Adrien went to bed as soon as he arrived home. He felt the kind of exhaustion that could only be induced by a long battle against an evilized supervillain, an afternoon of basketball training, or - apparently - one of Jagged Stone's monologues. The singer, like a great many people, loved the sound of his voice. Adrien wasn't so sure he did anymore. That dinner with his father and the rock star had lasted three hours, and Jagged Stone had quickly gathered that Adrien was a better conversationalist than his father.
The man had not stopped bragging for a second.
He had improvised a song.
Adrien had been raised to be compulsively polite and friendly.
He had lost the ability to formulate coherent thought.
Training with his father, prior to the meal, had not been as pleasant as he had hoped either. Adrien had walked out of the fencing club with the feeling that he had no talent for the sport whatsoever, Gabriel having pointed out his every flaw and then invented some. He had not done it to hurt his feelings, of course: he had the impatience that came with an abundance of skill and a distinct lack of leniency. Still, Adrien had hoped to get some semblance of approval. He had always trained hard.
Then again… Right hand, "sword". Left hand, "cataclysm". His father had been more than a mere fencer practicing for fun. He had been Chat Noir, with entirely different stakes and opponents.
Adrien wondered what his fighting style had been like. A saber was way more lethal than a staff.
He fell asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. At midnight, a knock on his window startled him awake. It was a very, very light knock, but he had very, very jumpy nerves.
He ran to his window and opened it to find Ladybug hanging upside down from the roof.
"H-hello," she said, with an awkward smile. "I hope I didn't wake you. I didn't mean to knock too hard."
He tilted his head to the side. Reading the facial expressions of people was not that easy when your mind was foggy and their features happened to be in unexpected locations.
"It's fine," he mumbled. "I wasn't asleep."
That didn't sound very convincing. She didn't look very convinced.
"Aaaal… right? I, uh. I just wanted to drop by to say that your dad is not Hawk Moth. Proved with a hundred percent certainty. You have my word."
Adrien stared at her. She put on her best TV face and used her most assured tone to explain things.
"There was an incident with an Akuma this evening - a short one, he really didn't have the time to cause trouble or anything - but you and your father were at the restaurant. So, here, I just wanted to tell you," she said, already pulling on her string to climb back to the roof.
"Wait!" Adrien exclaimed, knowing there had been no 'incident', but that she had to find a way to break the news without divulging what she knew about his parents. "T-thank you."
She clenched her fist around her yoyo string and started balancing from left to right.
"I told you I would," she declared. "And I caused all of that trouble to begin with, by suspecting him."
He nodded, then shook his head.
"I… understand. Don't worry about it. You have to protect the city, you can't just ignore clues."
"Still. I should have been quiet about it until I had definite proof, not just rumors and suspicions."
He grabbed her string just under - above? - her hands to steady her, pulling her closer to the window.
"I said 'don't worry about it'," he repeated with a tired smile.
Then he noticed her blush. She had all but frozen, and was chewing on her lower lip with what he thought was a dazzled expression. It was hard to say. He wished he had turned the lights on: with just the moonlight and the distant glow of a street lamp, there was little he could see. The lip chewing was clear enough, however.
He heaved himself through the window, wanting to steal a kiss, stopping halfway through because you did not do things like that. Instead, he tried to hold himself into place with one arm, his feet swaying above the floor. He reached for her cheek with his other hand, and gave her a chance to prevent the kiss.
She did.
By flattening a hand on his face.
She didn't slap him or anything, just raised her hand and pressed her palm against his nose with a gasped "no", but he still fell back into his bedroom. She yelped, swinging in every direction and bumping her head against the window.
"I'm sorry!" she exclaimed after steadying herself.
He rubbed his nose, staring at her. He distinctly heard Plagg groan, but Ladybug did not notice that. She winced and gave Adrien a sad look.
"I'm sorry," she repeated, this time in a whisper. "I… I'm very flattered, but… You don't know who I am, and I don't think it would be fair of me to take this and keep my secrets."
She sounded so sincere and heartbroken that he felt himself crack a little.
A tiny part of him screamed and thrashed in fury. Why couldn't the people he loved like the side of him who loved them? Why did his father have to prefer Chat Noir, and Ladybug Adrien the model, whom she barely knew?
"I shouldn't have tried to begin with," he replied, grinning. "I wouldn't want to stab Chat Noir in the back."
Ladybug blinked, confused.
"What does Chat have to do with this?"
Adrien gave her his warmest smile. He had tried to tell her with the mask on, over and over again. There was no way she was not aware of his feelings, on some level. Maybe she did not want to think about it. Apparently, she liked 'someone else'.
"He loves you, you know."
She gaped, letting go of her string and falling a floor down. She climbed back to the window, head above feet, this time. She was giggling.
"W-why would you say that?"
She did not believe it. How could she not believe it?
"Because he does," Adrien replied, matter-of-factly. It was so much easier to say when pretending it did not concern you. "Have you seen the way he looks at you? Talks to you?"
She chuckled again, but didn't look so certain anymore.
"That's just Chat being Chat. He's a flirt. With everyone. He once 'rescued' me while I was out of costume and laid it so thick I thought I was going to give myself away by bursting into laughter."
When? WHAT? Adrien, what did you DO?
"He's a flirt," she insisted. "My favorite flirt, but still a flirt. I wouldn't pay too much attention to the whole 'romance' thing."
He bit the inside of his cheeks but kept his smile firmly on.
"Ladybug."
She grew serious, leaning forward and waiting for him to continue talking. He looked straight at her, not faltering, not hesitating, and more importantly not showing how much the conversation meant to him.
"He does ."
His partner's face fell. She slipped down by a few inches, clutching the window frame, and shook her head with a heavy sigh.
"He…"
She pursed her lips, breathed in, breathed out. It was too dark to be sure, but Adrien thought she was tearing up a little. His impression was confirmed when she blinked - just once - then sniffed. A second later, she had collected herself.
"It doesn't count," she said, her voice quiet.
She moved back a little, holding on to the window frame with a hand. She patted her chest.
"It doesn't count. This is not me. I'm not like this. I'm not that strong. I'm a klutz and I'm impulsive and I'm rash and I keep making stupid mistakes and he doesn't know that. All he knows is Ladybug. It doesn't count ."
Her words hit him hard, leaving him breathless and stunned. He had never considered she could feel that way too.
"It doesn't count," she murmured. "Not if all he knows is the perfect persona. That's not me. Do you get what I mean?"
Adrien's words flowed out of him without real thought, his tone casual. He was still reeling.
"I'm a model, Ladybug. I know exactly what you mean."
She stilled, studying his face with growing horror.
He patted his own chest.
" This is not me. I'm not perfect and warm and kind. I get jealous and mean just like everyone else. I can be impulsive and make stupid mistakes too. And no one knows that."
Silence fell. They stared at each other, him with a determined expression, her with a crestfallen one. A minute went by, maybe two.
"Adrien Agreste," she ended up replying. "You might not be perfect, and you might be impulsive, and you might make stupid mistakes, and there's nothing wrong with that , but you are an idiot if you think you are not warm and kind."
He flushed, heart racing.
She kept talking.
" And you should not keep that facade up. Your friends would love to know you better. That Nino boy who is always with you. That Alya girl with the blog. They would be there for you when you are down, they would love you even more for letting them in. You don't have to play pretend."
"You play pretend," he pointed out.
"I'm a superhero ," Ladybug retorted, grabbing the side of her mask and pulling on it. "It comes with the job. As myself , I am myself . Which is not always a good thing, and involves a lot of phone stealing, but it mostly goes well."
Adrien's brain latched onto the least important part of her sentence.
"Phone stea-"
"Forget the phone stealing. My point is… don't be afraid of being yourself. If someone pushes you not to be, maybe they don't deserve the effort."
Her eyes strayed to his bedroom door, so it was not hard to understand she was thinking of a specific someone. Adrien pretended not to see.
She was pretending and he was pretending, they were both pretending. What was it that Plagg had said? "Tikki gets her human and I find one that matches"?
He chuckled.
"What a pair we make," he said. "All about the masks, both of us."
"Please promise me you'll allow yourself to be, you know, yourself ."
He grinned mischievously.
"Well, I don't know, maybe you'd like me less. That would be a distinct loss."
She shook her head with an amused snort.
"Would I like you more or less as yourself?" he asked.
Her faint smile faltered.
"Excellent question. Maybe, someday, you'll find out. But not now. I better get back to my patrol before Paris sets itself on fire."
"W-"
She did not wait. She dropped down into the courtyard and ran away.
###
Ladybug stumbled through her patrol, for the most part mostly unaware of her surroundings. Paris could have set itself on fire, she would not have noticed.
Her conversation with Adrien had been every degree of unsettling.
She hated the idea that he could be wearing a facade every single day. Hated it. That he could have told her, with conviction, that he was not kind . That he felt like the Adrien people liked did not exist. That the Adrien Marinette liked did not exist. That was not the problem: she would gladly have watched the boy she fancied vanish, as long as he could be himself and happy. She knew the idea of him disappearing was nonsense, anyway. He seemed to think he was radically different, and somehow worse of a person, but really flawed people were not able to keep the pretense so well. Their flaws seeped through their masks. Of course Adrien was kind. His first instinct was always to protect and comfort.
She hoped she had found the right words. She hoped she had been of some help. Fighting supervillains, as it turned out, was much easier than comforting a friend.
Also.
Also.
He had tried to kiss her. He had tried to kiss her. And she had turned him down. Letting him had not even been a question: he was furious at her. He had not idea it was her he was furious at, but she was not about to betray him by taking advantage of his ignorance.
She didn't know how she would handle the situation as Marinette , either. Alya had lectured her about her calling Gabriel out, and Nino (once he had heard about the situation from Alya) had all but murdered her, but she still firmly believed she had been right to confront the man. She couldn't exactly tell her friends what Adrien had told Ladybug in strict confidence, so she had not been able to smooth the edges by explaining her exact reasons. She did not regret going after mister Agreste, only hurting Adrien . As for Gabriel himself, pleasant public facade and tragic backstory aside, he could rot in hell. How did you neglect your son to the point that ended up convinced you were a supervillain?
It was so wrong that she still wanted to scream.
Apparently, her yelling session had been of some use, because mister Agreste had spent more time with his son in a week than he had in a year. She had heard, through Nino, that there would be less modeling in Adrien's near future. She felt a little vindicated.
She tried not to. She still remembered the look of betrayal and anger Adrien had given her when he had realized what she had done.
Marinette would have to apologize to him for going behind his back.
She landed on the Opera Garnier and paused for breath. Not that she needed it. She needed to think.
The most unsettling part of the conversation had been his insisting that Chat was in love with her. Actually in love with her. She had brushed that thought aside for months, convincing herself he couldn't be serious, that all of his flirting had been just that: flirting.
Adrien's words kept coming back to her. Have you seen the way he looks at you?
She had. She had, and she had discarded it, forgetting how often and for how long she had felt his gaze on her. At first, it had been so overdone that she couldn't have taken it seriously, and then, it had been… the norm. She had discarded the idea because she had not wanted him to love her, but she could not honestly say she had not known. She had consciously looked the other way, because she liked someone else. If she had admitted Chat loved her, then she would have had to face the fact that she was hurting him.
Ladybug hoped he was not patrolling that evening. There was no way she could talk to him without giving her anxiety away.
She took a deep breath and looked around, to make sure that Paris had not set itself on fire after all. The streets were quiet. Nothing was burning, nothing was collapsing, no supervillain was rampaging in the area. Ladybug relaxed a little. Then she felt a presence, an overwhelming sense of menace, right as she heard a shifting motion behind her. She whirled, sending her yoyo flying. She saw the dark silhouette of a man crouch, raising a hand to the level of his eyes. Her yoyo's string wrapped itself around his head and arm instead of around his shoulders. Since he only had to move his arm to loosen the string, he freed himself effortlessly.
"Do you always attack civilians without warning, miss?" he spat, throwing her yoyo down.
She recognized the voice before she recognized the person: the unruly hair, grey pants and dark hoodie did not fit his character at all.
"Mister Agreste ?" she exclaimed, staring at him.
He didn't look like himself at all. There was little left of the proper, serious businessman she had met. He had kept his glasses. His hair was an utter mess, behind which he was trying to hide his eyes (not that it worked: he had groomed it back for so long that pushing it down was no longer an option). The clothes were unfamiliar, of course. But what made the difference so drastic was his posture. Gabriel Agreste was stiff and moved little. The man in front of Marinette… His back was straight. It looked like he was still. But his hands, while hidden behind his back, were not clasped. He was ever so slightly rocking on his heels, ready to run. The rigidity Marinette had come to associate with him had vanished.
She raised her chin.
"Fancy meeting you here," she greeted him with a cheeky smile, even though her confidence was all faked. "How did you find me?"
She had good instincts, and the man felt like a threat. He gave her a pleasant smile. It was not enough to hide his malevolence.
"Your patrol routes are easy enough to figure out," he said, which was not pleasant to hear.
He joined her, unzipping his hoodie and fishing for something into his pockets. She took a step back. Her reaction startled him, and he suppressed an eye roll, but he didn't comment and handed her an envelope instead. He was holding it by a corner, with the tip of his fingers, and released it as soon as she touched it, as if fearing some sort of contagion.
She dropped the envelope, snatched it as it fell, and stared at it. Mister Agreste moved back.
"I cannot express how grateful I am for the information Tikki provided about my wife," he told Ladybug. "That being said, I have more questions I'd like an answer to, so I can brief the detectives working on Alice's case. I wrote them down. I would tremendously appreciate it if you and Tikki could shed light on some of them. Just drop the letter into my secret lair, or maybe send me an email. Whatever works best for you."
Ladybug folded the letter, frowning.
"Tikki can't talk to you," she pointed out.
"I'm well aware of that."
"What if we don't want to help?"
The man shook his head and walked to the closest trapdoor, crouching to open it.
"Should that be the case, please remember I have a teenage son who has been waiting for answers for five years," he declared, lowering himself into the building. "But I doubt that slipped your mind."
It had not.
She gaped for a second or so as he took another step down - she had expected him to jump off the roof or something equally cloak and daggerey - then collected herself.
"What did you do? Why was your ring taken away?"
"Ask your Kwami, if it matters to you so much," he retorted. "As far as I'm concerned, it's none of your business."
"It would earn you points if you told me yourself."
"I'll pass. Oh. And one more thing, miss."
She crossed her arms.
"What now?"
"While I am endlessly grateful for your assistance in all matters concerning my wife, I still want you nowhere near my son. Leave him alone. Is that clear?"
Marinette stared him down.
"You seem to love pushing his friends away, mister Agreste."
Icy eyes stared her down, and she had to fight hard not to look away. The look on his face was darker and more menacing that the ones she had received from most of the enemies she had fought. Evilized people were always moved by some kind of boiling anger, by a stroke of madness that made it clear they were controlled by external forces.
Gabriel Agreste just loathed her .
It was nothing like Chloé's petty hatred. Chloé sometimes looked like she wanted Marinette to vanish from the face of the Earth. With mister Agreste, however, it felt like if he would make it happen if pushed too far.
"Just stay away from him," he said, vanishing into the building and closing the trapdoor as he went.
Ladybug stood there for a minute or so, then raced to the corner of the roof, jumped off, and ran home. She untransformed ten minutes later, as soon as she dropped into her bedroom. She had spent the entire way looking over her shoulder.
Tikki jumped out of her earrings and hovered in front of her. Marinette rubbed her own shoulders, skin crawling. The envelope was laying on her bed.
"That man scares me, Tikki," she blurted out. "Actually, genuinely scares me."
"He won't hurt you," the Kwami replied, heavy-hearted.
"The way he looks at me. It's just… What have I ever done to him?"
Tikki dropped onto the bed to open the envelope, then pulled three sheets of paper out. It was a list of questions about Hawk Moth's appearances over the last five years. They pertained to the villains he had created, the places he had been to, the dates of the fights against him, and so on. Not exactly something you could bring to a detective.
Tikki folded the sheets.
"You have done nothing, Marinette. It's not about you," she explained.
"It very much feels like it's about me," the teenager sighed. "Did you see the look on his face? I've had enemies be warmer to me. I'm just Ladybug. I help people. I don't-"
"Not to him, you are not," Tikki whispered.
Marinette froze and stared through her Kwami as those words sank in. The spirit shook her head.
"You have done nothing and there is nothing you can do. He will never be able to bear the sight of you. Just give him space."
Oh .
The third of october of the previous year, Ladybug and Chat Noir had been filmed and photographed for the first time. They had been on live TV, fighting not their first enemy, but the first whose powers had impacted an area large enough to draw attention.
Ladybug had been on live TV. Except she had not been Ladybug.
That poor man.
"Why was his ring taken away, Tikki? What did he do ?"
The Kwami shook her head.
"Can you promise me to never tell Chat Noir?" she asked. "Can you promise me to never tell Gabriel's son either? It's something they have to hear from him or not at all. It would have too much of an impact on how Chat Noir sees his powers, and on how Adrien sees his father. So, can you swear to me that you will keep it to yourself?"
"Of course I will!"
Tikki shot daggers at her at the hasty promise, and Marinette looked down at her hands.
"I will," she swore. "I won't tell them. You have my word."
###