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Paris is breathtaking at night, when its elegant yet convivial architecture is gilded in moonlight as well as bathed in the warm glow of street lamps and bedroom windows. Sitting back to back atop the skyscraping Tour Montparnasse — she loosely cross-legged, he with one leg bent at the knee and the other out straight in front of him — they have a panoramic view of the city stretching into the distance.
“What’d I tell you — better than the Eiffel Tower, right? Especially since you can actually see the Iron Lady from here,” Chat Noir says behind her. His tone is hard to read: smug as usual but subdued, too, in a way that has nothing to do with her ears being a little shot from the change in altitude.
“I might have to revise my list of favourite monuments,” she concedes. “Next time, though, I could use a little warning before you take us up through the air on a magical baton.”
“So there's going to be a next time, is what you’re saying. You fully condone my plans to whisker you off your feet.” She can almost hear his cocky little grin. “Besides, better to beg your paw-don than ask your purr-mission when it comes to showing you the best view in Paris.”
“Three in a row? Really?” she says, unable to stop from grinning as he starts cackling at his own line. In her distraction she finds herself leaning more than is strictly necessary into the warm anchor of his back. In the daytime, brushing off his advances comes naturally, but here in the dark and the quiet it is difficult not to hear sincerity and something frighteningly like devotion in his voice. It is difficult not to think how natural it feels to let her head fall back onto his shoulder. How comforting it is to take a deep breath and exhale in time with him.
“Still feeling dizzy?” he asks, in a different kind of quietly; tense, almost worried. It takes her a beat to realise that she’s practically buried her face in his hair, and he must be wondering why she’s acting so weirdly. Only, she’s wondering why she’s acting so weirdly, too.
“A little,” she hedges, biting her lip and turning her head so she’s back to staring at the cityscape. “Worth it, though.”
“What, worth spinning around like kids at a playground and eventually falling down together laughing?” He pauses as though considering, before chuckling lowly and concluding, “Worth it, definitely worth it.”
Times like this come so close to convincing her they must both be thinking it, must both be feeling this. This promise of something else between them. This potential, this precipice.
They both feel it, and so they don’t talk about it. Instead he breaks the moment, dutifully grousing, “Well, even so I’m not your pillow,” so that she can click her tongue as if displeased, so that in the ineffectual shifting that ensues he can surreptitiously tilt his head and thereby allow her to nestle more securely in the hollow of his neck.
“You know, Princess, I’m probably your prince or something after today,” he muses. “Or should I say... your purr-ince.”
His voice is still hoarse. She won’t feel safe letting him out of her sight until that at least abates.
She can still see it in her mind’s eye. The horrifying tableau of her partner struggling uselessly in the impossibly strong grasp of the latest akumatised villain to threaten Paris. There are quicker, surer ways to incapacitate one of them. She knows this only too well. That their opponent chose to taunt her like that shook her momentarily — but it also made her furious. She set a record takedown time, and didn’t crack a victorious smile until Chat Noir recovered enough to initiate their customary fist-bump and claim at least 30% of the credit. (“Flailing makes a good distraction!” he justified once he could string together that many syllables without wheezing. She stopped short and said, “That’s not funny,” to which he quietly replied, “I know. I’m sorry.”)
He fidgets against her back. “Cat got your tongue, m’lady?”
“Hm?”
“You didn’t groan at my pun,” he explains. “Or give a put-upon sigh, or anything. I hope you can hear my pout, because I’m pouting. I am pouting hard. I am also,” he declares, interrupted by a warning sound from his ring, “down to two paw pads.”
Which means that they should get down from here, ASAP, only she doesn’t quite want to… to leave this moment. She’s never let this happen before, never let them just hang out together after another mission accomplished. When she suggested they defer going home in favour of enjoying the cool evening a while, she reasoned that she could watch out for possible complications of his attempted strangulation, but their suits have always protected them from most injuries and all lasting effects. She’s not convincing anyone with her argument.
And yet he stayed. More than that, he quite deliberately brought her here, tugging her along by the hand until he reached quite a specific spot, from which it was quickest to access the tower roof via baton elevator.
But she won’t think about the implications of that. No, there are far more important things to worry about that took place earlier in the evening. Like the thought that crossed her mind a split-second after she saw him in that choke-hold, that he should have been able to avoid that. You don’t fight alongside someone for as long as she has been partners with him, without becoming intimately acquainted with their reaction times, without getting an innate sense of how their body moves. So now that she thinks about it, she’s sure he flinched away just fractionally slower than he could have, and how neat was it that this happened roundabout when she was struggling to put enough distance between herself and their opponent, to activate her Lucky Charm?
“Bugaboo?”
She hasn’t moved or replied for several beats too long.
Did he mean to do it? comes the insidious whisper of suspicion. It’s not like there haven’t been any precedents; she’s just never put it all together, like she’s doing now. When he flipped them both around and took Dark Cupid’s arrow for her, and in the moment before he succumbed to the akuma’s magic she could hear the apology and affection in his voice, calling her by the only name he knows her by. When he put himself between her and Timebreaker, sacrificing himself in a timeline he doesn’t even remember because it was later collapsed as the magic of her Miraculous fixed the temporal paradox.
When he’s not putting himself on the line for her, he’s often been the distraction. It’s how they work as a team because she’s the only one who can capture and purify akumas — but she’s always assumed he knew that wasn’t all he contributed, and that having her back doesn’t mean he needs to keep martyring himself.
They’re a team, and she just needs to remind him of that.
“I should get going,” Chat Noir sighs, evidently reluctant to leave too. He gently shrugs his shoulders, rousing her completely out of her reverie. “Pillow talk is over, come on.”
The suggestive humour should be distancing, but she doesn’t let it be, not this time. There’s a lot running through her mind tonight, but one simple, delirious thought emerges out of the clamour.
He’s rambling in the meantime. “I primed Cataclysm only like a minute earlier, so you must be down to what, three spots?” There’s a faltering and a pause towards the end of the question as he registers her continued silence. “LB?”
It’s crazy. She knows this, but still she’s testing it out, imagining herself saying the words, and as she does the feeling spreads, bubbly and golden, through her. She almost giggles.
“Tikki, spots off,” she says, just loud enough for him to hear.
“What are you—?!”
He makes as if to twist around and look at her, but instinct stops him from moving the shoulder her head is resting on, and so he ends up peering at her, wide-eyed and alarmed and possibly hopeful, out of the corner of his eye. Although he cuts himself off in amazement, she unnecessarily shushes him, holding up a finger in the universal sign for ‘wait’ while cocking her head as though listening to something. Which she is, even though all is quiet around them, because she can always hear Tikki somewhere in her mind when she’s transformed. Right now her kwami is protesting about identity and relationship and trust, at which she calmly interjects, “Tikki, you know we can.”
Having a kwami himself, he must know she could respond telepathically, and he must know the significance of her choosing to say those words out loud instead. Chat Noir turns so he’s staring straight ahead again. Meanwhile, her kwami falls silent, and for a moment radiates a sort of… approving mental warmth is the best way she can describe it. It comes from somewhere elemental and ancient in the kwami, the deep repository of memories stretching back quite literally for ages, of which she only ever catches glimpses.
Then with a flash of light, she’s plain, sweet Marinette again, shivering slightly in the high-altitude cold breeze that sneaks beneath her sleeves and goose-pimples her skin. (It’s not that she doesn’t feel the cold when transformed — it just tends to take the backseat to all the other inputs from her heightened senses and reflexes.) Tikki tumbles out of her earring and rolls down Chat’s front directly into his hands, which he intuitively cups to catch her in.
“Hello, Chat Noir,” the kwami says demurely, yawning. As the superhero makes a tentative greeting in return, she gives a happy giggle. “I got dizzy too!”
Marinette tugs her jacket sleeves over her wrists, half to keep out the chill, half out of a nervous tic that hasn’t surfaced since Tikki chose her. Quite a specific tic, too; it only used to happen around… well, around Adrien, in the early days when her crush was her secret alone and not even Alya knew…
“Ladybug,” Chat Noir says presently, his voice carefully modulated. “You said we couldn’t know who each other was. What are you thinking?”
That’s easy enough to answer.
“Cat got my back.”
There’s a beat as the apparent non-sequitur sinks in, like the critical push right up to the verge of hysteria. “What?!” he practically yowls. He makes a couple abortive attempts at demanding an explanation, until Tikki presumably does something or other to calm him down, like sagely pat his thumb maybe. That always helps her.
“You asked if cat got my tongue; well, cat got my back—” She’s cut off by another warning beep from his ring, the final one. They both know he has just seconds left.
“You’re not going to turn around,” she tells him, and tries not to wonder if it’s disappointment stiffening his back against hers. Her voice is soft but steady, and she’s still resting her head on his shoulder, even though it’s an open position, right in his peripheral vision. He wouldn’t even need to turn his head much. He could find out who she is, at long last, without her even realising, but she takes a deep breath and says, “I know you won’t. I know I won’t, either. So let’s just. Let’s just talk.”
He’s not silent for long, but it’s long enough for her to begin to worry about springing this on him without his concurrence. She starts to apologise, but then—
“Like the ultimate trust fall. Or… trust sit?” he says, and there’s something faintly bitter mixed in with his smirk as his transformation lapses, briefly illuminating the concrete around them.
Marinette lets out a breath she has been holding without realising it.
“Brr. It’s cold up here,” she hears him say, as casually as though nothing has changed. Except it has. It’s weird, because in timbre his voice is just the same as always, but it’s lost that signature Chat Noir drawl. Chat Noir wouldn’t have missed the chance to make some quip (“Woah, this cat needs his winter coat pronto!”) but the boy at her back who is suddenly a stranger just says, “Do you have a jacket on? You can have mine.”
“It’s fine,” she blurts out, more forcefully than she means to because her heart is thudding hard, and she shouldn’t be this disarmed when on the average akuma-fighting day she shrugs off flirting by the minute from her partner. Except he isn’t flirting with her now, he’s just being sweet and polite and—
“Don’t give her your jacket, it’s nice and warm in here,” comes the querulous voice of what she can only assume is his kwami.
“Plagg?” she hears Tikki squeak excitedly. “I’m covering my eyes, where are you?”
“Tikki! I hid from the cold,” the voice from before exclaims. “It’s been a long time, old friend.”
Plagg must emerge from his place of refuge to sit on Chat-but-not-Chat’s hands with her because shortly after, her kwami remarks (pleasantly enough, considering the truly quite pungent odour), “Oh, never mind. I can smell your favourite cheese.”
“Nice to meet you, Plagg,” Marinette ventures.
“The pleasure is all mine, Ladybug,” the kwami replies silkily. “Do you mind if I test something?”
“Um, I guess not. Go ahead.”
The next thing she knows, Plagg, who looks more or less exactly like a small black cat, floats over to her and inhales deeply. “I still don’t see why girls supposedly smell better than cheese,” he muses to himself, quite inexplicably. Marinette watches bemusedly as the kwami lands on her stomach and wanders with his eyes still closed into her jacket, giving an appreciative sigh of contentment as he does. “Ooh, but this is much cosier. Such soft fabric!”
“Thank you, I treated the jacket lining myself,” Marinette says, at the same time as her companion interjects, “Plagg, get out of there!”
Then, “Wait, you did? That’s so cool!” he exclaims, just as she assures him, “Plagg can stay if he wants.”
“It stinks like camembert in here,” Tikki comments from Plagg’s previous habitation, where she has unobtrusively installed herself at some point in all the commotion. “But it’s about time we each got to meet the new Ladybug and Chat Noir!”
“You’re spots-itively right!” Plagg agrees, heartily if somewhat drowsily. Probably he’s about to take a well-deserved catnap, snuggled up on her.
“We agreed that paws-itively was getting kind of old,” her partner confides in a stage-whisper, as if to justify Plagg’s slightly forced pun. His hair brushes lightly against her cheek. Somehow, she’s still got her head on his shoulder, and it feels so natural that neither of them have really taken any notice of it all this while.
“You’re in-claw-rigible,” she rallies without thinking, then freezes.
“Did you just—"
“—no, no, it must have been a slip of the tongue—”
But it’s too late. “You punned!” he crows, pumping his fist so that his shoulder shakes. “I must be rubbing off on you. Oh, this is great. This is just purr-fect.”
She can’t help joining in his laughter. He just sounds so smug, so like the Chat Noir she knows but just that little bit off kilter, that little bit uncertain. Like his voice isn’t used to talking so freely, like he’s been liberated from a whole stifling set of inhibitions and is just babbling anything that comes to mind to celebrate it. She wonders, not for the first time, about his civilian life. His home life, and the family he never brings up except sombrely and in passing.
At this recollection she abruptly raises her head from his shoulder, and hugging her legs in close to her chest, leans forward just enough to rest her chin on her knees, so that only her lower back is still in contact with his. That must be enough to communicate her change in mood, because there’s a slightly strained cheeriness in his voice as he says, “‘Cat got my back’ was a kind of wordplay, too, you know. But it’s not a catastrophe. You might still lead a pun-free life one day.” And with that pseudo-pretence of a joke he pats the nearest part of her he can reach.
“You’re patting my elbow comfortingly,” she informs him, but her lips twitch into a tentative smile and she sits up a little straighter. Her partner, whoever he is when he isn’t saving Paris in a black catsuit, is apparently the biggest dork.
“Oops,” he says, stopping. After a moment: “Does, uh, your elbow feel any better?”
Marinette tries in vain to keep her face straight. “Oh yes. It appreciates your puns, see. Since it has a funny bone.”
“…I am seeing a whole new side to you.” He shakes his head and makes teasing little tsk tsk sounds at her until she gives him a playful nudge; thereafter, without consciously agreeing to, they both lapse into a reflective sort of silence.
Without the twin distractions of kwamis and puns, they revert back to a shared awareness of their own vulnerability in this situation, only the ice is broken now. Nothing has changed, they’re still the same two people who have been a team for so long, but now she’s rapidly building a rapport with him outside of costume, and isn’t it strange how for a minute there she didn’t even need to think about whether she was behaving like Marinette or Ladybug? How all that careful demarcation of her civilian life from her superheroic one just fell away, redundant and overcautious?
Maybe they can know each other, and be friends, outside of costume after all. Maybe he’s the only person in the world she doesn’t need to hide any part of herself from — and vice versa.
“I guess you must be wondering why I brought you here.”
In a marked change from before, his voice is almost dull, resigned and sad. It’s true, she did wonder at first, but the view and the ambience just swept away her impatience. So instead of answering immediately, she counters, “I guess you must be wondering why I made you stay.”
“And I guess you could just tell me. But that’s not how it works with us, is it?” The sudden brittleness of his voice shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. He must sense its effect on her too, because she can hear him shifting uncomfortably, his sneaker scuffing against the ground as he bends his leg in closer to himself, and he tones it down to just plain sombre as he continues, “I think we both know there are things we do and say and— and feel, that we just don’t talk about.”
Which is ironic, because she was just thinking the same thing earlier. They separately and independently have come to the same conclusion, and in so doing have only proved further to themselves how in sync they are, how attuned.
She knows how he feels about her, or at least she thinks she does. It’s easy most of the time to brush off his corny lines and pretend he doesn’t mean them, but now that he’s called her out implicitly on how she reciprocates some of those same feelings... Tomorrow, or the day or week after when an akumatised villain strikes again, can she really go on pretending not to notice the frisson as he meets her gaze and nods, understanding perfectly the plan in her mind without her needing to say a word? They might continue to act as professional as though they were just teammates, but something has changed tonight. Because both of them have contrived to still be here, now; purportedly still just talking, but more critically connecting.
It’s vulnerable. It’s terrifying.
It’s electrifying and she should turn back but instead she pushes forward, against the invisible boundaries that have locked them in place so long. “Maybe that’s how it is with Ladybug and Chat Noir,” she admits, “but we’re not them right now. I— I don’t even know your name. We could be strangers, never expecting to meet again. Saying anything. No strings attached.”
For a long moment she’s afraid that she’s really pushed him too far, and he’s about to stand up and simply walk away, right out of this space they’ve carved out for themselves to be free to just talk. She wouldn’t even be able to turn around and stop him, not unless they both put their masks back on, and got their walls back up in place.
Then he says, with the barest hint of a smile in his voice, “When I was little I wanted to be a superhero.”
“You’re kidding.”
He sounds almost sheepish. “I’m really not. This— this life is a dream come true. In more ways than one.” His voice trails off towards the end.
With a light nudge, though, he revives the levity they’re rapidly losing. “You’re supposed to tell me something about yourself now,” he reminds her, “Nothing incriminating identity-wise, naturally.”
“Right, um,” she stammers. Funny how difficult it is to come up with something significant to say about yourself that doesn’t say anything substantial about yourself. “Well. I like... peaches? Fuzzy, sweet peaches.”
She has to stop herself from discussing the relative merits of fresh and preserved fruit for the different kinds of danish her parents have on menu at the confectionary. That’s probably a pretty big hint that she’s a baker’s daughter. Or, misleadingly, that she’s really into baking.
“Oh, yeah they’re the best! Okay, uh, my favourite colour is blue.” (“Blue like your eyes,” Chat Noir would have said, while waggling his eyebrows at her.)
“I made a blue scarf for someone once,” she replies easily, feeling proud of herself for not stumbling over the ‘someone’.
He gives a little bemused huff at that, like he doesn’t know quite what to do about her. “So you make stuff, I break stuff. You sound nice, in your other life. Me? Part of the reason I wouldn’t turn around is I’m not sure you’d like the real me.”
That stuns her a moment. So there’s probably a bit too much sympathy in her voice as she starts saying, “Chat—”
“—your turn,” he cuts her off, firm and clipped. “Don’t...” he starts saying, but seems to lose steam. Against her cheek, the feathery locks of his hair shift as he ducks his head.
He won’t let her pursue what he said, so “My best friend doesn’t know who I am,” she whispers on a whim, thinking of Alya as she starts saying the words, but ending with Chat Noir’s face in mind.
Now when he starts his turn, he seems to address the air in front of him rather than her, as if he has to shrink away from that immediacy to bear saying the words. “I come up here to clear my head. My mum used to come with my father. It was her favourite place.”
(“She never brought you?” she wants to ask, but because of their need for secrecy and his own taciturnity, all he could tell her is all that would force him to vocalise the loss he must have resigned himself to, long ago: “She was going to.”)
I guess you must be wondering why I brought you here, he said before. And this is why.
“I didn’t want to go back home to an empty house tonight. Not hurt, and alone. And I’m selfish, I know, because you were there, and I just—”
“I glanced back at you, right before I swung away.” She rushes it out first, and then realises that she’s been meaning all along to say it, that it’s been in the back of her mind all night. “I never do that, I think, because I’ve never seen that look on your face before. I couldn’t walk away from that.”
“Oh,” is all he can say to that, softly as though shell-shocked. She imagines his eyes have gone wide again.
“And you know something else?” She doesn’t give him a chance to answer, or to cut her off in turn with some wisecrack. “You never walk away from me, Chat Noir. Never. Do you understand?”
I guess you must be wondering why I made you stay, she said before. This is why, she thinks at him desperately. Please understand that.
“I had a theory about today and I knew I was right when I said ‘Cat got my back’ and you stiffened like you didn’t think you deserved the compliment. And then you brought it up again like a joke and you need to stop cracking jokes when it hurts. You need to—”
But she can’t say it and so she reaches back and takes his hand, and after a stunned moment he squeezes back. Hers is probably not the most elegant way to broach the subject, and definitely betrays the extent of her apprehension, but she can’t bring herself to care about all that. Not when he’s depositing his secrets with her like he has no one else to turn to for their safekeeping. Not when he’s spontaneously bringing her to a place with so much sentimental meaning for him, so many echoes. He’s sharing himself with her, he’s been sharing himself with her ever since he became Chat Noir and started slipping out of his lonely personal life to fight alongside her, hiding his darkness in her incandescence.
“For a moment? I thought about using Cataclysm on the akuma-villain,” he murmurs. He doesn’t use the villain’s name, like he can’t bear to have to say he thought about doing that to an actual person. It’s a confession, an abasement. “If you hadn’t… I might’ve done it.”
“For a moment I wanted you to,” she says, defying his aversion to selfishness with her own valid claim to it. Immediately she recalls the harrowing instant when he was attacking her under Dark Cupid’s spell and almost touched her with his power of concentrated bad luck. They still don’t know what would happen, but despite her close shave there’s a ring of truth in her statement.
His breath audibly catches as he (hopefully) makes the connections she’s been leading him towards. You are important to me. You are important. “Thank you, m’lady,” the boy who is sometimes Chat Noir tells her solemnly.
Her hand is warm where his fingers wrap easily around it. Her arm is bent at an awkward angle to hold his hand, and his must be too. He seems to carefully consider his next words.
“It won’t be like this the next time I see you, will it,” he asks rhetorically, wistfully. His thumb strokes across hers idly, slowing reluctantly to a stop as he sighs and says, “This isn’t fair.”
And it isn’t. It really isn’t, on both their parts — she’s letting him get closer when she knows she won’t let him get as close as he wants, and he’s exploiting the chance even though she’s offering it only in an unconsidered, heady emotional rush. Like with the intoxicating something that’s burgeoning between them, they’ve both been letting this happen without asking where it could go for fear of breaking the spell. So, “I know,” she says, and when he declares, “I don’t really care,” she whispers back, “Me neither.”
The silence that follows is complete enough that she can hear the soft, sad little chirp that Tikki gives sometimes when she’s really distressed about something. Plagg shifts in her jacket and it occurs to her suddenly that their two kwamis have been listening to the entire conversation.
She knows that there have been other Ladybugs before her, in a long legacy stretching back at least to ancient Egyptian times. Doesn’t that also mean there have been other Chat Noirs? Tikki and Plagg would know. Maybe there’s always been one way their story goes. Maybe history is repeating itself, and they’re just filling in the roles.
If that’s the case though, she doesn’t want to know. Whether Ladybug and Chat Noir have ever been happy before, whether they always have to fight all these conflicting impulses — she’ll see this through. She’ll make the story her own. And right as she’s reaching that conclusion he says lightly, “I’m still going to make puns and stuff though,” so she’s ready with the words, “Yeah. Thanks, kitty,” even before he finishes.
This is an extravagant, delicate balance they are tacitly agreeing to hold. So of course he’s broken the tension. Of course he’s given her an out, like the gentleman he is, even though he embellishes it with a flourish too many, in what she’s belatedly realising is a formula to make sure she never takes him seriously enough. So that he can keep pretending he has this, he has her.
You don’t have to pretend, she wants to tell him. You’ve got me. Not because you need me, or because I need you. Because we choose to rely on each other, just like we chose to come up here and stay up here tonight, back to back against the world.
But on the outside, she merely offers, “I can transform back to get us down.” Then tentatively, “All aboard the yo-yo express?”
(He really is rubbing off on her.)
“Yeah,” he answers after a little too long a pause, and Tikki flits into her earring as Plagg returns to his chosen’s jacket. She transforms more sombrely than usual, and is about to get up when he stops her with her name — still the only name he knows her by.
“Ladybug,” he says, and hesitating only a little, turns around to give her a hug from behind, which she leans into instinctually. His chin tucks over her shoulder and it’s warm and tight and familiar. Twice before has he hugged her as he sacrificed himself for her.
She knows his eyes are closed (like each time before, in loving resignation), even though this time hers are, too.