Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It happens in the worst possible way, at the worst possible time. 

It happens, but at first Ladybug is so consumed in her own thoughts that she doesn’t realize it’s happening. 

In her mind she’s replaying clues dropped in her and Shadowmoth’s earlier exchange, piecing together plans for their awaited ambush, and at her side, Chat sits silently. 

(He’s always there, at her side, so much so that she sometimes forgets when he is. This being one of those times.)

His voice is reserved when he finally speaks, not shy because Chat Noir’s voice is never ‘shy’ necessarily, but it is… quiet, in a way that he normally isn’t either. Vulnerable.

“Ladybug.”

Ladybug turns to him but doesn’t say anything. Her mind is still half-whirring towards a solution for her newest plan, but she meets his gaze as if to say: I’m listening. 

Chat Noir looks down at his hands. They’re folded in his lap, his fingers twiddling with his ring. 

“Are you still gonna take my miraculous if I tell you my identity?” 

Ladybug lets out a gust of air and rolls her eyes. For a split second she’d actually been convinced he had something productive to bring up with her. 

“This again, Chat?”

Her hands are behind her, propping her up, and she lets her head fall back between her shoulder blades. For a moment, it relieves the pounding pressure that’s been building in her head since she became the new guardian. Just another reason why she can’t encourage Chat Noir’s obsession with knowing each other’s identities; he has no idea the toll it takes on her to be the guardian. The last thing she needs is him showing up in her personal life too when there is already too much on her plate.

She lifts her head and sighs. 

That isn’t fair. Chat has always been a good friend and if they did - if they could - know each other’s true identities, she’s sure he would be an amazing friend to Marinette as well. 

“Listen,” she says, softening her tone, “I don’t like it either, but it’s still too dangerous to know each other’s identities! You have no idea what I’ve -”

 “Ladybug.”

Chat’s voice cuts in like molten steel. 

It’s a tone that Ladybug hasn’t heard him use with her before and so it surprises her into turning to him and - 

It feels like smacking into a wall. 

Chat is no more than a foot away from her but when their eyes meet, it hits her just how much distance has grown between them. Her heart hiccups out of rhythm, as hearts often do when something feels… wrong. 

Chat says, “Do you promise?” 

Ladybug doesn’t recognize his eyes. There’s something in them, something guarded and bone-deep, an open wound that she hasn’t noticed until now. 

How has she not noticed?

She swallows and says, “What?”

Chat twists his ring, eyes lifting to hers. “Do you promise if I tell you my identity, that you’ll take away my miraculous?”

The thought is so viciously unwelcome that rage boils up inside her. Her heartbeat rattles in her throat like a swarm of angry bees. 

“You know I’d have to! Why would you even ask me that?”

“Because you make exceptions to the identity rule for people you like. For instance, Alya and Nino,” says Chat, delivering that 180 degree neck-snapping reveal with the same energy one might effortlessly toss a winning Ace onto a felt poker table.  

Ladybug is too busy gawking at him to even attempt to compile a response, but Chat doesn’t seem interested in one. It’s like he can’t get the words out fast enough, like they’re rehearsed and he’s worked himself up to saying them so  that as soon as they’re out, he can be done. 

“And while you might not like me,” Chat continues, like this isn’t a question but a deduction he’s come to on his own which is worse, “I think you like my civilian persona. You’ve given me a miraculous before and I need you to promise that once you learn my identity, you will never give me another miraculous again.”

It’s too much to take in at one time. She can’t begin to think of who she gave a miraculous to that could be Chat Noir’s civilian persona and she doesn’t know how he learned about Alya and Nino’s identities or how her and his relationship has gotten to this point without her realizing and - 

There’s not enough time.

“So you accidentally cataclysmed something you shouldn’t have,” she throws her hands up, as if postponing this will keep it from happening, “It isn’t the first or last time that’s going to happen. We just have to get better at preventing it!”

“That isn’t what this is about, Ladybug.” The space between Chat’s brows crumple in frustration, before all of his agitation crests and in an instance he’s deflating, the fight just rushing out of him. He looks down. “It doesn’t matter…”

He’s pulling his ring off. She’s out of time.

“Chat,” her eyes widen and she reaches, “Wait -” 

“I renounce you,  Plagg.” The ring comes off and Chat Noir is overtaken in a burst of green-white light.

Ladybug gasps and throws her hands up over her eyes to shield her from seeing his secret identity, and hears the soft sound of him setting his miraculous box down beside her.

“It’s no use, Milady, I’ll just tell you my real name. I have to be sure you won't give me another miraculous, and you can’t promise that without knowing my true identity.”

“Don’t do this!” Ladybug begs, “We can’t go back if we find out each other’s identities!” 

“I don’t want to go back,” Chat’s voice is farther away, both in distance and tone. Ladybug’s chin wobbles as she holds back tears, hands trembling over her eyes. “I want to move on. I’m leaving Paris.”

Ladybug gasps and she almost opens her eyes - almost.

“Chat Noir,” she sobs, “Don't.”

“My name’s not Chat Noir,” he says and that’s when she knows it’s coming. She wants to leap up and swing off the side of the building but even then she might still hear him, and the truth was that she has to know. “My name is Adrien Agreste.” 

Ladybug chokes on a sob. It’s like the opposite of falling in love. Her heart rips from her chest as she tears her hands off her face. It eviscerates to shreds at her feet when her eyes land on Adrien.

On Adrien.

Adrien.

She can’t breathe.

He’s standing at the window of the balcony they’re on, ready to climb down, turned to gaze back at her for the last time, smiling sadly and looking tragically, heart-achingly beautiful. 

“I still believe in this team. I believe in you,” he says, looking at her the same way he had before stepping into the car that night he left New York. “You’ve chosen every member of your team but Chat Noir, and I won’t drag you down anymore. Even when you tried giving me the snake miraculous -” he doesn’t finish that sentence, instead trailing off, turning away, shrugging. “I’m the only piece that doesn’t fit, Milady.”

She wants to tell him he’s wrong. Wants to scream it at him. But nothing comes out. Her voice won’t work. She’s still trying to look at Adrien Agreste and make sense of the fact that he’s been the boy she’s fought along side for the past year, and who’s affections she’d fought off tooth and claw.

She feels, resolutely, like throwing up. She feels bottomlessly empty. 

Adrien’s eyes drop, “Goodbye, Ladybug,” and he climbs back in through the window.

“Adrien,” she says, voice weak and wobbly and too quiet, “Please.” 

But it’s too late. 

Chat Noir is gone. 

Chapter Text

The ground shakes underneath Rena Rouge as she shoves her way into the Dupain-Cheng bakery. 

The lights are out - the entire city’s lights are out - and the air inside feels wrong, agitated and heavy.

“Ladybug?” she calls into the quiet. No response. The glassware in the shop tinkles as the earth around her shakes again. 

Rena Rouge and Ladybug were supposed to meet at the Louvre thirty minutes ago, and the only reason it took Rena even that long to reach the bakery was because she had taken cover from the giant swarm of akuma’s flying around outside.

Rena spins to lock the doors behind her, taking in the amassing akuma’s on the other side, and quickly shoves a table, and then another, up against them for good measure. If their presence wasn’t worrisome enough, Rena also hadn’t spotted a single akumatized victim on her way over. That in conjunction with an MIA-Ladybug made for a terrifying combination. 

Rena closes her eyes and breathes slowly to calm her ravenous heartbeat. She can’t lose control. Not while Marinette needs her. 

It was while Rena observed the horde from her hiding spot outside that realization hit: Not only are the akuma's not red - and therefore quantity of akumatized victims can’t be Hawkmoth’s goal - but none of them seemed interested in her or any other civilian. In fact, the butterflies were no longer acting individually but instead as a single, angry entity intent on a single purpose. Rena Rouge can only imagine one person in all of Paris important enough for Shadowmoth to send a horde of akuma’s after, and even then he’d only risk it if Ladybug was too emotionally vulnerable to defend herself. 

If Rena's right, she has to find her before Shadowmoth does. 

She turns and wades carefully into the overturned bakery, navigating to where she knows the stairs to Marinette's room are in the back. She doesn’t have night vision like Chat Noir, and any light the moon might have offered is slowly being blotted out by the cloud of akuma’s above. The building shudders around them, groaning as the akuma’s compress the space like a plastic water bottle. 

Rena's heartbeat rattles her bones as she ascends the shaky stairs. Stay calm. Stay calm. Stay calm. 

She reaches the landing and shouts, “Marinette?!” forgetting to use Ladybug’s superhero name in her growing panic.

She shoulders her way into Marinette’s bedroom door, the lock splintering open under her super strength. Darkness awaits her on the other side, the only available light coming from the moon. Rena steps forward cautiously. She can hear Marinette somewhere inside, muttering something from out of sight, too quiet but sounding a lot like, “my fault, too late, my fault…” 

“Marinette?” Rena Rouge’s voice is softer but no less urgent, throwing her eyes around the room in hopes she’ll catch sight of her. “Where are you?” 

There’s the sound of scuttling by Marinette’s desk and Rena Rouge bolts over, sliding into view as a bright burst of green light momentarily blinds her. She blinks her eyes clear, and rears back at the sight awaiting her.

Marinette is huddled over her guardian box, wearing what looks like every single dormant miraculous. She looks up and Rena Rouge locks eyes with Chat Noir’s green iris’. 

Her blood runs cold. 

“Oh, Marinette,” breathes Rena. She feels off balance, disoriented. The team had been together earlier today, not two hours ago, but somehow, she just knows. 

Chat Noir left. 

She wants to rush forward to embrace her best friend - for Marinette's sake as well as her own - but there’s something in Ladybug's aura, something foreign and strange, that keeps Rena at bay. 

“It’s my fault,” she says, using her Robotic Ladybug Tone which she usually reserves for news anchors or crowds of hysterical people, “And I’m going to fix it. I’ll fix everything.” 

Rena takes a step forward despite herself, “Fix what? What happened?” A trickle of trepidation has been steadily filling Rena’s chest, and her heart sinks to the bottom of it when Ladybug says: 

“Adrien is Chat Noir.” 

And then Ladybug laughs, an unhinged, hysterical kind of laugh while Rena’s world tunnels around her, narrowing to the fingers Ladybug has hovered above the cat's miraculous. Adrien’s miraculous. 

“Chat Noir is Adrien!” Ladybug continues with a frantic intensity, “And I chased him off! I lost them, I lost both of them-”

“Marinette,” Rena hedges another step forward, “You’re not thinking clearly, maybe you should give me some of those extra miraculous-” Rena aborts talking when Ladybug cuts a vicious look her way. 

She hugs the box closer, protectively, a dozen activated miraculous transforming her gaze into something otherworldly. Something predatory. She bolts upright in a flash of movement too fast even for superhero standards and something inside Rena, the part of her that is all Trixx, wants to run.

The part of her that is all Alya forces her to stand her ground. 

“I’m the guardian,” Ladybug’s tone is dangerous, “I can use them how I please.” 

The akuma swarm makes sense now, why none of them bothered her or any other civilian. From Rena’s understanding, Shadowmoth is drawn by intense negative emotions and if she were him, she’d lay every chip on the table for a chance to dig her claws into Ladybug, too. He may not get another chance.

And if Rena doesn’t think of something fast, none of them will either. 

Subtly, she reaches her hand into her pocket to click the button that she forced Marinette to make for her after New York, the one that makes the little fox plushie she gave Nino buzz. (She in turn has a turtle for when he calls her, snug in her back pocket.) 

The swarm of akuma’s clamor against the windows all around them, banging in time to Rena’s heartbeat. 

“Yes, you’re the guardian,” Rena says, trying to casually flick her eyes around for - anything. A safe exit, a useful tool she could use to incapacitate an all-powerful Super Guardian. 

What would Ladybug do if she were here? 

Rena Rouge’s eyes flick back over to Not Right Ladybug. She doesn’t need all the miraculous, she just needs one. 

“I don’t want to take anything from you,” Rena says slowly, “I just want to help you.” 

“You?” Ladybug laughs. “Silly fox. What use are you to me? I have all the power and even if you dared try and take one of my Miraculous, I’d cut you down where you stood.” 

It’s awful hearing those words from Ladybug’s mouth, made more horrible by the fact that she hasn’t even been akumatized yet. It eliminates any remaining hope that Marinette is still reachable while Rena suppresses the rabid image of what an all powered-up, akumatized Ladybug would be like.

But if that’s the cost of saving Marinette in the end, Rena is willing to pay that price. 

“I already told you,” says Rena, taking a careful step forward, “I want to help you.” She’s within arms reach of Ladybug now and lifts her hands out in a nonthreatening manner. Then her turtle plushie begins to vibrate in her pocket and she doesn’t think, she just moves. 

Everything happens at once. 

Her fingers clamp down around Ladybug’s earrings and Ladybugs hands clamp over hers while Carapace crashes in through the window above them.  

“Shelter!” 

Rena shoves herself backwards into his trajectory with as much force as she can muster, forcing Ladybug’s grip on her to break. The last thing Rena sees before Carapace’s shield falls over her is the image of the akuma’s swarming Ladybug and enveloping her from sight. 

Carapace, now with Rena safely under his cover,  moves to leap into action. “We have to help her!” 

Rena grips his forearm fiercely to keep him from moving. “No,” she says, voice sand-paper rough. “She’s too far gone.” She opens up her closed fist to reveal a red and black-spotted earring. 

One single earring. 

God, Alya hoped it would be enough. 

“Our only hope is finding Adrien,” she says and protectively closes her fist back around the earring. 

She holds it to her chest and pushes herself up, hauling Carapace after her. He’s still watching where Ladybug is drowning in akuma’s, but Rena can’t make herself look back. She pulls him from the room and they burst out onto the roof through one of the windows in the hallway, running away under the silent moon. 

Chapter Text

It’s too quiet up here in the clouds. It makes it too easy to think.

Usually Adrien enjoys flying in his father’s jet (35,000 feet in the air is the only place he can go to escape the 20 foot billboard printouts of his face plastered across Paris) but now he wishes he was on a train to the Graham de Vanily estate instead. At least trains chug noisily and ruck from side to side. 

But they’re also more easily caught than planes, too. 

Adrien’s thoughts slip helplessly away from him once more, billowing into the shape of Ladybug’s watery blue-bell eyes looking at him, at Adrien , arm reaching out - 

Adrien forces his eyes open and the image away.

 He shoves the stiff airplane covers off him, pushing himself from the bed over to the pile of his discarded clothes; menial tasks are all he has for distractions and so he busies himself with getting back into them. He shoves his feet in his shoes, double-knotting the laces and going to brush his teeth after. Then hair, at which point he decides it could use a wash and so strips down all over again to jump in under the hot spray.

Roiling steam quickly fills the tiny private-jet bathroom as the harsh water pelts Adrien’s scalp.

He scrubs shampoo into his hair and tries not to think.

Not about how supportive his father had been of the idea of him leaving Paris when Adrien went to him with the idea that morning. (He had practically pushed Adrien out the door himself, only letting Adrien keep his original departure time because he promised his father it was before some important meeting he had to conduct tonight.)

He doesn’t think about how he didn’t say goodbye to Plagg. (In a lot of ways, Plagg was the only one who knew the realest version of Adrien. If Adrien had told Plagg he planned to renounce him, he would have talked him out of it. He would have made Adrien laugh and feel invincible and convince him they’d be at each other’s side till the very end, and Adrien would have stayed, if for no one else than for Plagg.)

He tries not to think at all, because if he does his thoughts always stray back to… 

Her. 

Adrien shuts the shower off. 

He towels himself off with fast and jerky movements, securing it around his waist to head for his suitcase at the floor of the bed. He shoves his hand inside the outer pocket and retrieves his airpods, the matte-grey case cracking open gently in his hand. He plucks the buds out to shove one in each ear then retrieves his phone from the charging dock, setting the volume to blasting then thumbing through his music library and selecting rock. 

A cacophony of thought-cancelling noise erupts into his ears. 

Perfect.

Adrien starts getting dressed for the third time that night. He doesn’t want to put jeans back on, but he doesn’t want to get back into his pajamas either - he probably isn’t getting any sleep tonight - so he ends up in crew socks, sweats and a hoodie, which he puts up over his head and secures snuggly with a yank of the strings. 

A new song begins thumping in his ear as he turns to walk to the bedroom door. He opens it carefully, peeking out at his nanny on the couch just outside. He’s dead asleep. Adrien swings the door fully open and tiptoes past, heading for the kitchen at the center of the jet. 

It’s a bright, kushy space just like the rest of the jet, with all the newest appliances and amenities. If Adrien wanted a perfectly layered, ice-cold caramel macchiato, or a fresh pressed panini, or rigatoni noodles made from scratch, there was a machine in this kitchen for the job. 

Instead, he walks to the fridge and scoops up an armful of sandwich makings, dumping them on the counter against the far-wall. He carefully compiles a turkey club sandwich, just like Marinette had taught him. 

A familiar ache pangs deep behind Adrien’s ribs at the thought of the friend he’d left behind. And even with Jagged Stone’s raging guitar solo half-deafening him in his ears, his thoughts slip to the golden Sunday afternoon he’d spent at the Tom & Sabine Boulangerie Patisserie...

He had been running from a mob of fans. It was a typical occurrence after a new ad release, and he had ducked inside the bakery on the off chance Marinette was home and could hide him or even help him escape like she’d done for him before. It was promptly after slamming the door closed behind him and diving down beneath the window skirt that he heard a surprised squeak come from further back in the bakery. He turned to look over his shoulder and spotted Marinette, standing by her dad behind the bakery counter, her eyes huge with surprise, the golden sun lighting her blue iris’ to a dazzling azure.

Marinette hadn’t hesitated to help hide him after he explained. Well, after her initial, staple stammering of course, and her mom had asked if they were hungry, do they want some sandwiches? And Marinette had pinched the sleeve of Adrien’s shirt and gently tugged him towards the stairs as she waved her off, saying they’d make their own before pulling Adrien away from the raucous his fans made at the now-locked bakery storefront. 

He remembers feeling guilty for bringing trouble to their doorstep, but more than that he remembers trying to feel guilty but failing because the Dupain-Cheng’s warmth and receptivity to him was, has always been, so completely unconditional that it obliterated every bad feeling inside of him. 

Marinette’s arms had been thrown wide and expansive as they reached the second floor, welcoming him to the space and guiding him through a short-and-sweet tour before they ended up in the kitchen. 

Marinette seemed so comfortable there. Sure, she was the same Marinette with the jumbled sentences and endearing clumsiness, but those aspects of her were softened in her home; It allowed her vulnerabilities space to exist, sheltering them from fear of judgment. And after being welcomed inside their home, how could Adrien be anything other than charmed by her idiosyncrasies?

He had heard the saying ‘A house doesn’t make a home’, but had never really understood what it meant until then. Until he watched Marinette navigate her home like a second hand, reaching for hanging utensils and cupboards without looking because they, too, have become a part of her like muscle memory. 

Back at Adrien’s home, he couldn’t even tell you where to find a plate. The servants always took care of everything.

“If this is your first d.i.y sandwich we have to do it the proper way.” Marinette throws the fridge door open and bends to rummage around inside. “We always start with preparing the ingredients,” she tells him, extracting herself from the fridge with an armful of bread, veggies, cheese, and meats. She dumps them onto the counter and a tomato bounces off the cutting board onto the ground, their foreheads bumping together when they both duck and reach for it at the same time.

Adrien pulls a clinically white cutting board out in front of him on the counter. He starts with the veggies, just like Marinette had. They aren’t pretty and thin like hers had been, but the feeling of doing it himself is inimitable. Adrien places each cut veggie carefully to the side, then reaches for the cheese. 

They fall away from each other, both lifting a hand to the place they’d bumped heads. Marinette’s eyes are wide like they’d been downstairs, cheeks bursting into a red as bright as the tomato in Adrien’s hand and, helplessly, Adrien begins to laugh. The noise just bubbles out of him, fondness engulfing him in sunshine. 

Adrien reaches for the French bread next, carefully cutting it down its length, like Marinette had, and the crunchy shell relents to a soft, fluffy center. Like a book laid out in front of him, Adrien presses the bread open, the center creasing where the two pieces are still connected.

“Oh,” Marinette says suddenly, “I... just remembered! Wait right there.” 

Adrien unstoppers a bottle containing a mixture of oil and vinegar and drips it over the bread, letting it absorb before he lathers the mayo on top.

Adrien only has time to place the tomato back on the counter before Marinette comes skirting back around the corner. Her movements morph into something more reserved than a moment before, consciously restrained as she kneels down and tucks a loose strand of hair behind her ear. Then she holds out a delicate, plastic gift box tied up with a dainty silk bow, a pretty, pastel pink macaroon inside-

- Adrien is ejected from the memory when an iron grip on his hood rips him back from it. 

He stumbles, neck kinking as the grip on the hood whips his head awkwardly until it springs loose from the hood’s confines completely.

Then he’s being man-handled around, and Adrien expects to see his nanny - the only other person on board besides the pilots -  but comes face to face with Chat Noir instead. 

It feels like being sucker-punched in the face. 

Rage and deprecation rear up viciously inside of Adrien at the sight of him. So Ladybug already found a new holder for Plagg? And why was he here, to rub it in Adrien’s face? But then the realization - the recognition hits. 

It’s not just any Chat Noir, it’s an older Adrien as Chat Noir. And he’s furious. He’s shouting at Adrien, reaching to rip the earbuds from his ears.

“- are you doing ?!”

Adrien manages, “Uh,” before his older self shoves him back to grip his wrist and lift his hand - his usual, miraculous wearing hand -  into view. It’s ring-less state speaks for itself.

Older Chat’s voice is low and thunderous, “What have you done?”

Adrien pulls his hand back from his grasp, his fingers automatically wrapping around where his ring used to be. He swallows. 

“I renounced Plagg.”

Chat swears, colorfully. He scrubs a hand through his hair - which is longer, untied and unkempt. He’s not fully turned towards Adrien, not fully looking at him, like his anger isn’t yet under control. 

He grits through his teeth, “Why?” 

Adrien’s eyebrows furrow as a spark of defensiveness kindles in his heart. What was this about? Was he really here just because Adrien gave up his miraculous? 

“You came back in time to talk about this ?”

“This ,” Chat Noir gestures hastily between them, “Isn’t supposed to happen. This is bad,” he says, “I’m talking apocalyptically so.”

Adrien’s heart knocks off-beat, twice. Slowly, he says, “What… What do you mean?”

“Have you not turned on a tv?”- Now that Adrien is paying attention, he can hear the twinge of panic in Chat’s voice; he’s not just angry, he’s scared. Adrien would know that look on his face anywhere  -“Looked at your phone? I’m here because Ladybug is gone!” 

Adrien’s heart drops like a lead block to his stomach. 

“That’s…” his heels hit the counter. He hadn’t even realized he started backing up. His heartbeat is in his throat, bloating there and making him want to throw up. “That’s impossible… I just saw her an hour ago -”

“Not your Ladybug,” Chat cuts in. His jaw works, his hand by his thigh clenched into a fist. “Mine. Just disappeared,” his hand flitters in the wind as he says the word, and then he laughs, an ugly, bitter sound, “Which means yours isn’t too far behind.”

“No .” Vaguely Adrien is aware that he’s shaking his head, but he can’t stop. He can’t stop his heightening breath, or the sudden shadows in his vision as fear burns through him like a wildfire. 

“She’s the guardian,” gasps Adrien, “She’s - Ladybug, what happened?!”

“She’s been akumatized,” a voice to Adrien’s left says and he turns to watch Bunnyx step through one of her burrow holes into the jet kitchen. Rena Furtive, Carapace, and Viperion follow after her. 

“That’s impossible!” Adrien’s heartbeat is deafening in his ear. “Ladybug would never let herself get akumatized!” 

Although Bunnyx and Chat Noir are older, the other three are the same as they’d been when Adrien saw them for the team meeting earlier that day, not a day over fourteen. Pigella, Vesperia, Purple Tigresse, and Pegasus were supposed to receive Miraculous’ tonight too, according to Ladybug’s plan; The only ones who left the meeting already wearing their miraculous’ are the people standing in the kitchen now.

Ladybug never delivered the other Miraculous’?

“She wasn’t in her right mind,” says Rena Furtive, “She had put on and activated every dormant miraculous by the time I found her.” Adrien lifts his eyes from the floor and immediately wishes he hadn’t. Rena’s features are grave and entirely Alya: heartbroken, fiercely enraged. She blames him . “And she had just lost you. It’s possible.”

Adrien’s eyes flick to Viperion, but he won’t meet his eye. Desperately, he turns to Carapace - to Nino, his best friend and the only person he can trust to tell him the truth  - and his last shred of hope implodes at the look on his face. He looks… Completely dispirited. Adrien has never seen him look like that before. 

“Rena,” says Carapace, “Show him.”

Rena turns to Carapace, something unspoken passing between them before her eyes shut in concession and she’s exhaling through her nose. Her eyes open and she reaches into her back pocket, retrieving something before pulling her hand back and holding it out in front of Adrien. Palm up, she unfurls her fingers to reveal a single Ladybug earring. 

Eyes downcast, Rena says, “It was all I could get off of her.” 

Numbness consumes Adrien.

Although his body must still be working, because he watches his hand reach out to pick up the  earring from Rena’s palm with severe delicacy. The second his skin comes into contact with the earring, Adrien feels everything inside him shatter into a million spidery cracks, devastating fissure’s reaching into the depths of every crevice of his soul.

“It’s more than we could have expected,” says Bunnyx, resting a comforting hand on Rena’s shoulder, “She won’t be able to channel Tikki’s powers with only one earring. Shadowmoth can’t make his wish.” 

Adrien’s entire vision pulses at those last five words. The realization, in light of something as glaringly obvious as this, is like a rotten tooth dug into: sharp and unbearable. He hadn’t even thought about it, but of course, he’d given his miraculous back to Ladybug, and now Shadowmoth has everything he needs but a single earring.

It really is the end of the world.

The words burst out of Adrien before he can stop them: “You couldn’t get through to her?”  

All eyes fly back to him. Bunnyx straightens from where she’d been consoling Rena and takes a step towards him. “Adrien-”

“She wouldn’t have listened to reason,” Rena shoots back. “You didn’t see what she was like.”

Adrien throws his hand out in a vicious rebuttal to her words, “I would have tried!”

“You left!” Rena yells, shocking the entire room into silence and causing Adrien to step back. She hastily turns away so that only her profile is visible, chest heaving, and takes three calming breaths. Then in a low voice, “Trust me, that right there is reason enough.”

Adrien can’t believe it. “Something else must have happened,” he says, mind beginning to whirr towards an explanation, “She doesn’t care enough about Chat Noir for my renunciation to have this effect on her. She doesn’t trust him, she leaves him in the dark, he’s the only one she held to the identity rule,” Adrien lists these off on his finger, before gesturing to Carapace. “You said it best, all he is to Ladybug is an obnoxious nuisance.”

Carapace receives those words like a punch to the stomach, and seeing his eyes flash with guilt turns the knife deeper in Adrien’s heart. He can’t stop hurting the people he loves . 

Rena’s eyes are burning. “Something else did happen! She found out you’re you, then lost you in the same moment.”

Before Adrien can respond, Bunnyx cuts in. “I admit that the identity rule is my fault,” she says with collective calm, “Or, well, Chat Blanc’s fault more specifically.”

The four teenagers chorus together, “Who?”

Older Chat says, “It’s who we,” he gestures between himself and Adrien, “Become when we’ve been akumatized.”

“A creature capable of mass destruction,” Bunnyx continues, “Galactic destruction. None of you remember because your Ladybug and I already corrected that doomed timeline.”

“What?!” says Adrien. The earring stabs into his hand, he’s clenching his fist so hard. “She keeps me in the dark because of something I did in a timeline that no longer exists?”

“Adrien,” Bunnyx steps closer and places a hand on his shoulder. “Put yourself in her shoes. In your timeline, she faced Chat Blanc only a few months ago. And it hadn’t been Paris that was on the line if she hadn’t deakumatized you, it had been the entire universe. All she knows about what set off Chat Blanc is that it had to do with you learning her true identity. Can you blame her for being cautious?” 

Adrien’s expression shudders, “And now it’s happening the other way around.”

“Well, that’s what you think, but do you know what I think?” Bunnyx taps Adrien’s nose and smirks mischievously. “I think anytime only one of you knows the other’s identity, an apocalyptic event is triggered. I.e.Chat Blanc, and now MegaBug. My job as the rabbit miraculous holder is to navigate a thousand multiplying timelines and try to help Ladybug choose the best path. I thought I had at the end of the Chat Blanc timeline, but I think I made a mistake in reverting your knowledge of who Ladybug is. But,” she draws a line through the air with her arm, “We cannot dwell on the past. If anyone knows when to look towards the future, it’s me.” 

“You’d tell him Ladybug’s identity?” Rena says with slow realization. Her eyes flicker back to Adrien, and her mouth drops open just barely, like now that the idea of revealing Ladybug’s identity is on the table, she’s itching to blurt it out herself.

Chat Noir says, “And I’ll cease to exist.” 

Bunnyx turns to him. The two exchange a charged moment of suspended eye-contact. Then she says, without distinguishing who’s question she’s answering, “Yes.”

Chat’s ears droop, and the pieces click together in Adrien’s brain. 

“You still don’t know Ladybug’s secret identity?” Chat’s eyes flick to Adrien. He doesn’t have to speak, the look in his eyes confirms that Adrien guessed right. 

“So telling you now will cancel out his timeline,” Bunnyx confirms, a level of detachment moving in and getting comfortable in her tone. Adrien watches her swallow and force her eyes from Chat Noir. Adrien can’t imagine the things Bunnyx has seen and had to swallow, if not for the world’s sanity than her own. And now here she was about to do it again, all because Adrien can’t stop fucking up.

“This is my fault,” Adrien says, “If it means he’ll disappear,  then it’s not worth it.” Him and Chat Noir’s gazes meet, and Adrien’s resolve hardens. “The priority is saving Ladybug, and you guys can’t do that without Chat Noir.”

Bunnyx smiles sadly. “You’re exactly right.”

“I always knew this would be the likeliest outcome,” Chat Noir says to Adrien, as if that’s supposed to make him feel better. A slow resolve has begun to bloom on his face and  he looks at Bunnyx and smirks wistfully. “I guess I was just feline optimistic.”

Fondly, Bunnyx says, “Till the very end.” 

Chat Noir steps forward towards Adrien, the storm on his face from earlier settled out to an expression Adrien can’t begin to unfold. He reaches down and removes his miraculous and is overtaken in green light. He’s left in his civilian clothes, looking like Adrien but older and scrappier and holding out the ring to him. 

He meets and holds Adrien’s gaze, looking between his eyes. “It’s up to you , Adrien. Right here, right now.”

It’s all Adrien can do to just stare at him. He feels debilitatingly overwhelmed.

Is this how Ladybug felt when he turned into Chat Blanc?

“Take it, Adrien,” says Rena Furtive.

Bunnyx says, “It has to be you.”

“I - can’t,” Adrien says breathlessly, “I’ll just mess it up -”

“You’re wrong.” Bunnyx's voice is like carved stone, sharp at every edge and unwaveringly solid.

She takes a step forward and picks the miraculous up from older Adrien’s palm and with her other hand squeezes his shoulder. Then she walks three steps towards the fridge and creates a hole into her burrow. She turns back and offers her empty hand for Adrien to grab.

“Come with me, Adrien Agreste. It’s time you know the truth.” 

Chapter Text

Stepping inside Bunnyx’s burrow is unlike anything Adrien has ever experienced. 

It does not give the same sensation of climbing into something but instead of climbing out , and Adrien’s brain misfires clunkily in its efforts to make sense of it. This limitless void. An endless multiplication of universes unfolding before him, warping and ebbing like the undulating illusion of heat on a desert horizon.

Vaguely, he feels nauseous. 

“Here,” says Bunnyx from somewhere beside him. Her hand gently squeezes his shoulder to draw his attention to her and once it’s there he anchors it desperately, as if he’s afloat at sea and she’s a passing piece of driftwood. Then, for the second time that evening, he’s offered older Adrien’s ring. “You’ll be more comfortable in my burrow while wearing this.” 

Adrien takes a reflexive step back. 

Bunnyx’s head tilts. “It agitates your human brain, doesn’t it?” - Her tone is one you’d use when speaking to a small child and a slick voice in the back of Adrien’s head that sounds like Plagg tells him that’s because she is - “The effects of my burrow? Trust me, Plagg will make it easier for you to process it all.”

“It’s not just the borrow, it’s - everything .” 

He had been trying to keep his eyes focused strictly on Bunnyx, but the backdrop of the burrow behind her is twisting and rolling and - yeah, he’s going to throw up. He shoves his knuckles into his eyes to block it all out and focuses on the simple task of breathing.

A moment passes. 

Bunnyx says, “Adrien, why did you renounce your miraculous?”

Adrien doesn’t remove his knuckles from his eyes. It’s easier this way, both being in her borrow, and having this conversation. He feels the corners of his mouth pulling down.

“You didn’t see what happened on one of your screens?”

“I can only view events as they have happened,” she sounds like she’s suppressing laughter, “I can’t read minds.” 

Adrien twists his lips in reluctance. It isn’t that he doesn’t want to talk about it - in fact he has been aching to confide in someone - but a larger part of him has wrapped itself around his renouncement like a raw opening needing to be sealed. 

It stings peeling that back now.

Slowly, Adrien says, “When I came back to school, all I wanted was to find a place where I belonged. I thought I had, at school, or with my friends, but then those moments happen when the Agreste spectacle catches back up with me and I’m reminded I can’t just be a normal kid. Being with Ladybug was ironically the only time I could be myself but - I wasn’t good enough.” Adrien swallows. “I realized, knowing where you belong also means knowing where you don’t.”

A beat.

Then Bunnyx says, “That is the biggest crock of shit and you don’t even know it.”

The words surprise Adrien so much that he takes his hands off of his face. The effects of the burrow hit him in full swing and he hazes out for a moment. Bunnyx manifests from - where? - an aluminum bowl which she promptly plops onto his head in the same moment she catches his swoon with a hand on his back. 

“Trust me,” Bunnyx stresses, “If the solution to this catastrophe were an antibody, you’d bleed it .” The ring comes into view under the lip of the bowl. “No more asking. If you want to know Ladybug’s identity, you have to stay in my burrow. In order to stay in my burrow and not faint like a fair damsel in distress, you need to wear this ring.” 

In the end, it isn’t a contest at all. Adrien’s desire to know Ladybug’s identity outweighs virtually every other emotion in his personal catalogue. He lifts his hand to pinch the ring between his pointer finger and thumb. Under the privacy of the aluminum mixing bowl, he tests the weight in his palm. It feels different. Heavier. But that’s probably the guilt talking. 

Adrien shoves the ring on with mechanical stiffness, in the same moment shutting the door in his brain where a tumble of conflictions swell on the other side. A white and green orb surges up from the ring, Plagg bursting from it to immediately throw his arms around Adrien’s face. 

“Baby Adrien!” he exclaims.

The nickname emphasises the fact that this Plagg isn’t his, not anymore. This one has traveled with a different Adrien into an unknown future he’ll never see.  

“Hi, Plagg,” Adrien says with a watery chuckle, and cups the back of his body to return the hug. 

“Reunion later,” says Bunnyx from outside the aluminum bowl, “Time may be a non-factor while we’re in my burrow, but it is of the essence.”

Plagg and Adrien share a look, before the little kwami gives him an encouraging smile and nod. “Let’s do this!”

“Alright, Plagg,” Adrien says, “Claws out!”

The transformation knocks the bowl clear off his head. At once his mind feels lighter, exhaling in relief as his body thrums. Without confusion weighing his brain down, there’s room for awe and wonder to spill back in through the cracks as he takes in the Burrow with activated cat vision. Or that might just be Plagg getting settled back in.

Which reminds him. 

Chat Noir whirls on Bunnyx. “What happens to Plagg -  this Plagg, once the old timeline is erased?” 

“As long as we are inside my burrow, he will remain in limbo. Once we leave my burrow,” she takes a few steps towards the wall, “Well. That’s another matter entirely. But don’t worry,” she looks over her shoulder at him and winks, “My plan doesn’t hinge on Plagg, it hinges on you .”

Then she glides her hand over a window, like brushing a strand of hair behind a child’s ear, and the view inside expands into a panoramic view over Paris.

Of which there’s virtually nothing left. 

A soft, shocked noise passes Chat’s lips. The only indicator that what they’re looking at is actually Paris being the peak of the Eiffel Tower, miraculously clear of vines, reaching out like the last desperate plea of a drowned civilization. Below it, an angry, knotted jungle entangles everything else.

Bunnyx doesn’t wait for him to speak before swiping against the screen again. The view plunges in, magnifying at a blinding speed to the center of Paris where a colossal banyan tree canopies over the city. Then the view delves deeper, sinking into the trunk of the tree, beneath bark and fiber until finally, they reach Megabug.

Sorrow slashes through Chat Noir, constricting the breath from his chest. 

Her eyes are closed.

“She’s sleeping?” 

“She’s waiting,” answers Bunnyx.

Megabug has bled so seamlessly with the tree that Chat can’t see where it ends and she begins. Her limbs are entirely absorbed. It isn’t until he watches a Parisian sneaking across the jungle floor, accidentally brushing an exposed root miles from her location, that he understands why.

Megabug’s eyes snap open.

Ugly fear spikes inside Chat Noir. Her face is still gentle and human- her mask a distorted shape of the one he knows - but her eyes… Her eyes are jagged bark, like windows to a wooden core.

A splitting noise rips from her mouth as she flexes one of her arms encased in the tree. Miles away, the brushed root bursts obediently from the ground to entangle the Parisian, a curdling scream erupting from him as it drags him underground. Dirt and leaves muffle the noise until eventually burying it, and him, completely. A moment passes where everything is still. Then a seedling springs up from the loose soil, taking only seconds to mature into a sprout, then sapling, and then a young and finally fully mature tree. Megabug meanwhile recedes back into her cocoon like slumber, the exposed root settling back to the jungle floor. 

Bunnyx reaches over to close Chat Noir’s agape mouth with a single finger underneath his chin. “I’m calling her akumatized state, ‘Gaiabug’,” she tells him. 

Chat Noir doesn’t respond. He can’t tear his eyes away from the mutated version of the girl he loves, imprisoned and unreachable through the screen.

“From what I’ve gathered,” Bunnyx continues, tone turned clinically calm, “The severance of the ladybug earrings also severed Gaiabug’s access to said powers.”

“So she can’t use her lucky charm?”

“Or her magic ladybugs. But, Tikki is still unified with the kwami’s, even if her bond with Gaiabug has been fractured,  and her powers of creations have bled through in… unpredictable ways. I believe the severance of the earrings while mid-transformation must have done something to unbar Tikki’s powers of their safeguards, as if she doesn’t have a holder at all. Add an akuma on top of that, and I think we have our explanation for how the akumatization mutated into… this.” They both look back to the grim scene of Paris.

“So this…” says Chat Noir, “This wasn’t Shadowmoth’s plan?” He doesn’t know why that thought terrifies him more.

“Not unless his plan was to end up six-feet-deep.” Bunnyx swipes her hand across the screen, welcoming the image of a tree like the one they’d seen the parisian turn into.

Both of Chat Noir’s eyebrows shoot up. He points, a little dumbly. “Shadowmoth?”

“Shadowmoth,” she confirms. Both of them regard the tree on the screen, her with unfazed indifference and Chat Noir with poorly veiled alarm. “The same fate as anyone who finds themselves in Gaiabug’s reach. And her territory is only expanding,” Bunnyx swooshes the screen and the zoom explodes back, exposing a mass of swelling green spreading out over the entirety of Europe. She tsks, “And so it wasn’t fire or ice, but foliage that killed the world.”

Chat Noir looks at her with bare incredulity. “How can you make a joke at a time like this?!”

“Because I have my secret weapon right here!” She claps him heartily on the shoulder.

“Tell me that isn’t really your plan,” says Chat, a little strangled. 

Bunnyx waggles her finger in the air, “Spoilers!”

“What if you’re wrong?” Chat stresses, chest tightening, “What if I can’t save her? What if -”

“Do you know why the Ladybug and Cat miraculous’ are always deployed simultaneously?” Bunnyx cuts him off. She raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t wait for a response before continuing, “Because no one, not even Ladybug, can do everything themselves. And no one expects you to. You’re not alone, Chat Noir. I didn’t come here to get your help, I came here to help you save the day. And so did all those heroes waiting on the other side of my burrow.”

“Not Rena, she” - Chat swallows, not knowing how to say he let her down and all of them down and how could he come back from that and then lead them into battle? - “She blames me.”

“She blames the secrets as much as you do, and what those secrets have caused, but she could never blame you. All of us have faith in you. The challenge of a leader then is to take that faith and place it back into your teammates.”

Chat looks between her eyes. “And then?”

A triumphant smile spreads on Bunnyx’s face. “Then, we use love to save the day.”

Chat’s mouth twists bitterly. His brain flits through a hundred scenarios wherein he bore his soul to Ladybug, and she never so much as batted an eye. “My love isn’t enough to fix anything.”

“Your love is enough to fix everything ,” argues Bunnyx, “Because we can use it to draw her own love back up to the surface.”

Chat scoffs without meaning to. “She doesn’t love me.”

Bunnyx lifts an eyebrow. “Are you sure?” And then the screen which had the view of Paris morphs into a night he remembers all too well.

The night where Ladybug never showed up for their evening date on the rooftop.

“Why are we watching this?” Chat asks, but Bunnyx shushes him, and so he has no choice but to turn back to the screen. 

“Chat Noir, it’s beautiful!”

There is a recurring dream that Adrien has about Ladybug. Always the last dream he has before waking up. In it, he’s holding Ladybug tightly, desperately, as consciousness beckons on the horizon. It comes and every night she melts into golden, glinting sand, slipping through his fingertips as he’s dragged awake. 

Somehow, seeing Ladybug looking perfect and unharmed in the memory now gives him much of the same sensation.

“Aren’t you glad you finally came?” 

The Ladybug on the screen hesitates, pretty lips pulling into a frown. He already knows what she was going to say.

“Listen, I don’t want to play around with your feelings. It would be the same as lying to you, and I don’t want to do that. You’re more than a partner, Chat Noir. You’re my friend. And I’d never want to lie to a friend.”

“But, why do you think it’d be lying?”

“Because, there’s this boy I…”

“There’s a boy? Who is - ?”

“It’s… I can’t tell you who it is. We can’t know anything about each other. Our identities must remain secret. We’re both superheroes, Chat Noir. We don’t have a choice.”

On the screen, he watches himself drink in her words, and is surprised with the lack of emotion he gives off on his face. Surprised, no, more like impressed, considering how fast he knows his mind had been racing during this conversation.  

He watches himself step up to Ladybug, their height difference exaggerated with their close distance, the rose all that separates them, and despite himself, feels the butterflies stir inside him. Just like they had then.

 “I get it, Ladybug. Your friendship means everything to me.” He kisses her cheek, “You can keep the rose, it goes with your costume.”

It’s surreal re-experiencing that night like this. At the time he had thought he detected a twinge of regret to her tone, in her eyes, as if a part of her also wished things could be different between them. But now, as he watches himself leap away from Ladybug, he has the absolute, world-shattering pleasure of watching the skin just beneath her mask burst into a hot, deep red, and he just knows. 

He’d been right.

Chat Noir can’t help it. His eyes leap back to Bunnyx, like a little kid watching a nail-biting show with their parents turning back to ask are you seeing this insanity? Bunnyx snorts and turns his head back to the screen by poking his cheek.

“Show’s not over, yet, kid.”

His heart is beating so fast he feels it dancing in his toes. On the screen, Ladybug lifts her hand robotically to her cheek, the action appearing more compulsory than anything. Her eyes are intent on the rose. Then she physically shakes herself out of the daze and looks around herself quickly, as if afraid Chat might’ve been off somewhere, watching her reaction.

God, he wishes he had been.

Her yo-yo is out in a flash and he expects her to take off into the night and the memory to end, but instead, she swings over to the Dupain-Cheng’s rooftop and lands on Marinette’s balcony. 

Chat’s heart trips in his chest with surprise. He had just visited Marinette that night - he knew that Ladybug was associated with Marinette, but… Could she have told Ladybug what Chat Noir told her? 

No… That isn’t like Marinette… But why else would Ladybug be there?

Chat Noir watches intently as Ladybug climbs in through the rooftop entrance, down into Marinette’s bedroom where the girl in question is nowhere in sight. It feels shameful almost, watching Ladybug without her knowing he is. Even if it’s just a memory, an inkling inside him, instilled through an upbringing around his mother, has him wanting to turn away to give her privacy. But Ladybug walks over to the pinboard above Marinette’s desk and with unmistakable devotion, spreads her hand out over one of the dozen pictures of Adrien pinned there, and Chat couldn’t tear his eyes away if he tried. It’s the largest picture on the board, the proportions almost life size, so that when she leans forward to rest her forehead against his in the photo, the stark image it presents makes something low in Chat Noir’s stomach twist .

A twist like the dawn of realization. 

Oh .

“Tikki, spots off.”

 The gasp punches out of him. Pure, unadulterated elation vibrating inside Chat like a nuclear reactor as the brilliant pink detransformation light fades and leaves - 

Marinette.

Marinette .

Chat Noir can’t breathe.

His feet move backwards without him deciding to and his knees, not receiving the memo, buckle and bring him down. His wide eyes never leave the screen.

Tikki asks, “Are you alright, Marinette?”

Marinette finally retracts her hand from the poster, then begins wringing it with the other. “Is it possible to be in love with more than one person, Tikki?”

Chat’s heart thud- umps out of beat.

Tikki’s eyes track Marinette’s gaze to where she’s still mooning at the Adrien poster while a memory manifests in his brain, of Adrien confronting Marinette after seeing the live tour of her bedroom, as well as a dozen other moments. How many times had his suspicions been correct, but abandoned due to his gullibility? 

“I don’t see why not, but you know I’m not a love expert.” Tikki  giggles, a soft, high-tune, but her cheeriness quickly dissipates when she sees that it isn’t helping remove the frown on Marinette’s face.

Marinette says, “But is it selfish?”

Tikki frowns in thought, then swoops in close to rest on Marinette’s shoulder. “Why would it be selfish, Marinette? To love is the most selfless act there is!”

Marinette’s lips slip into a gloomy pout, “So just unfaithful, then.”

Tikki places her tiny hands on her tiny hips. “Marinette, you aren’t betraying Adrien by having feelings for Chat Noir. You guys aren’t even dating!”

Chat is on his feet, arms braced against the edges of the window as everything inside him constricts.

“But I love him, Tikki, I love him more than anything in this whole world” - her voice raises an octave as emotion barrels into her tone - “I can’t imagine not having him in my life. Whenever I see him every bad feeling inside me just washes away and I’m selfish because I can’t give that up! I can’t give him up... I need him too much.”

“Which one, Adrien, or Chat Noir?”

Marinette’s eyes shut, a soft sound choking off in her throat as a single tear rolls down her cheek. It passes over the spot Chat had kissed her, and she lifts her fingertips to press them there. 

The scene ends. 

This entire time, she had been right in front of him. 

Why hadn’t he seen her?

“Do you understand?” Bunnyx says from behind him. “Everything is about her love for you. Even her rejection.”

Another scene begins without preamble, one from a year ago and he remembers the day only because it was his birthday. Marinette is standing in front of Adrien, a pretty blue giftbox behind her back, her shy stammering a lot more prominent back then. 

“I wanted to gift you a make - I mean, gift you a give I made - I mean - !”

Chat Noir’s hand comes down on the screen, brushing over the image of Marinette, and the scene suddenly speeds forward. He snatches his hand back quickly with an apologetic wince that Bunnyx answers with an unheated eye roll. 

In the window, Marinette is now at the gate outside his house. She’s dropping the blue gift in the mail chute and Chat is wondering why he doesn’t remember receiving a present from her when the next moment he’s watching Nathalie throw Marinette’s name off the box, and reclaim it as a gift from Adrien’s father.

His stomach twists unpleasantly.

The scarf. 

Beside the window, another scene begins to play. In it Marinette is in bed, the soft morning light slinking across her bed to caress her cheek. She makes the softest noise Chat has ever heard, and then her eyes are fluttering open as she blossoms into a full-body stretch that leads to her springing from bed. 

“Good morning, Marinette!”

Marinette giggles, seemingly brighter than normal, if that is at all possible. (On a bad day, Marinette is brighter than the sun.)

“Morning, Tikki!” She has already thrown herself into casual house clothes and launches herself out of her room down the stairs. Something about her appearance is… familiar, but he can’t exactly place why.

Tikki follows dutifully after her. “Marinette, you haven’t even eaten breakfast yet! You’re already heading for the bakery?” 

“You know it’s my Sunday ritual, Tikki! I have to finish Adrien’s special macaroon before the bakery opens or dad’ll be hogging the oven till noon!”

And it clicks in Chat’s brain, an image in his mind surging forward to supply the ending of the memory. The evening he spent at Marinette’s home, after she’d handed him the single boxed macaron. 

A tangy sweetness had burst in Adrien’s mouth - the flavor so incredible he can imagine it now as if tasting it again for the first time. He had met Marinette’s eyes and asked, “Passionfruit?” She’d nodded, visibly pleased by his reaction and at the same time they both said:

“You’re favorite.”

“My favorite.”

Chat turns with a poorly smothered intensity to the window above it, filled with the scene of Marinette leaving a voicemail that he does not remember receiving, and to the one below that, where there’s  an entire convoluted plan - concocted by Marinette and executed by all of their friends - to woo Adrien into going on a date with her. He watches Marinette find and answer the poem he had written for Ladybug and with helpless frustration, in every situation, watches his old self miss everything .

He gravitates numbly to the center of the burrow, neck tipped back, back, back. Scene after scene fills the burrow walls. A million moments of Marinette loving him, everywhere he turns, the proof there in overwhelming, momentous abundance.

She loves him. 

Marinette loves him . 

And Marinette is Ladybug.

It feels like a thousand suns upending their light onto him. If he so much as breathes he worries it will all come bursting out. So he doesn’t breathe. He doesn’t blink. He wants to keep this brightness inside him, wants to curl himself around this feeling and tangle his fingers into the woven web of Marinette’s love for him. 

Slowly, as if it had happened like this in Marinette’s heart, the times between Adrien and Marinette begin to include moments between Ladybug and Chat Noir. 

Ladybug giggling at one of his jokes, one of his terrible jokes, just to make him smile. The image of Ladybug telling Adrien not to worry about Chat Noir showing up because she trusts him - and the look of pure faith in her eyes as she makes that proclamation. Ladybug rescuing him, time and time again, with the desperate devotion of a secret lover. Flashes of Ladybug watching him during Akuma battles, drawing her eyes like an itch needing to be scratched. 

And then the windows all bleed together into one, an all encompassing scene, and he immediately recognizes it as the moment he renounced Plagg and left Ladybug on that balcony.

Chat’s eyes shut.

“Adrien, please.”

His eyes open. Ladybug’s tear-brimmed eyes fill the burrow walls. Alone on the balcony edge, her shoulders rising and falling with her rapid breath. A dozen emotions flit across her face and half of them Chat can’t place, but with each of them, all he sees is Marinette beneath that red and black spotted mask. 

Ladybug’s phone rings, startling both of them. She opens it a little too enthusiastically, as if expecting Adrien on the other line, but she returns back to her shell-shocked state as soon as she sees Rena Rouge on the caller ID. Her hand falls to the ground beside her, the ringing phone inside it going unanswered as Ladybug turns her numb expression out on the city landscape. 

Chat has seen that look on his own face enough to recognize it immediately. It’s the same face he made in the mirror before the press conference regarding his mother’s disappearance; when he talked himself into his renunciation that morning; after he left Ladybug - left Marinette - in that sewer in New York. It’s the face he makes when he’s smothering every big, ugly emotion inside of him in order to remain functioning.

Ladybug’s knees lock stiffly as she forces her legs under her and her feet forward, one step, two, falling into the window more than climbing in, her far-away expression suggesting that her limbs are working on auto pilot more than anything else. She’s moving towards the door to the hallway. Her hand comes up to cup her forehead, the opposite hand resting against the hall wall as her expression crumples into an uproar. The hand on her face turns into a fist. She presses hard between her brow, teeth gritting as she forces the tidal wave of emotions back. 

Now with a morsel of self-control back in place, she lifts her yo-yo into view and flips opens the lid. Inside, the center is bright white, spinning in a swirl that Ladybug dips her hand into. Chat’s eyebrows furrow as he watches her pull out the dragon miraculous.

Longg bursts into view as Ladybug secures the necklace around her throat. Upon seeing her, he looks confused and says, “I thought you wouldn’t be requiring my assistance tonight, Ladybug.”

Ladybug frowns deeply. “There’s been a change of plans.” She lifts the cat miraculous into view. 

Longg’s expression drops. “Oh, no.”

“I’m not going to let it end like this.” Ladybug’s fist clenches, reclosing the ring in her grasp. “We have a jet to delay, Longg, Tikki, unify!”

The unification overtakes Dragonbug in a flash of red and then she’s bursting out into the hallway. Her brows crumple together as she throws her yo-yo to knock out the window beside the elevators, and leaps through it like diving into a pool at twelve feet.

She hurls herself through Paris after Adrien. But his car is nowhere in sight. She comes to a skidding stop atop a tall commercial building, spinning in a wide scope, her breathing heightened, racking down her entire frame until -

There.

The tip of the airport command tower.

She pistons off the edge of the building, heaving her weight forward with reckless abandon. She eats away the distance with the new speed Longg’s unification supplies her and lands neatly atop the domed tower. 

The view opens up over her shoulder to the full length of the runway, separating her and the private jet on the complete opposite end. 

From her distance, Adrien’s bobbing blonde head can be seen approaching and entering the jet.

“Adrien!” A dark shade of desperation pitches Dragonbug’s tone high, but it’s not enough. Adrien hadn’t heard her. Her breath hisses through her teeth, hands forming in front of her to call on Longg’s power. “Wind dra-”

Dragonbug is never able to summon the wind. In the next moment, Shadowmoth materializes out of nowhere and whacks her back into the city with a brutal swipe of his staff.

Terror ravages Chat Noir’s body as he watches his worst nightmare unfold.

Dragonbug flies through the air like a bullet, body bowing in half as she slams through one, two buildings before being spat out into a back alleyway. Every atom in Chat Noir’s body vibrates with his longing to help her - to just reach through and tell his old self to turn around . But by now, he knows the jet has already taken off. 

Dragonbug pushes her arms up underneath her. She maneuvers her back up against the wall and reaches around for her yo-yo, opening it in front of her with a detached sense of intention. She pulls out the Ox miraculous and dons it quickly.

Stompp appears and looks immediately concerned, “Oh no! Are you alright?”

“I will be with your help,” she says, and without another word unifies him with Longg and Tikki.  She uses his power of strength to reinforce her own and without so much as a moment of hesitation, reaches back into her yo-yo for the goat miraculous, this time not allowing enough time for Ziggy to even get a word in before unifying her with the others. 

She shoots to her feet with a force that crushes the asphalt underneath her in two hoof-shaped circles, and shoves up. She explodes into the air, one, three, six hundred feet into the air. Vertically. Her hands and feet fan out as she reaches to latch on to the Eiffel Tower, more than half-way up its side. She uses the vantage point to better spot Shadowmoth. 

Who comes to land on the platform below her. 

“So, you’ve discovered my true identity and decided to collect collateral?” he drawls at length, sounding cool, but not collected. “Well, if you want to go near that jet you’ll have to go through me, Ladybug!”

From above him, Tetradbug looks completely confused. “As always, you’re completely off the mark, Shadowmoth.” She says the last word like a taunt. Already, the four unifications have done something to her voice. She sounds… Chaotic. And eager.

Shadowmoth notices too, because Chat can see him narrowing his eyes in order to focus on where Tetradbug is hanging. What he finds, the layers of miraculous', causes a reaction Chat isn’t expecting.

He begins to smile. A slow, sinister thing. “Trouble in paradise?” he tosses up to her loftily. “I guess I had it wrong about your intentions with the jet, but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

Tetradbug scoffs, “I can’t imagine how this situation works in your favor, Shadowmoth.”

“Well you see, after our earlier exchange I expected to face the full force of your A-team, and instead, you’ve handed yourself over to me on a golden platter!”

Tetradbug’s fists clench. “I'll never give myself over to you!”

“But don’t you feel it?” Shadowmoth taunts. “Are you even aware?”

A pebble tumbles down Tetradbug’s stone facade at his words.

“You put up a good front, Guardian, but your usual iron grip on your emotions has loosened with the strain of those extra miraculous. Did you know while transformed, negative emotions call to me like a melody?” Tetradbug’s eyes widen as a maniacal smile unfolds on Shadowmoth’s face. “And right now, your heart is absolutely howling .”

Tetradbug launches herself at him before he can say anything else, the fire in her eyes fizzling when he holds his staff out in front of him and unleashes an akuma right into the line of her trajectory. She cuts to the left and only barely avoids contact with the akuma. Her over-correction and extra power swings her beyond the tower, she has to launch her yo-yo back at the last second to keep herself from flying out of control. She lands back on the platform where it takes all of five seconds for her to capture, and de-evilize the akuma.

And that’s all the time Shadowmoth needed. 

It’s immediately clear the diversion had been Shadowmoth’s entire plan. While she had been distracted, he had created a sentimonster in the shape of a copy machine. And when he sends his next akuma through it’s entrance, a never ending stream of copies pour out the other end. 

Tetradbug reacts in an instant: “Wind dragon!”

The akumas hit the wall of air and peel away to the sides, pouring out into a cloud over the city. 

Tetradbug doesn’t stick around much longer. She turns in the opposite direction and leaps with the agility of the goat, landing a mile away in the streets where civilians run in a panic while a million other obstacles stand in her way. The akuma swarm has already spread over the top of the street, making navigation by yo-yo impossible. After a split-second assessment, Tetradbug launches herself up onto the side of the buildings and bounds forward with all the grace of a mountain goat on a steep edge. Mid-run, she lifts and opens her yo-yo in front of her, reaching in to grab and secure the tiger miraculous onto her hand.

Roarr takes in the scene that she’s been thrown into and looks understandably worried. “I thought I was being worn by Juleka, tonight.”

“We’re on our own with this one,” Tetradbug grits out. 

Tetradbug ducks into an open apartment window to her right in order to unify Roarr with a semblance of privacy. She comes out of the haze and stumbles forward into a short, wooden coffee table. Her hands come down to catch herself, and to Chat Noir’s absolute horror, shakily reach back into the yo-yo for her sixth miraculous yet. The horse miraculous. She unifies Kaalki without a single word to or from the kwami.

At six unified miraculous, Megabug collapses into convulses on the floor.

Chat Noir has to turn away. His eyes squeeze shut but he hears the noises that she makes and each one lodges in his heart like a fraying shard. He only turns back once they’ve stopped. 

On the screen, Megabug is shoving herself to her hands and knees, seemingly leveling off into a state of equilibrium as she stands. For a moment, she remains unusually still. Then she’s moving towards the window with a fluid agility that doesn’t seem human - doesn’t even seem superhuman. 

Awaiting her back on the street is a wall of akuma’s, upon which she unleashes a booming “Voyage!” and passes straight through them into Marinette’s bedroom.

And then the yarn begins to unspool. 

In the last wisps of light, Megabug methodically, robotically dons and activates miraculous, after miraculous. “One more…” she mutters, “My fault… need to be… stronger… need to...fix it… I’ll fix... everything...”  

“Turn it off,” says Chat Noir, already turned away. 

Bunnyx doesn’t wait to be asked twice. The screens fizzle out to white.

Chat lifts one of his clenched fists and opens his fingers to stare down at Ladybug's earring. Reverently, he unclasps the back and secures it through his ear. Then he turns to Bunnyx.

“What’s the plan?”

Chapter Text

Bunnyx gives Chat a fast-and-loose run through of her plan, then ends it by saying the ‘finer details’ are up to him to decide. And when he just stares at her in horror, she continues, 

“You see, there can never be just one plan. That would never work. One plan means one chance to get it right, and that’s not really my style.”

If possible, he feels more confused. “So there is more than one plan?”

She waves her hand in a clarifying manner. “Don’t think about it that way. Think about it like” - she cuts off, eyes wandering up and away as if searching for the words on the burrow walls themselves - “Time is everywhere and makes up everything, but it isn’t as static as people tend to think. The future’s always changing, right? Undulating intangibly around us, ebbing in and out of shape with our every action. And while it can be a docile force - if you have true intentions and a clear vision of your own future - it can also be a punishing one. So the true plan? Anticipate the unpredictability of time. Shift with it. Be adaptive, be flexible. Don’t let the disruption of one path or course of action derail you from your goal. Shit happens, you understand? The point is to keep moving forward. Make another plan. You have everything you need now, and I know you’ve got the brains up in that angsty little teenage head of yours to execute a victory no matter the obstacles thrown your way.”

He feels his bravado, which he’d been steadily gathering up until now, shudder and creak. 

“You make it sound so easy.”

For a moment neither one of them speaks, a dozen heartbeats passing before Bunnyx finally says, sounding a thousand years old and ten at the same time,

“Did you know, time sings as it passes?”

Chat blinks up at her, taken aback by the words. “It sings?”

Something ubiquitous flicks through her eyes. “Yes. It sings. And if you slow down enough to actually, truly listen, you’ll always know what to do. The universe wants to guide you. We are all a part of it, caught in the inhale-exhale of its cycle. What are humans if not star energy condensed into wanting vessels? The vibrations of our souls ache to be in alignment with the unending rhythm of the universe, a song that has played since the beginning of time, and that will continue to play long after we’re both dead and gone. And it does not play in secret, but to guide. You just have to listen.”

Gooseflesh rise in waves over Chat’s skin as Bunnyx talks, and he experiences a strange strike of sorrow; the same foreign, tangling of grief that comes whenever his thoughts bring him too close to an existential crisis. But it’s somehow worse because it's Bunnyx saying these things. She might be older than him, but she’s still young - so young - to be talking as if from the experience of a hundred lives. 

Hell, what does he know? Maybe that’s exactly what it feels like, being in here.

“Once Ladybug is deakumatized, once she’s - better,” Chat says slowly, “I’ll talk to her. We’ll figure something out so that you don’t have to stay in the burrow anymore.”

Bunnyx smiles, a weighty thing. “It’s that big heart of yours that makes me so confident you’ll succeed.” She leans forward to ruffle his hair as she says this, and he lets her, his heart constricting tightly in his chest as she does. “But I don’t need to be rescued. I’m where I need to be.” 

With rising intensity, Chat says, “How can you be so sure about something so monumental? Where does that conviction come from?”

She gives him that look again that makes him feel like a child speaking to someone ancient, and says, “Experience, Kitty Noir. There’s no shortcut for growing up.”

Chat’s gaze falls. It isn’t what he was hoping to hear, right now.

Bunnyx, astute as ever, seems to pick up on this instantly. “You’re still feeling doubts.”

“How could I not?”

“Adrien,” she says, surprising him by saying his civilian name while he’s still wearing the bell and ears, but it's clear when he looks at her that this had been the point. “I think the issue is that you need to learn how to have faith.” 

Like a knee jerk, Chat says, “I know how to do that!”

Bunnyx parries, “Oh, really? Then answer me this: I believe in you, Adrien. Can you believe in yourself?”

The words tangle the tongue in Chat’s throat. It feels like a loaded question… A familiar one. Like those that had plagued his restless nights over the last few months. (Although during those moments, the question hadn’t been so much ‘do I believe in myself?’ as it had been, ‘does Ladybug believe in me?’ It was only as evidence seemed to suggest no, she didn’t, that Adrien actually did begin to doubt himself. To question. Renouncing Plagg became all too easy after enough sleepless nights filled with nothing but self deprecating thoughts.) 

But none of those insecurities feel relevant now. 

None of those old hurts can hold a candle to the flame the memories of Marinette had ignited inside of him, so even if he might not believe in himself - not fully, not yet - he believes in his love for Marinette. 

Fully. 

Relentlessly. 

A calm washes over him as these feelings only swell in size, as if in emphasis of their enormity, and he realizes: nothing else matters. Marinette loves him, and he loves her. That will be enough.

He meets Bunnyx’s steadfast gaze unblinkingly. “I’m ready.”

-

The pads of Chat’s fingers linger over the warm metal of the cat miraculous, snug in its spot under his second knuckle. He has grown so familiar with the weight of it that he thinks he could identify it in a pile of replicas all varying in density. 

Yet in this moment, it has never felt heavier. 

He’s standing in front of the burrow hole that Bunnyx has opened back onto his father’s private jet. 

After she had opened the hole Bunnyx had stood beside Adrien and said, “I’m not going with you.” But he had already known that. “I need to stay in my burrow in case I need to jump back into the past at a moment’s notice” - and he had heard the unspoken in case you fail - but he had already known that, too. Can feel the gravity of the responsibility ahead of him.

If Bunnyx does have to step back in, he doubts it’ll be into a timeline where he - the Adrien he is in this moment - still exists. 

Chat finally breaks the silence. “Can you tell him I’m sorry?” meaning this Plagg. He doesn’t look up from where he’s fiddling with the ring, twisting it in a circle around his finger. “Tell him - I’m going to make things right.”

“I’ll tell him,” says Bunnyx, “But I’m sure he already knows.”

Chat’s eyes flick up to catch the tweak of encouragement on her lips. He swallows thickly. Then grips the ring to twist and pull.

“I renounce you, Plagg.”

The ring comes off and Adrien is overtaken in green-white light, his hand coming out automatically to deposit it in Bunnyx’s hand. His capacities once again swoon as the gravity of the burrow dawns over his human perception, and Bunnyx quickly swings him around so that he isn’t facing the enormity of it, twisting him forward towards the open ended burrow hole. 

Her hands squeeze his shoulders. “Good luck, Adrien.”

His hand comes up reflexively to grip the single Ladybug earring pierced through his ear. Then he steps forward. 

-

It is dark in the jet kitchen. Utterly silent save for the underlying hum of appliances and the rattle of Adrien’s shallow breath. His sandwich is still open and half made on the counter to his right and the sight sends a strange jolt through him, making him twitch uncomfortably.

For a handful of long moments, Adrien remains totally still. Needing a moment to gather his bearings before facing everyone again. He isn’t sure how he’ll be received, after all. 

Rena’s agonized eyes flash back through Adrien’s memory, then the shell-shocked state that Carapace had been reduced to, and finally Viperion’s downcast gaze, his remorseful silence... Adrien had left them all in varying states of distress and distrust, and now he is meant to lead them into what is undoubtedly the most dangerous battle any of them have ever fought. And, he can do it - he knows he can - but he just. Needs a minute.

The jet dips beneath him, a drastic shift in direction causing Adrien to sway and stumble to regain his balance. 

Adrien’s eyes fly over to the portholes at the edge of the kitchen entrance. Before he’d stepped into the burrow the sky had been black behind them, but now they are filled with a color - while still dark - that is a different shade than night; too starless, too gray, a dusting of dawn behind meandering clouds. 

He has to have been gone for hours, for the sun to be so close to rising. In the burrow, it had felt like minutes.

Suddenly, Adrien is feeling a lot more antsy about their time restraints. 

He moves decisively out of the kitchen and into the hallway in search of the others, hoping they haven’t flown too far from Paris while he’s been gone. Beginning at the first door, Adrien opens and closes four or five doors - leading to empty rooms - before he hears the answering sound of footsteps clapping down the hallway behind him. 

Adrien pulls out of the current room he’d been checking to see Nino racing down the hallway towards him, looking seconds from bursting into tears.

“Adrien!” Nino yells, “You’re back!” and flings his arms around him to drag him into a fierce hug.

Emotion bloats heavily in Adrien’s throat - he’s just so relieved to know he and Nino are still on good enough terms to exchange hugs.

In a watery voice, Adrien says, “Hey, Nino.”

Nino unleashes a tidal wave of words onto him - an apology, Adrien realizes as his friend barrels on, as if he’s rehearsed these words and has been waiting to say them to him once he got back. And Adrien is so astonished, so touched, that all he can do is listen. 

But when Nino says, “I’m so sorry I wasn’t a better friend, dude -” Adrien has to pull him to a stop.

“Nino, you’re an amazing friend. I was just -” but Adrien doesn’t know how to finish that sentence, so he changes direction. “ I shouldn’t have thrown that conversation back in your face. I’m sorry.”

Nino’s expression goes severely serious, eyebrows cutting down in two sharp lines. 

“Dude, no. I shouldn’t have said that about you - I mean, Chat Noir. He’s - You’re,” he sighs in frustration, scrubbing a hand down his face. “What I’m trying to say is: I should’ve been a better friend to Chat Noir . You’ve never let us down, in or out of costume. And I know you say you’ve forgiven me or whatever, but like - I won’t forgive myself if I’ve made you think you’re expendable because, dude. You’re invaluable.”

A warmness swells in Adrien and he yanks Nino back into another crushing hug. The two of them cling to each other in the tight space of the jet hallway, Adrien biting his tongue to keep the tears at bay.

“Are you done apologizing, yet?” Comes a high pitched voice from the direction Nino had come from, “Can we come out now?”

Adrien and Nino pull apart, and this time, there’s a peace in Nino’s eyes that Adrien feels reflected in his heart. 

Nino claps Adrien on the shoulder and turns back to yell, “Yeah, you can come out! We’re cool.”

Wayzz, Trixx, and Alya step forward down the corridor into view. Which left Luka and Sass tucked somewhere out of sight, but Adrien hadn’t fought with them . Luka could probably sense the heavy vibe Alya is carrying with her down the hallway, and had determined their reunion didn’t need any more of an audience than it already has.

The three of them come to a stop a step or so behind Nino, Alya’s eyes locked to the floor. When they do lift, Adrien is surprised to see the sheepish shade in her gaze.

He realizes, suddenly, that he won’t be able to take it if Alya tries to apologize to him right now. All she did was care for Marinette and grieve when she was taken from them. She shouldn’t have to apologize for that. 

Alya opens her mouth -

Adrien tips forward, brushing past Nino to crash into her. He wraps his arms around her in a bruising hug and she just stands there, frozen to the spot before a noise like a sob hiccups past her lips and her hands are coming up to match Adrien’s crushing hug in its strength. 

“We’re going to save her,” Adrien whispers urgently against her hair, “I promise, we’ll save her.” 

“I know,” Alya sniffles, “I know we will.” And when they pull back she drags her sleeve-clad arm over her eyes to wipe the tears. “So… Now you know?” 

She doesn’t say the words out loud, but she doesn’t have to. Their shared knowledge of Ladybug’s true identity passes silently between them, and it hurts more than Adrien thought it would. 

“If I had known,” Adrien begins, mouth working as he struggles to find the right words, “I never would have -”

“Adrien,” Alya says, hands coming up to cup his shoulders, head dipping forward to catch Adrien’s lowered gaze. “It isn’t your fault. Hey.” And then she shakes him, gently, just once to get his full attention, and when her efforts return his gaze to her, the look in her eyes is so indominably fierce that he doesn’t dare question what words leave her mouth next. “This is not your fault.”

But Adrien isn’t sure he can believe that. “Then whose fault is it?”

“Shadowmoth, of course.”

Their gazes snap to the side, because it hadn’t been Alya or Nino who had spoken. Coming down the long hallway alongside Luka and Sass, is Jessica Keynes, her kwami Liiri, and her sister Aeon. 

“Jessica,” Adrien says, the name coming out sounding like a gasp. “Aeon? How are you here?”

Luka says, “Future Adrien got ahold of them.”

Aeon nods, while a look crosses Jessica’s face like she’s still trying to wrap her head around this time travel ordeal.

“Apparently,” Jessica says, “We’re pretty tight in the future.”

“Yeah,” adds Nino, like he can’t help himself, “And apparently there’s like a million of us miraculous holders all around the world and there’s a secret organization we’re all apart of -”

“Nino,” Alya and Wayzz admonish in near perfect unison, effectively making Nino’s mouth clamp shut.

“I - he told you about the future?” asks Adrien incredulously. 

Wayzz says, “Yes, and you shouldn’t have.”

“It jeopardizes the continuity of the timeline, it’s true,” adds Sass.

“The dude was dying,” cuts in Jessica, her tone of voice defensive on older Adrien’s behalf. “If it was me, I would’ve done the same thing. More, probably.”

And it’s so unexpectedly sweet, hearing someone stick up for him, even his future self, that it makes fondness bead up in Adrien’s chest for her. If they are close in the future, he can already see why. 

Her words set off a bout of debate amongst the kwami’s and their holders, and amidst the noise Adrien feels Alya tug at his shirt sleeve. 

He turns to find her eyes brimmed with unshed tears, and she whispers, so the words can be for Adrien and no one else, “I told him, before you - before he disappeared. I told him about Marinette.”

The words hit Adrien square in the chest, then rise to bloat heavily on the back of his tongue. He swallows thickly, trying to comprehend this feeling inside him. It feels too enormous to dissect. It feels like if he tries, he might drive himself crazy instead.

He wonders whether the knowledge of Ladybug being Marinette comforted the older version of himself in his last moments, or whether it had just dug the knife in deeper. 

Adrien’s voice comes out sandpaper rough, “Thank you, Alya. You’re a good friend.”

Her smile wobbles, her hand finding and squeezing his. 

-

“So what’s the plan?” asks Jessica.

They’ve migrated from the hallway into one of the jet’s many boardrooms, the six of them filling up the upper half of the long, skinny table inside. It feels weird sitting at it with the others, the large straight-back chairs built for tall, broad men, not a ragtag bunch of teens. The fact that Adrien is the only one without a special power or miraculous doesn’t help; he feels like a child whose feet are dangling off the edge of a chair pulled up to the big kids table (even though his feet are, in reality, planted very firmly on the floor.)

Adrien tries to smother the feeling from existence. 

“We don’t have much time,” Jessica continues, “Our moms were in an emergency Category Five meeting when we left New York, and if they haven’t noticed we're gone already, they will soon.”

Adrien makes a strangled noise. “Your moms don’t know you’re here?!” As if there isn’t enough to worry about, he does not want to add ‘the possibility of Majestia blasting in through the nearest door’ to the ever growing list.

“It’s okay,” Aeon assures, “They’ll still be indisposed for a few more hours. They’re trying to decide whether or not they should deploy heroes to eliminate Gaiabug, or whether the situation calls for something more… drastic.”

Adrien’s eyebrows furrow. “Drastic like how?”

Aeon turns to share a shuttered look with Jessica, who says, “Like dropping a nuke over Gaiabug’s location.”

“What?!” Adrien nearly shouts, the others chiming in with their own cries of horror around the table. “That wouldn’t just destroy Gaiabug - it could destroy the entire continent!”

Aeon’s gaze drops as if in shame. Shame not for herself, but for her moms’ hand in this type of decision. “We know. That’s why we came here to help you guys, to bring Ladybug back. Because without her power to reverse damage…”

“It doesn’t look good,” Jessica continues, “With Ladybug gone, the leaders of the world don’t see a way to go back and undo. Because there isn’t. They have to move forward and navigate the most realistic course of action given the circumstances of the real world. They don’t have a bunch of magical ladybugs to rely on, this time. Even if they could neutralize Gaiabug, reclaiming her territory would cost trillions of dollars and would jeopardize the lives of the heroes who would have to do the work. In their eyes, it isn’t worth it. In their eyes, if they can at least stop her foliage from branching off to the rest of the world, then at the very least an apocalypse can be avoided.”

Adrien’s heart is beating hollowly inside him, a sickly pound humming loudly in his ears. The words have instilled a terrified silence around the table, not even the kwami’s having something to add. Long moments pass, the room suddenly feeling smaller, and smaller.

It’s Nino that finally breaks the silence. 

“But Bunnyx had a plan, right?” He turns to Adrien, frantically. “Right? You know what we need to do?”

The others are turning to Adrien now too, expectantly. Dutifully. But more than that, as if in search of reassurance. For a stark, blinding moment of clarity, Adrien’s vision flashes and he sees them for what they truly are. A ragtag bunch of teens, sure, but more than that a dedicated team of superheroes, capable of rising to the challenge.

Bunnyx’s voice echoes in his mind, ‘All of us have faith in you. The challenge of a leader then is to take that faith and place it back into your teammates.’

Adrien takes a deep breath, and starts talking. 

-

Everyone disperses once Adrien finishes outlining the plan.

They stalk down the hallway like the procession of a funeral, grave expressions mirrored on every face as they scatter into different rooms to ‘get ready’, though Adrien guesses that’s really code for ‘needing time to process.’ 

Adrien lets them go. Lets them have the space they need to work themselves up to the battle ahead of them. It will be a daunting one indeed. He wanders around the jet as a way to occupy his racing thoughts, and he finds his nanny still sleeping outside his bedroom door on the couch there. Adrien huffs at the sight. It’s actually impressive - the fact he hasn’t woken yet. Maybe, he might even make it to the morning without ever having known that the world almost ended. 

Adrien affords himself a single, selfish moment to imagine laying down, of falling asleep and awakening to find that everything had been a dream; his renunciation; Ladybug’s akumatization; the pain. But then he would have never found out Ladybug’s identity, and he realizes, more selfish still than his previous fantasy, that he wouldn’t give that up for anything in the world.

He goes to speak to the pilot.

Alya had told Adrien his future self had given the man order to circle high above Paris, both to stay out of sight and remain close to Gaiabug’s location. The pilot - a middle aged man who Adrien thinks is both a husband and a father - looks shaken and grim-faced when Adrien arrives, and they share a stilted greeting wherein he stares at Adrien like he’s a ghost (a reaction, Adrien assumes, is due to him having seen and spoken to the adult version of himself only hours ago) before his eyes jump compulsively back out the front windshield.

Adrien begins very gingerly, “I wanted to thank you, for not just landing the plane and running at the earliest convenience. I promise you will be generously compensated by my father when all of this is over.” 

“Compensated,” the pilot echoes, voice wavering as his eyes flick back over to Adrien. He looks terrified. “All I want is to be able to see my family again. Can you promise me that?” 

Adrien swallows thickly. The severity of their situation knocks into him again, just as ferociously as it had in the burrow. If their plan doesn’t succeed, he won’t be the only one to lose someone forever. 

Adrien meets the pilot's eye with unwavering determination. “You will see your family again. I promise.” 

The pilot exhales shakily, grip readjusting on the wheel. “What do you need me to do, kid?” 

Adrien looks out the windshield over the clouds in front of them. The first shades of morning light hug the underside of the bulbous shapes, transforming the view into a painting of contrasting shadows. 

“We need to be taken back to the center,” he says, “Back to her location.” 

The pilot shifts wordlessly to comply. 

Adrien's eyes fall closed. 

-

Adrien is down by the hatch door, readying the parachutes for those members of their group that can’t fly (which is to say, everyone but Uncanny Valley and Eagle) when Luka rounds the corner to join him in the private space. 

His fingers pause in their inspection of the bag, and he says, “Oh, hey.”

“Hey,” Luka says. He smiles in that gentle way that always makes Adrien feel calm and at ease in his presence, his eyes tracking unhurriedly over the progress of the parachutes. “Everything in tip top shape?” 

The corner of Adrien’s mouth twitches. “Almost.” He lifts the parachute bag in his hands and gives it a pointed shake, “This is the last one that needs to be inspected, and then we’ll be ready.” 

Luka hums. There’s something off about him, Adrien realizes now that he’s paying attention, a reservation to his actions. He notices it in the slightest delay to Luka’s movements, the way he won’t quite meet Adrien’s eye.

Adrien sets the bag down, turning towards Luka to give him his full attention. “Is there something you wanted to talk about?” 

Luka’s eyes rise to his. He looks guilty . 

“Luka,” Adrien says, surprised, “What is” -

The words rush out of Luka in a burst. “I’m so sorry.”

And Adrien just blinks, it’s all he can do. Of everything he had expected to hear, that hadn’t even been on the list. 

“What are you talking about?” Adrien’s eyebrows pinch together as he steps forward. “What could you possibly have to apologize for?” 

Luka says, “I’ve already known you and Marinette are Ladybug and Chat Noir for weeks now.” 

It’s like a needle shot through glass, the same sensation in Adrien’s chest.

Adrien squawks, “How -?”

“It was when we faced Wishmaker.” 

Adrien absorbs those words like he would something sour. The idea that someone has known his secret identity for weeks makes him feel off balance, forcing him to once again reframe his world view to accommodate the information -just as he had to do with Bunnyx. 

It seems time miraculous holders in particular come acutely inclined at keeping Adrien on his toes.

“I had to use my second chance a few times that day,” Luka continues, “Usually do, during missions. Usually have to use it a few hundred times more, actually. So I don’t always tell Ladybug every detail of every reset I’ve run - there aren’t enough hours in the day, ya know? But after Wishmaker… I didn’t just leave details out. Ladybug outright asked me if I had found out her identity, and - I lied. I blatantly lied. Not only had I found out her identity, I had found out yours as well and I'm just - I’m sorry. I’m so sorry I didn’t tell the truth.” 

Through all this, Luka has steadily been working himself up into a state that Adrien has never seen him in before; he’s practically shaking.

“Luka,” Adrien urges, stepping forward to touch steady fingers to his forearm. When he doesn’t resist, Adrien tightens his grip, trying to put as much reassurance into the touch as he can, wanting to give Luka something solid to ground himself to. “It’s okay. None of that matters, now.”

“You don’t know that,” Luka argues, his gaze finally coming up to reveal the burn of a fight inside of them. “How can you be sure that isn’t the exact misstep that set us all tumbling down this cursed timeline?”

Adrien takes a moment to consider this.

“Maybe it was.” And when Luka gives him a look like he’s sprouted a second head - no doubt expecting Adrien to refute his words of doubt instead of spur them on - he continues, “Maybe that was the catalyst that set these events in motion, but I really don’t think it matters. Not anymore, at least. People make choices every day, Luka, some of them a lot worse than telling Ladybug a lie.” And then, meeting his eyes with a look of pointed intensity, “We all made choices to bring us here. Don’t try and take that weight alone . You’ll only drive yourself insane.”

Luka skews his gaze sidelong at him. “Bunnyx’s burrow did a number on your head, didn’t it?” His lips tweak as Adrien laughs. “And maybe you’re right, maybe it doesn’t matter anymore… But it’s been eating me alive and I just - I had to tell you.”

A quiet moment passes where neither one of them speaks.

Eventually, Adrien says, “She wouldn’t have been angry, you know.” 

Luka gives him a dubious look, “Are we talking about the same Ladybug?” 

Adrien snorts. “Alright, maybe she would’ve been mad if she had found out yesterday or last week. But I have a feeling after today, everything is going to change for the better.”

“Optimism,” Luka says with an approving lip-tweak, shoulders visibly relaxing from the rigid line they’d been in moments before,  “I like it.”

They share a smile. It’s still such an overwhelmingly warm and bright feeling being with a friend, even in a situation as frightening as this. 

“I would’ve done the same thing, by the way,” Adrien says, partly to make Luka feel better, partly because it’s true. If their places had been reversed and Adrien had been the one to find out Ladybug’s secret identity, he wouldn’t have willingly volunteered to forget the information either. 

Pensively, Luka says, “I think I lied because knowing made me feel better. After me and Marinette broke up, I knew she was keeping something from me, that she wasn’t being truthful. I thought, you know, ‘she’s still in love with Adrien.’ And while I still believe that last part,” Luka emphasizes with a pointed look, making Adrien blush, “I guess finding out she’s Ladybug made me feel better because everything finally made sense. And I… I didn’t want to go back to feeling the way I had felt before finding out.” 

Adrien nods. “I know how that feels. To want to be trusted with the truth and then be denied it.” 

Luka’s eyes pass over his face, considering Adrien, though he can’t even begin to imagine what he might be thinking 

“Luckily,” Luka raises a pointed eyebrow, “Everything is about to change, right?” 

And Adrien repeats, more for himself than for Luka, “Everything is about to change.”

-

Fifteen minutes later everyone is suited up and strapped into parachutes, poised in a loose huddle around the now-open hatch of the jet. 

Paris is ablaze below them. The panoramic view rolled out and pinned to the shadowed, still-sleepy horizon, Gaiabug’s thick foliage broken up only by the occasional fire. 

Adrien’s eyes scour the obscure landscape below, searching for Gaiabug’s towering banyan tree. When he spots it, his heart constricts painfully in his chest.

I’ll save you, he thinks, Just hold on.

Finally, he turns to regard his team. 

The wind is whipping wildly through the space, causing a riot of everyone’s hair and making them have to nearly shout in order to be heard.

Adrien says, “We ready?”

“As ready as we’ll ever be,” Carapace quips, sounding shaky despite his attempt at levity. 

With more believable confidence, Uncanny Valley says, “We got this.”

Adrien says, “And everyone’s sure they know what to do?”

“We’re the distraction,” Eagle says, using her thumb to draw a line in the air between her, Rena, Carapace, and Viperion.

Rena continues, “We’ll lure Gaiabug out of her nest and keep her occupied while you and Uncanny locate Shadowmoth and his miraculous.”

“And I’ll use my second chance as soon as the two of you arrive to deakumatize her,” Luka adds, “Just in case something goes wrong.”

“Perfect,” Adrien says, feeling a rush of pride for them all. “I couldn’t have asked for a better team.”

Flattered but modest smiles shuffle around the group, until Eagle huffs and gently shoves at Adrien’s shoulder.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, “Just don’t get killed, alright?”

“You too,” and speaks to all of them when he says, “Take care of each other.” 

“We will,” Carapace reassures him, standing a little taller and broader as he makes the declaration. He is the shield of the group, after all.

“And you take care of him,” Eagle says to Uncanny, meaning Adrien. “Don’t let him do anything stupid.”

Uncanny nods, wearing a small, dutiful smile that hasn’t wavered since her transformation into her super form. “Yes, ma’am.”

Then a moment of silence as they all look around at each other. It occurs to Adrien that this might be the last time they’re all gathered together like this, intact and in one piece. 

He shoves the thought fiercely from his mind. 

“Good luck,” he tells them. 

“Good luck,” they echo in return. 

-

Rena and Carapace drop first, Rena to deploy the illusion and Carapace to protect her as she does. Eagle and Viperion follow swiftly after them, and then it’s just Adrien and Uncanny Valley perched alone on the hatch’s ledge. 

“Thank you for coming with me to locate the butterfly miraculous,” Adrien tells her, “Thank you for being here at all, actually.” 

Uncanny just smiles at him. “It’s very brave what you guys are doing, saving the world is no small feat. And I live in this world, don’t I? The least I can do is help.” 

“Still,” Adrien says, “I need you to know I appreciate it.” 

“I do,” she says, “You’re a very gracious leader. If I wasn't already working for my moms, I would be very proud to have a place on your team.” 

A stinging pressure springs to Adrien’s eyes at the words, and he has to turn to look through the open hatch out over the panorama outside to keep the tears from fully forming and spilling over. 

“It wouldn’t be my team without Ladybug,” he says, croakily.

Uncanny holds out her hand for him to take. “Then let’s go bring her home.” 

-

Paris is eerily quiet. 

Nothing but the faint whiz of the wind parting around Uncanny Valley as she flies over the canopy of Gaiabug’s foliage, Adrien grasped securely in her arms. He knows from the silence that the others can’t have intercepted Gaiabug yet, and his heart hangs suspended in his throat in anticipation for the initial clash. 

The resulting sound of which, he’s sure, will be unmistakable when they do hear it.

The rousing sun is a vivid line on the horizon in front of them, minutes from pouring out onto the world. It is a stark reminder of their looming deadline. A manifestation of that time ticking down.

“There,” Uncanny says, “Target acquired.” 

Adrien turns to look up at her, seeing her purple eyes trained on a spot below, silver and gold features clinically neutral. She’s in full superhero mode now. 

He says, “We’ll wait until the others engage Gaiabug, then” -

He isn’t able to finish his sentence, cut off by an ear-splitting shriek piercing the air. It is a frightening, deafening sound. The world rumbles in its wake, shivering, quaking, as Adrien’s heart rate spikes into a painful pace. 

Gaiabug is awake. 

His eyes drop compulsively to the jungle below. Fear lurches through him as he watches Gaiabug move through the trees, knowing it must be her even though the canopy conceals her from sight; she disturbs entire patches of trees as she moves, making her trajectory traceable like a snake slithering beneath sand. 

“I think they’ve engaged her, now,” says Uncanny.

Adrien feels off balance. He turns away from the jungle to look up at her, needing to blink a few times before her words truly register. 

Eagle’s voice comes in over their coms before he can find his voice. 

‘Mama bird has left the nest, ‘Canny. Better shake a tail feather before she catches up with Rena’s illusion.’

“Copy that,” Uncanny replies, and instantly begins to descend towards the canopy. 

Using her third eye, she cuts a clean opening in the canopy for them to pass through and they sink into the alien, underside world that Paris has become. More unsettling still is the knowledge that every tree they pass, used to be a Parisian.

Adrien forcibly averts his thoughts from that path of thinking, and takes a steadying breath. 

They’ve reached the ground now. Adrien’s feet crunch pebbled soil as Uncanny deposits him gently on the earth, all while his eyes track over the tangled landscape. The mangled, shadowed shapes of the twined tree trunks surrounding them, the seemingly undulating awnings above, the jungle floor, unnaturally clear of debris. Small seedlings - sprouted close to the large, interspersed tree trunks - are the only thing Adrien can see cluttering the floor besides the moss covered lianas, meandering lazily up from the earth.

The trees in this area of the jungle don’t have their roots exposed like the ones Gaiabug had puppeteered in that memory Bunnyx showed him, and he assumes this is because they’re pretty far from her nest - the giant banyan tree. Most likely, the trees, and their roots, become more sentient the closer to the nest that they are.

The jungle hangs in a hush so pristine that Adrien can hear the whirring of Uncanny’s elegant inner workings. 

They’re alone. 

His eyes pass slowly over each tree as he walks. 

“You can tell which one used to be Shadowmoth?”

Uncanny nods, her gaze already tracking slowly around them. Her eyes come to land on a twisting tree to her left, and she blinks. Then points. 

“That one,” she says, “I’m sensing three foreign anomalies present in that trunk.”

Adrien’s eyebrows crease. “What’s the third one? He’s only supposed to have the Butterfly and Peacock miraculous’.”

Uncanny shrugs, “I can’t tell that much… Maybe he had a third miraculous in secret?”

“Or maybe it’s a recent addition.” Adrien’s eyes narrow on the tree Uncanny had pointed out. “And you can cut them out without damaging them?”

“Affirmative,” Uncanny says, “But we’ll have to do some work… Just give me a moment.” She walks up to the trunk in question and holds a hand against the bark, expression concentrated as she feels around - leaving mental markers, perhaps - before stepping back and unleashing the laser of her third-eye. 

It slices the trunk in half, leaving a stump a foot taller than Uncanny as the topside crashes to the floor beside them. The echoing boom of its weight hitting the floor makes Adrien’s shoulders hunch up on a wince. 

Hopefully, Gaiabug hadn’t heard that.

The next lazer trims a neat block off the top, and Uncanny catches it as it flies into the air above her. It’s about the size of a soccer ball. She sets it softly on the floor and tells Adrien to, “Stand back,” before using her lazer with more precision and care to carve out three small, wooden nuggets. 

Then she plucks the clumps up and tosses one over to Adrien, producing and offering a small carving knife in addition.

“We’ll have to carve them out the rest of the way by hand, otherwise we run the risk of my lazer accidentally damaging them.”

Adrien takes the knife and sets diligently to the task. He starts on the edges, carving like you’d shave off the crust of an apple. He’s intensely aware of the time restraint they have, and that the distraction the other’s are posing for Gaiabug might begin to fail at any moment, but tries to force himself to remain calm and focused.

“Aha!” says Uncanny from beside him, already holding up an unearthed miraculous. “Is this the right one?”

Her excited expression slumps back into scrunched concentration when Adrien shakes his head no. 

“We’re looking for the butterfly miraculous. That’s the peacock.” And while good to have - good that they’ve recovered it - it won’t help them deakumatize Marinette. 

Another shave, and Adrien catches a glimpse of silver. Another shave. Another. And then the wood in the center starts to crumble, cracking open to reveal -

Adrien’s breath strangles off in his throat.

It isn’t a miraculous.

It’s his father’s wedding ring. 

Adrien’s entire vision pulses black as he’s plunged into disorientation. Confusion and denial barrel the air from his lungs. A muffled ringing hums in his ear as everything tunnels to the single loop of silver in the center of his palm. Very faintly he recognizes someone is saying his name - shaking his shoulder - but he doesn’t have control of his body anymore. He’s watching himself from a distance, falling away from himself as he sinks down, down, down. 

His dad is - oh god - his dad is -

“Adrien!”

Adrien lurches back into himself and snaps his eyes up to meet Uncanny’s. She’s kneeling in front of him, the first hints of emotion finally leaking onto her face - furrowed eyebrows, frantic eyes that calm only when they finally lock with Adrien’s.

“Oh, thank god,” she says in a rush, “I thought you’d been hurt or something. What’s wrong?”

Adrien’s hand unfurls in his lap, and Uncanny’s eyes snap down to take in the ring. 

“This was - this was the third anomaly,” Adrien says, his own voice sounding far away and numb, “It’s my father’s wedding ring.”

A horrible look of realization washes over Uncanny’s face at those words, and seeing it only serves to kick-start the panic inside him into full gear. 

Adrien says, truly realizing it for the first time, “My dad is Shadowmoth.”

And then he stops breathing. 

Time, inside a panic attack, can be a funny thing. Untraceable, slippery. And he loses his grip on it entirely. His vision blurs to flashes of color and shadow, ebbing in and out of clarity. The words play over and over in his mind as if in an echo chamber.

His dad is Shadowmoth.

His dad is Shadowmoth. 

Adrien thinks he might be sick. He screws his eyes shut and hones his focus on trying to calm down; It’s a battle just trying to work air down his throat and into his lungs.

Between a painful inhale and the next, Eagle is landing with a thud on the jungle floor in front of him.

His eyes track up to her face, dumbfounded as to how she got her so quickly - how much time has he lost? - but Eagle is looking at Uncanny.

“What happened?!” 

He hears her like a howling on a distant wave, lost at sea. 

But that isn’t right. He is the one the tides are pulling farther, and farther from solid ground. 

Uncanny says something that Adrien doesn’t hear, her and Eagle exchanging a few more words before time turns all watery and diluted in his brain once more, and the next thing he knows Eagle is kneeling down in front of him, determination burning in her eyes. 

Voice solemn, she says, “I’m so sorry, Adrien. I wish there was a way that you could process all of this in your own time, but time is the one thing we don’t have to spare. Hopefully you won’t hold it against me, using it without your permission.” 

Adrien can only blink at her blearily, vision blurring, lungs burning. 

She lifts her hand, palm pointing towards him, and enunciates loud and clear, “Liberation.”

Chapter Text

A heartbeat.

Then Adrien comes alive. 

He shoots to his feet in a blur, Eagle’s liberation wiring through him like molten electricity. The sensation wracks down his frame in heavy sheets, washing away every ugly fear and shaky uncertainty that had been inside him only moments before. 

When he gasps, even the air tastes different. Sharper. Thrumming with energy. 

Everything, down to the storms in his mind, seem calm and comprehensible and he realizes with a jolt that he can hear it - tinkling in the folds of a place he hadn’t known existed until now…

The song of time.

He quiets himself, and listens. 

The thrum of it swells all around him, twisting on the back of the wind caressing his cheek, intense in its intricacies, pouring and pouring through the now open floodgates. And when the notes finally crest into an ending, nothing has ever been clearer.

“Adrien?”

Adrien blinks his eyes open. Uncanny and Eagle are standing a few paces away, watching him with twinned, held-breath expressions.

Slowly, Eagle asks, “How do you feel?”

But that doesn’t matter anymore. Those parts of Adrien’s brain have been shut off, and the only thing remaining is his determination to save Marinette.

“I’m fine,” he answers, “Everything is a lot clearer to me now.” 

His eyes flick down to his father’s ring, still gripped in his palm. He tucks it over his thumb. The only finger big enough that it fits snugly. He waits for the swoop of despair and hurt and dread - but they never come. Whatever pain and loss awaits him on the other end of this liberation isn’t reachable now. 

Adrien looks up to address Uncanny. “We’ll continue as planned. May I have the butterfly miraculous, please?”

Her expression twists with guilt. It’s all Adrien needs to see to know something has gone horribly wrong. 

“Yeah,” she says, “About that…” then turns to share a harrowing look with Eagle. 

Adrien says, “What happened?”

Uncanny ducks her eyes to the floor, looking like she might be sick.

“We thought you weren’t going to be able to fight with the state you were in,” she begins, voice wavering unsteadily, “We thought someone else was going to need to wear the butterfly miraculous to deakumatize Gaiabug. And since Jessica already has Liiri we thought, I don’t know, maybe I could give it a try but -” her cupped hands come up, shaking, to reveal the butterfly miraculous. She says, “We didn’t know they can’t be worn by androids.”

Adrien’s eyes fall to the brooch. Directly down its center is a large, damning crack.

Instantly he feels the effects of the liberation flare up inside him, rushing in to meet and counteract the dread that the sight invokes in him, neutralizing it instead into a reaction of numb indifference. 

Bunnyx’s voice passes through his mind:

Be adaptive, be flexible. Don’t let the disruption of one path or course of action derail you from your goal. Shit happens, you understand? The point is to keep moving forward.

Adrien takes a slow, deep breath and says, “Call the others. I need Luka here, now.”

-

“I won’t be able to puppet my illusion very easily from this distance,” says Rena. When Uncanny and Eagle had returned with her and the others, she had been the first to swallow and process the bad news of the damaged butterfly miraculous. “So if we’re going to make a new plan, we need to do it fast.”

“I already have a new plan.” Adrien turns to Viperion. “We need your second chance, now.”

“Now?” Viperion asks, eyebrows furrowing. 

“Yes, now. Without the butterfly miraculous we’ll have to change three important aspects of our plan,” Adrien explains, “First, we’ll now need to secure the second ladybug earring in order for me to don the ladybug powers. Second, I’ll need to conjure and use a lucky charm to secure a magical ladybug reset. Third, we’ll have to now locate and destroy whatever object is holding the akuma to de-evilize it and free Marinette.” 

“Piece of cake,” Carapace croaks hoarsely. 

“I know it's more dangerous this way,” Adrien says slowly, “But the plan should still work. The most precarious element is identifying the akuma without Gaiabug retaliating by lashing out or hiding it.” His eyes flick to Luka. “Should be easy if she doesn't remember our previous attempts to find it, right?”

Understanding dawns in Luka’s eyes. “You want me to use my second chance so we can identify the object holding Gaiabug’s akuma?”

Adrien says, “Yes. Then you’ll reset to this moment and tell us what the object is, so that she won’t know that we’ve identified it.”

“Sounds like a solid plan,” says Eagle.

Viperion nods in agreement. “Let’s do it.”

Adrien says, “Rena, use your illusion to start drawing Gaiabug this way. Viperion only has five minutes once he’s used his second chance, and I don’t want him to have to waste half of that time crossing the jungle to reach her.”

“On it,” Rena says, pulling her flute around to play a quick, flighty tune. “She’s on her way.”

“Uncanny,” says Adrien, “Can you tell me how close Gaiabug is now?”

“Yes,” Uncanny says, turning intently to the left. “She’s approaching from the east. One thousand meters away, now. Nine hundred fifty. Nine hundred.”

The ground begins to rumble beneath them.

Adrien turns to Viperion, “Go, now.”

Viperion pulls his wrist up and twists the snake. “Second chance!”

An instant later Viperion’s body is thrown backwards, tossed off kilter as if he has been thrown back into this moment instead of beginning in it. His back hits the ground of the jungle, hard, loose rocks vibrating on the ground around him as Gaiabug draws closer. 

His chest is heaving, and his eyes are wide. 

“What happened?” Adrien falls to his knees at Viperion’s side. “What did you see?”

“The akuma“ - Viperion swallows, voice raspy - “The akuma it’s - it’s her earring. The Akuma is inside the ladybug earring Gaiabug is still wearing.”

No .

Adrien’s eyes fall closed

Voice shaking with horror, Rena says, “But that means -”

It means they can’t destroy the ladybug earring to release the akuma, because then there will be no way to conjure a lucky charm. It means Adrien will have to don an akuma-ridden pair of ladybug earrings and gamble the probability that he’ll be able to still transform and accomplish the task. He has never heard of such a thing, transforming with an akumatized miraculous, and can’t know if it’s even possible. 

But impossibility doesn’t frighten Adrien right now. 

Right now, in the liberated state he’s in, the only thing that is actually managing to get through the steel-laden bunker entrapping his fears, is the idea of losing Marinette. 

He opens his eyes. 

The wind is fluttering through the low-hung tree branches around them, rustling the leaves into a song.

Keep moving forward.

Adrien turns his attention back to the others. They’re in a fit of panic around him, verging on the edge of hysteria. 

“Everyone calm down,” he says, spreading his hands in a placating gesture. “This doesn’t affect the plan. Not really.”

Rena gives him a look like he’s lost his mind. “In what way does this not affect the plan?!”

Adrien squats to reach for a stick on the ground, and begins to draw a visual representation of his plan and strategy.

He says, “Here’s what we’re going to do.”

-

It happens like this. 

The others scatter into their various assigned places around the clearing, and Adrien remains standing at the edge where he can be visible as live bait. 

It had taken a bit of convincing to get the others to agree to this - Rena especially - but there wasn’t time to deliberate with Gaiabug already headed their way. They had to trust that Adrien could handle this. 

The last gamble they have to play.

The jungle floor rumbles underneath Adrien’s feet as Gaiabug approaches, up the pads of his feet and vertebrae of his spine to rattle his teeth.

The sound of Gaiabug’s approach is thunderous, a cacophony of crunching wood and rip-roaring shrieks echoing around him, caging him in. He can just make out her form through the still drowsy morning light fogging the treeline, a jagged silhouette moving towards him with frightening, inhuman agility. 

Come to me, he thinks as the adrenaline in him spikes, let me save you.

Her silhouette grows closer. 

And closer.

Adrien adjusts his stance and speaks clearly into his com, “Now, Rena.”

Rena’s mirage hits Adrien at the same moment that Gaiabug crashes through the treeline into the clearing in front of him. Adrien sees the moment that she sees him. She goes from monster to mouse in an instant, the sight of him making her lurch to a wrenching, stupefied stop. And it’s like in doing so she draws the rest of the world to a pause - the air between them hanging in rigid suspension. 

Adrien doesn’t dare even breathe.

The sight of Gaiabug in the flesh is nothing like seeing her on the screen of Bunnyx’s burrow. She is so much more harrowing in person than he had anticipated. He can feel the efforts of the liberation warring inside him, straining to smother the dread and heartbreak that the sight of her invokes. 

She’s nearly unrecognizable, more tree now than girl.

The wood in her eyes has spread. It overtakes the complete upper half of her face now, leaving just her delicate mouth and jaw still pink and human. Her hair is another story. Fallen loose from its ties, once silk-soft strands have hardened to individual branches, clacking faintly as they resettle into stillness after her speedy arrival. They are the only part of her moving. The rest of her has clenched into dangerous stillness, watching Adrien with those unseeable eyes. Unsettling more is her stance: more beast than biped. She’s crouched low to the floor, arms and legs showing hints of her escape from the banyan tree; she must’ve torn herself from it, because she is still half entrapped in it now, gnarled, reedy forearms tangled into a mess of torn roots where her hands and feet should be. 

An eldritch creature left to the forest to be forgotten.

All Adrien can see is Marinette. 

And all Gaiabug can see is the illusion Rena wants her to see; that Adrien is in possession of the butterfly miraculous, and has donned and activated its power. Even in this state, some part of Gaiabug knows that this means she should obey - even fear - him, but he can also see the gears of calculation whirring in her mind. If he gives her enough time, she’ll figure it out.

Adrien says, “Hello.”

Gaiabug’s entire demeanor rustles like the rising shackles of a wary dog, a snake cornered and ready to strike. 

Adrien dares moving forward. He steps out into the dappled dawn light, letting her see him, and reaches for his jacket flap, slowly revealing the butterfly miraculous pinned just inside - which has also been hit by Rena to appear intact and uncracked. 

The moment Gaiabug lays eyes on it she jerks forward, a terrible, chilling sound grating up her throat like a warning.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” he’s quick to say, not wanting her to take it as a threat, “I want to offer you a trade.”

She stops making that grinding noise, head slowly tilting in consideration.

“ Trrraaade ?” 

Gooseflesh raise in waves over his skin as he hears her speak for the first time. Her voice - it’s different. Disturbing . Just this side of not-human. Although, he has the strange feeling he has heard this kind of tone before… 

Then it hits him. Years ago, on his way to the dentist, Adrien had passed by a cat perched atop a hedge engulfing an old, wrought iron fence. It had been making this sound - this terrible, unsettling sound almost like it had been trying to imitate human speech, a sort of ‘wubububub’ that at some points he could have sworn formed actual words. But it still sounded wrong . Alien. Like those kinds of sounds weren’t meant to come out of a cat. 

That is how Gaiabug sounds now. 

“Yes,” says Adrien, holding himself perfectly still as Gaiabug starts to slowly stalk forward. “A trade. The butterfly miraculous, for one of your many miraculous’.”

She hisses, “ Caaan’t havvve earrrrring.”

“I don’t want the earring.” Adrien says, “I want the rooster talon.”

This, it seems, is not what Gaiabug was expecting. Her head tilts again, almost curiously. 

“ Wwhhyy ?”

“I have my reasons. And besides, the butterfly miraculous would fare far better with you in your… current state, don’t you think? Call it an investment in insurance.” 

Gaiabug creeps forward another step, wooden eyes never leaving Adrien’s face. Never blinking. Adrien forces himself to do the same. To remain just as unwaveringly sturdy under her gaze. 

“Do we have a deal?”

She moves another step closer, into the light of the canopy. “ Yesss ,” she hisses, “ Dealll .”

They are an arm span away from each other now. 

“On three,” Adrien says, reaching into his jacket flap. “One.” Gaiabug slips the rooster talon off of her thumb, the strike of Orikko’s light leaving her and returning to the jewelry in a flash. “Two.” Adrien grips the butterfly miraculous, beginning to tug. “Three.”

Everything happens at once. 

Adrien rips the miraculous from his jacket - effectively ruining the mirage - and deposits it onto Gaiabug’s palm at the exact moment his other hand snatches up the rooster miraculous she’d placed there. He yanks it and himself out of Gaiabug’s reach at the same moment Carapace falls from the canopy directly above her.

“SHELTER!” He booms, and slams the shelled dome snugly over Gaiabug. 

Adrien shoves the rooster miraculous onto his thumb before anyone can take their next breath, Orikko appearing in a flash before he’s shouting, 

“Sunrise!” 

The transformation crashes through Adrien, and he doesn’t waste any time once it has fully settled in his bones. He calls on the power of immobilization as Gaiabug - from underneath Carapace’s shelter - lets out an enraged roar, hand coming up blazing with her cataclysm. 

His voice cracks the air like a whip, “Now, Carapace!” 

Carapace is gone in an instant, leaping up as the cataclysm makes contact with his shelter and incinerates it to dust, clearing the path between them. 

Lifting his quill, he points it directly at Gaiabug, her arm still outstretched from the cataclysm.

“ IMMOBILIZE ! ” 

Gaiabug freezes instantly.

But her eyes are still locked on Adrien.Whom of which quickly renounces Orikko to give her a few crackers, leaving him for the first time in full, maskless, Adrien Agreste glory in front of her. 

He thinks he’s probably imagining the fissure of shock crackling across her face, those still human lips frozen on a parted gasp. 

“ Shit ,” Carapace hisses as he comes up to stand at Adrien’s side. They take in the sight of their mutated friend in front of them with a somber air of reverence. “How long will that hold her?”

“I’m not sure,” Adrien says, voice sounding faint and far away even to his own ears. He can’t looked away from Gaiabug. He can’t even blink. “But I don’t think we should waste time finding out.” 

He takes a tentative step forward. Gaiabug doesn’t move. Of course she doesn’t. She can’t. 

Another step.

“I’m going to help you, Marinette,” Adrien says as he closes the space between them. Her eyes are still fixed on his, like a painting whose eyes follow you as you move. He lifts a hand to brush the backs of his fingers down her cool, wooden cheek. “I’m going to save you,” he whispers, “I promise.”

Then he lifts gentle fingers to unclasp the single ladybug earring still pierced through her ear, blackened by the akuma, and steps back. 

It feels like falling out of his own gravity, and for a moment he has to steady himself. Resolidify the steel in his bones. 

Then he raises his hands and slips the earring into his ear.

Carapace’s voice carries over to him, softly somber. “Are you sure about this, Adrien?”

Adrien turns to meet his gaze. “It’s okay,” he says, as much for him as the others listening in, “This will work.”

Carapace lets out a shaky exhale. “Just be careful, okay?”

Adrien gives his friend a small, but fierce, smile. Into the com he says, “Be ready with your second chance, Viperion. If something goes wrong, that’s our only insurance.”

Viperion responds dutifully, “Ready when you are, boss.”

Adrien’s eyes flick back to Gaiabug, then fall closed. 

“Tikki, spots on.”

It’s like being struck by lightning. 

The ferocity of it crashes through the crown of his head down into the rest of his body in debilitating droves, and the moment the power of creation tries to latch itself to his nerves he knows. 

Something is deeply wrong with Tikki. 

Instead of coming back into himself in a transformed state, he is instead launched deep into the depths of his subconscious. A foggy place only darkening as the ground beneath him shifts and crumbles and shakes, a hole fastly opening to swallow him into nothingness. 

Then - a spark of pink light, flittering across the edge of his vision. 

Adrien lunges for it before it can skip away, and he feels his fingertips just barely brush the ends - 

His touch ignites an explosion of sunlight.

He’s deposited into the warm hold of a memory - but no, Adrien thinks as his eyes span his new surroundings, that’s not right. This is no memory of his if a memory is what it truly is. 

He is sitting in front of a golden landscape, the tail of the burning sun tucked behind the black horizon, its bleeding brilliance saturating the entire world into a concerto of sweltering colors. He’s on a hillside, above a tidy valley cupped around a lulling lake. 

And walking along its edge are Adrien and Marinette.  

He watches with astonishment as this version of himself - for it clearly isn’t the real him - cajoles Marinette with gentle prodding, coaxing her into an easy, weightless dance. They float around the lake edge with all the effortlessness of two lungs breathing in harmony, pulled into each other as if chasing the other’s gravity - desperate for it; Unable to survive without it. 

They twirl and twirl and twirl across the ground until they’re spinning out onto that glittering lake surface, melting into the colors of the landscape as it begins to undulate and melt together, so that they are just another swipe of oil in the hundreds making up the painted landscape.

Then, that spark of pink light again. 

There and gone it goes in a flash, and this time when Adrien leaps for it, he knows what it is. 

Or rather, who.

“Tikki!”  Adrien calls, but his voice sounds like it’s bubbling up from underwater. “Please! We need your help!”

“I’m sorry, Adrien,” Tikki says, but her voice is all wrong. Distorted in a drooping way that reminds him of melting plastic. “I can’t seem to - “ and her light flickers, glitching between purple-black and pink-white, like she’s infected with an illness quickly spreading.

The golden landscape melts into that endless void of blackness all around him. His ears begin to ring.

“Tell me what to do,” Adrien pleads, before she can blink away entirely, but he can hardly hear his voice now. “Marinette needs us, Tikki! Please!”

Tikki’s voice comes broken up like static. “ Cr - eee - ate. Creeee - ate. Crrrreate .” 

“Create?” Adrien echoes, eyebrows furrowing;  “Create what?”

But Tikki doesn’t respond. Her light has gone out, blackness enveloping even sound from existence. He squeezes his eyes shut - or at least he thinks he is. It’s hard to tell even where his body is in space while surrounded by so much darkness… He didn’t know anything could be so black.

If only he had something to lighten the dark, a candle or a match or a - 

Memory. 

In an instant Adrien tries again to squeeze his eyes shut, calling upon all of his composure and clarity of mind so that he can visualize in perfect detail the warmth of Marinette’s brightness, the exhilaration of knowing he is the object of her affections - him, Adrien Agreste, when she could have her pick of anyone, when she could choose the man in the moon and it still not be a bright enough fit for her golden soul. 

And she chose him. 

Flares go off in bursts all around him at the thought, dazzling displays of light twisting and morphing through the vast void as he holds tight to that feeling. 

He can sense an unsteadiness in his tether to Tikki - unsettled like the crumbling edge of a cliff, moments from fully collapsing if too much pressure is applied. 

So he leans as far away from that edge as he can. 

Vaulting himself instead into the place in his subconscious that he has carved out for Marinette, clusters of memories spiraling into view like twinkling stars sewn into the canvas of a night sky. He leaps out towards the brightest, warmest star within reach, fleeing the vast void of Tikki’s fastly deteriorating mindspace.

“ Crrrrreeeate ” - Tikki’s garbled voice beckons from behind him - “ Chhaaarrrmm. ”

And then he is falling full bodily into the memory he’d leapt towards, the opening to Tikki’s void swallowing back closed behind him. 

He’s deposited onto the scene of Marinette’s birthday party, the two of them standing close under a sparkle of fairy lights in the middle of the floor. Her eyes are full and bright and burning, looking up at Adrien as if her next breath depended on their continued close-proximity. He watches himself hold the small gift box out to Marinette, pasted into his old selves place in the memory and thus only able to watch as it unfolds. 

It’s different watching her open the lucky charm he’d made for her now, after everything that tonight has revealed. Now , Watching the pure delight that sparks in Marinette’s eyes makes him ache with regret. 

How could he have been so, so blind.

He hears himself say, “ I always carry the lucky charm you gave me wherever I go, and I think it works pretty well! ” as he pulls out the matching lucky charm that Marinette had gifted him first. He still has it now, tucked away in the pocket of his suitcase back on the private jet.

“You’re so wonderful!” Marinette is saying. “Oh, ah - it’s wonderful! Uh - oh, what a charm! The charm - I mean, I’ll wear the charm. With luck! Basically, um, thank you?”

The ache in him worsens. He feels his longing for Marinette only growing here, so close to this too-real feeling. It would be so easy for him to continue to hide here.Would be so easy for him to let the memory whisk him away from the real life nightmare awaiting him. 

But not easy enough. 

Because this Marinette, here in the safe folds of his memory, doesn’t need him. This Marinette doesn’t have a heartbeat, doesn’t have a clock counting down above her head, doesn’t know that Adrien is Chat Noir or that a - literal - apocalyptic heartbreak awaits her only months down the line.

This Marinette doesn’t need rescuing. The one waiting for him on the outside of his mind, imprisoned in a shell of her own making, does. 

Adrien feels himself - this version in the memory - wrap a hand around Marinette’s lucky charm, and he focuses all of his attention into the sensation of its weight on his palm. He can still feel the ladybug powers coursing in the background of his mind - like the soundtrack of crashing waves in his ears - but like Tikki, they are unstable. Crumbling the longer they’re handled.

And so Adrien treads very, very carefully. 

He squeezes phantom fingers around that phantom lucky charm, entire body locking up from jaw to heel as he forces the memory - the ladybug powers - to bend to his will. It doesn’t matter how unsettled the ground becomes as he wades into Tikki’s domain. Right now, he has enough fortitude and presence of mind to stabilize the both of them. 

Create , calls Tikki’s voice in his mind. 

And then the not-so physical lucky charm in his hand becomes very tangible indeed. He gasps, fingers clenching white-knuckled on the wooden string of beads as the ground finally gives and he falls. 

Fast.

And awakes into chaos. 

The jungle is swirling in a cyclone around him, trees the size of skyscrapers and roots like furious pythons lashing through the air as Gaiabug - at the eye of the storm - manipulates it all as if a conductor of her own personal calamity. 

Her arms are thrown out wide in the air, even her mouth wooden now, open and shrieking. The sound rips through the air, so ferocious in strength that it causes the dome of Carapace’s shelter around them to quake. 

“Adrien!” comes Rena’s voice from behind him. 

He can barely hear her over the cacophony of sound he's been thrown into. 

Her hands are suddenly at his back, helping him sit up, and he can see the others scattered in various states of readiness around them, all poised for the moment Gaiabug breaks through the creaking shelter. 

“Carapace,” Adrien rasps, swallowing to wet his dry throat as he pushes himself the rest of the way up. Then, louder so that the person in question can hear, “ Carapace !”

Carapace’s head snaps over, hands still outstretched to hold his shelter in place as he peers at Adrien over his shoulder.

“Adrien,” he says, a look of relief quickly cracking into panic when he sees that Adrien isn’t transformed. “ It didn’t work? ”

“It did,” Adrien assures, vaguely aware of Rena’s gaze snapping over to him, “But not in the way you might think.”

“Oh my god,” Rena says, “For the people without liberation brain, please?”

“Everything will soon make sense,” Adrien says.

“That isn’t an explanation, Adrien!”

Adrien turns to Carapace. “You need to retract your shelter, and detransform to recharge Wayzz’s strength.”

“Uhh, sure thing boss,” Carapace says, “Just as soon as we find a way to avoid getting pulverized by the all-powerful jungle guardian waiting on the other side.”

“No,” Adrien says. “Retract the shelter now.”

This time, it isn’t just Carapace and Rena looking at him like he’s lost it. Every single person under the dome turns to give him that look now.

“I’m going to break the ladybug earring and release the akuma,” Adrien continues, unruffled, “When I do that, I need you to create a shelter around the akuma so that it can’t get away until we can use this.” 

He unfurls his palm, and reveals to them the lucky charm he’d taken from the ladybug infused mindspace of his memories, now colored red with black spots. 

“Oh, thank god ,” Eagle says, Rena nearly sagging to the floor in relief as Uncanny beams and Luka laughs victoriously. 

Carapace whoops, “Oh shit! It worked! You did it, dude! You actually did it! I mean - of course, I never doubted you for a second.”

Adrien rolls his eyes unheatedly as Eagle shoves at Carapace’s shoulder.

Rena starts, “But how did you - actually, you know what? Nevermind. You can tell me when all of this is over. It’ll make for great exclusive content when I write about this moment on the Ladyblog.”

Adrien smiles. A true, genuine smile - the feeling of warmth spreading and pooling low inside of him at the rejuvenated optimism in her voice. At the idea of all of this soon being over. 

He tells Rena, “I promise.”

Gaiabug unleashes another devastating blow of roots and bark against the dome, and it gives an answering, foreboding groan like the wails of a wounded animal. Any moment now, the shelter would give. 

“Alright.” Adrien reaches up to unclasp the akumatized ladybug earring, taking it off to hold it in his palm. He finds a flat stone and sets the earring on top of it, bringing his heel over it as he meets and locks eyes with Carapace. When he gives him an answering nod, Adrien says, “Now.”

His heel crunches the ladybug earring against the stone, feeling as well as hearing the metal snap at the exact moment the shelter flickers out of view above them. 

Wayzz swirls into existence at Nino’s shoulder, tiny arms already outstretched to accept the food being handed to him. 

Adrien’s eyes drop to the squirming, vibrant purple akuma under his foot, then flicker over to Gaiabug, who has frozen in wait as the deakumatization process begins. It drains out of her from her feet up, a billowing cloud of purple and black erasing the wooden girl and leaving behind Marinette, inch by blessed inch. 

Wayzz has finished his food. 

Nino shouts, “Wayzz, shell on!” 

The transformation ignites his silhouette in blinding green-white light, and then Carapace is standing at the ready once more, eyes already poised on the fleeing akuma. 

“Shelter!” A soccer ball sized shell encloses the akuma in the air, and it drops like dead weight to the ground, successfully trapped inside. 

But Adrien isn’t watching the Akuma anymore. He’s watching Marinette reamerge from her wretched stasis. 

Finally. 

His feet consume the distance between them before his mind can make the conscious decision to move, arriving at Marinette’s side like a communicant taking to worship. 

Her soft, beautiful features reappear as the wood is peeled back, until she has finally been restored to her former self, stumbling and all. She sways unsteadily - eyes squeezed closed - and Adrien catches her. Their forearms pressing flesh together as she falls against him, Adrien’s cupped under hers in his capture of her weight. Dark, sweet lashes fan wide over the delicate skin of her cheekbones. She slumps against Adrien, soft noises leaving her lips while she comes back into herself. 

The kwami’s hover above them where they’d reappeared alongside Marinette; Like the other members of the team- like the very air in the jungle - they hang in anticipatory silence.

Adrien can’t tear his eyes from Marinette’s wakening face. Her eyelashes begin to flutter. Her nose scrunching as she turns to press it against Adrien’s chest. 

“Mmph,” she grumbles.

Adrien whispers, “ Marinette ,” his breath rustling loose strands of hair by her ear. Gently, he lifts his fingers to tuck them behind her ear, the backs of his knuckles brushing her jaw.

Then her eyes snap open. 

She tosses herself away from him - not making it far, enclosed in his hold as she is, the pair of them folded around one another on the jungle floor - her eyes swiveling up to peer at him like a stupified owl.  

“Adrien!” She squawks. 

Her arms instinctively rise to push them apart, but Adrien doesn’t let her have an inch. He tightens his hold on her, sliding the flats of his palms around to cup her back, thrilling at the splash of red bursting across her cheeks. 

“ Marinette .” Adrien lets out a breathless laugh. “You’re okay.”

It feels as if a new star is being born inside of him. Burning, burning, burning him from within. The rational part of his brain is telling him it’s the effects of the liberation in action, but a larger, more prominent part of him knows it has everything to do with seeing the light returning to Marinette’s eyes. Which are currently enormous, flitting all over Adrien’s face in a frantic scurry as she blinks sporadically - like doing so will clear up the situation she’s found herself in. 

“Y-Yes,” she says - and he decides in that moment that her voice is the sweetest sound he’s ever heard, “I’m okay.” Her eyes flick sidelong to lock with Rena. “But I’m beginning to think I may have missed something big.” 

Rena, teary eyed (and doing a remarkable job holding herself back so that the two of them can have their moment) says, “ Huge , girl.”

“I don’t mean to interrupt,” comes Carapace's voice, sounding strained. “But we do still have the issue of what the hell we’re gonna do to de-evilize this akuma.” 

The two of them look over to where he’s poised above said akuma. Marinette’s eyes immediately drop to it, then fly to the crushed ladybug earring on the flat stone beside it. 

Adrien feels the noise Marinette makes as much as he hears it. A gutted, wounded sound reverberating up from her throat as the realization strikes. Her hands shoot up reflexively and when she feels her ladybug earrings gone, her fear erupts on her face.

“ Oh god ,” her voice wavers, a dew drop posed atop a shivering thread. “Did I -” she turns those breathtaking azure eyes back up at him - “Did I get akumatized?” 

“Yes,” Carapace says, before Adrien can so much as open his mouth. His arms are quivering with the effort to keep the shelter corporeal around the akuma, mere moments from transforming back. “And it’s a long, terrifying story that we can all tell around a campfire sometime, once this akuma has been de-eviled. ”

Marinette’s eyebrows furrow in concentration. “It won’t matter without a -“

“Lucky charm?” Adrien says, holding up the one he’d pulled from his mindspace.

Her face lights up instantly, a relieved gasp punching through her lips. 

“I-It’s the lucky charm I gave you,” she says, trying to school her tone even though Adrien can tell that the sight of it pleases her. Then in the span of a moment, that soft expression leads to confusion. “But the earrings,” she says, “How did you - ?”

In a conspiratorial tone, Viperion says, “We’re all still waiting to hear that ourselves.”

“ Hello, ” Carapace stresses, “The akuma!”

Marinette transitioned into her Ladybug demeanor with impressive ease, her back straightening, brow hardening.

“We can use the rooster to conjure the power of the yo-yo, which can be used to de-evilize the akuma.” Then, that steel-boned manner softening shyly as her eyes flick over to Adrien. They’re still tangled together on the floor, her smaller body practically cradled in his arms. “Then you can throw your lucky charm, and reset the world.”

Adrien just blinks at her as he processes her plan - such an obvious, but simple plan he can’t believe he didn’t think of it - before his face is bleeding into a helplessly smitten smile.

His hands fall to grip hers, and squeeze. “I am so glad that you’re back.”

“Oh!” Marinette’s cheeks erupt with that beautiful rouge splash, wide eyes blinking quickly. “Oh - uh, well, I -”

“Get a room!” Eagle calls from their left, hands cupped around her mouth to project the words.

If possible, Marinette grows even redder, her stammering revving into fifth gear- and Adrien wants to kiss her. 

He wants to kiss her so badly that he aches with it, the feeling enveloping him all the way to his toes. But not here. Not yet. There’s still one more thing he has to do. 

So, still grinning like a dopey fool, Adrien squeezes Marinette’s hands one last time before rising to cross the space to the trapped akuma. He tightens the talon on his thumb and says,

“Orikko, sunrise!” 

-

And so the world is reset, every trace of their battle erased. Everything but the memories, and the hours that have passed. 

The sun is still rising on the new day around them, now clear of the jungle debris and towering trees. The seven of them stand scattered in a tidy, cobble-stone lined courtyard, vibrant roses spilling buds and perfume all around them. Adrien hears, tucked somewhere out of view, a private fountain trickling. Now all completely transformed back, they make a rather stupefied picture, still waiting for the surreality to wear off. 

They had done it.

They had saved the world. 

They had saved Marinette. 

She is standing a few paces from Adrien, golden sunlight haloing over her shoulder. The liberation has long since worn off, but even still there isn’t a trace of reservation or fear in Adrien’s body as he covers the distance between them in three swift, decisive steps (a very faint part of his brain notices Alya shepherding everyone else out of the courtyard so they can have privacy.)

“Adrien,” she says, barely above a whisper.

He feels like he might shake apart, the relief inside him is so fierce.

“Marinette.”

Neither one has so much as blinked since he stopped in front of her. Then, at the same time they’re both blurting,

“I’m sorry!”

And clamp their mouths shut at the unexpected synchronicity, which leads to them bubbling into laughter immediately after. 

Adrien says, “But we don’t have to talk about that right now. We’ll have plenty of time later. Right now I just -” and he takes a huge, filling breath, knowing that there’s still work to be done, there’s still the matter of Shadowmoth’s identity. But he refuses to give up this golden moment quite yet. 

An hour, yes, then he’ll be ready to get back to work.

“Let’s go to breakfast,” he says, “You pick the destination. Any place you want, we’ll go.”

Marinette lets out a flustered, ringing laugh. “Don’t think I’ll let you get off that easy,” she teases, “I want to know everything that I missed.”

“I love you,” Adrien says. He steps forward to capture her hands between them as he does, thrilling at the way the words make her eyes gleam, the way they take her breath away, “Anything else, I can tell you over breakfast.”

The emotion unfolds on her face in waves, her mouth working, bright eyes gleaming with brimming tears. 

“Oh, Adrien,” she gasps, “I -”

Another step forward, brilliant morning light spilling between them as Adrien drops his forehead to rest against hers. 

“I know,” he whispers, and with those words feels her finally let go of the last whisps of tension in her body. She surrenders against him and he supports her weight as if a gift bestowed upon him. 

The future is theirs to create, and Adrien can’t wait to get started.

♥️ F I N ♥️