Submitted prompt:
Edited slightly
More kwami swaps because I love kwami swaps and always will. (fox!Marinette, snake!Alya, ladybug!Chloe, and Chloe and Adrien salt. Maybe Fu Salt? Idk, tag as you see fit)
Marinette, the literal Robin Hood
What if, instead of Marinette getting Tikki, she got Trixx? And not like through Master Fu or anything.
In this AU, more Miraculous were originally lost: the butterfly and peacock are still lost like in canon, but so are the fox, the bee, the snake, and the dragon.
One day, Marinette happens upon this cute little necklace with a fox tail in a shop. She decides to buy it and- HOLYCRAPWHATISTHATWEIRDSQUIRRELTHING?
Trixx basically debriefs her- what a Miraculous is, how to transform, etc. Since there is no threat (yet), Marinette just decides to keep the Miraculous and not transform. Trixx and Marinette live happily together. I headcanon Trixx’s favorite food to be spicy food, so Marinette loves making them spicy pastries.
One day, Marinette is struck with an idea. She could use the powers of the fox to steal from the rich and give to the poor (how this idea forms is up to you)! She makes sure Trixx is on board with this before, though. And luckily, they are! They don’t like Chloe OR Adrien after seeing one too many instances of Chloe reigning over the class, and Adrien discreetly forcing the class to bow to Chloe’s demands, guilt-tripping Marientte when she stands up for herself and her friends, making her feel like it’s her fault she’s being bullied.
So Marinette transforms, and over a span of like 4-7 months, she steals from the Agreste and Bourgeois manors, and she either makes anonymous donations to charities helping the homeless, or gives it to the poor families directly. It’s not like the rich will notice, right?
Eventually, they do- but Marinette doesn’t care. Helping increase the poor population’s quality of life is way better than succumbing to the wealthy’s demands. And slowly but surely, less and less people are becoming homeless.
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Cut to a year later, Hawkmoth rises. And Fu, unfortunately swayed by Chloe’s and Adrien’s performative acts of doing good (Chloe was trying to impress someone else entirely, and Adrien was helping), gives them the ladybug and black cat Miraculous respectively. So now there’s two rich heroes that are only in it for the fame.
Chloe uses the ladybug to push her persona as a “hero”, but she does the absolute bare minimum. Adrien uses the cat miraculous for the same purpose as canon, to goof off and have fun, and damn the consequences or collateral damage.
That’s when Marinette starts to emerge from the shadows, and does what the two blondes refuse to: be a competent hero. She doesn’t stop for interviews, and won’t even tell anyone her name. For the longest time, she’s known only as “the mysterious hero”, because most people can’t even get a good look at her. Eventually, the city settles on the name “Firefox”, because, well. It’s fitting, to say the least.
Marinette is an extremely clever girl. The rules say she can cast one illusion? Well it’s a good thing she’s able to come at the problem from a different angle. An illusion of a bird, for example, isn’t just one solidified object. Each feather is an illusion, the shadows it creates and the light that bounces off it is an illusion. All of these seemingly separate illusions are technically one illusion.
So there’s literally nothing stopping her from doing whatever she wants. All it takes is creativity. And she has more creativity in her pinkie than most people have in their whole body.
She always has one illusion cast over herself, and multiple she uses for combat.
The illusion she has over herself hides her in a wreath of raging fire that blocks all prying eyes, and her voice, on the rare occasion she needs to speak to anyone, is created through the crackling and popping of the flames themselves, without her ever opening her mouth, so there’s no chance of anyone recognizing her.
And of course, this is not even remotely the limit to her power. She’s more than capable of making herself entirely invisible, and creating independent clones, but she figured she has to keep some tricks up her sleeve for a rainy day. It’s not like the Akuma battles are particularly hard, now are they? Not when the two so-called ‘heroes’ distract themselves and keep each other out of her way.
At some point after Hawkmoth’s reign of terror begins, Alya finds the snake Miraculous and befriends Sass. She goes by Dyaman (simply Diamondback in Haitian Creole). By pure chance alone, she joins Marinette on her heists, after they accidentally broke into the same house at the same time. Second Chance proves useful when you’re about to be caught, and she has just as much hatred for the rich as Marinette does.
They become fast friends in both aspects of their lives, completely independently of their other relationship. Marinette and Alya are best friends, and Dyaman and Firefox quickly move past ‘partners in crime’ to best friends again.
If there’s ever an identity reveal between these two, it’ll come as a pleasant surprise, instead of a horrifying shock. (there’s no universe with logic where canon Marinette finds out Adrien is Chat Noir and is happy about it.)
Pretty quickly, Paris starts to prefer the best friend duo of Firefox and Dyaman over the generic and compassionless blondes Harmony and Chat Noir. No one even suspects the two “upstanding heroes” are the thieves that have been clearing out the homes of the rich.
Well. Many of the poorer residents of Paris suspect, and some even know for a fact. But they’re not going to snitch.
When do Harmony and Chat Noir lose their miraculous? You decide! Is it a slow downfall, or do they get their miraculous taken from them almost immediately, and who takes them? Does Fu get his act together and confiscate them? Does an Akuma defeat them? Does someone else entirely take matters into their own hands?
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