sunfoxfic
Hello, kind reader! This is my fic, as I'm sure you know. If you need a full description and list of tags, please go to the fic on AO3. Otherwise, enjoy! If you feel so inclined please do leave any comments or thanks over on the fic on AO3 or in my Tumblr askbox!
“Got any advice for me?” Elena asked as she pulled on her coat. “Ever interviewed a journalist?”
"Elena" is actually based on an OC of mine from a fantasy TV show I started to write. In the show, her name was Eleni, but I decided to choose something more French for this fic.
Her editor, Michel, only shrugged. “Any advice I could give you about interviewing a journalist would mean nothing against her. Just do the best you can — I know you got it in you.”
She nodded and took a breath, making sure she was bringing her phone and keys and, well, everything else.
“I’ll be off, then."
I couldn't tell you for certain, but I'm fairly certain I was watching Gilmore Girls at the time that I wrote this, and therefore Michel is named after Michel in Gilmore Girls.
People tend to think superheroes are infallible, and maybe some of them are. Rena Rouge, evidently, was not: she lived in a gated community specifically geared toward the elderly, and her nurse greeted Elena at the door.
“Come on in,” he said. “She’s set up in her office already.”
Elena nodded. “Thank you.”
The townhome was average, for the most part, other than superhero memorabilia up on the walls. A year ago, anyone walking in might have thought it was a remnant of a career well past its prime; now, it took on a new meaning, a meaning of love, of good memories.
Elena stopped to stare at a photo of Rena Rouge and Carapace. Based on their suits, the photo was from maybe the mid 2030’s, and Alya would have been in her mid-thirties.
“Are you ready?” the nurse asked. “Do you need a minute to prepare?”
Elena shook her head. “Let’s go.”
They made it the rest of the way down the hall. The nurse gently opened the door.
“Alya, the journalist is here to see you.”
When writing this, I almost made this the word "paraphernalia." I googled the definition and added the correct word, thank God, but this was almost very wrong.
“Send them in,” Elena heard, the voice quieter than she expected. Less smooth — Alya Césaire had made her mark in no small part from the way she crossed barriers with sheer confidence. A Black woman in the early-to-mid century who made it past so many hurdles — she’d been an inspiration to Elena for years.
She stepped into the room. The nurse didn’t come with.
The room was beige, and sparse, decorated with all the things you might expect an office to be decorated with. A few diplomas behind the desk, bookshelves upon bookshelves in the back, and more filing cabinets than Elena would know how to fill.
Alya sat at her desk, and nodded to the chair in front of it for Elena to sit.
She did.
This is set in a universe where in the late 21st century, the state of the world has gotten much better for people of color. I am very much holding out hope for this.
“Dr. Césaire,” Elena started. “It’s an honor to meet you. Truly.”
In her day, Alya had always been known for bright colors in her hair — the iconic red, of course, but she would choose a different, more distinct color every few years for some reason or another. A way to protest hair discrimination, a new look to match her dress for an event she’d been invited to, and occasionally she just wanted to change it up.
She would always go back to red, though.
Now her hair was back to its natural color, but rather than black, it had dulled into a gray. A beautiful gray, but gray nonetheless.
The wrinkles on her face were deep, the laugh lines deeper, but her eyes were as intelligent and sharp as ever.
Elena sat up straighter.
I don't know what Alya has her doctorate in, but I always loved the idea that she'd get it eventually. She seems like the type to retire into teaching journalism once she gets a little bit older.
“I’ve read a bit of your work,” she said. “You’re a good journalist, even if I think your take on the super-political situation in Canada is lacking in a bit of nuance. Of course, I’m biased, seeing as I was good friends with the superhero who trained Trident.”
Elena swallowed, aware that this woman had paved the way for her entire career, and that was before you considered the way she saved the city more times than Elena could count.
“Before we get into superhero stuff, we have the formalities.” She tapped her phone screen a few times before turning her attention back to Alya. “This conversation is being recorded, and everything we say is on the record. Is that understood?”
“I’ve said those words more times than I can count, so you better hope I understand them.” After a pause, she added, “That’s a yes.”
Elena nodded. “Thank you.” There was a silence in the room, and Alya didn’t fill it, so Elena scrambled to open up her journal where she’d taken notes for the interview.
One part of the ML worldbuilding I love to explore is the way journalism and politics are different in relation to superheroes. I imagine that superhero journalism would be its own field of journalism, like sports journalism or political journalism.
Usually she wasn’t this discombobulated. Alya had more of an effect on her than she anticipated.
“So, I know it must get repetitive, but... I really do have to thank you for everything you did. I mean, you’re an inspiration to everyone. Journalists like myself owe everything to you, and Black women, and superheroes, not to mention the fact that you’ve saved Paris ten times over.”
Alya put her deep laugh lines to good use. “It never gets tiring, trust me. Or maybe that’s my bloated ego speaking. I’ve done a lot of work for this city, and most of it wasn’t visible, especially not until recently. Knowing that there are people like you who appreciate me for what I did, not who I am, is the cherry on top to a very satisfying life.”
Elena took a deep breath and pushed her hair out of her face. Alya was human, after all — this should be an interview like any other.
“But realistically, a lot of what you did depended on not being known, yes?”
Eleni was quite a confident character — in fact, she was more often than not entirely overconfident, especially when she was stressed. Her arc followed her journey to understanding patience as a choice and respect as something that people can genuinely deserve (even if many authority figures don't deserve it). I chose to portray Elena as being close to the end of Eleni's arc, but I do worry that her actual characterization was obscured a bit too much by this choice.
“Oh, God yes. Especially as the superhero of illusions, I needed to stay in the shadows. Not to mention keeping my secret identity, and if everyone knew that I was Rena Rouge, I never could have been a journalist — not in the way that I was, anyway.”
Elena’s eyes drifted over the office, again. Though most of the knick-knacks on the desk were turned away from her, she could barely see a photo of Alya and a girl who could only be Marinette Dupain-Cheng.
“That didn’t stop you from getting accused of unethical journalism in the past year, though, did it?”
Alya waved her hand in the air, the skin wrinkled deeply. “I learned very quickly to untie what is ethical from what is moral. I’ve done immoral things, and I’ll admit to that, but none of those things were unethical, and nothing unethical I did was immoral. Which is not to say, of course, that laws on the ethics of journalists are not in place for good reason, only that certain exceptions are necessary for the people saving our asses.”
A lot of the challenge Alya faces as a superhero seems to me to be a matter of glory versus results. I see this fic, in some ways, as the ultimate reconciliation of those two things for Alya: by doing what she's doing, she's getting both the recognition she deserves and benefiting the world.
Elena couldn’t keep a snort from escaping. Alya’s eyes twinkled in response.
“Is it different? To be on the receiving end of an interview?” The question hadn’t been in Elena’s notes.
“I retired when I couldn’t bear the formalities of journalism anymore, but I miss the thrill of it. This is a good reminder of what I missed.”
“I’m glad. You deserve it.”
“Though I do admit, sometimes I wish I could Mirage myself into being again, because you haven’t asked me one thing about being a superhero.”
Elena’s mouth opened and she blinked, but Alya’s face was still humorous. She took a breath.
“Of course. You were Rena Rouge for how many years?”
“Forty-six. Including when I went under disguise as Rena Furtive, that is.”
“That’s a lot longer than most superheroes; few make it past the ten-year mark, especially if they only appeared during a time of crisis.”
Alya shrugged. “There’s more than a few reasons that superheroes don’t last long. A lot of them willingly retire after doing what they set out to do; a lot of them can’t maintain the source of their powers for very long; and sometimes they burn out or lose whatever funded them, yes. It isn’t a mark of how extraordinary me and my friends are that we stuck it out; only that we got lucky.”
Pausing as she considered her words, Elena decided it was far too good of an opportunity to pass up. “Maybe you’re not extraordinary, but you must be Miraculous, yes?”
They both stayed still for a moment, making eye contact. Alya’s skin had dulled a bit in her old age, getting almost ashy; her hair was dull and thinning; but her eyes were as vivid as ever.
Her mouth pulled into a closed smile.
“Adrien would have liked that one. You can take that as a compliment, but it’s not a high bar; he liked most puns.”
Elena smiled and swallowed at the mention of Adrien.
“Adrien Agreste, that is?” she asked. Only for the record. She didn’t want to bring up the grief Alya must feel over him.
“The one and only. Paris’s sweetheart, a long time ago.”
“No one ever did get an interview with him after it came out that not only was he Gabriel Agreste’s son, but Chat Noir. Do you think he’d have anything to say on that, if he were alive today?”
“No, I don’t. He never wanted an interview with anyone who knew both of those things. Aside from myself, of course, but that’s where the unethical journalism came in handy.”
Elena sat with that answer for a moment. Alya had seemed so open, so casual before; but that was such a stark answer, so closed off and blunt.
“Me, and Marinette, and Nino all made sure that Adrien would never have to make any comment about his complete role in defeating Hawk Moth. The plan was for him never to answer anything. Which is why he didn’t. But if you were to ask me what I had to say on the subject...”
Elena met Alya’s eyes for a moment, then asked, “What did you think about Adrien being Chat Noir?”
In the fantasy TV show I tried to write, Eleni's arc actually kicks off in part because she laughs at a boy when he's in minor emotional and physical distress. I don't know if this was an intentional parallel but it is a parallel nonetheless.
“He was always infinitely less infallible than the public believed. And to be fair, you don’t go around assuming that people have been through the things he’s been through. But I’ve been adamant that we stay out of superheroes’ business ever since I learned who he was exactly because of what he went through: People find it so easy to assume that superheroes don’t go through their own shit. And more often than not, I find that superheroes are going through more shit than you could possibly expect.”
This is a lie; Alya has never once been able to stop herself from staying out of a superhero's business. I do believe she went about her interactions with superheroes very differently after this point, though.
“So Adrien was impacted deeply?” Elena asked, almost afraid of the answer.
Alya was looking over at a picture on her desk, and she reached out to grab it, picking it up and examining it up close. “We were all deeply affected. You don’t go through a year of a terrorist being able to strike at any time, any place, without some scars. But Adrien had more to unpack than anyone I ever knew. And I don’t want to make it sound like he only ever suffered. Adrien was a ray of sunshine, personified. But it took effort to keep that fire burning, on all our parts, but his especially.”
Elena sat with that for a moment. The weight of the words — of the fact that this recording would be the first ever official statement about Adrien Agreste being Chat Noir made by a Parisian superhero — rested heavy on her shoulders.
Before she was done processing, Alya handed the photo over.
“Careful with that one — the frame was painted by Marinette herself.”
It was a photo of Adrien and Marinette, when they were still young, Adrien’s hair still golden, Marinette’s hair still long. It was from their wedding day — Adrien wore a black tux with a green vest, and Marinette’s white dress had a red ribbon around the waist. They were both smiling so wide.
“They weren’t subtle, were they?”
Alya smiled as Elena handed back the picture. “Not one bit. Nino and I always tried to keep it low-key, but they loved to flaunt just how much they loved each other, and part of each other was their other identities. They couldn’t have hid it if they tried.”
“You were all happy, right?” Elena asked. If she could limit this interview to one question, she decided, that was the most important.
“So, so happy. None of us would have traded it for the world.”
Elena could feel her shoulders get less tense.
“Nino Lahiffe. Carapace. Your husband. He was always considered the least relevant of you four, right? Both as a superhero and a civilian. Do you think he deserved better?”
I wrote this before going to uni but my oceanography professor would tell me "VERBING WEIRDS LANGUAGE!" if he read this right now. What he doesn't know is that "impact" is derived from Latin "impactus," a conjugation of "impingō," meaning "to push, strike, dash." SUCK IT LARRY!
Alya rolled her eyes. “I think he deserved the world, plus some. He would disagree, which is his right. But... We made a decision, when my career was taking off and our twins had just been born, for him to stay at home and stop working. It was intended to be temporary, and he did eventually work his way back into the film industry as an independent creator. But... everyone knows that he was forgotten.”
“Did he mind?”
“No. He loved our family, and he was so happy to get to spend time with our girls as they were growing up. He aspired for more when he was young, but... I always tried to ask. I was convinced that he was unhappy and suffering through it for my sake. But I really do think his place was at home. And while he may not have been in the spotlight as a superhero, he probably spent more time patrolling than the rest of us combined, especially as the twins got older, and patrolling was always his favorite part.”
“But you think he deserved better.”
“I’ve been stubborn since I first learned to walk and kept walking straight into the fire. I’ve always been ambitious, and I didn’t understand how he wasn’t. Still don’t, honestly. But I was never given any reason to believe he was unhappy, and I looked. At some point even I have to admit that Nino lived a good life.”
Elena leaned back in her chair. “You sound as though you don’t believe it.”
Alya’s eyes narrowed, and she nodded thoughtfully. “He wouldn’t want me to say what I believe. What I believe is wrong, and I know that, logically. Now only to convince myself of that.”
I always headcanon that Alya and Nino have twins because I think it would be funny (Nino's coping with it would be,,,, interesting, to say the least).
Generally speaking, I headcanon Nino as a stay-at-home dad. Adrien may or may not also be one; usually I put more emphasis on his role as Chat Noir than Nino's role as Carapace. (See my fic "Slow and Steady.") I appreciate the headcanons about the core four all eventually gaining fame in their own rights, but I generally tend to gravitate toward stories where they're mostly just "normal" people (other than whatever baggage Adrien is bringing from his childhood). Marinette tends to own a boutique she runs with Adrien's help. Alya is generally the most well-known of the core four in my future fics.
Elena had never been in a relationship with someone she considered marrying. She had no idea what Alya could possibly be feeling about her late husband.
“And Marinette. You were her best friend. She’s... It was after she was gone that word of all your identities finally got out. Was that... planned?”
Alya sat up slightly straighter — not too much straighter, but as straight as she could — and looked around the room for a moment before meeting Elena’s eyes.
“She didn’t tell me to do it, if that’s what you’re asking,” Alya responded. “But she knew that as a journalist, I never wanted our secrets to die with us. As her friend, of course, I didn’t want her to be hurt because everyone knows. We had an... unspoken agreement, that if I outlived her, I would release the truth into the world.”
“Why?” Elena could hear her favorite professor’s voice ringing in her ears, telling her that a single-word question could be the most impactful of an interview.
“Why are you a journalist?” Alya shot back.
Elena’s eyebrows furrowed, but before she could stop herself, she answered, “Because I believe in making the world better.”
A big part of Eleni's arc in the original story is a resistance to marriage despite a cultural to expectation marry — in fact, she becomes a healer to avoid marriage despite the fact that she's absolutely miserable as a healer. This is, of course, all to say, #AroIcon.
Alya nodded. “Then you have your answer, kiddo.”
They sat in silence for a moment more.
“What was she like?” Elena asked.
Alya’s eyebrows, clearly penciled in, furrowed. “What?”
“Marinette. What was she like?”
Her eyebrows loosened, then her face as a whole slackened, and she rolled her eyes.
“Marinette was perpetually unaware of anyone and anything outside of her own body. I think that’s why she liked being Ladybug; there’s no floor to trip on when using a yoyo. But she definitely had her struggles with understanding. And I think that’s what made her who she was, because it was all hardship for her to connect with the world, and even when she got it wrong.... You could tell, she was trying. So, so hard. Everyone fell in love with how hard she tried, eventually.”
“Do you think people would have appreciated her more, if they’d known she was Ladybug?”
“They would have tried to. They wouldn’t have succeeded.”
“You sound sure of yourself.”
“Just saying that makes me feel like you are unprepared to interview me.”
Elena smiled and looked at her lap. “Point taken.”
“She didn’t want to be worshiped,” Alya continued. “Aside from the danger it presented to herself, I don’t think she would have minded people knowing her identity, but she didn’t want anyone to change how they treated her, and no one would have respected that. And trust me, I was one of the first to believe that Ladybug was a goddess — a little literally, if anything — and I had to do a lot to unlearn that. I don’t think the rest of Paris would have done that, much less the rest of the world.”
“Do you think Paris deserved her?”
“Not particularly. She’d disagree, and she’d be entitled to that. But I do believe that every day she was out there doing what she did, Paris got all that much closer to deserving what she gave them. If there was anyone who could have made us deserve her, it was her.”
Elena nodded, consulting her notes again. She didn’t have very many questions — an interview, after all, is a conversation first and foremost, and a conversation can’t be planned. But here, in front of Alya, she knew that any question she could ask would be insignificant, because anything Alya had to say, she could write herself better.
“Let’s go back to your journalism,” Elena said, going back through her notes. “You were one of the most notable journalists in your time, and from a young age. Was it difficult to balance your ethical duty to truth with your super duty to keep secrets?”
They met eyes for a moment, and Alya smiled gently. “Now you’re asking the good questions,” she answered, her voice hoarse with how loud she was speaking.
Before Elena knew it, Alya was backing up, wheeling herself backwards — she’d been in a wheelchair this entire time, apparently. She wheeled just left of her desk, to a small door in the corner, and opened it up.
“Come here,” she said, waving for Elena. “You can’t expect an old woman like me to reach the top shelf, can you?”
Elena did so, promptly, and reached up to the top shelf, grabbing a large weathered cardboard box — keeping it balanced as she lowered it was difficult with the weight.
Alya wheeled back to her desk, and Elena dropped the box on the chair, looking over her shoulder. Eyebrows raised, Alya nodded slightly.
Elena opened it.
At several points in "Animan," Otis refers to various people as "kiddo." In "Strangely Familiar," he refers to Alya as "kiddo."
Inside was... thumb drives. Lots, and lots, and lots of thumb drives. Elena was stunned.
“Hand one here,” Alya said.
“Which one?”
“Any of them. Doesn’t matter.”
Elena did, picking one from the top that was marked with a piece of masking tape and permanent marker — 2054, it said.
Alya opened up her laptop and plugged it in.
Elena waited with bated breath for a moment as Alya clicked around a bit, then smiled at the screen.
“Oh, this was a good year,” she said.
“What?”
This fic was based off of a Tumblr post I wrote in December 2021, which can be found read, "thinking about. S4 Alya carefully documenting things about Marinette, taking Polaroids and keeping a scrapbook, of things that aren’t really significant for Marinette, but things about Ladybug that should survive for future generations to know. Thinking about that."
She turned the laptop toward Elena, who quickly leaned over. On the screen was a picture: It showed Marinette and Chat Noir. Judging by Chat’s suit — less leather-like around the joints, more fabric-y, with more green than previous versions of the suit — he was fifty-something, though the label on the thumb drive was probably enough to prove that.
Chat’s tail was curled around Marinette’s waist, and they were both lying in bed beside each other, not cuddling much at all (other than the tail). The image was slightly blurry.
Elena smiled.
“These are all pictures that we weren’t allowed to show anyone,” she said. “And diary entries that I scanned and transcribed — you can thank me for that later, Marinette’s handwriting went to shit after she turned thirty — and articles that I never got to publish because they knew too much.”
Elena leaned further into the laptop, examining the photo.
I chose these specific alterations because I figured that at age fifty-something, they probably want more flexibility and mobility in their supersuits.
“They did all give their blessing,” Alya said. “And our kids have been notified that I would be giving these out now. They’re ready to be put into an archive for everyone to see, because while I may have done many unethical things in my career as a journalist, I’ll be damned if I don’t give all of this information a chance to be seen by the public. I don’t know what you’ll do with all of it, but I know it’ll serve everyone better than it will serve the box that it’s been stored in.”
Elena felt her mouth fall open. “I — I —”
“Please,” Alya said, reaching over the table and grabbing Elena’s hands. “Just make sure the world sees it.”
She looked at the box one more time, full of thumb drives. That must be terabytes of information — terabytes on terabytes on terabytes. Of never-before-seen, frontline journalism.
But before she could get too caught up in how big this was, she looked to Alya once more, meeting her eyes and smiling.
“Thank you, Dr. Césaire,” she said.
In an early outline of this fic, I actually wrote down that at this point, Alya would mention that Elena would be spending time with her kids soon and somehow work in the implication that they would be superheroes and Elena would be their journalist (because superheroes always have journalists by their sides, assuming they're not journalists themselves). The story didn't take me in that direction while I actually wrote it, but I did like the implication.
Alya smiled.
I ended on a note of juxtaposition between Eleni referring to her as "Dr. Césaire" and the narration referring to her as "Alya." This was very intentional, though I'm not sure exactly what for; I think it's probably mostly to kinda drive home the point that this is inherently an outside POV story, even if the readers don't feel that same emotional distance between the text and the story. There's also definitely a similarity to be drawn between this line and Alya's lie from earlier, where she claimed she likes to stay out of superheroes' business; Eleni is supposed to be professional with Alya, referring to her as Dr. Césaire, but emotionally she feels close.
The title of this song comes from In the Embers by Sleeping At Last. SAL is one of my favorite artists ever, and a good chunk of my song titles come from them. The song is very thematically relevant — it's about the way light happens and fades so quickly, and the only thing we can keep on doing is remembering. "Cursive light" has always stuck out to me particularly much when listening to the song, and so I continued on with that imagery.