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A whip-like appendage hissed through the air, slicing open Ladybug’s cheek with the clean precision of a doctor’s scalpel. She found herself sneering at the akuma facing her, more irritated that he’d managed to land a hit than actually hurt by it. A different whip slashed out, and if she was quite honest she wasn’t sure if she or her weapon reacted first. The leaf-shaped Xiphos was double edged and a shade of obsidian so deep and fathomless that someone could get lost in it if they stared too long.
The blade split the whip with zero resistance, “Mi’lady! Be careful-seems like she’s really lashing out,” Chat Noir’s voice rang in her head, his teasing lilt failing to cover the tension she could feel beneath it.
Ladybug ground her teeth, focusing on deflecting the continued attacks, rather than replying to her partner. She was reluctant to engage any resonance or trigger their skills so early in the fight, it could just as easily backfire and require them to recharge. A moment of indecision considering her options held Ladybug in a pocket of unawareness just as the akuma struck with multiple whips at once; they curled around her torso in a vice, constricting her lungs and reeling back with her in its grasp.
“ Ladybug!” Chat yelped, vibrating anxiously in her grip.
Suddenly, the pressure released and she was gasping frantically, her chest burning like a firebrand. Air roared in her ears as her body hurtled through the air, distantly acknowledging her impending impact with the ground, but immersed in the seconds that seemed to be stretching into years. In the timeless moment she found herself tumbling through, Ladybug allowed herself to consider how she’d ended up in this position.
If someone had told her a few months ago that she’d be moonlighting as a superhero meister with an overly flirtatious tomcat as her partner, trying to take down what could only be called a supervillain-who despite having failed to defeat them 78 out of 78 times, apparently was so consumed by his own hubris and self confidence that he refused to back down- Ladybug would laughed until she cried.
But here she was, 14 year reigning champ of the clumsiest girl alive, going toe to toe with a terrorist on the biweekly, resonating with her partner to a mind blowing magnitude. Ladybug’s belief was that the Miraculous amplified both their ability to resonate, as well as the power of their individual souls. Chat liked to insist that it was because they were partners, destined to be a perfect match-infuriatingly charismatic, as always.
Tikki had suggested it might be some of both.
In any case, Ladybug didn’t know if she could ever have another partnership compare to this one.
Her spine crunched audibly as she collided with a wall, an iron tang heavy on her tongue. A cacophonous symphony of metal on stone rattled her pounding skull, seeming to echo within her head. Ladybug became aware of a high pitched ringing, nearly drowning out her partner shouting, “Cataclysm!” from somewhere in between her and the akuma.
The whips that had been barreling towards them dissolved into ash in mid air, tracking all the way back to their roots in the akuma, leaving the creature with only a couple left. Ladybug levered herself onto her feet, ignoring the screaming protests of her bruised and strained muscles.
Chat sprung into his human form, immediately blocking her path to the akuma, his face contorted with anxiety and concern. “Mi’lady, maybe we should regroup after you rest…”
Ladybug furrowed her brow, irritation and impatience rising in her, she could see their window to strike the akuma closing the longer he spent fussing over her. The cure would fix everything in the end, it wouldn’t matter, they just needed to stop this akuma before it became a true kishin. “I’m fine, Chat,” she bit out, a bit sharper and more venomous than she’d meant to. “Transform. Let’s end this.”
He shot her a look, dripping with unspoken conflict, but his body glowed and reformed in her grip in his Xiphos form. Ladybug dropped into a crouch, leveling the sword at the akuma. “Chat-Soul resonance!”
Their souls burst into renewed life, swelling to overlap until Ladybug could no longer tell where her body ended and his began; her pain and harsh determination blended with his concern for her safety but unending faith in her, an exquisite palette of their partnership. His soul burned within hers, an everlit torch igniting her from her core. Chat began to glow, warping into an exaggerated but no less elegant form.
Ladybug wondered if she’d ever feel quite so whole resonating with anyone else.
“Lucky charm!” She screamed, driving Chat’s double edged blade into the akuma’s chest, an explosion of red light tore the creature into bits of shadow. When the light faded, a teen girl dropped to the floor, crumpled and unconscious, while a butterfly still hung in the air above her. Maintaining their resonance, Ladybug slashed the tiny creature out of the air; splitting it open for a fresh, pure version to flit away.
The resonance faded and a wave of dizziness and pain crashed over Ladybug as the adrenaline of battle began to wane. Her knees buckled, cracking painfully into the ground. Lifting Chat felt as though she were competing in a lifting competition after doing 1000 straight pushups, her arms trembling with exhaustion at the stress her body was enduring; she managed to extend the blade straight up and cast her miraculous cure. The healing wave washed over the vicinity, immediately righting all the damage caused by the akuma. A fresh, unrestricted breath of air entered Ladybug’s lungs and she sighed heavily with relief, the pain she’d been drowning in a moment before nothing but a phantom memory in her nerve endings.
Chat sprung into human form, pulling her into a tight hug. “You really scared me today, Mi’lady,” he scolded half-heartedly.
She could see his soul and knew he wasn’t actually upset now that she was safe.
His soul was bright and tinged with the blush that always seemed to consume him when she was too close. It had confused her for some time, but she’d dismissed it as a fluke or his miraculous altering his soul’s form, or perhaps even the remnants of their resonance in visible form. (Privately, perhaps, she hoped her own was tinged with a lime green traces of him.) Ladybug had devoted more time than she probably should have, thinking up clever ways to explain away the soft shade of rose that tinged the edges of Chat’s soul on occasion. And by occasion she meant anytime they were closer than usual, in a physical or emotional sense-which was fairly often since they tended to spend most of their time together locked in a high stakes battle and then coming down from the adrenaline high, basking in the fragments of their soul bond.
She didn’t actually figure it out until she’d really started practicing her soul perception, even while in her civilian meister form, taking careful notes about the people around her, strangers, classmates, she made a point to notice everyone. In doing this, she noticed other souls tinged with color like Chat’s. In class sometimes, Nino would spend too long staring at his girlfriend and his soul would flush deep magenta, or Rose would give Juleka a particularly sweet note and the girl would flare a soft baby pink.
No shade was quite the same as the lovely caress of rose that her partner’s blush took, but it became harder for Ladybug to deny what it meant. A blushed soul was evidence of a crush. She’d spent an almost unhealthy amount of time dismissing her partner as nothing more than a stray tomcat who flirted with any pretty girl that crossed her path, and in doing so had never stopped to ponder the phenomena long enough to realize that he wasn’t just flirting.
She tried not to think about what her own soul might look like, because if she did, she might have to examine feelings she'd shoved very very deep and intentionally never revisited.
But even once she knew what the blush meant, Ladybug let her infrequent cowardice get the best of her, not daring to bring it up with Chat for fear that it would upset the balance of their partnership. She couldn’t begin to even consider how she felt about him romantically, but when she did dare to imagine it, all that plagued her was fear that she might lose her best friend.
Ladybug would never admit it out loud, lest the words go straight to her partner’s ego, but he was right that they were a perfect match, at least as meister and weapon. Twisted together like rose thorns entwined in ivy, almost impossible to separate one from the other, they found home in each other’s souls.
So she kept his secret, and hers.