A/N: This is a prequel to my fic "I Shall Never Know That Second Death", but it's probably not required reading for understanding this - except that it explains the ending, I suppose.

(this didn't happen)

There are nerves in the air around Ladybug, but she carries herself with bitter resolution. The mouse miraculous hangs from her fingers as she sits on a rooftop over Rue de Solférino.

"All ready?" Cat Noir asks when he sits down beside her, and she nods without taking her eyes off the city below them.

"Yeah, all of them."

He should ask about Marinette. He knows Chloé, like everyone else, and Kagami. He's not sure if he's supposed to know Luka, or any of the others. But Marinette, fierce though she may be when it's her friends on the line, isn't like them. She hasn't got Chloé's iron obstinance, hasn't got Kagami's experience in battle, hasn't got Luka's steady wisdom. Multimouse was cunning. She hadn't fought, and whatever reason Ladybug has for not bringing her back with the others, it isn't something Adrien wants to chance by bringing it up.

Numbers might mean everything or nothing. If the Mouse is going with them, he'd rather it won't be Marinette who has to see whatever it is they'll see tomorrow.

"Are you ready?" he asks instead, and Ladybug smiles in all irony and no joy.

"I'm ready for it to be over," she replies. "I'm ready to be done being scared. I'm ready to know how my days will play out. I'm ready to stop worrying about my friends and my family and people I don't even know. I'm ready to stop freaking out over someone figuring me out."

"Yeah," says Adrien, his belly liquid in something much, much bigger than your everyday akuma battle.

A year ago, he would have thought it absurd to be fifteen and walking into a new day with the knowledge that there is a very real chance he won't see another night like this.

"There's something else," says Ladybug, and she looks at him out of the corner of her eye, before she reaches out and takes his hand in both of hers.

"Oh?"

"Yeah."

She's silent for a good while. Someone laughs in the street below. The Sacre Coeur and the Eiffel Tower stand like beacons in the distance. The traffic is still audible along the quay.

"All things considered – " she starts. "Knowing about tomorrow, I mean," she tries again, and her hand tightens around his. "What I mean is, everything feels insignificant right now. Like, how stupid is it to worry about how someone else thinks about me when I could die."

There's no lie there. He squeezes her hand, and she smiles, a little wistfully, still looking ahead.

"Like that boy. Here I was saving the city and battling monsters three times every week, but couldn't muster the guts to tell him. I'd see him in school, every day. And he's nice. He wouldn't make fun of me or anything like that. I don't know how many times I chickened out of it, and the few times I didn't, it all ended up wrong somehow. I was so crazy in love with him, and he never even knew."

"And now you regret it?"

"I don't know," she says softly. "After a while, you know – everyone else had figured it out. You'd think he'd at least notice if he were interested. Turned out he was in love with someone else anyway. And here I am, and whether some boy likes me back or not feels like the least important thing in the world. I could've gone straight over there, right now, and told him to his face."

"Well, there's still – "

But Ladybug shakes her head. "He's got enough going on. He doesn't need to worry about hurting my feelings on top of everything else. And besides, I've – there's…"

She draws a breath, releases it in mirthless laughter. "I'm sorry," she says and turns to him, smiling sheepishly, "this isn't hard. Not really. I'm just terrible at it."

"We can't all be perfect," he says, smiling back, and Ladybug turns her eyes to their joined hands and runs a thumb along his.

"There's one akuma I never told you about."

"When was that?"

"Spring. It was his name day, and I went to give him a gift. But he wasn't home, so I snuck in as Ladybug. He must've seen as I left, and told someone. I hadn't even gotten five minutes away when Bunnix shows up and drags me into a future where the city is underwater and the only living thing is – is an akuma."

She turns his hand over, twists his miraculous at his finger. He lets her, as she continues the tale. "It was you. You had been akumatised, and you knew who I was. You called me by my name. Hawkmoth was dead. And I was dead."

"Because I knew who you are?"

Ladybug shrugs. "It must have been part of it. Because the thing that fixed it, was going back and removing my name from his present, so that he didn't know and couldn't tell whoever it was he told. But also…" she drifts off as if uncertain, as if she has to summon courage. And if she spent a year trying to confess to a boy, then he understands it when she continues.

"There was another part of it. You were talking about our love. You said it was our love that destroyed the world. You said you wanted us to be in love again. And I don't know how and I don't know when, and I don't know if I knew but I guess I must have – and that ended up worse than anything I could have ever imagined."

"I guess I see why you never told me about that one," Adrien says, staring at the city, Ladybug's hand limp around his.

"Yeah," says Ladybug, very quietly. "So I knew that you and I absolutely couldn't know. Not as long as Hawkmoth was around."

They sit in silence a while longer.

"But we've passed that future now, and it didn't happen. And tomorrow, either we win, or he does. There won't be a draw this time. And if there's no Hawkmoth to akumatise people, then no-one can akumatise us for knowing."

"And that's insignificant?" he dares the joke, and Ladybug turns to him, smiling shyly.

"Just next to maybe dying. So I'm saying this now so that I know you won't go and do something too stupid. Keep yourself alive another day. And then it won't matter if you call me by my name."

"Yeah," is the only thing Adrien can say to that, the jittery anxiety smothered by the joy of a long-missed dream on the cusp of coming true. He can feel himself smiling, and Ladybug is, too, and it's warm and it's open and there's no teasing, no regret, no distance, no walls any longer, until she buries her face in his shoulder and tugs at his hand, again, mouse miraculous still secure around her fingers.

The city is radiant around them, and Adrien would have never imagined his life coming to this, to this lightness in the face of death and the most amazing girl in the world holding his hand on a rooftop.

"And the other part of it?" he asks, because it's not like he doesn't understand her feelings about what is important and what isn't, because there's still a part of his heart humming with the hope that once was a fluke, twice isn't.

He can feel Ladybug's shoulders rise and fall in a sigh, and she lifts his hand along hers.

"Yeah, the other part of it too. If you still want to."

"Bugaboo," he whispers, and tightens his hand, and she squeezes his in return.

He wonders if she'll let him tell her how wonderful she is, now. How brave and how strong and how beautiful, how smart, how kind, how determined. She's never taken him seriously before, laughed it away, rolled her eyes. Yeah, so maybe Cat Noir jokes too much for sincerity to come across. She's met Adrien Agreste and even seems to have a soft spot for him. She'll believe him.

He's kissed her once before, and forgotten it, and he's spent hours and hours staring at that photo and making up memories, dreaming up theories, trying out explanations for what in the world happened during that hour or so that made her let him. Now, she shifts her grip on his hand as he lifts the other one to her cheek, and her smile is full of warmth and god, of love.

"Milady, can you close your eyes for a moment?"

He kissed her once before, and all the world knows that it happened.

(this happened)

She's the strongest and bravest person he's known. She's the girl who glares at the monster his father has become, hands caught, eyes fierce as she refuses to give him the answers he demands. She never once breaks that stare between the grown man and herself, never once gives as much of a hint of hesitation or regret, and then –

And then –

And then she speaks the words that make Mayura forget him for just the second he needs, that let Tikki escape, and that shift the balance of everything in Adrien's life for the second time tonight. He doesn't dwell on it as he charges, doesn't let himself think about the consequences as his father trips over Rena Rouge's flute stretched out from a previously limp wrist, forces his mind onto ending this, ending this, ending this until Nooroo's miraculous is in his hand, and the miraculous box no longer is round and red.

There is a petit, dark-haired girl crumbled on the floor where his father dropped her, and all of Adrien hurts because this wasn't the way this was going to happen. But he doesn't have the right to grieve a promise that might as well never have been made, not when the brave and determined girl that he loves in the end was strong enough to let it go.

Even as a thousand tiny pieces in a puzzle he never knew existed are suddenly falling into a furiously aching place as Marinette Dupain-Cheng, who sits behind him in class and always blushes and babbles in nerves and had a wall of magazine clippings with his face but said she didn't like him like that – it's Marinette, fierce and bold when her friends need her to be, who opens her eyes and says, "I don't think I'm supposed to be here."

She doesn't recognise Cat Noir, and she doesn't ask for Tikki, and there's nothing to be done but to let the story end the way she chose it.

"Marinette, can you close your eyes for a moment?"

The ladybug miraculous is small and light in his hand, because Marinette Dupain-Cheng won't ever know what did and didn't happen.