As he gives the number of his father's lawyer to Marinette, Adrien surveys his friend's reaction with a certain worry. It's not that he's against Alya's plan, but he's afraid that such badgering is becoming excessive.
And now, his fears are justified.
From where he is, Adrien can pinpoint the exact moment when Marinette's patience comes to its end. He is standing close enough to her that he can't help but notice how her immense blue eyes widen. How her cheeks blush in anger. How the muscles of her jaw quickly contract. Not to mention how she is clinging to her desk with such vitriol that the young man is surprised that they don't leave a mark.
Marinette vibrates with such a rage that Adrien has the impression that he is feeling it physically. Feeling waves of fury across the air hit him hard, leaving him paralyzed in stupor.
And before Adrien has the time to start in the slightest backtracking, to say even a word to try to defuse the coming explosion, Marinette jumps from her seat.
"I have had ENOUGH!" she yells, violently slapping her hands down on her desk, striking the wood with a terrifying crash. "For the last time, MY. BOYFRIEND. IS. NOT. HURTING. ME. How many times and in how many languages must I repeat that before you comprehend it?"
Marinette stands up tall, her chin proudly liftly, and shoots a look at each of her classmates.
"You are ALL wrong," she shouts, even stronger. "I have bruises because I BUMP INTO THINGS. Because I FALL," she hammers insistently. "Not because I'm being beat by someone who would NEVER raise a hand on me. So whatever you've been told is just a huge misunderstanding," she concludes, turning to Alya.
Interrupting her tirade for a moment, Marinette takes a deep breath in an obvious effort to calm herself.
"I know you're worried for me," she starts in a voice trembling in anger, "and normally, I would appreciate it. But here, things are going too far. WAY too far. I would love if you could trust me when I talk to you and I repeat to you that my boyfriend is not hitting me. And above all, I would love for you to leave me ALONE when it comes to him!"
As Alya settles shamefully into her seat, Marinette lets out a furious grunt.
"To think that you ALL thought that… That my... That he… That I'm… Raaaaa!" she exclaims, glaring at her friends again. "I know that Alya is the queen of twisted plans and quick conclusions, but you ALL thought that I was actually being hit. You didn't ONCE ask yourselves if Alya could be wrong. You didn't ONCE come see me to ask questions!"
Marinette's sparkling eyes stopped abruptly on Nino, instinctively retreating his head into his shoulders.
"Meanwhile, YOU knew that I told Alya that she was wrong," she spits at him, her voice growing dangerously sharp with each new word that escapes her lips. "You were there during our conversations. But no, you had to follow in her delusions!"
Before Nino has the time to articulate a single word in his defense, Marinette turns her head acutely toward Adrien. The young man feels himself blanch as the blood flees from his face. Never had he seen his friend in such a state of fury that the fact that he was clearly the next victim of her wrath does not reassure him.
"And YOU!" she shouts, pointing an accusatory finger toward him. "I thought that you would have been the most reasonable out of the two of you! Because as much as I can understand THEM, usually YOU, you seemed to have a minimum amount of common sense!"
Adrien gulps painfully. In front of him, his friend is yelling, storming, letting loose this thundering anger has been brewing within her for way too long.
The entire class remains paralyzed by this violent onslaught of fury. Just like his classmates, Adrien doesn't dare make a move or utter a word, for fear of further fueling the hurricane that is rampaging before him. Even akumas - which the young man watches for worryingly - hardly seem inclined to come face his friend.
And Adrien understands them. Judging by the look of rage that flares in her eyes, Marinette is going to end up killing someone.
Marinette is going to end up killing someone. That's certain.
She feels it, deep within herself.
So, before her actions and words go beyond the limits of the irreparable, the girl takes advantage of an ultimate moment of clarity to make a cautious retreat. Hands trembling under the effect of the anger, she hastily stuffs her things into her bag and storms out of the classroom.
She couldn't remember if she had ever been in such a state of rage.
Her heart beats furiously in her chest, booming with the rhythm of the tempest that has been unleashed in her entire being. She feels that she can only sense that heavy, insistent pulse that feeds her anger with each passing second. In a desperate effort to keep her self-control, Marinette clenches her fists so hard that her nails dig painfully into the palms of her hands.
Certainly, Alya's obtrusive interventions had been out of good intention.
But Marinette can't stand to see her ceaselessly accuse Chat Noir - HER Chat Noir - of being a despicable person. He deserves better than that. Never should he be the target of such contempt, such gossip, such innumerable slanders that sicken her heart. Marinette already painfully knew that her best friend had informed Nino and Adrien of her theories. But that she had gotten their entire class and perhaps the entire school on her side, that was too much.
Too absurd.
Too cruel.
Too injust.
Just… Too much.
Marinette has her limits, and those have been largely reached. She needs air, peace, time. To get away for a moment from these people who only want the best for her, but hurt her without knowing it.
It only takes a moment for Marinette to arrive home. She barely greets her parents as she crosses the living room like a tornado, before scrambling to her room. Then, without a second more, she furiously dumps her bag on her bed, transforms, and leaps out the window.
The sun is beginning to disappear behind the horizon and, perched on the roofs of Paris, Ladybug is no less angry. Jaw clenched, she scans the area, her piercing blue eyes seeming to challenge anybody that dares to stoke her discontent.
The young heroine runs a hand over her face and lets out an irritated groan, before jumping slightly when an unexpected exclamation rises up behind her.
"My Lady?" her partner articulates, approaching her cautiously. "Is everything alright?"
Ladybug feels the skin of her cheeks softly warm under her mask, signaling an undeniable display of embarrassment.
"Sorry, kitty…" she excuses with contrite little smile. "I had a bad day…"
"Welcome to the club…" Chat Noir sighs, letting himself fall heavily to her side.
Ladybug shoots him an incisive look. Ordinarily, their meetings put her teammate in a good mood, but today, that was clearly not the case. On the contrary, seeing the way he's struggling to smile and how his eyes avoid hers, Chat Noir seems particularly dejected.
Like he sometimes is after a long and hard day.
Like he sometimes is after a dispute with his father.
Ladybug doesn't know what is bothering her companion, but as always, she feels her heart clench at seeing him like this. Instinctively, she reaches a hand out to him and laces her fingers with his.
"You want to talk about it?" she asks him with a weak smile.
"Why not…" Chat Noir sighs. "Who'll start?"
"Go ahead," Ladybug offers, with a slight encouraging nod. "I'm listening."
Gaze lost in the tide, Chat Noir lets out another sigh.
"I had a fight with one of my friends," he starts hesitantly. "Well, it was a bit one-sided, rather that she yelled at me. Which is more or less the same, I suppose. She's angry with me."
As Chat Noir pauses for a moment, Ladybug gently squeezes her fingers in his to silently show her support. Despite the mask that conceals part of his face, the mortified expression on her teammate's face is clearly visible.
"The situation is a bit… complicated…" Chat Noir picks up again, rubbing a hand on the back of his head by habit. "I don't really know how to put this simply."
"You can always try, if you want," Ladybug replies with a little smile. "I promise, if I don't understand anything, I'll tell you."
"Thank you, my Lady," he responds, leaning gently into Ladybug to place a kiss on her cheek. "Actually, this friend… Her best friend is convinced that she's being beaten by her boyfriend. Because she always has bruises on her arms, and she never has any explanations for their origins. And she never says anything about her boyfriend."
Not noticing the almost inaudible hiccup of surprise that escapes from Ladybug, Chat Noir continues his story.
"In short," he goes on, once again allowing his gaze to wander across the city that stretches beneath his feet. "My friend keeps saying that nothing is happening. But her best friend is convinced otherwise, and as a result, she asked us to intervene. And by'us', I mean the whole class. There are people that tried to talk to her more or less subtly about her love life, others offered to protect her if she needed, for example, in the case that she's scared to break up with her boyfriend… Someone even made a presentation about domestic violence!" he adds with a little embarrassed laugh. "On my end, I settle on giving her the number for a lawyer, but… It really was a lot. For my friend, I mean. I've never seen her so angry! She…"
As he turns his head slightly to set his gaze on his teammate, Chat Noir stops abruptly.
Something isn't right.
Under her mask, Ladybug is pallid. Frighteningly pale, almost corpsellike. Her pupils are dilated in shock, as if she had just seen a ghost, and she's currently so still that she could easily pass as a wax statue.
"My Lady?" he murmurs in a perplexed voice, leaning towards her.
But his partner doesn't seem to hear it. Then, suddenly, her eyes come back to life. They begin to frantically sweep across the young man's face, scanning, analyzing, scrutinizing the slightest details of his features, as if she was seeing it for the first time.
Ladybug could not have looked more bewildered if her world had exploded in front of her.
"A… A… " she sputters, clearly incapable of formulating the slightest coherent word.
"Ladybug?" Chat Noir urges, more and more worried.
"Adrien?" she whispers in a small breath.
For Chat Noir, the shock is as brutal as a punch to the stomach. He feels his heart do a perilous flip in his chest, bouncing painfully against his ribs, before resuming its furious beating.
Throat suddenly dry, he rubs his hand along the length of his neck.
"Adrien," Ladybug repeats slowly. "Adrien. Agreste."
And all of a sudden, the obvious fact hits Chat Noir. Fast, hard, illuminating his brain as violently as lightning tearing through the night.
His teammate's reaction cannot be a coincidence.
Eyes riveted on Ladybug, the young man has the sensation of the ground slipping away underneath him. How has he never noticed it before? How could he have not seen anything?
That blueish black hair. Those luminous smiles, those bursts of laughter that joyously warmed his heart. That face that he would have sworn to know the features of by heart, and yet he had never recognized until then. And those eyes, the crystal-clear blue.
That sky blue gaze that soothes his nights and haunts his days.
That sky blue gaze that he saw shining far too familiarly on the face of one of his classmates.
Ladybug.
And behind the mask…
"Ma… Marinette?" he stammers, breath suddenly short.
Stifling back another groan, Ladybug presses her hands to her face.
"Adrien," she grumbles, the frustration in it now clearly palpable. "It's you. It's you, you're Chat Noir. It's been you from the start."
Chat Noir nods his head slightly, incapable of shaking this strange sensation of having been catapulted into a dream. The reality that he had known this morning was now shattered, replaced by a new world that he is struggling to apprehend.
"So that was the reason?" he utters painstakingly, still trying to come to his senses after this incredible discovery. "For your bruises? It's just that you're…"
"...Ladybug…" his teammate finishes with an exasperated sigh.
While Chat Noir is still stunned, Ladybug regains her composure at a remarkable speed. In a fraction of a second, the anger that had devoured her all day seemed to melt away, erasing the shock of realizing who was hiding behind her teammate's mask.
"I don't JUST fight against super-villains," she exclaims, suddenly raising her arms to the sky in a movement so snappy that she barely misses knocking her partner's jaw. "I get cats out of trees. I prevent accidents. I… I… I… I do TONS of things that I don't necessarily have to use my Lucky Charm for! And I'm CLUMSY. Chat, you're in the best position to know how clumsy I am!"
Ladybug stands up in a swift motion. Under the worried gaze of Chat Noir, she begins pacing across the roof on which they had found refuge. Clearly incapable of stopping her tirade, she continues her ranting with an almost frightening vehemence, gesturing every which way, only taking the time to breathe.
Chat Noir watches her with a certain uneasiness. His Lady is giving off the feeling of a pressure-cooker ready to explode, and he lets her drain the pressure without daring to make the slightest move.
"I've already almost given you a concussion by swinging my yo-yo onto your head," Ladybug continues, backing up her words with a big wave of her hand. "Two times. Last week, I almost fell from a roof trying to help an old lady whose drying laundry had been blown away by the wind. I spend my LIFE banging into things, of course I have bruises. And naturally, Alya notices them."
"And you can't tell her where they come from because you're Ladybug…" Chat Noir completes automatically, still speaking quietly from the improbable turn of events.
He might have guessed. He might have understood.
He, too, has returned home with inexplicable bumps and scratches, the consequences of giving a heroic helping hand to somebody in distress.
But with his busy schedule, he has much less time to help the citizens of Paris than his teammate. His appearances mostly coincide with the appearance of a super-villain and the use of a Lucky Charm, and the small wounds he's sustained under other circumstances have always been too rare to be noticed.
"Exactly," Ladybug agrees with a vigorous nod.
Obviously tired of pacing everywhere across the roof, she moves toward her teammate and lets herself fall heavily to his die. Lost in his mind, Chat Noir follows his train of thought.
"And you couldn't talk about your boyfriend because…" he begins.
He abruptly goes pale and stops in the middle of his sentence.
Oh.
Oh.
OH.
Oh no…
