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The night was colder than usual with all the snow that had fallen in a matter of hours, but the warm fabric of his body suit allowed him to remain unbothered.
He could sense it, feel it through every single one of his nervous terminations. She was so close he could practically smell her signature flowery essence in the air, almost as clearly as if he had one of those stupid charms she left behind in front of him. The stray black cat that insisted on sticking to his side could too, by the look on its face and the way its nose turned, trying to find the source of the odor.
He had no more than a few minutes to sneak inside and see if she had already claimed that house as hers. She had been getting dangerously close to breaking their agreement, getting so dangerously close to stepping over their quickly spoken agreement. And yet, somehow, she managed to be so obnoxiously careful, practically measuring her steps, so that she never went past her space. Never.
As soon as he managed to break into the second floor of the house, Chat Noir didn’t know whether to be in complete awe of her skill, or to allow the rage that was starting to boil inside of him to fully ignite.
She had drawn a line with some chalk that seemed to have been laying around previous to her arrival. Every single drawer to the right of the line had been completely looted and left with nothing more than old worthless papers and anything that wasn’t worth selling.
What was even more infuriating though, was the fact that she had moved a seemingly heavy couch from a corner of her side of the living room all the way to his side, and left it in front of a burning fireplace, the wood emanating a sophisticated smokey aroma he hadn’t smelled in years.
When the fragrance hit his senses, he stood there on the spot, practically paralyzed.
How… How did she know?
A soft tinkling broke him out of the shock. He got closer, suddenly remembering about the line right before stepping on it.
Chat turned to the side, trying to figure out where the sound came from, when a gust of wind struck his face, the unmasked bits numbing at the cold.
There, in the window, laid calmly a polka-dotted charm.
Any trace of the rage he had felt at her repeated toeing of the line had disappeared. Even if the oddly specific type of wood had been a fortuitous coincidence, the way the chalk went out of its way to trace over the sofa to his side couldn’t be. There was simply no way it wasn’t.
Both of them knew better than anyone in the city sofas like that, old and scraggy looking amidst a sea of riches, were exactly the kind to solve their lives for weeks. Rich people did things like that, keeping whatever they held dear in deplorable conditions solely to make it look worthless.
Chat Noir knew it better than anyone.
It took something big for Ladybug to leave something so unassuming, yet could hold so much inside untouched. In front of something like the wood.
He debated internally whether it had been an act of mockery.
He hoped with all the warmth the fire in front of him provided it wasn’t.
It was a funny thing, actually.
By the time he showed up, Paris was her city. Everyone knew to fear the “polka-dotted mystery”, the “spotted threat”, the “mini menace”, as the press liked to call her. When he started, he had been worried. Worried she would decide the city was too big for two renowned thieves, and certainly worried she would try to do something about it.
Instead, she just started using her charms.
He knew beforehand that if a crime scene was flooded with a flowery fragrance of some sort, it had been her. Everyone in the city did.
He had lowkey trusted that system to play at his advantage. Maybe he could buy a cheap perfume that resembled hers at a store (or steal one), and spray it wherever he went. It would leave him to the side, allowing him to stay as nothing more than an incognito in the night, a nameless shadow that came and went.
Looking back, the charms had been a good idea— a great one even—.
When he was a kid, living between the high walls that formed his parent’s manor, warmed by burning wood of the exact same type as the one before him, he never understood why the criminals in the movies he watched were so keen on letting others know it had been them behind the bomb, the heist or murder.
With what his life had become since then, he kind of understood it better. It was the little things he could take pride in, accomplishing and stating with his signature pawprint it had been him, Chat Noir, who managed to escape untouched once more. That it had been him, Chat Noir, who managed to destroy a key part to a secret plot that would have hurt many more, even if it looked like a crime for now.
That it had been him, Chat Noir, and not the boy he left behind at the mansion the day he escaped.
That innocent, once smiley boy no longer existed.
Sometimes, he wondered what had turned Ladybug into, well, Ladybug. If she had a deep, dark and tragic story behind her that ultimately led to the life she led now.
On days when his thoughts were particularly wild and refused to shut up about his memories, he wondered if it had been related to the man he used to call a father.
He had been young when he started, and from the little bits of information he collected here and there, Ladybug probably was too. Maybe even younger, given that she had been around for a few years by the moment he first set a foot on the street.
As much as he liked to think he despised her and thought of Ladybug as nothing more than a rival, he really, really hoped it wasn’t like that. Even having her be nothing other than a rich spoiled kid who thought she could have more than the world would make him sleep better at night than knowing it had been his “father’s” fault, or knowing her life was half as miserable as his.
A noise on the ground floor startled him, reminding him he had barely more than a few minutes to make an escape if he wanted to have his “no sightings in action” record perfect.
Still, he made a dive under the couch, hoping for Ladybug to have been right.
He moved his hand along the springs, suddenly grabbing what he hoped would be a fairly valuable necklace or something similar.
He tucked the item into his pocket with a quick motion, getting nervous at the sound of ascending footsteps on the stairs, and dived for the window, not before leaving a pawprint on the clearest part of the stained glass he could find.
The cat, as always, was there, and accompanied him along the rooftops until they were both well out of sight.
Once Chat had recovered his breath, he turned to the stray. He deserved a name.
“So, Plagg, let’s see what we got today!”
He reached inside his pocket to find his loot of the day and pulled it out.
One of Ladybug’s charms now rested on his palm, with its signature shimmer not dimming even under the snowflakes that covered it within seconds.