Adrien left Nino's place with his mind surprisingly clear.

Marinette, his clever girl, had trusted miraculouses to her very best friends, knowing with her whole heart that they would defend Paris with their lives. Nino, the protector, shielding the team from harm. Alya, the illusionist, deceiving the enemy with her quick thinking. It all made sense.

She'd even thought to entrust him as Adrien with the snake miraculous all that time ago, even though it hadn't worked out. As it turned out, Luka was a much better fit for that miraculous and Viperion was a great help to their akuma-fighting duo from time to time.

She was smart as a whip, she was kind and generous, she was beautiful beyond words… and she was in the hospital.

Plagg flew out in front of Adrien's face, dark ears drooping. "Finding Tikki isn't as easy as saying you're going to find her, kid. How exactly do you plan to track her down?" Plagg didn't speak about it like they were looking for those earrings—he was more worried about his other half. Now that was something Adrien could relate to.

"Last night's akuma may have flown under the radar, but someone must have noticed something. I'll look all over online, on news feeds, until I find a scrap of video evidence of where me or Marinette were. If I can retrace our steps, I can find out where we were before I woke up in that alley and Marinette was…"

Oh. He'd ended up in an alley, but where did they find Marinette? That would be the ideal place to start his search, rifling through the destruction that the Miraculous Cure failed to resolve. It wouldn't do to ask Mari's parents—he didn't want to trouble them or make them relive their initial fear that they might lose their little girl. If he asked the doctors, they might tell him, but visiting hours were likely over.

This wasn't a job for Adrien. This was a job for Chat Noir.

"You need to recharge, right?" Adrien asked his kwami. Plagg nodded, ears drooping further, if possible. With no one but Adrien to snap at, he was getting more morose by the second.

"Whatever went down last night drained me," Plagg admitted. For a god of destruction, he was rarely humble, so admitting that he was truly tired was a surprise. He'd put up his sassy, sarcastic front for Nino and Alya, but now he just seemed exhausted. "Let's go back to your stash at home."

Adrien shook his head. "Too far. You'll just have to settle for some basic supermarket-bought cheese. Won't be camembert, but you'll live."

Plagg hid away in Adrien's pocket now that they were reaching a busier street, but he yanked on the boy's shirt impatiently.

"Plagg, you can't seriously be that upset about the camembert—"

"Don't you think you should check in at home? Your father and Nathalie are probably wondering where you are, considering you've been MIA since the akuma attack."

"Believe it or not, my father and Nathalie are pretty low on my list of priorities right now."

Plagg gave him a flat look. "Adrien. They might think you're dead."

That gave Adrien pause, but a smaller pause than he might have expected.

His relationship with his father was… difficult. Adrien loved the man, as much as a son was expected to love his father. And yet… the strict schedule. The hobbies he hadn't enjoyed for years but was forced to continue. The lonely, lonely house, so devoid of laughter unless Adrien was the one creating it. If it hadn't been for his alter ego of Chat Noir, Adrien wasn't sure what sort of hole he would have fallen into stuck in that house, all alone.

He was able to grow as Adrien, to take more risks, but that was only thanks to the time he spent in the mask. Chat Noir gave him the chance to bring out the more playful aspects of his personality, the bits and pieces that Gabriel Agreste would never approve of. He could make mistakes that way, he could be foolish and say the wrong thing and throw puns at his lady to his heart's content.

Nathalie was never a mother to him, but she was never just an assistant either. Some part of her seemed to care for him, but that could be because of his connection to his father. If his welfare was threatened in any way, his father might blame Nathalie. Since he didn't know if the woman genuinely wished him well or was just working to save her own ass most of the time, he took her opinion of his absence with a grain of salt.

There was a hierarchy of people that mattered in his life, and Marinette had reached the top long before today's events and reveals.

"If I go back in that house, I don't know what'll happen next. I might get stuck for hours, either by questioning or my father literally locking me in my room, and then Mari will just be—"

"Your princess will still be lying in that hospital bed. She's not going anywhere, you know."

Adrien growled at his kwami. Growled. He hadn't even known he could make a sound like that when he was a civilian. Through his surprise at the instinctual sound, he held his ground. "She's all alone, and Hawkmoth could make his next move any second now. Or who knows— maybe that first akuma is still out there, biding its time for an even bigger rampage. I need to speak to Marinette."

To find out where she'd been found… and he couldn't resist the need to see her face again. He'd been so thoroughly shocked when he'd formed the connection in his head he hadn't gotten the chance to truly bask in her presence. She was warmth and light and good and he needed a little bit of that right now.

Now that he understood their relationship better, now that he realized his heart had never been split but loved one girl completely, he felt like a piece of him was missing without her beside him. It was dramatic and ridiculous and a bit insane, but it was the truth.

"Fine. Store-bought cheese, a visit to the princess's bedside, and then you show your face at home," Plagg muttered before hiding away again.

Plagg either felt really bad for him or was too drained to put up a good fight. Either way, Adrien got what he wanted, so it was fine by him.

LBCNLBCN

Twenty minutes later, Chat Noir was lurking outside Marinette's window. She was on the second floor of the hospital, but he balanced on his staff with ease, comfortable at this height. Her room was dim except for the glowing monitors and a TV that had been left on, likely because she was supposed to be sleeping right now, but despite the darkness of her room and the clouds rolling in, his night vision made it as if the room was bathed in sunlight in his gaze.

Her eyes were open. She had Ladybug's thinking face on, her brow furrowed, and lips pursed in the most adorable way. Still, she was staring off into nothing, seemingly wide awake. He wouldn't have wanted to disrupt her sleeping, but a tiny part of him panicked about what came next.

He leaned forward and tapped the window lightly, watching as her head swiveled towards him and her eyes widened in surprise. She flinched in her bed, her body tensing as she raised her hands to cover her mouth, face contorting in a wince at the fast action.

Because a mysterious cat boy who she'd never heard of before was knocking on her second story hospital window. Now you've done it, Agreste. He hadn't been able to get much further than the need to see Marinette and question her, and now his failure to think ahead had terrified the poor girl.

It wasn't her fault, the fear in her gaze, but it still stung. Chat forced himself to shake off his own feelings of sadness to focus on the goal of introducing Marinette to Chat Noir and questioning her whereabouts.

Chat pushed the window open and leaped into the room, crouching on the floor in what was hopefully a non-threatening stance. He kept his back to the window, his ears drooping on his head as he put away his staff, all his movements slow and slick.

"What are you?" Mari whisper-yelled, inching away in her bed so she was as far away as she could get while still being hooked up to a machine.

"Mari—" Chat wanted to hug her, bury is face in her neck, but he figured she wouldn't appreciate that coming from the stranger he was now. If he was going to do this, introduce her to the world of the miraculous and be her guide (hopefully finding a way to bring back her old memories in the process), he had to do it right. He couldn't scare her away, and he couldn't use his knowledge of her to his advantage.

This was an uneven playing field, but there was nothing he could do about that now. He just had to do the best he could with what he was given.

He cleared his throat, eager to help her relax. At this point, he was willing to do anything to get the look of fear out of her eyes. "Miss Marinette Dupain-Cheng?"

Mari, still scared, managed a nod. His brave girl. She asked her question again, disbelief clouding her voice as she spoke. "What are you?"

"That's a who are you, purr-incess. The name's Chat Noir, Paris's favorite feline superhero," Chat bowed at the waist, allowing his most charming grin to spread across his face.

"Superhero?" Marinette echoed, brow furrowing again. "What—I mean, how… is this the brain damage? Am I seeing things?"

"Allow me to explain," Chat took a cautious step forward. Mari didn't cower from him, so he continued. "I hear you've suffered some memory loss, and there's a lot going on in Paris you don't know about. We were acquaintances, so I thought it was only fair that I be the one to help you catch up on the missing holes in your memory."

He was bullshitting hard, but the words just kept coming out. The explanation, this reasoning, it at least had some teeth to it. A hero looking out for a civilian he'd met a few times—a hero gathering intel on an akuma attack when Paris's safety was at stake. It was logical and could hold up if anyone else was to walk in the room and questioned his intent, but a tiny part of it still felt wrong.

Once Mari didn't seem like she was going to call for a nurse, Chat sat on the edge of her bed and spun the tale of the miraculous, of Hawkmoth, Chat Noir… and the illustrious Ladybug. He kept his description of her short and to the point, moving forward before his chest ached from her blank face.

Well, not completely blank—shock, surprise, and disbelief all took their turns shining on her delicate features. But there was no understanding. No hint of a memory returned.

She took in his story, his explanation, staring at him like he was a stranger in cat ears… which he supposed he was. When he finally finished, she released a sigh and relaxed further into her bed, eyebrows raised. "Wow. I wouldn't have believed any of that if I wasn't hearing it from a boy in a leather cat-suit."

"It's the truth. Cat's honor," Chat tried bowing again, but his position on the bed made it less suave and more awkward. "I know that's a lot to take in right now, but I was hoping to ask you a few questions about last night. My partner's missing in action, so I'm retracing our steps to figure out what went wrong."

"I don't remember much," Mari said slowly, folding her hands in her lap. She looked so small that way, so fragile. "It probably won't help."

But not remembering much meant she remembered something. It just somehow wasn't related to akuma-business.

"Anything at all, even the smallest detail, will help," Chat assured her.

Mari tugged on her hair, loose around her shoulders. Chat wasn't used to seeing her hair down like this without her trademark pigtails, or the high ponytail she'd begun to sport in recent months. He thought it suited her, but he could tell she was uncomfortable, the hair still dirty and greasy from before. There were two elastic bands resting on the bedside table, likely holding her hair back earlier.

Before he could stop himself, talk some sense into his stupid feline instincts, Chat grabbed the elastics from the table and combed Mari's hair back with his claws, leaning in close to pull the loose hair into a low bun. It wasn't a hairstyle she wore frequently, but it gave him a better look at her face and, hopefully, made her more at ease now that the dirty strands weren't blocking her vision.

Marinette stared at him, wide-eyed and surprised, as he forced himself to sit back and pretend like he hadn't just done up a civilian's hair to make her feel more comfortable. Pretending would prove most difficult, considering a healthy blush coated her pale cheeks. "Huh?"

Chat would ram his head into a brick wall later. For now, it was time to push ahead. "I was just asking if you remembered anything at all from last night."

"I was working on homework. Well… avoiding homework. Physics and I don't exactly agree." Didn't Chat know that. Mari excelled in most of her classes, but physics was where she struggled the most. As Adrien, he'd offered tutoring sessions multiple times, but she'd only taken him up on it once or twice. He'd have to double his efforts. "And then…"

Mari winced, raising her unbandaged hand to her head with a sigh. "I'm sorry. My head feels fuzzy."

If Chat had to guess, that meant whatever memory lurked directly after her homework was akuma-related, and her muddled mind was struggling to fill the gap of time. He didn't want her to exert herself, but he'd try to work around it. "That's okay, just take your time. I believe they brought you here unconscious, yes?"

Marinette nodded, leading to another wince. "They didn't tell me much, but I think I looked bad. My parents and friends were pretty shaken up when they came to visit."

"I doubt you could ever look bad," Chat winked. Marinette offered a hoarse laugh, none of the teasing she'd had when she first faced Chat all those years ago.

But he reminded himself again, that was different. When Marinette met Chat Noir, she'd already dealt with his flirty ways for weeks, playing him like the fiddle he was. Right now, it was like she'd never met him before, and she didn't know superheroes existed, so she had no idea how to act.

This was how Chat had treated Marinette the first time he'd met her civilian form. Looking back on it, he'd been so eager to impress Marinette, the girl who could barely form a few sentences around him, he might have gone a bit overboard. But after that day, Marinette had remained the only civilian he ever treated in that manner.

He cared about her, in and out of the mask, and she knew that. Just because she didn't remember didn't mean Chat wasn't allowed to care about her anymore.

"Tell that to the guy that carried me in. Apparently, he puked in a trashcan lobby and booked it right away," Mari laughed again, breaking into a cough at the end.

Now that was news. "Someone carried you in?" Chat leaned forward, ears springing up to attention at the new detail. He just assumed that due to whatever wreckage laid in Paris, Marinette had been found in some sort of search-and-rescue deal across the city. Brought over in an ambulance like everyone else who might have been caught in the crossfire of the latest akuma.

"Yeah, that's what the doctor said. Just a Good Samaritan, I guess," Mari shrugged. "I wish I could thank him, but they told me he left before I woke up."

Gentle. He needed to be gentle, even if he wanted to plead and scream and find out exactly who found his girl, bleeding and alone in the street. "Did they describe him at all? Your parents or the doctor?"

"No," Marinette said slowly. "Just that he puked and ran away. Why are you asking about him? Do you think he's related to this… akuma stuff?"

Yes. No. Maybe. Yes. "He could be. Like I said, with my partner missing in action, I'm doing the best I can to connect the dots and help last night's victims figure out what went so wrong."

Marinette frowned, her blue eyes blown wide. Chat was surprised to find her eyes lined with unshed tears. "I wish I could be more help, I really do. I'm so sorry, Chat Noir."

"Marinette, don't apologize," Chat put his hands on her shoulders, rubbing them in what he hoped was a comforting way. She didn't shy away from his touch. She just stared at him, her face full of consideration, freckled cheeks shifting into a soft pink hue. "You're doing the best you can. I shouldn't have come so soon. I'm the one who should be sorry, princess."

"Princess." Marinette blinked at him. Something odd flashed in her gaze. "You said that before, too."

Chat forced himself to give her a charming grin, even as his heart was beating a mile a minute. "That's right. I even climbed all the way up to your tower."

"Does that make you a prince?" Marinette asked softly, her voice just audible over the whirring of machines.

Maybe it was the pain meds that had her talking this way. A tiny part of him was hoping that his face, his attitude, was jogging her memory. Making her tease him, even if it was timid and unsure.

Either way, he'd play along.

"Not yet," Chat murmured, lifting Marinette's hand to his lips and kissing it lightly. "I'll settle for being your knight in shining leather, if you'll have me."

Marinette's face was bright red now. Had he gone too far? "I-uh, I mean…" She shook her head, trying again to get out a sentence. "I've never had a knight before… do you offer that sort of service to all the girls in Paris?"

Only one. "Just two. But then things got a little tricky," Chat laughed, standing from the bed. Speaking like this with her made him feel warm inside. "That's a story for another day."

Maybe things weren't so fucked. Maybe they'd be just fine. Maybe, no matter what came their way, Chat Noir would always be Marinette's knight.

He would take whatever he could get, at this point. As long as that smile, warm and less unsure than it had been ten minutes ago, stayed on her face.

"I hope we see each other again when you're feline better," Chat backed away toward the window, keeping his eyes on Marinette the whole time. He'd visit her as soon as he could as Adrien, but he wanted another glimpse at her face.

The face that had met Chat Noir and did not hate him, not even a little bit.

"I so too hope." Marinette blurted out, blinking before fixing herself, holding his gaze. "I mean, I hope so too."

Chat offered his lady a final bow before pushing the window open, arcing into a graceful backflip to land on the ground below with a genuine smile.

He didn't have much to go on after that short conversation, and Mari didn't remember Chat Noir in the slightest, but there was one other person that had seen what went down. That meant he had a real lead to follow, someone who's memory was hopefully intact.

Hospital lobbies had to have security cameras, didn't they? And superheroes like Chat Noir got to have access to as many security cameras as they wanted. One of the many perks.

Author's Note:

So it's been a while… hope it was worth the wait! The first official Marichat scene, and Marinette meeting Chat Noir for the very first time.

Also, for those keeping up with season 4's random episode releases… SENTIBUBBLER WOW. The Marichat scene in the bubbles? Chat breaking the chimney? PeGABuG?! I, for one, am so so excited for tomorrow's episode, Rocketear!

Anyways, see you next time for a little more investigating from the new Team Miraculous… and Marinette's first day home from the hospital!