And then one day Chat can’t take it anymore.
As soon as the akuma flies away into the sky, white and pure, Ladybug soars off with her yo-yo - quick, wordless, cold departures are her specialty now. But this time, Chat follows her trajectory with determined eyes. This time, he turns his back on the noises and confusion and emergency sirens that he’s been taking care of now, alone, and slams his staff into the ground before extending it at a speed that he’s never gone at before; it even shocks him, but his determination is too strong to allow him to fall as he shoots up like a rocket into the starry Parisian night.
He’s barely halfway up what would be the length of the Eiffel Tower before he spots the familiar figure of red swinging up briefly in between two streets. She’s already so far away.
Heart lurching in a sudden fear - now that he’s made this decision, Chat can’t lose this statue that was once his Lady, he can’t, he already let that happen once before and now all of Paris is paying the price - he lets himself fall.
The staff keeps extending even as it slowly tips over, stretching farther and closer like his own desperate hand towards the direction that he saw Ladybug go, and Chat finally lands atop a roof after what feels like hours, even though it was only seconds, and a lightning bolt of anxious relief, as oxymoronic and yet just as real now as an reckless Ladybug, goes through him as he sees the familiar silhouette again, soaring through the moon and falling back into the city several streets away.
Chat chases after her. He leaps rooftops and streets without a second glance, trusting his instincts to keep him from a fall as his eyes search the horizon for that shadow again, so familiar and yet so cold, following her.
He doesn’t know what he’ll do if he catches up with her. What can he do? Regret is like a dagger driven deep into his heart. And yet, Ladybug failed to save Marinette. She failed everyone, failed him. But the city doesn’t deserve this. Paris doesn’t deserve to have its protectors at odds. How long can they keep doing this until an akuma slips through their cracks?
Chat chases her like an elusive dream, until he suddenly realizes that he’s arrived at one of the bad sides of town, and that the trail has suddenly gone cold.
He immediately drops down where he stands, ignoring the puddles of rainwater as they and the concrete roof chill his body through his suit. If Ladybug has disappeared, then this area is where she lives - and he can’t risk her seeing him. Who knows how she’ll react if she knows he followed her?
What if she already knows? Because surely she can’t be living here, in this dump of an arrondissement; he knows her - knew her - too well. What if she spotted him earlier and decided to use this area to trap him?
Chat sucks in a breath, apprehension clinging to his nerves. Whatever happens next, he can’t stop. He has to keep going. He has to know.
What happened to Ladybug?
Chat peeks his head over the lip of the roof. Nothing. He scans the streets below him and then the roofs around him, systematically tearing it apart in his mind for anything that could be a hiding place, an ambush, for any suspicious shadows or a glint of red in the green tint of his night vision. Nothing.
Finally satisfied that Ladybug isn’t lying in wait nearby, Chat stands up again and studies the area with a new vantage point. He decides that one of these buildings in the immediate area must be where Ladybug is living - he’s confident in his tracking skills and has no reason to doubt them. And if there is one thing that Ladybug has changed in to his benefit, it’s that she is so much more careless now - so much less vigilant. She won’t have seen him with the care he’d taken.
With all of the stealth and secrecy he can muster - quite a lot, as Chat Noir - he inspects every plausible building on the block; some of the places are nearly rubble or otherwise so rundown that he can’t imagine even this new version of Ladybug willingly staying inside one of them, so he skips those.
It’s the fourth one that he checks, an abandoned warehouse with several storage rooms, that he hits the jackpot - he can see light, faint and with the telltale flickering of fire, emanating from a deeper, undoubtably windowless room.
Chat stalks his way through the warehouse, taking care to make sure that he avoids anything potentially noisy, as he moves closer towards the light. His apprehension is so strong that he’s frightened that Ladybug will hear him coming by the beats of his heart, which are so fast and so loud in his ears that they seem almost deafening in the silence of the warehouse.
Finally, after what seems like an eternity, he reaches the end of the room. Slowly, carefully, Chat grabs the lip of the wall with a single hand and peers cautiously around it, as tightly wound as wire as he prepares any second now for the need to pull back, to run, from what he’s sure will be wrath if luck is not on his side and Ladybug sees him.
To his unfathomable relief, she does not see him - her back is to him as she stares into a fire, apparently of her own making.
Chat stares in fascination. The person is definitely Ladybug - he recognizes the ugly green and jagged cut of her hair, which became her new norm after the school bus accident - it has to be her, anyway. Where else can she be?
After a moment, Chat realizes that this is it. He caught up with her, and now there she sits, untransformed and completely unaware of his presence. To her horrible misfortune - the pain of the irony threatening to tear a wound in him - Ladybug has cornered herself. She is sitting in a dead end of a room, with Chat blocking her only exit and her transformation worn out. Whatever he wanted to do, this is his chance now.
Chat takes in a deep breath, as quietly as he can manage it with his gut suddenly aflame with fear. He steps out into the room behind her and walks towards her, silent and sure-footed despite his nerves, until he’s only a meter away from her back. It both confuses and pains him terribly that she still has yet to notice his presence. It used to be that Chat couldn’t sneak into the same room as her without her noticing, and now he could just reach out with his staff and Ladybug wouldn’t know it until she was falling into her fire.
The thought of how Ladybug used to be - his Lady, who he, even after all this time and all of their mistakes, still loves - helps to steady his determination. He remembers his Lady as she had been, can already see her in her blue-black pigtails scolding him into high heaven over finding out her secret identity, and he smiles. He knows he’s doing the right thing.
Chat takes the staff from his back, the weight of it in his hand reassuring because he doesn’t know how Ladybug will react now, and he speaks.
“So this is where you live, Ladybug?”
