Marinette grumbled as she dragged herself out of bed.

At least some things never changed, even after all these years.

She dragged a hand over her face, wincing as the blurry digits on the clock. Four am wake up calls for a Transatlantic flight were the worst.

Marinette wasn't sure who she was missing more.

She missed so much.

Tikki sweetly giving words of encouragement as she'd tugged Marinette out bed a few extra minutes early.

Discussion sessions with Master Fu. He had lived for so long. Seen so, so much, had known so much that now would be lost to the ages. Had he lived she was sure that there was so much he could have taught her.

But he was gone now. Sacrificing himself when she hadn't moved fast enough. When Hawkmoth had pressed his advantage and took a pot shot at Chat Noir.

And Chat Noir...the bruise had faded from where she'd pushed him out of the way and took the hit Hawkmoth had aimed at him, but the ache was still here.

That loss was still there. That guilt just gnawed at her. Every single doubt she'd ever had was magnified, and she didn't have Tikki to talk her down.

It was incredible to have that much presence and near constant support in your life and then suddenly to lose it all.

But that wasn't all she'd lost.

Alya was great and all, but she couldn't really explain just who she had been. Who would believe it?

Alya grew a little depressed with her hero no longer there. It had splintered their friendship for a while, because the near constant reminders of what she'd had and lost were making her miserable...but what if they came back? When could she ever be sure it was safe to tell anyone who she is...she was.

Who she might still be.

Her fingers grazed over the earrings.

Even after all this time, she still didn't look much older.

It was why she'd had to move away from Paris. Even once things had settled down to their previous dull roar, once most of their class had moved on and moved away.

It seems that possessing a miraculous and the joining of your life force to a kwami basically slows your growth so long as that connection is maintained.

She knew that Master Fu was quite a bit older, but even Tikki had always been vague on just how old he was.

What she did know was that at least a few of the Ladybugs and Chat Noir's of the past perished. Or the guardian took their Miraculous back. When the threat passed, the miraculous mostly deactivated, shutting Plagg and Tikki into hibernation mode until another threat approached-not that they knew that. That was the realm of the guardian.

If things had played out differently, she might have learned more, might have understood better what needed to happen with these things eventually.

No one was expecting the Guardian to be killed that night.

In the wake of that big fire where so many went missing and so many questions were left unanswered.

With the Guardian gone and Tikki perpetually not answering her call, it fell to her to protect her now inactive miraculous for as long as she could.

But since she didn't appear to be aging, maybe that was far longer than she had originally planned.

Once his term was up with his father, it seemed the most ideal time for Adrien to strike out on his own.

His father was still grieving, oddly depressed in the last few years. When Adrien said he wanted out, needed out to live his own life.

Adrien spent years doing research, long enough to know that he'd need to seek out opportunities in academia. He didn't need tenure. He needed access...and information that was mostly lost except for in certain tightly held academic and wealthy circles. He could manage the first well enough although anonymity was difficult to come by.

When it became clear that the years were passing, but he wasn't aging anywhere near as quickly as his classmates. He needed to do something.

He hated leaving Nino, Alya, and Marinette behind, but it wasn't like he had much choice in the matter.

They wouldn't understand and he couldn't very well prove that he had been Chat Noir.

He couldn't transform and because he was free to act so differently, he did.

He kept the friendships for years, and they were amazing. But he couldn't allow anyone to get too close.

An internationally known model not aging? Well, that made for a rather big issue. Paparazzi were following him everywhere while he was outside of France. Make-up artists could only do so much, but they couldn't travel with him all the time.

Adrien has to disappear from the scene, especially when some five years later, he very clearly is not changing.

That lead to him going in to teach a class half a world away.

Marinette had a lot more flexibility. She could pass for older for longer...until she couldn't anymore.

Adrien had moved away, disappearing mostly off the map and then social media. She asked Nino for a while via Alya after their friends had married, until even Nino wasn't getting much information.

Marinette had tried not to let it get her down, but she'd always felt this loss almost as acutely as she did of Tikki and Chat Noir. She was never really sure if it was just more of her own feelings or as an ever-present reminder of that point in her life.

But even out there as he must still be, Adrien grew to be the spectre in her life.

Haunting her dreams, her relationships.

Try as she might, nothing ever panned out for a long time.

Eventually, she met someone within the industry. He'd been a partner, who had helped grow her business. He'd been a friend with a quick wit that reminded her vaguely of Chat Noir. The blonde hair and winning smile had only reinforced that image in her mind.

And the fact that she looked youthfully vibrant in spite of the longer work hours that she kept hadn't exactly been a deterrent.

There had even been talk of marriage. Of children.

But her own body had worked against her. She'd never been able to conceive.

She delayed the wedding for one year and then two as they tried and failed over and over again.

She didn't need a big ceremony. She could have a dress altered at barely a moment's notice. He'd had the rings ready for some time.

But the time lingered away with each failed attempt. She grew depressed and distant.

But she was so used to working at her speed, and he just had not been willing to keep waiting for her.

Marinette had done any number of things to get her online label off the ground, including working in a bakery in New York city, half a world away. She'd thrown herself into her work, working tirelessly to be able to afford her rent and create a pool of seed money to start up the company. Her evenings and breaks were mostly spent designing.

It took a while, but it worked. Giving her all the networking she'd needed to move her design house far out of the eye of others.

Little by little, design by design, she'd networked through her younger years until she had the funds and pull to create her designs and then gone functionally underground, designing until she had the means, the skills, and the networking to pull together her own label.

She worked for a while in NYC, designing, until it became clear that she must move away to avoid unwanted questions.

She buried herself in her work, bringing Lady Magique up to snuff to hit the Paris Runways.

She couldn't come home as herself. That was too risky. But she could pose as one of the models. She'd created a whole set of masks. Played up on the theme.

Created a whole slew of costumes from the book she had brought to Master Fu all those years ago, when she'd first met him and understood his role as the Guardian.

The colors and forms were inspired by the images that had been burned into her subconscious.

But she had to be a a bit more practical than the warrior garb there. There were dresses to do battle on the church floor or the dance floor. There were boardroom warriors, with suits to take down even the mightiest mansplainer.

To draw on the innate confidence that being Ladybug had brought her all of those years ago.

She'd had variations on themes for all of the miraculous, but Ladybug was definitely her favorite.

And since she couldn't pretend to be the creator, not without great risk of recognition, she learned from the girls how to walk the runways.

To her surprise when she'd donned that mask and walked out under the lights, strutting down the board had felt somewhat natural. Like coming home.

Once his classes had ended for the day, Adrien dropped his bag at his desk in the tiny office he'd shared to cover his office hours. His fellow TA, Xian was on his own way out for the day, but they had shared this space for long enough that he'd known the tiny sliver of his own history that he'd felt comfortable enough to share.

He'd been waiting for the invitation to use to faculty library for his research. He had spent years improving his knowledge of the written language and the past few months learning his way around the hard copy library system.

"Weren't you in Paris when Ladybug and Chat Noir were running around?"

Adrien nodded. He'd always been deliberately vague about that point in his life, going so far as to use his mother's maiden name in his more professional working life, making it easier to claim plausible deniability of his past as Adrien Agreste. If they thought he was a kid at the time, all the better. "Yeah. They were really big heroes before they disappeared entirely."

Xian grinned shoving her phone into his face. "Well, they seem to be invading Paris."

He'd blinked. Did he hear that wrong? His Mandarin was good, but wasn't always perfect. Politely, he took the proffered phone, scrolling over the screen.

"You always seem a little homesick, so I thought you'd appreciate the news."

His eyes caught on the Ladybug - or a reasonable facsimile of her as his finger slowed the scrolling. Smiling, he looked up. "What is this?"

"I guess there is some big fashion show in Paris." Xian grinned. "Something told me that considering all your research, you might find that fascinating."

Adrien's eyes drifted to his Calendar. Fashion Week had been pushed far to the back of his mind in recent years, but the long ingrained knowledge had never entirely faded. He handed the phone back, gratefully.

He'd have to pull it up again once his office hours had wrapped up.

"Thanks, Xian."

He had grabbed take out, hiking to his apartment not long after his office hours had ended.

If he was going to take a trip down memory lane, he would do it on his own computer, where he could see the pictures more clearly.

Where he could fight the urge towards sadness and tears in the privacy of his own space without disruption. Up on his own computer setup. He'd expanded it over the years, scanning in what materials he could for cross referencing.

It just meant that the screens were top notch and he didn't take up much space in his tiny apartment. The funds went longer when he stayed inconspicuous.

His father would find him again soon, and then he'd have no choice but to move to keep under the radar.

He plopped his food down in front of the computer, queuing up the pictures on the link Xian had sent him.

He'd plowed through the pictures. So much of it was familiar and tired. Simple re-hashes of pieces he had worn decades ago now.

He'd held off on looking at the Ladybug pictures until the end. He expected he'd to spend a bit of time succumbing to the wave of nostalgia, and might need a distraction once all was said and done.

With finality, he'd reached the final round of photos, there was one photo that captured his attention completely.

Dragging his thumb over his ring, he frowned at the designer's name He hadn't noticed it before.

Lady Magique.

He watched with fascination as the designs emphasized a few choice costume elements, ones that were far too familiar and detailed for all but the most diligent and observant reporters to have noticed. They were some surprisingly subtle ones too. The zippers of his suit, the mixed media used.

He'd even had to dig up a few old files of him in his suit more than a decade ago for comparison.

The work was complex and deft but appeared far more simple from far away. Stark and impressive - powerful even - simple and clean lines, outfits that were probably even fairly comfortable for the models.

He'd been fascinated and grinning at the Ladybug dresses and Chat Noir suits. Every single one of them in a mask that tugged at his heartstrings.

He hadn't expected to see some of the others who had been in that book.

Not just Volpina. Colors of the bee, the peacock, the turtle.

His eyes narrowed, pulling back the image he'd almost passed over. There was something elusive about picture in particular that drew him in.

Before he even realized it, he had darted to the kitchen, cracked open one of the bottles of wine he'd been saving for a special occasion.

It wasn't just the red-and-black-spotted suit dress that had pulled him in. It was the familiar silhouette, draped in an empire waist that tapered in over the models hips and then expanding out in a mermaid flare, a trail of fabric barely dusting across the floor behind her.

The look in her masked eyes.

The confidence, the spirit locked behind it.

He could have sworn it was her. Sworn it was Ladybug behind that mask.

Challenging him. Daring him to come back to Paris. To find her again.

But was that even possible?

If he had hardly aged in all that time, maybe-just maybe-she hadn't either.

And if Ladybug had truly returned to Paris, there was nowhere else in the whole world that Chat Noir would rather be.

He hoped they could work together to find a way to awaken Plagg.

He just wanted to live his life as normally as he could...and if he could get another chance to be living that with LB?

Well, all the better.