you were human

The new Miraculous ep gave me Ideas and I always love a good 'existential crisis no plot' fic, so here you go. Yes, we're naming Sentibug 'Bridgette'. This episode wrote the fics itself, of course I'm going to get on the opportunity that presented itself.

Sentimonsters, apparently, live for as long as Mayura doesn't take their feather away from them. 

It's a slip of luck that Chat Noir tackles her just as she tries to unmake the fake Ladybug. She goes down, he nearly takes the miraculous from her, and then Hawkmoth arrives.

Sentibug doesn't disappear, even hours after the battle. 

“I feel like I'm going to, anytime,” she says, huddled in an alley with both of them, away from prying eyes. 

“Even so, you still need someplace to stay,” Ladybug says. She glances at Chat Noir, thinking. After a while, she nods to herself and says, “Follow me, both of you.”

-

The trip to the Guardian’s house consists of Ladybug hiding and Chat Noir turning away, and then both her and the fake Ladybug - Sentibug, Chat’s nicknamed her in his head, but that doesn't seem very nice of a nickname - enter the house, detransformed so as no one who accidentally sees questions why Ladybug is entering a random house . A few minutes later, Ladybug comes back and tells him he can go in. 

She doesn't stay. Her work here is done and she's only brought him here because she'd thought it was finally time for him to know about the Guardian, and where Sentibug is hiding. 

He's not at all surprised it's his Chinese tutor. 

He's been hiding for years, he says, and Chat sees why this is the best place for Sentibug to hide. They can't have two Ladybugs running around, and they can't just drag her someplace else and have her assimilate to daily life without questions being asked. But Master Fu has been doing this for years. He'll know what to do. 

“Mayura can take away her amuk anytime,” Chat says. 

“I know,” Master Fu says. “We'll try to find a way around that.”

“I don't really mind,” Sentibug says. 

Chat turns to her. She looks so much like Ladybug that it's actually jarring. She looks real. Alive. 

“Don't you want to stay alive?” Chat asks. 

“I haven't been alive for very long, I don't… have much to say about it,” she says, and shrugs. “But thank you for the concern.”

Master Fu tells him he can visit anytime, if he makes sure no one follows him. He plans to. He just hopes he doesn't visit to the news that she's gone. 

-

Adrien’s schedule doesn't have a lot of time for leisure, so he visits after patrol. Ladybug has the same idea, apparently, so they work out a schedule to avoid accidentally running into each other's civilian selves. 

Sentibug seems to be adjusting to freedom and being alive well, although then again, she's only had a few hours of being controlled when she was called into being. At most, she's confused about a lot of what’s around her; she knows about Mayura and Hawkmoth and the miraculouses and a few other things, but outside of that, her knowledge is foggy. She’s catching up scary fast, though. 

She’s always excited to talk about what she’s done for the day, whenever one of them visits. She talks about the simplest things, but Adrien’s chest hurts for her anyway. I saw a kid riding a bike today, she’d say. I only have a faint idea about bikes. I’ve never really seen one before, and I just realized that then. I want to try one. 

Or sometimes, she’d say, The birds visited again. It’s so weird to think I know about them but have only seen a few, you know? And they’re so colorful and vibrant and loud up close. 

Once, she’d said, I saw a black cat on the street today, it was cute. Like Plagg. Plagg had asked her if she’d offered it camembert, and she’d asked if she should have. Adrien had to tell her no. 

He’s seen that spark of curiosity in her eyes before. He sees it in the mirror everyday. He doesn’t think about this too hard because then he starts thinking again about what if, one day, he visits and she’s not there at all. What if Mayura uses her miraculous again and unmakes her? He doesn’t even know why she’s still here. Master Fu had thought it was simply because Mayura hadn’t had time to get to it, or is trying to plan to use this to her advantage, but has to take the tower charm again.

He looks at her and at her sheer delight of just being and thinks he’s absolutely terrified for her. 

He talks to Ladybug about it, and she’s silent for a moment. 

“Me too, Chaton,” she says. “She’s alive. She’s very alive, but maybe we’re the only people who think that.”

He looks out over the city, asleep and peaceful. “That’s unfair.”

“Most things are,” she says. “We can try to take Mayura’s miraculous from her next time she shows up, though. We unmask who she is and we keep little Bugette alive.”

He nods. 

-

Bugette (as Ladybug doesn’t like calling her Sentibug, although Bugette herself doesn’t mind) doesn’t have her mask and her suit the next time he visits. He almost doesn’t recognize her, stomach dropping to his feet when he sees that it’s only Master Fu in the house, with a girl he thinks to be his niece or granddaughter or something, but then she laughs and says, “It’s just me, silly.”

It’s her. Apparently, she can just transform out of her costume on command. Which, he supposes makes sense because she was created as Ladybug but without a kwami. She probably is just what makes up Ladybug’s superpowers, without the civilian self and everything.

Adrien cannot see her face. 

He knows that she’s wearing her hair down. He knows she’s in a soft white button-up and black pajamas. He knows that she’s smiling at him. But when he looks away, he forgets, exactly, the shade of her eyes, and the curve of her lips, and whether she has dimples or freckles or beauty marks on her face. He can’t recall the color of her hair even though his logic tells him, when he looks back, that duh, of course it’s dark, she looks like Ladybug. 

He recognizes her when he’s looking at her. And then he blinks or turns away, and she’s just a blur in his memory again.

“She is Ladybug, in essence,” Master Fu says. “In a sense. Your powers make sure that no one recognizes you, either by condensing you into merely an idea or convincing others that you must be mistaken, there is this and that difference.”

“The upside is,” Bugette says. “If anyone comes looking for me - if they have to, that is - they’re not going to find me easily.”

“If you transformed back into Ladybug, would I be able to see you?” Adrien asks.

“I think so,” Bugette says. “I think it’s funny - that I can get out of the costume but still keep everything. I nearly broke a rail by kicking it today.”

Adrien gives her a look of concern. She laughs.

“It’s okay, I was testing things out,” she says. “I got my answer.”

Adrien wants to ask her if she looks anything like Ladybug. He doesn’t. 

She asks about his photoshoot today, since she’d gotten wind of it from some tweets by fans who’d seen him at the park. He tells her about it, somehow enjoying it by how enamored she looks at how modelling works. It’s a tiring life of schedules and discipline but he can’t begrudge her the novelty of it. She tells him of her adventures figuring out exactly how she works outside of the costume, and they have a good laugh about it. 

Before he leaves, she tells him, excitedly, that she’s chosen a name.

Bridgette, she says. It sounds like Bugette, but it’s less obvious. 

He smiles. Don’t name a stray or you’ll get attached, his father had once told him when he’d tried to take one home. Bridgette isn’t a stray - no, far from it, she’s a whole person, but this is what Adrien is reminded of. Names create bonds, attachments, states importance. It humanizes and legitimizes, the way people say names to make a concept more concrete and get people to care because it’s not just a blur of an idea floating around. 

Her name is Bridgette. Adrien smiles thinly as that anxiety in his stomach gets worse.

-

Bridgette is smart. Scary smart. She’s also an valuable ally in a pinch.

During a rather hard battle where the akuma just keeps multiplying with every hit Ladybug and Chat Noir deal it, they end up detransforming twice and have to hide and recharge. Adrien keeps his eyes to the sky and his ears alert while Plagg eats, exhausted but not complaining. The akuma and its copies are still running wild, and he and Ladybug are stuck on opposite sides of a dumpster because it was the only place they could reach before their time ran out. 

“Do you think we should get help?” he asks, “Roi Singe?”

“Good idea,” she says. “If we can confuse it on its own game, we might get it to slip up.”

“That’s better than nothing,” he says. He hears noises above them. “M’lady…”

“Damn it,” Ladybug says. He hears her move, then - 

There’s a red blur above them, something small and red pinging around and looping over and under itself, forming a net over the gap of the buildings on either side of them, successfully making sure that if anyone jumps over where they are, they’d just bounce back up. Another red blur follows, this time familiar, and it grabs the yoyo and kicks it, sending it to the side to create another net, still connected to the last one.

“Bridgette,” Chat says.

“She’s making a net,” Ladybug says. “She won’t have to hit them, she just has to catch all of them.”

“How’s she going to tell apart who’s the real one?” Chat asks.

“I don’t know, but we better get out there and help her.”

Bridgette does end up rounding a sizeable portion of the clones. The original isn’t with them but it’s alright, because it cuts down on the number of clones chasing after Ladybug and Chat Noir, and Ladybug get to call on Roi Singe to scramble the Gremlin’s powers (it’s not actually called that but Chat thinks it’s funny, calling it Gremlin). Chat breaks the watch on his hand and Bridgette hides before Roi Singe can notice something’s not right.

-

“Lucky you,” Ladybug says, when they’ve just finished patrol and are hanging out with Bridgette on a dark bridge by the Sienne. “You get to keep the gymnastics.”

“Do you not?” Bridgette asks.

Ladybug just sighs, and Bridgette laughs. 

“Good thing no one actually knows what you look like,” Chat says. “Otherwise, people would probably think you are Ladybug.”

“Or just a really athletic kid,” Bridgette says. “I can say I was inspired by her, so much so that I dyed my hair or something. Or changed my hairstyle, trained and everything. I don’t think anyone would question it much. You’re Paris’ heroes, after all.”

Chat considers this. He’s never really thought of it like that, since when he thinks about people getting inspired by them to be everyday heroes, he thinks about Chloe’s first run as Queen Bee and Hibou Noir. Maybe that’s just because those are the only incidents that have warranted him actually being present for them. Real heroes didn’t advertise their presence on posters. They just moved.

“Does it bother you?” Ladybug asks. “That no one recognizes who you are?”

Bridgette thinks it over. “No, not really.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I mean, my face doesn’t really belong to me. My body doesn’t belong to me. It’s mine, but not really. I think I’m glad enough to have a physical form at all.”

Chat taps his fingers on the bridge, nervous energy making him jittery. 

Ladybug quiets. After a while, she says. “You didn’t ask to look like me,” she says, “You didn’t ask to be made as a copy of me at all. I don’t blame you, you know.”

“Thanks,” Bridgette says. She starts to say something, and then hesitates. “Do you - do you recognize me?”

Ladybug turns to her, and Chat Noir waits.

“No,” she says, and she doesn’t sound like she’s lying. 

-

Two months pass and Bridgette is fine. Three months pass and Bridgette is fine. 

Adrien should be happy. Ecstatic, even, that his friend is alright and is living her life, but he’s had too many nightmares of Master Fu’s empty house and her disappearing right before his eyes that he finds his hands shaking at times when he doesn’t want them to be. He wants to be happy. He wants to be glad for her that she’s finding out how ice cream and cake taste, how much fun flying a kite is,but his brain thinks: that could all be gone tomorrow. 

He doesn’t mean to. He really doesn’t. He likes talking to Bridgette, and he’s never been more glad that someone actually understands how it feels like to be a kid his age not knowing how this and that works when it should be normal to know so, but there’s an anxiety that creeps up on him that makes him want to puke everytime he thinks about it.

He doesn’t know what Mayura is planning. He doesn’t know why she hasn’t shown up in the past few months either.

It’s on a whim when he asks Bridgette about it. He needs to know, because he can’t wait every second of the day wondering if she’s going to die because they don’t know where Mayura is and she’s made a whole person but probably doesn’t think so and will kill her with a snap of her fingers. 

Bridgette frowns down at the embroidery she’s doing, sitting on the back porch of Master Fu’s house. It’s overlooking the river. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “I know she could whisper into my head and everything, but when I was...created, she was already transformed. I never saw her detransform. Outside of telling me what to do at times, I never learned anything about her.”

He nods. That would make sense. And if Bridgette had seen Mayura detransform, she probably would have already told them, not to mention Chat and Ladybug would likely have seen it too, given the fight on the building. 

“Adrien?”

Adrien snaps out of his thoughts. He forces a smile, perfect for a magazine. “Yeah?”

“I don’t mind, you know,” she says. “Knowing that Mayura could unmake me any day.”

Adrien’s smile falters. He tries to keep it on, but it slips, until his stomach is roiling and his hands are shaking again. 

“Why?” he asks. “You’re alive, Bridgette. Why don’t you mind?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t really feel real, I guess. Not to me.”

Adrien doesn’t tell her that sometimes, so does he - he doesn’t feel real to himself. He feels like a paper doll being dressed up and propped up this way and that by his father, kept in a little chest when he’s not in use, and being let out when he is. He doesn’t tell her being Chat Noir and going to school and going around his father’s back is the most alive and real he’s ever felt. 

Instead he just smiles at her, the kindest he can. “You’re real, Bridgette,” he says. “Just like the rest of us.”

-

“What makes a person real?” Bridgette asks . They’re both standing in line for a snack at the Dupain-Cheng bakery - out of pure coincidence, funnily enough, as she’d been sent to get snacks by Master Fu and Adrien was with his classmates discussing a group project and they’d decided it would be nice to eat while doing so; Marinette had some sketches she needed to get from her house anyway - he’d noticed her and volunteered to get everyone’s orders. 

Adrien thinks about the question for a moment. “Existing?”

“Wouldn’t that make every fictional character a real person, then? They certainly exist.”

“Ah, true,” he says. “Existing like us, I guess.”

She hums, pondering. “So, dogs and cats?”

“To be fair, I feel like some animals act more like people than people.”

She laughs.

“I guess - I don’t know. A certain level of awareness, I guess,” he says. “I would say ‘human awareness’, but we’d be back to asking what makes a man.”

Bridgette pretends to be lifting a chicken and says, mindfully keeping her voice low, “Behold, a man!”

Adrien snickers. 

“I guess I get what you mean,” Bridgette says. It’s been seven months since she’s been created. She’s read book after book, watched show after show, and biked around Paris to see everything she can and she’s no less excited than when she first started. Adrien’’s glad, but that worry still looms over him. 

He needs to find Mayura. He needs to take her miraculous away from her and make sure she doesn’t do anything to Bridgette.

“What if you’re just a creature of pure thought?” she asks. “What if you were just a tool created with a purpose?”

“That depends, I think,” he says. 

“Why?”

“You have your own thoughts, don’t you?” he asks.

“I do...have sentience, yes, but isn’t that in the name, sentimon - ” she cuts off, careful not to be specific in case anyone is eavesdropping for whatever reason. “Emotions - attachments given sentience? Pure thought given form?”

Adrien suddenly thinks of every sentimonster they’ve faced, little in the number they may yet be. He feels a little sick. “Goodness, Bridg.”

“I think about it a lot, sometimes,” she says. “I’m not really any different from them.”

“Of course you are.”

“Because you’ve personally assigned importance to me, that’s how friendship and connections work, but think about it,” she says. “Every single one of...us...is created with a purpose. You can say I couldn’t help but follow orders, but so did the rest of them. They couldn’t have chosen what they were created for.”

Adrien’s expression turns pinched as guilt wells up in his chest. 

“What marks the difference between the ‘monster’ and the ‘person’ from our lot?” she asks. To anyone else, they’re just two kids pretending at philosophy. “We’re all following orders. We don’t look the same, of course, but - we’re made of the same stuff, aren’t we? So what makes me different from them?”

“I think…” Adrien says, trying to gather his thoughts. “I think you were designed to be a person, for starts.”

“Oh, true,” Bridgette says. “That does need to be factored into it, doesn’t it?” She glances at him, and puts a hand to her mouth. “Oh, I’m...sorry, I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable. I genuinely was just curious.”

“S’okay,” he says. “I don’t mind. You do have some points.”

“I just, you know. I overthink,” she says, scratching her cheek. The person at the counter walks away with their order. The line moves forward. 

“Do you know her?” Alya asks him later when he’s come back to their table with a platter full of pastries.

“Yeah,” Adrien says, giving Bridgette a glance as she walks up the counter. Marinette comes downstairs right as she does, and she smiles when they see each other. She must be a frequent customer. “I see her here sometimes.”

-

“Hey, Ladybug?” Chat Noir asks. They’re at the Eiffel Tower tonight. It’s a slow night - usually is, really, but they patrol just to be safe anyway. “What makes a person real?”

“Did Bridgette ask you that?”

He nods. “Yeah,” he says.

Ladybug sighs, leaning back on her hands. She doesn’t answer for a long while don’t know,” she says. “God, I don’t know. I - I worry about her so much these days. I’m glad she appears to be generally happy and curious. I can’t imagine how it’s like to constantly have to deal with the realization that you can just - just disappear at any time, but she lives through it so well.” She pauses. “Tough girl.”

“Yeah,” he says. “I wish we knew where Mayura was.”

“Me too,” she says. “Why do you think she hasn’t done anything yet?”

He shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s plotting, or just busy, but I don’t know what villains get up to when they’re not terrorizing people.” Or maybe she’s trying to think of a way to use Bridgette against them. Maybe she already is, but Chat doesn’t like thinking about that. 

“Did she seem a little...ill to you, last time?” Ladybug asks.

“A little, yeah,” Chat says. “I could hear her coughing, sometimes.” He points up to his leather ears, more sensitive than his human ones. “Do you think she’s sick?”

“She could be,” Ladybug says. “And through some sort of luck she’s not using her miraculous because she’s too sick.”

Chat feels some sick sense of triumph curl in his chest. He remembers Mayura holding out a hand to get rid of Bridgette, and he’d tackled her just in time. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t have one of the few close friends he has now, who talks about existence and is excited over the smallest things with him and is overall just a ray of sunshine despite the guillotine over her head. 

Still, he tamps the feeling down. It doesn’t quite go away.

It gives him an idea, though. “...do you think we could look into hospital records?”

“That’s illegal, I think,” she says.

“Even for an investigation for a villain who terrorizes Paris?” he asks. 

“I think so,” Ladybug says. She sighs again and pushes some of her hair away from her face. “I know you worry about her, Chat, and so do I, but we can’t incite mass panic by saying, hey, we know Mayura is sick. Anyone who is sick right now could be her! We’ll turn Paris against each other. I’m surprised they already haven’t.”

“I think everyone’s gotten used to the fact that the cops used to get thirty phone calls a day of people claiming that they are or have met Hawkmoth.”

Ladybug laughs.

“We’ll find a way to help her, okay?” she says, after her laughter fades.

“If Mayura uses her miraculous again, the first thing she could do is unmake Bridgette,” he says. 

Ladybug’s shoulders slump. “I know,” she says. “I know. I’ll try to ask Master Fu if there’s a way to permanently let an amuk stay in an object. But until then - ” She turns to him, and he can see the determination in her eyes. He knows Bridgette has been like a sister to her. “ - until then, we have to keep our heads up for her sake, okay?”

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, okay.”

They visit Bridgette again that night, in separate turns. Chat talks to her about how school has been and what it’s like, and she mentions being interested in attending one, and they go about their evening like they usually do. He goes home, he goes to bed, he tries not to think about the possibility of losing a friend anytime. 

He pushes the thought aside. Tomorrow, he can talk to Ladybug about her asking Master Fu about a way to keep Bridgette separate from Mayura. He can actually start doing something about his worry, and it’s about damn time that he does. He can try to find a way to sniff out Mayura without having to wait for her to show up again.

But tonight, he has to rest. He does. He falls asleep, and he dreams about people, and not-real-people, and wonders how he could ever tell any of them apart.