Arrietty

I know I submitted this AU to Multifandomscribette, but this is my take on the prompts I gave them. This is not the same AU, and I am not using their headcanons. Just the same basic premise of Marinette being Stephen Strange’s biological daughter.

You know Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, but this story is about

Lady Strange, the Grand Guardian.

What is with this family and alliteration?!

—*—*—*—*—*

Stephen Strange was a narcissistic, emotionally constipated bastard. But he was rich, well known, and handsome, which counted for a lot when he decided he needed some time to relax, unwind, maybe with another human.

And when Sabine Cheng realized what had happened, that night she had catered for a high society medical conference gala in the States, she vowed to never drink again.

She also vowed to never tell Strange about the child growing in her womb. The only person she ever told about her child’s true origin was Tom Dupain, the man she started dating a month after her chance encounter with Doctor Stephen Strange. Nine months after that, when Marinette was almost a month old, she would propose to Tom in blatant disregard of tradition. She would be waiting for years if she wanted Tom to get up the courage to ask her, and even though it hadn’t been a full year yet Sabine knew what she wanted. Seeing the gentle way Tom held her daughter, their daughter, seeing the way he looked at the little baby as if she hung the stars for him, well that only solidified the little Chinese woman’s love for the french man.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng would not know about her true father’s origin until she was twelve, when a science lecture at school had her asking Sabine who had blue eyes in each of their blood lines.

When Sabine hesitated, Marinette knew instantly that something was wrong. Sabine never hesitated. She was a whirlwind of decisiveness, always knowing what to say and how to act. Hesitation wasn’t a part of her.

Sabine told her everything. How her biological father was someone she only met once, how he was a successful surgeon who had won many medical awards. How he didn’t know she existed.

Of course, Marinette was immediately obsessed. Hurt by her mother’s secrecy, she turned her feelings of betrayal into curiosity and researched everything that there was to research about Stephen Strange. Apparently blue eyes ran on his side of the family. His own were more icy than hers, closer to a blue-gray, but familiar all the same. Both his parents were already dead though, so there went her hope of having another set of grandparents.

Marinette even went so far as to read the research papers he had written, and did follow-up research until she understood as much of it as she could. It helped that Professor Mendeleiev was more than willing to sit down and go over the medical papers with her so they could try to understand it all together.

One day, while Marinette was sewing a new dress, she paused with her needle in the air and stared at her fingers. After that day, she took much more pride than before in how steady her hands were. Her father was a surgeon, it must have been a biological trait. She clung onto anything that connected her to the oh-so mysterious Stephen Strange.

And then came Marinette’s thirteenth birthday. The same day that Stephen Strange was in a car accident and deemed in critical condition.

If Marinette kept an app for American news sources on her phone and set them to alert her if the name of her biological father was mentioned in any reports? Well, her parents didn’t need to know.

She didn’t tell her parents about the reason she was so morose for the rest of the day. She didn’t tell anyone.

She cried herself to sleep when Doctor Stephen Strange was declared to have irreversible nerve damage in his hands, and again when he went missing on a mysterious “vacation” that no media sites seemed to have any information on. She didn’t know why she felt so much connection and pain for someone she had never met, but she couldn’t help it. She would keep researching, keeping her eyes out for any mention of the man online without any luck.

That is, until Master Fu and the Miraculous entered her life. Slowly, she began to neglect her obsession with her biological father. Her passing crush on Adrien Agreste even faded away, never having much traction to begin with because of her overlying concern for the father that didn’t even know he had a daughter.

When Marinette was fourteen, the city of Paris was flooded and she had to swim through the quickly bloating bodies of the dead in order to defeat an Akuma. She reversed the damage and everyone who died was resurrected with no memory of their demise, but Marinette would never forget. All it took was a glimpse of the wrong face on the streets and she would be overcome with a panic attack, with the sight of glassy eyes and blue faces.

That was when Hawkmoth’s attacks picked up in intensity. When people began to die during Akuma attacks more frequently. When Marinette stopped sleeping in quite so much.

Her obsession over her father was a mere footnote by then, something she would idly look into on her ever increasingly rare free time with no success.

When Marinette was fifteen years, six months, two weeks, and two days old, Master Fu died. Marinette assumed the alias of Lady Strange, alongside her identity of Ladybug, so that the Miraculous wielders could contact her and know she was the new Guardian without knowing that she was also their leader in the field.

On the one year anniversary of Lady Strange being the Grand Guardian of the Miraculous, there was a worldwide magical disturbance.

Unlike Fu, Marinette did not limit herself to reacting to Miraculous problems.

—*—*—*—*—*

When Stephen glided back down from the equivalent of thousands of years bargaining and dying with Dormammu, he expected Hong Kong to be in a mess. It had been, from what he remembered of the scene before he created the time loop.

But it wasn’t. Instead, the streets looked as if no damage at all had been created. Kaecilius and his remaining zealots were tied up, quite literally, in what looked like string and hung upside down from a lamp post. Sitting down on the curb of the sidewalk and giving him a dangerously sharp glare was a young woman in a spotted costume, a mask over her face. When Strange realized he could not get any of her features to stick in his memory, he realized what she was.

Another magic user, but different from a Sorcerer. Her Neptune blue eyes bore into him with an intensity he was wholly unprepared for, but had no problem baring. After dying almost a million times, a guy tends to grow a backbone of vibranium.

Wong and Mordo stood on either side of the girl, both at a respectful distance. Wong had this wide-eyed look on his face, so much more expressive than usual that it caught the new Sorcerer Supreme off guard. Wong looked… awed?

Mordo, on the other hand, was regarding the girl with a look of barely disguised disdain and distrust. That was in character though, so Stephen didn’t pay it much mind. Instead, he walked over even as his bargain with Dormammu kicked in and Kaecilius’s cult was banished to the Dark Dimension.

“You reversed the damage, then?” He asked without beating around the bush, glancing down briefly to assure that the Eye was, indeed, still on him. It was. The girl stood up, her eyes continuing to blaze with an unknown soup of emotion.

“I did,” she confirmed easily. It wasn’t until he stopped only a few feet away from her that the sorcerer noticed how small she was. The only detail his mind allowed to stick with him besides that fact was that she also looked young. Too young to have to deal with a mess like this. “You might not know of me. The Temple Of Guardians made a deal centuries ago that all records of their existence and our own magic be removed from any Sorcerer sanctums.”

“The temple that appeared in Tibet out of nowhere more than a year ago?” Strange asked, eyebrow raised. “I remember the Ancient One briefly mentioning how much of a hassle it was to hide their reappearance and teleport the temple’s location somewhere new. I was under the impression that all the members of that temple have been in a pocket dimension separate from this reality for almost two hundred years.”

“They have,” the girl confirmed with a nod. “But before that, one of the Guardians escaped that fate. He became the Grand Guardian, and was my teacher until he passed last year. He named me the new Grand Guardian to take his place,” she turned, looking at something that Stephen couldn’t see. “I have illusions keeping us from being seen by the crowd, but it would be better if we took this inside the sanctum,” she said, nodding her head to the Hong Kong Sanctum’s door behind them. Strange simply nodded, more than willing to distract himself from his immeasurably long torture by indulging his curiosity. If this girl showed up and went out of her way to repair the damage the sorcerers and Kaecilius caused, then he wanted to know why.

“Wait,” Mordo barked, walking up to have a heated discussion with Strange that ended in the former storming off. Stephen knew he should be concerned about his former friend’s desertion, but he couldn’t muster up the energy for it yet. Focusing on the mysterious girl in a ladybug suit was an easier topic for his exhausted mind to latch onto.

When they got inside, the Sorcerer Supreme saw that she had even reversed the damage in the building. He saw a few scattered disciples rubbing their heads and looking around in confusion from their spots crouched on the floor. Stephen was almost certain he had seen those same people as corpses before.

The ladybug-spotted girl had scarcely removed her gaze from him for even a second, and easily picked up on the older man’s train of thought.

“My powers reversed all the damage I could handle, including physical wounds and death,” she told him. Strange blinked.

“That explains why I thought you all looked odd. Your clothes are spotless and you don’t look like you’ve fought at all,” he directed that comment to Wong, who merely nodded. “But that doesn’t explain how you can do such a thing. I’ve been intensely studying magic and magic theory for the past almost three and a half years, and I haven’t come across any healing spell that can be this effective without the subject of the healing themselves helping to work the power through their body. I know you are not a sorcerer like we are, but what exactly is your magic? Who are the Guardians? And who exactly are you?”

The girl pursed her lips, waiting until the two older men led her to the still-wrecked tea room. Her power hadn’t been able to reach that far when she had to focus on reviving so many people without the regular Cure. That only worked on victims of Miraculous magic, what she used on the Hong Kong streets and the Sorcerers was a more advanced usage of Tikki’s powers that she learned from both Fu and her periodic visits to the Tibet temple.

“The Guardians are a group of monks dedicated to the protection and distribution of Miraculous, which is essentially magic jewelry. I would normally go on to say how this might sound unbelievable, but you have a very similar pendant around your neck right now,” she pointed out once they all sat and Wong conjured some tea for them all. Stephen tensed at her mention of the Eye of Agamotto, his eyes narrowing. Did she..?

“I know what is inside the Eye,” she confirmed his silent thought, her voice soft but firm. “And I don’t care about it in the slightest. It is probably a good reference point for my explanation though. At the birth of the universe—“

“The Stones came into existence, each one representing and controlling a core aspect of reality,” Strange interrupted impatiently. “I am the Sorcerer Supreme, girl, I already know that.”

The young female rolled her eyes, huffing. “If you listened patiently, you would know that the story you were told is only partially true,” she snapped back with false patience. “The Stones were not the only things of great power to be created during the birth of the universe. Kwami, the first living beings to be born, were also created. They are each living representations of abstract concepts, some of which overlap with the powers of the Stones. The first to be born is the Kwami of Creation. She is essentially the goddess of creation itself, the living embodiment of that very term in every way. She is the source of my abilities, she lends me her power as I am her chosen Wielder. It is that same power of creation that allowed me to essentially counteract the destruction that was caused today, by having a condensed form of her power combat the direct source of the destruction and nullify it. The second Kwami to come into existence is her counterpart and the only one equal to her in power, the Kwami of destruction. There are a lot more, including the Kwami of illusion that used her power to keep us from being seen outside. And the Kwami Of time, which allowed me to experience the time loop you created,” the girl’s eyes sharpened again, boring into his own. “I left it after the equivalent of a few weeks, when I realized I couldn’t join you and do anything to help. The Kwami Of Time is about two-thirds as powerful as the Stone by itself, and there are more than double the amount of Kwamis as there are Infinity Stones,” she took a deep breath. “My job as Grand Guardian is protecting all of them, and distributing the jewelry they are bound to as necessary to combat world or reality threatening events.”

Strange remained quiet after that, drinking in the information and doing his best to wrap his head around it. Perhaps this young woman wouldn’t mind telling him more at a later date, especially seeing as they held equivalent ranking in two separate secret magical organizations. His eyes trailed down to a necklace she was wearing.

“How many of these pieces of jewelry—“

“Miraculous,” She corrected. “That is what they are called.”

“... Miraculous, then. How many are you capable of wielding at once, if they are so similar in strength to a Stone?” Wond asked, crossing his arms. The pigtailed girl leaned back from her spot sitting on the ground with them, humming in thought for a second as she decided what to tell them. A glance at Stephen seemed to make up her mind.

“Creation and Destruction hold equal power to a Stone. The Miraculous one stage lower than that hold four-fifths the power of a Stone. The last tier, where the Time Miraculous sits, is two-thirds,” she told them from memory. “I can wield Illusion, which is on the second tier, along with two third-their, and both Creation and Destruction at the same time,” she admitted. “But it saps a lot of my energy and I rather not ever do that again, if you don’t mind. I can wield all of the Miraculous though, since all of the Kwamis like me and are loyal. I can wear any three at a time, and I can switch between them as quickly as I need to.”

Strange really needed some sleep. Five thousand year’s worth of sleep would be nice. He ran a hand over his forehead, wondering who in the world gave this much responsibility and power to a child.

“One last question, and then you can spend the night if you wish, we’ll begin reconstruction of all the Sanctums in the morning,” Stephen spoke, forcing his back to straighten and his eyes to meet the girl’s. “You never answered it, actually. Who are you?”

The girl's mouth twitched in the first semblance of a smile he had seen on her yet.

“When I am in this transformation, I am Ladybug the hero of Paris,” she said with a grin. “Spots off.”

A soft pink glow ran down her body, very similar to the ring of power that sling rings produced to make portals. It left behind an adorable teenage girl with blue-black hair pulled back into pigtails, and striking blue eyes. She was clearly of Asian descent, but there was something else very familiar about the sharpness of her jaw or the stubbornness in her lip.

“My real name is Marinette Dupain-Cheng. However, I go by an alias whenever I act as Grand Guardian, so that there is an extra layer of secrecy to protect me and my loved ones. I created that alias based on my biological father, who was never told that I was even conceived,” she said meaningfully, never losing eye contact with Stephen. His eyebrows furrowed.

“That’s pitiful, but what does—“

“My alias is Lady Strange.”

Wong barked out a short laugh before he forcibly covered his mouth, his eyes filled with sadistic amusement as he watched Strange’s reaction. The elder Strange, that is.

The new leader of the Sorcerers opened and closed his mouth like a fish, completely caught off guard. He looked over to Wong.

“Is there a spell to test paternity?” He asked warily. Marinette’s smile fell a bit, but Wong nodded.

A few flashes of orange light and two green ‘99% Match’ results later, Strange let his head fall into his hands.

“Alright, Marinette,” he finally managed to mumble through the slightly trembling appendages still covering his face. “I just spent thousands of years in a time loop with the Lord of Chaos, my back aches, my head aches, I will deal with this in the morning. Or whenever I wake up. Figures my own blood relation would end up in a position of extreme magical power, must be genetic. I still have questions, but sleep comes first. Don’t expect me to be a good parent. I really need sleep.”

Marinette just giggled, standing up and helping her father to his feet with surprising ease. “Just tell me where to go and I can drop you off in your room. No more magic for the rest of the day, you’re clearly spent. And as long as you make an effort, I’ll be fine. But don’t expect to ignore me and I’ll just go away, I have ways to track you to the ends of the universe and across the multiverse and time itself, and I will not hesitate.”

“Yep, she’s your daughter alright.”