Lilanette Week Day 1 Prompt: Trapped Together (quite literally)
Marinette helps Lila fix her jacket. They get to talking while she sewing and, too involved in the conversation to focus on her needle, Marinette stitches the two of them together.
Maybe Marinette is inviting Lila out after she’s exposed as as liar and the backlash hits hard. Maybe Lila’s heart flutters in the chest (the first it has in a long while) at this clumsy girl with two left feet but quick clever hands and stars in her eyes. She’ll accept the invite, hiding a smile (but never her reddening cheeks) at Marinette’s antics. Perhaps Lila learns to charm the world with her quick wit and sharp smile instead of extravagant stories and flashy adventures. Lila will learn value of creating and living her own stories where she doesn’t need an endless cast of celebrities to make it worth hearing.
Or perhaps Lila is never exposed but she learns to play the field more cautiously. Marinette and Adrien never say a word. Adrien because for all his reckless preening and prancing as Chat Noir, he is a boy who thinks twice before he speaks. And when he looks at Lila Rossi, he sees a girl who is all too much like Chloe and he softens. Lila’s lies are not his to expose and especially not when he considers how they might reflect on Ladybug. Marinette can not hold back the bitter tang of regret when she looks at Lila. She doesn’t know this girl and she created the tiniest of rifts in her heart for Hawkmoth to squirm into. Her classmates who have been akumatized said it felt like they were sinking into a bog of sickening sweet syrup. Their limbs were heavy, their eyes fogged, but every one of their senses alive and thrumming with anger. There was a giddy, nauseous joy in seeing the city burn and hearing screams in their wake. Marinette doesn’t know if Lila felt the same but she knows that if she did, and if she lies awake at night reliving those feelings, she, Ladybug, Marinette, is the reason behind it. So Marinette tries to pry own Lila’s wall of lies. Bit by bit, she chips away at their foundation, and finds that she and Lila are more alike than she thought.
Lila weaves a complicated pattern of half-truths, lies and honesty, so thickly meshed into one another that it’s hard to pick out what is and isn’t real. But this is how she grew up, watching her parents’ pretty lies and fake smiles, and Lila learns that this is how the world is. She moves from one country to another, an endless parade of changing schools, changing faces, and soon there’s no point in trying to make a real connection when no one is there long enough to listen. Lila is used to people tripping their feet for a taste of her stories and is she really to blame if others are gullible? When she lies, it’s always what people want to hear and she’s learned long ago that few care for the humdrum mundance reality of truth when a well-crafted lie can provide so much more fuel for the imagination. Try as she might, Lila can’t see why that might be a problem.
Marinette likes to think she’s never lied before and maybe she’s right by some standards. She’s never spent hours and hours crafting together a perfect lie, a story that has just enough truth behind it that no one can fully expose it as a falsehood. Neither has she ever tried to decimate someone’s hard work and reputation because they stumbled into her path to success. Marinette’s lies are clumsy things and she thinks that perhaps, just perhaps, if she had Lila’s polished smooth smile and quick flowing way with words, or Chloe’s arrogant confidence and vicious streak, she might also lie. But she has neither and it’s a thought she isn’t entirely comfortable to linger on. If Marinette is entirely honest with herself, she needs to admit her hatred of liars comes from a place where her truth, the part that is truly amazing and miraculous, isn’t something she can expose, and when she can’t, Marinette Dupain-Cheng, the baker’s daughter, isn’t something that belongs to the same rank as those dazzling golden lies.
It takes time. It takes days, weeks, maybe even months for Lila to let her guard down for this strange girl who reaches for her with friendly hands and a guileless smile, but eyes that are incomprehensibly guarded and wary. When Marinette finally admits why in an attempt to come clean (and maybe in a desperate bid for Lila to open up to her), Lila smiles and teaches Marinette to hold a better poker face.
They are not friends, not really, not yet.
Lila needs to learn the value of the truth, not just as a foundation to build lies upon, but as something with inherent value in and of itself. Marinette needs to pull back the reins on her immediate dislike of anything posing as something other than itself. They both need to grow and understand what they’re worth without a mask.
At the end though, Lila will know who Ladybug is sooner or later and it’ll be a rough ride.
In one world, Lila doesn’t need Marinette. She has lived a life of lies with only herself for support and there would have been many more years before she eventually collapsed on that solitary path. But in this life, she has Marinette, and with Marinette came others. The road to friendship (and maybe more) is a slow grueling experience but the day Ladybug stands before her and off comes the mask to expose Marinette, Lila exhales slow and hard through her nose before pinching her friend’s cheeks so hard that tears leap to the superhero’s eyes.
“That’s for ruining my chances with a cute boy and turning me into an akuma,” Lila says, a grin belying her stern tone. “Now we’re even.”
Marinette hugs her so hard Lila swears her ribs groaned upon the pressure.
In another world, Marinette can never find the right time to tell Lila her truth and Lila worries, and frets, and grows suspicious. When Marinette finally works up the courage to take off the mask, Lila shatters.
On this route, Lila is taken for a villain and Marinette is a lifesaver she clings desperately onto. Here Marinette is a saviour and Lila loves her for being able to see past the lies she told, for being able to know what she did and still be the first to come up to her with open arms and an extension of friendship that blossoms into more.
Marinette wants Lila to understand. She wants her to know that none of what she did was a lie (but she can’t fully convince herself it came from a genuine place either).
“Was it fun for you? Playing me for a fool?”
Lila storms away and Marinette isn’t sure if she should follow or not (she does anyway). Whenever an akuma attacks, Ladybug’s first item of business is to find Lila and whisk her away to the safest location. The top of the Rossi’s apartment is often decorated with a superhero, dangling her legs off the edge of their roof, casting frequent glances at the sliver of light gleaming through tightly shut curtains. Marinette has apologized for many things in her life but she’s never had to apologize for breaking, then mending, then breaking someone again. She isn’t sure she knows how.
It isn’t an easy road to recovery. Lila maintains a chilly contact with Marinette, for the sake of keeping the peace if nothing else. Marinette waits and watches and lets her heart break when she hears Lila muffled sobs through her apartment window.
When Lila cracks, it’s after months of frosty silence and hearing the softest thump of feet landing on her roof. It happens after she is whisked away, stiff and uncompromising, in arms that seem to be trying their best to be both secure yet politely distanced. The changes are small but to the peope who matter, they’re significant. A pair of curtains, cracked open, and muttered thanks when she’s being carefully set on her feet to safety during an attack. On cold and rainy days, there is a window open for her to enter, though there isn’t any conversation (that will take time). When Lila flinches during a thunderstorm and Ladybug reaches cautiously over to brush a hand over hers, Lila doesn’t move away and they both think that it’ll be okay.
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