Notes: Surprise! Two chapters in one day - since the goings on in them happen in the same day! Enjoy!


Cat Noir had returned her to the park next to her house as the sun was setting, pointing out that she'd still have to wait to learn who he was – Ladybug would get that privilege first, or not, it remained to be seen. And then he was gone once more.

Marinette stayed in the park for a while, talking with Tikki about the conversation she had just come from. Tikki had been able to hear most of it of course, but it wasn't the same as being a part of it. As she recounted Cat Noir not wanting this to be the last time she saw him she suddenly recognized that unless she saw Adrien another time she would never be able to talk with him again about anything related to being Ladybug. She had to see him. Running into the house, hugging her parents, and grabbing some croissants, she headed out of the door again and off towards where she knew Adrien's evening class would be. He wasn't at school today, but perhaps he would be at fencing.

As it happened, after their conversation Adrien had decided that some fight-based activity might help him let off steam, what with their being no akumas to fight any more, and so had returned home (as if he'd never left the house) and had his bodyguard take him to the night class for fencing. It was on his way back out of the class, walking down towards the car, that he was suddenly lifted off of the ground and into the air by a red blur. The Gorilla would have been furious to have lost his charge, but he knew of only one person who could do something like that and who wore those colors, and he trusted her.

Adrien caught on immediately to what was happening and could now appreciate Marinette's reaction to the way he had grabbed her earlier. Funny that Ladybug made the same mistake he had as Cat Noir, but Adrien wasn't going to berate her for it. He was just happy to be with her again.

Ladybug had herself recognized that she was doing what she had told Cat Noir off for, but didn't want to wait until he would be back in his room, nor try and talk with a bunch of people around again. They were close to Notre Dame and she remembered the first conversation there with Cat Noir, deciding that it did offer an appropriate degree of privacy. She brought them down onto the top of the southern tower this time and Adrien found the symmetry amusing – he'd started his week of deep thought at the Cathedral and it looked like it would more or less close here too, in almost exactly the same position.

"I really should have given you my number so you could announce your intentions this time," Adrien kidded her.

"Sorry," she apologized, trying not to read too much into the fact that Adrien had basically just offered her his phone number. "I hope you're ok with being here…"

"Of course," he reassured her, "I love the view from up here." Immediately he knew he should not have said that and watched as she looked at him with utter surprise. "Err, what I mean, is, err…" 'crap' he thought, as he tried to recover, "not here exactly… just on top of the Cathedral in general… they let VIPs up here, and, err… I've been here before with my father, I mean my mother, I mean both of them… when she was around." He looked at her, hoping she would buy the story he had just made up on the spot. Her expression returned to normal and he subtly breathed a sigh of relief. "I haven't been here in a long time," he added, hoping to cement the believability of the story, "thank you for bringing me here."

She smiled at him, pleased to have been able to do something nice for him, albeit unintentionally. "My pleasure," she said, adding, "I'll try not to scare you in the process next time."

He returned the smile, not sure how to make small talk after that train wreck. "Have you been thinking more about how you'd deal with Cat Noir knowing your identity and the guy you like, then?" he asked her, deciding that diving straight into the deep end was the simplest way forward.

"Yeah," she confirmed, fidgeting with her yo-yo, "another friend was helping me try and think about it a bit more too – get a different perspective." Adrien was glad she had someone else she could talk to but wondered how many people she was meeting up with this like.

"That's good," he encouraged her, "do you have a lot of people you can talk about this kind of thing with?"

"No, not really," she revealed. "Actually they didn't know they were talking to me." His confusion showed she needed to give some more explanation. "It's someone who knows me outside of the mask, so it wasn't a conversation about it directly. They have no idea I'm Ladybug." That made more sense to him, but sounded lonelier. "You're really the only person I've been able to talk to about this directly," she confided in him.

Adrien was surprised to learn that she had singled him out like that. He felt honored and told her as much. "What about the guy you like?" he asked and watched her blush. She hadn't anticipated him asking her about that and couldn't really explain why she 'wasn't talking with him' when she was.

"Let's not talk about that right now," she deflected, turning to look down the street running parallel with the front of the cathedral.

"Ok," he agreed, not wanting to pry, however curious he was to find out the answer. "Have your thoughts changed at all then?"

"Well, I think I'm able to appreciate the position Cat Noir is in a lot more." She was looking nowhere in particular now as she gathered her thoughts. "I'm not sure how it would go down, him learning all of those things, but I think I'm better prepared to try and talk with him about it in a more sensitive way now, if we do share identities with each other." Little did she know she was talking about it with him now. Adrien was grateful that she was being so considerate with Cat Noir's, his, feelings, but he still hoped things could change.

"That's good," he reassured her. "So what do you still have to think on?"

"I guess just my first concern, I want to put it to rest," she explained.

"What was your first concern?" he asked, thinking he knew the answer, even though in her eyes he shouldn't.

"That sharing identities could come back to hurt us if another supervillain ever surfaced. That's why we're taking time thinking about this. The complications that could come from sharing identities is really secondary to whether we should even share them at all. Knowing who each other is could impact any future work we might have to do together."

"So why don't you just keep them secret from each other?" he asked, not because he wanted that, but because it's the kind of question he expected someone who didn't know the things he knew would be likely to ask.

"Well if we aren't ever needed then that would mean we wouldn't actually ever see each other again," she informed him, giving him some time to understand it, not knowing he was already well aware. "I know that that option seems devastating to Cat, and to be honest, whatever worries I have, the idea of never seeing Cat again makes me really sad too."

Adrien had to steady himself to hear that. Ladybug wasn't often upfront with him as Cat Noir about what she felt about him, despite how much he wore his own affection on his sleeve. "Which is why you were telling me before that you'd just be sharing your identity with him, and why we've talked about what we've talked about up until now?"

"Yes," she agreed.

"So, if I'm understanding your dilemma correctly," he started, "if you don't tell him who you are you might never see him again, but if you tell him who you are that could maybe cause a possible problem in some future hypothetical battle that may never happen?" He knew he was biasing his summary in his favor a bit, but it did seem like the most realistic way of talking about it to him.

She looked at him for a while as she replayed his description of her predicament in her mind. His way of putting it was very different than how she had been thinking about it. It almost made it sound like her concerns were quite silly, though she didn't believe Adrien to be the kind of person that would imply such a character assessment. This boy really did seem to be on Cat Noir's team. "If you put it like that then yes, I suppose not telling him would look like a somewhat paranoid choice."

Adrien looked back at her, not wanting to say anything that might inadvertently cause offence. He wasn't meaning to suggest she was foolish for having the concerns she had.

"The thing is," she went on, "who's to say what the likelihood of us being needed again is? There's really no answer to that." She had him there, it was only paranoid if the possibility was very low, but no one could say what the possibility was.

"Yeah, that's fair I suppose," he accepted. He realized stating his case in a biased way hadn't been right and thought for how to better explain himself. "I guess it just looks to me like you have to choose between a certainty and a possibility."

"In what way?" she asked him to elaborate.

"Well, if you don't reveal yourselves and nothing happens, then you'll never see each other again. That's the certainty side." He explained. "But if you do reveal yourselves and something happens, it's only a possibility that knowing who each other is would be a problem, not a certainty that it would be. So you have to decide between a definite undesirable situation on one hand or a possibly undesirable situation on the other." He thought he had done better at stating his case this time, less bias, and less unclear probabilities.

Ladybug took some time to think over that again. "You know that makes sense. You're a smart boy too, you know."

"I'd like to say I'm more than just a pretty face, but I don't want to be egotistical about my looks – what did you call me as you left yesterday?" he joked.

Ladybug wanted to issue some rebuke to his seemingly inflated self-assurance, but the reminder had reddened her cheeks. She narrowed her eyes and complied, "Handsome Boy," she confirmed. "Don't get a big head though."

"Never," he responded.

"That does help in thinking about how to decide which to choose though. Thank you, Adrien."

"Glad to be of assistance, My La… err… Ladybug," he caught himself before he could give too much away.

"And you have," she verified, not noticing the near slip-up he had made. "In fact, I wanted to ask you one more thing."

"And what's that?" he enquired.

"Well," and she suddenly became very self-conscious. "I, um, have found it really helpful to be able to talk to you like this, and so was, um, wondering if you'd like to keep having little get-togethers like this in the future?"

"Like this?" he questioned.

"Well, not like this, on top of buildings or anything, I just mean some more time hanging out. It would be lovely to get to know you more." She was doing her best to channel her Ladybug confidence and push down her Marinette tendencies with regards to talking to him.

"But if you're giving up being Ladybug doesn't that mean," he reasoned aloud, "that you'd be telling me who you really are?" It would be one thing for her to learn that Cat Noir was Adrien all along, but for her to willingly want to reveal herself to Adrien directly was mind-blowing to him. "Even though," he added, since her revealing things this way around should raise such a question, "I'm the son of your nemesis?"

She really hadn't been thinking about him in those terms and suddenly realized how strange the request must be in light of it. But she'd made the offer and really didn't intend to retract it. She shifted uncomfortably where she stood, trying to justify her offer, "I believe you've proven yourself trustworthy, and not connected to your dad's activities at all, and it seems Cat Noir has made a strong connection with you as well." She was not quite on the mark with that last point but he wasn't going to try and explain that to her. "I think he'd let me tell one other person," she explained, knowing full well that he intended to ask the same thing of her already.

"I'd love to," Adrien quickly assured her.

She let out a breath she hadn't been aware she'd been holding and smiled. For a moment Adrien thought he was going to find out who she was a day early, but then felt conflicted about what it would mean if she did reveal herself to him first instead of Cat Noir. "Great," she told him, "you'll have to wait to find out who I am, though, as Cat Noir deserves to know first."

That answered that, though Adrien wasn't sure how to take that explanation – did it mean that she valued Cat more and wanted him to know first, or she felt duty-bound to tell him first even though she'd rather tell Adrien. Either way he wasn't going to learn who she was right now.

"I guess I'll see you in a few days or something," she informed him, "I'll let you know it's me when I see you." He was fine with that, since he knew that he should already know by then. "Unless Cat & I decide against telling anyone including each other, then I don't know what will happen," she admitted. The lack of clarity in that answer let him hope that she had already made the decision that they would be sharing identities.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" Adrien pointed out to her. "How am I getting down from here?"

Ladybug went red again. "Oops, I suppose I shouldn't leave you here. Where should I take you?"

"Just down to the ground should be fine, I'll have my bodyguard pick me up." He told her, not wanting to make her go out of her way to get him somewhere, with the possibility of more time together in the future on the horizon.

She picked him up and jumped off of the tower, the yo-yo attaching to a gargoyle to slow their descent.

"See you then, Adrien," she said.

"Don't you mean, see you then, Smart, Handsome Boy," he teased.

She opened her mouth to say something in response but closed it and just glared at him. "Goodbye Mr. Agreste," she closed and swung off into the evening.