Pairing: LadyNoir/various other names for these two dorks based on who has a mask at the time

Summary: Ladybugs are known for their reputation of bringing about good fortune, but when something proves to be seriously wrong with Tikki, Marinette is going to need a lot more than just good luck on her side to save her kwami. Can a certain Chat help without finding out his Lady's true identity? In the end, will it even matter who she is behind the mask? And to think it all starts with a broken yo-yo…

a/n: much like hawkmoth, i own nothing pertaining to a miraculous. UNLIKE hawkmoth, I do not wish to steal anything miraculous-related, so have this disclaimer

LadyBlog Post #362

Good morning, Ladybloggers! This is your favorite reporter, Alya C, checking in before the first bell of the day to say that the search for Ladybug's true identity continues. I have a good feeling about today, and not just because I woke up to an actual ladybug crawling along my windowsill (for the sake of staying professional, we'll keep talk of "fate" out of this). My reporter senses tell me that today will be the day I find a solid clue as to just who this masked character is, and then we'll know for certain the girl that protects Paris along with her feline partner. Until then, stay tuned for a video log and be sure to subscribe so you get notifications of when I livestream! Ladybug is never too far away, and we ALL know just how much my camera loves her. You definitely don't wanna miss her in action. In the meantime, I'd love to hear any and all of your theories if you have any ideas! Feel free to shoot me a message.

Chat with ya later, Buggers!

xo, Alya

There was a ladybug on his desk—a real one this time too, not just the charm from Alya's cellphone that tended to fly off its cord whenever the girl would swing it around.

The blond allowed himself to slowly tune out the teacher one fact about the Roman Empire at a time, his eyes following the path of the tiny insect as it made a slow, lazy trek across his notes. Its dotted pattern was taking his mind to other places, and to one masked figure in particular.

Adrien rested his head against his hand, lounging against the top of his desk and invading Nino's space. The other boy didn't seem to mind, as he was too busy using his tablet to research the release date of an upcoming album to notice. Adrien began to let his mind wander as the tiny insect's spots made his eyes lose focus, and he was soon daydreaming about bounding from rooftop to rooftop in the heart of Paris on all fours.

Although he knew it was wrong, he found himself crossing his fingers for an akuma spotting so that he could have an excuse to transform during the school day.

He flexed his hand without thinking about it, feeling the ring that weighed heavily on his finger. Plagg was hiding out in his locker, no doubt making the boy's science notes smell anything less than aged cheese and not feeling at all sorry for it. The sprite would probably be all too pleased to hear about Adrien wishing for an akuma attack, never missing an opportunity to tease the boy about his obvious crush on Ladybug.

A tiny sneeze from behind the blond snapped the boy out of his thoughts.

Just in time too, by the looks of it.

"Mr. Agreste, could you please repeat what I just shared with the class?"

Adrien looked to his friend, hoping his eyes could convey the level of panic he was currently feeling inside, but the other boy only shrugged helplessly. Nino hadn't been paying attention either, thanks to that damn tablet.

His teacher was smiling patiently at him, although Adrien picked up on the fact that it looked a little tight at the corners today. She must get tired of having to constantly call for his attention, but he knew that she would never say anything outright about it; not when his father was at such a high power and a call home could result in her punishment, not Adrien's.

Which he found completely unfair.

"Sorry, ma'am," he sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck and felt his cheeks warm. He figured the least he could do was pay better attention. He sputtered a quick answer that he hoped would please the teacher and was relieved when it seemed enough to work.

"Bless you," he whispered once she turned back to the board, not exactly knowing whom he was saying it to until he turned slightly in his seat to see a blushing Marinette. He smiled politely as she stuttered a quick thank you that left her even redder than the barrettes that she used to pull her hair back.

"Th-thanks," she squeaked, her mouth hidden behind her hands as she was still reeling from the second sneeze that had occurred while Adrien had been talking to the teacher. The crinkles by her eyes were the only thing that gave away her smile. She dropped her gaze from the blond's shortly after for no apparent reason that the boy could figure out.

Adrien turned back around at Alya's knowing smirk, ignoring Nino's quirked brow as he returned his attention to his notes only to find that the ladybug was gone.

He let out a long sigh which luckily went unnoticed by his friends. While it would have sounded dumb to explain out loud, the boy had been secretly happier about the random ladybug than he should've been. The romantic side that he normally reserved for Chat Noir had been nagging at him since he'd noticed the tiny thing, trying to convince Adrien that it'd been a sign that his Ladybug had been thinking of him.

Just for fun, the boy looked to the glass windows-his eyes sweeping over the reflection of his classmates as he toyed with the idea that one of them could be his partner in civilian form.

A soft beep sounded out, breaking the silence of the classroom as all the students had turned their attention to the graded tests their teacher had just handed back. Thanks to the woman's infamously brutal grading system, both Adrien and Marinette went unnoticed by their distressed peers as their hands flew simultaneously into the air.

May I be excused?

Ladybug ran her hand along the yo-yo once, sliding her fingers over its smooth plastic as she swept her eyes over the view of the city. Her heart was racing with a mix of excitement and adrenaline of being up so high, and she hoped she never took the sight for granted. Down below, she could see Chat leaping from one rooftop to the other on all fours as he hurried to their predetermined meeting spot, the boy not yet noticing his Lady from her high perch.

She shook the loose hair that fell into her eyes that the wind had pulled free from her barrettes, tucking a piece behind her ear. The girl took a deep breath, steadying herself as she prepped for the jump. It amazed her how free-falling towards pavement never phased Ladybug, but the high dive at the local pool still gave Marinette a heart attack every summer. She backed up a few spaces until she figured she had enough room for a running start, and then once she reached the lip of the building's edge, she pushed herself off in one bounding leap… and the ladybug flew.

Or, rather, fell through the air—gracefully.

The glare from the sun reflecting off the glass windows of the building became a blur as Ladybug picked up speed. The wind was whipping her hair all around her face, and she enjoyed the feeling of it flying free from the bands she was always holding them back with. She did a quick little spin just for the heck of it, since she had the few seconds to spare. This building was tall, even by her standards.

Figuring it was time to get down to business, she swiftly unhooked the dotted yo-yo at her side to aim at an upcoming flagpole jutting from a neighboring building. She enjoyed the rush of adrenaline as she braced for the jarring pull of the wire that would send her flying up to meet Chat. It was a routine motion; something that felt like second nature as she swung her arm around in a wide arc, letting the yo-yo fly free from her hand.

Ladybug realized too late that something was wrong.

Her "grappling hook" didn't zoom through the air to loop around the metal pole as planned. The wire never left the holster at all.

She tried again, refusing to freak out since the rational side of her knew that it would do nothing to help the situation. The girl quickly reset the device, mumbling a silent prayer that her hands would remain as steady as one's could when falling towards hard concrete. She knew there was no time for her clumsiness to make itself apparent. Ladybug shot the disc again, this time at a different target that was closer, but was left with the same results.

The yo-yo was definitely stuck.

"Tikki!" she shouted, feeling the panic begin to creep in. She hoped that the sprite could offer some kind of quick explanation, or at the very least a helpful way out of what seemed to be impending doom. The ground was beginning to look alarmingly close, reminding Marinette of the high dive. "Tikki!"

Why isn't she answering me?!

"Chat!"

"Oof!" Ladybug let out a pained huff when she all but collided with the boy's chest, jarring every bone in her body. He must have made it to their meeting spot and saw her predicament, leaping from the roof of the inn to catch her. His heroic jump, however, proved to have too much momentum.

They landed awkwardly on the edge of a flat rooftop that sent them rolling across the rough cement. Chat hit the ground hard on his side which made him lose his hold on Ladybug-sending the girl skidding and tumbling away from her partner in a whirl of red and blurred, black spots. The impact knocked the wind out of both of them, leaving the teenagers gasping for air as they waited for their racing hearts to slow.

After a moment in which the girl quietly assessed the situation and verified that nothing was broken, she slowly opened her eyes, feeling dazed as she blinked to get rid of the mirage of black cats that were circling her head.

Groaning, she groggily pulled herself up into a sitting position and hissed when the action pulled tight on a few scrapes along her side. Her cheeks flared up as she rubbed the back of her head where a small knot was beginning to form. While she was grateful for her partner saving her, she could only imagine how Chat's little rescue mission must have looked from the street.

She just knew she would find the whole ordeal catalogued in perfect—stretched—detail later on Alya's blog.

The girl wondered briefly if her ears were playing tricks as she heard the faint click of a camera phone go off from somewhere below.

Ladybug sighed and hid her face in her gloves, wincing when she accidentally bumped her split lip against the heel of her hand.

"Wh-what… happened… back there?" Chat panted, rolling over onto his back with his arms now outstretched on either side. He wasn't looking at her, instead focusing on the clouds overhead that seemed to be traveling south in a slow march. She watched as he swallowed hard, struggling to catch his breath. "I wasn't sure if I could make that jump. I thought for sure you were a goner."

Ladybug ignored the last part of her partner's statement, not wanting to let her thoughts wander to how she could have ended up had he not made the catch after all. Her eyes trailed to the yo-yo that had skidded a few yards from it's owner on impact.

"My yo-yo," she replied softly, deep in thought before the reality of her situation finally hit her. "It-it just completely jammed!"

Chat lolled his heavy head in her direction, some of the blond fringe falling into his eyes. He half-heartedly blew it out of the way and frowned. "Jammed?" His eyes left hers for a moment as his brows drew together, turning back to the sky. "I didn't even know that could happen."

"It can't happen. My yo-yo's string is unbreakable, I told you that the day at the zoo." Ladybug bit her lip, forgetting that it was split. "It isn't that it's broken…" she trailed off.

It wasn't broken. It just didn't work.

The girl shook her head, cocking it slightly to the side as she eyed the device in question from a distance. Nothing about it seemed out of the ordinary. Slowly, she crawled the few feet it took to get to the yo-yo, her knees painfully scraping along the concrete through the rips in her suit as she went.

She tapped the red and black polka-dotted tool, pressing the side of it so that it rewound the few inches of string that the device did emit nice and tight. It seemed to have no trouble resetting itself, making the idea that it was jammed seem all the more ridiculous.

Chat wasn't saying much, she noticed as she carefully tucked the yo-yo to it's place on her hip. He was still lying with his back flat against the rooftop, staring at the sky as the clouds continued their leisurely stroll on their way towards the south side of the city.

The guilt soon set in, and she felt her cheeks tinge pink at the realization of just how badly she had worried him–again. First, it was somersaulting her way into a T-Rex's gaping mouth and now this. The boy wasn't cracking any of his normal romantic gestures to follow up his "heroic" gesture like he normally would, which told the girl that this particular incident had really struck a nerve.

Hell, he hadn't even attempted a bad pun.

And there was a plethora of them to be made.

Chat stiffened for a single heartbeat as Ladybug surprised him with a soft kiss to the forehead, eyes wide as his face quickly turned the shade of his partner's—now ripped—suit as he looked up at her upside down figure.

"Thanks for helping me out back there, Kitty," she said sheepishly, nudging his shoulder with hers when he finally pulled himself up into a sitting position so that they sat side by side. "Things could have gotten a little messy if you hadn't been around. This bug would've been squashed for sure."

Chat chuckled nervously, the corners of his smile not quite matching his eyes. "O-of course, my Lady. Have I ever let you down? Heh…" he trailed off, and Ladybug could tell he was trying to keep up his playful persona; his heart just wasn't in it.

She tucked some of the loose hair behind her ear. "I'm fine, ya know," she said softly, thinking he needed the reassurance. She hugged her knees to her chest as the two took a moment to just sit and get over the shock; to wrap their heads around the fact that while the afternoon could've ended horribly... it didn't. Things could have turned out a lot worse.

"Yeah," he grinned weakly, lifting a closed fist to bump against her own when he winced, the motion having jarred the shoulder that had absorbed most of the impact. Chat looked like he was about to say something else when Ladybug's earrings beeped before he had the chance, and he warned her that her spots were already down to two.

"You better get somewhere," he lifted his chin to motion towards her miraculous, "and fast."

"Weird," she mumbled, twisting one of the earrings. "Tikki never gets tired this quick."

Her suspicion that something was going on was only growing by the second, as was her worry. The yo-yo resting on her hip suddenly felt like lead hanging from a loose thread.

Something wasn't right.

"Chat," she struggled to keep her voice steady and waited for the boy to swivel his head around to look at her before saying, "I think there's something seriously wrong."

He frowned, the cat ears atop his head twitching at her words as he inspected her for any visible threats other than the few obvious scrapes and bruises. His eyes trailed along her suit before those piercing green eyes came to a stopping point at her own, and she watched as one skeptical brow raised to arch over his mask.

"What do you mean?"

"I think-"

Flash.

Luckily, Chat seemed to realize what had happened before she did.

Marinette saw the boy all but throw himself in the opposite direction of where she now sat in her normal clothes, his arms smacking him in the forehead in his haste to shield his eyes.

"I didn't see anything, Lady! I swear!"

Frantic and confused, the girl pushed herself to her feet and quickly ducked behind a protruding air-duct with an exhausted and fainted Tikki in her cupped hands. Marinette's chest was bursting with nerves as nothing was making sense. Chat had just warned her that her dots were down to two, which should have been more than enough time to safely get away somewhere she could transform in private.

She bit her lip as she shifted the tiny body that was passed out in her palms.

"Tikki," she whispered, digging into her purse for the granola bar that she'd passed up at lunch. She tried to gently rouse the sleeping sprite, but to no avail.

What's going on? she wanted to ask—wanted to know of the age-old kwami in hopes that she could provide Marinette with any answers.

…or, at the very least, a little reassurance.

But the sprite wasn't waking up.

"Lady?" she heard Chat ask nervously from the same spot where she had left him, but she wasn't worried about him getting any closer. Marinette knew her partner wouldn't try to sneak a peek at her true identity. "Is everything, uh, okay?"

Swallowing around the lump in her throat as she silently tried to rouse the sleeping kwami, Marinette sadly shook her head.

She didn't know how to answer that.

"Do you need any help?"

"N-no! No, I just…" she trailed off, not knowing what she needed. In her hands, the tiny sprite lay unmoving. "I don't think I'm going to be able to transform again anytime soon," she called out, biting her lip at just how much truth her words seemed to hold. "Would you mind keeping your head down while I make a quick getaway?"

There was a beat of silence, and the girl's heart warmed when Chat asked if she needed any help getting down to street level.

"I won't look," he promised, then Marinette heard him nervously chuckle at his own reasoning. "Well, I'm not exactly sure how I'll pull it off—getting you down to the ground while my eyes are closed, I mean—but I'm not about to just leave my Lady stranded on a rooftop in her civilian form."

Marinette's mind flashed to a scenario where there was even the slightest possibility of her partner finding out who she really was, and it made her chest tight to think about. She was terrified of him finding out how plain she was in comparison to her alter ego, whom he had on multiple occasions expressed his love for.

Chat loved Ladybug, or at least thought he did, but there was no telling what his reaction would be to finding out that Plain Jane Marinette was really the one behind the speckled mask.

Not that Chat was the object of her affection, seeing as how he was no Adrien, but he was still important to her.

She was afraid of disappointing him.

"There's a fire escape on the far end of the building." She remembered seeing it right after they'd landed. "We aren't that far from the ground so it should reach the sidewalk. Thank you, Chat, but I think I can manage from here. Go on without me, I'll try to figure out what's going on and catch up to you later."

She heard the boy sigh, and Marinette knew it was at the idea of abandoning his partner. They were a team; she knew it didn't sit well with him to leave her when obviously there was something going on.

"Okay," he agreed reluctantly, and the girl could hear his movements and in her mind she pictured him moving closer to the building's edge-opposite of the one with the fire escape. "Just, please be careful," and to—possibly—lighten the mood, he added an affectionate bugaboo to the end of his request.

Silence followed, and Marinette counted to ten in Mandarin—she'd been taking mini lessons from her mother ever since her uncle's visit, much to Sabine's delight—before she called out to the hero.

"Chat?"

There was no response, or the sound of the tiny bell that hung from his neck, telling the girl it was okay to come out from behind her cover.

Marinette tried to rouse the sleeping kwami once more on her way to the fire escape, but still the tiny sprite remained unresponsive. She tucked Tikki safely in her purse and rested her hands on the cool metal of the ladder that hung over the side of the building, but before beginning to climb down the girl looked out over the city.

The wind swept hair into her eyes, blocking her sight of the skyline; this time Marinette let it.

until next time...