Fanfic / Kintsugi The Beauty In Broken Things

Kintsugi
Noun
1.The Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold or similar material, highlighting the cracks instead of disguising them.
2.The associated philosophy. 

During the fight with Mayura, Ladybug and Cat Noir are able to defeat the villain and retrieve the Peacock Miraculous before she can dismiss the Ladybug sentimonster. Now with a new lease on life, the sentimonster (now going by Centi) struggles to find her place in the world and learn what it means to be a hero.Meanwhile, Nathalie is beginning to question her place in Gabriel’s plans and struggling with the new feelings she has for her "daughter".

Kintsugi - The Beauty in Broken Things is a Miraculous Ladybug fanfic by XaranAlamas that focuses on what would happen if The Ladybug Sentimonster hadn’t been destroyed by Mayura. It is complete and has a sequel Kintsugi Breaking Point.

This story contains examples of:

• Adaptational Early Appearance: Juleka becomes Purple Tigress much earlier than in canon.
• Adapted Out: Word of God is that Party Crasher didn’t happen in this story’s continuity due to the author not liking the episode, so Kim never became King Monkey here.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When arguing with Marinette about Nathalie, Centi gets fed up with Marinette’s insistence that Nathalie had to have been akumatized and angrily questions if she would willing to forgive an Akuma if they committed murder. This causes Marinette to remember all the more lethal akumas like Timebreaker.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Duusu mentions that Helen of Troy was a previous holder of the Peacock Miraculous and that the Trojan Horse was a sentimal she created.
• Bittersweet Ending: Despite all the changes to the timeline, Fu is still forced to give up his mantle as guardian and Hawkmoth manages to escape. On top of that, a mysterious swordwoman stole the Dragon Miraculous and has her own agenda separate from Hawkmoth’s. However, Centi has finally learned to accept who she is and found a loving family, while Nathalie has undergone a Heel–Face Turn and begun to work against Hawkmoth.
• Brought Down to Normal: After burning through all the energy Ladybug gave her, Centi can no longer safely transform into Blue Bug and finds that her untransformed self’s capabilities have been reduced to that of an average human.
• Clone Angst: Centi has a lot of baggage over essentially being Ladybug’s clone and suffers from frequent nightmares. When Kim brings up how she looks like Marinette, she nearly has a panic attack.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The broken state of Duusu’s Miraculous has left the kwami rather loopy.
• Discard and Draw: Centi eventually loses her Sentibug powers permanently, but soon afterwards receives the repaired Peacock Miraculous.
• Dream-Crushing Handicap: As a child, the costume shop owner Camille had dreams of being a Badass Normal superhero. Then she got into an accident that resulting her losing her legs. Thankfully she found fulfillment in designing costumes.
• Evil Versus Evil: Thanks to Alec bringing up the weather girl competition, Aurore and Mireille get akumatized into Stormy Weather and Sunny Skies. The two of them spend all their time fighting each other, but since they’re both Persons Of Mass Destruction, the heroes can’t even get close to them without being caught in the crossfire.
• Happily Adopted: Centi is eventually adopted by the Couffaine family.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: Nathalie’s loss of the Peacock Miraculous and her growing (but complicated) feelings toward Centi cause her to begin questioning Gabriel’s actions. It reaches a head when his Bond Villain Stupidity causes him to lose an easy opportunity to save Emilie and she learns he’d be perfectly willing to use Adrien as a pawn in his schemes, causing her to realize that Gabriel has gone completely insane and making her actively begin conspiring against him.
• Heroic RRoD: During a battle with an akuma, Centi starts to feel weak and collapses mid-battle. Turns out her Blue Bug transformation was powered by the limited amount of creation energy Ladybug inadvertently gave and using it all up causes her to fall into a coma.
• Insistent Terminology: Duusu is very insistent on her creations being referred to as Sentimals refer than Sentimonsters.
• Mama Bear: Anarka. Seeing how badly Centi’s "mother" traumatized her causes her to be reakumatized into Captain Hardrock with the intent of going after every bad parent in Paris.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Early on Nathalie has an extremely vivid dream involving Emilie who forces her to confront some hard truths. It's revealed that it actually was Emilie, whose soul got trapped in the Slumber as a result of using the Peacock Miraculous.
• Metaphorically True: The backstory Ladybug gives for Centi is that she is a runaway whose abusive mother tried to kill her before Ladybug intervened.
• More than Mind Control: Centi believes that Akuma’s aren’t actually brainwashed, but instead have their preexisting emotions amplified and twisted, a realization she came to after her real self encouraged her Akumatization self to take revenge on Nathalie.
• Mythology Gag: The ladybug Sentimal Bluebird creates during the fight with Monster Moth is based on Thomas Astruc’s earliest drawings◊ of Ladybug.
• Naked People Are Funny: When Centi first detransforms, she discovers that she doesn’t have any clothes on underneath, much to her and Marinette’s embarrassment. Tikki has to stifle a laugh at the sight. Duusu doesn’t even bother holding it in.
• Noodle Incident: It's mentioned that Duusu once used her powers without a holder, causing mass hysteria and traumatizing somebody so badly that they invented a completely new subgenre of horror.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Duusu is still pretty upset about how Fu’s reckless usage of her Miraculous led to her being lost and broken in the first place.
• One-Winged Angel: During the finale of the story, Hawkmoth akumatizes himself into Monster Moth.
• Pretend to Be Brainwashed: At the beginning of the story, Nathalie feigns the same confusion Akuma victims experience after being turned to normal.
• Removed Achilles' Heel: Ladybug’s Miraculous Ladybug ends up merging Centi’s Amok into her body. This means that nobody can control her or kill her by destroying her Amok.
• Second Super-Identity:
  • Marinette briefly retakes her identity as Multimouse while Centi is using her earrings to recover from burning up all her energy.
  • After receiving the Peacock Miraculous, Centi takes up the new identity of Bluebird.
  • Due to Cat Noir being stung by Miracle Queen’s wasps, Bunnyx has to hide him in the Burrow and passes it to Alix who uses it to become Cattix.
• Shout-Out: The color scheme of Centi’s Blue Bug costume is based on Scarlet Spider, which is fitting since she is effectively a clone of Ladybug.
• Summon Magic: As in canon, the Peacock Miraculous grants the user the ability to create creatures from emotions. Centi discovers a dimension called The Slumber, where sentimals can slumber until they’re needed for use rather than dismissed outright, giving her the ability to resummon previous sentimals.
• Supernatural Fear Inducer: Bête Noire’s power is to trap people in illusions of their worst fears
• Title Drop: After repairing the Peacock Miraculous, it's left with golden cracks in it due to the gold being slightly impure, Alix brings up how this resembles Kintsugi.
• Trauma Button: Nathalie is a major one for Centi. The first time she sees her again causes her some turmoil that she gets Akumatized into Bête Noire.
• Wham Line:
  • The Swordswoman: "Tell me: how would you like to help me kill Hawk Moth, avenge my beloved, and spare the world from the reign of Monarch?"
  • At the end of the story, the Lady in Gold reveals that she was one of Duusu’s previous holders and that her name is...Emilie.

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