Am I going to use cheesy Ed Sheeran song titles for every single chapter in this fic?

Yes. Yes I am.

Chapter 2

Photograph

Ladybug, on the other hand, smells clean.

Like the air on a cold winter morning, or the earth after a rainstorm. She smells like an ocean breeze, easy and light; she smells like wide open spaces and bounding above Paris rooftops and freedom.

She smells like everything Chat Noir has ever wanted.

"Race you?" she asks, turning to him with a mischievous glint in her eyes that Chat swears she got off him and can't refuse, and he capitulates with a matching grin.

"Loser's in charge of distractions for the next five akuma," he says nonchalantly, before dropping to all fours without a warning and bounding across to the next rooftop. Behind him, Ladybug yelps as she scrambles to take out her yoyo, and Chat can't help but laugh at the indignant sounds coming from his lady's mouth as she realizes he's got the jump on her. But she's soon in hot pursuit, her yoyo flashing ruby-red under the light of the setting sun, and Chat doesn't hold back his feral grin as the two of them leap and vault over the darkening Paris cityscape.

"That's not fair!" he hears Ladybug's voice from behind him, struggling to make up for his head start, "You cheated!"

"I gotta take what little advantages I can, my lady!" he calls back to her, and at the same moment a wobbly roof tile gives way underneath him, almost causing him to slip to his doom (or at least, to second-place in his race with his Lady, because Miraculous users bordered on invincible—as evidenced by the fact that Stormy Weather once bounced him around most of the town with nary a scratch on him). He manages to recover with rakish grin intact, and even has enough time to turn his head and flash Ladybug a glimpse of said grin. "See? My Miraculous powers aren't so much an advantage as they are a handicap here, Ladybug. In the interests of fairness, don't you think I'm entitled to a bit of a head start?"

Ladybug's response is a very mature sticking out of the tongue, and Chat laughs again before throwing himself back into the race in earnest. This is good, he thinks, the wind in his hair and the world at his feet and his Lady by his side (or trailing a little behind, currently); this is everything he ever wants in life. His real life as Adrien Agreste might be a planned-out parade with an agenda behind every single facet of it, but right now, as Chat Noir, he cannot think of anything else he could possibly desire—

A face slams into is head and he almost loses his footing on the next landing. Scratch that, he does lose his footing on the next landing. Chat Noir collapses dramatically, his face planting itself onto the concrete of some high-rise building rooftop, and he might be almost invincible but a fall like that is still enough to rattle his brain so much in his skull that he feels like he's been put through the washing machine and the dryer. Unfortunately, it's not enough to shake the image of the face that is the cause of his fall from grace, and Chat splutters as he gets back to his knees, his hands over his own face that's suddenly flaming—and not just because of its high-velocity contact with a very solid object just seconds prior.

"Ha! I win, minou!" comes the triumphant voice of his Lady from somewhere beyond him, but Chat doesn't yet have enough breath in his chest to counter that with an appropriate pun. Part of it is to do with his impromptu pas de deux with the concrete rooftop, but most of it is thanks to the fact that he's actually, physically holding his breath. Breathing doesn't particularly feel like a necessity to him in this very moment, not when it entails the maddeningly enticing scent of cinnamon and sugar entering his lungs.

"Minou?" his Lady calls, and this time her voice is closer to him; Chat chances a breath on the slim hope that maybe her clean, cold-air scent would help clear his mind, but all that he can smell is cinnamon and sugar. He wants to growl in frustration; for the love of god, if he was going to have this kind of reaction every time he so much as walked in the same street as a bakery—

"Chat!" Ladybug says again, as she crouches down beside him; her expression is worried, and she winds an arm around his back to help him up. "I didn't realise—are you hurt? I didn't think you would be, but— was there something sharp sticking out, maybe? Are you bleeding?"

It's rare that his lady is so concerned for him when a villain isn't implicated, and he wants to bask in her attention a little more—or he would have, if his brain was not currently being overrun by thoughts of another girl's face and another girl's smile and oh, god, another girl's lips, and this was something he was trying very hard not to think about but the smell from the bakery on the street below them is nothing short of provocative. Chat wants to crawl into the nearest available hole and die. He also wants to see (hold, kiss) Marinette again. He also loves his lady (who is running her hands over his torso to check for wounds, oh god, oh god) with all his heart. He also thinks he might be going a little insane.

If this is puberty, then he sure as hell hasn't signed up for it and wants his money back right now.

"I'm fine—I'm fine—" he manages to gasp out, in between still holding his breath and trying to brush his lady's hands away from his body. He gets to his knees shakily, before reengaging his baton and vaulting over to the next roof, a still-worried Ladybug arcing over with him, perfectly in sync. "It's nothing, my Lady, just a little winded, that's all, the Miraculous might be magic but we're still human after all—"

Winded. Ha ha. He's actually kind of proud of that one. After all, wind was the source of all his problems here; wind was what had carried the scent of the bakery all the way up four stories to reach him. It was kind of a shame his Lady wouldn't recognize it for the pun that it was.

"Hmm," Ladybug says, skepticism all over her face, but thankfully, she lets it go. "Well, in any case, is that a win to me? I guess distraction duty falls to you for the next five akuma, then~"

By now, with her fresh, open-spaces scent surrounding him, Chat has recovered enough to grumble about this turn of events. Ladybug just laughs, high and tinkling, and he feels the tightness in his chest loosen a little; the memory of Marinette seems very far away now, without the devastating fragrance of cinnamon (sinnamon, he's going to call it from now on; no scent on earth should be able exert such a power over a single human being) curling its fingers round him. They fall into their routine banter, light and comfortable, as they make their way to their customary haunt on top of an abandoned set of factories on the outskirts of the city. In fact, Chat is almost on his way to feeling normal, no trace of Marinette working its way through his system like a drug, when something purple flaps out the corner of his eye and he grinds to a stop once more.

"Chat?" his Lady enquires, but then she, too, stops as she spots what he is currently fixated on.

A purple scarf.

More specifically, purple fading out to violet fading out to black, with an abstract design not unlike butterflies worked through it in a lighter shade of mauve. Chat feels every single drop of blood in his body run cold; the scarf is wound around the neck of someone very tall, shrouded from head to toe in a mix of purple and black, cast half in shadow as they stand in front of a round window. Of course, this is not what draws his attention; Paris is the fashion capital, after all, and attracts more than its fair share of eccentric dressers.

No, what draws his attention is the white butterfly in the man's palm, glowing in the semidarkness of twilight.

"No—way…" his Lady breathes, but Chat shushes her hurriedly and vaults over to a nearby treetop for a better view. Ladybug follows suit, landing amidst the foliage with barely a whisper, and ordinarily he'd be almost jealous at her supernatural good luck that allows her to accomplish with ease what had taken him immense effort to do, but not right now. Right now, he has space for only one thought in his brain, and that thought is:

Father.

No. No. He cannot believe it— refuses to believe it. But the more he looks, trying desperately to find something that will discredit the terrible theory forming in his head, the more he sees the similarities: the build, the gait, the peculiar way he holds himself, as though he had piano wire attached to the top of his head and was pulling taut. Model posture. Who else was he to learn it from, when his Father had been so terrified of losing him that he had practically cut contact between him and all but the most trusted of house servants? His Father was the person who had taught him everything about modeling, from the posing to the expressions, and if that scarf wound around his neck hadn't already given the game away then his posture was betraying his identity to Chat in excruciating clarity.

When he opens his mouth, Chat closes his eyes, for the deep bass monotone and the sibilance of his hissed 's' sounds is far too familiar for him to deny.

"Ah, the devastation of betrayal by close family. Is there anything more debilitating to one's mental state? Go, my akuma. Rule over than broken man!"

At this point, Chat no longer knows if the akuma is meant for him or for someone else.

"Chat! Get up!" Ladybug hisses, as the butterfly's wings gloss over black and it takes flight into the night sky. "Quick, division of labour, you go after the butterfly and I'll tackle Hawkmoth—"

"NO!" he yells, wildly, before he can think about it; he sees his Lady's startled expression and catches himself, reining it in. "I mean, I—let me go after Hawkmoth, Ladybug, it's not as if I'll be able to do anything with the akuma, after all—"

She looks like she wants to argue, but time being of the essence, she does not press him. "Fine," she concedes, before darting away nimbly after the black dot in the distance. Chat breathes deeply, once; then he leaps from his hiding place and crashes feet-first into the round window, hoping his steel-capped boots and Miraculous-enhanced strength will be enough to crumple what look like the solid iron shutters that have closed over the opening. In a rare moment of good luck, they are, and he lands amidst their twisted debris, both feet intact.

But that's where his luck ends. Only darkness greets him in the attic that he finds himself in. No butterflies, and no Hawkmoth.

No Father.

Chat doesn't know whether to be grateful or to swear. He chooses neither, instead searching the entire attic manually; an unnecessary exertion, considering his excellent night vision. He'd known from the moment he broke through the shutters that there was no-one to confront in the tiny, dark room.

God, everything is a mess; he slumps down tiredly next to the broken window and stares forlornly into the night. Part of him is disappointed that Hawkmoth is gone, and that he can't be sure now whether he is Gabriel Agreste or not; the greater part of him, however, is relieved that he doesn't have to open that particular can of worms tonight. And an even greater part of him is disgusted with himself for being relieved. Actually, on second thoughts, that part might just be Plagg.

And god, isn't that just a perfect metaphor for his situation with Marinette and his lady right now: part of him is relieved he has the excuse of a fake-kiss to tide things over with Marinette and soothe his own guilt at the 'betrayal' (inasmuch as you can betray someone you're not actually dating, at any rate), part of him is trying to avoid thinking about the entire thing as much as possible, and most of him is disgusted with himself for being such a damn coward. If he has any more ironic parallels in his life right now, he might as well just jump into an ancient Greek play and have done with it.

He thinks this after every night patrol with his Lady, but god help him, he really doesn't want to go home tonight.

When he drags himself to school the next day, Adrien is wrecked; and even though it's not at all unusual for him to be suffering from a lack of sleep (going to school and modeling at the same time is hard, not to even mention his nightly superhero duties; sometimes he almost understands his Father's insistence that he be home-schooled), the bone-deep weariness that pulls at his limbs and draws dark circles under his eyes is something new.

His Father. His Father. Hawkmoth. The words chase themselves around in his mind, endless looping circles, and whoever had said that repetitive thoughts were a good way to get to sleep had clearly known nothing because that had been the only thing he was able to focus on for the past nine hours, and he had spent exactly seven of them lying wide awake. In his bag, Plagg is equally tired; it had been the first time Adrien had ever seen the kwami become anything resembling 'serious'. He'd had to physically stop him from barging into his Father's room when they returned to the mansion past midnight; when Plagg accused him of being a coward, he could only hang his head in shame and nod.

"But what are you even going to do in his room, anyway?" he'd hissed at his little partner, and Plagg had rounded on him indignantly.

"I don't know! Wake him up, make him confess, look for the poor kwami that he's clearly keeping locked up somewhere because none of us in our right minds would support being used for evil. Anything would be better than ignoring the problem and not doing anything at all! Are you or are you not a hero of Paris, Adrien?"

He'd had no reply to that, but something in his desperate expression must have struck Plagg; he agreed to not take immediate action, and took to the little lego bed Adrien had fashioned for him. They'd proceeded to spend the rest of the night in silence, despite the fact that neither of them were actually sleeping, and in the morning when Adrien had roused him for school, he'd been more irritable than usual.

"Why even bother?" Plagg had snapped at him, when Adrien had told him that he had to accompany him to school, in case of an akuma attack. "I could just tail your father and have done with it, couldn't I?"

They hadn't run into his father on the way to school; Adrien wonders if this is a further case of rare good luck on his part, or if the continued absence indicates something more sinister brewing for him. In any case, he decides to be thankful for small mercies; he doesn't think he can quite deal with his father yet, especially not with an irritated kwami by his side and his brains addled by less sleep that he'd like. He'd packed his bags hastily and departed the house, hoping the relative normalcy of school might distract him from his glum thoughts.

He'd forgotten that school was where he had the most contact with Marinette Dupain-Cheng.

Not! The! Time! His brain (and Plagg, probably) screams at him, as he's rendered helpless by the gentle scent of cinnamon and sugar on the morning breeze. Marinette spots him from across the courtyard, a bright smile lighting up her features, and Adrien wants to melt into the ground as she makes her way towards him. The bakery smell gets stronger, and he feels lightheaded.

"Morning, Adrien!" Marinette greets, and it's all he can do to pull together a vaguely coherent reply.

"M-morning, Marinette! Sleep well?" he asks, and mentally congratulates himself; there, that was coherent, right? No major grammatical screw-ups, nothing to betray his massive internal turmoil. Marinette seems to hesitate a little, but her blinding smile returns as she replies:

"Oh, pretty well! Could have been better, though. You?"

"Tell me about it," he mutters darkly before he can stop himself, and notices Marinette look up at him sharply. "I, I mean," he backtracks, intensely uncomfortable with the level of focus she is directing at him, "I just, uh, I have trouble getting to sleep at night, sometimes?"

"Oh," she says, and if he knew her any better he'd say she looked… suspicious? "I thought… maybe it might have been something else."

Okay, that was new. Flustered, he'd seen many times before on Marinette. Concerned, shy, anxious, confident, commanding; these were all expressions he'd seen on her before, directed at him and at other people. But he doesn't think he's ever seen her look suspicious before. And especially not at him.

What was she thinking?

He doesn't have to wait long. "You… that time we went shopping for your father," she says, and his heart thuds in a way that has exactly nothing to do with his father and everything to do with the girl walking next to him.

"Yes?" he croaks, and he really, really hopes she doesn't notice the nervousness in his voice.

"Did… did you end up giving that scarf to him?" she asks, and for a moment, Adrien is caught completely wrong-footed.

"What?" he asks again, because he's not sure he heard her right; of all the things he'd expected her to bring up about their (disastrous? Wondrous? Adrien doesn't even know anymore) trip to the boutiques, whether his Father had received the scarf had been last on the list.

"I mean, I, it was a present for Gabriel Agreste after all, and I just—what if he didn't like it? Oh god, Adrien, I would never be able to live with myself! Did—did you give it to him? Does he wear it? Did he like it?"

Oh. That explains it. Adrien feels guilty at the path his thoughts had been straying down; wild fantasies of Marinette confronting him about the kiss and confessing her deep feelings for him and maybe pulling him down into another kiss shatter like the iron shutters over Hawkmoth's secret lair. He was an idiot for not providing her the reassurance sooner; of course she was worried about this. He forgets it sometimes, but his Father is one of the most influential people in fashion today, and Marinette wants to become a designer. He should have been more considerate of her.

"Ah, right. Yeah! Yeah, I gave it to him, he loves it! Wears it all the time, I think. Well, I think because I don't actually see all that much of him, you know? He's super busy. Hardly ever in the house. But the last time I saw him, he was definitely wearing it! You did great, Marinette, thanks for helping—"

Well, technically it isn't a lie; he hasn't seen his Father since he'd given him the present, but he sure as hell has seen Hawkmoth. And he'd been wearing said scarf, even over his costume; if that doesn't indicate he likes his present, Adrien doesn't know what does. He chances a glance over at Marinette in the midst of his incoherent rambling to see if she is mollified.

She isn't. Her suspicious expression has sharpened into something positively dangerous, now, and Adrien almost flinches at the dissatisfaction she's exuding. His diatribe about her excellent eye for fashion peters away into silence, and Marinette looks up at him in surprise.

"I'm sorry, did I do something…?"

"No! No, not at all, you just weren't looking very happy so…"

"Oh." She looks pensive again, and Adrien just swallows; he doesn't know what he's said to make usually-bubbly Marinette look so serious, but whatever it was, he doesn't want to say it again. "Is your Father out of the house often?"

"Huh? Well, yeah. He's really busy. Doesn't even sleep at the house, most nights. I mean, I understand, it's got to be hard, being who he is; I don't really mind being alone."

Marinette is silent for a while before she replies. "That must get very lonely," she says quietly, and Adrien stumbles; he doesn't know why such a simple sentence should affect him so much, but something about the starkness of the statement causes him to miss a step.

He's saved from his second faceplant in 24 hours by strong arms coming around him. Marinette catches him around his shoulders and eases him back up, helping him regain his balance. This close, the smell of cinnamon sugar once again forces its way to the front of his mind, and for a moment Adrien blanks on all previous thoughts he'd been having.

Marinette seems to sense the change in mood; suddenly, she's blushing, all trace of her previous no-nonsense demeanour gone, and she lets go of him hastily and turns away, changing the subject. "So! Uh, there was something else I was wondering about that day, just, I'm not sure if you'll be able to answer this for me, but I figure since you grew up around fashion since you were young you'd be able to know—do you happen to know how many items a high fashion house usually makes of each design?"

Today has been an endless stream of odd questions he can't make heads nor tails of from Marinette, and she doesn't disappoint to the last. This question piques his interest in a way that she couldn't possibly guess, though, and Adrien looks at her curiously. "Why?"

"Well, uh, someone I know wanted to get the scarf too, and I was always under the impression that couturiers only make one piece of each design—"

"That's true," he concedes, nodding slowly, "but only for their haute couture collections. Those are made to the exact specifications of the customer, only on demand. Ready-to-wear, I believe, is exactly what its name implies—they're ready-made, to be worn immediately upon purchase with no further input from the customer to the fashion house. As a result, they make several of each design; the number would depend on how large the fashion house is and how much of a customer base they have."

He slows his footsteps, as if allowing his thoughts to catch up to his physical speed. "The boutique we visited last week was relatively small, and the scarf was from their ready-to-wear collection. They would have made a few of the same design—not that many, since they're not that famous yet, but still, more than one."

"Ah," Marinette says, and looks profoundly relieved—exactly the way Adrien feels, actually, but for entirely different reasons. He wonders idly who Marinette plans on getting the other scarf for.

He wonders, rather more intently, who else had already bought a scarf of the same design.

The two of them walk the rest of the way to class in silence, each lost in their own thoughts; neither of them realise that the other is thinking about the exact same thing.

In retrospect, he should have known his weird streak of good luck wouldn't last.

He stands in his Father's office (and despite what he has learned this morning – that there could be other candidates for Hawkmoth apart from his father—he can't help his wandering eyes, looking surreptitiously for a small, floating creature somewhere in the vast room), cheeks burning, eyes stinging, his insides twisting themselves into knots; his Father hasn't even said anything yet but the cold anger is palpable, so thick in the room as to be suffocating. Adrien wants to disappear. It's evident that he's screwed up; he's screwed up bad.

He just has no idea what the hell it could possibly be.

He keeps his eyes on the purple-black scarf round his Father's neck, replacing the usual white-and-red tie, and waits for his judgement.

And then Gabriel Agreste throws down a thick wad of photographs on the desk between them.

"What," he hisses through clenched teeth, "is this?!"

He spreads the photos out messily with a dramatic sweep of his hand; some of them flutter to the ground in a mimic of butterfly's wings, and Adrien is numb as he takes in their contents.

A deserted alleyway; a narrow, dead-end street. A tall figure in a dark blue coat and a shorter figure in a mint-coloured one, their bodies collapsed together as if they were one person. A gleam of short blonde hair, partially obscured by long black strands flying in the wind. Adrien knows for a fact what those glossy black strands feel like: silk through his fingers, soft and fragrant, imbued with what might as well have been magic for all the effect they had had on him.

Well, now his Father knows too. So does all of Paris and the rest of the world besides, judging from all the gossip sites and magazine articles Gabriel brings up on his computer screen. He scrolls through them quickly with a stony expression, but not so quickly that Adrien misses the headlines.

YOUNGER AGRESTE CAUGHT IN ROMANTIC TRYST

AGRESTE JUNIOR: COULD IT BE LOVE?

ILLICIT RENDEZVOUS OF YOUNG AGRESTE HEIR CAUGHT ON FILM

And all of them, every single one of them, adorned with a photo of him and what was unmistakably Marinette, even through the mosaic filter some websites (only some) had been decent enough to place over her eyes. A hundred different captions, a hundred different websites, but always the same picture: him and Marinette, attached at the lips, blissfully unaware of anything else around them.

He glances up at his Father fearfully, and finds his lip curling in disgust.

Adrien doesn't usually swear, but in that moment, he can think of only a single word to accurately describe his feelings.

Fuck.