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The ending is precipitant. Whoever it was that hid behind Hawkmoth’s mask is gone as his miraculous pass to Lila Rossi’s hands. And Lila Rossi is more vengeful than they knew, fiercer on the battlefield of magic than in high school intrigues, as ruthless with people’s lives as she once was with a classmate’s friendships.
Hawk Moth carefully plucked open the seams of people’s minds. Farfalla barely bothers making the snip into the fabric of civilian life before she tears the city apart. Her impatience forces their hands, and her fall is brutal, sudden, and literal.
As Lila Rossi takes the step back from the platform no visitors are allowed on the Eiffel Tower, twenty-eight others have already gone before her, at times and corners of life where Ladybug’s power could not reach.
“The miraculous were never meant for children,” says Su-Han, and that is the only comfort he can give as Marinette weeps in her room, in a grief that she can only share with Alya and this ancient man. Not her parents, not her other friends, not a school counsellor or priest because a professional oath of confidentiality is worthless when magic is involved. Marinette has shut her mouth and swallowed her tears and listened and nodded and carefully not said a word until she is safely in the company of the only people who know who she is.
“I’m not a child,” she replies as the Master of the Guardians comes to stand in front of her.
“No,” he says, mien unreadable, “you no longer are. And even when you were still, you were remarkable.”
“The miraculous are so dangerous,” says Marinette, and she scowls at the miraculous box and the destruction within it. “Hawkmoth got to them. Lila got to them from him. We’ve got them all back now, but who’s to say someone won’t try to take them again? Enough people know how they work, probably more than we know about. They know where to look for them, and they’re going to, for sure. And the only one who can hide them all is me.”
“The obvious solution,” says Su-Han, “is to take the box to a place where there are no outsiders, and many guardians.”
“You want to take it to the Temple?”
“I want to take you to the Temple. The world is changing, and the way you have changed the miraculous is considerable, and impossible to ignore. Your effect on them, your unorthodox approach, is unlike anything recorded. There are so many things for us to teach you, and to learn from you.”
“I’d have to leave my life here.”
“If you wish to keep the box in Paris, that is your prerogative, Ladybug. You will have to decide what is the wiser choice. If you wish for the box to remain, then I trust that you can protect it. But if you elect to take it away, then don’t forget that you are the Guardian. You will take the box yourself, or you will have to name another person to be the Guardian. With all that entails.”
Safety checks and precautions and doors without locks to keep secret the power that can create and destroy indiscriminately. Being Ladybug was exhilarating; being the guardian of the miraculous was a duty that Marinette had never asked for. Her heart is haemorrhaging after the destruction caused by Nooroo’s slavery to people who cared more about themselves than about what was good for everyone else, but Marinette can no more see herself without a miraculous than she can see herself without her right hand.
There’s a girl that everyone thinks that he is, but Marinette doesn’t know that girl at all. A girl who is sweet and carefree, who likes to sew clothing and play video games and make pastries for her friends. But not a girl who is brave and strong, who can fly across rooftops and fight dinosaurs and create magic that fixes everything, everything
(almost everything, but not the magic that guards it, not the man who spent a hundred and seventy-four years protecting it only to be left as a doddering shadow who never knew how miraculous his life was)
There’s a girl who has loving parents and so many friends, who has a future open for anything she wants, who doesn’t worry about anything big at all and who lives her days freely.
But she’s not the girl who can do the impossible.
“For what it’s worth,” says the Master of the Guardians, “the powers and the abilities you have demonstrated far surpasses anything recorded in our libraries. Your instincts for the miraculous could do so much more good than merely stopping villains.”
And so it is decided that Marinette will go to China, to find her roots before spreading her wings. She’ll stay with Uncle Wang. She’ll do a bit of travelling.
And then she’ll meet a boy in Lhasa.
“How on earth are you going to fake a Tibetan boyfriend?” Alya asks, and Marinette presses her finger to the spot on Alya’s clavicle where a fox-tail pendant was once hidden against her skin.
Alya answering laugh tapers off into a fond smile, which then collapses a second before Marinette is pulled into her arms.
“I can’t decide whether this is the coolest thing to happen, or the saddest one.”
Neither can Marinette, and so she settles with the answer that she knows is true as steel:
“It’s for the best.”
She puts an absurd effort into her worthless exams, she treasures every minute with her friends, spends every evening with her parents. She memorises their laughter, their breathing, the pitch of their sentences; prints the fall of shadow and pose into her eyelids, tattoos their words under her skin.
She’ll visit, of course. There’s going to be calls and texts and chats, but Marinette will disappear to the fringes of their lives. They’ll go to university and work, to weddings and children, and Marinette will become someone they used to know, a girl from school who made clothes and cakes and who left and stayed gone.
People drift away from their friends all the time, mum once said, that’s what happens when you no longer spend every day together, but go to new places and meet new people. That’s how it is for everyone. People from old parts of your life will go their own ways, and you will meet new ones on the road you’re on.
That’s life, but mum merely moved halfway across the globe, not to a space and a time unknown to the rest of the world.
Mum wasn’t the one who can do what no-one else can, but still couldn’t do enough to save those twenty-eight people.
Alya throws her a going away-party, and nobody there knows that their hugs and we’ll-see-you-next-summers are so much more than that. If Marinette cries more than normal, well - whoever of them spent an entire year away from home before?
“We’ll keep in touch, okay?” says Adrien as he lingers in the doorway, “We can meet up if my dad sends me over there to do promo work for his shop again.”
“Yes, of course,” Marinette lies to the boy she’s loved unlike anything else in her short life, a boy who might have been within reach for the girl without magic.
A boy who will probably be the mold of the fantasy to explain to her friends and her parents why Marinette will leave them all behind. Once upon a time, Marinette is very certain that for Adrien Agreste, she would.
“I’m going to miss you, Marinette,” Adrien says in Mandarin, with that soft smile that still smothers her schoolgirl heart.
“Me too,” she replies in a bit stilted pronunciation that has vastly improved with the weeks and months of tutoring whenever he had time to spare. It is a perverse understatement, but telling Adrien all those things she never was brave enough to say is useless, now. He was a teenage dream about three kids and a hamster, a ludicrous hope of a normal life that didn’t involve cosmic magic and ancient men who think that Marinette might unlock its deepest secrets. Marinette is going to a world where Adrien Agreste has absolutely no place. She lets herself sink into the hug he gives her, and savours the ache when he pulls back and walks away.
As she watches his back down the street, she wonders if she will ever see him again, and how that hole the shape of him will be filled.
Paris has wound down into early, early morning when she drops down on the roof of Francois Dupont to brave the cavity she knows will be deeper than any other. Once upon a time, she couldn’t be Ladybug without Cat Noir. After tonight, she is going to be Ladybug alone as she leaves the city and takes every miraculous away from it. And the only one who truly knew her will give up the magic of his life one final time, and she’s not sure which one of them is making the greatest sacrifice.
She dangles her feet off the roof as she stares at her own bedroom across the street, her heart a mess of melancholy and homesickness and a buzzing disquiet as she waits for the one who will come as her partner and leave as just another boy in this city they dedicated their teenage years to defending.
Cat Noir was chosen to stay by Marinette’s side, and there is a part of her that still bleeds betrayal at the choice she made. The sound of his stick retracting, the thud of his boots, is as much a part of her as her parents’ laughter over dinner. She turns around to give him a smile, and he returns it at he sits down next to her, swinging his legs over the edge with the ease given only those protected by a superhero’s suit.
He’ll be leaving through the maintenance door, tonight, and Marinette feels her smile fade and her shoulders tense.
“How are you?”
“I don’t know,” she says, looking straight ahead at the Notre Dame. The breath she draws is unsteady from the tension wound tight in all her body. “I’ve said goodbye to everyone except my family. They’ll see me off at the airport.”
“I wish I could come,” he says, and Marinette feels herself tense further the second before he realises the mistake. “I mean - I know we agreed not to. Sorry, I didn’t mean it like - it’s just, you’re leaving so much, and they won’t even know about it. I just wish you wouldn’t have to say goodbye all alone.”
“I know,” she feels her body relax, and sighs, “I’ll be fine. And besides, how’d we explain some stranger I’ve never mentioned before showing up there?”
His reply is an amused snort, and silence falls between the two of them.
“It’s a nice thought, though. That you’d be there. I’d like that.”
“I’ll be thinking about you.”
She lets herself collapse against him, lets her head find rest on his shoulder, as she closes her eyes and pulls herself small and tight against the night.
“Are you scared?”
“What, of a bunch of monks and kwamis?”
“Bugaboo.”
“No. It’s just that I always thought I’d live my life in Paris and be just a normal girl with a normal life. I never asked for all of the magic and the superpowers.”
Cat Noir takes a little while to reply.
“I don’t know if someone like you were ever just a normal girl, though. You’ve always been amazing. I totally get why the Guardians want you to go there and continue being awesome. Being a superhero is cool and all, but to learn about, like sacred magic older than the universe - “
“Sounds like you should’ve been the one to go be their new super-disciple!”
There’s something brittle in his laughter. “Too bad I’m not the Guardian! I’m just - “
“You’re not ‘just’ anything. If it weren’t for you, The Guardian would’ve given up on her superheroing the first time Stoneheart stamped his foot at her!”
“She would not.”
“She so would. Just ask - “ but Cat Noir won’t be asking any ladybird kwamis, because the Miraculous box will leave Paris tomorrow, and Cat Noir will just be another boy who she’ll probably never see again. “Tikki,” she says, anyway, “if you’d ask Tikki, she’d tell you. None of this, this entire Guardian business and all, would have ever happened if you hadn’t been there. Hawkmoth probably would’ve had my miraculous within a week.”
“I wonder what it was he wanted so badly.”
“Who cares,” she mutters, slumping against him again, “if he’d only let it rest, our lives would’ve been normal.”
“Is it bad - “ Cat Noir starts, “that I’m happy he didn’t? Oh god, it is, it’s horrible! But I’m so happy I could be Cat Noir. Before all that happened, my life was just… empty. Nothing ever happened, and nothing I did mattered. I don’t even want to imagine what kind of person I’d be if it weren’t for Plagg and you, and everything we’ve done together.” She can hear the smile in his voice as he exhales, feels the surge of joy slowly ebbing out of his body as he continues. “It’s going to be so weird, not doing this any longer. And you two not being around. But I’ll be fine now. I’m such a different person than I used to be.”
“Me too. Going away to a temple in Tibet to study magic? No way would I ever have said yes to something like that! But now I think it’s kind of exciting!”
“It’s going to be a whole new adventure.”
“I just wish I didn’t have to leave everything behind.”
“Yeah.”
And they fall silence once more, as the city is calm with night and heartbeat after heartbeat counts down until the inevitable reason they’re here tonight. Marinette spent the entire evening hearing friends plan their summers and their futures and lying through her teeth about her own pursuits. Only Alya could talk about something more than months, knowing that Marinette needed to hear about years and decades, and Alya, as little as any, could answer that with certainty.
“What are you gonna do now?” she asks from the only other person who knows what matters.
“I don’t think anyone our age really knows that? And me, I guess I used to think that being Cat Noir was what mattered. I’ve a job - not one I’ll be holding onto for the long-term though. So I’ll probably have to study something. I want to be useful for other people. What do everyday heroes do?”
“Maybe become a fireman.”
“Ooooh. Maybe I’ll become a chimney sweep. I’ve got extensive experience climbing roofs, after all.”
“A paramedic, you’re used to quick response times.”
“Or a detective chasing criminals!”
“How about a lawyer putting them away.”
“If this has taught me anything, it is that you should never assume guilt if there are third parties involved. Maybe a lawyer defending the innocent?”
“I’m sure a good kitty like you can be anything you want to be.”
“I’d rather be with you.”
It is a thoughtless reply, slipping through his synapses and teeth before he’d had the mind to catch it. It’s a reminder about something Marinette knows like a pair of well-worn jeans, something they didn’t talk about any longer, and in all the time they haven’t talked about it, the memory of it stopped itching. The years have varnished it in iridescent layers until it’s grown from a barely noticeable chafe and into some smooth and unassuming beauty that still aches when she remembers and feels it pressing at her heart from the inside.
“Sorry,” he says again, sighs, straightens as he turns his face to the sky. “Of course defeating Hawkmoth was what I wanted. And Lila Rossi - that was so horrible. I never thought I’d quit being Cat Noir - never for real. I used to think one day we’d reveal our identities, and - “ he pauses, snorts at himself, turns to give her a wistful smile, “if you’ll forgive me for bringing it up, my favourite daydreams used to be that we’d get married and live together in a cosy little place with Tikki and Plagg. We’d get a hamster. I’d have my friends over whenever I wanted, and we’d still be protecting Paris. I felt like that was inevitable. And I guess there’s a part of me that still feels like you leaving everything is just all the wrong ending.”
“Kitty, you know why.”
“I’m not arguing. I know that this is the best we can do to protect Paris - if it keeps anyone from doing what Lila did, it’s worth it. And if you really can do what the monks think you can do, then you’ll do so much more important things than just being here in Paris and using the miraculous to - what, assist the police and the rescue services? My stupid teenage dreams aren’t much next to that. And I know you never wanted that, anyway.”
“I’ve always wanted you around. You’re one of my best friends.”
“And that was always the most important part. Whatever else I’ve felt about you - being your friend was always the most precious thing.”
“I’m going to miss you. I’m going to miss so many people, but I’ll be missing you so much, too.”
“We could -“ his voice is thick as he stops, then shakes his head in self-deprecation, “I guess a lost temple in the mountains won’t have a mail address.”
She doesn’t say that the village a five hour trek away will have one, because he can’t know the name her parents and Alya will be sending letters. No tracks and no traces; only two souls in the city know the name of the girl with the magic, and soon, there will only be one. Cat Noir never needed Marinette, never loved her like Alya did, besides.
The words still ache against her teeth at the knowledge that this is it, this is where she’ll leave behind only one who is making any sacrifice close to what she will.
“Don’t worry,” he eventually says, “I mean it, that I’ll be fine. I’m just letting go of some old dreams I thought I’d grown out of.”
“It’s okay. I’ve been letting go of those, too.”
His arm comes up around her shoulder, and Marinette rests against him.
“When are you leaving tomorrow?”
“Please, no desperate scenes at the security gate.”
“I just don’t want tonight to end.”
Doesn’t want to say goodbye, doesn’t want to see her one last time, speak to her one last time, meet her eyes one last time, walk away from the miraculous life he’s lived these last five years, give up the magic and continue on in a grey everyday while she’s leaving to explore the stars and the aeons, and oh, how Marinette knows that feeling.
“I have so many things I wish I could tell you,” she says instead, “there’s so much I wish we could talk about. There’s so much of me I wish you could know, and you - there’s so much of you that I’ll never know. When I leave, I’m going to be all Ladybug, all the time. But I’m not, not really. And the person I am when I’m not Ladybug, I wish you could’ve known her.”
He is silent for a beat, his arm growing tighter around her shoulders. When he replies, his voice is firm.
“I’ve always known her, Milady. Didn’t you realise? I didn’t fall in love with the amazing superhero. I fell in love with a girl who was so scared and so insecure that she was almost crying, but so brave and so devoted to justice that she ignore all that and ran headfirst at a super-villain. And who was clever and amazing and had a mind like lightening. I know what a miraculous does and doesn’t do. I know that those things weren’t Tikki. So I’ll never know your favourite colour or what you have for breakfast or if your history marks are any good. But I know the important parts.”
“What are yours, then?” she asks, rather than let herself dwell on that deceptively casual, nuclear reminder about everything he and she have been to each other, rather than letting herself fracture further at what she’s giving up tonight.
“Yellow. Croissants and fruit. Top marks, even if I’m not three thousand years old.”
“What’s your family like?”
“It’s just me and my dad. I think I’ll try talking him into getting a dog. He’s been getting soft these last couple of years.”
“Have you got a driver’s license?”
“Don’t tell anyone, Bugaboo - I don’t know how to ride a bike.”
“What?!” she pulls back, but his face is set in a smile of mild embarrassment. “I’ve seen you parkour up the Eiffel Tower!”
“I grew up a bit sheltered.”
“’Sheltered’, he says. What, were you never allowed outside as a kid?”
“Kind of?” he shrugs uncomfortably, “my parents were pretty overprotective. I wasn’t kidding when I said that being Cat Noir and fighting villains were the highlight of my days, back in collège.”
“You must have been a menace, locked up inside.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” he says, casting a wistful look out over the city, “I can be very well behaved, for the right reasons.”
“Better reasons than fighting super-villains, huh?”
He shakes his head. “No. I knew you didn’t mind - if was only with you I knew I could joke around without being told off. So you see, that part of me that I never felt I could let other people see? You and Plagg were the ones that let him out. And if it weren’t for that, I think he might’ve been stifled for good, and I’d have remained just a good boy who did everything his father told him to.”
“I never realised.”
“Yeah, I was pretty good at keeping the two apart,” he shrugs. “I used to think my normal self was useless and boring, and by the time I realised you probably wouldn’t mind him, it wasn’t easy to quit the clever kitty act around you.”
“I’d like him,” she promises, fervently, and Cat Noir smiles in all ache and love.
“I know, Bugaboo. We’ve met.”
“We have?”
“Several times. You’ve saved me from akumas, and my father’s been akumatised. You’ve been to my room. More than once.”
“For real?!”
“Yes! So I know for a fact that you like me. After all, you- “ he stops himself, shakes his head, “I’m sorry, for the times I had to lie to you. And for some dumb things I shouldn’t have done, but I really wanted to impress you on the other side of the mask.”
“You know, now I’m curious.”
“Does that mean you’re ready to meet him?”
He’s facing her now, cross-legged on the edge of the roof. And she’s known that this is the last time, but only when he’s asking her to let it go does she truly feel it. She’s been learning by heart her parents, her grandparents, her friends and classmates, but the only thing she’ll have left of her partner in everything that matters will be pictures on the internet. And how can pixels on a screen ever carry the wild fall of his hair in the night, the bell of his laugh over rooftops, the hold of his body against hers as they are thrown together in battle?
She’ll never be ready to let him go, but that is the only way forward on the road she chose. So she reaches out and takes a hold of the magical leather making up his cat ears. She feels them twitch in her grip, and she has to force herself to let them go, to let her hands travel down to find his human ears under his hair. She can’t feel the heat of his flesh through her own suit; can’t tell if the skin on his cheeks is as smooth at is looks.
She lets her hands fall to grip his, and nods.
“Right,” he says, and closes his eyes. Draws a deep breath. “Right,” he repeats, and his voice is firm as he ends the tale that has been his life for five years. “Plagg, claws in.”
After years of calling on friends for help for battles, the flash of magic dissolving is as familiar as the back of her hand. Maybe that is why it takes her a full three seconds to even feel as she sees the face behind the mask, and it’s familiar, it always is, except this time it shouldn’t be, because Adrien was the only one who insisted someone else could be a better hero than him.
Adrien, hands naked between hers as he smiles, a bit sheepish, a lot sad. “Hi,” he says, and then, “my name’s Adrien. But you knew that already, right?”
“Oh,” Marinette says, as the cacophony in her heart become white noise deafening any attempt at understanding.
Adrien turns to the kwami floating next to him. A long look is exchanged, before he reaches out to give Plagg a cuddle between the ears, and then he pulls the ring off his finger.
“Plagg, I renounce you.”
And like that, the last door has closed. The unassuming ring that she’s seen daily since her last year in collège becomes black and green in his hand. He holds it out to her in a cruel parody of a hundred thousand daydreams where it’s still steel and comes with a promise of when we’re old enough I’ll give you a proper one. Some part of her almost laughs at the absurd idea of Cat Noir giving away his miraculous as a romantic gesture.
“Ladybug?”
“Sorry,” she says, soullessly taking the ring from him and tucking it into her fist. “I, I wasn’t expecting - “
“I understand. I know I’m not a whole lot like - that, when we’ve met outside the mask.”
“Yeah.”
He sighs, an awkward hand clutching the back of his neck. “I used to dream about this, too. Of course, it usually didn’t involve giving up my miraculous.”
“I wish you didn’t have to.”
He shakes his head. “No, it’s best this way. The only reason I had it in the first place was because Nooroo and Duusu were in the wrong hands. We both know what the result was. The best thing would’ve been if none of that happened at all. The next best thing was that you and I got to be superheroes to stop it. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, Milady.”
The endearment coming from Adrien’s mouth tears open all the little stitches that has been keeping her together ever since she made her choice.
“Me neither,” she says, and her voice is trembling.
“Please never forget that,” and his voice, too, is unsteady now, as he climbs to his feet and she follows him. “If you ever come back, if there is ever something I can do for you, please find me. You’re the most important person in my life, and I wish I could do something more to help you. I would’ve come with you, if I could.”
He wipes his face and sniffles, and Marinette’s mind is still numb from the overload of things that were never meant to be this way. She was never meant to leave Cat Noir, and it was never meant to be Adrien. Adrien was never meant to be weeping over her on the roof of their collège at half past two in the morning, and this isn’t where any of them are supposed to end. The only boy she’s truly loved isn’t supposed to have been the boy whose love she refused all these years; he’s supposed to be clueless and happy, to forget her like everyone else and to live a life with someone who’s simple and easy. He’s not supposed to be giving up on his best friends, isn’t supposed to give up a life of magic so that Marinette can take it away from the city they both love. Everything is going all wrong, and somewhere far beyond everything, Marinette faintly thinks that Tikki knew, and Tikki didn’t try to say because Tikki must’ve known that Marinette would never have taken Cat Noir’s miraculous and left Paris for good if she’d known that it was Adrien who had it.
And if that isn’t answer enough to how vital it is that she does, Marinette doesn’t know what could be.
“I will,” she tells him, “I promise. If I ever come back, I’ll find you. You’re the most important person in my life, too.”
“No,” he says, “I don’t know what you’ll be doing, but it’s going to be something much more important than some guy who looks good in pictures.”
“How can you say that?! You’re Cat Noir, you’ve protected the city with me all these years!”
“I’m not Cat Noir any longer. And when the miraculous are gone, Paris won’t need him anyway. They’ll forget him and Ladybug, and you’ll do something no-one else can do, and I’ll finally live the life that I wanted.”
But innumerable little comments dripped in the aftermath of battles, in wistful moments discussing reports on the Ladyblog, tell a different tale. He always wanted to be a hero, in a way that Marinette never had. Marinette would be happy with three kids and a hamster. Marinette would be happier with three kids and a hamster, if they were with him. Marinette never asked for the magic that’s now as much a part of her as the marrow of her bones, but Cat Noir -
But Adrien had lived a life yearning to be free, and he’s there now, isn’t he? His dad’s been getting better, and his duties are gone, and the girl he’s been holding back for is leaving.
Except the thing she has ever wanted, more than anything, was a simple life with him.
It would be so cruel to tell him that; to pull him into this disaster of identity and brutal fate, of chances lost and the good intentions of an old man who may have thought they’d find each other in due time if they were close enough to touch. Now it’s too late; the die is cast and Plagg’s ring is unyielding in Ladybug’s clenched fist.
The kindest thing she can do is to let him have what she always wanted, and Ladybug bites her tongue for all the things he deserves to know, and which wouldn’t make anything better at all. He can’t follow to the places she has to go, and he doesn’t deserve all the regrets she’d been blissfully ignorant about until three minutes ago.
“You’ll always be my Cat Noir.”
The faint smile falls, and then she’s pulled into his arms for the second time tonight, but there’s no polite distance this time. He holds her like a child clinging to a lost parent, and Marinette winds her arms around him in turn.
“And you’re the amazing Ladybug, who’s going to do so many miraculous things that no-one else could. And you have no idea how lucky I am to have been your partner. Please never forget that, Milady. For everything, for all the things that hurt - you were the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“And you - “ she tries, but the words get caught in her mouth, “and you’re - “
He pulls back and she’s already longing for him so deeply that it feels like a physical wound.
“I’m the one who’s gonna be sad for a while, and I’ll have to lie Nino and Kagami about it, and then I’ll pick myself up and learn to ride a bike. I’ll get one with a basket, and a little dog that can sit in it, and maybe one day I’ll meet a girl who thinks my dog is cute and by then I’ll have stopped moping over the fact that the only girl I ever loved was too amazing for me to keep. And I’ll be fine, because I know that she’s still somewhere out there living a life that is so much more amazing than it would’ve been if she’d stayed with me.”
He wipes away fresh tears at his little story, clearly struggling to keep up the smile. “Thank you, Milady,” he says, “for everything.”
And then he takes her gloved hand in his naked one, and lifts it to his lips. The gesture is a joke from the days when Hawkmoth was just Hawkmoth with his one miraculous; when it had been just the two of them, when they were kids and Wang Fu was the one protecting the miracle box, when they had laughed and bantered and she hadn’t known how much he meant it, and how much it hurt to know she was breaking his heart. He’d stopped, at some point, like the casual confessions and the puerile attempts at talking her into going out with him, when the battles got ugly and things were no longer a game. A joke indeed, but his lips pressed against her fingers are a solemn declaration.
“Take care of yourself. And be happy.”
Those are the words with which he leaves her, making his way towards the door leading down into the school where she’d first met him. Along with him goes all that was left of Marinette’s girlhood; every silly daydream, every fantastic second of battle in breathtaking sync, a waltz at a party, in the moon-drenched air above New York, a boy who’d stood by her side through every mistake, who’d always been there to take her hand even when she didn’t deserve it. Hours of teaching her her mother’s language, and Marinette can’t speak.
They’re adults, now; she’s made the choice of the duty she never asked for, and she made the choice where she leaves him behind, and a superhero listens to her brain, not her heart. A superhero knows that the safety of the world is more important than her personal happiness, and that the only way to opt out of it, will mean giving up on him entirely. And Marinette, too, knows that for every desperate tear she’s shed over the magic she never asked to keep throughout the years, she, too, wouldn’t trade it for anything. It’s a gift Lila Rossi killed for, and Marinette won’t forget him, won’t give up on half her life because it’s the easy road.
Adrien deserves freedom more than anyone, but Marinette bleeds at the thought of a bike and a dog and a girl who thinks its cute when it could be her, and him, and Tikki and Plagg and a hamster in a little flat that she’s already envisioning in dangerous detail.
The door is heavy and the lock needs greasing, from the grating metal sound as he pulls it open, and Marinette’s heart is breaking too fast for her brain to keep up
“Wǒ ài nǐ”
and he laughs, shakes his head
“That’s super serious, hardly anyone says that. If you wanna tell a boy you like him, try wǒ xǐ huān nǐ"
her heart quivers as she meets those dreamy green eyes head on, and says, in full confidence
“Wǒ ài nǐ”
“Wǒ ài nǐ”
he corrects some indiscernible sound with a warm smile
“Wǒ ài nǐ”
she tells him once more, in a bright spring afternoon in his room
“Wǒ ài nǐ,” she mewls against his back, arms clutched around him in the dark summer night. She’s not supposed to. She’s supposed to let him go on and live a life that’s finally free of the burdens of being a superhero; to be just a normal boy with a normal life, to have the things she’d want so dearly for herself. He’s supposed to forget her, but this isn’t it, at all, and he’s the one that’s tensed, now, still and breathless in her arms as she buries her face in the fabric of his jacket and says it again. “Wǒ ài nǐ.”
There is a second of bright relief that finally, finally he knows, and the pain of what could have been in a better life won’t be hers to carry alone. It heals nothing, and it’ll make it all the harder for the girl who likes the dog, but at least he’ll know that it wasn’t for nothing, it wasn’t all wasted, that as much he loved her, she has always loved him.
“Mah - “
It could be the start of a milady or of a name that he’s not supposed to know, of a girl whose awkward Mandarin only her mother knows better. And Marinette pulls her arms from him in a moment of blinding terror at what she’s just done, and she doesn’t stay to see if he stays or leaves, if he turns around and reaches for her. Because she's not a child, and she's responsible for the creatures that tortured her city for years, and those twenty-eight souls, and selfish dreams have no place in a game of cosmic powers where boys who used to be superheroes absolutely can't know who she is and where she's going. Ladybug’s yo-yo catches onto some ornament on the Notre Dame, and takes her away from the boy who was the reason for all the worst mistakes in her life.