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The PE hall has that musty smell of rubber shoe soles and windows that won't open to let out the sweat. Marinette fiddles with the hem of her Minnie Mouse T-shirt (obviously an ironic fashion statement, regardless of what Chloe said) and waits for her turn to clamber up the rope suspended from the ceiling. The whole class is seeing how far up they get, and timing how long they manage to hold on. Nino is up there right now. He's gotten pretty high up, and she can see his knuckles are white where his skin strains around them. Still, he's literally hanging out, Adrien timing him while they joke. They've got these long boy limbs. All angles of muscle and bone. She tries not to ogle Adrien too obviously. His blond hair is slick and dark over his ears where he's been sweating, and his cheeks and throat are pink from exertion. He looks cute, like a little kid who has been running around, but also upsettingly like something Marinette wants to lick.
It'll be her turn after a few more kids go. Alya is in the back, chatting to Alix. Right behind Marinette are Chloe and Sabrina, clucking over something dreadfully normal. Marinette looks up at the metal bearing that connects the rope to the ceiling, and remembers night.
At night she sweeps across the shingles of an old slanted rooftop in seconds, wind streaming over her cheeks, legs tireless. The shingles clatter but none of them dislodge. Invisible but for brief veins of light across his black suit, Chat bounds beside her. His flash of silver, the zip of her line, the clear chime of the metal staff, the line catching – all these things happen at the same time, and he vaults to the next roof just as she leaps. Skyline, streetlights, cars below: the world wheels around her, she in freefall at its center. And then, touchdown weightless, they keep running.
So now it is day, and it is PE class at school – Marinette approaches the rope and hops up to latch onto it. Tireless, weightless, she grabs hold and – this isn't like night. Her arm and leg muscles burn in seconds. Gravity has never pulled like it does now. She feels herself slipping down even as she clutches the rope and attempts to crawl back up. Her own knuckles must be way whiter than Nino's. She can hear Chloe and Sabrina giggling, higher in pitch as she drops back onto the mat. Marinette can feel her face burn. It must be as bad as her hands. They're bright red.
Juleka is saying "Four point thirty-five seconds,” and waving a stopwatch. The weird thing is that she doesn't sound surprised.
"Not bad for a beginner!" The gym teacher gives Marinette a thumbs up. Around her, Adrien and Nino are still bantering, haven't even looked around. Sabrina and Chloe move to the front now, sneering at the rope like it's one of their classmates. Alya gives Marinette a curious look and wags her hands, palms out, like "are your hands okay?" No one is surprised that Marinette failed, except for Marinette.
☽
That night she is transformed, but so is her city. The angles are all wrong. She throws the yo-yo and it flies true, because it always does. It's her own trajectory that is stilted. She goes from roof to roof but she is not surefire. She's waiting to fail again. She reaches the Eiffel Tower, the stone steps up to the Sacré-Coeur at her back. The tower looms. Behind it, the gardens are washed out in the middle dark. It's so late no more than a few lost, drunk tourists are meandering about. Halfway up the tower, the LED display says something about European cultural centers. She knows that up close those LEDs are so bright they leave bright spots trailing in your vision. She’s been so near to them that the words scrolling by were too big to read. The spider webs and moths that collect around the display turned fairy-like in the changing colors.
Only her sense of balance and a magic yo-yo put her there, and she's still got both. She's going to get up there and stare at those LEDs again, so close by that the lights leave imprints in her eyes.
Without further thought, she launches herself up. Overthinking makes everything more difficult anyway. The yo-yo catches and reels her in. She lands on the closest metal tier with a stumble, and thinks of her stinging hands again, but she can't see them under the red membrane of Ladybug. Next level up. Her feet slip. She doesn’t usually think about whether she's sweating when she’s in the suit – she barely remembers her own name, in the suit – but now she is sweating, and her name is Marinette, and she’s a teenager standing unaided on an iron beam of the Eiffel Tower with nothing between her and the ground but her sense of balance and a yo-yo.
“Are you hurt?”
She rears in surprise, but it's just Chat, suddenly there beside her.
"Ah...” her breath is wheezy.
“What happened, Lady?” His cat's eyes are an otherworldly green, but his boy’s mouth is drawn in worry. "You're moving like you're in pain."
“It’s all wrong, Chat,” she blurts.
"What is?"
She distractedly watches as below, a taxi halts and tourists spill out. Their cameras flash, and just like that they’ve been spotted. What are the odds her sad face will show up on Alya’s blog tomorrow? "Me."
Chat Noir has noticed them too, and instead of responding he steps between her and the cameras. He runs cursory hands up along her suit, tapping her legs and arms and tweaking her nose. She flinches and pouts at him.
“I’m not hurt. And I’m not an Akuma.”
“That’s all I needed to know,” he smiles at her. “So how about we get a mew-ve on, my lady?”
She nods. Chat fluffs her right pigtail as he fetches his silver staff. “Are you dead? No? Are you sure? Usually you roll your eyes more.”
"I'm afraid to jump," A tiny mouse's voice says, but it's her voice.
He bows and says, "Lady, the pleasure would be mine."
She has just enough energy to sigh at him very deeply before he sweeps her up, one wiry arm under her knees. He braces a moment in case she punches him and demands to be put down, but she just throws an elbow around his shoulder. With a flourish, he extends the staff to lower them safely to the ground. The tourists advance, but even with a lost girl in his arms Chat Noir outruns them, up the steps, up a fire escape, up to the shingles.
Chat bounds across roofs, away from the Tour Eiffel. His passenger watches, over his shoulder, as chimney pots and skylights bob by. Living rooms race past her, bathed in unexpected color as people watch evening TV.
He doesn't stop until they reach one of their personal favorites, a penthouse garden with grass and a big birdbath. It’s too late for birds. After the pavement and brick of Paris, though, the grass smells alive.
Out of breath from his roof parkour, Chat attempts to put her down very gently on the lawn. Instead she rolls out of his arms and drops onto the lawn with an "oof".
He grins. "Sorry."
She feels soft and small and foolish. “So tell me,” he says, long skinny legs sprawled on the grass beside her, and is silent while she takes all the minutes she needs to speak.
“Do you– do you think we can break our magic? Like, ruin it somehow?”
His eyes are luminous in the moonlight.
“No. Why?"
Her palms, wrapped in this red shell, are colorless.
"Wait, let me change that answer. I do believe we could ruin our magic somehow.”
Her eyes snap back to his.
“Like the guy who keeps making evil butterflies. I bet he’s ruined whatever magic he had. But I don’t think you or I have."
She shakes her head. “Today, I… when I was myself, I had to do this thing, just a dumb physical thing, and I thought, well when I’m Ladybug I can do it, so why not when I’m M-” she catches herself on the M . Chat Noir is listening, a fixed look on his face. She swallows. “But I- I couldn’t manage? At all. Nothing like if I had been transformed. And the worst part was that no one had even noticed."
“Noticed what?”
“That I failed to – to do the thing. I failed.”
He laughs quietly and pokes the soil. “I’m usually pretty happy when nobody notices my failures.”
She allows a smirk to edge into her voice. "Well, your failures are pretty flamboyant."
"What? I thought you said you hadn't been akumatized!" Chat pounces on her and pretends to steal her yo-yo. "Surrender this poor girl, you fiendish butterfly!"
Ladybug shrieks at the assault. After a brief wrestle she flips them and pins him to the grass. The laughter she hears is her own. Chat looks up at her, delighted. “Just because you didn’t achieve Ladybug levels of amazing while not transformed doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong. When I’m not transformed, I do not try to pole-vault my way across the roofs of Paris.”
“I really wish… I wish I'd become as cool in daily life as Ladybug is in super-life."
"They're both you. You're Ladybug." He reminds her.
She shifts off him to wrap her arms around her knees. "Do you wish you were as cool in daily life as Chat Noir is?"
He clicks his tongue, leaning back in the grass without taking his eyes off her. "I dunno. I'm pretty cool in daily life. I have a lot of fans."
"Yeah uh, your mom doesn't count." She teases, and he bares his teeth at her. They glint in the moonlight.
"You wound me, Lady," he drawls, closing his eyes. While his luminous eyes are closed he seems an unknown entity. The magical texture of his mask, glinting dully in the soft light, covers even his eyelids. "Your cruel words are like stabs in my heart."
She stabs her finger at his chest a couple times to get a rise out of him, but he just watches her with one eye open. His tail flicks to one side.
"I'm your fan," she offers, gentle.
He scoffs. "Do you even have any posters of me on your wall?"
She shakes her head, sheepish, thinking of her walls papered with poor unsuspecting Adrien Agreste.
"Maybe a screensaver?" Chat tries.
She's still silent, but smirking again.
"Are you even a real fan?"
"...maybe I have the Chat Noir anime body pillow," she offers silkily.
He lets out a guffaw and she thrills. "Fine, my lady. It's not like I get hourly updates for the LadyBlog."
Her eyes light up. "You do! And you have posters and a screensaver of Ladybug, don't you!" She hazards, and then deflates – "even though she is just a girl in a polka-dot suit with a yo-yo."
She flails, suddenly upended. “Hey!"
He's sat up, that sneaky cat, and is holding her ankle up in the air as if it's not attached to the rest of her.
“Don’t you think it’s ironic that we manage to scale these buildings, and discover this one grassy roof in downtown Paris, but we can’t take off our magical boots to like, walk on the grass barefoot?” His black-gloved hand pokes the sole of her foot. It tickles.
“Wanna hear my gross theory?” He asks, grabbing her toes through the suit and wiggling them. Briefly she is struck by what that gesture would be if her foot were bare, if his hand weren’t in a black glove.
“What’s your gross theory,” she asks.
“My gross theory is that our magical suits actually are our kwami, who open their mouth up so, so wide that they can fit all of us inside, basically swallow us up to our necks, and they've got no bones 'cause they're magic, right, so then they vacuum-deflate to basically fit around us skin-tight–"
“Aw, gross,” she interrupts.
“-and that’s why we can’t expose our hands or feet without detransforming. And also why I sometimes smell of old cheese.”
Their eyes meet and they smile, cheered up here on this green roof under the moon.
He’s still holding her foot like he’s forgotten it as he looks at her. She looks back, and then growing impatient, attempts to jam that foot in his face, saying "here! My kwami smells like cookies!" He does a pretty good job fighting her off.
When he has caught his breath, he says, “Ladybug. You’re the one and only Ladybug, okay? Your kwami provides the firepower. It’s who you are that provides everything else."
A slip of a girl, enfolded in a magic suit. On her back, on the grass, beside her partner, absorbing the smattering of stars visible beyond Paris' light pollution. Below her roofs are all those living rooms, lit up in color. If there had been an akuma attack tonight, would she have been able to keep them safe?
“What happens when everything else isn't enough?"
He hums. “Like when you can't reach the top of the Eiffel Tower?”
“Maybe not the top. Just the LED display on European cultural centers.”
He grins. "That's when you let Chat Noir be your personal elevator, my lady."
"I don't want to have to depend on you," she says. When he doesn't reply she looks over.
"Is it such a bad thing?" His voice is small, "I mean, if I didn't get to depend on you, I'd definitely be dead, or like, an evil zombie, or–"
"No– Chat, I meant– of course we depend on each other as a team. I meant… tonight it felt like the suit and I weren't connected properly. Like it might disappear mid-jump. If I can't be sure of that, how can I be a dependable partner?"
He nods his understanding now, and leaps up. "The way I see it, we've got no choice. Why don't you try again?"
"Try what?"
Chat Noir drags Ladybug up off the grass and grabs her shoulders. "Scale the Eiffel Tower with a yo-yo. Oh, don't pout at me, my lady. If I were physically capable of carrying you to the ends of the earth, you know I would! I'd carry you forever – feed you cookies, keep you warm, hold you close..."
"I already have a Chat Noir body pillow," she says, "and it is less noisy than the real thing."
Smirking, he backs away from her. "Then I'll meet you at the Eiffel Tower," and he jumps off the side of the roof.
The wind pushes and pulls at her, the rooftops reverberate in her bones as her pounding feet meet them. It is an effort. She keeps running. The little yo-yo whizzes out, catches, carries her along. She wobbles. She keeps going. Her polka-dot limbs flash. Nobody in Paris can keep up with her.
Almost nobody. When she gets to the Eiffel Tower and skips up storey after storey of metal latticework, there is Chat Noir, pleased to see her, dangling his long black legs, bathed in the multi-colored light of the LED screen at his back.
Her landing beside him is perfect. It's going to be okay. Ladybug smiles at Chat Noir and says, "there are spiderwebs in your hair."
FIN