Let's call this the melting pot of aus. Enemies au (kinda), human kwami au, modern day fantasy au, 'Adrien and Mari never met in lycee' au…

Optional author's note slash mental prep about the nature of this au:

Here is a brief rundown, so you're prepared going in. After writing 'Untitled' in my one-shot collection ('Cross the River and Roam the Shore') I wanted to further explore that idea of their powers being more dynamic. So this story is my exploration of how could their powers could be if unrestricted by the limits of the show. (I mean, come on, their powers are literally creation and destruction. You can do so much with that it physically pains me that the show cops out on that goldmine and makes their powers predictable and boring.) So yeah, their powers will be a LOT more complex here (read: less cartoony) and more reliant on the whole 'magic is real' aspect of it as opposed to unexplained/unquestioned existence of superheroes/villains. Think spirits instead of kwamis. Possession instead of miraculous stones and akumas. That's all I can tell you now without spoiling the plot; the rest will reveal itself as the story unfolds.

Also, closely related to the plot, Adrien never succeeded in his demands for public schooling. So, here at the beginning of this tale, he and Mari have thus far never met outside of costume.

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Nothing to Fear

[Prologue]

"That is not dead which can eternal lie,

and with strange aeons even death may die."

~H.P. Lovecraft

The Eiffel Tower was a sight to behold at night, but even moreso was the view from the top of it. The nearest metal leg dropped straight out below them for what looked like miles before curling away in a gentle parabola toward the place where it grounded one of the world's most famous man-made wonders to its home below. Ladybug and Chat Noir sat on an outcropped ledge about twenty meters from the very tip, where the nails were rusted from exposure and the finish was faded by time.

"You ever think about the fact that we're the first ones to have touched this particular place since the tower was built?"

It took some effort for Ladybug to tear her gaze from the sprawling city below. He was noisily finishing off his capri-sun (which she'd given him so much shit over when he shamelessly requested it because honestly, they were twenty-four now) and when he saw her looking, shot her a sly grin and disintegrated the empty foil pouch with a flash of searing light. Ladybug flinched, but only because without the usual dazzling array of light she used to disguise her civilian clothes (she usually dialed it back when they were alone together, all except her satin mask) it was rather dark this high above the city and her eyes weren't ready for that. Not because he'd frightened her.

She could hear him snickering and pulled a face in his general direction. "Sorry," he laughed. "Seeing spots now, are you?"

"Maintenance workers come up here," Ladybug said in lieu of responding to the cheap play on the nickname the public had given her when she first appeared, and then finished off her can of cola, crushing it against their lofty perch. Chat stopped laughing. "Painters. The people who change the lightbulbs… And me, probably, when I rebuilt this tower with my bare hands. Should I go on or have your romantic notions been dashed already?" Having regained the use of her eyesight now, she batted her eyelashes at him devastatingly. It had the desired effect.

Humming low to himself, Chat leaned back onto his hands, kicking his legs as whimsically as if he were sitting at the edge of a shallow pond rather than a full seven-second drop above the city of Paris. The way the moonlight crested across a woman's cheeks was enough to fuel a man's heart for a dozen lifetimes. They two were no different. They may be the scions of incomprehensibly ancient powers, but they were more than that, and less. At the end of the day he was still just a man.

And she… she was a woman.

Said woman cocked her head at him in tentative curiosity, surprised that her eyelash tactic had so thoroughly succeeded in shutting him up.

"You should know by know," Chat Noir purred, voice deep and subdued with longing, "that I don't let go of romantic notions that easily."

So entranced was Ladybug by the fire in his eyes that she didn't see him reach for her. She sucked in a breath when his hand brushed her forearm, sliding slowly and purposefully toward her hand. Their eyes were still locked. Her lips parted in surprise. What was he...?

He plucked the crushed soda can from her hand, eyes crinkling in amusement. "May I?" he offered casually. Damn, he got her back. He knew exactly what was guilty of, too, judging by the smirk plastered on his insufferable face as he incinerated her trash the same way he had done his.

"Chat, stop," Ladybug sighed.

The hot ashes that had once been a can of Coca-Cola fluttered out of his open hand into the current of the lively wind. "Sorry," he repeated, this time more sincerely. "Did I hurt your eyes again?"

She shook her head; her heart was hammering against her sternum and it was only getting worse with him looking at her like that. We're just partners, she reminded herself. It doesn't matter what we've been in the past; we're only partners and that's all we'll ever be. So there's nothing to be worked up over, here. Nothing at all. But as the silence stretched on and his ears pressed flat against his head in concern, her heart found plenty to get even further worked up over.

"Not that," she said, finally, through clenched teeth. "I meant…"

"Oh." She didn't have to say it; he knew what she meant. "Come on, Ladybug," he backpedaled clumsily, rubbing at the side of his neck, "I was just joking."

She shook her head again. "No, you weren't."

The careful monotone she said it in was impossible for him to decipher. "Alright then, you got me. I wasn't. What do you want me to say?" he sighed. "It's no secret how I feel about you."

"We can't play this game anymore," she sighed back. "You know that."

"I wouldn't be so sure," he snorted, and rapped his knuckles on his head playfull. "If you asked Plagg, he'd assure you that I don't know anything."

"Chat Noir," Ladybug complained. "You just don't get it." Truthfully, it was her fault. She was the one who'd started it; she knew better than to flirt with him. What was she thinking, opening this Pandora's box again?

"It'd be easier to give it up if you, I don't know, actually turned me down," Chat hummed.

This argument was familiar ground. They'd been here before. They knew all the steps to this dance, and it always ended the same. So why did he continue to invite her anyway? Ladybug wrinkled her nose at her partner like he'd lost his damn mind. "Are you kidding? I've turned you down more times than I can count! We can't be anything, Chat. You know that ㅡ"

"Can't," he pointed out, lazily. "See, you always say that. Can't. If you felt nothing for me you'd just say no." Heat blossomed on her cheeks at his words, changing them from silver to champagne-pink. Point: Chat.

"It doesn't matter either way," she fumed. "Tikki and Plagg have been at war for centuries, Chat. They're too stubborn to change. And it's absurd to think we could ever have a chance of being happy together when we can never meet outside our transformations. It didn't work before and it never will. There's just too much at stake, and besides, I want you to be happy..." As she spoke, Chat tuned her out. He rolled his eyes and then his shoulders, cracking his neck and then moving on to a series of arm stretches. He knew this monologue of hers by heart. It felt faker every time like she was trying to convince herself more than she was trying to convince him. Because seriously . As if he wasn't agonizingly aware of their spirits' feud. She might as well inform him that the sky was blue and they lived in France. The fact that she was dutifully restating all of this meant they were nearing the end of their routine argument now, where she ended it without any hint that she still wanted him. Sure enough, she crossed her arms and finished the speech with: "So it's better to just relinquish whatever feelings you have left for me."

All done stretching, Chat leaned back on his hands again to survey Ladybug with a frown. His turn to reaffirm that his position on the subject hadn't changed and never would. "Who's to say Tikki and Plagg won't make up someday? Stranger things have happened. Like, you and me," he added softly.

Ladybug huffed and tucked a flyaway strand of hair back into her bun, refusing to meet his eye. He wondered if she was also recalling the day they met. The day he almost levelled the entire city of Paris. The day she almost killed him. The day she saved him instead.

The day he fell in love with her.

"Fine," he said with a great dramatic sigh when it was clear she was done speaking. "I'll concede, for tonight. But I won't promise not to sweep you off your feet if I ever have the pleasure of running into you on the lovely streets of Paris." Grandiosely, he swept his hand out over the yawning void between them and the city belowㅡthe place they'd lived all their lives. The city of love. Looking at it he saw endless opportunity and, more importantly, he saw a future with her that he'd do just about anything to achieve.

But when Ladybug looked, she saw a dangerous, beautiful labyrinth laid out in silver and gold. A blind child she was tasked to protect. A deadly trap, if she didn't tread carefully.

"A city of over two million inhabitants. What makes you think you'd even recognize me if you saw me?" she trilled with amusement. "We might have even met before and never knew."

"Oh please," he murmured, and his voice was so raw that she froze in place. "You have to give me more credit than that, bugaboo. I'd know you in an instant."

And as she searched his face for somethingㅡ anything ㅡto show he was bluffing, she found nothing. Nothing but honesty. And she realized, then, that if they ever met on the streets of Paris out of costume, they would be absolutely royally screwed. Because pitch black illusion or not, there was no way on Earth she could look into those radiant, hopeful, acid green eyes and not know they belonged to Chat Noir.

If they ever met as civilians they were fucked.

"What are you doing?" she said suddenly, torn from her thoughts when he touched the ledge between them with a finger and started to rust away the metal there.

"Have a little faith," he droned, squinting his eyes in concentration as he curved the line of rust. He was drawing something, she realized incredulously. "I haven't tried to destroy this tower in what, ten years? Huh. I guess we're about due for another attempt, then..."

"You shouldn't joke about that," she grumbled, then leaned over despite herself to see what he'd drawn. When she saw, she had to sigh. It was a little heart with LB and CN inside. Sometimes she swore he was still as old as the day they met. She crossed her arms, refusing to comment on the nature of his little drawing, like he had been no doubt hoping for by drawing it in the first place. "And you also shouldn't use your powers so frivolously."

"Maybe you should use yours more frivolously," he answered.

"One of us has to take this job seriously," she replied haughtily as she rose to her feet. It was time to call it a night. They'd already been up here for far too long and tomorrow was the most important day of her career so far (her civilian career). Change of heart or not, if she was late for work tomorrow she would kill him. She would actually kill him.

"It's not a job," Chat shrugged, choosing not to take her cue to stand and instead settling back into his previous position of comfort. "No one's paying us to do this. There's no omniscient, omnipotent force that chose us for this. We didn't pull these swords out of magic stones. It's just, something that happened to us. And if I took my powers as seriously as you took yours," he finished guiltily, "then I'd have ended up`like all those other people that came before me. All the other ones that Plagg's possessed."

Ladybug's stomach dropped out. "Chat, I didn't mean…"

"It's okay." He smiled up at her, and it hit her like a punch in the gut.

They'd been partners for so long that sometimes it was easy to forget what it had been like when they were enemies, however briefly. It was easy to forget that in his hands was a power deadly enough to bring this entire monument down in piles of burning rust, and instead he used it to do things like draw little hearts at their meeting spot. It was easy to take how good he was for granted. Sometimes, in moments of clarity like this, she wondered: if Plagg hadn't chosen him that day all those years ago, would Tikki have chosen him one day herself?

"Hey," she put in, ruffling his blonde hair affectionately. "You know I…"

He leaned into her hand. "I know." She didn't have to say it; he knew what she meant.

"I'll see you tomorrow," she said, and with a flash of pink light a chunky backpack appeared on her back. With a wink she produced a matching one for him and tossed it into his waiting hands. With that done, she put her hand on the thin cord trailing out the bottom and stepped up to the edge where the tower met the open air.

"Good luck at your… whatever the important thing is that you're doing tomorrow." Chat clutched the backpack to his chest, wishing he could give her better wishes than that for this life-changing event she'd been talking circles around for weeks. Whatever it was she did for a living, he was sure she was the best around.

"Thank you, chaton." And she leapt into the night.

Chat watched her fall, and only leaned back when her parachute blossomed above her, drifting away toward the city far below on the whims of the breeze like she was no more than a dandelion seed.

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"Honestly," Plagg hissed, the second Adrien released him in a dark, secluded alley. The spirit made no attempt to keep quiet or out of sight, opting to flail his monochrome glowing arms this way and that as he complained. "You're using me to destroy trash again? Come on, you can do better than that. What was it you were telling Ladybug back there? 'Due for another attempt?'" If possible, his solid black eyes seemed to darken, and he bared his teeth with glee. "I liked the sound of that, kid. Why don't you put your money where your mouth is?"

Despite the malicious intent, Adrien only rolled his eyes. Ten years now he had put up with the lanky, wispy demon that haunted him. "Littering is wrong," he whispered, peeking his head out of the black alley to make certain no one had seen him transform. Aside from a biker that was crossing at the nearest intersection, the street beyond was empty. "And you know I was kidding about that," Adrien added in exasperation. "I'm not like that, Plagg, and I never will be."

"Don't I know it more than anyone," the spirit drawled. "Ugh, if only I'd passed you up that day."

Adrien beamed at him sarcastically; after ten long years he had finally matched the apparition in height, so that now when they argued it was eye to eye. Although, looking into Plagg's charcoal black eyes, it was easy to imagine that Adrien was staring into nothing more than two bottomless black holes. Relatively human appearance or not, Plagg would always look like death to him. "But you didn't," Adrien prodded, "and you're stuck with me till the day I die. Sooner or later you're gonna have to accept that."

"I'll accept it when you're dead." Plagg flipped him off and vanished.

The walk home from here was short, but Adrien dithered, stopping at every other house to admire the gardens and the architecture, delaying the inevitable. It was almost two in the morning when he put his key in the front door of his flat. But his tactic had worked. In front of the dark window that overlooked the eastern half of the city, his angry black cat was already sound asleep, curled up in a ball of fluff and breathing softly in his sleep, tail flicking as he dreamt. The cat looked harmless.

But Adrien knew better.

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"You're letting him get too close again," Tikki scolded, the second Marinette released her halfway up the fire escape to her studio apartment.

Ghostly as she was, semi-transparent and glittering in a manner that put the urban night sky to shame, Tikki lit the secluded stairwell like a second moon. Shorter than Marinette but with sloping, generous curves and a matching bob haircut that was shockingly modern for a force of nature as old as time itself, she could never have been mistaken by any passerby as a regular human. The way she appeared now was purely for the benefit of being able to speak with Marinette. To give her the same lungs and vocal chords humans possessed in order to communicate. This humanlike apparition touched the full spectrum of the rainbow, catching the light every time she moved, like a shattered mirror floating through the vacuum of space. She was beautiful in that inexplicable way customary of surrealist paintings.

Frustration and concern twisted that beautiful face and drove her to cross her arms at her human conduit like a disapproving mother.

"I know what I'm doing," Marinette withered. Button-cute as she appeared, an angry Tikki was a force to be feared. "I trust him, Tikki."

"Well I don't. You're forgetting what he did , Mari."

"I did not forget," Marinette snapped. How could she ever? "But it was one time and it's been ten years since then. He has proven himself a thousand times over to be a good man, whether you see it or not."

The spirit of creation stepped toward Marinette, her eyes now softer and kinder, and placed one ethereal hand on her shoulder. "I know it seems that way. But Plagg has been using his conduits to terrorize humanity for almost four hundred years," Tikki insisted. "And everyone he choosesㅡ"

"Maybe Plagg made a mistake this time." Marinette angrily shrugged her spirit off and resumed the climb to her apartment.

If she'd have turned back to look, she would have seen Tikki succumb briefly to an age-old sorrow, hugging her arms around her chest as she swept her eyes out over the sprawling modern metropolis. A glint of white flickered above the rail, and as she turned toward the light it manifested into a small cat that stalked silently along the railing of the fire escape. As it neared her it blossomed from within with colors that bled out behind it in the dark.

"Plagg doesn't make mistakes," Tikki whispered to the incorporeal cat. Cherry blossoms made of light sprinkled into existence around the apparition, spiraling downward on an imaginary breeze, and the cat lifted its nose to touch one as it fell. The cherry blossom vanished as soon as it connected. With a flick of her wrist Tikki made the cat disappear as well. Plagg makes decisions, not mistakes.

Unlike me.

Up in her apartment, Marinette fussed about with last minute checks and preparations for her big day tomorrow. It was only as she was already in bed half-asleep that she suddenly remembered to water her plants, and got back up to stumble about in the darkness, filling her watering can before heading out to the balcony with a yawn. When she was almost finished, a little ladybug landed on her hand, flicking its wings as if in exasperation.

"I'm sorry," Marinette mumbled to it. "We're a team, Tikki, and we always have been. I know it hasn't been like that with your other chosen in the past." Marinette knew all about the past harbingers of destruction; had known of them for her whole life, had grown up studying them in school alongside her peers with morbid fascination and dissociated awe and fear. Everyone in the world knew about them. Murderers, arsonists, terrorists, all of them.

All except Chat Noir.

"But Chat is…" Marinette set down her watering can and gently touched a wilting blossom sprouting from amidst her daisies. They were by far the plainest flowers in her garden, but they were special to her because he had gifted her the seeds. "He's different," she said for what felt like the ten millionth time since she'd partnered up with the man who by all accounts should have been her enemy. The ladybug flapped its wings again. "Plagg may be the spirit of destruction, but he picked the wrong guy for his agenda this time around. Plagg might want us dead but Chat Noir would never hurt us. So if we never meet outside of costume and Plagg never finds us, well then, we have nothing to fear. Do we?"

The ladybug only flapped its wings again. Amazing how much disapproval and exasperation a simple flap of the wings could convey.

Reaching into that warm fountain of energy deep inside her heart, Marinette touched the dying daisy with her index finger, letting loose a little of that magic that pulsed in her veins, tethering Tikki to the physical plane. Slowly but surely the white petals perked up, water and sugar pouring in fast-motion into its little cells. A few minutes later Marinette fell asleep with a smile on her face. It may have been just a single little flower, but to her, no one and nothing was beyond saving.

That night she slipped into an old recurring dream she'd had about once month since she was fourteen years old.

A lonely, furious, desperate child with a black hole for a face, who wanted her city to fall. Rubble and flame carried her through the night. In her bed, she tossed. A knife to his throat, flat on his back at the edge of a rooftop. Her hands shook.

Do it , he whispered. The first words he ever spoke to her. Startlingly green eyes broke free from the darkness that clung to his skin like ink, veiling him, swallowing him, eating the light of day. A ring of sunny hazel hugged the middle of each irisㅡtwo tiny rays of humanityㅡand as she looked they filled with tears.

Please, he begged, just do it.

But she didn't.

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First, I'd like to give a shout out to knightsweeties on tumblr for the physical appearance of human form Plagg and human form Tikki. Besides the whole 'ghostly spirits' part heheh. Other than the fact that they behave very much like ghosts here, physically, I've imagined them to look almost exactly like her drawings of them. Check out her art at tagged/human!kwami-au. :) Thanks to her!

Second, this is gonna be kind of a long story. Yes I will delve more into their past and how they met and WHAT exactly happened that day. Cause I know y'all are wondering what the FUcking fuck Adrien did on his first day as Chat Noir to warrant Ladybug almost killing him… ;) ;) ;) Do not worry. Speaks will deliver. "WOAH, but that's out of character for both of them!" you say. "I totally agree!" I say back. You might want to just wait for a little further explanation on the whole 'spirits' thing before jumping to any conclusions. This story is going to be rather high on the drama/violence/sexual content scale, so if you're not into that you may want to check out now. Rating won't be bumped up till I find it necessary.

Also, eyyy, I'm a huge Plagg fan! He is kind of an asshole and a half in this fic but you might be surprised to hear he's actually not meant to be the antagonist. You'll understand him a little more later on. It's all part of the plot.

Till next time,

xoxo