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The Champs de Mars seem endless in the summer day, despite – or perhaps because of – the sea of people swarming them, though the area around their blanket is clear. Adrien is wearing a black sweatshirt that cannot be too comfortable in the 20-degree weather, blond hair hidden under its hood and green eyes – behind his sunglasses. That’s enough to transform him, Kagami thinks, though she’s not sure she can place exactly what that transformation is.
Adrien had shown up at her door before her second-to-last class, said “Mr. D’Argencourt said fencing’s cancelled today because of some emergency or the other, so we have a free afternoon and I can take the blanket off from Marinette, so...” and he’d trailed off, because his confidence was only so much more than hers, and Kagami had simply said “Yes.”
And now they’re sitting in the spring sunlight, the blanket Marinette had sewn for their friend group to use throughout the year holding the two water bottles and two big quiches they have to their name. It’s a rich green colour – stains will be less obvious this way – and already covered in crumbs (both of them eat a lot more than people assume they do, and a lot messier when alone than whenever there is anybody else to see them), and Kagami can think of nothing more perfect than the way the green of the blanket goes with the black of Adrien’s hoodie and the red of her dress (which she is very thankful she went with this morning, as if sensing it would turn out to matter).
Kagami is happy and Kagami is smiling beyond anything her mother would have ever considered ‘polite’ and Adrien's smiling back at her and only at her in the same way. He brushes the crumbs aside and lies down on the blanket, hand gesturing for her to join him, and so she does.
There are birds circling above. Adrien reaches for her hand between them and clasps it in his own. One, two, three–
– riiiiiing, riiiiiing–
– six, seven–
“Yes, father?” Adrien says, his right hand still in hers. “An akuma attack at the school?” His voice doesn’t change, or at least it probably doesn’t to the man on the other line, and his hand squeezes hers a bit tighter. “No, I’m–fencing finished earlier, so Kagami and I went for a walk. Yes, I know. I’m ahead on homework this week, so I didn’t have anything to do before my session with Mr. Chan–” he stops in his tracks.
Kagami can hear him swallow, and then she can feel him let go of her hand to prop himself up. Adrien hides the sun from her when he does so, the hoodie falling off of his head. “Champs de Mars. He can pick me up from–” and Kagami tunes him out, just for a moment, to stare at his hair and admire the light reflected in it and hold on for just a little bit longer . Then Adrien hangs up and it is silent. Kagami raises herself up.
She expects an offer for a ride. What she gets instead is:
“How fast do you think we have to run to get to the school and back here before my bodyguard comes?”
“Traffic always gets botched around an akuma attack,” she replies without thinking. “I’m assuming your father told you to stay put and he’ll find you?”
“Yup,” he says, gathering the takeaway quiche containers.
“Then he knows that too,” she concludes as he gets up and goes to the bin, “so we have until the akuma gets defeated.”
Kagami can’t see his eyes. She isn’t sure she’d know what to think even if she could. “Right,” he says as he turns around, and she stands up, too, taking the water bottles in her bag as he folds the blanket quickly and neatly into a small square before shoving it in his. He looks up at her, then, and she was right – she doesn’t know what to make of his eyes. “I’m just worried about Marinette, Alix, Marc, and Nathaniel; they have a late art session today,” he says.
And then they run and it’s almost a competition, though Kagami isn’t sure what her prize is in all of this. She doesn’t ask why he thinks his presence there would be any help, either, because, strictly speaking, that’s not what his statement implies, and Adrien is the least arrogant person she knows.
(They make it back on time. She loses him in the chaos after they arrive and before Chat Noir shows up, but then the akuma is defeated a minute later and he’s back and they are at the Eiffel Tower just as his bodyguard pulls up. Simon never asks questions, and Adrien is silent after he opens the door for her and tells him they’ll be taking her home, too, and Kagami gets no answers either.
Later, she’ll think that this is where that pattern started.)
Ryuko has caught Chat Noir staring at Ladybug many times like this lately – with a strange sort of apprehension, as if he’s stuck between deciding two chess moves of which he favours neither – and while she doesn’t have the first idea of what is going on between them, she finds herself saying, once their team leader is at a distance:
“You should try being more direct with her.”
Chat turns to look at Ryuko in surprise, but she decides to elaborate before he can protest either her indiscretion or her advice; she’s feeling brave, for some reason, and strangely sympathetic in an abstract, detached sense of the word, like a spectator watching a film character they’ve unwittingly found themselves invested in despite having little feelings about their destiny either way.
“Ladybug is like the sea,” she says, stops, but decides to go ahead and try with the metaphor. “You are throwing pebbles and trying to make them bounce off and make waves when what you really want to do is step in the water.”
His look of apprehension is now turned on her, but the specific sort of confusion she’d expected is absent, and so she continues talking: “You are testing her boundaries constantly – at least from my point of view – but you never actually attempt to establish yourself within them. You sit on the shore and watch the water and appear content, but I think you’re far from it.” Her confidence evaporates, then, and so she adds on: “That is my impression from having seen what I’ve seen of your relationship, I mean. Please excuse me if I’m wrong or overstepping.”
“Don’t apologise,” is the first thing he says, but it doesn’t sound like a pardon; it’s a strange sort of tense resignation to some sort of truth being uncovered by someone else and his eyes scan her over. She feels like she’s being patted down for weapons.
Chat Noir lets the imploration dangle for a bit more, like bait for further argument between the two of them, and then looks away towards Ladybug’s back and says: “You’ve got me, I think. Your analogy is not entirely right, though.”
“Oh?” is all she can muster. The look in his eyes becomes somehow even harder to decipher.
“I am not sitting and watching the sea from the shore. I think I was for a very long time, but I am walking alongside it now, trying to find a stream that feeds into it.” He looks back at her as he says the next bit, the green in his eyes setting off an instinct in her to stand still:
“The point of testing it was to see if the waters were calm enough for it to be safe to go in.”
“And?” Ryuko finds herself asking as Ladybug calls out to them from the far side of the building, apparently having found an entrance in.
“Well, there are always waves in the sea,” he says, turning around and heading towards its direction. “That’s not its fault. There’s nothing I can do about that, either. I am thirsty, though, and neither admiring it from the shore nor bathing in it is not going to help me with that.”
And then the battle starts and ends before Ryuko can think of what to say, but by that point, Chat Noir’s already disappeared.
(She only really has one question, though, and she’s not quite sure where her curiosity comes from: Can you see a stream yet? )
Chat Noir is out for the count , Ladybug tells her without specifying how or why as she hands Kagami the box with the choker inside. She won’t look Ryuko in the eye, either, only barks out a plan and there they are, back-flipping through Dupont as the akumatised art teacher attempts to paint them with all the acidity of his destroyed supplies (“I will get back at you and all the philistines in this world–” crack, goes the thunder ), when Ryuko sees Adrien run into the building (and only later does she think that it may be a tad weird on his part that he always does that as if he has the foolhardiness of a hero and not the foolishness of a civilian) and she can’t help it – she shouts something at Ladybug for cover and swings down to grab him and whisk him away outside.
When they’re on the other side of the street, she doesn’t hold back her tone:
“There is an akuma battle going on inside, monsieur Agreste, could you please– ”
“I had to get to Ladybug,” he says, eyes showing that determination she’d pretended wasn’t there that day in the Champs de Mars. “Chat Noir has an important message for her,” he adds on, hastily. “She probably told you he’s not around right now, but he is, and he’s coming; he has an idea, too, since these acidic paints are sort of a problem–”
“Why isn’t he here himself, then?” Ryuko demands. Adrien’s mouth tightens, but whether from anxiety or frustration or both, she can’t quite tell. She decides to drop her act; the news reports had caught her in the battle with her mother, he knew anyway–
“They...had a fight, earlier,” he says as if through gritted teeth, then sighs, slumping his shoulders slightly. “Look, Chat Noir is a friend of mine, so I’m just...here to see if Ladybug herself would be alright with him coming, basically.”
“Why did he send you straight into the fray?”
“He didn’t, actually. I wanted to check up on you and Marinette anyway since I knew you’d stayed in after classes, and, well...”
His eyes are not quite meeting hers now, either.
Ryuko is sure there are one or two very big, very obvious pieces she’s missing, but she has no idea how to begin deciding where in the puzzle they’re positioned and thus – what they are. She hears the akuma cry vengeance again behind her, though, and she thinks she hears Ladybug swear, and so she says–
“Whatever it is, I’m sure they can sort it out between themselves. We can definitely use all the help we can get, though. And besides...” and here she hesitates, not because what she is about to say is false, but Adrien is looking at her with that strange sort of intensity again, and she does not know how this piece fits in, either, but: “Ladybug needs him, too.”
He nods, eyes darting quickly to both sides before he leans in, placing a quick kiss on her cheek and whispering “Thank you.”
Then he runs off and so does Ryuko – back into the building, where she zips through to where Ladybug is holding the akuma off with a confetti streamer and says, “Chat Noir is–” right as the boy in question vaults in through the ceiling, and Ladybug looks at him tensely but a new plan that involves his belt and their three-way coordination is hatched and executed within the next minute or so and the day is won.
(Ryuko watches them fist-bump for the cameras, standing further apart than usual, and remembers Adrien not asking her if she’d seen Marinette or known if she was alright.
She doesn’t know how that fits in, either, and she isn’t sure she wants to.)
Kagami wakes up restless at 2:53 AM on a Monday morning and sees a pair of shining green eyes in her window. Somehow, her life is such that this doesn’t startle her at all.
She flips her duvet and rises from her bed, Chat Noir’s silhouette coming into focus in light shining in from the outside. He is perched on his baton in a crouching position that leaves only the edges of his heels on the weapon, and yet seems comfortable enough with his left hand holding on the staff for further support and his head resting in his right one, a tight smile coming on his face as she comes to stand before him.
“Good evening,” she says, arms crossed over her chest, not even attempting to open the window; she knows his hearing to be good enough. “Why are you here?”
He shrugs languidly, arms moving in a performatively disinterested way that reminds Kagami of his namesake. “Came to ask you something regarding our, ah, mutual friend, ” he replies, right arm falling to rest with his left against his legs on his staff (Kagami refuses to think of the only person she knows right now who would be interested in the physics of that).
“At this hour? Is it something urgent? And why didn’t you knock?” she can hear her voice escalate slightly, but she finds that she has no patience for a game of chase at this hour, on this day, with one more person–
“It isn’t urgent in the saving-the-city-requires-it sense, but it is urgent in another one,” Chat replies, pausing again, eyes seemingly taking her in as if she’s the spot marked by a laser pointer. His smile’s already dropped. “And I couldn’t knock, not without knowing whether there’s an alarm set up or not.”
There is, and he’d done well to intuit that, but Kagami doesn’t tell him so, just stands stock-still, sensing that she is being tested, but doesn’t attempt to amend her perhaps too-reticent expression. After a brief moment of eye-contact, Chat blinks at her, slowly, and then says:
“Keep in mind this is because you did me good with your analogy a while back, so I thought I’d do you a favour, too.
My question is this: do you know if you’re standing before a sea or a stream?”
Kagami is stunned for a second, and then coldness seems to climb up her lungs. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business,” she says, feeling some of that ice seep into her voice, but Chat Noir doesn’t reply, only his eyes seem to dim a bit. She feels a pang of guilt, then, and amends herself:
“I’m sorry. That was unfair of me,” pause, but, “I do not...I do not wish to discuss this with you.”
Another tight, this time – apologetic, this time – familiar, smile on his face. “Of course. I...sorry.”
“It’s fine. Thank you for your concern,” she adds on.
He nods stiffly. “Good night.”
“Good night,” she replies, turns around, walks to her bed, can’t help it, looks back at the window–
–but he’s already gone.
(Kagami regrets it.
She doesn’t know what it is, though.)