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[Ladybug → Chat Noir]
“You know,” he says to her once, “Thoughtfulness has always looked good on you, Milady.”
Something about Chat Noir has… changed, and Ladybug can’t quite put her finger on it. It's not that he's become less affectionate—he'll probably always hold something like that for her. But the way he does it is different now. The puns will always remain, sure. But he doesn't insist so adamantly on their future together. He doesn't flirt as blatantly as he used to before. The more time they spend together patrolling and de-evilizing, the less often he kisses her hands, or winks at her, or gets a little too cozy, in spite of all their usual banter.
He seems… mellow, now.
She almost has to wonder if he's been sick or something.
But he doesn't look pale, or dizzy. In fact, the catlike abilities his suit affords him keep him alarmingly steady on the ledge of a luxury apartment building, even in these last few moments before the two of them are set to detransform. His eyes, green and wide, scan the nightlife below them—the mother carrying the toddler asleep on her shoulder, the college students in full swing of an evening on the town, the Louvre in the distance as it begins to close down until morning. His ring has only beeped once, and so have her earrings, so they probably only have ten minutes left together. Ten quiet, somber minutes.
When he looks to her, he’s smiling. Genuinely, like he just might see the moon and all the stars in her face. It’s the kind of smile she hasn’t really seen on him since the day he gave her that rose. And it isn’t really until now that she understands how much she missed seeing it.
“Penny for your worries?” he asks. Gets comfortable with sitting, and swings his legs back and forth in turns. There’s something almost dreamy about it, but he’s always been something of a dreamer, a hopeless romantic. Sometimes more hopeless. Sometimes… sometimes, more romantic. She’ll admit to it, at the very least.
Ladybug manages to smile back all the same, even though she doesn’t let down her guard. “I thought the saying was, ‘Penny for your thoughts?’”
“I didn’t feel like being redundant.” There’s that grin she knows so well; she was starting to think it had disappeared forever. “Offsets the mood. So. Any plans to share?”
The smile fades from her face. Her earrings beep again. Eight minutes to go. Eight minutes to speak.
She’s been thinking about how to say this for… ages, really, Maybe even since the moment it happened. It wasn’t so difficult before, when he was far too flirtatious and she could tell him, without so much as missing a beat, that she wasn’t interested, that she was in love with someone else. Now, it’s… it almost feels impossible to get the words out. Because it feels like a different kind of rejection. One that feels so closed, and yet otherwise indescribable.
“Milady?” he says again. Soft. Tender, even.
“I’m in love,” she finally tells him, to the tune of six minutes left. She can’t bring herself to call him any nicknames, because kitty just doesn’t feel right in this kind of moment. She can’t even bear to look at him for much longer, because the pleasant confusion on his face twists her heart more than it should. Deep breath in, deep breath out, and she’s still got a death grip on the ledge, she’s still watching over the civilians like her life depends on it. Maybe she opened this floodgate too early. Maybe she should have thought about it a little more.
“You mentioned it before,” Chat Noir says. She can’t tell if that hidden tone in his voice is something hopeful or self-resigned.
“No, I…” Ladybug settles for wrapping her arms around herself. This is supposed to be easy. She never—really—felt for Chat Noir the way he wanted her to, the way she felt for… another boy. Other boys. So why does it feel like every word she wants to say, every word she should say, is opening up some weird void inside her? Why is she trying so hard to hold herself together? Why is it so hard for her to hold herself together? “I mean, with someone else.”
He seems to go slack around the edges, out of the corner of her eye. “I know,” he says, a little quieter, but she hears him a little too loud and a little too clear. “You mentioned that, too.”
She braces herself. “It’s a different someone else.”
She doesn’t have to be looking at Chat Noir to know he’s perking up a little; she can feel it in his aura alone. It’s the sort of thing she thinks she can pick up on more easily the better she gets to know a person. And, as far as she knows, she’s had plenty of time to get to know him as much as their confines allow. Even if, at the end of every day, he still manages to surprise her somehow. “Oh?” he says, and there’s the hopeful.
“Yeah,” she tells him. Closes her eyes. Deep breath in. Deep breath out. “He’s in love with me, too.”
And there’s the dip, the coldness in the air, and she’s sure that whatever moon and stars he saw in her face before have faded into the golden glow of the streetlamp. Fake and real, all at once. “Oh,” he says again, and there’s the self-resigned, crawling through the woodwork again, not missed but making its grand appearance all the same.
For a while they are silent, side by side and taking in the city sounds of distant chatter and pump clicks on cement and the distant whistle of a car through the nighttime streets. For a while they wait, until the earrings beep again, and the ring isn’t all that far behind, and there are only four minutes to share… anything. Everything.
Four minutes isn’t enough time for anything. Certainly not enough time to spend with the ones you care about.
They’ll have other minutes, she knows. He does, too. But they aren’t the same minutes, and it won’t be the same kind of time, and it might not even be them—not who they are now. Just people who look like them. Just people who live the way they do, with all their feelings wrapped up in smoke and mirrors.
“Look,” Ladybug starts, because she can practically hear the ticking between her ears, down to three and a half, down to three, and it’s making it hard to breathe. “I—”
“I know.” Chat Noir doesn’t look at her now, and it hurts almost as much as the time he refused their usual fist bump. She can imagine she must have hurt him just as badly, once upon a time. Maybe more times. Maybe worse. “You don’t have to say it again.”
“There’s something else I want to tell you.”
His tail curls at his ankles, and his fists curl where they keep him balanced. “Then tell me.”
Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. She needs more. She needs more time, she needs more time with him, she needs more than just this to tide them both over. “I…” Her voice cracks, and she has to swallow hard around the words jsut to keep her voice steady. “Chat, I don’t want you to walk away tonight thinking I don’t love you.”
“You don’t,” he says simply. “You said it yourself.”
Ladybug winces, and tries again anyway. It’s all she ever seems to do, is try again, try again. She doesn’t have time for metaphors or flipping coins or anything but the honest truth, even if she has to spit it out, even it it has to come out like she’s yanking ticker tape from between her lips. “Maybe not the way you were hoping. Maybe not that, but, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love who you are, or what you mean to me, at all. Because I do—it’s a different kind, but I do, and I mean that—”
“I have to go,” he says. “You’re gonna detransform any minute now.”
“Do you believe me?” she asks, looking at him everywhere she can. Trying to commit him to memory. Even if his expression hurts to look at.
Sometimes time winding down feels like blowing a balloon to its absolute limits just before it pops. And in the moments that time goes down and down and down, and the balloon goes up and up and up, Chat Noir gives her a sad smile, and tips her chin up to press a kiss to her cheek. It’s soft, and sweet, and it makes her heart clench—though not as much as it does when he meets her eyes and says, “Who would I be if I didn’t, Milady?”
He’s leapt off to some building she can’t see before she can say anything else, and even after she detransforms on that rooftop and Tikki sits cautiously on her shoulder, she’s still touching her cheek. Tikki must be calling her name, but she barely hears it. She only sinks to her knees—to give Chat Noir a little bit of privacy, she jokes weakly—and the hand on her face finds its way toward her heart. And it doesn’t feel like there’s a hole there. But something feels empty. Something feels missing.
That’s why they say it like this in French, she thinks. You’re lacking me to say I miss you. Because people are a part of you, and you feel the pieces of them break off and go missing from your heart all the time. And you feel exactly where they used to be.
[Chat Noir → Marinette]
There has to be a reason he only comes to see her at night. By this point, it’s practically symbolic.
It isn’t the night she told him about Luka without actually telling him about Luka, because if she was exhausted by the time she got home, then he must have been dead on his feet, wherever home must be for him. He comes a few nights after that, and really, the only reason she knows he’s there is because she finds him perched on her balcony when she comes up to water the flower boxes.
Marinette’s never seen Chat Noir so quiet before. It’s kind of unsettling. She almost doesn’t want to disturb him. But… he must have come here—to her—for something, right? He could have gone literally anywhere else, so maybe…
She doesn’t clear her throat or call his name; she only makes her presence known with her footsteps, and a gentle sigh, and the steady stream of her watering can. But she steals glances at him every so often as she works, in hopes that he’ll turn around sooner rather than later. There’s something comfortable about the whole thing; neither of them has to talk to say hello. Neither of them has to do anything grand to know the other person is there.
When she finally catches him looking at her, he seems… sad. Not devastated, exactly. There’s just a quiet kind of emptiness lingering in his expression. But he smiles for her all the same, even if there’s something missing in it, and he gives her a little wave, and instead of that hello he says, “Spare change for the lovesick?”
It takes her by surprise, even if it probably shouldn’t. She fixes him with an amused look and a soft laugh, as if to say what are you talking about? But he doesn’t laugh back, and so her smile fades, and she sets the watering can aside and joins him at the edge of the balcony. Paris has never looked so lonely from here. And Chat Noir has never looked so blank.
“I’ve got nothing,” she murmurs, turning out all her pockets. She hesitates, hand hovering, before she brushes her fingers against his wrist. “Well… I have me, I guess. And tea, downstairs, if you want some.”
“No thanks,” he says, though he actually sounds grateful for the offer. Or maybe he’s just grateful for her company? It’s hard to tell with so few words. He slinks down to the floor of the balcony, tail curling almost forlornly around his ankles—she’s never really known how that thing works, when it also seems to detach so easily whenever she needs it. “I’m okay like this.”
Marinette scrunches up her lips, and sinks onto the floor with him, far enough to give him space and close enough that he can still get to her if he really needs her. “You don’t look so okay,” she murmurs, hands flexing at her knees with the urge to reach for his.
Sometimes, after you say something to a loved one, there’s an immediate and chilling silence that follows that makes you feel like you shouldn’t have said anything at all. It’s how she feels now, but she also knows—just by virtue of existing and talking to other people—that the things that make you feel that way are, coincidentally, the things that need to be said the most. Even if it makes one of Paris’s great superheroes fold into himself, and what little there is left in his expression fade into the night.
Eventually, Chat Noir says something. “She’s spoken for.”
It feels like her whole body is dissolving into the floor now, clipping like one of those glitched-out video games she’s seen people joke about online. Or like that one horror movie she probably shouldn’t have seen, but did anyway, even though remembering that sinking place kept her up all night. “Ladybug?” she says. Hesitant to say her own name.
He nods without any sound, rests his chin on his knees. There are times when he’s come off so childlike—playful, a little energetic, eyes always gleaming with some kind of potential. Now he seems like it in the opposite way. Small, and still trying to make himself smaller.
For a moment, part of her wonders if Joan of Arc ever had to deal with anything like this. Or if France and fighting were always the most important thing, and Tikki just whispered and whispered to her through it all until she burned away and left her kwami behind.
Delicately, Marinette scoots a little closer and keeps her hands folded in her lap. Present, in case he needs them. Needs her. It’d be funny, him needing her of all people, if it weren’t so sad. “She must be pretty lucky to be in love like that,” she murmurs. Most of the time, she feels like it. “I’m sorry she turned you down, Chat.”
“I guess I always knew,” he says to the tune of a distant siren, leaning back against the rails. “I just always hoped, too.” Slowly, he looks up at her, more pupil than color in his eyes and a faint quirk in his lips. “Have you ever felt like this?”
She frowns, a little nervous. “Like… what?”
“Like you love someone with everything you have,” he says, “and you know you have to give it up, you know you will one of these days, but it still hurts to. It hurts to let go. Even when you find someone else, it’s still there, and you’re afraid of being a bad person for giving up. And you’re afraid of being a bad person for holding on, too.”
The more Chat Noir talks, the more that crumpling feeling in her chest comes back to her and weighs her down. At first all she can do is nod dumbly, so much she’s a little afraid her head might fall off, because something inside pushes down on her too much and keeps her from speaking. Eventually, she manages to say, “Except, I think—I think… I don’t think bad people worry that they might be bad people.”
His whole body goes soft, and then opens up a little, like maybe… no one told him that often. Or ever. “You think I’m a good person?”
“Of course I think you’re a good person. Why would I ever think you weren’t?”
“So it’s not the superpowers, huh?” He makes an attempt at a grin, probably the cheekiest thing he’s done all evening, and even that seems lukewarm at best.
She goes for a smile of her own, tries right back. “Nope. Unfortunately, you’re just a good person because of who you are.”
He holds down a laugh, and rubs the back of his neck, jingling the bell at his throat in the process. It’s a weirdly joyful sound for the conversation they’re having, too light for what he says next. “She said she still loved me, just different,” he mumbles, almost like he doesn’t particularly want her to hear, but wouldn’t particularly mind if she did. “And it kind of reminded me of you.”
Marinette’s voice cracks. “Why?”
Chat Noir smiles, gentle and the widest she’s seen all night, and leans forward to ruffle her hair. It doesn’t totally work with the gloves and the skintight suit, but it’s the gesture that matters most. “Because you’re good at loving everybody, Princess.”
She doesn’t know how many straws there were, but that was the last one. There aren’t any tears like she’s expecting, but there’s still that heavy feeling in her chest, and not even crawling into Chat Noir’s lap and hugging him like her life depends on it makes it go away. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” he says, first gingerly patting her back, then resting his hand against the back of her head. “You don’t have to feel bad for my sake. It’s not like you’re the one rejecting me.”
Marinette only presses her face harder against his shoulder, and holds him a little tighter, and tries with everything she has to push that feeling away. She doesn’t want to say anything else. She doesn’t even want to cry.
She just wants to be sorry.
It’s funny; she knows she should be comforting him, but he’s the one rubbing circles in her back. Or maybe he’s doing that for his own sake. Maybe she’s the only person he’s really gotten to hold like this. Maybe he’s always wanted to. “Probably a good thing it’s not like those comics, huh?” he says.
In his arms, Marinette goes still. “What comics?”
“The one about the boys who turn into animals when girls hug them.” He laughs a little, and it’s a rumble in her ear, right alongside the steady, not-too-slow-not-too-fast beat of his heart. “It’d be kind of funny if I turned into a literal cat.”
“I’ve never heard of that one,” she admits.
“I’ve seen it around…” There’s a pause between them, and it’s… nice to feel him so comfortable here. “You know Adrien, yeah?”
Marinette’s stomach jumps, and then sinks back into place. If she grabbed onto Chat Noir’s suit a little too tight, he doesn’t mention or make any sign of it. “Adrien Agreste?”
“The one and only.” He’s got that same smile on when she pulls back, but it looks a little less empty this time. More like he thinks he can trust her with anything if he tries. More like he thinks he wants to try. (Hasn’t he? Hasn’t he trusted her?) “Don’t tell him I told you, but he’s a huge comic junkie.” He reaches up, gently pats her cheek with the back of his hand; if it’s to try and make her smile, even a little, he’s succeeded. “You should ask to borrow some of it. You never know. He might say yes.”
She raises an eyebrow, starting to play along again. “If I never know, then how do you know?”
Chat Noir only flicks her nose when he tells her he has his sources, and his eyes sparkle. And for a moment Marinette thinks, through the leftover touch and the not-there tears, that he might be learning how to be good at loving everybody, too.
[Marinette → Adrien]
Chat Noir promised her he was going to be okay, and that’s all she really has to go on when she walks into school. He promised her he was going to be okay, and if they’re in the habit of making good on their word, then she has nothing left but to believe him. So she throws it into the mantra she speaks only to her locker, with a tight grip on the door and no one else to come find her.
At least she has a rose to speak to; it was lying on the top shelf of the locker, pale pink and not a thorn in sight. No name. No tag. It didn’t need one, as far as she was concerned.
Today is going to be okay, she tells herself. Speaks truth to the petals. Today is going to be fine. You can breathe. Someone cares about you. Someone loves you. You’re good at loving everybody. He said he was going to be okay. He said—
“Morning, Marinette.”
The voice makes her nearly jump out of her skin—people have really got to stop doing this to her—and she almost bumps her head on her locker. How she would have managed it, even she doesn’t know, but she’d attribute it to the simple fact that she’s Marinette Dupain-Cheng, and only Marinette Dupain-Cheng would find a way to bump her head on her own locker. She’s already found a way to injure her thumb with it, so what’s another body part on the list? When she whirls around, though, it’s Adrien standing behind her and awkwardly rubbing his neck.
He looks… yellow. Not golden.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to…” Adrien trails off slowly, and then his gaze drifts down to the rose in her hand. A soft smile, full of a knowing she can’t really describe, graces his face. “Hey, pretty flower. Did Luka give that to you?”
A figure catches the corner of Marinette’s eye—speak of the devil. Luka’s standing just outside in the hallway, looking like he was about to come in. But he holds up his hands in surrender, as if to say he’ll see her later, and leaves her with a wink and a silently blown kiss. Which makes her blush, and try to hide a smile, and cradle the rose a little closer. “Yeah,” she says. “He’s sweet.”
“It seems like it.” There’s a beat of silence, and then, “I realized I never properly thanked you for inviting me to his show. I just wanted you to know I appreciate it.”
He’s smiling at her so genuinely that the words spill out of her, instead of her actually speaking them. “Can I borrow you after school? I mean—no, that sounds weird, when I say it like that. I meant…” It’s almost hilarious, that all of this is over and she’s still stuttering in front of him like a fool. The only difference is, she’ll try again, and she won’t go home and agonize over it for hours. “If you have a moment, after school. I won’t take up a lot of your time. I just wanted to…”
She wonders if Adrien ever stops smiling. Or if that’s why it seems so much sadder when he doesn’t. “Actually,” he says, “I wanted to ask you the same thing. Can I meet you somewhere?”
“Oh—uh—” Well. This is new. Very new. “I’m usually in the art room, if you wanted…”
He seems to fumble—she doesn’t think she’s ever seen him do that before. “Well… maybe we could go somewhere a little more… a little quieter. If that’s okay.”
Marinette’s stomach shouldn’t jump. It shouldn’t. But it does, all the way through the mechanical nod.
All day, she wonders what he could possibly have to talk to her about—no, what he could possibly need from her in a quiet space. In an alone space. She’d humor herself and think he might be jealous, but Adrien’s never come off as the jealous type, and she’s pretty sure he’s warming up to Kagami besides. These last several days, it seems like he’s just inches from asking her out on a proper date, something that doesn’t start off with,
So Marinette said…
Truthfully, she does still feel kind of… bad, that she diverted so much of his attention away from Kagami when they went ice skating together. Even if she didn’t intend to. Even if she looked like a fool running after him at the end of the day—and he probably thought she was one, too.
Still, it bothers her even through lunch, so that she’s barely hanging onto the conversation. When Luka asks if everything is all right, she shakes her head, then nods a little too fast and tells him she’s fine, she’s just thinking. She has to reassure him, even, because that wrinkle in his brow doesn’t go away so soon, and he keeps looking down at the way she’s drumming her fingers on the tabletop. Eventually he fumbles with his fidget ring and slides it onto her index finger—the only one it will fit on, apparently. And she short-circuits, because she’s only fifteen, and a boy just put a ring on her finger, and between Ladybug duties and a fashion career and, and high school, whenever that happens, she’s not ready for a commitment like—
“You can borrow it,” he murmurs, like he’s really giving her his life. “Till you’re feeling better.”
Oh.
Of course.
He must know what she’s thinking as she sinks into her seat with a too-hot face, because he laughs and rests his chin in his hand and says, soft enough so only she can hear, “Not yet.”
Still, she gives the ring a few experimental flicks with her thumb, listens to the gentle scrape and whine of metal against metal, and makes sure to lace her fingers with his and give his hand a squeeze before they part for their next classes. As if to say, I love you, too.
True to his word, Adrien’s waiting for her in the hall before she even gets to the art room. He doesn’t particularly look like he has anywhere to be—which is strange, because given his background of demands he almost always has somewhere to be. He meets her with a patient smile and a wave, and nods back toward the stairs to the courtyard. Which seem to be the only place worth having conversation anymore.
Usually, when she imagined walking around school with Adrien, there was this lovey-dovey element to it, where he would carry her books and give her a sunshine smile, maybe link his pinky with hers if they were feeling extra sappy. Now, she can only describe the way she settles under the staircase as a stiff comfort—because he’s her friend, her good friend, and she also has absolutely no idea what to expect of him.
“Is everything okay?” she asks to break whatever silence hangs between them. And strangely, there’s more of it than normal.
Adrien only nods, all folded up into himself. He’s a lot more precise and composed about it than Chat Noir is. He looks like he has something to say, and just needs the time to figure out how to say it. As though he didn’t have the entire school day to think about it the way she did.
“I…” he finally says, rubbing his hands together before he folds them. “I think I’m starting to put some pieces together.”
That makes Marinette sit up straight, confused and trying to ignore the way her stomach twists in on itself. She can feel Tikki rustling nervously in her purse, and tries not to make it too obvious when she pats it to comfort her. “What… kinds of pieces?”
Adrien scrunches up his lips in thought, looks all around at the floor space between their crossed legs. Objectively, he looks adorable, but Marinette can’t bring herself to smile or think anything past that. “You wrote that poem, didn’t you?”
She draws in a sharp breath, then holds it. Then almost forgets to let it out again. “What?”
“For Valentine’s Day.” He still hasn’t looked up. “‘Your hair shines like the sun, your eyes are lucky green…’”
Her chest goes tight, and she can practically feel all the color draining from her face, and she has to fight the urge to drop the rose Luka gave her and cover her ears with her hands, to tell Adrien to stop, stop, stop.
He… kept it? He memorized it? But that was last year, he—
“When we passed notes,” Adrien explains, hurried and apologetic, almost like he’s ashamed to come to these conclusions. Like maybe he should have waiting for her to come to him herself. Maybe he should have, even if she ended up never doing it. “I thought. I thought I recognized it from somewhere. Your handwriting. I figured it was a fluke at first—you know, when you stopped by with my homework that one time? But, it’s not a fluke if it happens more than once, huh. And then there was the picnic, and…”
She’s never heard him ramble so much, or at all. By this point, she’s not even sure if she finds it endearing or unsettling. And she’s not sure why her heart flutters as it sinks when he reaches up to touch his cheek, right where she held him. Right where she kissed him. And here she was, assuming he must have never thought about it again.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and she doesn’t know exactly what he’s apologizing for until he adds, “I should have known sooner. I just figured…”
Adrien looks up through the gaps in the stairs, toward the sound of a guitar playing in the art room. It only makes Marinette bend into herself too, just like him, caught between wanting to run upstairs and wanting to tell him everything.
“How long?” he asks.
Marinette fidgets. “Since the rain.”
Adrien mouths the words to himself, trying to jog his own memory. Then he blinks a few times, eyes going wide. “That… that’s a long time.”
She nods, but otherwise doesn’t answer him. They’re not destined, she thinks, holding the rose close and swallowing hard when the petals tickle her chin. They’re just two people sorting out love in an empty courtyard.
“I think I know what you meant now,” he says. “About loving someone and not knowing how to talk about it, and not doing anything about it. Just needing someone to know you care about them, and are happy to have them in your life.”
“Yeah? You do?”
“Yeah.” Cautiously, maybe too cautiously, Adrien reaches out and brushes his knuckles against the petals with a delicate respect. It’s the first time he looks at her that afternoon, really looks at her, pulls her in with that lucky green, those long lashes. “I love you too, Marinette. Like that.”
She pinches the stem of the rose so hard she’s sure it’d break with any more pressure. It’s exactly what she’s wanted to hear all this time, and exactly how she’s wanted to hear it, so why is there this gaping hole in her chest? Why does she not know what to say? Why does she not know what to do about it when she knows there’s nothing to do about it?
Why, why, why?
“Marinette?” Adrien prompts again, as gentle as she’s always expected him to be. She jolts, an inexplicable chill running through her body, and rubs the stem with her thumb where she pinched it.
“Thank you,” she murmurs. “For telling me this.”
“I still have it, you know,” he says.
“The poem?”
“The lucky charm.” He smiles, more to himself, and fishes the beaded lanyard out of his pocket. “And yeah. The poem, too. I couldn’t get rid of something so beautiful.”
And there’s the heat in her cheeks again—remarkably, not because she’s flustered by his general way of existing, but more because he could say something so kind, in the end. “Do you know that comic,” she blurts out, “about the kids who turn into animals when they’re hugged?”
Adrien raises his eyebrows in surprise, or maybe confusion. “Yeah,” he says, and then, kind of sheepishly, “I own the whole series.”
“Do you…” Marinette rubs the back of her neck. “Do you think I could borrow some of it sometime?”
He softens, gives her the smile she used to want to die preserving. “Yeah. Anytime you want.”
They talk for a while longer, about a number of things, about assignments, about Kagami and about Luka, until Adrien’s phone buzzes and lights up with a text from his bodyguard. He looks almost reluctant to go, and gathers his belongings, stuffs the charm back in his pocket as he gets to his feet. “It’s storming again,” he says, holding a hand out to her. “Will you be all right?”
Marinette looks to his hand, then up at his eyes. He’s not the boy who scraped chewing gum off her seat, or the one who lent her an umbrella and took her heart, just like that. He’s not even the boy who she wrote the letter to, and the poem to, and she’d rewrite them both if she could, and maybe she’d give them to him in person this time. He’s Adrien. Just Adrien. And he’s a good person to be. And he’s a good person to love.
She takes Adrien’s hand, and he pulls her to her feet. “I’ll be all right, yeah,” she says, and lets him go with a hug and a lasting gaze until he disappears out the door. And then she carries herself to the art room, where only Luka and Marc and Nathaniel remain, and she asks Luka to play that song about cursed missed opportunities, the one that came out when she was too young to remember having heard it. He looks to the rose in her hand, smiles affectionately and obliges her, singing to her in what he says is red-violet instead of red-orange. You are home, you are home.
He shields her from the pelting rain with his jacket as he walks her home, and he takes her up to her room without a word. Leaves his canvas shoes out to dry and cradles her close in his lap and lets her cry out everything she doesn’t have the words for, and everything he’s gracious enough not to ask about. And he sings to her, home, home, where I wanted to go.
[Adrien → Ladybug]
“You can’t stay here,” Ladybug says. “I can’t let you stay in harm’s way.”
Really, she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she did. But it’d be strange to say so, even if it’s not an exaggeration. And it’d be one more thing for Hawk Moth to capitalize on—and she’d die before she let him do anything to Adrien.
That’s not an exaggeration, either.
She’s got Adrien by the wrist—and months ago, she probably would have blushed about it, and maybe she would have sworn that he was blushing too. The bakery-patisserie is the safest place she can think to take him, the only place she can think to take him in the wake of a new akuma.
“I’ll be fine,” he says, and maybe the tone in his voice and the gentle flex of his hand is an attempt at reassuring her. But she won’t have any of it, not with the echoes of screams cut short in the distance downtown, and the pointed look she gives him tells him so.
“Really,” he tries again. “You don’t need to worry so much about someone like me. I’m sure Chat Noir is waiting for you anyway, isn’t he?”
She goes stiff, and nearly stops in her tracks. Chat Noir. She hasn’t seen him since the night on the rooftop—not as Ladybug, anyway. What will he do when he sees her today? Will he even come? Or is he planning on avoiding her for a while, or worse: doing what he needs to and giving her the cold shoulder in the meantime?
“I don’t know,” she finally admits in the quiet that lives between the chaos, just as they’re reaching her house. “But you are worth worrying about. I know that much.”
She has to wonder if he can feel the way she squeezes his wrist. If he thinks she’s trying to be gentle with him too, when she’s so scared but isn’t allowed to be just yet.
“He’ll be there,” Adrien reassures her.
What does he know? “We’ll see,” she says, and leads him in.
It’s always so strange seeing her parents like this, when they could and should so easiy recognize her but just… don’t. Maybe it’s all in the magic, the same kind that keeps the mask from coming off altogether. She tells them to keep Adrien safe, to let him upstairs if they have to, and that she’s trusting them with him. Which they seem honored about—her father even salutes her, Yes, Ladybug! and all, and gives her permission to head up to the apartment. And it’s not often that she gets the twinge to tell them who she really is, but it hits her now, just before it’s washed away by the overwhelming need to keep them safe, too.
“Listen to me,” Ladybug says, “because I can’t stay long. I’ll be fine out there, whether Chat Noir shows up or not. It’ll be much more reassuring to me to know that you’re safe, okay? Just—just stay here for me. Please. And don’t look her in the eyes, or you’ll—”
“Disappear.” Adrien shudders. “I saw it happen. No wonder she calls herself the Basilisk.”
And here she was hoping they could keep the snake theme to superheroes. (What would Viperion do if he were here? If he really existed?) “Can I trust you?”
He draws in a breath, searches her whole expression. The more he looks at her, the more she wishes she had more time to look right back. To talk to him. To tell him more and more. But what would she say? And why would she need to say it at all? It’s hard to see a point in turning someone down when you’ve never admitted your feelings for them in the first place. And when you can’t quite tell if they feel the way you do, to boot.
“Yeah,” he says eventually. “Of course you can trust me, Ladybug.”
“Good.” She gives him a single firm nod. “And one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“Marinette is all right. Just in cased you were worried about her.” She smiles, soft, careful. “I want you to know that you can trust me, too.”
“I’ve always trusted you,” Adrien says. Somewhere in his appreciation, he almost looks like he wants to chase after her, to tell her more and more, too. But what would he say? Why is he hesitating? “I—”
Ladybug holds up a hand to quiet him. Takes a step back. Doesn’t let him follow, even though all his body language tells her that he wants to. “I understand,” she tells him. “But I have to go now, Adrien. I have a city to protect.” And maybe a partner she shouldn’t be leaving alone. It’s always in these situations that she has so many things to do and say, so many places to be all at the same time, and not enough time for it all. It never fails. And she still hasn’t figured it all out.
Should she have by now?
Would she ever?
“Will you come back?” he asks, to the tune of another cry for help in the distance.
She tilts her head, and searches him too. As much as she can in this little time and space. “Of course I will. I said you could trust me, didn’t I? And besides… you’re still part of Paris. And I’ll still be protecting you, too. Bug’s honor.”
It takes a moment—not a long moment, but a moment all the same—for him to break into a smile of his own. “What about a Lady’s honor?”
Her stomach flutters a little, and maybe it shows on her face. She might have gotten all the tears out just a few days ago, but the fondness and the feelings are still there, somehow. She has to wonder how long it’ll all last. If she really will carry it all for the rest of her life. If it’ll all fade to the background somehow, and he’ll just be a boy she fell in love with once upon a time.
Will she ever figure that out, too? Should she have?
“Yeah,” she finally says, with a hard swallow. “We can call it that.”
She doesn’t know how to describe the way his smile changes then, or the new sparkle in his eyes, but something in her wants to hold onto it a little longer. Something in her isn’t ready to say goodbye to it just yet, or even see you later. “You should probably go now,” he tells her, sinking patiently to the living room floor. “You have a city to protect.”
He’s right. Her earrings don’t need to be beeping for her to know their time together is nearly up. In the few seconds they have left, she steps toward him, lifts his chin with all the care she can muster, and slowly sweeps her hand over his eyes to close them. As if to say, Don’t look at her. And as if to say, Don’t look at me, either.
This is how she hopes he’ll remember her. A hero, and someone to trust, and someone to wait for. Someone who’s leaving him without leaving him.
“I’ll be back,” she whispers—blows him a silent kiss goodbye and everything, just to seal it all up.
She only wishes she could say that that’s that.
Adrien’s eyes are still closed when she leaves through the latch door. Once it locks, a hand flies up to clutch her chest—barely more than a shaking fist against her suit. Another wraps around the railing, right where Chat Noir always waits for her in the night, and she screws her eyes shut tight. Goodbyes shouldn’t hurt like this, shouldn’t leave something gaping the way they do. It doesn’t matter what reunion lies on the other end of it—if there’s even one at all. It isn’t fair that it makes her feel this much, pulls her back in when she’s tried to be over it, again and again and again.
Come on, she tells herself. Stop feeling. Stop hurting. She gave Adrien a Lady’s honor. If anyone should make good on it, it’s her.
So she keeps her eyes closed, and she lets all the goodbyes go away like every butterfly she’s freed, and she doesn’t want to wonder if Chat Noir will be waiting for her. And when she lets herself drop form the balcony, she trusts herself. And she lets herself trust Adrien, too.
The hole isn’t gone. But it’s starting to close.
Just a little, at the sound of, “Didn’t think I’d leave you alone, did you, Milady?”
Just a little more, when she remembers the smile.
And then, all the way, with the pieces of Adrien and Chat Noir still inside, when she comes home—home, where she wanted to go—to an empty living room.