Historian's Note:

This is the third in a series of adventures set in the universe first created by Elegy for a Chat, roughly taking place immediately after Sweethearts Ball and in that gray area of time that may or may not have existed between the second and third seasons of Miraculous. Though not required reading, you might find it beneficial to review those before continuing.

This story was written before the third season of Miraculous had been released in the United States; though the author attempted to avoid spoilers at all costs, they did become aware of a few plot points that were planned as part of that season but not before a substantial portion of this story had been completed. Any similarity of this tale to episode(s) that aired in the third season are purely coincidental and more due to logical intuition on the part of the author based on what had aired up to season three.

Ladybug (present day)

Chat was purring as he leaned closer to kiss me; I couldn't help but smile. The evening had been everything we had hoped it would be, short of Adrien actually taking me to the dance in person. We'd have to revisit our plan to "out" our relationship with our school, but there was plenty of time to decide our next move. Right now, I was focusing in on his impending approach, and closed my eyes in anticipation of his very gentle, but very right kiss as he planted those lips on me.

And I waited, puckered.

And waited.

"Chat?" I said, cracking an eye. "What the...?"

Where did he go so quickly?

I opened both eyes, and stood up. The candles continued to flicker where we'd left them, but his tablet was missing as well as his backpack. I'd not even heard him flip away, which made it doubly weird. "Chat?" I called, starting to walk the space. "Where are you?"

I'd put on the necklace he'd given me, even though I'd not intended to wear it while transformed into my alter-ego, and my hand went immediately to the Le Chat Noir pendant. It was still there, so clearly he had been there with me. "This is damn peculiar," I whispered, immediately realizing I was quoting one of his favorite movies. That brought a smile to my face, albeit briefly.

I clicked open the yo-yo and triggered the tracking system. No clues immediately appeared, and I was on the verge of switching to the phone function when a faint green paw print faded in.

Why is he at the park? And how did he get there so quickly?

Swapping to the phone function, I speed dialed Chat, only to have it go directly to voicemail. I tried several more times with no better result. Having the paw print appear on GPS, but not having him answer was a non sequitur that ratcheted up my concern another notch.

Clicking the yo-yo closed, I tossed it into the air and snagged a chimney to pull myself into the night, swinging through the empty streets of Paris to the small park that was a short walk away from my parent's bakery. I dropped down next to the statue the Mayor had commissioned to celebrate us, and immediately felt something was off.

I turned to examine it more closely. Somehow, it had been swapped out – instead of the two of us in action, it had become a solo work, with a bronze version of me throwing my yo-yo at some unseen akuma. Chat was nowhere to be found. I leaned over and squinted at the dedication plaque, confirming my concern; it was dedicated to the "hero" (singular) of Paris.

"Chat?" I called, concern creeping into my voice. "Are you here?"

Without his natural night vision, I was hampered in searching the park, but despite the faint green paw that persisted on my GPS, Chat was not in the park. I followed as the print moved away from the park, rather quickly actually, and stopped two blocks over; I landed in the middle of the empty street, exactly where the coordinates said he would be, and found nothing.

As it turns out, that wasn't the worst of it. Scanning the street, my eyes fell on one of the ubiquitous billboards that hounded Paris. For months now, I'd been treated to seeing Adrien's smiling face hawking that new perfume of his fathers; tonight, however, a different model was there. Starting to put the pieces together, I blindly began swinging through the city, confirming that there wasn't a single billboard, placard or other advertisement with Adrien on it.

At length I landed outside of the Agreste mansion, needing to physically confirm what the pit in my stomach was trying to tell me. I used the yo-yo to swing over the fence and landed gently at the window outside of Adrien's bedroom. Per usual, he'd left it open for his return that evening, but the lights were off in the room. Carefully, I pulled myself over the sill. "Adrien?" I asked quietly. "Are you here?"

The silence hung heavily.

I snapped open the yo-yo, turning on the flashlight function in the process, and stifled a gasp. As I swung the light around, nothing in the room was familiar. Where the computer had been, a fully stocked bar now existed; the bed, a small round dining table. The couch had been replaced by several cozy reading chairs, replete with lamps; the grand piano was completely missing. There was no door to a bathroom. As far as I could tell, there had never been a bathroom in the first place.

No trace of Adrien existed in the space.

I froze, hearing footsteps approaching, and quickly shot the yo-yo out the window and pulled myself to safety, landing on the rooftop overlooking the mansion. I fingered the pendant again as my eyes roamed over the building. "Where are you, kitty?" I asked the silence.

It didn't hold any answers.

Chat Noir (in the past)

Ladybug continued to glare at me and I shifted gears.

Clearly this was not the right time for me to delve into the metaphysics of what I was now seriously thinking had been some sort of time travel; I rotated the ring she had given – wait, will give? - me and tried for a conciliatory tone. "Trust me when I tell you that nothing is wrong with me," I said. "Let's take care of Stormy Weather and then I'll try again to explain what seems to have happened to me." I dropped all of my Chat Noir pretense and went for the bombshell to convince her. "I know who you are, because you'll tell me."

I waited a beat. "Because you also know who I am, too."

Emotions flashed on her face faster than I could process them, but something clicked behind her eyes. "I will tell you?" she correctly repeated.

"Yes," I said, then amended: "Well, technically, you'll make a series of little mistakes that will lead me to realize who you are." I smiled again. "It turns out to be a good thing."

"What makes you think I don't know who you are under that mask right now?"

I smiled a Chat smile. "That would've been the answer to a lot of the dreams I'd at this point," I laughed a little slyly. "But you don't."

She nodded, for the moment ignoring the gathering storm around us. "'Had at this point,'" she repeated. "You seem a bit mixed up on your tenses, Chat."

"No," I said, shaking my head. "I'm not. You're hearing me correctly."

"All right," she said, coming to some sort of decision. "We'll deal with this later. Now, are you coming or not?"

"Of course, milady," I replied. I saw her quirk an eyebrow, and I realized I was possibly a bit early in introducing that particular affectionate moniker.

She shot up into the darkening sky, and I followed her, trying desperately to remember exactly how I had handled this akumatized villain. Something in the back of my head was warning me against making too many changes in how the past unfolded in order to ensure that the future – my future – remained as it should be. But I hadn't exactly been keeping notes about my life, either.

We landed in the street just behind Stormy, who was floating toward the television station. I was pretty sure I'd said back then: "You just won yourself a cat fight!"

I started running toward her, while Ladybug held back. Stormy turned toward me and said something, pointed her umbrella at the street and coated it with ice, which (as I now remembered) I started to skid over. Before I had a chance to claw into the surface, she blasted me backward with another burst of wind. I sighed as I started to get blown down the street, knowing that (once again) Ladybug was going to...

"Gotcha!" she said as she grabbed my tail and pulled me to safety.

"That hurts, milady," I winced quietly as we watched Stormy blast away a billboard. Then: "A little Chat Noir will take the wind out of her sails!" I cried, and started after Stormy once more only to have Ladybug grab me by the tail again.

What is it with that, anyway?

"Whoa, kitty," she said as I gently massaged the end of my tail. "You better think before you leap!"

This was getting old, but I kept playing along. "You got a plan?"

"Just follow my lead," she said.

It was easier to switch to automatic at that point and allow the muscle memory to play out. We were once again nearly crushed by a bus, I used my night vision to escape from the darkened television studio, and at length we wound up back atop the television station working the Lucky Charm to free the akuma from Stormy's umbrella. I couldn't believe how much of it I had remembered, but was also sure that I'd done a few things differently since the "current" version of me had a few more villains under the bell, as it were.

The clouds parted, the sun came back out, and we stood together for what I think was one of our earliest post-victory celebrations: a fist pump with a mutual "Pound it!"

We'd used our secret super powers, so both my ring and her earrings were chirping madly. She motioned and we left the rooftop and made our way by unspoken agreement to the park; I landed back on the fencepost, and she dropped gently to the sidewalk below. "Here is where we part for now," she said. "I have something I need to do first, but then I will meet you right back here, say around seven?"

"Purrfect, milady," I said, as my ring chirped the next-to-final warning. I leapt away and found the same spot I'd used earlier (like, months earlier) to transform back to Adrien.

Adrien (in the past)

Except, I was still wearing the suit I'd put on for the Ball. Not the clothes I was supposed to have on for the photo shoot I was about to return to. The same photo shoot that Marinette was about to crash.

Plagg came floating out and I tossed him the last piece of Camembert I'd hidden in the suit. "Tell me this is some sort of really bad dream," I begged.

"I don't think so, Adrien," he said as he polished off the cheese in a single gulp. "I usually have something of a connection to the other kwamis, but the silence tells me I'm alone at the moment. And we know that there are other kwamis around, having just seen Ladybug in action."

"So I am me, then, from some point in the future? Somehow gloriously reliving my early days as Chat Noir?"

He looked pensive. "We need to be really careful, Adrien. It's possible that changes made while you are here could impact what you find when you return to your proper time." He flew a little closer. "For example, defeating one of the upcoming villains in a way that wouldn't be possible without a little foresight."

"Adrien?" I heard the photographer call. "Are you okay?"

I continued to huddle behind the tree I was stationed at. "Yes!" I replied loudly. "Be there in a minute." I turned back to Plagg. "But you think we can get back? To our correct point in the timeline?"

The Kwami of Destruction shook his head. "I have no idea."

"Adrien?" the photographer said again, louder.

"I can't go back like this," I said. "It'll ruin the shoot!" My eyes scanned the area and landed on the small trailer they'd parked outside the gate. The makeup artist had redone my hair and added the required makeup for the shoot inside that tiny space, and unless I missed my mark, a backup set of my attire for the afternoon had been hanging on the rack. Plagg ducked back into my pocket and I made a mad dash to the trailer, as fast as the wingtips would allow, and was lucky enough to find it unlocked and empty.

I shucked out of my suit and into a more normal looking set of everyday Adrien attire, pocketed Plagg once more and made my way back to the set. The photographer was in a foul mood at my tardiness, but I saw I was just a half-step ahead of Marinette and that little urchin she'd brought to the park with her that afternoon. I set my smile to "on" while cringing inside at what I knew was coming next.

Again on automatic, I watched as Marinette announced she was ready to be in the photo, and then saw the photographer swoop in for the urchin instead, which he placed in my hands giddily. I pulled out all of the tricks I had in the model book to emote the way I thought I had the first time, and must have been successful. We had minimal reshoots and wrapped a bit more than an hour later.

Gorilla was waiting for me outside the gate; I made him wait while I retrieved my favorite suit from the trailer (cringing as I stuffed it into my satchel) and then he whisked me back to the mansion. If I didn't know what had happened to me, I'd have assumed it was just another day in the life of Adrien Agreste.

Nathalie met me at the door, and we had the standard "no dinner with your father" discussion. I shrugged, uncertain if I'd had a pithy comment all those months ago. Then, it was still a fresh scar that he'd started to ignore me; now, I was used to it, and in fact, perhaps a bit more independent as a result of it. My room was more or less the same as I'd left it earlier that day, save for the change in schoolwork awaiting me on the desk. I wondered if having done the homework once would make it faster the second time around as I dropped my bag and returned to the dining room to eat alone, again.

I pushed the food around on the plate, not terribly interested in eating, realizing that in my brain, I'd just left Ladybug on that rooftop no more than four hours earlier. In this timeline, it was close to six o'clock in the evening, so even my internal clock didn't really line up. But I felt as tired as I should have been, having been awake for more than twenty at that point.

I'd seen enough science fiction to have some theories on time travel, and found myself musing. Was I caught in one of those situations where something in the past has gone off the rails, and I had to correct it in order to restore the future? Or was I in some sort of quantum physics alternative reality, where this timeline was unspooling separately and in parallel from the one I had been living in up until a few hours ago? Maybe I was predestined to return to the past for some sort of heroic quest.

One thing that troubled me was that if I had returned to the past, once before, the "me" at that time apparently didn't encounter the "me" from the future and therefore had no memory of the event. It was hard to wrap my brain around that, but it felt like this might be the "first" time I'd gone backwards in time.

If I were being honest with myself, I was hoping it was the first option, and not the second. I really wanted to get back to the way my life had turned out and had no desire to relive these first few months finding my way as Chat Noir. Those had been tough the first time around, littered with dumb mistakes as a hero and more than a few missteps in my dogged pursuit of Ladybug.

I pushed back from the table and returned to my room. Plagg flew out from my shirt and nibbled on a slice of cheese I'd slid to him under the table. "I may have already told her too much," I lamented to him. "But I think I'm going to need her help to get back."

"Her and Master Fu," he said thoughtfully. He looked at me with seriousness I'd rarely seen in his eyes. "Be as honest as you can with her," he offered. "She'll have to make up her own mind. And be prepared that she won't initially believe you."

I sighed again. This was going to be harder than I thought. Ladybug and I had covered so much ground already that starting over at nothing was almost cruel; having the dire situation I'd found myself in possibly forcing me to compress all of that relationship building into a very, very short period of time made it all the more horrible.

The phone went into the dock, set to play some random piano pieces. "Plagg, claws out," I said, not all enthusiastically. The green flash enveloped me and in short order I was again standing in my room as Chat Noir. But I hesitated; normally, I would have bounded out the window to embrace the freedom my heroic alter-ego offered. Tonight, I was deathly worried I might mess up more than just a relationship.

My very existence felt like it was on the line.