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Something’s on Nathaniel’s mind. It’s not hard to tell, considering the giant stack of comics and reference books beside him, and considering the way his brow is so wrinkled that it rivals even the most crumpled of Marinette’s sketches on a bad day.
They’ve been doing these “creation days” ever since school let out; a group of them would get together, either on the Liberty or at the library or an open coffee shop, and just work. On song lyrics or clothing designs, warm-up sketches or storyboards, two-hundred-word pieces that never go anywhere and drafts of neon-loud street art, scribbles of songs that sound like they should be ringtones instead of symphonies. People could drop in and out as they pleased; it wasn’t like one of those lengthy game campaigns that seemed to take forever just to find a time that worked for everyone.
It was Marc’s idea at first, surprisingly to everyone—and most surprisingly to Marc himself—but it worked to near perfection. They didn’t need to make masterpieces. They just needed to make.
This time, though, it seems like Nathaniel’s stuck on the making part. And that’s probably the worst curse of all.
“What’s the matter, Nath?” Marinette asks, taking a seat at a large table tucked away by the coffee shop window. She’s one of the last ones to arrive to this small session at the tail-end of July, but Luka and Marc are already in line, chatting away as they wait to place their orders. Marc looks back once, gives her a little wave, then smiles warmly at Nathaniel and turns on his heel. She gives Nathaniel a nudge. “You’d think you’d be all warm on the inside, with Marc looking at you like that.”
“Huh?” Nathaniel squints. “Like what?”
Marinette rolls her eyes. “Like you’re the world. You’re not even being subtle about it.”
“I didn’t realize we had to be subtle about it,” Nathaniel quips, though his face goes pink as he rests his chin in his hand and looks away. Like he’s thinking too much about something. A different something. But then he plucks one of the comics from the tower beside him, leafs through a few pages, puts it back. “ We’re stuck,” he confesses after a moment.
“Stuck?” She looks between him and Marc, who’s shuffling up to the register now—probably stumbling over his order here and there, but still loads better at it than he used to be. Luka catches her eye, winks at her, and waves her off as if to tell her not to worry—he already knows what she wants. She tries not to think anything of it, but it’s hard to do that when it feels like even the smallest gestures make her fall for him all over again. “What kind of stuck?” she asks, still keeping her eyes on the line.
“Story stuck,” Nathaniel replies, firm and frustrated enough to grab her full attention. When she turns to him, he recoils, awkwardly tapping his pencil against the tabletop. “Sorry, it’s just… Marc brought up a really good point about Ladybug while he was working on the script for one of the updates.” He pauses; maybe it’s for dramatic effect, or maybe it’s because he doesn’t want anyone else listening in on some brilliant idea they’ve put together. Or maybe he’s still just that uncertain about it.
“Well?” Marinette prompts him, gently. “What did he say?”
Nathaniel scrunches up his face. “He just pointed out that… well… Ladybug knows who Mightyllustrator really is. She probably knows who Viperion really is, too. But nobody gets to know who’s under her mask, you know? They know Ladybug… and people probably know her civilian form. But we can’t really write about that, or draw it, because… we don’t know either, and…” He sighs, staring out the window. “It must be pretty lonely sometimes. Knowing everybody and not letting anyone in. Do you know what I mean?”
Marinette sits stock straight, willing her face not to go hot and her stomach to stop twisting, silently praying he won’t look her way. It’s probably one of the only times she’d ever wish to possess the Cat Miraculous, because twisting a ring around her finger under the table is easy to explain away, and Luka’s still waiting for his drink—both of theirs—to lend her his again. “I dunno,” she says, kicking herself for how strained and high-pitched her voice sounds. “I’m no good at that writing—uh, character development stuff, you know?”
God, she hopes the little laugh that follows is at least close to convincing.
“Kinda.” Nathaniel mumbles the word into his palm, turns back to the piles of books. “I guess that’s what makes working on this stuff even easier. Having someone to point out the things you don’t even think about. And having someone look at everything you put on the table and tell you, ‘I hear you. I get you. All the words in your head and the things in your heart that don’t know how to be said. And I know you.’”
She smiles warmly, taps the cover of his sketchbook with her pencil. “Why do I get the feeling you’re not just talking about the comic?”
Nathaniel rolls his eyes, even though there’s the threat of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “I’m serious. I just have a lot of thinking to do so we can both make this… really good, you know? Good, and developed and stuff, but… not if it can’t keep Ladybug safe, wherever she is. Whoever she is.”
In the silence, he opens up his sketchbook, starts drawing the perimeter of a few panels with idle, ragged strokes. Just to get something down. Just to get his hand moving. Marinette knows the feeling. “Do you think we’ll have to discontinue it?” he asks, almost like he doesn’t want the question to be heard. “If it gets too risky? If… anyone could find out?” He chews his lip. “D’you think something could happen to Chat Noir, too?”
Everything Marinette feels, everything she wants to say, sinks like a stone in the pit of her stomach and sews her mouth shut for longer than she’d like. Long enough that she’s almost afraid it might be suspicious. Before she can let the quiet between them go on any longer, she says, “I dunno if I’m the right person to ask about this. Maybe it’s risky even talking about it. But…” She pauses, drums her fingers on the tabletop. “But I think you’re doing a good job with the details you have, and you’ve always liked focusing on the superhero parts of the stories, anyway. So maybe it’s not so risky after all.”
Nathaniel doesn’t look totally convinced; she supposes she doesn’t blame him. “But doesn’t it feel like she’s not… I dunno… whole? If we don’t talk about that?”
“The way I see it,” Marinette says carefully, with a death grip on the edge of her chair, “Ladybug is still a whole person with or without her mask. She’s just as much the person she is when she’s Ladybug as she is when she’s… not Ladybug. And it’s the same for Mightyllustrator. And if we’re starting to see the story more from his perspective, then he probably wouldn’t know about all that complicated stuff. Which… might make that easier for you to hash out with Marc, you know?” Her leg starts to bounce under the table, and she hopes Nathaniel doesn’t notice. Or feel it. “Maybe you could use something like that so he’s… I dunno, a confidant for Ladybug. He could be there for her.” She chews her lip. “Someone has to be.”
Someone has been, at least.
Her heart is pounding, so loud it nearly drowns out the dull roar of the conversation around her, but it certainly doesn’t block out the silent, thoughtful look on Nathaniel’s face. That feels like the loudest thing in the room. Say something, she wants to tell him. Don’t leave me on the spot, don’t leave me hanging.
“You know,” he finally mumbles, to her relief, “I think you have a point.” He lifts his gaze from the panels, smiles at her. It’s not wide or overly excited; it’s mellow, genuine, I hear you, I get you. “How do you always know what to say? It really is like what Adrien said, huh?”
Marinette’s stomach twists again, in the indescribable way. “What are you talking about?” she stammers.
“When he called you our everyday Ladybug.” Nathaniel taps his pencil against the table, scoots over to make room for Marc when he returns with two cups; it’s not hard to tell that their fingers are laced under the table now. “I think he had a point, too.”
“You didn’t get those done with a gun, did you?”
Chat Noir’s voice, smooth as the dark, shouldn’t surprise Marinette as much as it does, but he has a nasty habit of slinking up to her balcony and scaring the pajamas right off her. Tonight is no different, but at least she only gives a start instead of, well, shrieking and stumbling over her deck chair. The first, last, and only time that happened, she had a hand-sized bruise on the back of her thigh for at least a week. (He’d felt bad about that, at least, but his track record still wasn’t looking so great.)
Sure enough, there he is, perched behind her on one of the pillars, his eyes glowing green in the summer night and illuminated by the moon. He makes himself right at home, taking a knee on the deck of the balcony and giving her a two-finger salute. “Long time no see, Princess.”
Marinette smiles weakly, tries to crack a joke. “I was starting to think you’d forgotten about me.”
“You?” Chat Noir laughs; maybe it’s supposed to sound over-the-top on purpose. “Never.”
“What were you saying?” she says, turning back to what she can see of the city; she can hear him getting comfortable behind her in the deck chair. “Something about a gun?”
“Oh, just… your earrings. They’re new, right?”
“The seconds?” It’s been long enough since the piercing that they’re not warm and throbbing and obviously present, but not so long that she can go around twirling and touching them without any problems. She has to remind herself of that when she tries to reach for them on instinct. She also has to will her stomach not to turn. It feels like it’s been doing that a lot lately. “Y-yeah, they’re… new. And no, I got them done with a needle.” She turns back to face him, leaning against the railing. “What do you know about that stuff?”
He grins, sprawled out over the deck chair just as she imagined, a true cat in his own right. Then he points to both ears. His actual ones. “Just some things from my rebellious phase.”
Marinette rolls her eyes. “You literally wear a bell around your neck.”
“That’s irrelevant.” Chat Noir’s eyes flicker toward the stone ledge nearby, inviting her to sit with him, and quiet falls between them once she does. These moments aren’t unusual. Sometimes she might feel the urge to say something, find something to bicker about, wait for him to make some comment he probably thinks is smooth. Anything to fill in the gaps. Most of the time, they end up sitting. Not basking. Not stewing. Just sitting. Just quietly absorbing each other, the way people do to know each other better.
“It looks good on you,” he says after a moment, a strangely perfect, just-sitting thing.
Not those. The other ones.
It makes Marinette feel sick. It makes her pray. And it makes him stay with her, even with what little they say, until she doesn’t feel like praying anymore.
“I had a dream about you,” she finally says, once all the other words and thoughts disappear. For some reason, she’s always found it creepy, saying things like that. But for some reason, it feels even weirder not bringing it up. “A few days ago. It’s been happening for a while now… The same one, over and over.”
Chat Noir’s eyes widen, pupils going slight round, and then he grins, his tail swishing by his boots. “Fantasy, huh? I’m flattered.”
“Stop.” Honestly. The last thing she needs is for his head to get even bigger. “It wasn’t even a good dream.”
“I’m pretty sure every dream I’m in is a good dream.” He gives a nonchalant shrug, the kind that’s supposed to make her laugh—would probably make her laugh—any other day. “Sorry, it’s the law.”
“No, it…” Marinette shifts in her seat, uncomfortable, but not suddenly so. It’s the sort of thing that’s been creeping up on her ever since she broke the silence, and even before then. “This one’s. Bad.”
Chat Noir’s face falls. His pupils go back to normal. He sits up, and it feels like all the air around him starts to compress. “Hey,” he says, genuine and soft, that way that feels like a delicate brush of fingers across the back. The way that might make anyone tear up immediately, because it carries that underlying I’m here. I hear you. “What happens in the dream?”
Nino always told her, growing up, that if she ever had a bad dream, she wasn’t supposed to talk about it. Because that was what his parents said to do—that bad dreams came from something evil, and it wasn’t right to spread evil likee that around the world—and he respected their reasoning enough for it to make sense. Even if it did leave her up late, on more than a few nights, wondering if akumas could come to people in their dreams. But this doesn’t feel like something she can just contain anymore. Not after she’s had it so many times. “You get akumatized,” she says, and even though it comes out so soft and so small, there’s a part of her that’s afraid the breeze will carry the words away. All the way to Hawk Moth, even.
Chat Noir can barely get out a word of his own—not even an oh—before the rest spills out like ticker tape, like that endless thread of brightly colored scarves that clowns or magicians pull out of their mouths. “You’re all white—even your bell, even your hair. Everything’s white except your eyes. They’re blue, like ice, and the moon is all messed up like something attacked it, and it’s like the whole world is buried underwater, like a wasteland, or after the apocalypse or something. And…” She nearly chokes on the words as they come, but there’s no stopping them. Not anymore. “And you were alone. Singing to yourself. Every single time, it happens like that. And then I call out to you—I-I think. Like, it’s me, but the voice doesn’t sound like me. And you turn around, and you call my name. You say it like you thought you’d never see me again, and then…”
Chat Noir swallows. Tilts his head, leans over. Marinette can’t tell if the stiffness in his frame is because he’s paying such close attention or because maybe… part of him is scared like her. Or because he can tell that one part—the part where she’s Marinette and not Ladybug—is a lie. “And then?”
Marinette’s hands start to shake, and her leg starts to bounce. She doesn’t realize it’s happening until she looks down; maybe they always were, the whole time she’s been narrating the dream. She has to sit on her hands to keep them still, or otherwise clench them into tight, white-knuckled fists. There’s nothing she can do about her leg. “Your eyes turn into slits,” she whispers. “And then you pounce. The last thing I see is the blue.” She hesitates to close her eyes now—like if she does, she’ll see it all over again, seize up with fear. And she won’t do that. She can’t. “The first time it happened, I woke up screaming. Now I just… shake. And try to get back to normal.”
For a long while, Chat Noir is quiet. He can’t even bear to look at her. It weighs so heavily between them that Marinette can’t help wondering if he feels guilty. For plaguing her dreams like this, or for not being there to talk her through the after. He’s quiet, and it’s like he’s trying to find the words that make up for too much lost time. “God,” he says after a while, and he actually sounds… remorseful. It’s probably the saddest she’s ever heard him. “I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” she says, and she actually means it. “I’ve got some help, so… it’s not as bad as it could be.”
His eyes flick up towards her, finally. “Your boyfriend?”
Warmth floods her stomach at the word, but she nods. It isn’t often, because Tikki is always there, but there are times when she’s called Luka in the middle of the night, when she needs to hear all her kindnesses coming from somebody else. When she needs to fall asleep to him—the next best option to all that middle-of-the-night sneaking around—to feel just a little more functional. “He gets it,” is all she says.
Something in Chat Noir’s expression changes. It’s hard to tell whether he wants to be the one to get it, or if he wants someone to get him, too. But he covers it up with a cheeky smile, the one he usually sports, and he says, “Guess I failed you as a knight, huh.”
Marinette pauses, feels her face changing too, before she looks to him. It looks like Chat Noir bristles from his seat, like maybe some part of him is running through all the things he might have said wrong. It… hurts to see that. But she only pats the empty space beside him on the ledge, waiting until he’s come closer before resting her head on his shoulder. Has it really taken her until now to notice how small she is next to him? Has she always been? Or is it something that’s just grown, like her, with time?
“You were never my knight,” she mumbles, looping one of her arms around him and lightly kicking at his foot. “But you’ve always been my friend.”
Chat Noir doesn’t answer at first, but after a while, he slides his arm out of her grasp and around her shoulders, holding her close. “I’ll take it,” he says, and there’s no way the wind can take it away from them.
It isn’t allowed to.
Luka is in love with people’s hands. These things that do nothing but work and create, he says. These things that hold the power to be so, so soft when life has made them so, so hard. They give people away, he says, and he’s in love with them.
Marinette feels like she should have known it from the start, but she supposes she was always so tuned in to how he chased after the melodies in people’s hearts. Sometimes all it takes is a few passersby along the Seine for him to make up a story—an argument, a friendship, the hesitation of two people trying to fall in love. Sometimes he sits, and stews, and stares at the person he’s composing until his eyes just might bore into their very soul. He plays, thinks, goes back, rewrites, replays, because authenticity is the key here, and he’s always said that music is the one thing that tells the truth.
But she’s starting to pick up on it more often now. How he focuses so deeply on the way her father sprinkles flour over a countertop with all the love and care in the world, kneads dough to make a fresh loaf of bread. The way her mother swipes debit cards and hands over boxes of baked goods. The quiet certainty of Juleka’s fingers when she strokes out fresh coats of nail polish, or the eager jitter in Rose’s grip when she scribbles out new lyrics. He comes to know it in himself, too—the way she’s always known it. The gentle way he plucks at his guitar strings, how he caresses the neck and body, so lovingly that sometimes she finds herself getting jealous, as though the gesture grounds him. How he rubs his guitar pick between his thumb and forefingers before he presses it to his lips and starts to play.
She catches him finding it in her, too. There are times when she’ll look across the table, where Marc or Nathaniel is sitting next to her, and he’ll be watching her for how she twirls her pencil between her fingers, or how she curls her free hand over the top of her sketchbook while she hunches over it. Times when they’re riding the metro together, and her fingers slide absently between his, and his gaze will flicker down like they’ve never touched before, and he’ll kiss her knuckles just as idly before keeping her grip safe in his lap. Times when they’re waking up from a nap, either at her place or his, and he’ll watch her in awe from his side of the bed as she shifts to tie up her hair again.
“What is it?” she said once, when all they had to comfort them were his sheets and the sun hanging lower in the sky.
Luka only shook his head then, reached forward to tug the hair ties out and leave them on his wrist. “They work so hard,” he mumbled, taking her hands in his and massaging her palms with his thumbs. He held them to her lips, and then on either side of his face, and he said, “Let ‘em rest.”
Marinette’s not sure she ever knew what that meant.
This time, it’s the quilt.
Sure, it’s hitting the dog days of summer, when it’s an obscene number of degrees outside and the only thing worth doing is lying around with the air conditioner on and bemoaning the heat. But she did only just start working on it a week or so ago, and all her responsibilities considered, it probably won’t be ready until October anyway. It feels like a long way from here, October. A long time to be with someone.
The first time Luka saw the square scraps of fabric, he pulled up the spare desk chair, delicatedly cradled each one, and asked what they were for. Asked, with a mellow, teasing lilt in his voice, if this was her latest stress project.
They’re your songs, she told him. Everyone you hear. all the colors you play. She couldn’t be annoyed, though, because she knew he was right. She didn’t stress-bake; that was all her father. She stress-sewed.
His eyes lit up back then, once she’d said that. More than they already did whenever he had her attention. There’s a lot of red ones.
She felt herself go pink. That’s cause you play me the most.
The nice thing, at least, is that nowadays, whenever he comes over, she starts working on the quilt, and he starts playing what he sees in them. To help her figure out where the colors go, he says. It’s the least he can do to help her along in the creative process.
Except this time, Luka’s playing slows, and eventually stops. When she looks up, confused, he sets his guitar back in his gig bag, gives her a meaningful look, and pats his lap from where he’s seated on her chaise longue. “C’mere,” he says. “You seem extra stressed today.”
“Is that what I sound like?” she asks, though she sets her work aside and moves toward him all the same.
“No.” In an almost-swift movement, he tugs her into his lap and lays her back against his chest, tucking her head under his chin and idly playing with her hands. “It’s what you look like.”
Marinette mumbles an apology, shifts to press her ear to his chest. The way his heartbeat flutters at times puts butterflies in her stomach, makes her smile faintly into the front of his shirt. “Are you thinking about me right now?”
“No, I’m thinking about snakes.” He laughs, kisses the top of her head. “Course I’m thinking about you. I’m holding you. How could I be thinking about anything else?”
“Well, that just makes me feel guilty.”
Luka stiffens. “Sorry,” he murmurs, running his fingers through her hair and tugging out her elastics one by one. “Wanna tell me what’s on your mind?”
Marinette hesitates, shakes her head, looks for his hand again to keep their fingers laced.
Luka doesn’t press or pry; he never has. It’s one of her favorite things about him. Instead, he sighs, so deeply that her head sinks with his chest, and takes to running his free hand up and down her spine. “That’s it,” he whispers into her hair when she shudders with relief; it feels like she’s shaking the stress right off her. “Just relax. Just for a little bit.”
“Aren’t you hot?”
“I’m gorgeous,” he jokes, smiling against her scalp. “But no, I’m fine. I run cold most of the time.” He holds her for a while longer, sometimes kissing the top of her head as if to remind her that he’s still with her—as though she could forget—and breathing in a little deeper when she traces her fingers over the sailor bracelet and the bird tattoos. He waves off her murmured apology, insists that it’s not as tender as the day he got them done, and then he says, “Well, maybe I’ve been thinking of some other things, too.”
“Like what?”
“Like the time we got ice cream together. When we were singing on the Seine. ” He gives her a squeeze. “It made me think that… next time I get a gig, you could get up there with me. Just for a song. What do you think?”
Marinette’s blood prickles, just for a moment. “I don’t think I’m cut out for stuff like that,” she confesses. “I don’t sing to perform or get big or anything like that. It’s just… for fun, you know? Silly things in the shower, or whatever.”
“I get that. I don’t perform to get big, either.” Luka hums in thought. “I’ve thought about it a lot. If I want to travel the world, sell out all those stadiums and have all those followers. I think it’d be too much for me. Couldn’t handle the pressure. But as long as I get to have a little corner of Paris… as long as I get to keep making music, then that’s all I really need. And it’d be nice to share that corner with you.” He gets a little more comfortable in the chaise, letting her all but lie on top of him; she could probably fall asleep like this, with the way he keeps rubbing her back and holding her every thought in his grasp. “You don’t have to say yes, but it’d make me happy if you did.”
“Yeah?” She wouldn’t be opposed to making him happy… “How come?”
“Well, cause…” Luka shrugs. “It’d be a new experience, for one. Like with me and the poem.”
“Are you still writing them?”
“Sorta.” He laughs under his breath. “They help sometimes, when Rose is stuck on lyrics and needs a soundboard. But more than that… I guess, I’ve just always loved the music in your heart. I’ve heard it hundreds of times. It’s something you deserve to share with others, if you want to. And hey, if you can save Paris at least once a week, then you…”
Luka trails off, but there’s a sudden coldness in the room that follows his words, as though… as though he’s said something he shouldn’t. Confused, and with an opening pit in her stomach, Marinette shifts in his lap to look at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He opens his mouth to say something, then hesitates. Like all the words are jammed in his throat, and he can’t figure out which of them is supposed to come first. He’s frozen, half-lying there, but his eyes dart around. Everywhere but at her.
“Luka,” she tries again. Her hands are starting to shake, and there’s no way for her to sit on them, or hide them, or fidget with something, just to get them to stop. He couldn’t possibly be in love with them now. “What is that supposed to mean?”
Before he can answer, and before she can start jumping to even further conclusions, both of their phones go off with a siren. An Akuma Alert. They don’t even have to look at their lock screens to know it; these days, the sound’s so familiar it almost fades into the background, but it’s still so jarring, blood-chilling, every time.
Luka meets her eyes. He looks more serious than she’s ever seen him, even through the anxiety attacks, even when they encountered Bob Roth. And then he says the words that make her chest go way too tight. “You have to go, don’t you?”
And Marinette freezes.
She’s been shaking for hours, at least a day, and it’s not from the aftershocks of the akuma. Honestly, that was the relieving part of her afternoon; it’s hard to focus on all the things that make you anxious when there’s a literal demonized human being coming for your life. And your partner’s life. And, really, all of one of the biggest cities in the world. Some things just take priority, after all. But even Chat Noir’s voice was just barely enough to get her out of the fog in her head, and it shouldn’t have taken her as long as it did to figure out what the hell she was supposed to do with a handful of bobby pins.
She’s known for long enough, though—in spite of all the weight she ever resigned herself to letting anyone else carry. Panic plays second fiddle to every other soul-crushing responsibility.
When she came home through the latch door in the balcony yesterday, Luka was already gone. She didn’t know what scared her more: the fact that he might have left in the middle of the attack and risked getting hurt or worse, or the fact that he might have stayed just long enough for everything to be resolved before he left. That he left at all didn’t bother her; it was more of a relief, really, because she wouldn’t have known what to say to his face. She wouldn’t have known if she could say anything at all.
Besides, once she got settled, she noticed the thread of text messages that must have quietly filed in, one by one, while she was transformed.
hey.
i don’t want you to think i’m scared of you or that i don’t want to be around you anymore, because honestly that’d be selfish as hell. i just… thought you might need some space and time to process. what happened.
and i wanna make sure i give you that space and time.
so if you don’t want me around, you can say so. and if you do want me around, you can say that, too.
we can talk about it. or we can not talk about it.
but i’m here, and i love you, and i hope i’ve proven that you can trust me. and trust us.
i love you, i love you, i love you.
yeah, i’m rambling right now, talking to nobody really. i know that’s a thing i do when i get real anxious
but i needed to say it. again and again and again.
i hear you, and i love you. i just need you to know that
and the only thing i wanna be selfish about is telling you please don’t leave
She’s been reading the text messages ever since she got them, and she still hasn’t figured out what she could possibly say to him. If she asked him to come back, she wouldn’t know what to say. Wouldn’t know if she could look him in the eye knowing she’d been lying to him, or wondering how long he must have known. Knowing he… he’d been lying to her, too, hadn’t he?
But if she asked for the space he thought she deserved, well… who knows what could happen? Who knows what Hawk Moth knows, or could find out? Who knows what could happen to Luka, or his identity? What if she had to call on Viperion again? Would she be allowed to? Would he say anything? Would he—
Oh, God—
The earrings.
Tikki.
She can’t lose Tikki—
Her phone buzzes in her hand, startling her back to the cool summer air and the way the iron railing of her balcony presses into her skin, perhaps deep enough to leave imprints. Still shaky, she wobbles to her deck chair and sinks down onto it, swiping her passcode.
…marinette…? are you okay?
i can… tell you’ve been reading my messages, just
please tell me you’re okay.
“Marinette?” Tikki murmurs at the same time, phasing out of her purse and settling at the top of Marinette’s phone. Her eyes are so big, filled with all kinds of concern, and she must know, too, that Luka knows there’s someone like her floating around. That he knows Marinette’s earrings mean something else now.
The words start to swim together, and Marinette nearly drops her phone, pressing the heels of her hands to her and willing herself to stop shaking, to stop crying, to stop everything, just for once. Just for five minutes.
“I don’t know,” she stammers, her voice cracking under the pressure. “I don’t know anymore.”
It’s all she can bring herself to text Luka—i don’t know—before she tucks her phone under her thigh and cradles Tikki close and silently prepares every goodbye she never thought she’d have to say. Please don’t come, Chat, she thinks. Please don’t come see me tonight. And of course it’s a foolish thing to think, because his entire thing is bad luck. So when she looks up, eyes stinging and head pounding and stomach turning with every little emotion she’s tried to suppress for safety’s sake, and sees him there, she goes stock still, hoping beyond hope that he can’t see how puffy her eyes are under the streetlight.
“Please,” she whispers, trembling all the way to the tips of her fingers and toes. “Go away, Chat. Not tonight, please.”
Chat Noir hesitates, or so it seems, from where he’s perched on her balcony, but he slinks to the floor and makes his way toward her all the same. “Sorry, Princess,” he murmurs, taking a seat beside her and gathering her up in his arms before she can say anything else. “That’s an order I can’t follow.” His grip on her is strong, protective without crushing her. He even cradles the back of her head, as though there’s something out there he doesn’t want her to see. As though he’s looking out for something.
A butterfly, maybe.
“I’m fine,” she tries to insist, gently pushing on his chest for some distance. Because if anything, all she wants is to slip downstairs, rock back and forth in her bed and talk to Tikki. Talk and talk until they can’t anymore. Until they can’t, ever again.
“I can’t,” he says into her hair, even more softly this time, more strained, and perhaps a little broken, too. If anything, it feels like he’s hugging her tighter. Watching more closely. Saying goodbye without knowing he’s doing it. “You’re just gonna have to forgive me.”
In the nightmares, she sees herself, in some past she’s never lived, with her hair down and her body curled up next to Adrien’s, or her hands on his, or the two of them tucked away in some corner, connected at the mouth. She’s never known why. Maybe it’s some alternate, bad timeline—the kind Nathaniel and Marc sometimes talk about when they throw around the idea of retconning some of their older ideas. And the thing about it is, she never actually sees those moments. It’s more like they live at the edges of the dream, something she’s supposed to have known—remembers knowing long after she’s woken up and let them creep in from the corners of her subconscious.
He’s never seen her with her hair down before.
In the nightmares, Adrien never let her go. Or maybe she never let go of him. It’s always too blurry to pick apart details like those. And they don’t demand her attention the way Chat Noir does, all white like that.
She’s taken to calling him Chat Blanc. Not in the dream itself, but in the shaking moments after, when she needs to give the thoughts a word or two just to defeat them. She doesn’t know what else to call him, when she’s hovering between realities like that, and it seems like the most fitting thing besides. It’s twisted, how all it takes is a name to make a connection like that. To let it dig its claws into your mind with little hope of retracting.
This time, in the nightmare, her hair is down. And her yoyo is gone. And when she looks down at herself she sees pink and white instead of red and black.
Her heart sinks, and thrums deep and dangerous in the pit of her stomach.
She’s not Ladybug, here in this wasteland. She’s Marinette. And this time it isn’t a lie.
But when she dares to call out to him, Chat Noir—no, Chat Blanc—looks her way and stops singing… and nothing in his expression is any different. There’s no shock in his eyes. Only relief to see her at all. It’s as though he’s known she was under the mask all along. And the thought makes her feel…
Sick. Paralyzed. The way he’s looking at her from his cold, cold perch, she can’t even make a grab for her ears to make sure the Miraculous is still there.
Then there’s the name.
Ladybug.
And then there are the slits.
And then there’s the pounce.
Just like always.
The last color Marinette sees before she shoots up in bed, shaking and with tears in her eyes, isn’t that ice blue. It isn’t even white. It’s black. And before that, bright, bright red. She has to focus all her attention on swallowing down the bile rising in her throat, and evening out her breaths with all the exercises she would use, And then, almost frantically, she ties her hair back up into her pigtails. No, Ladybug’s pigtails. No. Hers.
She doesn’t even know what time it is, and she doesn’t want to. Because finding out what time it is means looking at her phone, and looking at her phone opens up the entire possibility of texting Luka in the middle of the night. And she doesn’t know if she can do that. She doesn’t know if she has anything to say beyond, I don’t know.
“Marinette…?” A thin, high, half-sleepy voice comes from beside her as she’s flipping her phone face-down, and she sighs in relief. Tikki. She’s still here—even floats up slowly to look her in the eyes. “What’s wrong?”
On instinct, Marinette cups her hands so Tikki can settle in them; they’re still shaking from the nightmare, the red and black, the if you can save Paris once a week. But Tikki doesn’t seem to mind; she even nuzzles her thumb, still waiting for an answer.
It sounds melodramatic, the way Marinette whispers, “Everything,” at God only knows what time. The way she doubles over, cries and prays that Hawk Moth can’t sense these things in his sleep because she just, needs, to break. But it wouldn’t be true, and it wouldn’t be right, to call it anything less. In this moment, while Paris sleeps and Luka sleeps right along with it, she’s herself.
Just herself.
She gets the feeling, while her phone lays silent next to her, that’s all she’ll ever get to be.