Overload

The first time Marinette uses a fake ID- the first time she actively lies to the medical establishment- her palms are sweating the entire time. They're gonna realize that I'm not a man, she thinks, (bad) they're gonna realize I am still a minor (worse!)

But Marinette is nothing if not an excellent crafter (an excellent forger and a compulsive liar,) or maybe adults everywhere are less competent than they seem at first glance (God knows she's learned the hard way to never trust anyone working in middle school.) Regardless, the nurse hands her her ID with a nod, and Marino can go on his merry way to get his blood pumped out.

"You can come back in two months," the doctor smiles at her once the procedure is done. "It would have been three if you'd been a woman."

It would have been none, had they realized she's years away from being eighteen; but they didn't, and so Marinette is already planning on the next ID she'll forge, so she can come back in one.

Generally speaking, Parisians prefer Ladybug to Chat Noir.

The most common reason people give for this is that, of course, there can be no akuma defeat without Ladybug. Chat Noir's role can be filled in by any other hero; Ladybug, however, is the only one who can purify evil and fix all damages.

The reason no one will admit, however, is thus: Chat Noir is destruction incarnate, and destruction is a terrifying thing.

How could it be otherwise? He brings rot to everything he touches. He's all fangs and claws and sharp edges, a predator in black made to hide in the night. Chat Noir is dangerous, and Parisians are aware of it.

The day Marinette ends up hunched over her sink at three in the morning, nose bleeding and bleeding in a flood that doesn't seem to stop, she realizes a very simple thing:

Creation is not a gentle thing, either.

Tikki says a lot of things Marinette processes more or less accurately, but it really boils down to this: the power of Creation is one that needs an outlet. A cut of her fingers, a twisted ankle- none of these will bother her ever again until she renounces her Miraculous, for her body will mend itself nearly instantly in response.

But if that power does not have any wound to heal, well. It finds other ways out of her body.

"You're lucky," Tikki tells her when finally, finally her nosebleed stops (oh God, her sink looks like a crime scene) "an overproduction of blood is easy to deal with. I've seen much harsher symptoms. One of my ladybugs had her ribs overgrow and curl inward until they pierced her lungs!"

What she means by that is it could be much worse. It's going to be okay! But what Marinette hears is: you need to give this power an outlet or you WILL suffer from it.

Marinette... is not proud of how she reacts to that.

Frequent blood donations is probably the safest and most reliable way to deal with her Miraculous issues. At the very least, it's a lot more discreet than her... initial solution. Despite everything, Marinette is sensitive to pain- and while she can absolutely deal with it for the greater good, being loud means getting attention and she does not want her parents to pick up on her problems.

(Her dad barged into her room once, alarmed by her cries. Thankfully, she'd managed to shoo him away convincingly enough. She doesn't think he'd noticed the hand she'd kept behind her back. Once he'd left, she'd cleaned her hammer throughoutly, and let the water from the faucet drown the sound of her own bones shattering as she-)

"Pound it!" Chat Noir's fist meets her own. If she focuses really, really hard- she can feel something under his leather gloves, the echoes of his cataclysm running through his suit.

Could he help her, she wonders? Their Miraculous are supposed to be complementary. Could he stops the ravenous creation festering in her chest, if she stayed by his side? If she got his claws on her throat, raking deep trenches in her flesh? If she got him to cataclysm her, force ruination through her veins until some sort of balance settles in her bones-

She does not ask. She remembers a Moon split in half- she knows he is the only person in this world who could ever hurt her in any sort of meaningful way.