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It’s all impressions and fragments.
It’s a memory of sitting by a river drinking wine from a dusty bottle while a wagon caravan trundles by on the other bank. It smells like wet earth and her toes are cold but there's a warm arm around her shoulder and she's happy for the first time in a long time.
It’s a memory of Chat’s bright bright green eyes turning brown as he loses the transformation but no details of his face and she wakes up convinced it’s real. Her Chat Noir must have brown eyes because what else could it mean?
It's dreams that keep coming. They don't happen every night but the dreams are haunting them both.
It’s desert sand giving way to farm land and then city and the realization that here, the yo-yo means she’ll be able to fly from rooftop to rooftop when it had never done much in her village. It's the little flutter of fear crystallizing slowly into determination when she realizes that this whole city is her responsibility. Not just a village of a hundred. A city of thousands and they're all hers to protect.
It’s sitting in a temple, at the feet of a god, and holding a ring so tightly that it leaves a mark on his palm. .
It’s a rain forest at night and she's already failed twice but this time she isn't alone. The girl beside her is taller than she is and doesn't seem to be afraid of anything. She holds up a hand and they lace their fingers together for a moment before moving into the dark.
It’s the rooftops at the Vatican. Adrien’s never been there but he passes through on his way to a fashion show in Rome and the fragments of a dream come back to him. He knows where to find the hand holds to get up onto that rooftop even without his powers. He stares at it and the realization that the dreams are real, that the gargoyle is right where he knows it will be, leaves him jumpy for the rest of the trip.
It’s high fives beneath a street lamp as jazz hums in the background and she taps his nose with her index finger. The air is heavy and muggy and he can’t remember what she says before she goes.
It’s a ballgown and a corset and a string quartet. It’s her father reminding her who she’s meant to dance with and why. It’s spending half the night with a servant boy with blue eyes and an accent and the most alarming tendency to wink at her when she was trying to focus on remembering exactly how one behaved at dinner.
It's a boy in red who elbows him in the ribs whenever he says something too proper and yanks on his tail whenever he says something too scandalous until it's a shoving match and they're both laughing too hard to remember what they're supposed to be doing.
It’s falling too fast and needing her to pick him out of the air. She calls him Bug and he calls her Kitten and she punches him for it. Her skin is darker than his and that’s going to be a problem when they’re themselves again but right now they can just be together.
It’s stray cats scattering as the firecrackers go off and sneaking away from her mother at the Diwali dinner to meet a boy in a cat suit on a balcony who gives her a grin brighter than all the lights in the house.
It’s all that.
It’s fragmented kisses that linger all day, replaying in the back of her mind when she really doesn’t want them there.
It's all that but it's also the fragmented horrors of nightmares that feel far too real.
It’s vague answers from Plagg and Tikki who can’t remember much more than they can reincarnation to reincarnation.
It’s Adrien becoming more and more sure, with each dream that he and Ladybug have always been meant to be together.
It’s Marinette fighting that same thought with everything she has because her life isn’t up the whims of mysterious fates and she’ll fall in love with who she pleases, dreams or no dreams.
It's two people.
It's one mission.
It's fate.
It's lifetimes full of choices.
It's happened before but it wasn't quite the same. It's never quite the same.