Unexpected Help.
Summary:
Marinette reflects on the past few months since Lila came to her school and threatened her. She didn't actually expect her to make good on her threats. As she lost all her old friends to Lila, she made a new one she never expected, who vows to bring down Lila Rossi once and for all.
As Marinette was rushing to get ready for school after sleeping past her alarm, the dread of going to school after a nice weekend sank in.
It had been several months. Several months since Lila Rossi had come to Collège Françoise Dupont and had since then made good on her promise of alienating Marinette from her friends. At first, Marinette hadn’t believed that it would be more than a few days before her classmates caught on to Lila’s lies. Unfortunately, she had vastly overestimated the people that were once her friends - not even the people that knew her since childhood believed her. Although some of her classmates were more hesitant to believe Lila than others, that didn’t change the fact that they didn’t stand up for her as the majority continued to ostracize her.
Nino and Kim - she couldn’t believe that out of everyone in the class, after all the years they were friends, after all the things she’s done for them, after all the days they spent with her at the bakery, that they would believe the things Lila’s claimed she’d done. They were supposed to know her better than everyone else in the class, even more so than Alya. Kim didn’t doubt Lila’s tales for a minute, despite Marinette’s warnings. Nino, on the other hand, was a bit more apprehensive and had more faith in Marinette at first. However, after Alya’s insistent belief that Lila never lied, he eventually sided with them. After all, his girlfriend’s a reporter and is insistent on checking sources. Therefore, she had to have checked Lila’s claims, right? Especially after posting Lila’s interviews on the Ladyblog? That’s why, despite Marinette’s pleas, he stopped believing her for good.
Alya, her former best friend (despite Alya still thinking they’re besties), was now Lila’s best friend, and refused to believe anything negative about her. At first, Marinette couldn’t blame Alya for believing Lila. After all, with how much Alya idolized Ladybug, she would also be excited to meet someone who claimed to be Ladybug’s best friend. But after all the lies about knowing Jagged Stone, and Prince Ali, among the many other celebrities she claimed to know, Marinette couldn’t believe that Alya continued to believe Lila when they could all be disproved by a simple Google search. In fact, she was surprised that Alya hadn’t asked Ladybug about Lila whenever Alya saw her after an akuma battle. For all the times Marinette was told to check her sources by Alya, she couldn’t be bothered to do the same? Even though Marinette laid out the groundwork for Alya to suspect something was off about Lila’s tales, her refusal to believe anything Marinette said, while chalking up her disbelief to simple jealousy, hurt her deeply. From someone who continued to claim to be her best friend, Alya stopped treating her like one long ago.
And Adrien, oh Adrien. Marinette’s obsession (albeit unhealthy) with him dwindled out two weeks after Lila came when he refused to do anything about her lies. She understood at first why he told her to take the high road, and that was because he was raised in an environment where he couldn’t speak out against injustice because of his father’s tight leash on him. However, Lila quickly manipulated the class into ostracizing Marinette, which took a toll on her mental health. A few months after Lila made good on her promise, she told Adrien that she couldn’t handle just taking the high road. He was quick to turn on her, telling her that as their Everyday Ladybug, she should understand that they can’t risk Lila’s akumatization by exposing her. He told her that she was supposed to be the better person and continued to say that him knowing the truth along with her should be enough. Marinette’s crush immediately extinguished, and she left Adrien standing alone in the locker room with tears streaming down her face as she felt Tikki patting her consolingly through her purse. When she came back to school the next day, the class assumed that Marinette refusing to speak to Adrien was her way of saying that Lila deserved to be with him instead.
