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“Miss Tsurugi, I do not think there’s a point in waiting for them–” But then they round another corner and Kagami shoots out her arm to stop him from running any further ahead. If the slam is a bit too cruel in how much he ends up gasping, it is not more than he has deserved, she thinks as she pulls him next to her, close to the wall.
“Mister de Vanily, I think we’ve already established that yours is not an opinion I would consult as an expert’s,” Kagami says, bringing up her phone again to check the LadyBlog. Still nothing. She starts typing out a message in the forum, hoping that it would get picked up by somebody soon enough: Akuma attack in the Rodin museum, second floor, power is to turn people into statues–
Adrien’s cousin huffs beside her and next thing she knows, she’s being pulled by the hand to run again. “Very well,” he says, no longer winded, which Kagami cannot help but regret, “I refuse to be turned into a statue for your foolishness, though, and so if we won’t be running away, we might as well hide somewhere like–here.”
Kagami gets shoved into what is, from her quick look, a small closet, with a mop and a broom in the corner and two shelves on either side with various cleaning detergents, cloth, and odd tools strewn about them. Then the light gets cut off behind her and she hears the door click shut. Her heart jumps–
“Is it an automatic lock?” she pants out, turning around to look at her companion in the darkness. She cannot see a thing, but she thinks his breath hitches. A moment later, she hears a rattling of the handle.
“Apparently it is,” the boy says shortly and then something thumps (with proper grace, but nevertheless: thumps ) in front of her, and Kagami settles down, too, trying to calm her heart rate. She pulls out her phone again to try and finish her message–
–no service.
“Are you unable to contact them from here?” Adrien’s cousin asks, voice slightly less brusque than before.
Kagami realises the features on her face are unschooled, so she reigns them into their usual (outward) coolness. “No,” she replies, the lowness of her voice a stark contrast in her mind to the anger she’d felt a minute ago.
The boy is silent for a minute. Then, he says:
“That...is a shame. Not much for us to do besides lay low and wait for them to come whenever they do get the signal, then.”
Kagami switches her phone off and puts it in the pocket of her jacket. “Didn’t you consider their intervention useless to hope for?”
“No,” he replies. After a moment’s pause, he adds: “I am well aware of the heroes of Paris’ capabilities and their track record. I would rather not become an akuma attack victim, though, even if Ladybug’s...power can fix anything.”
Kagami doesn’t remember much from being akumatised and even less from getting caught up in Syren’s world, among others (she did not count the weather girl’s second akumatisation; it was not on the same order of threat as the others), but even so she can feel the faintest traces of a ghostly tightness around her chest at the thought of that. She nods in the darkness before realising he wouldn’t be able to see her. “I can understand that,” she offers by way of a peace token.
“Thank you,” he ( Felix, she remembers ) says, all too formal, all too stiff, but Kagami appreciates the politeness nonetheless for the hint of sincerity behind it, and decides it’s alright to let some of her guard down.
After a while, though, the silence gets a bit too stifling for Kagami’s liking. She thinks she can hear a distant crash, Ladybug and Chat Noir fighting the akuma, maybe, if they’re lucky, but it’s not enough to calm her slowly gnawing nerves. She powers up her phone again, squinting against the bright light for a moment before opening the ice breaker app.
“What are you doing?” Felix asks and Kagami flinches; right, small space, of course I couldn’t do this without him noticing, foolish…
“I was checking if there was any signal,” she says, feeling suddenly anxious of being discovered. Felix hums in response but comments no further; she is grateful, for it gives her time to analyse her fear.
Kagami’s heard about Adrien’s cousin only enough to know that he is prone to manipulation and therefore potentially dangerous, but the two had resolved their differences after the latter’s disastrous visit to Paris last fall, which had prompted further subsequent ones. She’d never had the chance to speak with him much while Adrien and her had still been together, though. That is why seeing him in the museum had elicited the sort of stilted, polite conversation one only finds themselves having with people they are not actively sure they can fully trust with either friendship or themselves more generally – before the akuma had attacked and Felix had grabbed her hand to drag them both off to hide, that is.
Kagami remembers Nino saying something a few weeks ago about Adrien’s cousin being a lot nicer to be around when he was ‘trashing classic films he didn’t think worth their salt’, and seeing the boy warily compliment Marinette once on a design she’d brought to a group outing. The girl had looked ready to bite his head off initially at that meeting (for reasons Kagami suspects had to do with more than his first visit in Paris but couldn’t think of what they might be) but had shot one look at Adrien and his baby cat eyes (as Alya likes calling them) seemed to have convinced her to treat him with a socially acceptable amount of hostility.
All of this was to say that – and Kagami has no hopes of getting any further – that Felix, like everyone else around them, is putting in the effort for Adrien; even her, he probably grabbed at the beginning of the akuma attack because of him. Still–
“Thank you for...taking me with you out of the main hall of the exhibition,” Kagami says as she puts her phone back in her pocket again, sensing his head lift from where it rested on his arms in the shadows. “I would very likely have involved myself more in the attack than strictly necessary.”
“You’re welcome,” he replies, a mouse looking at cheese offered and wondering if it’s a trap. He reaches out further with: “I’ve heard that you are part of Ladybug’s team.”
“I’ve helped them once or twice, yes,” she says, unsure of where the conversation’s headed.
“Is this why you wanted to stay? Has it gotten into your head?” he pauses, then: “I’m sorry, that came out impolite; what I meant was–”
“Don’t worry, I understand,” and here it is, she’s rushing again and she doesn’t know why, but something about this boy puts her on a nervous edge – not one that makes her want to flee, though, just the opposite. “And...I think that is a fair analysis, yes. I do not know how noble that is given that it is rooted in a sort of arrogance that I can do it against beings with supernatural powers without having such myself, but...”
“It still is quite noble, I think,” Felix says, a tinge of hesitation in his voice which disappears as he continues. “Arrogance breeds courage, true, but it does not necessarily breed follow-through or responsibility, which you seem to also possess – you did try and call in the, ah, experts. ” He pauses. “Quite odd to think about them as such, though, given that they are about our age.”
“Some people have claimed they are several years older,” Kagami says, sensing something more behind the thoughtfulness in his voice.
“I’ve...seen Ladybug’s face up close,” he replies as if he’s been caught into the aforementioned mouse trap, “they’re not. She definitely isn’t, at least.”
Kagami decides not to ask. Instead, she offers: “And the way Chat Noir acts...yes, definitely not a paragon of maturity,” thinking about how he can be such when he wishes to, when there were serious stakes at hand (often relating to Ladybug), but this information does not serve her purpose, which was to try and bring the conversation down a lighter path.
At Felix’s snicker, she knows she's succeeded. “Indeed,” he says, and it is at this moment that a familiar stream of ladybugs envelops them and suddenly they’re back in the main hall, just in time to see the heroes of Paris fist-bump in front of the man who Kagami believes to be the exhibition curator.
“Bien joué,” they say in tandem, and then Chat looks straight ahead at her and Felix and Kagami thinks there’s something familiar in the confusion in his eyes, but it’s gone as soon as he addresses them:
“Ah, hello there. Need a ride home?”
“I have one already arranged,” Felix says and Kagami turns to see him shutting off his phone. He looks up at her. “Miss Tsurugi, I can have my driver take us to your home first?”
“That would be good, thank you,” she finds herself replying, and – his eyes do not quite match Adrien’s, actually, there’s more gold than green in there – “Thank you for saving us,” she adds, turning to Chat Noir and Ladybug again, and they both nod as Nadja Chamack and her team burst in through the door behind them. Ladybug looks over her shoulder and groans; Chat Noir merely huffs in amusement.
“Sorry we couldn’t chat more,” he says, grinning at them. “Go and get some rest.”
“Will do,” she and Felix say in unison, and she glances in his direction to find him doing the same. She turns on her heel, then, eager to use another exit than the one currently swamped by journalists.
They weave their way to the outside where a familiar car is already waiting for them, and Felix holds out the door open for her. Kagami nods to Simon through the rear-view mirror before settling down and sees him respond in kind. Once the door is shut and the Gorilla is backing the car out, Felix says, in an obviously exaggerated fashion:
“Well, that was certainly the most riveting exhibition I’ve ever been to.”
And at that, Kagami somehow can’t help but chuckle.