriel PR team long enough to point out the obvious in meticulous, and almost cruelly cool, yet scaldingly hot (because there might, in fact, be something to that domineering Daddy kink thing after all) detail.
Even if Ladybug and Chat Noir were in a relationship, and their personal lives were open to such rampant speculation from fans who, with all due respect, didn't know the heroes, there was nothing pedophilic about dating someone short.
It certainly didn't classify as “literal child porn” or pedophilia to post this kind of content featuring an adult woman. To claim otherwise just cheapened the genuine horrors of grooming and was frankly offensive to everyone affected by any form of sexual abuse.
The conversation devolved from there.
Suddenly, Chat Noir and Ladybug were playing second and third fiddle:
Fucking Agrete. Daddy probably went to Epstein's island.
Fuck, like, get her into your van with ice cream. Jeez.
Pedo af.
Yeah. His gf? Like two feet tall!
Totally minor-coding.
And Asian. You know they look really young.
Didn't he date only asians that other chinese girl kagome? Was short too.
OMG! Ur right!
Didn't he date them when they were like 14?
Damn! Pedo confirmed.
Only pedos would date asians. They're into that gross shit and all short.
Big-boobed five-year olds. Anime is just pedo-porn.
Pure degen. Never should have let that shit into our country.
Yeah!
Wait. We're still talking about anime, right?
Yeah. Anime. But a white rich dude dating only short teenage asians. Sus af!
Racist, even.
Totally racist, bro. Disgusting pedo.
It was at that juncture that Ladybug got a twitter account and a blue check-mark.
All to signal boost, and echo, the tweet that saved the world, courtesy of an Everyday Ladybug, Adrien Agreste's girlfriend, Marinette Dupain-Cheng:
