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Everytime Marinette had a break from school, she made sure to keep her alarms on for just the first day. The second day she would turn them off and let herself wake up on her own time, but the first day, she allowed herself to relish in the satisfaction of going back to sleep.
The first morning of winter break, she was met with a crashing alarm and an oddly gray light above. Had there been a normal amount of light, perhaps she would have just pulled her sheet over her head and fallen back into her rest.
Instead, she sat up and put her fingers against the glass, feeling it — ice cold. It dawned on her: the window was covered in snow.
It had snowed.
She froze, fingertips still pressed against the glass, and looked over at Tikki, who was resting peacefully on her pillow, unaffected by the sound of the alarm.
Rigidly, she dragged her hand down and began to step down her ladder into the main area of her room, avoiding her window. Her mother would surely have hot water on in the kitchen, which Marinette could use to make tea or hot chocolate, and she could grab a pastry from the bakery like she always used to do.
Only that would involve the big, open windows of the floors below her, and it would probably involve her mother asking her to look at how beautiful the snow is today, and maybe even it would involve a weather report, and...
The day was young. Marinette sat at her desk instead, reaching out and closing her curtains with her eyes half-closed.
Social media was too risky; too many people might be posting photos of their neighbor’s roofs covered with snow. She instead ended up playing solitaire, the one that comes built into the computer. And that lasted a while.
Longer than it would have another day, anyway.
She only stopped playing, in fact, when her phone went off. She faintly heard Tikki’s yawn above her before the sound of the alarm began to get louder, and she turned to see the kwami bringing it to her.
“It’s Adrien,” she said. Marinette smiled — it was fake and they both knew it — and grabbed the phone, taking a breath before answering.
“Morning, Kitty,” she said.
“Why hello, Milady. How are you doing on this fine snowy morning?”
She swung herself away from the desk, looking at her room, and smiled faintly as she leaned back. “I’m good.”
“Well, that’s excellent to hear. I was hoping that we could cram in a patrol today, just in case the bad weather causes any issues. If it’s snow problem with you, it’s snow problem for me.”
Her smile became all the more genuine. “That sounds good, but I don’t think I’m feeling up for it today. You go ahead, though. Have fun.”
Marinette’s smile faded in the pause that followed. She didn’t know what to say, or what she should have said, but she desperately regretted saying what she did.
“Are you okay?” Adrien asked, his voice lower, softer. “You don’t sound like yourself. Are you sick?”
She shook her head even though she knew he couldn’t see. “I’m just... tired. I forgot to turn my alarm off, so I woke up early and couldn’t get back to sleep. That’s all.”
Marinette could practically see his eyebrows knitting together. “Should I come over? If it would make you feel better, I will.”
“Adrien —”
“Coming over now. ETA five minutes, be ready.”
He’d already hung up, and the quick ETA meant he was coming as Chat. Another day, she might have done more to prepare — get out of her pajamas, at least — but today she was too tired. Too afraid of what she would see if she accidentally glanced out the still-uncovered window.
“Marinette, are you okay?” Tikki asked.
She swallowed what was left in her mouth and nodded. “Didn’t get much sleep. I’m all good. I’ll be able to catch up by the time the break is over.”
The kwami didn’t say anything, just kept hovering in front of her, her inner eyelids more sloped than normal. But Marinette just looked down at her hands, picking at her nails — she’d done such a good job recently of not picking at them, but quickly her thumb was shorter than the others, then her index finger, then her middle finger too. Just as she was moving to her ring finger, a thump sounded above.
Tikki quickly flew up to the hatch and unlocked it, and light flooded in as Chat Noir lifted the window, the snow sliding off the glass.
Marinette shielded her eyes.
Only a moment later, he was standing in the middle of her room, smiling at her, fangs poking out the side of his lips. She found another real smile in her to mirror back at him — sadder than his, with less teeth, but anything less than that would have been fake.
“Good morning, Milady,” he said. “Are you enjoying your break?”
“More now than I was before. Now keep it quiet, my parents can’t know you’re here.”
He walked up to where she sat, still in her desk chair, still looking away from her computer, and planted a kiss on her forehead. “ Paw-leased to hear it.” She noticed a single white snowflake on his arm, big and defined enough that she could see the pattern of the fractal, that she could see as it melted away against the black leather of his suit.
He stood up straight above her and they made quiet eye contact for a moment more, still smiling at each other, before Marinette didn’t have a smile in her anymore. As she let her lips go loose, Chat began to frown. “What’s wrong, Mari?”
“Nothing.”
“You’re not yourself.”
“Maybe I’m hibernating. Ladybugs do that during the winter, you know.”
Chat turned his head to where Tikki hovered nearby, and Tikki shook her head. “None of my holders have done that before.” They both looked sternly at Marinette, who just sighed, relaxing her neck and looking down at her chest, closing her eyes as she did.
“I’m tired.”
The safety of her closed eyes helped keep out the blinding white light that still managed to seep in — through the cracks in the blinds, through the uncovered window, through the recently cleaned off skylight.
Marinette heard a whisper from Chat, but paid it no mind until she heard his feet sliding along the floor and felt his gloved hands picking up her own. He had crouched down so that she was looking right at him, his eyebrows knitted together like she knew they would be.
“Are you okay?” he asked, his voice barely over a whisper.
“I just — I want to stay here.”
“You can stay here as long as you like, but I’m staying here until I know you’re okay.”
She broke her hands away from his and turned her chair away from him.
“I’ll be fine so long as I stay here.”
In her peripheral vision, she saw him stand up and hear him mutter, “Plagg, claws in.” The green light of his detransformation flashed and he walked over so he stood in front of her again, though he didn’t crouch down this time. When she looked up, she saw that he wore a Santa hat.
The same Santa hat she made for him last year, with red fabric that had white snowflakes and white fur trim and three extra pom poms coming out of the big pom pom at the end. He smiled at her, this one less flashy than his Chat smile. As Chat, his smile was always larger-than-life; as Adrien, it was cozy, just enough to fill the room.
“Then I’ll stay here too.”
“You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I’ll leave through the skylight and go in through the front. I know your parents will let me stay.”
“You should go patrol. I’m sure there’s plenty of good you can do.”
“My gut is telling me that the most good I can do is in this room.”
She turned back to her desk this time, so he wouldn’t be able to walk in front of her again, and looked down at her keyboard.
Marinette hated talking about this with Adrien. Hated talking about it with anyone, really — Bunnix and Alya too — but most of all with Adrien. She knew he blamed himself for actions he never took, a timeline that never existed. A timeline that was her fault, really, for being reckless.
He walked around to her other side and kneeled next to her, gently reaching for her face, his hand gently pulling her jawline toward himself. “Are you afraid of something?” he asked.
Slowly, ever so slightly, Marinette nodded. He may not have even seen the motion, but the way his fingers softly brushed against the skin of her cheek, he felt it.
“You can tell me. I won’t use it against you. I won’t make fun of you.”
She looked downward, afraid to meet his eyes, the whites of his detransformed eyes. One of his knees was planted on the ground, the other leg attached to the floor by the sole of his foot, like he was about to propose —
Look on the bright side, milady, he once said to her. Now that we're done with secrets, we can tie the knot.
No, that wasn’t him — that was a dream. A nightmare.
A lie.
“I’m... afraid. That I’ll see Paris in white, and it will look like...”
Like....
“Like... Chat Blanc?” he finished for her.
Face still pointed downward, his fingers still brushing her cheek, Marinette aimed her eyes up at Adrien until they were making eye contact. Green eyes, blond hair. His skin had paled in the winter, but it didn’t mean anything. It just meant that there was less sun.
Less sun, more moon...
She looked at the ground again.
“It’s different. I know that. Then, it was all bleached white, and now there’s snow covering it. But I’m scared. I don’t know how I’ll react, and that scares me most of all.”
“You don’t have to leave your bedroom,” he promised. “We can stay here all day.”
“But what about when I do?” she asked. “When it gets snowy on a day where I have to go to school, or there’s an emergency that Ladybug has to deal with... No one knows, Adrien. No one can know. Not everyone can be kind to me the way you are. I need to be strong — I’m just being weak right now. If I don’t learn to get over myself, I’ll just end up hurting people.”
They sat there in the winter silence for a moment. Adrien took his hands away from Marinette’s face, and all too soon — she wasn’t ready. But he let his legs down, sitting criss-crossed on the floor, and gazed blankly toward the wall opposite of them.
“I used to do that too,” he said. “I saw my hurt as weakness. I thought that because other people responded negatively to it, I was hurting them too. I was perpetuating it. Passing it on. I thought that made me a bad person. And now... It’s easy for me to look at it and blame someone for my hurt. But just because there’s no one to blame for the snow falling from the sky doesn’t mean you aren’t being hurt. And if you let yourself get hurt over and over and over... It won’t make you strong. It’ll just make the fallout worse.”
Marinette slid down her chair and joined him on the floor. “I don’t know how I can prevent the fallout, then. If it’s inevitable then what’s the difference?”
Adrien grabbed her hand, rubbing his thumb across the soft triangle of skin between her thumb and index finger. “I don’t think it’s inevitable. I think you’re a lot stronger than the things that hurt you. But you’re only gonna get hurt worse if you try exposure therapy on your own. We can help you. Me, and Alya, and Bunnix, and even the Guardians... There are people you can go to. People who will protect you and help you feel safe. You don’t need to shut yourself in your room alone. You don’t need to go through this alone. Even if all we can do is promise you that it’s gonna be okay... We want to do that. We want to help.”
Marinette stayed silent for a moment, looking at her nails — first, second, third were all shorter than the fourth and fifth. A sign of her weakness, of her inability to stay strong, her inability to just not pick at her nails.
She asked, “Where are Tikki and Plagg?”
“I asked Tikki to leave. I guess Plagg decided to follow her on his own.”
They sat in silence for a moment.
“Assigning blame doesn’t solve the problem,” Adrien said softly, “but if it helps, know that this is still his fault. It’s all his fault. It’s not the snow’s fault for existing, and however much I feel like it is, it’s not alternate-me’s fault for getting akumatized. It’s his fault.”
They’d never really settled on whether to call him by his legal name or his villain name. They always just ended up calling him, well, him.
“That’s the thing,” Marinette said. “We defeated him. I should have been better than anything he did to me. I... I should be stronger than the snow.”
“You are,” Adrien said. “You’re so much stronger than it. Doesn’t mean you need to subject yourself to it.”
“I just... I can’t stop thinking. What if I can’t stop myself from seeing the snow? I don’t know what will happen. Maybe I’ll be fine, or maybe I’ll have a panic attack, or maybe...”
She didn’t want to say it. The word flashback... It held so much weight. Gravity. People only got flashbacks when something really bad happened to them. What happened to her wasn’t that bad, it was just...
It wasn’t normal. But maybe she deserved it. She got the honor of being a superhero, being Ladybug, being beloved by all of France; she got a wonderful boyfriend and a great group of friends around her.
She got everything in return for what she gave up; did it not balance out?
She had done all the research. She knew the vocabulary, the cliches. PTSD. Triggers. Flashbacks. Trauma dreams. She even knew that for many people, to not allow themselves the privilege of using these terms, this vocabulary — it was an act of self-sabotage, and maybe even disdain for the people who used the terms.
Marinette didn’t want it to be like that, but she could never imagine herself being so traumatized, so afraid. It had been months, and she got around day to day — was it really that bad?
And yet here she was, sitting on her floor, holding her boyfriend’s hands, blinds closed on the beautiful first snowy day of the season.
“No one’s judging you if you want to stay in your room all day,” Adrien said. “And if it gets snowy when we have school, I can come over and guide you into the building with a blindfold. It doesn’t matter if people judge, Mari. They don’t know. But the people who know love you, and we want to help.”
Finally, she looked up at him, meeting his eyes. Tears were pooling in the corner of his eyes, and suddenly her own eyes were burning too. Snot dripped out of her nose, but she still found it in her to smile and said, “I love you. And I want to let you help me.”
“I have a plan.” Suddenly a smile graced his lips, his tears leaking into the corners of his mouth.
“Yeah?” she asked, managing to choke out a laugh.
“I’m going to transform, and leave out your skylight, and enter through the bakery. I’m going to bring up two croissants and pains au chocolat and I’ll ask your mom to make us hot chocolate and I’ll come up here and we’ll pretend like we’re just staying here because it’s too cold, no other reason. We’ll pretend I was never here.”
In the corner of her eye, a pinkish red dot and a dark void floated toward them.
“That sounds good.”
“Plagg, claws out.”
Without another word, Chat Noir bounded up the ladder and out the skylight, brushing the snow over the glass on his way out so the glass darkened again.
“Are you okay?” Tikki asked Marinette, hovering right in front of her head. “You... never mentioned this.”
“I didn’t want to worry you.”
“I can help.”
She nodded. “I know.”
Tikki rested on her shoulder and a moment later, the trapdoor of her floor opened up, Adrien popping through, smiling, genuinely, the corners of his eyes creasing with joy. He held a plate in his hand with two croissants and two pains au chocolat.
“Morning, Mari,” he said, stepping up and planting a kiss on her forehead. “Your mom is gonna bring some hot chocolate up once it’s ready.”