Our Love Will Go On

Written by: JuliaFC

Fandom: Miraculous - Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir

Rating: T

Beta: KhanOfAllOrcs, Mystic_Raven20

Big Bang artist for the story: DNA-D2 (Folks, look forward to her wonderful art in the upcoming chapters, on Ao3 and Wattpad only!)

Cover art by: Rose Minou

Disclaimer: This story is based on characters and situations created by Thomas Astruc. "Miraculous - Tales of Ladybug and Chat Noir" (c) TS1 Bouygues, Disney Channel, Zagtoon, Toei Animation. This story is not written for profit and is not intended for copyright infringement.

WARNING: THIS STORY CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR MIRACULOUS SEASON 5.

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Chapter 1 — The secret cave

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It had happened by accident. That afternoon his father had called him into his study and asked him to see his latest school results, showing great disappointment about the single A- that he had scored in his French literature course.

"It is inadmissible. You need to work harder. An Agreste can only achieve the best!"

Adrien was so beside himself that he left his father's studio and walked away. He reached his room, locked the door and marched to his bed; only then he lost his apparent calm and burst into tears after crashing on his mattress. But as he wasted his afternoon crying himself to sleep, he suddenly realised that he'd left his stuff behind in his father's office! Panic hit him, making him forget why he was so upset. After discussing the situation with Plagg, however, he established that it was appropriate to return to his father's office to pick his stuff up.

So, Adrien left his room, walked to the studio door, and knocked. Once, discreetly. A second and third time, stronger and stronger, but no one answered. His father must've left the office.

Adrien swallowed awkwardly—he remembered what happened the last time he entered his father's studio without permission. But this time, he had a good reason. So, he pulled himself together and cracked the door open.

"Entering his office without permission and without him being there. Do you want to get into trouble again?" Plagg said, appearing from inside his shirt.

"No, don't worry, buddy. I won't touch anything this time; I'll take my things and go."

The studio was empty, as he had assumed. Adrien took a quick look around and immediately found his tablet. He grabbed it and made to get out. Only to go to a sudden halt when he reached the door, his gaze lost in contemplation of his mother's portrait.

Almost hypnotised, he approached the picture and passed his fingers over the uneven surface of the painting. His mother was so beautiful in the picture; Adrien looked at her face and her eyes, so similar to his own, for a very long time. That's when he noticed the holes in the painting. Not that he had never seen them before–he had, but he'd never really paid attention to them. Today though, he furrowed his brows and gingerly approached the painting to take a better look.

"Didn't you say you only wanted to get your stuff? You have them; go!" Plagg said, peeking out of his shirt.

But Adrien kept looking at the painting, his hand reaching out and gingerly touching it with his fingers. "I never really thought about it, Plagg, but don't these holes look weird? They seem the perfect size for someone's fingers to slide in. But they're not part of the combination for the safe behind the portrait."

"I don't like this," the little furball muttered, "you'll get in trouble again. And it's not as if you've got a gadget to check for hidden technology. You're not in a movie, Adrien!"

But as Plagg said that, Adrien had a flash passing in front of his eyes. He gasped, which caused the black Kwami to look at him with a raised eyebrow.

"As a matter of fact," he said as he slammed one hand's fist against the other's palm, "I think I do. You remember the other day when we were looking for Father to tell him about Félix?"

"Huh-uh?" Plagg nodded.

"You remember that strange glass-looking thing we found on the ground?" Adrien flashed his eyebrows. "I think Félix must've been up to something that day. It was too good to be true that he'd just come here to help me; he's not that nice anymore. He hasn't been that nice lately, at least."

"What do you think he was looking for? And here of all places?" Plagg's eyebrow was still raised.

"I don't know, but there's only one way to find out. Let's grab that gadget and see how it works." That said, Adrien didn't leave Plagg time to object. He ran out of the office, returned to his room, and picked up the gadget he'd found a few days before. Then, he returned to his father's office and cautiously donned it, starting to fiddle with it to make it work.

"Meh," Plagg eventually drawled, "looks like it was just an average spectacle. Maybe your father–" But Plagg stopped talking when the gadget resting in front of Adrien's eye switched on, and some electric letters and numbers appeared on it.

"What the…" Adrien started to say. He messed a bit more with the settings until it highlighted the holes in the portrait, revealing a clear finger pattern. Adrien's hands trembled as he moved them gingerly to touch the holes and inserted them, following the exact sequence shown to him.

To his great surprise, he felt the ground open under him and his body being pushed down. He pulled out of the painting in time to avoid slamming his chin against the floor, and the ground swallowed him without warning.

He saw Plagg flying by and exchanged a terrified look with his Kwami.

What must have been a lift continued to descend until it reached a point where the outside was made of transparent glass, and Adrien could see a huge cave opening under his feet. He almost got dizzy. How weird: he never thought that under the Mansion, there could be a cave so great.

But it wasn't the size of the cave that surprised him and ran deep shivers through his back, no. There were myriad butterflies around the cave, the same white butterflies that Papillon loaded with negative energy to turn into Akumas. He looked around as Plagg left his pocket to explore the place before the lift reached its destination. A long bridge at the centre of the cave connected the ground in front of the lift with another platform, adorned with a large symbol depicting a... butterfly?

Adrien's heart started racing in his chest. As soon as the lift stopped and opened its doors, allowing Adrien out, the boy started running onto the bridge; there was something under the butterfly symbol, and he couldn't see what it was. But when he got closer, he saw Plagg coming back from where he was going; never had he seen the little God of Destruction looking so distraught.

"I wouldn't go if I were you, gamin," the black Kwami said.

Adrien sighed. "I must see what it is, Plagg. My sanity is at stake."

"To be honest, Adrien, I think it would be much better for your sanity if you didn't go further." But Adrien didn't listen to him and set out on the bridge. "Please, Adrien, don't go there," continued the little feline, but Adrien had already arrived halfway across the bridge and could already start to see something... It looked like a crystal coffin, a mass of blond hair, a white suit with black edges... No, it wasn't possible!

His heart was pounding when he arrived in front of the coffin, and his gaze could fill with the vision before his eyes. It was his Maman. His mother, whom he thought had disappeared a year before... lay in a crystal coffin, motionless, smiling, a rose in her hands.

Adrien gasped. His eyes filled with tears, his heart in his throat; he felt breathless as his pupils dilated.

"Maman?" The sound of his sobs resounded in the emptiness of the cave, his hands clinging to the glass of the coffin, his body squeezed against it, tears dripping on the clear surface. He pulled up to see if he could find a button to open the glass, but as he was doing so, he heard a lift stopping a short distance away; he wiped his eyes to look around. He barely had time to hide behind the coffin when his father's stiff and severe figure emerged from what was to be a lift to the side of the butterfly symbol. But that wasn't all. A little creature was floating over Gabriel's shoulders, a purple kwami that looked like a butterfly.

Adrien's heart stopped.

That was impossible! They had suspected his father once before, but he had been Akumatised. Three times! How was it possible that he was Monarch? But if the presence of Nooroo hadn't been enough to give the man away, the grin on Gabriel's lips would have been a good indicator of the truth by itself.

Adrien held his breath, not wanting his father to find him and realise that he had been revealed; Gabriel approached the coffin, however, and Adrien tried to sneak behind it, but in doing so, he stepped on a pebble and made noise.

"Who's there?" his father—Monarch—asked. Adrien had slipped behind the coffin, but he knew he was visible in case his father decided to look right there.

The boy put his hands over his mouth and started biting his flesh in fear. His palms were sweaty, and his fingers were ice. His heart had now found shelter in his throat and ears, and he had completely forgotten how to breathe. He had to silence a cry when he saw the little purple creature flying in front of him and looking straight into his eyes.

He shook his head; his mouth twisted in a terrified grimace. He put his hands in a praying gesture and then shook them in front of the little creature.

Nooroo looked at him carefully and then exchanged a look with Plagg, who had popped out of his shirt as Adrien's heartbeat had become even faster. Then he flew away with what Adrien thought was a glimpse of a smile on his little lips.

"All clear, Master," the Kwami lied, and Adrien breathed a silent sigh of relief. "We can go."

But when Adrien took a cautious peek to check that his father had gone away, he still saw the man's shoes in the same position as before; then, with his heart back in his throat, he returned to his hiding place and held his breath.

"Emilie, my beloved," Gabriel said in a tone of voice that Adrien hadn't heard from him in a long time. "Those kids beat me again. But do not worry, I am working on a new plan. I do not have much time left," he added.

His hand ran to his right arm and pulled up his sleeve, revealing a skin so dark underneath that Adrien had to cover his mouth to prevent a loud gasp from escaping his lips. Was that…what his Cataclysm left behind? Was his father going to die? But his mind couldn't spiral into a panic because Gabriel spoke once more and Adrien managed to get his heavy breathing under control.

"Soon, we will be together again, and all this will be just a distant memory," he concluded. Adrien heard a few steps, and the voice said again, "Come on, Nooroo, let's go." After that, silence. Only the sound of Gabriel's heels rang in the vast cave, slowly fading away in the distance.

Adrien leaned over a little to see what was going on, and when his father got into the lift and the cubicle started to go up to the studio that Adrien had come from and then disappeared from his sight, he continued to look in that direction with his heart in his throat. He eyed Plagg, wanting to ask him about his father's arm, but before doing so, there was something else he was dying to do.

He cautiously moved towards his mother's coffin, which was closed now; Father must've closed the glass panel before going upstairs. Adrien began to search with his fingers to find any button that would allow him to open it.

"Is that wise, Adrien?" the little God of Destruction asked. "What if your father has some device that alerts him if this thing is tampered with?" he said, trying to reason with his chosen.

But Adrien gave him a look so full of anguish and pain that the little black cat flattened his ears and didn't argue further, moving a bit to keep an eye on the lift in which the boy's father had disappeared, to make sure he wouldn't return.

Finally, after a few minutes of pushing and touching every small cavity of the frame around the coffin, Adrien was able to find a button that opened the two metal doors that covered the glass capsule.

Plagg heard the metallic sound of the doors opening, and soon after, the poor boy's sobs behind him. He turned, losing sight for a moment of the lift to cast a sad glance at his holder, his ears flat on his head, a frown stretching down the corners of his tiny mouth. With death in his heart, Plagg turned again to the lift, forcing himself to resist the temptation to rush on the boy's head and purr to console him. He had a reputation to uphold, even though many of his barriers had fallen since he had started living with Adrien.

Over the millennia, Plagg had always been the most feared Kwami in the Miracle Box. Considered the most powerful (along with Tikki) and the least stable (unlike Tikki), he had often been kept in the box without being able to create a bond with his holders.

Not that Tikki had had a better fate: after what happened with Dark Grimalkin and Jeanne D'Arc, the temple's Guardians were afraid to give away any Miraculous permanently. To prevent the Miraculouses from being used as bait to resolve wars between Nations, they had said. But also, Plagg suspected, to ensure that the Kwamis—especially the two of them—weren't becoming attached to their holders and ending up making irrational decisions. Like the decision Plagg wanted to make now—fly at breakneck speed to that horrible man's atelier and finish the job that Chat Noir had started in the Grévin Museum, by cataclysming his horrible face.

Because Fu hadn't received his full training, he hadn't felt the same fear to keep the Kwamis locked away. Besides, it would have been challenging for Fu to get a hold of the two kids every time there was an Akuma attack, so he had been forced to give Tikki and Plagg permanently to a holder. And, of course, Plagg couldn't help but get attached to Adrien. How could you not get attached to that kitten? He tried, oh yeah, he did. He knew very well that if something went wrong, he and Tikki would suffer the consequences of their mistake for millennia. Like when he destroyed Atlantis, or when he made the dinosaurs extinct. And the dragons... Longg hadn't forgiven him yet!

But Adrien... how could you not have a thing for that boy? He was the purest soul Plagg had ever known. He treated him with respect and friendship, as an equal, even though he knew full well that Plagg could cataclysm him and kill him on the spot. All the temporary holders he'd had in the last 2,000 years had been terrified—but not Adrien. Adrien treated him like a friend and the brother he never had. Slowly but surely, Adrien had managed to break the armour that the little God of Destruction had created around his heart and feelings; now, Plagg couldn't bear seeing his holder cry all his tears against his mother's coffin. It wasn't fair. It wasn't fair at all.

"I'm so sorry, Adrien," he allowed himself to say, but Adrien wouldn't listen, and Plagg couldn't leave him in his misery. With a sigh, he turned to fly close to him, laid himself on the boy's head and purred, massaging his hair with his front nubs while his eyes never lost sight of that lift.

When Adrien's hiccups finally dissipated, the little God of Destruction dared to move from the boy's golden hair and float in front of his face. Adrien felt the movement and pulled his head up, looking at him with green eyes injected with blood, his face patched with red, and his hair ruffled. He looked more like a child than the superhero that protected Paris. Well, he was a child. A human being who had only seen 14 springs. A human being with the right to be loved and protected, not thrown face-first into a literal nightmare.

"I've cataclysmed my father, Plagg!" Adrien's eyes were wide and glassy, his pupils dilated, his breath hitching. Plagg could tell that he was panicking big time. His face was as white as a sheet where it wasn't reddened because of the tears mulling his cheeks.

"No, I won't allow you to bash yourself over this!" Plagg shouted, startling Adrien. "We went through it at the time, but it's even more crucial that you understand it now. You have no reason to feel that it was your fault, gamin. He used your hand to cataclysm his arm. It hasn't been you. It hasn't been your fault. You didn't act upon it willingly. He made you do it and took away the Lucky Charm so Ladybug couldn't fix the damage. It's his fault; he's got only himself to blame."

Adrien winced. "Still…It must've hurt him so bad."

"GOOD! I'm glad that my power has inflicted him pain. He bloody deserves it!" The little god balled the little nubs he had in place of his paws and shook his tiny arms but deflated when he noticed how sad Adrien had gotten because of it.

"Will he die?" He reverentially touched the glass that covered his mother's beautiful face. "Will I be left on my own?"

Plagg deflated some more. He lowered his head and slouched over himself, his tiny lips curling down into a pout. "I won't lie to you, Adrien; probably he will. You know how painful it is to take a Cataclysm on your body; you took one when that Miraculer akuma attacked—I know all about it; I took most of the impact upon myself to protect you. It just destroys everything inside you, slowly. The human body is complex, so it takes time, but eventually, he will."

Fresh tears ran down Adrien's cheeks, and Plagg's little heart broke for him.

"But he would have died anyway. Human life is so short and delicate…he would have died eventually. And besides, I think your father died long ago; what we fought as Monarch was probably his empty shell. He wants to be back with her," Plagg said, moving his little face to shoot a glance at Adrien's mother. Then he sighed once more, and his decisive gaze fixed on Adrien. "You will be all right; you have other people who love you. You have me…we can still open that cheese shop if you like!"

Plagg's words somehow managed to do the trick, and Adrien resumed breathing. "Thank you, buddy," he said, his hand reaching out to pat Plagg gently on the head as the shadow of a smile stretched the boy's lips. A smile that was short-lived because soon his expression darkened again.

"I can't believe that my father..." Adrien said with such a hoarse voice that Plagg thanked the Creator that his ears were more sensitive than human ears because he would've struggled to hear it otherwise.

"Neither can I. As much as he's a bastard, I never expected him to be the lunatic holding Nooroo and Duusu hostage all this time." The little black cat slowly looked down. "To think I've been in such proximity to Nooroo and Duusu all this time and... I haven't even noticed."

Adrien gave him a slight pat on the head and scratched the back of his neck. Plagg closed his eyes, relishing the physical contact, but at the same time feeling that his heart was tightening even more because this was Adrien, and this was why he had managed to break through Plagg's armour. Even after all the trauma he'd just been through, the boy had thought of consoling his Kwami.

"How could you know, Plagg? I'm as guilty as you are; I never even considered the chance that my father could be Monarch. Even after the evidence that Milady gave me the day he Akumatised himself into the Collector. Father must've done it on purpose to divert our attention."

The boy squeezed the denim fabric on his legs so hard that his fists shook; his eyes clenched, his teeth chattering. "What fools we've been!"

Plagg watched as he slammed his fists against his thighs several times and took a couple of deep breaths to calm down. "What are you going to do, gamin? We need to talk to the Guardian!"

"Yeah," Adrien reflected, finally opening his eyes and sniffing. It was so strange to see those beautiful eyes so swollen and red. "But first, we have to get out of here."

"There's the lift," the little Kwami said tentatively. "I've kept an eye on it, and it hasn't moved."

"But it goes to Father's atelier. If he's still there, I could get in trouble."

Plagg gave him a mischievous grin. "You forget I can cross matter!" That said, the little Kwami rushed towards the lift and then inside the pipe and through the floor until he arrived at Gabriel's atelier.

And then, he went down again, his ears flat on his head. "You're right, Adrien. Your father is still there, looking at his tablet."

"We need to find another exit," the boy concluded.

The two searched everywhere and explored every corner of the cave. They found the second lift Gabriel had come out from, which led them to a dark room. Plagg found the switch that opened the window mechanism, thanks to his night vision.

When the window opened and the kaleidoscope of white butterflies scattered, Adrien felt the blood freeze in his veins—the Kwamis. The Kwamis were all trapped in little containers held on the wall of the lair, the only ones missing being Nooroo and Duusu, and obviously, Tikki and Plagg. Adrien looked at them with his eyes wide and full of terror, and they looked back, maybe even more terrified. And what's worse was that…there were another two containers in the centre of the wall. Adrien couldn't help but glance at Plagg and notice that even he looked worried. Or maybe out of his mind in anger.

Well, maybe both.

To Be Continued…

Author's Note

Hello everyone!

I'm so pleased to finally be able to share this story after having been working on it since July! Even before, to be honest.

This story came to my mind when I finally accepted the idea that Adrien was a sentibeing. There were quite a few things I was afraid of, for his sake, that Gabriel may take advantage of it (like he is in canon, the bastard!) that Lila may find out, etc. etc. I must tell you that my original idea was even worse for Adrien than this, but while I wrote the story, the characters moved it to this direction so…here we are.

The story, as the title may suggest, is inspired by the famous song from the Titanic movie, "My Heart Will Go On". Other pieces of inspiration for it were, even if not as obvious, "If My Hands Could Peel" by Federico García Lorca and one of my favourite manga of all time, Video Girl Ai.

I hope you will like the story. It starts as a continuation of season 4. Still, since I watched episodes of season 5 as I wrote it, I've adapted it to be compliant with them, so it's definitely compliant up to Destruction, to then deviate from it but keep some knowledge discovered in later episodes (like the hint to Reunion in this chapter). Also, my interpretation of Félix is based on what I understood of his character after watching Emotion; even though I didn't have to change much, I was surprised at how well I had understood his character.

As usual, if you read this and enjoy reading, writing and talking about Miraculous, please join my favourite Discord servers, Miraculous Fanworks (discord dot gg slash mlfanworks) and Miraculous Discordance ( discord dot gg slash QwgKdUhJNJ). I'll wait for you there!