With Marc, people assume it's the injuries. It isn't the injuries.
He has been shot enough times to have opinions about calibers. He has coughed blood into a sink and then rinsed the sink. He has set a bone against a doorframe in a stairwell in Budapest and gone back out. Khonshu closes the wounds — not gently, not kindly, and never fast enough to spare him the part in the middle — and Marc has learned to think of pain the way other men think of weather. It arrives. You get on with it.
He has died. More than once now, and he's stopped keeping a number, because the number stopped being useful somewhere around the third time. He's crossed and come back and crossed again, and the thing nobody tells you about that is how quickly it becomes ordinary. He'd take a bad night of it over a bad day, and he means that literally, and it isn't bravado. It's arithmetic. A body is fixable. He has been given a great deal of proof.
For Marc, a bad day is arriving late.
Not late by hours — late by four minutes. Late enough that the work is finished and all that's left is the arithmetic afterward. There's no fight to interrupt, no one to pull out, nothing to be fast about. What's left is a room, and what's in the room, and Marc standing in the doorway of it doing the only thing left available to him, which is counting.
And then killing the men who did it. That's what's left. Not saving anyone, because there is no one — just the mechanical, unhurried, entirely successful business of ending the people who made the room the way it is. He is very good at it. He is better at it than at anything else in his life. And when it's over he walks out of a building where everyone is dead except him, and the ratio of that is a thing he carries down the stairs and into the car and to bed and into next week.
A bad day is one who begs.
They do, sometimes. Not the hard ones — the hard ones die swearing. The ones who beg are usually young and usually frightened and usually not lying, in that specific moment, when they say they'll do better. He believes them, some of them, and it changes nothing, because the decision was made before Marc came through the wall. Khonshu doesn't revisit. There is no appeal, no discretion, no space between the sentence and the hand carrying it out.
He goes home with their voices anyway. Not the ones who cursed him. The ones who said please, and meant it, and got the same as everybody else.
A bad day is a girl who didn't get one chance, didn't get pulled back from an early death like Marc did. A man who used his life poorly and would have got it right on the next go and doesn't have a second one to retry with. People who are simply gone, permanently, at the first mistake — while Marc has been handed a second and a third and a tenth, and got up every time, and cannot for the life of him point at what he did with any of them that was worth the trade.
That's the one that gets him. Not guilt exactly. Accounting. He's been extended credit he did not ask for on terms he didn't read, and the interest is other people, and he cannot make the numbers come out.
He could end it. That's the part he'd rather not have understood as clearly as he does.
He knows how the deal breaks. He has known for years. He was at the bottom of himself on a mountain when it was offered and he took it, and he'd tell you he took it to live, and that's true, and it's also not the whole of it — because he has had a great many exits since and has taken none of them.
He hates it. That's real. He hates the Khonshu's voice, hates the debt, hates being a tool with an opinion. He also needs it, and not just for the healing. Without it he is a man with this skill set and nothing to point it at, and he knows exactly what that man does with himself.
So he stays. And he resents staying. And both of those are permanent conditions rather than a problem with a solution, and he has stopped expecting either one to resolve.
You know the shape of a bad day before Marc's through the door.
He's not injured, or not much. That's the tell, actually — the bad missions are usually the ones where he comes home mostly intact. He's quiet in the specific way that isn't tired. He goes and stands in the shower for a long time and the water is far too hot. He eats whatever you put in front of him without registering it. He does the dishes on autopilot.
He won't tell you. Not that night. He'll answer questions, badly, in the shortest available number of words, and none of the answers will be lies — Marc doesn't lie to you, he just makes the truth as small as it will go.
What you've learned is that there's nothing to fix and nothing to say, and that the correct thing is to be in the room and not require anything of him. Leave a light on. Don't make it a conversation. Let him do the dishes even though there are four plates and it takes him twenty minutes.
Sometimes, very late, he'll say one sentence about it. Never the whole thing. One detail, offered flat, apropos of nothing — the age of somebody, or what a room smelled like, or that one of them had a school bag.
You: You couldn't have got there faster.
Marc: I know.
You: Marc.
Marc: I know. That's not — I know.
He doesn't sleep those nights. He lies there with a hand on your back and stays awake with it, and in the morning the bed on his side is made and the coffee is on and he says he's fine.
And a week later, or a month, when it's stopped being the thing eating him alive, he'll mention it again in the car. One more sentence. That's how it comes out of him — a paragraph a year, in pieces, in the wrong order, in vehicles or the middle of a walk.
You never ask for the rest. He knows you'd take it if he offered. That's most of what he needed.
🌙 🌙 🌙
For Steven, it starts with the ceiling being wrong.
That's usually the first thing — a ceiling he doesn't know, in a light he can't place, and the two or three seconds before the rest of it arrives. Then the questions come in their usual order. Where. When. How long.
Where is sometimes answerable. A hotel, a room above a bar, a flat with somebody else's post on the mat. Sometimes a car. Twice a floor. Once a grassy hilltop with a dislocated jaw.
When is harder, and how long is the one that matters. He's learned to reach for the date before he reaches for his shoes, and he's learned to reach for it somewhere that isn't his own phone, because his own phone tells him what day it is and not what he's lost. Three days is a bad one. Three days has happened. He does the arithmetic standing up, in whatever he's wearing, and he gets a number, and the number is the size of the hole.
Then he checks himself over. He's got a system for it now, which is its own kind of terrible — hands first, then arms, then whatever he can see in a mirror if there is one. The injuries have no story attached. A split knuckle, a deep bruise across the ribs, a cut somewhere he can't reach that's already half-closed. He has no idea what any of it is from and no way to find out. He's stopped flinching at his own reflection, mostly.
The blood is worse than the injuries. There's often blood, and there's often more of it than his own wounds would account for, and there is no answer to the question that raises. He's learned not to ask it in his head, because his head will simply keep going.
And the flat, when he gets back to it, is exactly as he left it, or isn't. Either is bad. Either is information he can't use.
No note.
That's the part he could not make anyone outside understand, if he ever tried to explain it, which he won't.
People imagine it's an intercom. That there's a channel — a bit of shared interior somewhere the three of them can put things and pick things up. It isn't like that at all. Reaching another one of them takes effort, real effort, from both ends, and if the other end is exhausted or hurt or simply doesn't want to, there is nothing on Steven's side that can force it. He can shout into it for an hour and get weather. Just the sense of somebody there, not answering or not able to.
So he doesn't know whether it's over. That's the specific texture of a bad day — not the missing time, the unresolved missing time. Is there a thing still coming. Is somebody looking for this body. Should he be going to work on Monday or should he not be at this address at all. He has no way to check, no one to ask, and the only two people in the universe with the answer are inside his own skull declining to come to the phone.
Sometimes they tell him afterward. Sometimes Marc will surface days later and give him a version, compressed, sanded down, with the worst of it filed off — and Steven can always tell it's been sanitized, and never says so, because a clean version is more than he had that morning.
Sometimes nobody says anything ever, and it simply becomes one of the gaps, and it joins the others.
Early on he used to wish he was alone in there.
He'd never say it now. He'd deny having thought it, if you asked him directly, and then he'd go quiet, because Steven's a bad liar and worse at it with you.
But the bad days are the ones that grant the wish. That's the trick of it. He gets exactly what he asked for on the mornings when he wakes in a strange room with somebody's blood on his cuff and no answer from either of them — a body entirely to himself, the whole thing, sole occupancy, and nothing else in it but him. No one to consult. No one to be angry at. Nobody to tell him what happened.
He has never in his life been lonelier than in the sole possession of a body he shares with two other men.
They think the illness is the crowding. It isn't. It's the going away.
You've come to know a bad-day Steven from the doorway.
He's talking. That's what throws people who don't know him — he's not silent, he's chatty, brightly and continuously and about absolutely nothing. He'll narrate the kettle. He'll tell you a fact about kettles. He's filling the air because the alternative is what's underneath it, and he'll keep filling it for as long as you let him.
And he's checking things. The date on his phone, then the date on the oven, then the date on his phone again. The lock. The window. The batteries in the smoke alarm. He'll do a slow lap of the flat that he'd tell you was tidying. The flat does not actually get cleaner.
He won't ask you what day it is. He'd rather look it up eleven times than say it out loud.
What works, you found out by accident, is being an external record. Not comfort — information. You were here Tuesday. You called Wednesday and I didn't pick up. This was Thursday, I've got the receipt. Boring, checkable, dated things about the world, handed over without ceremony.
Steven: You don't have to do that.
You: I know.
Steven: It's just — it does help. Rather a lot, actually.
He sleeps badly and gets up early and reads something he's read before, which is the tell. New books are for good weeks. On a bad day he wants the ones where he already knows what happens.
And at some point he'll ask, in a very light voice, whether you'd mind terribly telling him if he ever comes back different. Not injured. Different. He asks it about twice a year and he always makes it sound like a joke, and it has never once been a joke, and you always say yes.
🌙 🌙 🌙
For Jake, violence isn't it. Let's clear that out first, because everyone gets it wrong in the same direction.
He sleeps fine. He genuinely does — he'll do something in a stairwell at one in the morning that would put most men in a chair for a year, and be asleep by three, and be pleasant at breakfast. He isn't performing that. There's no delayed bill that comes due at four a.m. He looked at the arithmetic a long time ago, decided some people are a subtraction, and has never once revisited it. Marc lies awake over the ones who begged. Jake remembers their faces and feels approximately nothing, and if you asked him about it he'd shrug and say somebody has to be able to do it.
So a bad day isn't blood and death. A bad day is a problem that violence doesn't solve.
It's the ones he can't fix.
A kid in a bad house, and the bad house is legal. A woman who won't leave, who has her reasons, who is not wrong about her reasons. A landlord, a court, a system, a form. A situation with a clear villain who is untouchable — not hard to reach, untouchable, in the sense that reaching him would make everything worse for the person Jake is trying to help.
Because Jake has exactly one tool. It's an outstanding tool. It's the best tool in the room ninety percent of the time and he is very, very good with it, and there is a whole category of human misery it does absolutely nothing for. He'll stand in a hallway with his hands open and nothing to do with them and it makes him feel about six inches tall.
That's the thing to understand about him. Jake's not a violent man who found a use for it. He's a useful man whose only currency happens to be violence, and on the days it won't spend, he isn't anything.
He'll go looking for a way anyway. He'll spend eleven hours on it. He'll find a guy, and the guy will know a guy, and it still won't work, and he'll come home at four in the morning having accomplished exactly nothing and be in a mood you know to stay out of the kitchen for.
The other one is being used.
He is the one the other two pull out when it has to be ugly. That's the arrangement, unspoken, never negotiated — Steven can't and Marc won't, so it's Jake, every time, and he takes it because if he doesn't, one of them will have to, and he'd rather they didn't have to.
But there are stretches where that's all he gets. Surfaced for the thing, shelved after the thing. No morning, no meal, no ordinary Tuesday afternoon. Hands and a job and back in the drawer, back in the black box.
He wakes up already in the moment he's needed, and it's finished and he's gone again.
And the worst version is when he catches himself being grateful for a bad night, because a bad night is still hours, and he gets the least of those to himself of the three.
Steven: You were up Thursday.
Jake: For forty minutes.
Steven: I didn't know it was only —
Jake: Forget it. It's fine.
He'd never call it unfair. He doesn't have the vocabulary for that and wouldn't use it if he did. What he does is get spiteful — small things start going missing, plans get inconvenienced, and none of them will connect it to the fact that nobody has let Jake see an afternoon in three weeks.
And once in a long while there's a day where the tool works perfectly and it turns out he was wrong.
Not often. He's careful and he checks, and he's been right about people for years. But it has happened. He has been certain, and correct in every particular except the one that mattered, and afterward there is no fixing it and nobody to be angry at except a man he has to keep operating.
He doesn't spiral about it the way Marc would. He doesn't do penance. He files it, and it's genuinely filed, and he could tell you about it in an even voice over dinner.
But he counts them. There's a number, he knows exactly what it is, and he will never say it out loud to anyone including you.
You know a bad-day Jake by the cooking.
Far too much of it. Three or four things at once, all evening, the good knife out, the radio loud — and he won't sit down, he'll stand at the counter and eat off the pan and keep going. Whatever he couldn't do out there, he can do this. He can put a meal in front of somebody. It's the one thing on the list that's still available.
He won't talk about it. Ask directly and you'll get it's handled, which in this case means the opposite. Push and he'll go out for a couple of hours and come back level.
What works is not asking. Sit in the kitchen and let him feed you and complain about something small and unrelated — the neighbor, the hot water, anything with a solvable problem in it. He'll fix it immediately and be visibly better afterward, and you both know exactly what that was, and neither of you will ever mention it.
And on the worst ones he'll say something once, at the counter, with his back to you.
Jake: There was a kid.
You: Yeah?
Jake: Yeah.
That's all you'll get.
💜 💜 💜
Been sick a few days. Have some angst.
⏾ Summary: Steven, your new neighbour, is unpredictable, sure. But only when a series of crash-bang-wallops brings you to his door (and the chance of imminent death), do you realise quite how unpredictable. As it turns out, that makes two of you.
Basically, being saved by the Moonboys!
⏾ Warnings/Tags: Steven Grant x Reader, Marc Spector x Reader, socially anxious!Reader, no use of Y/N, Steven being adorable, Marc being distant (as per usual) until it counts, unnamed attacker, threat of death, entrapment, brief kissing without consent, vague injury detail, reader with a backstory
⋆.˚ ☾⭒.˚
Marc enters his apartment at a crawler’s pace. He toggles the light, gaze darting across the ground as he trails the litter of books and trinkets tossed asunder. You make to follow – only to catch yourself on the door. Marc’s attention snags on his target and he marches from view. You’re left to bar your arms across your chest. And cave against the frame.
What accompanies his disappearance is monumental. You stare through unseeing eyes, severance once again threatening to swallow you whole, and all that exists is an unmoved vessel, save for your fingers. Your fingers travel of their own compulsion, tracing your attacker’s phantom touch. Chasing the memory of being steered deeper into this room.
A groan stirs in the base of your throat.
With no one to pull you back.
“Hey.”
Your hands fall. You blink.
Marc stands watching you, a slim box hanging by his side. His stare is inscrutable. He might have been there for a while. But when he speaks, his tone is undeniably soft.
“Here.”
It’s no surprise he doesn’t ask you how you’re feeling.
It’s a blur after stepping over the threshold.
Marc sets the first-aid kit between you, and although you keep your eyes down, your periphery brushes against the man’s furtive onceovers. He withdraws the contents. Unused. He slips a key into your palm.
“Five minutes. I promise,” he assures, the time it will take to attend to your room and any passersby who got wise of the scuffle. ‘Your room’, you notice he says. Not the body.
So you dress your wounds in silence. Not a mercy, but a convenience, the cut to your side isn’t too deep. Blood showing on CCTV wouldn’t have boded well for your attacker’s escape. The thought only reminds you of the sound Marc made when he hit the ground. You pause, scissors poised to slice the end of the bandage.
God.
What the hell are you doing here?
Yes, Marc, Steven, whoever, saved your life. That doesn’t mean they’re not the second to last people you should trust. The winner of that title lies face down on your apartment floor. But maybe he shouldn’t be – the winner, that is: you’d sooner see him dead if not for the necessity of answers. As for the man who owns this apartment, you know next to nothing about him—fuck, them. Something… happened to them in there. And it’s not like your attacker was looking for nothing.
For all you know, you could have traded one grave for another.
You finish tying off the bandage just as a double-knock sounds from the hall.
“It’s me!” someone calls, English this time. You pocket the scissors.
“Thank you,” Steven says, as you close the door behind him. A warm flush permeates his cheeks; he was longer than Marc promised. “Did you need any help?”
“Hmm? Oh. No. No, I’m fine.”
When he remains stationary, you instinctively look up, but he simply rocks on the balls of his feet. Then, starting as if electrocuted, “Would you like a drink?” he asks, already making a beeline for the kettle. “Do you use cow milk? I keep oat if you’d prefer. Or I could buzz to the shops to get something else. Soy… Almond…”
“Where is he?”
“I even saw they had pea milk in the other da—sorry?”
“Where—” You swallow. “Where did you take him?”
For a moment, he really looks as though he might tell you. Then his eyelids shutter, shoulders coiling like wire.
“No,” Marc murmurs. They flutter open. “I’m sorry. It’s not a good idea for you to know.”
“For you to know.” His words crash over you in droves.
“It’s… what?” Your lips twist into a smile, and you hate yourself even more. You skim the scissors in your pocket. Inhale. “Not a good idea.” “I’m sorry?”
“Look. I—” He shakes his head. “I get it. I do. How are you feeling?”
“Confused,” you splutter. “Like I should know what’s going on.”
“I’ve secured your apartment. You say the word, and I promise you, you will never see from me, hear from me, ever again—”
Your mind is a fortress at sea. Every drove a lashing. Chips of your detachment devoured by the tide.
“I’m sorry.”
The weight of your anger leaves you gasping for air. You eject it the only way you know how. You bark out a laugh. “But—but you can’t—you… You can’t just up and leave. Without telling me anything.”
“This was never supposed to happen. I tried to avoid this, I told Steven not to tell you his fricking name, hell, not to talk to you at all.” When he says this, you swear he fires his glare at the mirror. “I know you deserve answers,” he continues. “But I’m not doing niceties. I’m keeping you alive, and that means keeping you out. Like you should have been from the start.”
You stare at him, slack-jawed. Energy surges to your fingertips, and for a moment, you know exactly what you should do, to knock ‘Marc’ straight out of him.
Instead, you back against the door. “I need to talk to Steven again.”
He almost smiles. “You want good cop? Sorry. That’s not how this works.”
“Then explain it to me! Please!” you cry. Warmth wells behind your eyes. But you’re too angry to brush it away. “Tell me how it works! Tell me Steven—he’s not just some… some superhero alias. Tell me that man didn’t hurt me just to steal from you. Tell me what he was so desperateto have, he’d trap me, threaten me, assault me, kill me!”
With every word Marc is sinking lower. His hands open and close at his sides. He peels apart the floor with his stare. You implore him with your own. Then,
“I can’t,” he whispers.
You don’t give him time to react: you snatch the handle. He calls your name, but it’s too late. When you slam the key into the lock, which you’d tucked snug against the scissors, his voice hitches, enraged. By the time he’s wrangling the door, you’ve already made the corner. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
You want to scream.
Instead, you bite into your lip as needles tear incisions along your side. You tear up the steps. A crash of sickness accompanies each flight; it changes nothing. At the summit, your balance gives, and you thrust your palms against the fire exit. You gasp.
Someone’s disabled the alarm.
You were right. Of course you couldn’t be certain, but, opting for speed and discretion, the roof was your best and only bet. The realisation does little to relieve your urgency: that lock won’t hold them for long, and you throw yourself against the handle, propelling yourself into the open air. That’s when whatever little energy you had left evaporates.
He lies skywards, looking even more worse for wear than you last saw him.
Someone – who are you kidding – has stuffed a hand towel down your attacker’s throat. You gag. When you manage to drag your attention back, his forehead is slick with sweat, a crimson cavern seeping into his shoulder from where Marc…
One thing hasn’t changed. He’s gone to the world. Scissors in hand, you pace him. His arm and leg restraints don’t reduce your distance, but if you want answers, you’re going to have to bridge the distance somehow. You hurl glances between the figure and the fire exit, weighing up your options. Just as your thinking is obstructed by the scrape of footsteps.
His footsteps jar to a halt. The man registers your weapon. Slowly, he raises his hands, eyes wide. Steven.
Fingers chalking around the scissors, “I—I didn’t mean—I just needed to know!” you say.
“I understand. Believe me, I really do. Please.” He gestures for you to lower them. “I’ve been there. Marc, he… he makes a habit of forgetting that being in the dark can be just as terrifying as seeing your nightmares up close.”
You receive him. Wind snaps against your arms. Jesus. You were so focused on distance you forgot your closeness to the edge of the roof.
You take a step forward.
“Do you know what he was after?” you ask.
Steven exhales. This time, some of the tension unravels from his jaw. “No. But I plan to find out.” As he speaks, he lowers to a crouch, only inches from the man’s face. He casts you a backwards look before snatching the gag from the man’s mouth.
He wakes with a start.
The man slams his head against the wall. With limited success, he swings his healthy arm, yowling as pain erupts through his shoulder. And his back, you remind yourself. You did that. It only takes him a moment to adjust. Massaging the inflicted spot, his attention soon zones on his captor. His lips upturn, thought in more grimace than grin.
“Spector,” he growls. “Or is it ‘St-St-St-Steven’. Didn’t take you for much of a method actor, but fine job, mate. Fine job.”
“Who are you?” Steven snaps. “What do you want?”
He almost chokes on his own laughter. “Fuck me. On second thought, you ever hire a dialect coach? What’s all this for? Is it for you?” He cocks his head, and cold ripples down your spine the instant his eyes set on you.
“Still not Marc,” Steven says. “But make no mistake.” He takes the man’s wrist. “You don’t stop talking out your arse, you’ll need a lot more than speech therapy. Mate.”
The man opens his mouth to scream, but Steven is quicker: he smothers him.
“Alright—”
“—what were you so desperate to steal?” you interject. You drop to your knees beside him. After a beat, Steven releases his mouth.
Your attacker looks between you two then, working his wrist. Slowly, he stitches back together his grin. And this time, it appears eerily genuine. He directs his answer square at you when he says, “Crafty. So that’s what you told him, is it? I’m a common thief out for treasure? I take great offence to that.”
“I haven’t been told a word,” Steven says. “I saw. You tore our flat to bits.”
“‘Our’? Now that’s the kinda crazy I heard about. If you’d believe me, I was actually tryna save your hide. Not without a bit of perusing though, of course. Had to know what the crack is before I know you’re worth saving.”
“I take it from the stabbing us, you’re ‘perusing’ didn’t pull up anything good.”
“Oi! If you hadn’t barrelled in all guns-blazing, I might have spoken some sense to ya then. Hell, if you hadn’t started crying out in that phony accent of yours, I’d have known who the fuck you are!”
“And who is that exactly?”
“Someone dumb enough to protect the person out to kill you.”
Steven smiles. Actually smiles, firing you a glance. “Wow. F me,” he says. “We’ve lived side by side for almost two months. I think I’d have noticed the glass in my morning porridge by now.” The laughter dies on his lips. He fastens on you. A newfound wariness sifts between his brows, gaze flickering to the scissors by your side.
You blink at him. “What?”
“I just thought how easy it would be to manipulate a hostage situation to earn our trust… Hitting two birds with one stone.”
“No. No. What?” you shout, with more urgency than is wise. But you can’t stop yourself, or your rising volume. “I didn’t do anything wrong! He tried to fucking kill me!”
But now Steven moves with you, not taking his eyes off you, even when the man spits, “I don’t give a rat’s arse whether Moon Man lives or dies. All I care about is tracking down one stinking breed. Bastards seem to have it in for Moonie just as much as I do them. Before I burned up their little commune, I happened on an address. Figured it wouldn’t be long before one of them reared their sick, homicidal head.”
Your mind flashes to the man’s hands around your waist in Steven’s flat, one slipping too close to the hem of your shirt – but it wasn’t the hem. He’d brushed your arm. Only momentarily, but maybe just enough to show skin. Oh fuck.
Oh fuck.
Moon Man.
Moon Knight.
Without looking at him, “Who?” Steven demands from your attacker. “Who are you hunting?”
That’s when your attacker hurtles right towards you. You have less than a second to remember the handcuffs, his broken wrist, the rope around his ankle – less than second, as, an inch from the impending drop, you suck in a breath.
“How’s this for justice?” he whispers.
Then no one is holding your arm.
Your stomach drops. The wind snatches at you from every direction, desperate to break your fall. But there is nothing to stop you, nothing but concrete, and it is concrete that awaits you, promising to be quick.
Swirling lights come first.
When people talk of death, you’d always assumed they meant they saw one unfolding beam. Not that you care much for superstition. Not anymore. Yet, somehow, you stir. Wait. You can move. You flex a palm, closing on something rough, like used bandages.
“Hey. Look at me. Are you okay?” The bright lights narrow beneath his cowl.
And you recognise that voice.
“You’re… him,” you murmur, only semi-lucid.
“It's me. I've got you, alright? You're gonna be just fine. I’ll see to it.”
“No.” You try to push him away, but you only succeed in gently brushing his arm. Those lights begin to dim, and, though he’s speaking, you only manage to rasp one more word before darkness steals away the rest.
I'm writing a fic where she figures out Adrien is chat noir from heartfixer and steals the twin rings in order to Ruin His Life and decided to draw them
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚ Warnings/Tags: Adrinette, Marichat, Ladynoir, Ladrien (have them all!!), Adrien's POV, ftm!Adrien, Adrien is going through it, Ladybug gets akumatized, hints of transphobia and self-harm, angst angst angst, hurt-comfort, bittersweet ending, bits of fluff, early-seasons coded
"I just wanted everything to stop.”
He thought of her bottomless optimism, the smile she could proffer should anyone ask for it. For the first time, he saw the gap between his own teeth.
“I know,” he said.
Check it out on AO3!
“Their—bracelet!”
Chat Noir narrowed his gaze.
Ten metres adjacent, and, with the whirl of his staff to parry strike after slash, he scoured for that elusive object. Which arm? he griped to himself. Leg? And there was so many of them, each knotted limb as unrelenting as the last. She couldn’t hold them for much longer. At this rate, finding the damned thing would be like trying to find an akuma in all of Paris.
Fear Knot sent their head back in frustration.
You and me too, buddy, Chat thought. Instead, “Gonna need another clue, M’lady!” he called back. She didn’t respond. He looked to her.
And Chat lost all air. Ladybug’s yo-yo had fled her grip.
Feigning left – Chat ducked as a yard of rope snapped for his wrist – he doubled back and extended his staff, pitching himself high into the open air. A metallic clink: he disabled it as higher, he soared, his claws outstretched, his heart the beat of a hummingbird’s wings.
“—don’t!” Ladybug shouted.
He choked.
Panic rapped against his chest. Tighter, the ropes seized. His legs thrashed, fists pummelled. His vision drowned with tears. If he could just extend his—his staff slipped through his fingers. His jabs began to lose momentum, aiming at nothing. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t see… Couldn’t…
Cou
ld
n
Then, something whistled by his hair. His binds slashed open. The earth opened up beneath him. He screeched, oxygen rushing into his lungs in one fell swoop. His lady’s yo-yo hadn’t yet retracted to her palm. Mid-air, he caught her mouth springing open in horror. He cast the bracelet. Like clock-work, one moment his boots scuffed the earth, the next, with a satisfying snap, a tangle of beads rolled towards them as Ladybug tugged the chain in half. Instantly, he bent double.
But with a high-pitched scream, it was no longer him in free-fall.
“I’ve—"
“—got it!” Chat interjected, scooping up his staff. He jolted upwards, seizing the woman in his arms with a whoomph. She gasped. His arms, she gripped almost violently, her attention fluttering too fast for him to follow as,
“Hey, hey, hey. It’s okay. You’re okay,” Chat said. He shifted her weight slightly, hoping to relieve her discomfort. Her hold tightened. “You’re you.” He sucked in a breath. And smiled. “Promise.”
Whilst Ladybug reset the stage, erupting into a de-evilizing shout, Chat wished, longed to drag back the curtains. They landed on scene like space-invaders in a soap opera, swinging microphones and thrusting their cameras through the barrage of spectators. He fought to prevent his mouth morphing into a scowl.
His focus snapped back when the woman staggered, and his hand flew to her shoulder. Camera flare glittered in her irises.
Using her shoulder to manoeuvre her away from the gawk of their lenses, “Don’t worry,” he insisted. “That nausea you’re feeling, it’ll pass.”
The woman shook her head, brushing him off. She gestured to her ear.
In response, he tapped his own ear, then his mouth. Deaf?
Her expression filled with relief, laughter lines deepening. Yes, she signed back.
Everything’s going to be okay.
“Let me through!”
Chat spun, the woman chasing his eyeline to the raising female voice. Behind them, a kaleidoscope of butterflies chased across the sky, undoing the akuma’s (and a little bit of their own) damage.
“Please!” the stranger cried. “Please, I know her!”
“Hey!” He directed his answer at the crowd. “Don’t ignore her. Let her through!”
With some delay, they conceded. The crowd peeled apart, and before as much as a foot could fall in her wake, with a zip of Ladybug’s yo-yo, they wrestled against an impromptu barricade. Their grumbles were lost to the choked sound by Chat’s side.
He looked to her in alarm, but she was beaming. She patted his arm. Then, with surprising speed…
The couple crashed into one another.
Chat stepped back as the newcomer cradled the woman’s cheeks, as they enveloped the other in a fierce embrace, trembling with adrenaline and relief and joy and terror. Their palms held the weight of a lifetime of history, of memories unearthed, and love left to give. Though their knees buckled and their tears threatened to burst, they held on. Unyielding.
Chat watched on. So he could never begin to understand the feeling the awaited those he protected – that didn’t stop him fighting for it every single day.
“Are you okay?”
Ladybug sidestepped him, roaming him up, down, left to right, but before she could dwell any further, with more instinct than intent, her reached out to brush her hands, guiding her attention up.
With a laugh, “There’s knot a scratch on me, M’lady,” he said, and released her. “I’ve got you to thank for that.”
“I know. I-I-I’m so sorry. I swear, I-I won’t let it happen again.”
His face fell. “Wha—‘Sorry’? Ladybug.” She skirted his gaze. “I said you saved me. If you hadn’t broken me out—”
“If I hadn’t let go of my stupid yo-yo…”
He shook his head. “I wouldn’t have got caught? That was on me. Hey.” He reached for her, then thinking better of it, “Do you wanna talk?” he asked, softly. He glanced towards the expectant crowd, acutely aware the cameras had already begun rolling. “We’ll wrap this up quick, okay? Two minutes.”
As if one cue, Ladybug’s Miraculous flashed. Without responding, she cradled her ear and made a beeline for their audience. He allowed himself a beat before following her lead. He sprung to her side, arming himself with a grin, and the shuttering of lenses quadrupled. The couple had already launched their escape. Satisfied, Chat returned his look to the cameras, flashing a wave.
Blood pounded in his ears.
They exchanged a glance, and unlike his, Ladybug’s eyes widened with a purpose, asking for his approval. Chat leant towards her, delight rippling through the crowd as she closed the distance between them and hooked an arm through his.
“Please, only brief questions!” he said. “We’re kinda short on—”
“Ladybug! Right here! Why the recent surge of akuma alerts?” one voice demanded. “Is Hawk Moth growing more confident, or is the public losing its support?”
“Ladybug, what have you done to discover Hawk Moth’s true identity?”
Ladybug squeezed his arm a little tighter.
He squeezed his staff. His jaw stiffened like oven-baked clay.
“Hey, Ladybug—”
“Sorry, but has anyone got any questions they want to ask me?” Chat said, not kindly. He took a step ahead, and, as he shadowed his partner’s, fought to school his expression. “As I said, we don’t have enough time to answer complex question right now. We’ll respond to any and all of the public’s concerns live with Nadja Chamack next Tuesday. So, please…” But the victim and her partner were gone. His ring flared. “Oh, no. Would you look at that?”
And now, it was their turn to vanish.
“Wow, me too! Better disappear before we transform back!” Ladybug echoed.
She recalled her yo-yo, Chat his staff, and without another word, the pair broke into a sprint. They tore for the skies, voices crying out in their wake but carrying only so far in the cacophony. The tussle of wind and blaring of horns did well to mask his displeasure. He hit the tiles of an adjacent roof, equally protected from prying eyes.
“One day, I’m gonna…” he said, cheeks growing warm. Except, no sooner had he straightened than he realised Ladybug hadn’t dropped down to meet him. “Bug?”
He beat out a message. He wandered the cityscape for almost a full minute, gaze fluttering every which way for signs of her telltale red. Ladybug had chosen this vantage, of the eight or so the pair had claimed across the city: on a billboard overhead, his own likeness razed over him, lips tilted upwards in glee.
Only at the last second did he plummet behind the school. The transformation words were on his lips before the poor kwami even had chance to swallow, and, without wasting a second, Chat had staff in hand. His opened the phone app, hovered a finger over dial…
The staff landed by his side with a clink. He dragged his hands down his face with a smile. And sunk against the wall.
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
“Where are you, dude?” Nino called, just as his best friend seized him by the shoulders. Adrien grinned.
Rounding the corner, Alya rewarded him by thwacking him over the head. The boys parted, Adrien dusting his hair, but not without, “Aw, did Ady-Baby miss me? Does he need a hug?” Nino teased with his best Zombizou impression. Adrien started to defend his honour, then: “Seriously, dude. What gives? You just took off! Is this your way of auditioning to replace MIA-nette?”
“Is Marinette not with you?” he asked. “I saw her when she was leading people—”
“She’s cool.” Alya flashed her phone. “Just text back. Says she’s gone for a bathroom break.”
“That’s if she hasn’t already fallen in the bowl.”
The three glanced up.
Chloé, her eyes glued also to her phone, stalked down the distant end of the corridor. In an instant, they darted wide.
“Sorry!” she said, fingers flying to her mouth. “I was adding to my story. Old habits die slowly.”
“Isn’t it—”
“That’s fine, Chlo,” Adrien interjected.
Hard, Alya finished for her boyfriend, mouthing as Chloé slunk from view. Adrien brushed her off with a wave and a grin. “At least she’s trying.”
“Yeah, that’s one word for her…”
“Well,” Alya suddenly said, clapping her hands together. “I’ll go rescue MIA-nette. You two, on the other hand, clearly haven’t seen each for, how long? Five minutes?”
With a sheepish chuckle, Nino dropped the arm draped around Adrien’s neck.
“Go on,” she conceded. “Get. You must have plenty to catch up on.”
“Oh yeah, dude, like the fact I absolutely annihilated everyone at Gin Rummy…”
After an epic tale of betrayal, bravery, and bloodlust, Adrien dumped his bag and swung into an armchair, letting out a grateful sigh. They’d dropped on some seats in the library for the dwindling remainder of the day, though had they been forced to stand, he’d just as easily flopped onto a windowsill, or strewn himself across the radiator. He propped his head atop the armrest and wiggled his shoulders. Detransforming when wearing a binder was like being voluntarily slugged by a bag of bricks.
“This is what happens when you run amok,” Nino said. “Shoulda stuck with the crowd. We got free cookies. We even played Mecha when Als wasn’t grumbling about ‘missing’ everything.”
Scattered behind shelves, most scrolled absently; others chattered through stifled yawns. If they were Chloé, who’d stayed with Sabrina since Sabrina’s dad was busy remedying the situation, they animatedly narrated how they’d thrust themselves into harm's way to shield ‘poor, sweet Juleka’ from the walls’ implosion. She caught him looking, wasting no time in sticking her tongue out at him.
Whenever Queen Bee beat the cat to the punch, you could be certain Adrien would know about it.
“Unless that’s not why you can barely keep your eyes straight. What’s that I smell? Is that… Is that…” Nino stuck his nose in the air. “No. Not a whiff or radiance. And I don’t feel even the teeniest bit carefree. Something you wanna share?”
“Like the fact I skipped a shower this morning?”
“Come on. Her name must start with the same letter as something in this room. Please. Lemme guess. I’m literally on a roll.”
“If it does, my brain is too mushed up to think of an object that starts with ‘N’.”
“‘N’? Okay. Woah, man. I mean, I’m flattered but—"
“Nobody, Nino.” He but him with his elbow. “Nobody.”
But Nino had already whipped out his phone.
So it wasn’t precisely true on the no whos involved, but if he had come out with a ‘yes, there is a who, and that who is a wanted criminal’, Nino might have had a few more uncomfortable questions. At least, over scampering about Paris dressed in a fursuit, Nino placed Adrien’s seclusion as slightly likelier. He did have plenty of volunteers keeping him awake at night. The catch, they weren’t queuing up so much to snog him in the face as to slam him in it.
Leaning to get a closer look, “What are you doing now?” he moaned.
Nino battered him aside.
“Don’t mind me. Just letting everyone know I’ll be switching sides for this prom situ’. ‘Sorry… Als… Pals… before gals… XOXO…”
“Yeah, like I’m going,” Adrien said, smiling, but it made his friend stop typing, his mischievous grin falter.
“Shoot. Sorry about that, man.”
“Hmm? Oh, no, no, it’s fine.” When he failed to respond, expression still woven with sympathy, Adrien said, “Really. I’m just grateful I don’t have to do any more dress up.”
“Yeah, I bet.”
Nino gaped.
“Wait, who said anything about that? Wait, hold on. Are you for real? It’s, like… serious?” Covering his mouth, Adrien was suddenly grateful for their private nook in the corner. “No. Adrien, you’ve gotta help me. No, really! What am I gonna—hey, don’t laugh! What if I embarrass her? Shit, shit, shit. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Adrien!”
Wrong kind of suit, Adrien thought. Instead, enclosed in his friend’s iron-clad grip, “Nino, no offence, but I’m as new to this as you are.”
Nino’s gaze travelled to his footwear.
“Fair.”
“There is someone who might be able to help. An extra-special someone we know who’s familiar with fashion…?”
“Dude,” Nino whispered.
“Dude,” he said, nodding in satisfaction.
After that, Nino swiftly forgot his panic to a game of online chess, his phone occasionally resonating with the sound of artificial ivory. Adrien sank into his seat – another reason to be grateful for some secrecy – and launched the Ladyblog. Alya’s typing speed bordered on wizardry sometimes. But after scrolling idly, that familiar well widened inside his stomach.
He paused. She laughed back at him through the screen.
He’d taken this photo while on patrol a little over two months ago, back during they’re challenge of who could send Alya the dumbest picture. Ladybug had hated it on account of her eyes being opened at slightly different angles, and her mouth too wide. But for Chat, their competition had ended well before he sent it.
His cheeks flushed warm when something prodded his arm, Nino, dropping a beanie into his lap. He hadn’t even realised the fingers wrangling his hair.
He bumped him back affectionately and snapped the hair tie from his wrist.
The day he’d unearthed his friend’s hat collection, all his birthdays and Christmases had come at once. Literally. Nino still hadn’t figured out how to tell his relatives there was only one cap he particularly liked.
“Thank. God,” Nino finally boomed, vaulting from his seat as he was accompanied by a discordant choir of chairs. “If I have to stare at a single book a moment longer, my eyeballs are going to evaporate.”
Adrien tried responding when, “Wow, you do learn something,” another voice said. With a sweep of auburn, she emerged from behind a bookcase, Marinette in tow. Alya smirked. “Never heard anyone pronounce ‘phone’ that way before. Or are we spreading even more misinformation, now?”
He raised his hands. “I had no part in this.”
“Oh, don’t I know it,” Alya said, but she wasn’t looking at him. That smirk thinned as she perked up on her toes, tantalising her boyfriend with her closeness. “Girls before guys. ‘XOXO’,” she drawled, so soft he scarcely heard. Then, she spun in a 180, linking with Marinette.
Nino stopped dead, goldfish-mouthed, as the girls stalked ahead. Adrien trailed behind, though not without seizing the opportunity to smack him with his bag. “Come on, Romeo.”
At the entrance, discussions of next week’s dance, speedily dropped for Adrien’s benefit, turned to the afternoon’s Ultimate Mecha Strike tournament. Alya had outmatched Nino, as per usual. That wasn’t what surprised him. It was that, as the couple took turns recounting what he’d missed with trained ease, it became rapidly more apparent the story was as much for him as it was another.
“Did you find somewhere else to hide?” he asked. “Marinette?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yeah, I—the bathroom.”
Before he could respond, “We’ll see you two tomorrow then, yeah?” Alya said, as she melted her palm into Nino’s. She bumped his shoulder. “See how he fairs fighting for my hand. Rematch?”
“Rematch. But five euros says I come out on top tonight. Or ten. It could be ten.” Nino flailed under her watchful brow. “You’d vouch for me, right, dude? Wanna bet?”
Silence stretched between them.
“Sorry…” Adrien murmured, recoiling inwardly, to which Alya clapped in delight.
“Ha!”
“Wha—Well, okay, okay. Laugh all you want. But Dudette’s been giving me extra private lessons, and she says I show true promise.”
All eyes fell on Marinette.
“This true, girl?”
Preoccupied by the curb, Marinette started as if just having awoken from a dream. “I… Well…” She swung a glance in each of their directions. “Personally, I think what really matters is determination, not necessarily… not necessarily skill… But if he continued to train—”
“Stand down, soldier,” Alya said. “There’s one losing battle I want to see tonight, and it’s not—”
She was interrupted by a low growl, and Adrien’s attention left the dark-haired girl.
Placide, rolling down the car window, tapped his watch with thoughts fossilised beneath firm lines and an even firmer grip on the wheel.
“Yep, sorry. Be right with you!” Adrien called, but the couple were already taking leave.
Tipping his hat, “Sayonara, my dude. My dudette,” Nino said, and he mirrored the gesture. At least, the best you could with a beanie on your head. Alya waved by his side. Just before turning the corner, “Dudette!” he suddenly shouted. “Remind me! I’ll talk to you about something tomorrow!”
Chuckling, he turned to Marinette. “Nino was actually gonna ask—”
“I think I left something in my locker,” she blurted simultaneously. “Oh. Sorry. What were you—”
“That’s okay. I can come with you if you’d…?”
“What? Oh, no. Thank you, but you know, I’ll probably take a while. It’ll take me a while to r-r-r—it’ll take me a while to remember my code. It’s fine. Don’t leave your bodyguard waiting. You have a good evening though!” Her pitch clambered alongside each step, higher and higher, until, at the very top, she ducked under the caretaker’s reproachful stare.
The school doors slammed shut. Adrien lowered his wave. The smile washed from his face. He reached for the limo’s handle.
And yet, despite everything, despite Marinette’s lingering advice, despite his bodyguard’s impatience, despite his own impatience to reach tonight’s patrol and talk to Ladybug, his next step wavered. The school arced above him. He’d made this decision before, back on his first day, and today, it was just as easy.
He extended his wave to his bodyguard, plastering his face with apology, and he broke for the building.
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
Marinette didn’t hear him, not as he slunk into the locker room and took chase. He found her on the bench, Marinette’s name already on his lips when the girl jumped:
“Oh. Hi,” she breathed, at the same time.
Itching his ear like this might stop its exponential pinkening, Adrien laughed, and relief flooded him when she followed his lead.
“Sorry,” she said, glancing down. “Again. I just expected everywhere to be empty. You’re not going home?”
He dropped to a crouch, smiling faintly.
“My father won’t mind if I’m only delayed a few minutes,” he lied. “If it’s help with your code you need, I’ve been in a few tight spots before. Lockers, I mean. I’m sure I could get yours open.”
“Well, I might—might be able to remember. I’ll see.”
She stepped towards her locker, shielding Adrien’s view as he rose behind her, and toyed with the digits. After about ten seconds, the hinges revolted with a low moan.
“Hey, well done. Oh, I just remembered. About Nino’s question…” Adrien began, but his sentence fell away when, beneath a bundle of innocuous books and stationary, Marinette tugged out a dark fabric.
Breathless, Adrien roamed the jacket.
“He… He was going to ask…”
Hugging it to herself, “Ask?” she repeated.
“Who is that for?”
Marinette bowed her head. “I-I know it’s a bit much,” she said. She took a step back. “I wanted to give it you in person, but—”
You. What?
“—then I thought… well, I thought you’d feel embarrassed and not know how to react so I-I was just going to drop it by your house. Not that you have to come! I know you can’t make the dance. You don’t even have to wear it! I made it dark so it wouldn’t stand out. That’s if your father… y-you know. I just thought, you said you needed a little help balancing your proportions how you like them, and we’re all going to be dressed up and things.” She opened her arms. “It’s not fair for you to be left out.”
Except Adrien was lost.
Lost in the details, he retreated so he could absorb everything, following every curve as though tracing his friend’s phantom touch. His chest squeezed, almost painfully as the image alighted in his mind: the silk enwrapping his frame, him spinning circles about the school atrium, gushing with untapped euphoria. As he continued to stare, warmth welled up behind his eyes, threatening to spill.
He forced himself to look away. The rest of his body went cold.
“Hey—”
“Sorry,” she said, a jump in her pitch. “Lost myself. I’m honestly just so relieved you like it. You don’t have to try it on now, but what do you think of the colour? I wasn’t too sure I’d made the right decision. Is there anything you’d like me to change?”
Expelled in an instant, there was no denying the dark apparition that had passed over her features.
“I wouldn’t dare,” he said. “You know, you don’t need to apologise. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s no biggie.” He’d hate to think of anyone denying their feelings for his sake. “Besides, if you’re worried about something, it wouldn’t be like me giving help,” he persisted, leaning in conspiratorially, “only returning a favour.”
She stepped back. “No, no. What I was thinking about is the no biggie. Just a brain fart, that’s all. This is about you, and you need to answer my questions. Is it too short? Too long? I can extend the hemline with a border. What do you think? I also wasn’t sure about the—”
He swamped his friend in a hug, snatching the words from her mouth.
A heartbeat passed between them before, with a soft murmur, she squeezed back.
“I couldn’t think of anything more perfect, Marinette.”
Then he snook the jacket from her grasp.
“Hey. Wait, where are you going?”
Without looking back, Adrien scurried for the hills, slamming a hand against the lockers to catch his momentum as he swung around the corner. Marinette’s footsteps raced behind him, calling out affectionate obscenities.
At the doors to the girl’s bathroom, Adrien turned, and Marinette near rammed into him.
“What are you…?”
He pinned the jacket to his front, swishing the tail like an exotic bird.
“Oh God.”
Beaming, he paced his friend, sending her shuffling in circles, whilst his expression fought to maintain scandal, seduction, scorn. With each pose, he framed his face, chuckling as she tried to grab at his arm. Seamlessly, he reversed the hold, and, suddenly, they were in dance. Adrien swung out, and let go, spinning across the room.
“If this isn’t enough to sweeten the pot,” he said, breathlessness creeping into his voice, “I don’t know what is.”
He reached for his staff as a prop. His fingers only halted mid-air when they made contact with just that – air. Of course, he wasn’t transformed.
“I…” Marinette snickered into her palm, then, that palm shielding her vision, sunk down against the door. “You’re terrifying me.”
“Oh, come on.”
He dropped down opposite her, taking care to drape the jacket over his legs. He’d try it on for real another time. Something so special couldn’t be tainted by his teasing.
“You don’t have to say anything,” Adrien said. “I get it, if you really don’t want to. But can you explain why?”
“I just think, it’s not in anyone’s control, so what’s worth worrying?”
“I have unusual connections.”
With half-baked amusement, “Not this kind,” Marinette murmured. “I mean it. I express worry about them, I sow doubt. Whatever way you look at it, it’s only an act of betrayal.”
Oh.
When he failed to respond, mind tinkering away and his focus turning to the balled fabric, Marinette lowered her back to the ground.
“We express doubt, we give in to fear. We give in to fear, we become…” She exhaled. “That’s why I can’t.”
He nodded, even though she couldn’t see him. Understanding more than she could ever know. Slowly, he crossed his legs, and he rolled onto his side.
“I can’t speak for Ladybug,” he said, before adding, “or Chat Noir. But doing crazy stuff, taking the risk to protect people, that’s their job. Their superheroes. So ours isn’t half as demanding, but you’re not wrong for having doubts. You’re sane. Bottling up your emotions is exactly what Hawk Moth wants. That’s how they get flushed out. Believe me, nothing stays buried forever.”
At that, Marinette glanced over to him, just enough to offer him a meaningful look.
“No conflict was ever won with apathy,” Adrien went on. “That frustration, that anger, even your fear, you can use it. As ammunition. Just like today.”
“What—what do you mean?”
“Earlier. I saw you, how fast you were. You were guiding everyone, looking every sort of way for any signs of danger. It was incredible. And all because you were scared of what might have happened if you didn’t.”
Technically, Adrien didn’t usually think before transforming and bounding into danger, but that was with his Miraculous. He tried to imagine how it must have felt, to not bear the omnipresent weight of responsibility, that spur pushing him into action, that reminder that, whatever he did feel, it could never amount to the victim’s fear. But he doubted Marinette knew how to live without that feeling either. So Marinette wasn’t a holder, she wasn’t leaping from roof to roof by yo-yo or sparring with her staff, and yet, “Just seeing you, it put me on my own two feet at a time I thought it might be impossible.”
He inhaled, sending oxygen to the gaping hole left behind.
Marinette smiled.
God. It made him soar.
Altogether, she sat up on her knees. “Are you serious?”
“Am I—Damn it, Marinette,” he breathed, grinning. “Sometimes, I wish you believed the impact you have on other people.” He rose to his feet, folding the jacket over his arm. “I mean, this? It’s…”
“It’s?” Marinette prodded after a few spare seconds, injecting her voice with humour.
He swallowed, extending a hand. “Beautiful.”
Marinette eyed the offer. Finally, she seemed to decide something to herself. She accepted. And just before releasing her, so quietly he almost missed it,
“I believe you.”
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
With the wink of each passing streetlamp, the tighter Adrien’s chest squeezed. Their radiance, snatched away in a millisecond, tantalised him with their closeness. He rested an elbow on the car windowsill and breezed across a gymnasium’s worth of street signs to vault, bike barriers to cast. Moving would help him think. Getting out would help him think. Except now, for at least the next few hours, he was trapped.
He twisted his ring.
A familiar head peaked out from beneath the bundle of fabric. He zapped through the jacket, coming to land right between his eyes, and rendered his feline presence impossible to ignore. Nor was it ever when his needs weren’t met.
“Hi to you too,” Adrien said.
“You’re grumpy. Why are you grumpy? You were being quite the little flirt only five minutes ago, even without my help.”
“Flirt? No I wasn’t—”
“Yeah, yeah,” Plagg cut in, using his nose as a springboard as he returned to the air. Adrien pretended to swipe him. “Come on. We talked about this. Or someone talked to you about this, probably not me. Expressing your true feelings… Peace and love… Yada yada yada…”
“Well, it definitely wasn’t Father,” Adrien murmured. He removed the phone from his pocket, holding it close just in case his bodyguard decided to roll down the divider. “What’s his favourite saying? To spare the ‘idle chit-chat?’” He scoffed.
Unsurprisingly, Plagg dragged his paws down his face. “Oh, what’s new? Kid, I’m sorry. I mean, we know he’s this and he’s that and he’s awful. But you can’t be hung up on him again. Take a minute. Smell the roses. The weather’s great, you’ve got no homework, and if you do, I’ll just eat it. Don’t be wasting time thinking about some grumpy old, pardon my French—”
“Meanie,” Adrien supplied.
“Right. It’s like poison. You could be thinking about, hmm, I don’t know, literally anything else. Like food. That’s my humble suggestion.” A faraway look possessed him as Plagg’s mind delivered him to a land of tasty concoctions.
Adrien nudged him away, his smile a tad lopsided. “Thanks, meanie. But it’s not really Father I’m worried about.”
“No? Well, I know it’s not Ladybug, because you’ve certainly never needed an invitation to blab about her.”
“Rude.”
“But true.”
“Okay…” He shook out his shoulders as though in an effort to dispel Plagg’s eagle-eyed stare. Tilting his head skyward, “Marinette,” he grumbled. “It’s Marinette.” When the indiscreet kwami failed to respond, he had no choice but to continue, “I guess, I’m just so used to her being crazy upbeat, I forget sometimes… What am I saying? No one can be upbeat all the time. What I mean is, I hadn’t realised she was so afraid of voicing her feelings. I know we’re not as close as I’d like us to be, like, I miss a lot. I just hope she has somebody to talk to. I think there might be something more, something she’s afraid of telling me.”
“Wh—what do you mean?”
Adrien thought back to an ordinary day, not two weeks ago. An ordinary day when Adrien couldn’t breathe. When he’d stumbled into the room that was supposed to be empty and, at the tip of those words – “Are you okay?” – he’d sobbed so hard into Marinette’s shoulder he feared she might never look at him the same.
But she didn’t. Thank God, she didn’t.
“I wonder… Every time we speak, she’s always shifting the focus to others. I always took that to be her shyness, and her kindness every time she springs to help.” His smile waned. “I know how terrifying it is to be seen. So, what if there’s a part she’s trying to hide? Maybe—"
“I don’t want to put words into her mouth,” Plagg cut in, “but Marinette said it herself. She’s worried for the city, kid, just like everybody else. You, especially. Listen… Are you sure it’s really her you’re worried about? Because it sounds to me like, because things today didn’t go exactly as you planned, you’re filling in problems elsewhere. I’m sure you’ll fix things up with Ladybug.”
“No! I mean, I will. But this is different. Marinette, she—she’s not like everybody else. If she’s truly that worried about protecting Paris, if she continues to doubt Ladybug and I…” He yanked off his beanie, raking a hand through his hair, thoughts booming with terrible visions. “Today, she tried to help Ladybug and Chat Noir, and I-I encouraged her! God. Why did I say all that? I was telling her to do a superhero’s job. I was telling her to put herself in harm’s way—”
“Woah, woah, woah.” Plagg swam into his field of view. “Chill. No one’s done anything yet, have they? This is fixable. All she needs is a chat with Chat, and end of—Adrien, WATCH OUT!”
He lurched from the window, but his seatbelt snapped against the movement. Nothing but glass lay between him and the beat of its wings. With horrid warning gaped wide, he was powerless to watch the akuma hurtle past the car.
“It’s not for me,” he said. Then, realising what that meant, he snatched at his belt. “Hey, stop!”
He rapped on the divider, which slowly, infuriatingly, teeth-grindingly rolled down. Plagg dived into his jacket just in time. His bodyguard made a gruff sound that vaguely resembled a question.
“I’m really sorry. I’ll apologise to Father for all of the delays. I just need to go get my homework. Please. I won’t be longer than five minutes. I promise.”
His bodyguard flicked up a button, and the child lock came flying free. Not allowing himself an inch to breathe, Adrien fell out of the car door. He geared up to a sprint, his jacket frantically tussling against the gale, and already chartering the sky, ducked into an alley.
A minute already gone. The transformed Chat Noir summoned his staff to scale the nearest apartment complex. An ugly gasping and expanding thing, the knot in his chest grew tighter as he scoured street after street. With a shove of momentum, he hit an adjacent roof and pushed onwards.
“Come on, come on,” he hissed. Chat kicked off the tiles once more: he vaulted through the open air, breeze rushing through his fingertips. His lips sharpened to a determined line as his attention ranged left, then right.
He’d misread the distance.
“Shi—”
His boots scraped the roof tiles beneath him. An inch, and he would have made it. A howl, and he was in free-fall. The ground roared towards him.
Thankfully, he wasn’t so shot out of his gourd to forget to extend his staff. Sloppy. Stupid. But stupidly experienced in these predicaments. Clinging onto his staff to break some speed – there it was – he dropped to the ground and rolled. His suit absorbed most of the fall, and, spitting out a breath, his boots soon pounded against concrete in monophony with the rush of his ever-hurrying heart.
With a cry, he summoned his “cataclysm!” at his side, and bolted. He bolted with such ferocity his upper-middle could have been detached from his legs, and he wouldn’t have even noticed.
Claws held aloft, just when he thought he’d got it, the akuma swung around to alter its trajectory. He stumbled, almost lost his footing, but adrenaline, fear, confusion were swirling a cocktail through his veins. He seized a lamppost to shove himself back on course.
Down a set of steps he darted. The dusty stench of the canal clambered inside his nostrils. His ears pricked. Was that sniffling? He raised his cataclysm, though he could scarcely make out his own figure amidst the mist.
Squinting to adjust his heightened vision, he trod towards the source of the sound: a bowed head. As he advanced, it appeared to shudder.
The akuma.
He hurled himself forward. The girl lifted her head from her arms just in time, tear-soaked eyes brimming with terror as her name scalded the air.
With dawning realisation, “Marinette, move!” Chat yelled.
She scrambled to her feet. Chat tore for her.
His breath hitched in the back of his throat; he wrenched his cataclysm back. Too close, if he’d withdrawn a second later, he’d have scathed her bare skin. Clutching his own wrist, still alight with energy, the way one wields an atomic weapon, he slowly lifted his gaze. And staggered back.
“No, no, no, no.” At her side, Marinette crushed her pen with such ferocity that, across her knuckles, her efforts flashed white. “No!”
“Marinette, it’s me. It’s Chat Noir.” He couldn’t risk another step closer. But he still needed his cataclysm to destroy the akuma. Burning with helplessness, “Come on,” he begged, over his friend’s incessant hum, “you can do this. You can resist.” But Marinette had lost almost all connection to the outside world. This fact cemented itself when her eyes crammed shut, when her jaw popped with exertion.
The distance between them throbbed like an open wound. “I’m here,” he called. “Marinette, I’m here!”
She couldn’t hear him.
She was running out of time.
He snatched at his memory for pieces of their earlier conversation, if only he could discern some obscure clue, anything to alleviate her distress.
He could relinquish his cataclysm. He could rely on his words...
But words could snap, could break, could trip on the edge of his tongue when he needed them the most. He’d already failed her.
Just like you’ve already failed Ladybug.
“Chat!”
His name brought him back, but the wound between them stretched deeper. She reached for him. Chat stared down; his hands trembled violently. It hit him with such staggering strength, he choked aloud. What was he doing?
Hell. What was he doing?
Chat dropped low, pressed his cataclysm to the ground. A thin crack beat a path towards the canal, but he was faster: he was beside her. In one hand, Marinette wielded the pen; the other, Chat carefully took in his. Marinette released a low, guttural cry.
“I’m here,” Chat whispered. This time, he truly meant it. “I’ve got you.”
Tears mopped Marinette’s cheeks, blazon pink, as she tilted her forehead towards his. Chat let each remonstrance, each cry, flood through him as he spoke above the tide:
“I’m so sorry. I don’t understand what you’re going through. I don’t know what to say to make everything okay. I don’t even know if those words exist. But if I can promise you anything, it’s this. Whatever happens, I’ll still find a way to bring you back. If you can hear me… This cat’s going nowhere fast. I’ll be here.” With a delicate claw, he brushed aside the tear tucked beneath her chin. “I’ll save you.”
Marinette had stopped moving. A sob clung to the lid of Chat’s mouth as he squeezed her palm, a silent oath, and braced for the inevitable.
Marinette shoved him back.
And she hurled the pen to the ground.
“Leave me alone!” she screamed.
The akuma released its possessed object. It chased across the sky, a parting-kiss away. Then, Chat was in her arms. Marinette ensnared him in a fierce embrace, hugged him and didn’t let go. First momentarily stunned, relief washed over him as he buried himself in the crook of her shoulder.
“Chat,” Marinette breathed. “I was almost akumatized—I was almost akumatized—I heard—I nearly lost control—he knew something was wrong—he told me—”
“Hey, hey, hey.” Chat massaged a hand up and down her back. “Shh. Don’t speak for a minute. Just a minute, okay?”
“You’re going to detransform. You need to go.”
Chat’s hand froze. Marinette glanced up.
“I’m not going anywhere. Come on.” Carefully, he ushered her towards the steps. Their stone handrail provided an opportune barrier. Gesturing towards his chest, “In and out,” he murmured. “I’ll be right here.”
Chat waited on her nod before slipping behind the wall, sinking to the floor.
“Claws in.”
Plagg materialised right in front of him. Adrien summoned a hunk of camembert from his pocket, enabling his kwami to start nibbling away, as he spoke up,
“This wasn’t your fault.”
He outlined the bumps of his ring, awaiting her reply. When none came, he continued, “Marinette, you rejectedan akuma. All alone! Don’t you know how incredible that is? You did everything you could and you won. You made Hawk Moth feel small; you took away his one power.”
Nothing.
“Come on. Please. Can you respond to me?” Eyes widening, he looked to Plagg. “Marinette?” This time, his voice had a different edge. “Marinette? Are you okay?”
Dropping the cheese, Plagg zipped around the staircase. A moment later, “Oh no,” he whispered.
Already on his feet, Adrien stormed towards her.
“Wait! You’re not transformed!”
But Adrien was already crouched beside her.
“She’s passed out,” he snapped, without looking back. “Oh, God.” Then he began yanking his arms from his sleeves.
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
The sweet tinge of sundown burned into his retinas. As the sun cascaded from the skies, Chat cast his attention to those wonders above. A brilliant burst of watercolour, where strokes of crimson and orange blended in perfect matrimony, hung like God’s palm outstretched. Downstairs, he wondered whether Marinette had awoken yet.
About half an hour ago, he’d hoisted her up in his arms and ventured back to the bakery. After laying her atop her mattress and drawing the blanket up to her chin, he’d scribbled down a note: I’m keeping my promise. BRB - Chat x
He’d almost forgotten to remove Adrien’s jacket.
Then, he’d bolted back to the limo (“got that homework”), and on returning home, Nathalie had given him a stern look and a sterner word enquiring about his piano practice (“yes, of course, sorry”) before heralding him upstairs.
Adrien had just been propping up his phone on the piano when his bedroom door screeched open.
“Father.”
His phone fell behind the stand.
Adrien stood to attention. In his trained periphery, Plagg threw himself behind the sofa.
Gabriel Agreste stalked into the room. With hands folded behind his back, he perused his son’s possessions, the solar glare briefly rendering his eyes sharp, white slits. Adrien bit the inside of his cheek.
“I’m sorry, I would have called. I wasn’t sure you weren’t busy.”
“Your school was at the centre of another attack,” his father rejoined, the lines of his face staid. He advanced towards the table tennis table, picked up a ping pong ball, and bent to examine it. “Do I need a reason to express concern for my daughter’s wellbeing?” He cocked his head in challenge.
Adrien’s cheeks flushed. “Wha—No. I meant… With this new collection, I know you’ve been occupied.”
“You should know that when it comes to my work, family takes priority.”
“Yes, of course. I didn’t mean to suggest otherwise.”
How odd it felt for his father to use such a word – family – to describe what they were. Ever since that day, such a word had been tainted with blasphemy. His father once reviled him for it, as if it meant mocking his mum’s very memory: how could they ever be a family again, he’d cried, without a mother?
Gabriel released the ball, bouncing it across the table. “Nathalie tells me you came to no harm.”
So she didn’t mention how horrendously late I was.
“No. The villain couldn’t get—” Adrien watched the ball bound over the edge and, instinctively, ducked to seize it “—close enough.”
“And your classmates? Safe, I presume?”
“Yes. My friend, Marinette, she helped to guide everyone indoors.”
Gabriel took a moment for the pinch of a smile to slide into the corner of his cheek. Adrien stared down at the ball in his hands, tracing its curve with his thumb.
“I’m glad. You seem to mention this Marinette girl more with each passing day. A good friend, I’m led to presume.”
“Yes. She’s… brilliant.”
“She’s the bakers’ daughter, hmm? I wonder, it must take a monumental amount of courage to take charge as you describe her. Not easily scared, that one, by all accounts?”
Adrien raised his chin, resolute under his father’s scrutiny. “She’s just as brave as Ladybug.”
Gabriel’s smile widened.
“Undoubtably.”
With a curt farewell, Gabriel had not long made himself scarce, and Adrien set his phone to music and laid it carefully beside the piano before dashing out of the window in normal fashion – except, typically, he was rushing to meet his partner.
Ladybug.
The unbidden reminder opened up a well inside his stomach, the day’s events lapping in like water. And what accompanied it, but a tide of fury: at Hawk Moth, at those damn reporters for spouting whatever clickbait might next go viral, at every paper in the city that benefited from the victims’ akumatization – whether it be using the attacks as grounds for his partner’s incompetence, speculating about their shared dating history, or even making reaches about the victims’ personal lives.
He’d recently seen an article that suggested queer individuals were twice as like to become akumatized. During Pride Month, nonetheless. Rather than citing a credible source, the article went on to string a tenuous connection between identifying as queer and being mentally ill. Ladybug’s reaction had rivalled his. The next day, they’d taken to the city’s billboards to embellish them with pride flags. Ladybug hadn’t understood his amusement decorating a billboard of the famous model.
But he shook himself. Now, perched atop Marinette’s balcony, he fought to drag his thoughts back to his surroundings. He recalled from when he’d left her the drowsy tilt of her head; the fine blackthorns of her hair strewn across rosied cheeks.
She didn’t need his anger, or a retelling of his lady’s doubt. She needed him on top form tonight.
So top form he would be.
The hatch burst open. He leapt up with a cry.
His appearance suspended Marinette in motion. Still rocky from sleep, the girl’s voice broke as it bridged the distance: “Chat Noir?” she hissed, as she snapped the clasp. “What are you doing here? Shouldn’t you be out on patrol?”
“Ladybug’ll understand. Besides, I made you a promise, didn’t I?”
“But you already kept it. Your day’s been long enough without me in it. Please,” stalking towards him, “look at me,” she demanded.
Moonlight washed over her.
Blue eyes, they crashed over Chat like the weight of sea spray. Something bubbled in his throat—
“I’m right here. I’m not going to get akumatized. You don’t have to worry.”
—a warm kind of surprise.
“Marinette, look at me… Do you really think that’s why I’m here?”
Silence stretched between them. They beheld the other until he no longer remembered how to breathe, and she must have seen something in him because she finally said, “Do you want to at least sit whilst you wait?”
He threw her a wink. “If I’d known the place did table service, I would have come a whole lot more often.”
“Like you don’t already. You’re almost as big a fan of my pa’s chouquettes as I am.”
Grinning, he dropped down to the wall and swivelled his legs to dangle over the streets below. Marinette bent beside him. Her feet tucked beneath her, she surveyed the streets below: the rush of cars blitzing here, there and everywhere; the shrieks, hysteric with humour, that itched at Chat’s reflexes. He followed her gaze.
Despite his suit’s resistance to cold, he found himself massaging his thighs.
“I just want you to know,” he began, “you don’t need to explain. I meant what I said, even though I don’t know how much you heard. This wasn’t your fault. Whatever the reason—”
“You were wrong,” she interjected, “when you said I rejected the akuma alone.”
His hands froze. He looked up. “What?”
“I have no idea how you knew, but you did. Fuck. I wouldn’t be here right now if you hadn’t.”
“No, no, no, no,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m no Ladybug: I don’t have the Miraculous of Creation, I don’t know what to say or do to make things better. What you did, what I saw you do alone, was one of the strongest things I’ve ever seen.”
“Strong?” She laughed. “All I accomplished was letting him in. I was this close to losing control. I think, deep down, I wanted to—to forget. I… I just wanted everything to stop.”
He thought of her bottomless optimism, the smile she could proffer should anyone ask for it. For the first time, he saw the gap between his own teeth.
“I know,” he said.
Through eyes unseeing, Chat watched the cars below. As their truths lay scattered between them, they’d thrown the first stone. Together. His focus sharpened when he glanced to her hand. She knew he was here. She knew he’d stay for however long she needed. So why, not in hers, did his hand still feel empty?
Marinette pressed into him.
Instinctively, he stirred, heart kicking into a gallop.
And yet, seeing the subtle rise and fall of her chest, the droop of her eyelids, the soft quirk of her lips, Chat’s motion stilled. With a deliberate exhale, he pressed back. The sounds of the city had subsided to a fleeting thump, thump, thump, and nothing could reach them up here besides a tender breeze. It ruffled through his hair, traced a sketch along his face. He closed his eyes.
When he finally came around some minutes later, Marinette had a pad in her lap and was furiously jotting something down. Chat tilted his chin up to catch a glance.
In a flash, she tossed the pad and pencil onto her chair.
“What were you…” Chat began, sitting up to reach for what she’d been working on, but she seized him back by the arm.
“Chat.” The abrupt disquiet in her voice reduced the pad to a distant memory. “Come on. You’re tired.”
“Are you?”
Releasing him, “No…” she said.
“Well, neither am I.” He swung his legs up to cross them on the wall, facing her. “I’ve got the suit, remember? I’m basically invulnerable.”
She turned. “Yeah. Right.”
“If you want me to leave, I will. But I’m getting the impression you think I should want to leave. Am I right?”
“I don’t want you to leave,” she said.
“But?”
“After the fight today… You took another big risk. I-I saw it in the news. Doesn’t it kill you to be—” She gestured to him. “—like this? Don’t you just want go home and be, I don’t know, normal?”
He couldn’t tell her that civilian life for Adrien Agreste was never normal.
“What is normal? I think I like this better.”
She didn’t seem convinced.
With a sigh, he leant forward, threading his arms over his knees. “I know everyone thinks the best part of being a superhero is the invulnerability: the freedom to kick ass, defy every law, ‘save Paris.’
“Ladybug and I, we got out every day, we fight, and believe me, I do love it. I love being able to protect people and make a difference. To feel like what I do actually matters. Like I…” He stopped himself before continuing. “But no one questions it anymore. We’re still expected to go home and be normal, and sometimes, that’s the worst part. Sometimes, I think without being here like this, with you, or Ladybug, I wouldn’t cope with the ‘normal’ stuff.”
“So me… being here with you… That’s helpful?”
He tilted his head. “In a way. Still, I don’t expect you to—”
Except Marinette was already vanishing beneath her trap door.
“I’ll be two secs!” she whispered, and he paused his answer by pressing a finger to the air. He smiled at the ground. What could she be up to this time?
Moments later, his staff beeped by his side.
“Hey, Kitty. Sorry I couldn’t respond to your messages. Something’s come up, but we’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”
At the melancholy in her voice, the well in his stomach widened. He stared at her icon, features aglow, and blinked rapidly. That picture, he’d taken on their first patrol. On the surface, there was no need for concern: just because some nights he couldn’t bear to return to his room didn’t mean she should feel the same. This was hardly the first time she’d skipped out.
“I need your help.”
He looked back at his staff, but there had only been one message.
The hatch burst open again, except this time, it didn’t take him nearly as much by surprise. Marinette rose her head with a grin – and in her hand, a steaming plate of croissants.
His mouth watered.
Closing the latch behind her, “Excuse some of the more… interesting specimens,” Marinette said. “These ones usually get donated, but after my fiasco yesterday, there’s a lot more where that came from.”
He chuckled as she landed beside him. She immediately scarfed up one with a suspiciously-shaped addition. “Dare I ask?”
“Safe to say, I was the one feeling a bit flaky.”
He took a croissant before she could suspend his privileges. “Well, I’m glad you’re feeling butter.”
She pretended to smack him, to which he bowed under her, ejecting a speel of apology. When he rose, his cheeks ached, and his smile faltered somewhat.
Marinette’s softened. “Something on your mind?”
Before responding, he took a deliberate bite. Considering Marinette’s worry for his and his partner’s wellbeing, was it really the smartest move to raise his concerns out loud? Except, even as he asked himself this, he knew his mind was already made up. Marinette had been honest with him. The least he could do was offer the same curtesy.
“I just got a message from Ladybug,” he said. “Something came up.”
“Oh. Is that a problem? You don’t see each other every night, do you?”
“No, no, only every few.” He took another bite, although he barely processed the taste. “We just didn’t get a chance to catch up earlier, that’s all, and she… she seemed like she had something she needed off her chest.”
Marinette shifted slightly beside him. “I’m sure she’ll reach out to you if she has a problem. Maybe she just needed some time to mull it over?”
“Yeah. Maybe. Yeah, it does kinda seem like she’s avoiding me on purpose.” He inserted a laugh to keep himself from sounding too self-pitying, expecting Marinette to return it. She didn’t. Her expression turned calculating as he went on, “Even if I can’t tell her the specifics, I can always tell her how I feel. I just hope she feels the same, or at least enough to tell me when she doesn’t want to. You know?”
“I can’t pretend to speak for her but… You said you fight side by each other’s side almost every day. You must trust in each other a lot more than just your emotions. Not ‘just’ emotions, but—”
He nodded. “No, you’re right. I’d give literally anything to keep her safe. I think she knows that.”
“She does.”
At the finality in her tone, he looked to her, but her hair shielded any chance of reading her expression. That was until, whipping the hair from her face, she turned to say, “I owe you one by the way.”
“You do, don’t you?”
Marinette wasted no time going in for a second swipe.
“No, no. No IOUs,” he amended. “Except if it’s the pastry kind, then I’ll take a hundred. Actually, that does remind me. I’ve been thinking. I’ve already got you the bestest name—”
“‘Bestest’?”
“For if you did happen to get akumatized.”
Marinette deadpanned him.
“But hear me out.” He hopped from the wall and framed the word with a wide gesture. “How about… Meganette?”
She squinted, giving him her not-amused-face, as she joined him. “That’s dreadful. What am I, Godzilla?”
“Do better, then.”
“Given the absolutely terrible circumstances, I’d rather not think about being akumatized right now, thank you very much. But… if I was, hypothetically, to get evilized, it’d be an even dumber name like… Miss Cucumber, or—oh! Water Woman. So I could frighten you off.”
“Very mature,” Chat said.
“Yeah, like I’m the one who suggested I get akumatized.”
“Fair.” He chuckled. “I do actually have one request. If any other time, you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’ll let someone know. Your friends, your family, me, whoever. Can you do that?”
She nodded. “Promise.”
“You’re not having me on? You swear—”
“God! I promise,” she groaned, stepping back. “Come on. Bed. Now.”
Chat’s attention hovered next to her: the drawing pad lying skywards, and an illustration of a sleeping kitty. Thoughtlessly, Marinette tore the drawing out and folded it into his hand.
“Here. It’s in ink.”
Warmth flushed Chat’s features. He stared down at the little scrap of paper for what felt like years, driven dizzy by the multitude of words popping and fizzing inside of him, threatening to bubble over. Ultimately, as he tucked the sketch into his breast pocket, “Thanks, Meganette,” he said. “Shit. Sorry. ‘Marionette’: that’s it! That’s your name!”
“Actually, it’s Water Woma—” A yawn cut her short. “Alright,” she said, trapping the sound. “I won’t say it again.” She unhooked the trap door. “Go home.”
Meeting her hushed volume, “Okay, okay. Oh, wait,” Chat added. “Earlier, you said Hawk Moth knew something was wrong. Did you mean anything by that in particular, or…?
“Did I? I don’t even remember saying that. I guess it was just nonsense? Probably.”
“Yeah, I wouldn’t blame you.” Chat scooted over to the edge of the roof, summoning his staff from behind. He waited a moment longer, as long as he could, testing the silence. Finally, “Goodnight, Mari,” he said.
“You too, Chat. And—”
Just as he vanished into the night.
“—thank you. For staying.”
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
The following day, Adrien awoke with his body in pieces.
Pushing onto his back, “Ah, fuck,” he groaned, as he crossed his arms across his face. He hissed between his teeth: nettles wracked him crown to toe. He attempted shifting the weight between his shoulders.
“Ugh. Fuck me.”
“What’s the matter with you?” an unhelpful voice asked. “Haven’t heard that sound since Big Bird.”
“Big… What, the dinosaurs?”
“Well, I was going for Pharoah and the whole mummy thing, but either-or.”
Adrien didn’t need to disturb his arm-barrier to remember the special delivery they’d returned to last night. He screwed up his nose. Chloé. It was all well and good her encouraging Plagg’s acquired taste when she didn’t have to live with it.
But to answer his question, he had no idea. If not his binder, and he’d never sustained an injury the rejuvenating powers of the Miraculous couldn’t heal, what?
Tilting his head to the side, “Dead…” he murmured.
“That’s great!” Plagg plopped onto the sheet, crossing his paws behind his head. He sighed. “About time we got some rest.”
With a moan, the remainder of Adrien’s limbs followed suit and spilled over the side of the bed. The duvet went with him, and Plagg took to the air with a yelp. Adrien locked his knees against the mattress to stabilise his footing, forcing exaggerated blinks.
Plagg harrumphed. “Should have known. No rest—”
“—for the wicked,” he finished, just as he buried his face in the sock draw.
“Excuse me?”
Bang. Scraping the back of his head, Adrien started to attention. He glanced to his companion, which was now empty space. Gabriel Agreste appraised him with narrowed eyes.
“I—Father. Good morning.”
“I noticed your tardiness to breakfast this morning.”
His hand returned to the nape of his neck. “Oh. I-I’m sorry. I must have slept through my alarm. I’m a little tired, that’s all.”
“Tired?” With faster reflexes than a Miraculous holder, his fingers rested beneath Adrien’s chin. He tilted him skywards for inspection. His throat closed – for possibly the first time, he felt grateful for the weakness of his Adam’s apple. “Far too pale. Are you ill? Nauseas?”
Adrien forgot how to move. It was only when his father released him to mutter about, “public school implementing hygiene procedures,” that he staggered forward.
“No, no. I under-slept. I’m fine, I promise.”
The look Gabriel gave him stalled his approach. “Then we have another problem entirely,” he said. “Fortunately, I’ve already taken action to relieve you of your afternoon schedule. Vincent is dismissed.”
“Di-dismissed?”
“Yes. I visited you this morning, not on account of your unpunctuality, but to inform you Gabriel’s assets are due to go up for auction.”
“Vincent’s gone? But why—” His heart skipped a beat.
His father had already made for the door. It was only, squeezing the handle, that he glanced back. And had he not seen it for himself, he wouldn’t have believed it. His father. Smiled. Actually smiled! Not a strange arrangement of teeth with an upturned lip, but one as real, as honest as he remembered.
He’d all but begun to doubt his memories’ integrity.
“Is there anything else?” Gabriel asked, with a glint of amusement.
Adrien stood in place before remembering he still needed to respond. Even without a mirror, he knew he looked just like him when he said, “No. No, Father,” and slowly, as if testing muscles under-exercised, broke into a grin.
“Very well. You’ve left Nathalie long enough, don’t you think?” The door clicked shut behind him.
Auctioned.
Adrien planted his hands at his hips. And barked out a laugh of disbelief.
Auctioned.
Plagg zipped to his holder’s side. “He say anything?”
“Dude! You’ll never guess what!”
Twenty minutes later, Adrien whisper-shouted as he dropped into the seat beside Nino, bag thumping at his feet. The school drive had done little to diminish his hundred-watt grin, even when Nathalie made a note of the fact, combined with breakfast, which she always insisted he take, he’d be ten minutes late.
He’d occupied himself giddy as a schoolboy, patting his thighs as the streets whizzed by. More desperate, with each passing second, to unleash the gargled-down excitement brimming on the edge of his tongue.
“Please. Quiet, boys,” Miss Bustier said before he could finish. Adrien bit down.
Perhaps it was a sign: Mari hadn’t arrived yet, which wasn’t a particular stretch of the imagination. He’d tell them once they were all together. Except, as ten minutes became twenty, and twenty devolved into forty, Adrien’s plan begun to unravel before his very eyes. In the seat ahead of Nino, Alya’s attention hadn’t left her phone. She beat out text after text.
Something gnawed inside Adrien’s stomach.
“No, nor me,” he murmured when the bell rang, pocketing his phone. Marinette’s voicemail answered him, and, for the third time, Nino muted her with a huff.
“Why don’t we get Friend Tracker again?”
Miss Bustier was waiting for them at the door.
“Alya, boys, could I have a moment please?”
Only once the rest of their classmates had filtered out did her smile pale. She threaded her hands, her voice a soft hush: “You’re not in trouble, I assure you. I’ve notified Ms. Mendeleiev, so don’t worry about your lateness to next period—”
“Is this about Marinette?” Alya interjected.
Rather than scolding her, Miss Bustier nodded.
“Mr. Damoclès has requested you three join him in his office.”
Lateness was the last thing on any of the teens’ minds when Alya rose a fist to announce their presence. They exchanged glances, which was the closest any of them were willing to confront the myriad of possibilities – no one possibility more assuring than the last.
Before knocking on the door.
Mr Damoclès made it so much worse. His tone, like Miss Bustier’s, was far too soft, too controlled. Nino and Adrien sat. Alya refused.
Marinette’s parents had reported their daughter missing at 7am that morning. She hadn’t taken any clothes, or other personal items, including her phone. The police wanted to know whether Marinette had said anything to suggest her plans to leave home. She hadn’t. Alya asked when the police were going to launch a search-party. They already had.
“Although, kids, I highly suggest you go home. I have no control over your activities outside of school premises, but please. Use this absence to be comforted by your families.”
“Like hell am I going fucking home,” Alya snapped, the second they stepped out into the hall. “We need to get out there. Now.”
Nino said, “We should question her parents. Find out last she was seen.”
“But first, we have to flag Ladybug and Chat Noir. They can cover more ground. What do you think, Adrien? Adrien?”
Adrien was too busy grasping at his chest.
He couldn’t breathe. Fear Knot. That was the only explanation. He must have returned and broken into the school. He stumbled back. Their eyes followed him, pointed with accusal. Why were they staring at him? Couldn’t they see the akumatized villain currently crushing the air from his lungs?
He needed to get out. He needed—needed—
“Air,” he spluttered.
He broke into a sprint. Their voices bounded along the walls behind him, but their words were lost. The only to shove through the haze, Alya’s desperate plea – “See… bug… call me!”
He burst through the entrance, flying down the steps. Flying, until at the very bottom, his foot snagged on rubble. Fragments sank into his thigh, but that wasn’t why he cursed.
“Fucking—idiot!” he yelled. And when he then scraped his arm scrambling upright, he eagerly awaited the sensation. The friction of pavement against skin. The release of taking himself apart. Piece by piece. A half-thought winked across his mind, that he hadn’t had these desires since—but it didn’t matter. What mattered was amending his mistake. Before it was too late.
He transformed in an alley, but where a current of energy usually surged to resuscitate fatigued limbs, he felt nothing. Pure adrenaline drove him forwards. Raw and human, and too much like Adrien Agreste.
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
He’d left her. He’d abandoned her all alone, even when he’d seen her hurting. How many times had Marinette sat by his side, lent an ear to every tantrum, coddled him for his own self-inflicted problems? As he scaled the nearest apartment building, he tapped his breast pocket, her drawing still there. Just yesterday, she’d given him a gift that had taken hours upon hours of dedication. And for her trouble, he’d abandoned her at her time of need.
Some friend.
This wasn’t about him. He wasn’t thinking straight when he plummeted into a well of his own self-pity. He needed a plan. First, call Ladybug; then, question Mr and Mrs Dupain-Cheng. They had to know something. Anything. Otherwise, that meant the last person to see their daughter was…
His partner picked up on the second dial.
“M’lady,” he panted, “I need your help. There’s someo—”
“Meet me at the Eiffel Tower. We’ll talk there.”
He headed her command. Only minutes later, he dropped down on the familiar metal framework and raced towards her. But when she turned, the falter in Ladybug’s voice stirred within him an unprecedented rupture of unease: “Chat Noir.”
He stalled.
“Ladybug. Is everything—”
“We need to talk.”
“Talk? But… I…” He couldn’t find the words. He only knew hers meant the world.
Their gravity dragged him to submission. To refuse her now, after weeks of trying – how could he articulate how he was feeling? He just knew he couldn’t make the same mistake twice.
But Marinette…
The police were already looking for her. By now, his schoolmates would have joined the search. He could spare a moment, if only for this. That was at least what he told himself.
He trailed Ladybug to the ledge. He scoured her expression for an explanation. On kneeling beside her, this became impossible. Ladybug’s hair fluttered across the right side of her face, casting her features in obscurity.
Quiet reaped upon them. Only broken, softly, by,
“I…” Ladybug’s voice chased away into the breeze. “I… I don’t…”
He softened a palm over hers. As though a lofty fist had seized him about the chest – they found one another, fleetingly, gently – he stopped breathing. A squall of rain swept past his ears.
Despite everything, “Take your time,” he said.
Ladybug’s lip wavered as she tried to speak.
“Hey. Come here.”
With a sharp inhale, Ladybug buried herself in Chat’s chest. He blinked in surprise. But instinct took hold, and he cushioned an arm around her. He ran a hand up and down her back, producing gentle shushing noises as his partner was overtaken by desperate clutches for air.
“Shh, you’re okay. You’re okay, hey?”
Ladybug gasped. “I-I—I don’t know what to do.”
“That’s fine. That’s totally fine. I know you can’t be specific, but what’s worrying you, is there any way you can explain it to me?”
Her eyes lifted, and Chat’s motion stilled.
“I don’t want to disappoint you.”
He felt something warm slide down his cheek. Absolved by such sudden compassion, Chat tore away. Blue eyes. For a moment, he was nothing: a speck of dust caught in a lapse between past and present, his expression shadowed by oblivion. Then, he cushioned Ladybug’s cheeks; the world dissolved around them.
“Try,” he breathed, with a smile.
Ladybug’s chin bobbed. Slowly, she rose her hands to entwine his. Anxiety jumped inside his stomach when those fingers traced the edges of his ring.
“There, now,” Chat said, glancing down, but her fingers had since moved on. “What’s wrong?”
“I’ve found a replacement holder.”
He didn’t react at first. Because he must have not heard her right.
“What?” he suddenly snapped, and, without thinking, he jerked to his feet. She flinched, but he was too busy processing what she’d said to care. “What do you mean ‘replacement’? What have you done?”
He felt as though he was watching himself from the outside, cringing at his venom, but powerless to stop it.
Drawing her legs inwards, Ladybug blinked up at him. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t have a choice.”
“No. No, of course you do! You can’t do this. You—you can’t make me do this!”
She rose to his height. “Chat, it was you whodidn’t leave me a choice!”
Water swashed in his ears.
“Every time you sacrifice yourself, every time I have to watch you die…” Her lip wavered. “Have you ever given one thought to what you’re leaving behind? I wake up. Terrified. Every time, I think you’re going to do something I can no longer reverse.”
Her words sounded so broken, so unfamiliar falling from her lips that Chat tried, desperately, to reach for her. But she stepped aside, shaking her head.
“Don’t.”
“I’ve only ever sacrificed myself because I trust you—"
“I said don’t.”
“—to bring me back, and I’ve always put my trust in you, even when youdon’t. Because you’re capable of so much more than you know—”
“‘More’? You’ve never not seen me as exactly the person you wanted me to be!”
Chat stared. Realisation washed over him.
“Ladybug, who is this replacement for?”
Except, hands trembling at her sides, something in his partner’s expression flickered.Something unrecognisable came to light within her eyes, a fire beckoning deep below the surface.
Sotto voce, Ladybug breathed stillness into the air.
“I can’t do it anymore.”
She extended an open hand towards him.
“Wait a minute,” he said, taking an involuntary step back. “Let’s think about this for a second.”
“Let me save us. Both of us.”
Chat’s footsteps continued to recede as she advanced towards him. When he spoke, even with his Miraculous, he sounded airless.
“You don’t really want this.”
“Yes. I do. I know why we wear these masks. And I know you really believe it, that you see me for more than just my powers. But we wear these masks because we’re supposed to forget. It’s his design.”
Chat released a choked murmur: his back hit the wall.
“I’m done forgetting. I will notwake up in a world where I fight with a holder of the black cat Miraculous and not Chat Noir.”
In the shadow of Ladybug’s vision, Chat Noir’s claws moulded into fists. “This is a test,” he murmured.
Please. Please, whoever was listening, give him this. And yet, deep down, he already knew.
For every night he’d cursed these ridiculous rules, cursed their forced anonymity, there were two truths he’d bet his life on. One: Ladybug would never pressure him into anything, ever.
“If you hand me your Miraculous, I can find another eligible holder just like I did with mine. It’s what you’ve always wanted, right? To see each other. For real.”
Chat turned his back to her; his heart punching holes through his chest. A thin scowl stretched across his features. He braced his staff. And released a long, slow breath.
Two: Ladybug would never use his desires, his thoughts, his feelings against him. And now, another truth.
“There’s a problem there, Bug.”
“What’s that?”
Chat barrelled towards her. What was he doing? He couldn’t hurt her. Chat tried to grab her wrists, but she evaded his throw. He didn’t have time to regain his footing before Ladybug tugged him down. He landed hard with a yelp.
Ladybug locked him in place with her elbow, her terror tearing into him as she cried, “What are you doing?”
“Fight me; don’t fight me. But don’t pretend to be her,” Chat hissed, writhing from her grasp.
“Kitty, what do you…”
Chest heaving, Chat watched it happen. From the genuine, abject horror that snatched at his instincts, Ladybug’s eyes emptied. Her lips straightened into a narrow line; the stiffness in her spine melted.
“I’m saving your life, even if that means I have to take it from you first.”
Before she could snatch his ring, and before Chat could stop himself, he drove his knee into her stomach. She wrenched to the side; Chat scrambled to his feet. What had he promised? He couldn’t hurt her. But what other option did he have? He guarded his face and retreated, brain whirring with questions.
Where, where, where, every one screamed. Where was the akuma? Chat surveyed her once, and once again, but besides her yo-yo… Not her earrings.
His eyes stung.
It didn’t matter. He’d bring her back.
Hawk Moth knew Ladybug’s identity.
It didn’t matter.
Ladybug would never be safe until Hawk Moth was defeated.
Ladybug rose slowly, the veil of neutrality fluttering back into place.
“I know you can fight him,” Chat said, as he struggled to widen Ladybug’s advance.
“You ‘know’?” She snorted. It sounded agonisingly real. “Try ‘hope.’ I think you hope, more than you do for anything on this earth, that I’ll save myself. I think, deep down, there’s only one thing that really scares you.” She hurled her yo-yo; Chat avoided her with a narrow leap. “You’d rather die in that costume than live a day as what you really are.”
She darted towards him. In a jolt, Chat ducked behind a chimney to avert her strike. The chimney crumbled. A measly pile of bricks, Chat stared at the wreckage before grappling with Ladybug’s furious punches.
Was that really what she thought?
He ducked and rolled.
No. It couldn’t be. What had Marinette said, when he’d vowed to do anything to keep his partner safe?
“Wait!”
Ladybug already knew.
“I’ll do it. You hear me?” he shouted in fervour. His voice caught. “Stop. I said I’ll do it!”
Ladybug pulled her punches. Spinning her yo-yo in the air between them, a faux barrier, she said, “Nice to see you haven’t lost your sense of humour.”
“Really. No games.” Chat lowered himself to his knee, gasping. “You can have my Miraculous. If that’s what you really want, then it’s yours.” He raised his hands. “You’ve always been a person, not a piece of jewellery. It’s always been just you and me, M’lady. Miraculous, or not.”
She was right in front of him now, tilting her head.
“Granted, this isn’t quite how I imagined it, but I suppose I’ve wanted to tell you who I am since the moment I met you.” He laughed. “I guess I can afford to wait another—”
Ladybug slammed his face into the tiles. Pain erupted through Chat’s nose; tears sprung from his eyes. Ladybug wrung through his hair, and she yanked him upright. Lights danced in his vision.
Stooping low, Ladybug observed him with apathy.
“Lucky Charm,” she snapped.
She rose her yo-yo, and he recoiled, gritting his teeth. What power could possibly be gifted to the holder of the Miraculous of Creation?
Something clamped around his wrists. Horror wrenched through him – raw, animalistic horror. And he hit the ground. He tried to move, but his new wrist-restraints bound him to the tiles, as all around him brick walls begun to manifest into existence. He choked on his own surprise. Darkness swept over him, Ladybug’s shadow, and the roof came next. Trembling, his fingers clawed at the nothingness in the air.
He needed out.
Even if her voice sounded like home when she said, “I’m going to keep you safe.”
He needed to run.
“Cataclysm,” he stammered, before she could leer close enough. He stretched out as far as his arm could possibly take him.
His bounds, and the walls with them, turned to ash.
He surged to his feet, lunging for the rail. Only before extending his staff, scarcely able to hold on, did he glance over his shoulder.
Ladybug stared back, unperturbed. Despite everything, he refused to call her anything else.
Chat ran.
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
She’d tried to warn him.
Between snatches of air and buried words.
Throwing back a glance to check he hadn’t been shadowed, Chat hastened to escape that voice – her voice. His wrist still burned with the phantom of his partner’s touch, how her nails had sliced into his skin with such a surgical precision as to suggest she’d done it a million times over. How she’d twisted his ring, hunger sliding off her crooked lip.
She screamed after him.
Confused clamours swirling in his ears, he plummeted into an underground station. As he dodged over the turnstiles, voices crowed: “Chat”; “Was that…”; “Chat Noir?”
He hit the ground running. A sign overhead, its words crawling and twisting into a jagged script, illuminated with the bathroom symbol. Screw it. A hand seized him from the swarm. A cry punctured the air. He snatched his arm back. Worried faces flushed his vision. He crashed into a disabled toilet and bolted the lock, shoving his palms up against the door.
With head hung low, “Claws in,” he choked.
And he sank to the floor.
He shook his head.
Coward. Attention-seeker. Egotist.
He caged his mouth.
Hawk Moth had taken Ladybug.
Marinette was missing.
It was all his fault. If he’d just been there, if he’d said something different, if he’d disobeyed her request for space when she obviously needed his help…
He cracked a fist against the door.
A sharp tang stung his tongue. When he brushed his nose, withdrew, red ran through the cracks of his palm. The fine droplets accented his sleeve. It lashed across his mind, how it had felt for the crown of his head to crack against tile, for his eyes to eclipse, fluttering dimly in and out of focus. Why hadn’t he healed? He couldn’t process the implications.
He’d failed.
He drove strength into his legs, dug his fingernails into the toilet lid as he willed himself, get up! He hit the floor.
“Adrien. Hey! Hey!” A paw tugged on his arm.
He collected his surroundings; his gaze lifted from the ground. Immediately, shame washed over him for such an overt display, and for the way Plagg looked at him, like a wilted flower doused in rain. “Focus on my voice. It’s okay,” his kwami said. “You need to step back. Just breathe, yeah? Breathe, and we’ll think this through.”
But Adrien’s head was throbbing, and his hands were shaking, and he needed air, and he needed his mother, and he needed to protect her.
He clung to Plagg’s worry; he pleaded his name; he jut out his ring-finger. “Take it. You have to find someone. Now.” He subconsciously breezed a hand across his burning wrist, breath flying quick and hot. The cry ripped from him: “Plagg. I’m begging you. She needs help. Now!”
He’d let her down. He’d let her down, and he’d had. No. Idea. He wasn’t strong enough to protect the person who meant the most to him. Had he ever been? The greatest act of love a person could commit, he’d thought, was to give everything for them, even if it meant giving away his own life, just as his mother had once done for Adrien.
But Adrien’s everything wasn’t enough.
“What are you saying?”
The thought of her, still in there as someone else’s words clawed from her lips, indomitable – how lonely she must have felt, how terrified… “Believe me, if I could, if I had the Miraculous of the snake, I wouldn’t stop fighting. No matter how many chances it took, no matter how long. I wouldn’t stop fighting until I got her back. But I don’t have those chances. It’s one shot, and… I’m too reckless. I make too many mistakes. And this is one mistake I won’t let myself make.”
“But how can you give up now? You can’t! Chat Noir protects. Chat—”
Fury alighted in him like striking steel to flint. “Chat Noir isn’t real!” he roared.
Plagg recoiled.
Despite the tears welling in Adrien’s eyes, he willed his features to not betray his own self-reproach. What he’d said crept around his neck like a vine of thorns. Even between burning clutches for air, he pleaded, “You need to leave. You need to find someone before it’s too late. If I refuse to stand up for her, I take the decision out of your hands. I don’t deserve to be a holder. So please.” He couldn’t breathe. “Don’t make me fail her again.”
He couldn’t—he balled a fist around his collar, realisation dawning over him. It announced its monstrous birth: the sob raked against his throat. They finally fell free. He bowed his head, overcome. A torrent of tears burst from the beds. And between pockets of air, between twisting stabs to his side – he barked out a laugh – a hand bristled his cheek.
Even if it wasn’t real, he knew it wasn’t real, the familiar imperfections of it, slightly worn with age, flooded him with relief. For the solace of release, for letting his layers unravel, his pent-up frustrations fly.
“Go.”
The hand morphed in texture, until it felt warm and soft, like fur.
“No,” Plagg whispered plainly.
“Why?” It was all he could muster.
“I could find someone else to save Ladybug, Tikki.” The little kwami alighted on Adrien’s shoulder. “But I won’t.”
He ran a hand under his nose, sniffed. “Why? Because I’m more capable than I think? Just like Ladybug?”
In his peripheral, Plagg flinched.
Finally, “No,” he said. “No.
“I forget sometimes that I’ve never… I’ve never had a holder so young. The word kind of implies you’re looking after me, right? It always has. I’ve never not thought of my powers as a gift. But that’s because, until you, I never understood what it meant to be responsible for someone.”
Adrien hoisted his head from his arms.
“I’m not going anywhere. Even if I’m proving myself to be a burden, I’m not leaving.”
The spark that Plagg had struck within him, a twisting fury, had grown.
But not in frenzy. Its crackle, a heartbeat, warmth flushed through him.
He dragged a hand across his cheek, then stared down at his ring-finger. His reflection glistened back at him under the lamplight. He thought of that startling, confusing, life-changing day: the day he’d transformed, and Plagg had opened a door in a blank wall, shown him a life he’d never known he could have.
“No,” he breathed. “No, Plagg.”
He mushed the kwami in a hug, and Plagg released a small yelp of surprise. He cradled him against his cheek.
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m sorry, but I won’t—"
“No—no, I meant…” As they parted, “You know I don’t see you like that.”
“You don’t?” Plagg asked.
He didn’t. He didn’t, he didn’t, he didn’t. Which was why it charred his blood to think of his next words. It didn’t make sense – these words, his actions – but he’d needed to embrace the kwami one last time. He needed that embrace now more than ever. If only he really did have the power of second chance.
“You’re worse,” he blurted. “You’re just like my father. You control everything: how I act when I’m transformed, what I can tell my friends, my life, and when I should throw it away. If you were truly responsible for me, if you truly cared about protecting me, you’d have left a long time ago!”
Plagg stared back, but his face didn’t reveal the hurt Adrien had anticipated.
“Only if that’s what you really want.”
Adrien held out the ring.
“It’s what I want,” he said, without vigour.
Plagg didn’t react, even as much as nod. He took the Miraculous and fazed, likely, through the air vent. Adrien didn’t watch him go. He stood, sobs clawing up his throat, and clutched the handle before the ground could take him.
The least he could do was buy the kwami some time.
˚₊‧ʚ🐞ɞ‧₊˚
He closed the door of the bathroom behind him, and he immediately knew.
Ladybug had attacked.
Crowding from the light, a swarm of Parisians groaned to accommodate the new body as Adrien pressed head to shoulder with a mother and her buggy. A man growled at him to “get back inside!” but he steeled himself. He could hardly make out the turnstiles amidst the mob, but he already knew exactly where he needed to be.
Teeth gritted, he made for the light.
“What on earth are you doing?” demanded the consensus as Adrien fought through a wall of locked arms and legs, young and old, streaming tears and vacant expressions. That feeling swelled within him, the feeling that made the ground feel so close. But his place was where it always had been, by his lady’s side. Even if it only meant buying her some time.
He murmured apologies to anyone who would look him in the eye, snatching pieces of conversation from those who cast him with glares, or those who had different priorities altogether:
“S-she’s not real, is she?”
“Don’t worry, baby. It’s probably all for show. Just another silly villain. The real Ladybug will show up soon, I promise.”
“Don’t do that, girl.”
He didn’t have time to react before the man gripped his arm. Adrien rose his head, jaw stiffening like oven-baked clay.
“Excuse me, sir,” Adrien repeated.
“Listen, kid. I’m trying to help you. You’ll only get yourself hurt.”
What the man didn’t know, was that there was little in this world that could hurt him now. With a grunt, he released his hold, and accompanied by shouts of protest, Adrien made the last step into the light.
He didn’t look back.
And low and behold, Adrien’s footfall permeated everything. Even with nimble steps, it seemed the whole city was holding its breath. Not one door had been left unlatched, not one blind forgotten. Had he not fought though the underground, he might have believed a city’s worth of Parisians had fled in a matter of minutes.
He’d always known that, without a Ladybug, Paris would fall to its knees. But somehow, he’d never imagined this.
On one street corner, he passed a billboard: thick lashes and cerulean liner crinkled with glee. He matched his own gaze. Then, the promotion phased out, replaced with his lady’s equally rosy-cheeked expression. Instead of Gabriel, the text behind her read one word.
Unstoppable
It was at that moment Adrien decided his sound no longer grated on him. His footsteps became stomps; his own breaths transformed into a shrill cry.
“Hello?” he shouted, projecting fear, confusion, and hardly a lie. “Is anyone there?” He rose his voice even louder, standing directly in the centre of the square. “Ladybug! Where are you?”
Except, it wasn’t Ladybug who responded to his call.
“Adrien! Here!”
His head shot up. He looked just about every direction before he saw him: Mr Dupain. The baker gestured wildly as, door ajar, “Come on, boy!” he shouted.
Like father like daughter, Adrien knew the futility of dissuasion. He froze up. Oh God. What should he do?
“Have you seen her?” His voice hitched up with a pleading note he’d thought impossible. “Have you seen my girl?”
Adrien’s skin went cold.
That was when a thin cord enwrapped Tom’s leg. Before Adrien could react, the cord snapped free and sent him sprawling.
“Mr Dupain!” he cried, stumbling forward.
It snaked around the bakery, sealing the door shut, and sealing Tom inside. Adrien spun when it returned to his partner’s hand.
Ladybug – despite everything, still Ladybug – received him. Her eyes narrowed when they met the light, her stare as sharp as glass. She advanced towards him.
He shrunk back, but he couldn’t think of anything else except that his vision had come true. Marinette was out there somewhere, in danger: he’d told her to use her fear as ammunition, to delve into the throes of chaos without a thought for her own safety. And now, without the Miraculous Ladybug—
Ladybug tossed her weapon, and his hands flew to shield his head.
Her yo-yo snagged his wrists, tugging them together. He didn’t act, even when she took hold of him by the restraints to utter,
“Why aren’t you—”
“Marinette,” he blurted. Her roaming gaze froze. Still, he held her eye. “You know her, right? I’m looking for my friend. Have you seen her?”
Without missing a beat, “She’s inside,” Ladybug said. “Safe. You should join her.”
He shook his head. “No. No, she’s not. She’s missing. He parents are terrified. I have to find her. I have to know she’s okay. Ladybug.” Ladybug’s hold on him loosened. “Please.”
Deliberating, his partner chewed the inside of her cheek. The simple action reminded him of the face she usually made whilst decoding her Lucky Charm.
Then his voice found freedom.
As the gale clawed against his face, clothes, hair, he shredded his lungs with protests. They toured the cityscape, swinging from one roof to the next, soaring over street after street. Instinctually, he buried his face in his partner’s shoulder, trembling without his suit.
And when he finally found grounding, “Is she… is she here?” he stammered.
Only when she moved away did he collect their surroundings. To his relief. Had she been any closer, he doubted she wouldn’t have noticed the grief that cast across his features.
Ladybug leant across the barrier of the Eiffel Tower.
He didn’t know what he’d been expecting. Streets in upheaval? An army of brainwashed citizens crying for his Miraculous? Ladybug regarding him with the same inscrutable apathy? Stillness crept across the city, a stillness he knew all too well. Up here, he could almost convince himself that nothing had changed.
An image came to him then, the two of them, their backs to the sun, content in the other’s silence, and it would have crushed him then and there had it not been for Ladybug’s sigh.
She sounded so much like her, so much like—“Marinette’s not here. Is she?” Adrien asked.
“No, I’m afraid not.”
Another beat passed in silence. That was, until her eyes found his, crinkled with mischief – God. It broke his heart to think of the things he would have done to achieve that smile.
“Do you know why Hawk Moth, all these months, has been so desperate to get his hands on my and Chat Noir’s Miraculous?”
He scrubbed his neck. “I think so. A wish, right? That’s what Alya wrote in her Ladyblog. Whoever possesses both at once would have the power to make a world-changing wish.”
“Right. I was told, a long time ago, that making that wish would have world-ending consequences. What I realise now, is that I was told to underestimate the one to make it.”
“B-But, you’d never eliminate the risk. If you saved one life, you’d be damning another. That’s the way it works,” Adrien stammered. Without thinking, he’d reached for the barrier to join his partner’s side.
“And if I said I’m not afraid of taking that risk?”
But he caught himself just in time, letting his hands fall limp.
“‘Creation, but not without destruction.’ Say I ensure the safety of your friend Marinette. I could choose onto who I inflict her fate.”
“But who would you choose? If Hawk Moth thought that it was even remotely possible, he’d—”
“He won’t.” And she said it with such finality, a shiver jerked down his spine. Only at that precise moment did it dawn on him.
“Is Hawk Moth… is he talking to you, right now?”
She chuckled. At least she didn’t sound angry. “We’ve reached an agreement. All he wants is one life, Adrien. All that fighting. All those risks…” She turned to face him, entreating his approval with a conviction he didn’t understand. “And we could have put a stop to it if we just listened.”
We did, Adrien thought. We listened to the terrified screams of an akumatized child. We heard the silence when Hawk Moth rendered it near impossible for vulnerable people to ask for help. What he said was, “What do you want, Ladybug?”
Her lips parted, then she shook her head. “All I ever wanted was to protect Paris. Including you, Adrien. I can make you free of your father.”
Your father.
His hairs electrified.
“What…” he breathed. “What are you talking about?”
“Free of your father,” she repeated, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “It’s all you’ve ever wanted, isn’t it? To be free to choose your own path, your own company? You could dress how you wish, find your own hobbies. You wouldn’t have to be a model anymore. You could be as normal as you want. Whatever it is you want, I can help you.”
No. No, this wasn’t right. He staggered back. But it wasn’t the fact she knew about his father, no. He just hadn’t realised it at first. Jesus Christ, he was so stupid.
It had felt so natural, so normal. Ladybug followed him with widened eyes.
Blue eyes.
A crack of lightning sounded in his ears.
That day, he’d stumbled to find any vacant classroom.
Heat filled his cheeks.
That day, it had been the tip of one girl’s words, “Hey, are you okay?” that had inspired his fear she might never look at him the same.
His mind went empty.
That day, it had been one girl who understood him even as he said things he didn’t know he was capable of thinking.
“Adrien? Is everything—”
One girl who had been first to say his name.
He gripped her arms, meeting those eyes imploringly. He searched her, the fine blackthorns of her hair, her rosied cheeks, but deep down, he already knew – he’d found her. Her, from whom Adrien could run to the ends of the earth and still never be a foot further than the day he started. Her, who lived with him in his heart; who he heard humming with each one of his breaths. Now, his breaths dragged with shallow, painful gasps.
How many times had he seen this day?
He wanted to laugh, to shout, to cry out with joy. Instead, he began to cry. And before he could articulate any of this—
“Where’s Chat Noir?”
—she snatched herself back, shoving him as she rose above.
“He wouldn’t be this long if it weren’t part of his plan.”
“No, no. I wasn’t trying to…” Adrien said, scrambling to sit upright. “I’m not—”
Voice flaring, “Where is he?”, she already had her yo-yo.
“He’s… He’s…” Tears pulsed in his vision. “He…”
She loomed over him, readying her strike. If she destroyed him right here and now, who would he be when she created him anew? This girl, he realised, who’d never expected him to be anybody else?
Her Miraculous had lost its power.
Squinting through her yo-yo’s shield, squinting through his saturated vision, she posed a blurred silhouette. But from that moment, he knew he could never mistake her. Marinette. She held him in thrall. Forcefully, he took a breath. Her hums sounded not with anger, but fear – that Chat had taken everything for good. With this knowledge,
“You’re right,” he said. “He sent me.”
Marinette didn’t lower her weapon. What she did do, however, was stop.
“Why?” Softly.
In answer, he rifled through his pocket, feeling for that familiar companion. A gift. His fingers trembling, he withdrew the slip of paper. An ache unfastened within him.
“There were some things he wasn’t strong enough to tell you himself.”
“I’m so sorry. I don’t understand what you’re going through.”
“‘I’m so sorry that I didn’t recognise what you were going through,” Adrien said.
“I don’t know what to say to make everything okay. I don’t even know if those words exist.”
“I was looking for words to make everything okay. I couldn’t accept you needed more.”
“But if I can promise you anything…”
“Still, I made a promise. Whatever happened, I’d always find a way to bring you bac—” He choked, enclosing the sound in a fist. He exhaled, as if into a wound. He looked to her, not bothering to roam over the page. “If you’ll still listen to me, superhero or not, this cat’s going nowhere fast. I’m here.”
“I’ll save you.”
His final pledge dried up on the edge of his tongue.
In place of words, he rose to hand off the slip of paper. A sleeping kitty splashed across the page. She beheld her own handiwork, then her gaze matched his. She stared, transfixed. As a whole universe of understanding lapped between them, her irises glittered like diamonds.
When her knees gave out beneath her, he chased her to the ground, grasping her waist to break her fall. But she didn’t seem to notice. Those glittering diamonds didn’t waver, holding onto him as though, one look away, and he might disappear entirely. She brushed his outstretched arms as, rocking,
“You…” she said. “Adrien… You can’t be.”
He planted his chin upon the softness of her hair, steadying her movement.
“You were right, M’lady,” he whispered. “Every time I sacrificed myself, every time I knew you’d bring me back... It wasn’t protection. It was a sentence.” As he spoke, as he massaged his fingers through her pigtails, she gradually begun to slow. “I can free you from Chat Noir,” he said, with the flight of a white butterfly.
Her suit retracted, revealing an almost identical one beneath.
But only you can free yourself of Ladybug, he finished, just as his partner came to, blinking rapidly. She reeled back, and he gave her space – and in that moment, he could have sworn he caught the faint aroma of cheese. He swept their surroundings.
Plagg was nowhere in sight.
Realisation washed over him. Gratitude came next, its current stronger than ever for the kwami who had kept his same promise. He was smiling faintly when,
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