A/N: Alright. So I absolutely adore the cutesy, brightly-colored, cotton-candy ML series that we got. But, like a lot of other people, I was originally drawn in by the PV—dark, moody, atmospheric. I've spent a lot of time wondering about the "darker and more political" Ladybug that they originally had in mind. What would that story have looked like? Probably nothing like this—I'm adhering more closely to CGI canon than to what we know about the PV-verse—but that's the aesthetic I'm going for, anyway. I hope you enjoy it.

Here's the thing: Marinette doesn't actually believe in luck.

Oh sure, there's a superstitious streak in her that's a mile wide, and that's probably never going away. She has always been the kind of girl who was extra careful around mirrors and ladders and sidewalk cracks. If she spots a black cat while walking, she'll take care not to cross its path. Her bedroom is filled to the brim with various assorted lucky charms: a horseshoe over her door, a drawer full of rabbit's feet, a Japanese beckoning-cat that sits in her window, an entire scrapbook filled with pressed four-leaf clovers.

But here's the other thing: Marinette knows, that for all her efforts, she's never been any luckier—or unluckier—than anybody else.

She learned that the hard way.

It starts with a pair of lucky earrings.

They appear in her bedroom when she is twelve years old.

She wishes she could remember the moment that she first found them, but that memory dangles just out of her reach, sliding away every time she thinks she might have it pinned down. Did they appear on her bedroom floor, a plain black jewelry box sitting abandoned in the middle of her room? Or was the box left on her vanity counter, blending in seamlessly with her scattered piles of lip gloss and charm bracelets? Maybe it was left on her windowsill, or on her pillowcase, or on her sewing desk.

At their first appearance, in any case, she hadn't thought much of the earrings. They are simple studs, red spotted with black, like two little ladybugs sitting in their box. In dim light, they almost seem to glow, but they are otherwise unspectacular. Marinette puts them in a pile with the rest of her earrings, and does not think of them again.

She stumbles on them again, months later, when she is cleaning her bedroom. This time, though, something about them feels... different.

"Maman?" she calls out.

"Yes, ma petite?" her mother calls back. Marinette descends the staircase from her bedroom slowly, holding the earring box in her hand. Mme Cheng looks up from her cooking, brow furrowed. "Is something wrong?"

"Do you know where I got these earrings from?" Marinette asks, holding the box out towards her mother. Her mother sets the stove on simmer and wipes her hands down on a towel, then lifts the box up gently. She brings the earrings close to her eyes, face scrunching up as she examines them.

"I'm sorry, sweetie," Mme Cheng says. She hands the box back. "I don't think I recognize them. Is there something wrong with them?"

"No," Marinette says slowly. "I just don't remember getting them, that's all."

Mme Cheng returns to her cooking. "Maybe they're magic!" she jokes. "You could take them to that magic item appraisal shop that's just around the corner."

Marinette laughs. "Maybe I should," she says. "With my luck, they're probably cursed."

Perhaps she was not so wrong about that.

Marinette spends a moment thinking very seriously about taking the earrings to the shop, just to see what they will say about them. She takes them back upstairs to her bedroom instead, thinking that they feel strangely heavy in her hand. Then she puts them in a drawer and forgets.

Maybe that's part of the magic, forgetting. Sometimes she opens the drawer and is surprised to see them there. There is a moment of confusion, a feeling of wrongness, before she remembers—oh, that's right—and then she closes the drawer again. The memories seem to fade the moment she looks away.

One day in late summer, while searching for a pair of sewing shears, she stumbles upon them again. She digs through the drawer, unearthing pincushions and stray bobbins and scraps of ribbon, and her fingers close around a box. She frowns. It is not what she is looking for. For some reason, she pulls it out anyway.

She holds it up. The box is still perfectly ordinary. She cracks it open, peering at the glittering earrings inside. Marinette takes a moment to admire them. They look like nice earrings, she thinks. She wonders what they're made out of—they don't quite look like plastic. Coral, perhaps? Jasper?

She doesn't put them on.

She doesn't know why—she thinks that they're lovely, and her ears have been pierced for years—but somehow she feels that she's not... ready. Not yet.

She closes the box and moves to place them back in the drawer. But then she hesitates.

On a whim, she puts the box in her purse instead.

She is fourteen years old.

The day that Marinette Dupain-Cheng first meets Adrien Agreste is anything but fortuitous.

It is a dreary Friday, not yet raining, but with ominous clouds hanging low in the sky. All of Paris is cast in a gloomy gray, and school children make their way to their classes with umbrellas clenched in their fists. Every so often, someone will hold out their hand, palm turned toward the sky, to check whether it has begun raining yet. It hasn't.

At the corner of Rue de Rivoli and Avenue Victoria, an old Chinese man sits contently on a bench. He does not carry an umbrella and does not look to the sky. He is, in fact, wearing a rather tacky floral print button-up, and would look more at home on some faraway Pacific beach than here in the middle of drab, autumnal Paris.

This intersection, in the heart of Paris's 21st arrondissement, is crowded with people. The man watches them come and go with sharp eyes. This is a very busy part of town, a crossroads of sorts, where you might come across anyone—rich or poor, old or young, local or tourist—and that is precisely why he is sitting here, at eight in the morning, watching them pass with carefully feigned disinterest.

"Master," a voice whispers. If anyone had been paying in particular attention, they might have noticed that the voice seemed to come from a small sack at the man's side, and not from the man himself. But this voice went unheeded by the passers-by, who were all quite busy with their own goings-ons. "The force is growing stronger."

"Hmm," the man says. If he is concerned, his face betrays no hint of it. "And what of Ladybug?"

"Still dormant," the voice says. "Tikki will not stir until her partner does."

"Hmm," the mans says again. He reaches into one pocket and removes a plain black jewelry box. He opens it just a crack, peering in at the black ring sitting within.

Perhaps it is ancient magic at work. Perhaps it is only a trick of the light. But for the briefest moment, the ring appears to glow faintly green. The man smiles to himself and snaps the box shut. He stuffs it back into his pocket and leaps up to his feat with surprising agility for a man of his age.

"Well," he mutters, "then I suppose it's good that I've finally made up my mind. That's the one."

He raises one hand to point out a boy walking on the far side of the street. The boy is thirteen, perhaps fourteen years old. He is tall for his age and has a certain lankiness about him, a definite sense that he has not quite grown into his limbs. Despite his awkward proportions, he has a certain agility and grace—almost catlike, you might say—as he weaves easily through the crowds, much to the frustration of his chaperone. The polite fake smile that he has plastered on his face accidentally turns genuine when the woman accompanying him calls out after him, and he pauses for a moment, waiting for her to catch up.

The old man looks on with a faint smile, evidently quite pleased with his decision. The voice from the sack, however, has been watching the scene with growing horror. It makes an incoherent spluttering noise. "Adrien Agreste?!" it hisses. "Do you know whose son that is—?!"

"I know," the man says quickly, though he does not seem particularly concerned by it. "But they're perfect for each other. You can sense it too, can't you?"

The voice is oddly silent for a moment. "That may be true," the voice acknowledges, "but it's still too dangerous. I'm sure there's someone else who would work just as well."

"No. It has to be him. This is—" (and here the man pauses for dramatic effect) "—fate."

There is some grumbling from the sack. "I never got along with Moyrra," it says, somewhat petulantly. "This human concept of fate—it is illogical, dangerous even—my master, I beg you to reconsider."

"Oh, come now, old friend," the man says. "Look at him."

They both watch as a hurried businessman collides with a young child on the sidewalk. The child falls. The businessman walks on. But the Agreste boy stops. He kneels down by the child's side, talking to her in a low murmur, and when the girl confirms that she is uninjured, he lifts her up and sets her down lightly on her feet. He pats the top of her head before she goes on her way, and his chaperone rolls her eyes.

"He would make a good fit," the voice admits, albeit grudgingly. "But Plagg's powers are... volatile. How can you be certain that the boy would not be corrupted?"

The man frowns slightly. He does not answer at first, ambling slowly along the street, watching the Agreste boy from afar until he disappears completely from his sights. "That is the trouble, my friend," he says. "You can never really be certain."

He taps one finger against the box, still sitting in his pocket. "I have a good feeling about this one, though."

The box appears in Adrien's bedroom later that morning. He does not find it until late in the evening—until after his school lessons and fencing class and one truly disastrous first meeting with a certain Mlle Dupain-Cheng—and he is drawn to it immediately. Where Marinette was all nerves and hesitation, Adrien is absolute certainty. He puts on the ring without even thinking about it, and nothing has ever felt more right in his life.

As for the old man—he waits, and he watches.

He trades his spot at the streetcorner for a place on a bench under a covered bus shelter along the Seine. The bus stop just happens to be across the street from a local school, the Collège Françoise Dupont. Six buses come and go while he waits. The sack at his side is still and silent.

At precisely 11:42, there is a murmur.

"Tikki is waking," it says.

At half past four, the school day ends. Students pour forth from the building, laughing and chatting, and go their separate ways.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng emerges from the building at 4:34, accompanied by another student. The other girl has one arm wrapped around Marinette's shoulders, and they are talking in hushed whispers. At the bottom of the stairs, the pair hesitates a moment, both of them glancing backwards. A particularly astute observer might notice that Marinette watched the school's doorway just a touch more wistfully than her companion, and that when she finally turns around again, her eyes are filled with disappointment.

At 4:39, Adrien Agreste stumbles out of the collège, looking crestfallen.

"There is still time to un-Choose him," the voice in the sack suggests.

"Patience," the old man says.

By seven in the evening, the old man has migrated from his place at the bench to an improbably high perch on the rooftop of Les Invalides. A few tourists, walking underneath and admiring the great golden dome, point quizzically at him. One of them wonders aloud whether he is going to hurt himself. The old man ignores them.

At 11:15, it begins.

The old man fishes out a cell phone from one of his pockets, and checks the time just to be sure. "That was cutting it awfully close," he says. "It's practically Saturday, already."

"I am sure that things would have progressed much the same if they had happened on Saturday the 14th," the voice says, a little wearily.

"It's the principle of the thing." The old man stands up and squints out at the horizon. His mortal eyes cannot see anything amiss, but once you get to be one hundred and eighty-six years old, your mortal eyes cannot see much of anything anymore. There is a power burning in him, something that sits heavy in his heart, and he feels the pull of like calling to like. Somewhere, just out of his sight, ancient magics are stirring.

"It's been a while," the old man muses, "since once of our butterflies was corrupted."

The voice is silent for a long time. The sack shifts slightly, and from it emerges a small green creature. You might say that it looked like a turtle, if you had never seen a turtle before. The creature is clearly magical, half-transparent and almost insubstantial, with something resembling a shell on its back. Its eyes are striking—bright and too large—making the creature seem almost... human. It moves slowly, floating through the air, and settles in comfortably on the old man's shoulder. It is quite dark enough now that few people can see the small old man standing atop the roof of Les Invalides, and none of them have eyes sharp enough to see his tiny magical companion.

"Cahokia," it finally says. "About eight hundred years ago."

The man grimaces. "Remind me how that one ended?"

Another pause. "Badly."

"Well," the man says. "I suppose we'd better keep a closer eye on our heroes, at least for tonight."

He looks up to the sky. Takes in a deep breath. He has gotten too old for the superhero shenanigans of his youth—too old to leap easily across city rooftops in the night, or to fight against great cosmic evils—but he is not quite old enough that he can't still meddle, just a little bit.

The old man lifts one wrist up towards the sky. "Transform me," he says.

A local collège student, one Alya Césaire, would later dub the day Unlucky Friday. It is not an particularly inspired name on her part, but she honestly had not been putting all that much thought into it. The name comes to her at three in the morning as she is typing out a brief recap on the events she witnessed in between games of Candy Crush, while she waits for rescuers to come pluck her from the rubble of the half-collapsed Tour Montparnasse. She posts the write-up to her blog, along with a short cell phone video she managed to capture of the city's new superhero duo, later that night.

Her blog gets two million hits that weekend alone, and the name sticks.

Officially, the events of Unlucky Friday start at 11:15 on the thirteenth of September, when an adolescent boy—never officially named but known to be a classmate of Mlle Césaire's—is possessed by an unknown malevolent force and transformed into the supervillain known as Stoneheart (also named by Alya), thus beginning five hours and twenty-two minutes of the worst destruction that Paris had seen since... well, since the last time they'd had an active supervillain in the city.

(Approximately six years and seven months, if you must know.)

If you were to ask Alya when the events of Unlucky Friday began, she would point instead to a moment twelve hours earlier that day, when an off-handedly petty remark from young Chloé Bourgeois prompted one of her classmates to respond in kind, and it had all been steadily downhill from there. She, too, would be wrong.

The events of Unlucky Friday, really began around 50,000 years ago, when humans first discovered the concept of change, and for some unknowable reason, they decided that it was one of the fundamental forces that held together the universe. From that belief was born power and from that power was born magic.

Its first name was 'anoor. It was named in a tongue that has not been spoken on the earth in tens of thousands of years. There is no human alive that remembers that word, and it has had many new names since. But it remembers that first name, and what it means—butterfly.

Humans remembered too, in their own way. Not the word, but the meaning.

Here, in this time and this place, their word for butterfly is papillon. It is a different word, but beneath it lies the same power.

In a dim attic in the heart of Paris, a black butterfly spreads its wings.

But back to Stoneheart:

Alya spends almost two weeks as the New Girl, a status just beginning to grate on her nerves when she is mercifully replaced by an even newer student. His name is, apparently, Adrien Agreste, which prompts gasps from a few students and a half-whispered damn from Marinette, the upbeat girl who sits next to her in class.

Chloé Bourgeois glances in their direction. Alya glowers back. From the very start, she'd gotten a bad vibe from the Bourgois girl, and so far Chloé had done absolutely nothing to change that impression.

"Don't get too excited," Chloé drawls. "He's not into girls who like to play dumb."

Marinette's face falls. Alya barely knows the girl at all, but she knows enough to see that Marinette is the last person in the world who would play dumb to win some boy's attention. She's willing to bet Chloé knows that too, and that's probably why she said it in the first place.

"Yeah?" Alya asks, lifting her chin. "I guess it's lucky for you he only likes girls who are actually dumb."

Alya, of course, doesn't know the first thing about this Agreste kid. But slinging that insult felt good, and it feels even better to see the look of shocked gratitude on Marinette's face when she realizes that someone is actually standing up for her. Even Chloé has the decency to look taken aback for a fraction of a second. Then her shock morphs into a sly smirk. "Who needs to be smart when you're as hot as I am?" she says, flipping her hair over one shoulder. "It's only fuglies who need to be worried about intelligence. Right, Mylène?"

Mylène, who sits behind Chloé and is hardly the picture of traditional beauty, slides down glumly in her seat. She supplies no retort. Alya doesn't know it at the time, but this, too, was a calculated barb from Chloé—Mylène had been struggling with her grades since her parents divorced last year.

"Knock it off, Chloé," another classmate (Alix, Alya would eventually learn, but at the time she just thinks of her as Spiky Pink Hair) intervenes. "We don't have time for your crap today!"

Chloé just rolls her eyes. "Well, tough, sweetheart. Looks like you're going to have to make time."

Spiky Pink Hair looks like she's about to jump over their desks and start a proper fistfight, but Mylène stops her with a hand on her arm. Another classmate, a mountain of a boy who is already taller and heavier than most adults, takes a few steps forward and looms large over Chloé. "She's right," he says, "knock it off."

Ivan, despite his appearance, is one of the softest-hearted people in all of Paris. When he tells Chloé to stop picking on Mylène, there is no real threat behind his words. He is the kind of person who traps spiders in cups and carefully releases them outside. He is not looming over her to intimidate her—it's mostly just that he is the kind of person who looms over everyone, intentional or not.

Chloé doesn't see things like that, of course. All she sees is someone bigger and stronger than her, and if there's one thing she responds well to, it's power.

"Fine, whatever," she says, drawing into herself. The crisis seemingly averted, everyone in the room relaxes slightly, and Ivan returns to his seat.

But then she adds under her breath, "I'll make sure Daddy saves a particularly dank cell in prison for you."

For some reason, those words worm their way into Ivan's heart. It's strange. They may have been cruel words, but that was certainly nothing out of the norm for Chloé. He'd heard plenty worse from her, honestly. But something about them, at that time in that place on that unlucky day, hurts more than usual. They linger in his mind for hours afterward, long after school ends. They haunt his thoughts, eating away at him until he can't bear it any longer.

A small, dark part of him wishes that he could hurt Chloé as much as she hurt him.

And that is exactly what Papillon is waiting for.

The battle lasts for hours. Papillon uses Ivan's negative emotions to transform him into Stoneheart, who rampages senselessly through the heart of Paris, from Tour Montparnasse to the Champs de Mars. Two young teenagers take him down. By dawn, the story will be playing on every news station all over France, and by tomorrow the whole world will have heard that there is a new supervillain trying to take over Paris.

But for now—now that the civilians have been rescued and the corruption purified and the damage magically undone—the two heroes stand on metal beams halfway up the Eiffel Tower in the middle of the night, positively giddy with their victory.

"I can't believe I did that!" the girl exclaims, one hand clapped over her chest. "I can't believe we did that!"

"That was the best birthday ever," the boy says, starry-eyed.

The girl laughs out loud. "That was—" she begins to say, but then she's dissolved back into laughter. "That was your—" she tries again, before falling again into a fit of laughter. She can't seem to stop laughing. The boy joins in too, eventually, and somehow they find themselves with hands clasped, their foreheads pressed together, giggling in the darkness.

Finally, after they have slipped back into silence, the boys says, "I never got your name."

The girl smiles. "I think they're calling me Ladybug," she says.

"Ladybug," the boy says, almost reverently.

"What about you?" she asks quietly.

The boy seems startled for a moment. "Oh—I. Um. How about—uh—Chat Noir?"

"Ladybug and Chat Noir," the girl says, rolling the names around in her mouth. "I like it." She stands tall for a moment, looking awfully proud of herself, her hands planted on her hips as she surveys the city beneath her.

"So," she says. "How do we get down from here?"

Chat Noir leans forward slightly, looking at the distant ground below. "How did we get up here to start with?" he wonders aloud.

Somehow, without really understanding why, laughter overtakes them yet again.

Far, far beneath Ladybug and Chat Noir, in the Trocadéro Gardens, the old man watches.

The turtle creature is sitting on his shoulder again. "Why did you detransform?" it asks, sounding slightly confused.

The old man squints upward, eyes fixed on the Eiffel Tower. "I'd say they handled that pretty well themselves, wouldn't you?" The magic creature makes a quiet noise of agreement. "Papillon hasn't realized that I'm in Paris yet. Best wait until I'm needed before I reveal myself."

"Ah," the creature says. "A wise decision, my master."

The old man fishes his cell phone out of his pocket and checks the time. 4:52 AM, the numbers say, bright against the darkness. He returns the phone to his pocket.

"And so the wheel of fortune turns again," he murmurs. "Let's just hope I got it right this time."