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“This?” Chat asked, gesturing to his little finger. Ladybug herself could not stand to look at it, so distraught was she. Was she upset that of everyone in the world, Chat had been on the other side of her string? No. What upset her was who was not on the other side of that string.
What upset her was that Adrien was not on her string and that she needed to rewrite her entire life’s plan. And Adrien… he probably had someone better than her.
“Yes, this,” Ladybug grit out, trying to calm herself from the emotional whirlwind of chaos going on in her mind and her heart. “This is something unavoidable. This is something we don’t get a say in.”
The next words she uttered came out without her bidding, but she knew they were true. “This is wrong. And I can’t fix it. I can’t…”
The hopelessness of their situation, the situation they had been landed in, swarmed on her at once. As much as Ladybug had hoped that this Red String of Fate was a fake, it had proven to be all too real. It connected loved ones, grew the distance to traverse the entirety of Paris, and no string had been cut yet. Scissors, razor blades, and even chainsaws had been reported to be ineffective against them. This akuma was making every String visible and causing chaos for the entirety of Paris.
Miraculous Cure would render the Strings invisible again. It would not, however, remove the results.
Ladybug needed to breathe. She needed to think. She needed to calm down. She needed to come up with a plan. Akuma now, String…
String…
She looked at her pinky again, her brain refusing to compute until she had dealt with the panic. This wasn’t her plan. This wasn’t her life. This wasn’t what she wanted.
This was wrong. She had no choice…
“My—Ladybug, look at me.”
She couldn’t.
“Ladybug, please…”
She couldn’t…
…but she had to.
She was Ladybug. Superheroine with a responsibility to Paris and to her partner. Did she wish it would remain platonic at best? Yes. It was too dangerous to allow it to be anything else. But the String…
She looked up to see Chat. His green eyes were dimmer than normal and there was a frown on his face. His ears were not completely down, but rather pointed forward. His eyes were searching her for something. Something she was not sure she could give him currently.
“This is bothering you a lot,” he said. It was not a question, but she felt inclined to respond. She nodded.
The moment stretched into an eternity. Ladybug’s mind raced on ways she could forget such an ancient tradition that had literally interwoven into her childhood bedtime stories. The String was never wrong. It never broke. It was eternally binding.
It had taken her choices away from her.
“Cataclysm.”
Ladybug blinked, turning to her partner.
Chat.
His hand.
It had a dark power within it.
He reached for the string.
Her eyes widened.
“Chat!”
His palm hesitated mere centimeters from the string. Ladybug could not move, the implications of his actions resting heavily on her head.
He would destroy her String.
And his as well.
“You can’t do that,” she whispered. “This could hurt you…”
“Ladybug,” Chat said, his voice even. She had never heard him without emotion like this before. His eyes remained dim, his ears pitched forward. His brows were pinched and his frown deep-set.
“It already has.”
Before she could protest further, he snatched the String from the ground, holding it until the red faded into white. The once flexible wire stiffened until it was brittle, then suffered a resounding crack until it lay upon the ground between them, shattered into many pieces.
Ladybug’s lip quivered as she stared at the white shards.
What…?
“I’ve been trapped before. I know what that feels like.”
Ladybug ripped her gaze from the shattered substance between them and to her black cat of a partner. He stared at neither the string nor her nor even the hand he used to break a force so powerful. Instead, he pointedly kept his gaze away. Yet he could not hide the tremor in his voice.
“When it comes to me, you will always have a choice. No one is going to tell you how it is or isn’t going to be, because you’re going to be the one to tell them. I won’t hold you down and I won’t hold you back.”
His face, usually so expressive, remained blank. Remained withdrawn.
Ladybug felt a tear roll down her face.
“If you love me, that’s your choice. If not, then that’s your choice. I won’t be the one to trap you. I refuse.”
The battle was quickly won after that. Ladybug left the scene quickly.
But not quickly enough.
Because behind her, in the frigid air of Paris, a howling cry shattered the recently returned peace of Paris.
And there was nothing she could do to fix it.