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They called her Ladybug, because of the business card she left at every scene, small, white, and nondescript, the only identifying characteristic the intricate pink ladybug printed on one side. They called her Ladybug, though perhaps Cameleon would be more accurate, as she’d taken on more than ninety six identities since she’d popped up. And those were only the ones they’d caught onto.
Adrien Agreste had been assigned as lead detective on her case from day one. Since then, Ladybug had made herself known as the most notorious thief in Parisian history.
And Adrien? Well, he was no closer to catching her than he’d been two years ago.
He groaned, eyes roving over the investigation board. Usually his were much neater, and even Lê Chiên had complained that there were way too many strings and imaginary connections, but the Ladybug Case was the bane of his existence.
“Find anything new?” Kubdel asked, leaning back against the table. “I think there’s more strings than yesterday.”
“I’ve got nothing.” He sighed and accepted the coffee she offered, taking a sip. “How do I still have nothing? Am I crazy to think I could ever solve this?”
“You’re definitely crazy,” Lahiffe said, leaning against the doorframe with a smirk. Adrien rolled his eyes at him and returned to staring at his board. “Lê Chiên just radioed in for backup. The Banque du France is being robbed.”
Adrien’s gaze snapped back to his friend. “Ladybug?”
Lahiffe shrugged. “Would anyone else be crazy enough to try to rob that place in broad daylight?”
Adrien didn’t answer, rushing to grab his keys and his jacket. “You coming, Kubdel?”
Lê Chiên met them on scene, the bank already cordoned off with police tape.
“We missed her,” he said, brandishing a bagged business card, and Adrien groaned. “By the time the call came in, she was long gone. No one’s found anything yet.”
“They won’t.” Adrien lifted the tape for Kubdel to duck under. “She’s never left anything before. Why start now?”
Kubdel snorted. “Agreste is going soft,” she told Lê Chiên, elbowing him in the side as they headed into the building. “I think he might just give up one day.”
“I won’t,” Adrien assured them, surveying the witnesses that were being interviewed inside. “I’m not going to stop until I find her. I’m just saying she’s not going to make it easy. Has Lahiffe gotten the security feed yet?”
“Yup.” Lê Chiên pushed open a door, waiting for them to pass through. “He might have an easier time, though, once one of these witnesses can actually tell us what she looks like today.”
Adrien rolled his eyes. Of course she’d been inconspicuous enough that none of the witnesses noticed her. Of course. Because this day couldn’t get any better.
“And here’s the vault,” Lê Chiên said, as though they hadn’t been here a couple dozen times before for this exact reason. “And the manager.”
Adrien held out a hand. “Mme. Raincomprix, I wish we weren’t always meeting under these circumstances.”
“I think we’ve been through this enough that you can just call me Sabrina,” she said, shaking his hand. “She took six million today. I wasn’t on site, so I can’t help with her appearance, but I’d assume she must’ve had a duffel bag to fit it all.”
Adrien nodded, pulling out his phone to text a quick update to Lahiffe.
“Alright,” he said, sighing. “Keep interviewing the witnesses. Hopefully someone saw something.”
Lahiffe found Ladybug in the video feed not long after getting the tip. At least, they hoped the girl he’d picked out was Ladybug. She was the only one carrying a duffel bag, and that was as good as they’d get.
None of the witnesses had anything substantial to say about the brown haired woman whose photograph they showed them. One lady said she’d picked up her toddler’s toy that he’d dropped. A man had asked her for drinks and she’d declined. An elderly couple said she’d been very sweet and let them go ahead of her in line.
All in all, the same things they always got. She was nice. She was pretty. No one could imagine her robbing the bank.
Adrien ran his hand over his face, staring at the red light. Another bank robbed, another six million euros gone, and he was no closer to finding her than he’d been that morning.
The light turned green, and he started driving again, glancing over at Kubdel when her phone rang.
“Lahiffe,” she said, turning it to speaker, “tell me you got something good.”
“A credit card registered to Bridgette Tikki, one of Ladybug’s aliases, just pinged,” he said, and Adrien flicked on the siren.
The car skidded to a stop outside the mall, and Adrien barely turned off the engine before he was out. Lê Chiên pulled up behind them, and he waited for him and Kubdel to join him before pushing open the door to the mall.
Adrien’s shoulder hit a woman, sending her stumbling. He knew he should rush on, that his chance to finally catch Ladybug was slipping further and further away the longer they took, but he was reaching out to catch her before he could think twice, tugging her against him.
“Are you okay?” he asked, knowing Lê Chiên and Kubdel were waiting on him.
She pressed her hand against his chest and offered him a smile, tilting her face so her eyes finally met his. “Fine, thanks to you,” she purred.
He barely heard her, too caught up in staring into her deep blue eyes, the shade tugging at something familiar that he just couldn’t place.
“Do I know you?”
“Agreste!” Kubdel’s call jolted him back to the present. “Stop flirting when we have bad guys to catch!”
Adrien flushed and pulled away from the girl, resisting the urge to glance back as they hurried through the mall.
“There!” Lê Chiên shouted, pointing at the store.
“Paris Police,” Adrien stated, waving his badge at the man behind the counter. He pulled the picture of Ladybug they’d gotten off security cameras near the robbery that morning from his pocket, sliding it across the counter. “Do you recognize this woman?”
The man stared at it for a moment before his face lit up in recognition. “She was in here about half an hour ago,” he said, and Adrien felt hope bubbling. Half an hour. She couldn’t have gotten too far in that time. “But she was blonde.”
The hope crashed down again at those words, and Adrien groaned. He stepped away from the counter and ran a hand through his hair. They were so close, but now she could be anywhere. She’d ditch the new disguise as soon as she could, he knew, and then they’d be back to square one again.
“Her credit card pinged here,” Kubdel was saying. “Do you remember what she bought?”
Adrien perked up as the man confirmed. Maybe they could use whatever Ladybug was stupid enough to purchase with her credit card to track her down. Maybe this could be their break.
“She ordered a custom message and said her fiancé would be by soon to pick it up,” he continued, searching behind the counter for a box.
“Fiancé?” Lê Chiên repeated, peering excitedly over the counter. “I didn’t know Ladybug had a fiancé. Did she leave a name?”
The man finally found the box and pulled it onto the counter, nodding. “Adrien Agreste.”
Adrien felt something tighten in his stomach and he sent a glare at Kubdel’s barely concealed snickers before stalking forward and snatching the package off the counter.
“I didn’t know your fiancée was Ladybug, Agreste,” Lê Chiên said, a stupid grin on his face. “Are you planning on arresting her before or after the wedding? If I were you, I’d wait until after the honeymoon.”
Adrien ignored him in favour of the worker. “Can I open this?”
The man nodded, and he wasted no time in peeling back the packaging. He tugged out the mug, staring at it. It was green, overlaid with pawprints and tiny black cats.
Better luck next time, Kitty was scrawled in silver across the side.
Adrien set the mug on his desk with the rest of the tokens she’d sent him over the years, knocking a small plush cat off a miniature Louvre pyramid in the process. The tokens, of course, were all legally obtained and unable to do much more than clutter his desk and remind him of every time he’d failed at catching her.
He righted the cat and trudged across the office.
“Tell me you got something,” he snapped, sinking into one of the extra chairs that had been tugged over to Lahiffe’s desk.
“I did.” Lahiffe sent him a triumphant grin, and rewound the security footage he’d been watching. Lê Chiên and Kubdel gathered around. “So this is her in the disguise she robbed the bank in.” He zoomed in on a face that sure enough matched the photo they’d gotten that morning. “Before this, she just kind of wanders the mall for a bit while she finds things for a new disguise. But here is where she disappears into the bathrooms where Kubdel found her things in the trash. Everyone who leaves is accounted for except her.” He paused again on a blonde woman whose face was turned away. “She doesn’t look at any cameras until she reaches the mug store to buy Agreste his present.” He paused again, and Adrien felt a brief recollection at this particular disguise. Where had he seen it before? “And that’s as far as I’ve gotten so far, but we could be able to find how she leaves.”
Adrien nodded his permission to keep rolling, and they switched between cameras as they followed the woman through the mall towards the exit. She stopped in the cafeteria, and they fast forwarded through a forty five minutes or so of her eating a burger and sipping at a milkshake.
She moved again when flashing lights shone through the doors, Lahiffe returning the feed to normal, and that was when he figured out where he’d seen this disguise before.
Because there they were, himself, Kubdel, and Lê Chiên bursting in through the doors. And there he was, bumping right into Ladybug like an idiot.
“Fuck,” he yelled, pushing away from the desk. How did he not see that it was her? How could he have been so stupid?
“Holy shit, man,” Lahiffe said, pausing the video with Ladybug pressed up against him. Kubdel was cackling, and Lê Chiên gave him a patronizing pat of comfort on his shoulder. “You got so close, and she got away.”
Adrien swore again, glaring at the screen. His eyes widened as he took in the positioning of her hand, and his own dove into the breast pocket on his suit, fingers curling around a piece of cardstock. He took one look at the pink ladybug before tossing the business card on Lahiffe’s desk.
“I’m going home,” he decided. “This shit can wait till the morning.”
The apartment was dark when he got home, but then again it was the middle of the night. His fiancée was probably already asleep. He was as quiet as he could be as he helped himself to a snack and brushed his teeth, and he shed his clothes before crawling into bed behind her.
Marinette groaned sleepily, turning in his arms to face him. “Long day?”
He hummed in confirmation, pressing a tired kiss to her nose. “Ladybug decided to rob a bank,” he said. “Spent all day trying to track her down.”
Marinette ran her fingers through his hair. “And did you get anything?” she wondered.
“Not a damn thing,” he groaned. “She did give me another mug, though. Addressed it to her fiancé.”
Marinette laughed, and all the hardships of the day seemed to melt away. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’re cheating on me, M. Agreste,” she said, lip jutting out in an exaggerated pout.
“Right,” Adrien agreed. “Because master criminals are definitely my type.”
Marinette hummed, her twinkling blue eyes tugging at some memory just out of his reach. “You never know,” she warned, lips tugging into a teasing smirk. “I could be Ladybug.”
Adrien had to laugh at that. “I’d know if you were Ladybug,” he promised, nuzzling into her neck. “You’re too sweet to be her. How was your day? Did you get anymore donations for the woman’s shelter?”
“That was last week,” she reminded him, fingers dragging lazily through his hair. “We’re saving a hospital this week. And our anonymous donor came through again. We’ve got more than enough to update the pediatric wing and keep it running for years.”
“That’s good.” Adrien sighed, pulling her closer as sleep threatened to overtake him. “That’s really good. You had a good day. A lot better than mine.”
“But you got a free mug,” Marinette teased. She pressed a kiss to his forehead, cuddling back into the blankets. “You’ll catch her one day.” Adrien hummed noncommittally as she pressed her face into his neck. “I’m sure she’s closer than you think.”