aged up Ladybug drawing from a few years ago. Last year I decided to bring her to life by finishing up the line art and color! While my art has grown I am still quite pleased with this!
title: memory/desire
summary: When Adrien is seventeen, Ladybug dies. Nearly six years later, Marinette Dupain-Cheng comes home to Paris. (ao3)
// previous
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february, 2017
She doesn’t see him die.
They’re separated by the building collapsing all around them, the path between them literally aflame. She thinks if they were near enough— if he’d still been alive —he would have made a pun—( you set my heart on fire milady)— but they aren’t, and he isn’t. He had been trapped on the other side of the fire with the akuma, and even though she’d tried, even though she’d used every bit of cunning and agility and strength she’d had, Marinette had failed.
She doesn’t see him die, but she feels it. She has seen it before—watched as he slipped through time, watched as he was skewered or pierced or thrown off of tall heights—but she has never felt it like this:
Something missing. Something gone. Something so intrinsic that she hadn’t even known she’d had it until confronted with the shape of its absence.
She’d heard the triumphant roar of the akuma one moment, and then the next (even though it’s impossible, because she’d been too far away) a sharp intake of breath and a blinding green light. Chat Noir, revealed in death.
Marinette calls for a Lucky Charm without thinking. And this is world’s worse than conjuring a record so your crush stops dancing with another girl. This is death. That is life. Ladybugs do not meddle in either.
So one moment, the green light, and then the next, the pink. Afterwards, she catches a glimpse of his eyes across the room, frantic with panic and love. And then the building whines and creaks and groans and she’s sinking underneath the flames.
april, 2023
“Hello.”
Adrien looks up from the display of flowers in front of him, expression owlish, body still angled to smell a heavy bloom.
“Adrien?” Marinette tries again; Adrien thinks back to all the times he’s flustered her in the past and wonders if this is karmic punishment.
“Marinette! Sorry, you caught me by surprise.”
Marinette smiles, “I can see that. Fancy meeting you here again.”
“Yeah, are you buying anything?”
They’re the only ones in the front room besides the surly old owner. The space is perpetually hot and humid, and Adrien is struck by the picture Marinette makes: her flushed cheeks, her dark hair, her blue eyes a shock of color in the middle of all that green.
“I was just looking. The weather’s been so gloomy lately that I thought some flowers might be nice. You?”
He takes a moment, wondering how he might answer, when the decision is made for him by the emergence of the old man’s wife from the back of the shop, a large bouquet of red snapdragons dripping ruby red over her arm.
“Monsieur Agreste, your usual is ready.”
“Snapdragons?” Marinette asks, her voice faint.
Adrien takes the flowers from the older woman, his answer absent minded as he carefully inspects the blooms, “Somebody very important told me once that they were her favorite.”
“What a coincidence, they’re mine, too.”
When Adrien finally glances up, Marinette’s half-smile is so sad that he asks without thinking, “Do you want to come with me?”
//
They end up in a park square a few streets away, sitting pressed shoulder to thigh on a small bench to ward against the cold.
There is the initial shifting and settling and crinkling of cellophane. Adrien looks at the obscenely large bouquet of flowers awkwardly laid across both of their laps, and thinks not for the first time that he’s an impulsive little fool.
“Very cozy,” Marinette says, breaking the silence. It’s nearly impossible to turn and look at each other unless they want to bump noses, but Adrien can still hear the smile in her tone. It automatically makes him want to smile in return.
“Yeah, only the best for my friends.”
Even though it’s stilted and (more than) a little lame, Marinette laughs.
“I don’t remember you offering to pick me up in that limo of yours on the way to school,” she teases.
“Yeah, I didn’t pick up on social cues until at least the end of lycée.”
Marinette snorts, but to Adrien even that’s a generous statement. He had not been kind the last year of lycée, either. He hadn’t been much of anything beyond the grief and rage.
“I’m making up for lost time now,” he says, and pulls a snapdragon from the bouquet.
He holds it out to Marinette with a little flourish, and there’s no reason why she would think this out of the ordinary, but Marinette’s eyes widen, her mouth a perfect “o” of surprise and her face suddenly stark white.
Before Adrien can panic, Marinette’s expression softens, and she takes the flower.
“I love it,” she says, still staring at the livid red of the petals. “Thank you.”
There’s a significance that Adrien is pretty sure he’s missing, but he lets it go, “Like I said, making up for lost time.”
//
They talk a little about what they’ve been up to: Adrien about university and his tentative plans to apply for a thèse, and Marinette about Shanghai and the small label she’d started in her junior year of university. They skirt around their terminale, and why Marinette had to move in the first place. They do not talk about Adrien’s father, or Paris’ heroes, or the dark time in between.
They talk long enough that they start walking again. After all, Adrien had flowers to deliver.
“Do you do this often?” Marinette asks, looking at the over-large bouquet in his arms. Already, the flowers had swatted three unsuspecting bystanders in the head as the duo shoved their way into the usual metro madness.
Adrien grimaces, trying to shield the blooms from the crush of people around them, “Enough.”
The train is too crowded to speak, but Marinette silently laughs every time Adrien mimes stabbing people taking up more than their fair share of space with his bouquet.
“We’re close!” Adrien says when they get off at the familiar stop, Marinette trailing behind him as he navigates the familiar route.
“Oh,” Marinette says when the statue of Ladybug comes into view, the bronze likeness garlanded with the usual flowers.
It’s a good likeness, but Adrien knows the artist would never have been able to capture everything that made his lady his lady —not the fond curve of her smile or the gleam in her eyes as she considered a particularly thorny problem.
Adrien has never brought anyone with him on his regular visits, but Marinette is different—Marinette had been there too. She stands back as he walks up to the memorial, carefully laying the snapdragons at its base.
I miss you; I hope I’ll see you again; I love you .
When he turns around, her expression is inscrutable.
//
Marinette is quiet afterwards, but Adrien’s reluctant to let her go. They walk aimlessly around the neighborhood, to-go cups of coffee in hand.
“I’m surprised you’re not mad.”
He takes a sip of coffee to give himself a moment to think. “I was mad—for a long time about a lot of different things, but never at Ladybug.”
“You should be,” Marinette says, so quietly that it’s almost a whisper. The flower he’d given her dangles limply from one hand, and she’s nearly shaking.
They come to a stop at an intersection. Adrien bites his lip, thinking again: Marinette had been there too. Of all of them, Marinette has the most cause to be angry, not Adrien. Not when it’d all been his fault in the first place.
“I’m thankful,” he finally says.
“Then you should have been giving those flowers to Chat Noir—or her.”
It takes every ounce of the self-control that he’d learned over the years for Adrien to not stiffen up. The light changes, and the crowd jostles them in their impatience to cross, but Adrien doesn’t think he can walk and come up with the right words at the same time.
“I am, I’m grateful to them both, but Ladybug…Ladybug most of all.”
He hears a sniffle, and whipping around to face Marinette is distraught to see the tears on her cheeks.
“Marinette—Marinette, I’m so—”
“No,” she steps away from his outreach hand, roughly wiping the tears from her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I think—I think I need to go.”
She’s so quick, turning and hurrying away in the direction that they’d come, and Adrien is left helplessly watching as she is swallowed by the distance.
february 2017
She is floating in a deep darkness; muffled, as if from a great distance, she hears him screaming for her.
She struggles to stay awake, to tell him that she’s sorry, that it’ll be okay—
Don’t fight it, Marinette. She feels the soft flutter of Tikki against her cheek; Marinette lets herself sink.
‘...Though the Spooktober month may have passed, some of us still got plenty of Halloween candy to finish...’
A belated Halloween squigglustration just in time for Spooktember featuring my favourite fox kwami, Trixx from the Miraculous K-SQUAD. Since I’m Trinidadian and Halloween isn’t really a national holiday or a big deal in my part of the world, that gives me the golden opportunity to celebrate it whenever I want, right?
So I’m continuing the spooky fun in November.
I am quite pleased with how this turned out. Very pleased. It is one of the rare occasions where you start off with a rough concept and the end product is exactly, or even better than you originally envisioned. Another personal best ♥
♦ Artsy Trivia:
As some of you who follow my ML squiggs might know, I sometimes like to cosplay the kwamis in costumes inspired by characters from other series.
Can you guess who Trixx dressed as for this year’s Halloween?
I’ll give you small hint. It’s not Renard Rouge but it is another fox-themed super hero from a popular magical girl series just like Miraculous.
Think you might have the answer? Take a guess and leave a comment if you think you know.
As always, I hope everyone enjoys this week’s newest squiggle art brought to you by the squiggle meister. Til my next awesometastic piece, staaay tune for more precious star kids! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧
♥ More Miraculous Art by Squiggles
