A/N: Wow! Sorry for the messed up chapter! Hopefully this works better.

Also, I didn't realize that I had only said that they were aged up on AO3. They are eighteen in this and at the end of their last year of school.

o-o-o

The restless feeling from the night before and a well timed (and rare) day off for Nathalie meant that Adrien didn't wake up until much later than usual. The sun was already high in the sky by the time his phone ringing woke him up.

The teenager groaned and rolled over to grab it from his night stand.

"Hello…?"

"Adrien, hey," Nino's voice came from the other side. "I know it's probably a no, but you haven't seen Marinette, have you, man?"

Adrien rubbed his eyes with his free hand and sat up. He frowned as he tried to clear his thoughts and his vision from sleep, attempting to make sense of what was being asked of him. Ever since becoming Chat Noir, he swore that he had a harder time waking up in the morning.

"Marinette?" he repeated. "Not since school on Friday. Why?"

Nino sighed on the other end and the blonde could hear him telling someone else the answer.

"She's missing," he responded. "Her parents went to check on her this morning and she wasn't there. They haven't seen her since yesterday at dinner. No one has. Alya yanked me out of bed this morning to go look around, not that I mind. Marinette would definitely do the same for us."

Adrien was silent for a moment as he took in what was being said. He pictured the sweet girl that he had been in class with for the last four years and couldn't imagine something happening to her. She was so tiny and fragile looking. He didn't even want to start listing possibilities in his mind.

"My dad's already at work, I'm sure, and it's Nathalie's day off. I'll come help you guys," he told his best friend. "Where are you at?"

After getting the address and hanging up, he tossed off his blankets and put his feet on the floor.

"Plagg, get up," he insisted, nudging the kwami. "Marinette's missing and I want to have a look around from a higher perspective before I meet up with the others."

For once, Plagg seemed to come out of sleep fairly quickly. In fact, Adrien thought that he looked troubled, but it was hard to say since the human had never seen that expression on his partner's face.

"I'm up," Plagg replied, floating near the blonde's face as he threw on a shirt and pants. "Just say the words, kid."

Adrien stared at him for a moment.

"No asking for camembert?" he asked skeptically.

The kwami held out a paw.

"I'm not going to turn it down if you insist," he said expectantly. "I was just trying to be helpful. I just assumed you'd want to rush out."

Adrien handed the cat-like creature a piece of his favorite cheese, which he swallowed quickly.

He felt like something was going on with Plagg, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it for some reason. It was always like that when he tried to get to the bottom of the kwami's moods. He thought that it probably had something to do with whatever magic kept their bond together, but he really hadn't ever asked Plagg. If there was one thing the black cat kwami was good at, it was being annoyingly stubborn. Plagg always tried to play it off as him being lazy or tired, but Adrien knew when the little creature was refusing to answer him.

"Plagg, claws out!"

o-o-o

Chat Noir had searched from above on the rooftops for about a half hour, but that was all of the time that he could afford to give the effort before it would seem strange to Nino and Alya that he hadn't shown up yet. He landed on the ground in an alley and headed towards the park near Marinette's home where they had agreed to meet up. As he walked up, he noticed two police cruisers in front of the Dupain-Cheng bakery, but that wasn't surprising, given the situation.

When he came in sight of his friends, he saw that they weren't alone. Quite a few people from their class had come, it seemed.

"Sorry I took so long. I had to get out of the house unseen," he lied.

"Don't worry about it, man. I'm sure you got here as quickly as you could," Nino said, patting his shoulder comfortingly.

"How are you doing, Alya?" Adrien asked gently.

"I just… I already put a post on the Ladyblog asking for Ladybug and Chat Noir's help, but no response, obviously. I wish they'd let us go up to her room and look for clues," Alya answered, sounding frustrated but anyone could see that she was hurting.

Adrien briefly wondered if maybe that was where Ladybug had been last night. After all, he knew that she knew Marinette somehow. There had been more than one occassion of his classmate being in trouble and her getting to the scene first. Additionally, she had been the one to originally give him Marinette's address a few years back when Nathanael had been akumatized. Plagg did say that it was possible that Ladybug was just out dealing with a personal emergency. A friend going missing certainly was an emergency.

"Babe, Tom and Sabine already said that we could go up to her room as soon as the police left," Nino reminded the girl, putting his arm around her shoulders. "Let's just organize our classmates into search parties and then we can see how long the police are going to be."

Alya nodded and turned to the other teens.

After about ten minutes, it was decided who would look where, a total of six teams going out to look for signs of Marinette and ask people if anyone had seen her. Alya had texted a recent picture of Marinette to everyone so that they could show it to people.

About the time that people had started out, a car could be heard starting and Nino was the first to notice that the police officers seemed to be leaving. Alya grabbed Nino and Adrien by the upper arms and pulled them back over to the obviously closed bakery. After a few short words were exchanged with Tom, the three went up to Marinette's room.

The first thing that struck Adrien was that the room looked different than any other time that he had been up here. Although he had become much better friends with the girl since their best friends had started dating and had been to her house on quite a few occasions, he had somehow never seen the posters on the wall of him. Had he been blind to them all of this time or were they new?

His baffled face seemed to catch Nino's attention as Alya rushed over to Marinette's computer and started to log into the girl's social media accounts (luckily Marinette had never been overly secretive with her passwords).

"Seriously, dude, this is not the time for you to suddenly realize Mari's crush on you," his best friend said quietly, careful not to upset the only female in the room any worse than she already was. "We can talk about it when she's safe at home."

Adrien shook his head.

"Sorry," he quickly apologized, blushing. "I wasn't trying to… I'll just… Help look around…"

Marinette had a crush on him? How long had that been going on for? How had he never noticed? Had he been insensitive at any point because of it? Now he really felt bad. Apparently this girl had been crazy enough about him to put multiple pictures on her wall of him and he had never even once thought about her behavior in that light because he had been blinded by his own crush on Ladybug, not that that relationship seemed to be going anywhere.

If- When Marinette came home, he would make sure to be a lot more conscientious of her feelings. He knew what it was like to be ignored by someone that you thought the world of, even if it was a complete accident.

Besides, she was kind, smart, beautiful, and she always made him laugh. His father seemed to like her, or at least her designs, when he had met her through design competitions at their school. She was definitely the kind of girl that he would have gone for if he hadn't been so wrapped up in his crime fighting partner all of this time. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to give her a chance once he was sure that Ladybug didn't think of him that way…

He shut down that train of thought almost immediately. What a ridiculous time to be thinking about romance. Marinette could be seriously hurt or worse and he was daydreaming about dates…

The blonde hit himself in the forehead, glad that he had retreated over to the other side of the room so that Nino and Alya wouldn't see his strange behavior. On the return trip to his side, the back of his hand hit something and knocked it off of the top of the vanity. He bent down to pick it up and froze.

A small, black box in the shape of a hexagon.

A box for a Miraculous.

o-o-o

The second time Marinette woke up, the room was still dark, though she could easily tell from how alert she felt that it most certainly had to be day time, possibly quite late given her usual preference to sleep in. Apparently this room had no windows for light to seep into, not even a crack, which would make escape all the more difficult.

If she even could escape without Tikki…

She had struggled quite a bit the night before, ultimately giving up since it seemed useless. She had wanted to break down in tears, but had held it together in case her captor decided to show himself. She was Ladybug and she would act like it. Besides, crying would only make her sluggish if an opportunity to escape appeared. And so she had settled down to sleep and conserve energy in hopes that that time would come.

The clicking of shoes on what were most likely tile covered stairs alerted her to another person approaching before the door opened, giving her a moment to flinch away and saving her eyes from the light that flooded in. It still took a moment to adjust, but it could have been worse.

"Miss Dupain-Cheng. So glad to see you awake," a male voice said in an almost taunting tone. "Or do you prefer to be called Ladybug?"

o-o-o

If you want the updates right away, follow me on tumblr. I have the same name, Palsinabox, and I post the story there first.