She's throwing her yo-yo against one of the support beams again and again when he shows up for patrol. Her teeth are bared and the way she whips the string back and forth is violent, upset, and the loud clangs against the metal of the Eiffel echo into the night.

Chat feels his heart break a little when her face turns just enough for him to see the frustrated tears in her eyes.

"Ladybug?" he says, calling out to her through the night, tentative. She stops suddenly, her yo-yo falling to the platform with a bounce, the string limply following it. Her shoulders tense, and then she shakes in an aborted way, as if trying not to cry. "Are you okay?"

He does not move closer and he does not reach out to her. Somehow, he feels it isn't his place to.

After a moment, she stops shaking, and she brings a hand up to swipe at her eyes. A beat passes where they both just stand there, rigid in the night, before she turns toward the open edge of the tower. The string of her yo-yo falls from her hand, and she leaves it lying there on the metal.

"Come sit with me, Chat," she says, and walks over to sit down, letting her legs dangle off the edge. He follows, with some trepidation, and sits down with a respectable few inches between them.

To his immense surprise, she closes that distance, scooting over to lean against him.

"My lady?" he says, the words startled out of him. She does not reply, just stares out at the night with her head on his shoulder.

"We're partners," she says eventually, and the way she says it makes Chat think she's looking for confirmation.

"Of course we are."

"I trust you. More than anyone else in my life." The way she says it makes Chat Noir think there's a "but" to it.

"But…?" he prompts, some kind of disappointment swirling up in him.

"But only with certain things."

Another silence drifts between them.

"I'm so tired," she says, and exhaustion pools in her words.

"Perhaps you should go home and sleep, then, bug," Chat says, starting to pull away. She holds on, and he hadn't realized until now that she'd held a grip on his arm.

"Not like that."

"Then… what do you mean?"

She sighs, tracing patterns onto his wrist with one hand.

"The only one on this whole planet I can be my entire self with is my kwami, Chat. I'm tired of putting on a face. I'm tired of not being able to talk about my problems to people from one side or another. I'm tired of coming up with excuses to run off and play superhero and I'm tired of pushing you away, for the sake of Paris." She clenches her hand around his wrist, gripping him tightly. "You're the person I trust the most in my life but I can only trust you with little pieces of me. You're so reliable, and sometimes I wanna spill my guts to you about my civilian life, just so you can help me make sense of it. It's agonizing keeping most of my life away from you when I feel like you already know me inside and out. It's agonizing trying to be professional about this job and keep our civilian identities separate from each other when you're my friend, too, and…"

He's staring at her, wide-eyed, enraptured with her words. "…And?"

She's quiet, for a moment. "And… we're kids, Chat. I love being Ladybug, but… sometimes I really hate having to worry about the fate of the whole city. I'm so tired of it."

She lifts her head from his shoulder, unwraps her arms from where they're hugging his. She turns to him, not meeting his eyes, and opens her arms, as if for a hug. Hoping he hasn't misread her, he reaches out, and pulls her into his arms.

She relaxes into him in a way he hadn't realized she could. A kind of tension leaves her that he didn't realize she carried with her, but he recognizes it now: Ladybug has always had a kind of stiffness to her posture. A professionalism she clings to with vigor.

And here she is, now, bare.

"Did your kwami tell you that learning our identities will cost us our miraculous?" The words are muffled, what with her speaking them into his shoulder, but he hears them all the same.

"What?"

She turns her head so that her voice is no longer muffled, but stays wrapped in his arms. "My kwami said that if we ever found each other out, we'd have to give up being Ladybug and Chat Noir. I don't know why, exactly. Probably the reason I insisted we keep it secret in the first place."

"Oh," he says, for lack of anything else to say.

"Yeah." She sighs. "I… want to just be your friend, Chat Noir. Not your partner or your lady or a superhero with you. I want to be friends, like normal kids are. I want to tell you all about myself." Then, quieter, "I want to know all about you."

His mouth has fallen open in surprise by now, and at her last statement, he squeezes her a little tighter.

"I want to be friends with you, too, Ladybug."