Ladybug and Chat Noir defeated Hawkmoth and revealed him as Gabriel Agreste, but at a cost—all the kwamis had to perform a ritual, sacrificing a great deal of power and going into extended hibernation to recharge.
Now, years later, Marinette returns home to discover that Adrien Agreste, son of Hawkmoth and number one suspect for holder of the Peacock Miraculous, is working at her parents' bakery. Sure he seems nice, but Marinette will not be fooled!
A Miraculous Ladybug AU by buggachat
. In addition to being a Flash Forward Fic, in this AU Adrien never went to public school, the heroes never saw Mayura, and Ladybug and Chat Noir never told anyone else about the Peacock Miraculous. Because of this, Marinette greatly distrusts Adrien, while her friends don't understand why.
Can be found here.
This comic provides examples of:
- Anger Born of Worry: At the gala, Marinette has to face Alya and Nino, who were freaked out over the warning letter she wrote in her Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy when she suspceted Adrien was going to poison the gala. The fact that the letter said that she might be dead and mentions poison causes the two to demand if anyone was hurting her or how is still fine to cater the event.
- Bad Liar: When Marinette tells her mom she and Adrien are practically best friends, it sounded so unconvincing Sabine tells her "never become an actor".
- Bait-and-Switch: Marinette panics when Chloe, Ladybug's biggest fan, sees the son of Hawkmoth. Of course, she doesn't know they were already friends.Chloe: Adrikins!
- Beneath Notice: Nathalie ended up being this to both Ladybug and the public. When Marinette begins casting around for suspects besides Adrien who might've been Mayura, the only one she seriously considers is Gabriel's sister-in-law (who was quickly discarded due to not living in France.) After all, logically it's unlikely that a mere employee or business partner would be willing to commit domestic terrorism for the sake of Gabriel Agreste. Unaware of Nathalie's motivations, Marinette concludes that Adrien is the only possible suspect, and scolds herself for grasping at straws to avoid that fact.
- Brought Down to Normal: All the Miraculous stopped working after the final battle with Hawkmoth. Which makes it very difficult for the old heroes to reconnect.
- Conflicting Loyalty: Adrien eventually admits to Marinette he figured out his father was Hawkmoth about one week before the latter's downfall. She understands why he didn't tell her as soon as he found out.
- Contrived Coincidence: Adrien gets a job at the bakery without knowing Ladybug lives there.
- Deus Exit Machina: The premise of this story requires that Ladybug and Chat Noir can't find each other. Tikki knows Chat Noir's identity, and Plagg knows Ladybug's, so either of them could have put the heroes back in contact in five minutes if they'd been available — but all the kwamis went into hibernation shortly after the defeat of Hawkmoth.
- Didn't Think This Through: Due to her Exhaustion-Induced Idiocy, Marinette eventually decides that the best way to disrupt Adrien's Evil Plan is to destroy all the presumably poisoned goods Adrien had spent days working overtime to bake- then confront him about being Mayura. She fails to consider a few aspects of this plan- for instance, it's a bit too severe to follow with her original plan to privately ask for the Peacock brooch back, but if she wanted to get the authorities involved instead, she'd basically be destroying the evidence. In addition. regardless of how the situation panned out, Tom and Sabine's bakery would take a big hit to its reputation if they didn't have the huge Hero's Day order ready to go the next day.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Ladybug thinks that Chat Noir might be the bearer of the Peacock Miraculous.
- Marinette wonders if she'd recognize Chat Noir if they met, not even suspecting that Adrien, who's just been introduced to her, is Chat Noir.
- Of a more heartwarming variety: Alya and Nino help comfort Adrien over the friends he lost contact with. Everyone is unaware that they were in fact those friends.
- Marinette does start to consider other suspects who might've been Mayura after she grasps how sweet and lonely Adrien is, but is goes nowhere because Gabriel was infamously antisocial and a cruel boss, so she can't think of anyone with personal loyalty to him outside of his son.
- Unaware that Adrien is Chat Noir, the Dupain-Chengs keep him out of the task of baking goodies themed after him and Ladybug out of fear Adrien resents the heroes for imprisoning his father.
- After finding thousands of pictures of Ladybug on Adrien's phone, she becomes convinced that he's searching for her out of revenge. He is searching for her... but not for revenge.
- When Adrien is alone in Marinette's room for a few minutes with her diary (where she openly talks about being Ladybug), she thinks he's figured out her identity and will be coming after her soon. He hasn't, and he won't be.
- Easily Forgiven: Marinette very much wants to Invoke this after getting to know Adrien better. Marinette remained convinced that Adrien had to have been Mayura, but as she got to know him better, she realized that he was also a sweet and dorky guy with a love of bad puns. Thus, while workshopping a plan for how to proceed, Marinette hoped that Adrien might just hand over the Peacock Miraculous with an apology for being "young and foolish" when he was his father's accomplice. If that happened, the plan called for Ladybug and Chat Noir to immediately forgive Adrien, apparently without any legal consequences. Of course, as much as Marinette wanted this to happen, she couldn't help but consider the worst case scenario instead...
- Fatal Flaw: Marinette's tendency to catastrophize. When confronted by the possibility of something terrible happening, her panic tends to lead to her unconsciously discounting logical alternatives to focus on the worst-case scenario. This is why she has such a hard time even pretending to act normal around Adrien at first; she's a genuine Nice Girl, but in her mind Hawkmoth's son was the only viable suspect for being Mayura. In the end, a series of unfortunately timed developments convince Marinette that Adrien was plotting to poison the crowd attending the Hero's Day gala, and thus she decides to smash all the pastries Adrien had spent days preparing — the day before Tom and Sabine's bakery was supposed to cater the big event.
- Felony Misdemeanor: While Marinette is going on two days with minimal sleep, she thinks Adrien is pure evil for violating labor laws. The violation in question being that he himself is working unpaid overtime.
- Friendless Background: In addition to his canonical lack of friends, Adrien never went to public school and found friends there. Worse, he did find friends among the Miraculous heroes... but lost them all when the kwamis went dormant and he had no way to contact them.
- For Want Of A Nail:
- This Adrien never attended Francoise Dupont, so he never got to know Marinette, Nino or anyone else as classmates, only interacting with them in their superhero personas. This left him even more isolated after Hawkmoth's defeat and exposure as Gabriel.
- Hero with Bad Publicity: Adrien Agreste is one of the heroes who took down the dreaded Hawkmoth... but people only know him as the son of Hawkmoth.
- Hilarious in Flashback: A flashback shows Chat Noir telling Ladybug he intends to become a baker so he can bake a cake that's as good as the one she gave him, and she says he'll likely forget about it in one week. As Marinette would know had she learned Chat Noir's secret identity, he didn't.
- Hope Spot: Just when it seems that Marinette and Adrien are finally starting to get along, a serious of misunderstandings reignites and exacerbates her suspicions of him:
- She finds his phone and decides to takes a quick look, finding thousands of pictures of her as Ladybug and Chat Noir.
- She's told by her mother that Adrien's in her room looking for his phone. Remembering that she left her diary (which contains entries about her being Ladybug) she rushes to her and finds Adrien with his back to her while looking at her pictures of her and her friends. This, combined with him asking about her earrings plus talking about how luck she is for having so many friends is mistaken by her as a Shame If Something Happened threat.
- She spends the night with Alya and Nino, and the next day she receives a call from her mother, who tells that she and her father got food poisoning from some takeout food, which Adrien was spared from, leading into her believing that Adrien poisoned her parents just so he could poison the food for the Heroes' Day gala, as Sabine tells her how Adrien offered to finish the orders.
- Hypocritical Heartwarming: Marinette might have been suspicious about Adrien's motives at first, but when she saw that customers were actually running away upon seeing Adrien at the bakery's counter, she wasted no time in sending Adrien to the kitchen to spare him the experience. After all, Marinette knew full well that Hawkmoth did have an accomplice that had yet to be caught. The average citizen would have nothing but speculation to go on.
- Improperly Paranoid: Way too much of the comic happens because Marinette thinks Adrien is Hawkmoth Jr. out of sheer paranoia.
- I Never Said It Was Poison: When Marinette confronts Adrien, she demands his Miraculous—the brooch that is not the Butterfly. He asks incredulously "You think I have the Peacock?" She crows that she never mentioned the Peacock, and it was never public knowledge, so no one besides Ladybug, Chat Noir, and the villains know about it. She doesn't notice that's he's breaking down due to basically having the exact same revelation in reverse.
- In Vino Veritas: Attempted, but failed. Marinette thinks that getting Adrien drunk will trick him into revealing the Peacock Miraculous. Instead he's just as nice and friendly as ever, though he accidentally outs Chloe as gay.
- Innocently Insensitive: Marinette has been out of Paris for some time, and once "reality smacks her in the face again" upon arriving home, she's too busy worrying about the implications of having Adrien Agreste around to really listen to what her parents had to say about him at first. Thus, Marinette doesn't really understand how rough things were for Adrien (apparently the media hasn't been kind to him), and openly asks why Adrien would want to work in a bakery when "he's super rich"- not knowing that the Hawkmoth reveal had cost Adrien his fortune. Luckily, Marinette gets much better about this as time goes on.
- Innocent Innuendo: Tom and Sabine see Adrien leaving Marinette's room, dressed only in underwear and a shirt.Sabine: Have you two been... safe?
Adrien: Uh... y-yes...? - Internal Reveal: Adrien only learns what happened to Plagg after he and Marinette learn each other's identity and she tells him about the kwami hibernation.
- Keeping the Enemy Close: As much as it scares Marinette that Hawkmoth's son is working at her parents' bakery since she fears he wants revenge, she talks him out of leaving hoping it'll increase her chances of recovering the Peacock Miraculous, not knowing Adrien doesn't have it and isn't an enemy at all.
- Like an Old Married Couple: The last page shows that barely a day after discovering their identities, Marinette and Adrien have no problem watching TV in bed while eating pizza, then going to sleep without having sex. They look like they've been married for a decade.
- Like Brother and Sister: Chloe and Adrien seem like a one-sided Sickeningly Sweethearts situation, and Marinette assumes they're dating. Adrien later explains that she's been his only friend for most of his life (and she was the only one who stuck with him when his father was outed as a supervillain), but she's secretly a lesbian.
- Like a Son to Me: Marinette's parents describe Adrien this way as part of a blatant guilt trip.
- Locked Out of the Loop: All over the place:
- The city doesn't know about the Peacock Miraculous, or that it's still missing.
- The heroes didn't know Mayura was a woman.
- Marinette and Adrien don't know about the other's identity.
- Adrien didn't know Plagg was hibernating or that the other kwamis were in the same way until Marinette explained it to him.
- Made Out to Be a Jerkass: Marinette actually manages to do this to herself, especially immediately after arriving home. Her parents are rather taken aback by Marinette's open suspicion towards their new apprentice, and her friends are similarly puzzled. Since Ladybug and Chat Noir never announced the existence of the Peacock Miraculous- and thus, the fact that there's likely an accomplice to Hawkmoth still out there- none of Marinette's loved ones know that she's merely being Improperly Paranoid, not blaming Adrien for being Hawkmoth's son.
- Mugging the Monster: A robber attacks a bakery that happens to be staffed by Ladybug and Chat Noir. They take him down in about two minutes.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Nino literally ends up lying awake at night stewing over his behavior when he met Adrien; i.e., gleefully bragging about his girlfriend's fame as the Ladyblogger, in front of Hawkmoth's son.
- Marinette is hit with this in chapter 24 when she FINALLY clues in to who Adrien actually is... right after she completely destroyed the cake he made for Ladybug. She spends the next few minutes desperately trying to fix it.
- Not What It Looks Like: Tom and Sabine come to the obvious conclusion after they see Marinette and Adrien exit the former's room with the latter only wearing a large shirt.
- Only Friend: Chloe was the only person Adrien was allowed to interact with growing up, and after the Hawkmoth reveal she was the only one who stuck by him.
- Riches to Rags: As Marinette's parents tell her, Adrien's no longer rich because "he lost his fortune in court fees and donations to akuma recovery programs".
- Right for the Wrong Reasons: While Marinette is right about Adrien having a Miraculous, she only believes it because she thinks he's the one who used to send sentimonsters to help Hawkmoth. The Miraculous Adrien wields is the Cat one.
- Shame If Something Happened: Marinette finds Adrien in her room, looking over her pictures of her friends, and he spends a few minutes telling her about how lucky she is to have friends and how he hopes nothing happens to them. She's convinced that this is all a threat because he's discovered that she's Ladybug... but he's actually just happy that she has friends and remembering how he lost what few he had.
- Sins of Our Fathers: Most people of Paris see Adrien as nothing more than the son of Hawkmoth, unaware that he was one of the heroes that defeated him. Marinette herself suspected him as Hawkmoth's partner Mayura, though her animosity died down as she got to know him. She remained convinced that Adrien was the most likely suspect, but reminded herself that as a child under the control of an Abusive Dad who was also a master manipulator, Adrien would have been easy prey, and might indeed be Gabriel Agreste's greatest victim. She starts suspecting him again when she becomes afraid he's planning to poison everyone at the Heroes' Day gala and believes he poisoned her parents to have a chance to implement said plan.
- Skewed Priorities: When Marinette destroys all the pastries and realizes that Adrien is Chat Noir, she's entirely focused on the first problem. Adrien points out that the second one is kind of important.Adrien: We solve our problems together. ...Because we're Ladybug and Chat Noir. A FACT WHICH I'D LIKE TO DISCUSS.
- Wake Up Fighting: After a nightmare about everyone getting poisoned by Adrien, Marinette wakes up to hands shaking her shoulders and reflexively punches Nino, knocking his glasses clean off. She's immediately horrified, and they ask each other whether they're okay.
- The Wicked Stage: Adrien being a former model and actor is held by Marinette as a reason to believe he's just pretending to be nice.
- Wham Episode:
- In chapter 20, Adrien had left his phone behind in the bakery and Marinette offers to keep it safe until she returns. When she checks his phone, she discovers that he has pictures of Ladybug and that he's been searching for her, increasing her paranoia about his actions.
- This is followed in chapter 21, where while Marinette was in the shower, Adrien comes to get his phone back and is told by Sabine that it was in Marinette's room. By the time Marinette gets there, he points out the old pictures of her with twintails and earrings. After he leaves, she finds out that her journal marking down her time as Ladybug was open, making her believe that Adrien now knows her Secret Identity.
