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Adrien de-transformed as he collapsed onto his bed. What a long day… Chat Noir and Ladybug had fought M. Pigeon, then an akuma from the future, then M. Pigeon again. Sure, the two Pigeon fights were easy enough that they only really counted for maybe half an akuma, but it was still a lot, especially with all the wild revelations the future Bunnyx had given them.
Adrien closed his eyes as he heard Plagg open the Camembert cupboard, allowing himself to think back on Bunnyx’s words. Ladybug would be an incredible team leader, confident, caring, beautiful… and apparently still not in love with him. Ladybug might have found Bunnyx's crazy flailing description of their relationship amusing, and Chat Noir might have dismissed the possibility with his claim that the future was not set in stone, but it still hurt to hear his chances with her were not good. Adrien sighed, loudly, and opened his eyes.
“Plagg, you think Chat Noir is cool, right?”
Plagg glanced up from the cupboard, wondering what Adrien was thinking. “Well, I still say the bell’s silly, and you could stand to buy me more delicious Camembert, but yeah, we’re the coolest cat around!”
“We’re the only cat around, though. And…” Adrien trailed off, looking at the ceiling. “It’s just… I almost broke Bunnyx’s miraculous today. She said I will break it in the future. And if Ladybug and I aren’t together all those years and I’m still making the same mistakes… maybe you’d be better off with a different holder. I mean, if Ladybug’s going to be the ‘greatest superhero ever,’ I don’t want to be dragging her down. She deserves a partner just as amazing as she is, and—”
“Whoa! Hang on! I don’t want a different holder! You get me all the Camembert I could ask for! Who cares what some bunny hero who broke her own Miraculous says?” Plagg interrupted, flying into Adrien’s view with a slice of cheese. After Syren and Fu’s last-minute intervention, Plagg was much more alert about Adrien’s talk of giving up the ring. If the kid was doubting himself and thinking of quitting, it was past time to step in.
Adrien sat up. “Wait. What? What do you mean, she broke her Miraculous?”
Plagg stared at him. “Think, kid. You used Cataclysm on the Bee Miraculous before, right? What happened to the comb?”
“It… it rusted and shattered, the same way metal always does when I cataclysm it. But… her watch wasn’t rusted. It was cracked, like when Lady Noire used Cataclysm on that Sentimonster. So… Bunnyx… lied?” Adrien found that hard to believe. Ladybug hated liars, so why would Future Ladybug pick a hero who ran around lying to her?
Plagg gulped down his cheese. “Eh. I mean, maybe. You probably should be more careful with your cataclysm — that’s my ultimate power of destruction at your fingertips after all — but I don’t think her watch would break that way if you actually cataclysmed her Miraculous. If you push your Miraculous to do something it really shouldn’t, it breaks and looks like what you described. You should take everything a Rabbit says with a grain of salt anyway, kid. You watch those time-travel shows along with your anime, right? What’s that one doctor always saying?”
Adrien blinked in realization (and surprise that Plagg had actually paid attention to the show). “Oh! No spoilers? So Bunnyx can’t really tell us about the future, because it could change the past and make a paradox or something?”
“Right. I’d guess Bunnyx made up half of what she said about the future villains and battles on the spot, just to keep Ladybug's spirits up and give her some confidence. Rabbits have to know how to keep secrets, and if they’re telling you about the future, you never know if it’s a lie, a trick, or the truth. I should know; Fluff’s pulled that on me a few times. Did Master Fu tell you about the dinosaurs?”
Adrien raised an eyebrow. “Master Fu doesn’t talk to me at all, Plagg. He just gave us the transformation cheese, said the Miracle Box had other Miraculous, and left, remember? What’s this about the dinosaurs?”
Plagg sighed. “Alright, so you remember after Style Queen, when I told you I used Cataclysm myself and broke half the city? How kwamis can’t control their powers if they use them without a holder? When I was trying to get Master Fu and Ladybug to let me help her defeat the akuma, Master Fu blamed me for the extinction of the dinosaurs. But he’s only half right.”
Adrien was starting to think he was going to learn more today than he had in all two of his meetings with Master Fu. First the lesson on breaking a Miraculous, the warning about judicious cataclysm use, and now a secret history lesson? “Wait, you destroyed the dinosaurs? How? Why?”
“I was young and stupid, alright? But… I guess I need to tell you the whole story.” Plagg took a moment to float back up and clear his throat before starting his story.
“Tikki loved the dinosaurs. I didn’t really get it; they’re just big dumb smug reptiles. The T-Rexes always ran around chasing everything down and acting like they were the greatest, and the little ones were always getting squished, but it’s not like humans. They just ate and slept and wandered around; they didn’t create music or build skyscrapers or make cheese or anything interesting. But for some reason, Tikki was obsessed with making more of the things. She kept making them bigger and bigger, or giving them fur or feathers or other little details that made no real difference. But it was getting pretty boring; she hadn’t made anything really new in two hundred million years. That’s when Fluff came to me.
“Fluff’s the Rabbit, the Kwami of Evolution; he's all about change and progress and the flow of time. He didn’t like Tikki getting so fixated on the dinosaurs that she neglected the mammals and bugs and everything, so he came to me and told me that he had peeked into the future and found this cool new thing he thought I’d like and handed me this white squishy wheel. My first taste of my glorious love, cheese. It was so good, like nothing I’d had before!”
Plagg took a moment to drool and gaze lovingly into space, remembering that first taste of his beloved cheese. So soft and gooey, rotten yet edible… Adrien had to cough to get Plagg to remember he was in the middle of a story.
“Right, so I had to have more cheese, so I asked Fluff where it came from. He told me that after the dinosaurs, eventually these new mammals called ‘humans’ would figure out how to make cheese from the fermented milk of other mammals. Which was ridiculous to think of at the time – the only mammals we had then were tiny little things, squirrels and groundhogs and shrews, and the dinosaurs kept stepping on them or eating them. Clearly, if I wanted to get more cheese, in any quantity worth talking about, the dinosaurs were going to have to go. So I zipped over, found the right size asteroid, and sent it flying into Earth. Boom! No more dinosaurs! ... And almost no more mammals to make cheese, which is part of where the 'young and stupid' comes in. I let Fluff trick me, and I almost destroyed all life on Earth as a result.”
Adrien stared at Plagg for a moment, then squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “You mean to tell me you killed the dinosaurs… so you could get more cheese? After Fluff snuck you some from the future?”
Plagg nodded happily. “Yep! And you’re welcome, by the way! If it wasn’t for me, who knows how long it would’ve taken for Tikki to get bored of making dinosaurs? Heck, you could’ve been some scaly lizard-man whining about how Ladybug’s scales were so blue and shiny and her tail was so long, instead of mooning about her hair and her eyes and whatever other disgusting romantic nonsense your brain thinks about.”
Adrien blushed. “PLAGG!”
Plagg cackled, then continued, “But do any of you humans thank me for it? No, it’s all ‘Plagg, you killed the dinosaurs, how could you’ and ‘Plagg, don’t use your cataclysm, it’s too dangerous’. Maybe I could have waited, sure, but the dinosaurs had it coming and I don’t regret it really. Those hypothetical lizard-men wouldn't have made cheese, and they might have never come up with the Miraculous like humans did, and all the kwamis would be stuck watching and only able to interfere on a cosmic scale, not here talking to our Chosen. I get all the blame, even though it was all Fluff’s plan in the first place!”
“So anyway, remember, kid, never trust a bunny. They’re there to save the day, not play twenty questions. You’re better off making your own decisions and treating the future as what you make of it, like that one guy with the flying train in that one movie said. Now where’s my cheese? All this reminiscing made me hungry!” Plagg flew off to one of his hidden stashes of cheese, but kept an eye on his Chosen. It seemed like he’d managed to distract the kid from his thoughts of quitting for now, and hopefully Ladybug would notice and give him some words of encouragement and affirmation. Plagg preferred getting real cheese, not giving cheesy words of love, after all.