Title: Quis Custōdiet Ipsōs Custōdēs?
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Mature
Length: 1.7K
Content notes: Major character death.
Author notes: The mourning, after.
Summary: An art installation in several pieces rings the fountain in the center of Place des Vosges, just west of the statue The Heroes of Paris, installed a few years earlier.
Four bronze sculptures ring the fountain in Place des Vosges. Each depicts the same two figures, a tall boy with a ring on his right hand and a smaller girl with cabochon earrings on her ears, both with gymnasts' muscles and each with a beaded bracelet on one wrist. The sculpture on the west side, nearest the carousel, is the only one in which the two figures are separated by any distance: a game of tag, perhaps, or keep-away, where he is chasing her and she is watching him as she runs, and both are laughing and carefree and—these sculptures are life-size; she is one point five meters tall, he is a head and a half taller—so, so small.
The Ladyblogger caught the moment on video: Ladybug, alone, seated on the edge of a rooftop with both feet dangling wearily. This clip is from minutes after the fourth battle she and Chat Noir fought that day, years into their counter-terrorist war, and it shows in the way her back slumps, in the way she needs her hands to bear the weight of her drooping head.
A shout, which some claim the Ladyblog transcript originally attributed to Adrien Agreste, though Alya Césaire has always insisted the transcript always said Chat Noir: "Ladybug, behind you!"
Ladybug reacts instantly: leaping up, seizing the Chat Noir lookalike by the wrist, flinging him hard enough he's three blocks away when he evaporates in a burst of blue-black. When the camera pans back to Ladybug, she's falling, her right arm gray to the elbow—to the shoulder when she hits the pavement, shattering the gray limb to dust.
"Alya, tell—" Ladybug manages to say before the destruction reaches her throat. Her lips keep moving, noiseless. In the next fraction of a second, she catches sight of someone offscreen; her frantic gaze softens, then—the green flash is only in one frame—her eyes widen. Her earrings survive, vivid red and black, and in the few heartbeats before Chat Noir plucks the first from her ear—an act that crumbles all the cinders of her body to ash—it's clear that she died smiling.
To the south of the fountain, they're dancing. She's leading, a rose tucked into her pigtail to match the one behind his ear, wearing block-heel boots to his evening flats and a crisply tailored suit to his gown, its long bronze skirt flowing outward like silk: they are immortalized mid-twirl, in the midst of a dance so fast-paced and demanding that they must know and trust their own bodies and trained strength perfectly and each other's better. Both are gazing outward, smiling, confident and graceful and—neither ever learned, really, how to dance—so, so young.
A security camera in the Agreste mansion provided visuals, and Adrien Agreste's voicemail box provided audio: Chat Noir—it is unmistakably he, though his armor is purple laced with gold and has neither ears nor tail, and though his eyes are an ordinary human sort of green—Chat Noir storms into the atelier and swings his staff at Gabriel Agreste's head, with enough force to be skull-shattering if blue-violet light did not flare around Agreste, granting the man another twenty-five centimeters of height and Shadowmoth's fan and cane.
The body of the cane is the sheath of a sword. Chat Noir's eyes track the flung sheath; it visibly surprises him to find the blade between his ribs.
Green glimmers on the viewer's screen, somewhere between cyan and lime, as though it were the afterimage of something between crimson and magenta: a flung round object whirling around Shadowmoth; a cord binding him too tightly to move; a girl, smaller than most twelve-year-olds, plucking both brooches from Shadowmoth's neck, then dropping to her knees beside her partner on the floor. Save for the brooches, which carry themselves to Chat Noir's side and drop themselves into his pocket as though brought by an unseen hand, and the weapons and armor that dissolved when the jewelry was removed, none of these exist in the footage. It is only that these all look as if they were there—as if one has been staring so long at a vivid presence that one's mind, overstimulated, tricks one into perceiving the absence of its absence.
Chat Noir rises, bracing himself on his staff, and types something on Agreste's keyboard. He turns, his armor fading back to the familiar black cat theme in a flare of pink light, and pries at one side of the gold portrait on the wall two steps away; it swings outward, and a safe hidden behind it pops open without his touching the safe or its keypad at all. An old leather-bound book is far from the only item in the safe, but it's the only one he takes, leaving the safe open for whoever might investigate. He begins to hobble towards the foyer door, blood dripping.
The timestamps on both files say that the audio begins here: the voice of Nathalie Sancoeur saying "Adrien, you are to find somewhere to hide at once." Though she means to sound commanding, she doesn't have the volume, nor the calm. "Outside of Paris, if possible."
"Tell him why," says a voice familiar from news clips. A waveform view of this audio shows only a flat line in the moments corresponding to Ladybug's words; the afterimage has gone.
"Because Chat Noir is having a tantrum," snaps Agreste: here, waveform view shows, the volume of the word caprice—'wish' as much as 'tantrum', implying impulsive childish whims—spikes the amplitude. "Adrien, he means to murder you."
The afterimage reappears, as though carrying Sancoeur in a fireman's lift; Sancoeur thuds onto the floor, bound just as Agreste is in cord that isn't truly there, her phone landing screen down until the afterimage flips it, leaving it out of reach. "If I say you're lying," asks Ladybug, "who will he believe?"
Chat Noir's face might as well be a porcelain mask for all the emotion he shows. "You're only being permitted to warn him," he says in tones of pleasant reminder punctuated by strained breathing, "because my lady believes he deserves to know why he's going to die."
"You'll die first," Agreste says. "He only needs to stay out of your reach for another twenty minutes."
Chat Noir shakes his head and keeps moving.
"Is this about his mother?" asks Ladybug. Agreste snarls wordlessly. "Who did you mean to kill in order to resurrect your wife, Hawkmoth?" she asks. "Was it Nathalie? Was it Adrien?"
Chat Noir is almost in the foyer, now, but he turns back. "Was it?" he asks.
"Do you think your son would do less for his beloved," wonders Ladybug, "than you have done for yours?"
"At least," Chat Noir adds, "the one paying the worst of my price is me."
The foyer door bangs closed. The voicemail, before it runs out of time, records only room tone and one of the thumps of Gabriel Agreste failing to rise.
To the north of the fountain, they're sleeping, sitting up and leaning on each other, her head on his shoulder, his nose in her hair. Both are barefoot, wearing pajama pants and T-shirts, and both are relaxed and contented and—there is no shortage of social media posts and breaking news reports commenting on the oddity and the inconvenience of superhero response time of more than five minutes—so, so worn.
Eyewitness reports say Sabine Cheng and Tom Dupain were sobbing over the collapsed Adrien Agreste as they would if he were their own dying child. Eyewitness reports say Alya Césaire and Nino Lahiffe were holding his hands at the end. One witness, uncorroborated, says she saw him carrying a large brown book, that he dropped when he fell. Another, equally unsupported, claims to have seen him hand some small objects to Césaire, or possibly to Lahiffe, before Césaire vanished into Tom & Sabine's bakery and before Lahiffe crossed the street to Place des Vosges and began to punch his fingers bloody on the pedestal of the statue The Heroes of Paris.
The only documentation is the audio notes of the emergency response team, which were never released to the public, and the death certificate, which of course identifies the deceased and gives his date and time of death, not its cause.
The sculpture on the east side of the fountain is seated figures, pressed together from shoulder to knee. Like their selves to the west, they are wearing everyday outfits, though unlike those to the west, these are drawn from her designs, not their wardrobes. They each have a crochet hook in one hand and a strand of yarn in the other; she's guiding him through the magic ring technique to begin a project.
This is the place at which children who have lost their parents find themselves, and where the trail ends when an abusive parent or significant other is seeking their escaping victim. Lonely people touch the four-leaf-clover bead on his bracelet for comfort; blocked artists touch the bell on her bracelet for inspiration, though explaining the problem out loud to the pair is often enough. Her visible earring shines with the prayers of people seeking Paris's guardians' blessings, as does his ring with the imprecations of people seeking Paris's guardians' curses on their enemies. Visions of the small girl in red and the tall boy in black appear all through the city, but on the rare occasions when someone records their green and red afterimages, it's here.
The statue The Heroes of Paris predates this set of sculptures by a few years. The six figures among the north, south, and west parts of the art installation Quis Custōdiet Ipsōs Custōdēs? all face away from The Heroes of Paris, as though they were living without concern for the superheroes' responsibilities or for the dangers the heroes guard against. In the eastern part, however, though both figures are intent on their creative efforts and each other, both still have one eye on the bronze figures of Ladybug leaping into action and Chat Noir ready to spring after her.
Who, after all, guards the guardians? Who watches the watchers, save only the watchers themselves, courageous and determined and—nothing and no one has infinite resilience—so, so young?
Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug
Rating: Mature
Length: 1.7K
Content notes: Major character death.
Author notes: The mourning, after.
Summary: An art installation in several pieces rings the fountain in the center of Place des Vosges, just west of the statue The Heroes of Paris, installed a few years earlier.
Four bronze sculptures ring the fountain in Place des Vosges. Each depicts the same two figures, a tall boy with a ring on his right hand and a smaller girl with cabochon earrings on her ears, both with gymnasts' muscles and each with a beaded bracelet on one wrist. The sculpture on the west side, nearest the carousel, is the only one in which the two figures are separated by any distance: a game of tag, perhaps, or keep-away, where he is chasing her and she is watching him as she runs, and both are laughing and carefree and—these sculptures are life-size; she is one point five meters tall, he is a head and a half taller—so, so small.
The Ladyblogger caught the moment on video: Ladybug, alone, seated on the edge of a rooftop with both feet dangling wearily. This clip is from minutes after the fourth battle she and Chat Noir fought that day, years into their counter-terrorist war, and it shows in the way her back slumps, in the way she needs her hands to bear the weight of her drooping head.
A shout, which some claim the Ladyblog transcript originally attributed to Adrien Agreste, though Alya Césaire has always insisted the transcript always said Chat Noir: "Ladybug, behind you!"
Ladybug reacts instantly: leaping up, seizing the Chat Noir lookalike by the wrist, flinging him hard enough he's three blocks away when he evaporates in a burst of blue-black. When the camera pans back to Ladybug, she's falling, her right arm gray to the elbow—to the shoulder when she hits the pavement, shattering the gray limb to dust.
"Alya, tell—" Ladybug manages to say before the destruction reaches her throat. Her lips keep moving, noiseless. In the next fraction of a second, she catches sight of someone offscreen; her frantic gaze softens, then—the green flash is only in one frame—her eyes widen. Her earrings survive, vivid red and black, and in the few heartbeats before Chat Noir plucks the first from her ear—an act that crumbles all the cinders of her body to ash—it's clear that she died smiling.
To the south of the fountain, they're dancing. She's leading, a rose tucked into her pigtail to match the one behind his ear, wearing block-heel boots to his evening flats and a crisply tailored suit to his gown, its long bronze skirt flowing outward like silk: they are immortalized mid-twirl, in the midst of a dance so fast-paced and demanding that they must know and trust their own bodies and trained strength perfectly and each other's better. Both are gazing outward, smiling, confident and graceful and—neither ever learned, really, how to dance—so, so young.
A security camera in the Agreste mansion provided visuals, and Adrien Agreste's voicemail box provided audio: Chat Noir—it is unmistakably he, though his armor is purple laced with gold and has neither ears nor tail, and though his eyes are an ordinary human sort of green—Chat Noir storms into the atelier and swings his staff at Gabriel Agreste's head, with enough force to be skull-shattering if blue-violet light did not flare around Agreste, granting the man another twenty-five centimeters of height and Shadowmoth's fan and cane.
The body of the cane is the sheath of a sword. Chat Noir's eyes track the flung sheath; it visibly surprises him to find the blade between his ribs.
Green glimmers on the viewer's screen, somewhere between cyan and lime, as though it were the afterimage of something between crimson and magenta: a flung round object whirling around Shadowmoth; a cord binding him too tightly to move; a girl, smaller than most twelve-year-olds, plucking both brooches from Shadowmoth's neck, then dropping to her knees beside her partner on the floor. Save for the brooches, which carry themselves to Chat Noir's side and drop themselves into his pocket as though brought by an unseen hand, and the weapons and armor that dissolved when the jewelry was removed, none of these exist in the footage. It is only that these all look as if they were there—as if one has been staring so long at a vivid presence that one's mind, overstimulated, tricks one into perceiving the absence of its absence.
Chat Noir rises, bracing himself on his staff, and types something on Agreste's keyboard. He turns, his armor fading back to the familiar black cat theme in a flare of pink light, and pries at one side of the gold portrait on the wall two steps away; it swings outward, and a safe hidden behind it pops open without his touching the safe or its keypad at all. An old leather-bound book is far from the only item in the safe, but it's the only one he takes, leaving the safe open for whoever might investigate. He begins to hobble towards the foyer door, blood dripping.
The timestamps on both files say that the audio begins here: the voice of Nathalie Sancoeur saying "Adrien, you are to find somewhere to hide at once." Though she means to sound commanding, she doesn't have the volume, nor the calm. "Outside of Paris, if possible."
"Tell him why," says a voice familiar from news clips. A waveform view of this audio shows only a flat line in the moments corresponding to Ladybug's words; the afterimage has gone.
"Because Chat Noir is having a tantrum," snaps Agreste: here, waveform view shows, the volume of the word caprice—'wish' as much as 'tantrum', implying impulsive childish whims—spikes the amplitude. "Adrien, he means to murder you."
The afterimage reappears, as though carrying Sancoeur in a fireman's lift; Sancoeur thuds onto the floor, bound just as Agreste is in cord that isn't truly there, her phone landing screen down until the afterimage flips it, leaving it out of reach. "If I say you're lying," asks Ladybug, "who will he believe?"
Chat Noir's face might as well be a porcelain mask for all the emotion he shows. "You're only being permitted to warn him," he says in tones of pleasant reminder punctuated by strained breathing, "because my lady believes he deserves to know why he's going to die."
"You'll die first," Agreste says. "He only needs to stay out of your reach for another twenty minutes."
Chat Noir shakes his head and keeps moving.
"Is this about his mother?" asks Ladybug. Agreste snarls wordlessly. "Who did you mean to kill in order to resurrect your wife, Hawkmoth?" she asks. "Was it Nathalie? Was it Adrien?"
Chat Noir is almost in the foyer, now, but he turns back. "Was it?" he asks.
"Do you think your son would do less for his beloved," wonders Ladybug, "than you have done for yours?"
"At least," Chat Noir adds, "the one paying the worst of my price is me."
The foyer door bangs closed. The voicemail, before it runs out of time, records only room tone and one of the thumps of Gabriel Agreste failing to rise.
To the north of the fountain, they're sleeping, sitting up and leaning on each other, her head on his shoulder, his nose in her hair. Both are barefoot, wearing pajama pants and T-shirts, and both are relaxed and contented and—there is no shortage of social media posts and breaking news reports commenting on the oddity and the inconvenience of superhero response time of more than five minutes—so, so worn.
Eyewitness reports say Sabine Cheng and Tom Dupain were sobbing over the collapsed Adrien Agreste as they would if he were their own dying child. Eyewitness reports say Alya Césaire and Nino Lahiffe were holding his hands at the end. One witness, uncorroborated, says she saw him carrying a large brown book, that he dropped when he fell. Another, equally unsupported, claims to have seen him hand some small objects to Césaire, or possibly to Lahiffe, before Césaire vanished into Tom & Sabine's bakery and before Lahiffe crossed the street to Place des Vosges and began to punch his fingers bloody on the pedestal of the statue The Heroes of Paris.
The only documentation is the audio notes of the emergency response team, which were never released to the public, and the death certificate, which of course identifies the deceased and gives his date and time of death, not its cause.
The sculpture on the east side of the fountain is seated figures, pressed together from shoulder to knee. Like their selves to the west, they are wearing everyday outfits, though unlike those to the west, these are drawn from her designs, not their wardrobes. They each have a crochet hook in one hand and a strand of yarn in the other; she's guiding him through the magic ring technique to begin a project.
This is the place at which children who have lost their parents find themselves, and where the trail ends when an abusive parent or significant other is seeking their escaping victim. Lonely people touch the four-leaf-clover bead on his bracelet for comfort; blocked artists touch the bell on her bracelet for inspiration, though explaining the problem out loud to the pair is often enough. Her visible earring shines with the prayers of people seeking Paris's guardians' blessings, as does his ring with the imprecations of people seeking Paris's guardians' curses on their enemies. Visions of the small girl in red and the tall boy in black appear all through the city, but on the rare occasions when someone records their green and red afterimages, it's here.
The statue The Heroes of Paris predates this set of sculptures by a few years. The six figures among the north, south, and west parts of the art installation Quis Custōdiet Ipsōs Custōdēs? all face away from The Heroes of Paris, as though they were living without concern for the superheroes' responsibilities or for the dangers the heroes guard against. In the eastern part, however, though both figures are intent on their creative efforts and each other, both still have one eye on the bronze figures of Ladybug leaping into action and Chat Noir ready to spring after her.
Who, after all, guards the guardians? Who watches the watchers, save only the watchers themselves, courageous and determined and—nothing and no one has infinite resilience—so, so young?
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