I have too much fic already on my plate so this is not turning into an actual fanfic, but given what’s happening in the fandom thanks to early releases, I thought those relying on the ML Distractathon tag might appreciate this as a distraction.
- Some kind of amulet arrives in Paris, which happens to host the Djinn kwami. Thanks to it’s nature, the Djinn only appears every 100 years, grants 3 wishes, and then is sealed away again. Chat Noir wonders if the Djinn’s wish could solve their Hawkmoth problem, but Fu tells him that the wishes are always cursed in some way, so it’s vital to grab ‘Genie’ and bring him to Fu before anyone makes a wish. It could have ramifications that even Hawkmoth doesn’t want.
- Hawkmoth of course, doesn’t care. When he realises that the Djinn Kwami is active, he’s heading straight for it. Knowing that he’s facing Ladybug and Chat Noir and possibly the Guardian, he also brings Mayura, and uses an Akuma on Lila as extra muscle.
- However, when Lila learns that they’re hunting a GENIE KWAMI, she double crosses Hawkmoth and grabs it for herself. Before anyone can stop her, she’s transforming, and making her first wish. She doesn’t have a lot of time to plan, because Hawkmoth, Mayura and the heroes are all lunging for her, so she thinks fast. What she wants more than anything is admiration, and Adrian’s attention. So…
“I wish I was Ladybug!”
- She gets a moment to enjoy the look of absolute horror on Ladybug’s face, before everything goes dark, and she wakes up in her room – wearing a new pair of earrings and a rather sour looking red Kwami asking her what’s wrong.
- She’s suddenly hit with altered memories – her mother came to France several months earlier, and when she was walking to school, there was an incident.
- (Fu was looking for a new ladybug, tried to test Lila, ‘accidentally’ got pushed into traffic, and loses the Ladybug kwami box. By the time he’s gotten out of hospital, he has no clue where the box is or who has it).
- Lila brushes off Tikki, who goes to sleep, and then she pulls out ‘Genie,’ who explains that he had to rewrite time in order to allow Lila to be in a position to get the earrings. She’s a little insulted that she could only get them through an ‘accident’ rather than being worthy, but she can live with it.
- She spends a good hour that night just looking through her calender. ‘Ladybug’ has dozens of media appearances and modelling set up, and she absolutely can’t wait.
- In fact, she decides to improve everything by adding a second wish. While she’s doing a good job on her own, she always preferred the easy way out, and wishes that ‘Marinette Dupain-Cheng didn’t have a single friend at Dupont.’
- The next day, she heads to school with a spring in her step. While she knows nobody can know she IS Ladybug, she can’t wait to bask in everyone’s admiration, while that little goody-two-shoes enjoys being unloved and unwanted. However, when she gets to school, while everyone smiles and greets her, they seem rather withdrawn and not all that excited. She’s sitting next to Alya, who greets her fairly apathetically. When she asks about Marinette, she gets a blank stare.
- New memories hit. Turns out, Marinette doesn’t go to this school – she’s never gone to school with anyone here. This means that Chloe never had her favourite target, and went after everyone else. When Lila arrived, people flocked to her and her connections, but when she could never follow through, people dropped her pretty quickly and treat her like Chloe.
- It gets worse when she asks about the Ladyblog. She ‘remembers’ that Alya more or less gave it up very early on. The biggest blog around these days is the ‘Chatcall’ run by someone else entirely.
- Apparently, Lila’s love of the spotlight and general bad nature has soured Ladybug’s popularity. Chat Noir is by the far the more popular of the two heroes.
- Her great morning has suddenly become a nightmare, and while she’s seething, she asks Nino when Adrian is going to get here. He’s still got to be into superheroes, surely.
- Nino however, just stares at her and asks ‘Who?’
---
- Meanwhile, Marinette wakes up in the morning, remembering exactly what happened, and is horrified to find both Tikki and the earrings are missing. But more strangely, her room is altered. The walls have photos of people she’s never met on them, along with several of Adrian – but not professional photos, photos of the two of them. There’s also a lot of random outfits midway through design that she barely remembers.
- Then, her parents come up to her room, and tell her she’s going to be late to school if she doesn’t hurry. School in this case, being an extremely exclusive private school she’d only ever dreamed of attending.
Then the memories hit. Her parents, after Chloe first bullied Marinette, decided to try her at a different primary, and without the constant bullying, she blossomed. She continually entered competitions regarding craftsmanship, and was eventually invited to apply for a scholarship at the private school. She continued to excel, befriending the Quantic kids and beginning her own MDC line.
- That’s quite a bit to take in, but it’s nothing compared to when she actually gets to school and finds Adrian waiting for her at the door. He greets her, calls her his girlfriend, and kisses her on the cheek.
– She immediately passes out.
- When she wakes up, she’s at the nurses office, and remembers – she met Adrian and Gabriel at a fashion shoot. She didn’t quite have a crush on Adrian at the time, but he was elated to meet another person his age – and she talked to him about her school...and somehow convinces Gabriel that letting Adrian attend such a prestigious school – used to handling high profile famous students – would be perfectly safe. Since they’d allow Adrian’s bodyguard on the grounds, have an almost legendary rep, and he does kind of want to lure Marinette-AKA-MDC over to Agreste and he’s not above using his son to do it, he allows Adrian to apply, thus removing Adrian’s need to use Chloe and go over his father’s head. As he and Marinette spend a lot of time together, they both fall for each other, and started dating before the whole Hawkmoth/Ladybug battle began.
- She barely makes it through school, and is very conflicted when she gets home. Especially since there’s an Akuma attack that day, and it’s very clear ‘Ladybug’ is nowhere near up to the task. Chat Noir’s definitely having to pick up a lot more slack that he usually does, but they do still beat him.
- That night, she’s visited by the Djinn kwami, (who waited until Lila was asleep) comes to visit and explain what happened. The nature of the kwami means he has to grant ‘cursed’ wishes, even when he doesn’t want to. So to get around that, he tries to find loopholes – in cases where a wish will cause someone who doesn’t deserve it misfortune, he tries to counter it by improving their life. Lila wanted to be Ladybug, but there was almost no reality in which that could happen as long as Marinette went to Dupont...so he fixed things so that Marinette never did. This happens to be the ‘best’ future Marinette could possibly have in which she didn’t attend.
- Marinette is genuinely surprised he’d go to this much trouble. He surely didn’t have to give her the best life possible, but Genie admits there’s a more malicious additional reason. Lila wanted Ladybug to hurt. She wanted Ladybug to remember what she’d lost. However, Ladybug might then try to undo the wish, and it’s the Djinn’s duty to fulfil his master’s wishes – so he had to make sure Ladybug wouldn’t WANT to undo the wish.
- And so, Marinette finds herself torn. On the one hand, she has an amazing life, with fantastically loyal friends and Adrian at her side. On the other, she no longer has Tikki, and Lila is struggling as Ladybug. Does she try and steal Tikki back and risk Lila using the third wish? Or does she try and steal the Djinn’s token and reset the world back to what it was?
- Meanwhile, Lila tries to figure out what the perfect third wish would be given how badly things have gone so far.
- (Oh, and Adrian is still Chat Noir. While he was being driven to school, he spotted Fu struggling on the pavement after one of the other Dupont students ‘failed’ to help him, and stopped the car to aid the older man. He was late for school making sure Fu got to his destination, and Fu decreed him worthy. Of course, he’s already head over heels for Marinette, and really can’t stand Ladybug. Chatcall is run by Felix).
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
It's probably not an accident, this time.
Alya thought things would be easier, now, but her friends are stubborn and Hawkmoth is a jerk and this isn't what she meant by game night. This isn't what anyone meant by game night.
At least if she plays her cards right she'll have a cool sword for a while.
