I don't own miraculous ladybug.
It's dead late and the cashier looks ready to kill them. Matters not.
They're pouring over a map for the third day in a row. The skin under their eyes has already darkened to the molten, bitter black of the drinks breathing lazy, smoky wisps just within arm's reach. There are disappointingly little results to show.
He's just about tattooing red ink into the worn skin of yet another attack point within the last month when the chair next to him screeches and groans awake. There's a name bleeding from his partner's lips. Names. They tangle and melt into each other, into a wary, disconcerting mantra that rises and strengthens. There's disbelief swimming in her eyes but also feeble drowning hope. He follows her gaze and sees, he sees what the others around probably wouldn't and then he looks back down.
He doesn't stop her as she walks away.
He doesn't stop her as the paper ruffles with the wind ushered in by the opening of a door.
Later on the long quiet walk from the cafe to the building they now stake out, she describes it to him deliriously. Desperately. She says it felt like a warm caress. She says it embraced her. She said it dissolved like a memory. She says it felt so much like them.
He doesn't tell her that he knows. That he's already tried grasping a dream and that it most likely has something to do with them travelling between worlds. That they somehow see things that play out had fate picked a different thread. And it did. But they're here to cut it.
He tells himself he's done chasing dreams.
It's quite pathetic, isn't it?
Bri and Fe are from another timeline and sometimes see events that would have happened in it as a ghostly "illusion". Side effects of the magic.
Before you ask, yes, Marinette and Adrien are in this story.