Red and Blue make Purple

okay but i keep thinking ‘what if alya had ended up with the earrings?’

and i just imagine her and chat fangirling over themselves and each other so. hard. because HOLY SHIT THEY’RE SUPERHEROES HOW EFFING COOL IS THAT?! and their fights are a lot of miscommunications and pain and failure until they get used to each other because they both jump the gun so hard it fucks them up

and they totally think they’re invincible until they find out they’re not, rather painfully, and are forced to start using their noggins when they fight (which neither are all that great at but they manage, somehow)

marinette never gets her kwami-given confidence shot and is just this lonely shrinking violet for the longest time. her only friend is alya, who’s both a little more protective and a little more… dismissive? of marinette, because alya’s a totally badass heroine and marinette’s just a civilian.

but marinette low-key runs the ladyblog in honor of the heroine and for her best friend, who really totally wants to run it but just never seems to be in the right place at the right time. it’s one of hundreds, but it has a claim to fame in that it’s ladybug’s favorite (like alya’s going to let her best friend languish in obscurity forever; marinette just wants some peace and quiet)

and then marinette figures out ladybug’s identity around the pharaoh, because ladybug drops her history book and marinette picks it up, going ‘…hunh’ and takes it to alya, thinking alya might find it interesting

and alya goes, ‘oh hey you found my history book, thanks!’

and marinette’s just, ‘but wait i don’t think it’s yours! ladybug dro-’

‘no, look, see? i wrote my name on the back cover.’

why the hell did ladybug have your textbook, marinette wonders for a while before the disappearances and other random shit start to click, then, oh my god my best friend is ladybug

the secret identity thing is only kept up between the two heroes because they’re both HUGE NERDS who are waaaaaay too happy to be ~superheroes~ with ~secret identities~ (which falls through eventually, possibly around evillustrator when ladybug explains, a little desperately, that her best friend is in Danger and she needs chat’s help right now)

marinette only discovers her own grit around dark blade, remaining the ‘timid one’ right up until it looks like chloe’s going to become the class president

marinette’s been sharing a class with chloe for four damn years

like hell is she going to let her into a position of (further) power

so marinette starts tapping into her previously untapped leadership potential and immediately starts to kick pseudo-political ass and keeps their class safe against dark blade

and when alya and adrien ~mysteriously reappear~ (seriously she doesn’t know where adrien came from but could alya be a little more subtle about the whole ‘being ladybug’ thing??? seriously, those excuses are cringe-worthy), she delivers her heartwarming, honest speech and adrien’s heart kind of trips over itself

and then she starts pulling her weight and dealing with being a student leader and standing up to chloe (now that she knows she can) and adrien keeps witnessing these little flashes of the kind, confident, powerful personality she’s always kept under a giant layer of self-doubt

and he falls

hard

and then alya gets to hit her head repeatedly over how in love and how oblivious her two best friends are

(chat and alyabug aren’t really interested in one another romantically beyond ‘that attractive member of the opposite sex is wearing a skintight costume. nice.’ and their flirting is both mutual and never ever gets serious on either side, because they’re too similar and too different in all the wrong ways for romance, but build a really strong platonic relationship together.)

and then evillustrator happens and chat runs through what he’s gonna say like a million times because yeah marinette’s cute as hell and also his crush, but he’s got a mask now. he can totally talk to her without a stutter.

totally

and he meets her and doesn’t stutter at all! and he kisses her hand like a gentleman and invites her to be a hero for a day and he thinks he’s doing pretty well, and then she

she pushes him away with a boop to his nose

she smirks at him, tells him, ‘you’re lucky i’m in the mood to cooperate, casanova’

(because she doesn’t have to pretend to be a helpless, swooning citizen in this verse, and can just let her inner ladybug fly free)

and chat goes from ‘oh no she’s cute’ to ’holy fucking shit’

and then she keeps it up through the episode (acting like she normally does in a canon ep) and by the end of it chat’s practically on the verge of proposing

and alya just kind of suffers through chat’s hearteyes with good-natured amusement, and is completely unsurprised with adrien’s complete and utter inability to form a coherent sentence around marinette ever again

i just need alya and adrien being bros and superhero-fan bffs and marinette figuring out how to stand up for herself without tikki or the suit okay

i need it