#hi sorry i've been dead but been sucked back in the fandom after my rewatch ahaha help!

[e-milieeee]

a good sort of awful—ladynoir

Summary: Ladybug makes Chat Noir do post-akuma-reflection-worksheets. Needless to say, he hates them. 

Especially on days when he's sacrificed himself and been out of commission the whole fight.

Notes: I’ve been literally dead for a year but this was my piece for @theladynoirzine​! Reblogs are very much appreciated :) 

Read on AO3!

Ladybug hopes Chat Noir’s fashion statement today won’t catch on like his last one did.

He’s wearing a combination of bad, worse, and terrible. Everything—from the fuzzy, striped socks that are pulled up nearly to his knees and the crocs over them—screams a complete disaster. It’s not his most disgraceful one yet, but the most unacceptable part is how he’d paired it with the scarf she’d knit. Ladybug’s heart aches every time she sees it; her perfectly acceptable scarf is now a fashion catastrophe on display for all to see.

“Why do you feel the need to do this?” she asks him again as he settles down with his drink from the seat across from her. “It’s…” Blinding. That’s the nicest way to put it.

“Superb?” Chat fills in. “Yeah, I know.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

A group of girls pass them, sneaking peeks and giggling. Chat flashes them a charming smile, then winks at Ladybug. “They’re already mooning over me.”

“I’m pretty sure they were laughing at your outfit,” she deadpans back.

He rolls his eyes at her good naturedly. His hands are wrapped tentatively around his cup of hot chocolate (complete with whipped cream and marshmallows) as he leans over the table to peek into her bag, which Ladybug is rifling through. She’d been in too much of a hurry to sort it out properly, so when she pulls out the pieces of paper, they’re crumpled and folded.

Chat Noir groans. “Let’s just get this over with.”

Ladybug slaps his sheet down in front of him. “If you don’t do them well, I have the full rights to make you redo them.”

He lets out a pathetic little sniffle which she promptly ignores. Instead, taking a sip of her coffee, Ladybug turns her attention to her own paper.

“Ladybug,” he whines after ten seconds.

She does not look up at him.

“Laaadybug.” As if to make his point, he drags his pencil across the table to make an awful grating noise.

“No.”

“How can you say ‘no’ when you don’t even know what I’m going to say? Anyway, can we please not do these today? We can chat about something else. How about the weather? The weather’s nice, right? It’s perfect weather for—”

“Chat,” Ladybug says slowly, masterfully ignoring the way his ears droop and he stares at her with dangerously convincing eyes. “You’re not going to get out of this one no matter how much you ask. Just do the worksheet.”

He makes an awful noise in the back of the throat that had her convinced he was dying the first time she’d heard it. Now, Ladybug has grown immune to his theatrics, because she tunes him out and returns her attention to her own worksheet. For a little while, they slip into companionable silence. Everything but the scratch of the pencil across the page is white noise: cars drone by, a summer breeze whistles, idle chatter threads through the air like music.

Chat finishes at the same time she scribbles down her last sentence. He slaps his pencil down. “Done,” he announces proudly.

Ladybug fixes her toque a bit before opening her sliding her paper over to him, an action he mimics, and they exchange worksheets. The one thing about Chat Noir that always throws her off is how neat his writing is—his letters are ridiculously consistent, almost as if it’s taken right out of a typewriter. Even now, four months of worksheets later, Ladybug finds it hard to match that handwriting to Chat Noir.

“The date is April 18th, not April 15th,” Chat tells her. “Uh… are you okay? You’re three days off.”

Ladybug winces and downs another mouthful of coffee. She’s slept a grand total of eight hours in the last three days—between studying, designing and akuma attacks, there really isn’t much time to rest—and the exhaustion has become something she’s learned to live with, but apparently not function with. Even black coffee has its limits, sadly.

“Just change the date,” she instructs Chat with a groan. “Let’s see…”

The first question of the worksheet is a straightforward one: rate the difficulty of the akuma. On the line, Chat Noir had written a 2/10.

“Chat…” She looks up from her paper to see him sipping his hot chocolate, suspiciously in a way that avoids her gaze. When he sets it down, a mustache of whipped cream settles on his top lip. “That akuma was not a two out of ten in terms of difficulty.”

“Well, I was frozen in a chunk of ice for the whole battle, so it really wasn’t that difficult for me.”

That’s a flawed point, but somehow irrefutable. Ladybug scowls. The next couple of questions all address technicalities, so she skims over them until she arrives at Chat’s least favourite section: the long answer part of the worksheet. (Although their answers are never really long.)

What did you do well today?

He’s written two words: saved Ladybug.

Across the table, Chat Noir has gone silent. Ladybug’s sure she can feel him watching her in her periphery, but she doesn’t dare look up to check. Instead, she forces herself to move to the next question: What did you do wrong today?

Couldn’t help Ladybug in the end because I was turned into a cat-sicle.

It holds his typical tone of humour, but when she raises her head, the smile he gives is more self-deprecating than anything else. For a moment, they do just that: stare at each other as the gap of silence grows wider and wider between them. Heavy behind the green eyes are guilt, and slowly, Ladybug sets down his worksheet.

“Hey,” she says when she finally finds her voice, “are you okay?”

“Yeah.”

“Chat…”

He seals his lips tightly, a habit of his every time they venture into territory he doesn’t want to talk about.

“Chat.”

“Ladybug.”

“Chat.”

“Lady—fine, what?”

Ladybug sighs. “The point of these worksheets are to reflect, chaton,” she tries, but the guarded, guilty expression remains up. “But it’s not just to reflect. If something happened, you can talk to me about it, you know? That’s also why we do this.”

For a moment, it looks very much like he’s going to shut her out again. It’s not an uncommon occurrence: Chat Noir can wax lyrical about her for hours, it seems, but his own fears and worries remain heavily locked.

But then he lets out a deep exhale. “If you tell me why you wrote ‘should’ve been more careful so Chat didn’t have to get blasted—’” he holds up the sheet to show her, “—then I’ll talk about it.”

Ladybug blinks. “Wha—sure?”

“You don’t really talk about it either, Ladybug.” Another sip of the hot chocolate, but this time, his hands are trembling when he lifts it up to his lips. “You lecture me about sacrificing yourself, but you put yourself into that position to begin with sometimes just as recklessly, and it’s like you expect me to just… stand by when you do something like that.”

“When I do something like what?” she shoots back, immediately defensive. Being a superhero comes with risks, and Ladybug is dead certain that Chat Noir takes much more than she does.

“You expect yourself to be the one who… shoulders the brunt of it.” The words are thick like wading through quicksand, like it takes effort to simply force them out, and Chat averts his gaze from her to stare at the table. He clears his throat. “I know you feel like you have to deal with all of this alone sometimes, Ladybug, but you don’t. I know for a fact that you try to take the most dangerous parts for yourself and that you’d be willing to throw yourself head first into danger if it means protecting others—because yes, that’s what we do. And I know you’re smart enough to have a solution and you’ve gotten yourself out of near-scrapes with quick thinking, but what if you can’t, because you’re not being careful enough? What if that happens?”

Ladybug’s own mouth is dry now, too, because she can’t think of the words to say when Chat Noir isn’t exactly wrong. Still, she tries, “Then what about you?”

“What about me?” he asks back immediately, and Ladybug thinks that she can’t remember the last time she’s seen Chat Noir so upset. “I save you each time because I know you can save me, m’lady, but I don’t trust myself to be able to save you if the position were to be reversed.”

The confession falls into silence. The droning of cars and the breeze and then chatter of passersbys no longer remains white noise but turns into an incessant buzz as they sit across from each other with worksheets abandoned and everything lay bare between them. Ladybug realizes a little too late that it’s impossible to ask him to lay his cards on the table without doing the same.

Chat Noir finally looks up at her and holds her gaze. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, firmer. His hands are no longer shaking but laid flat against the glass of the table. “I’m sorry to worry you each time, but I can’t… I’ll never stand by and watch you get hurt, no matter what.”

As much as Ladybug wants to remain on the defensive, she knows she can’t—because she gets it. She really does; she knows the terror firsthand of seeing someone she cares about hurt (and frightened and in danger and a breath away from being harmed—) and she understands perfectly well why Chat Noir has thrown himself in front of her so many times for her because she’d do the same—she does the same, in her own way. But one’s own fear is always easier to entertain than others’, and while Ladybug knows, she still struggles to fight down a wave of irrational frustration that she herself deserves as much as he does.

But Chat Noir is right, and Ladybug’s aware of that even running on two hours of sleep, four cups of coffee, and a lifeline of stress. “I’m sorry, as well,” she admits quietly, and his eyes widen at the apology. “It’s just… I know being Ladybug comes with its risks, but it’s so different when I’m the one in danger compared to when someone I care about is. And I know you’re my partner and that means that what we do we do together, but it’s still hard seeing you hurt, you know?”

He lets out a shaky exhale which turns into an equally trembling laugh. “Yeah, I know. Pretty well.”

For a moment, there is silence. Not the sort from before; this one is companionable enough for Ladybug to sink into its reprieve and enjoy the wordless mutual agreement they’ve come to. Chat Noir extends his hand across the table and offers an additional olive branch, which Ladybug takes and gives a gentle squeeze.

“We can both try,” he says. “Watch each other’s backs instead of… well, blindly throwing ourselves out there?”

“Only you do that,” she can’t help but shoot back.

His mood once again bright, Chat’s lips lift into a grin and he leans back on his chair. “We have come quite a long way, though,” he muses. “I mean, look at us now.” He lifts a leg, and Ladybug wrinkles her nose at the crocs. “We could barely fight together without getting in each others’ way in the beginning, and now even our clothes match!”

Ladybug practically spits out her coffee. “Say that again, I dare you.”

“My fashion is better than yours?”

“I should’ve left you frozen,” she groans.

He shoots her a cheeky grin. “You love me too much for that. Anyway, are we done? I want to order a slice of cake from the bakery cafe too.”

She rolls her eyes and writes a B minus on his worksheet before handing it back. “You didn’t get a C because your writing is nice,” Ladybug informs him with a sniff. “Here, a sticker.”

She pokes it into his cheek instead of the paper, and Chat lets out a laugh. “Goes with my outfit perfectly,” he decides with a wink. “I’ll be back out in a sec.”

Ladybug watches as he disappears through the door, wincing at the way the sun glances off a particularly shiny part of the get-up. It’s awful. So awful.

But it’s a sort of awful that she's grown to love. Ladybug drums her fingers against her cup and feels the warmth seep through even her gloves. There’s a long road ahead of them, with much more fear and chaos and ruin waiting for them outside coffee shops and sunny days and reflection worksheets—but that’s fine because she won’t have to face it alone.

#miraculous ladybug #ladybug #chat noir #marinette dupain cheng #adrien agreste #ladynoir #mlb #my writing #hi sorry i've been dead but been sucked back in the fandom after my rewatch ahaha help!