Jogging down the street with the other heroes, la Gymnaste found her gaze over and over being drawn upward to the tall figure of the Lancer, seeming to float just above the level of the sidewalk, her boots level with the middle of la Gymnaste's shins though that placed the Lancer almost two heads taller than la Gymnaste. The day had been so warm, but all the warmth had vanished after sunset, leaving la Gymnaste with a chill running down her spine. She'd thought about bringing a sweatshirt or a jacket with her when she left, but she had in the end rejected the idea. She was supposed to be a Hero of Paris; she couldn't cover up her suit.
Of course, "supposed to be" was the right way to put it. She'd thought she was a Hero of Paris for almost a year, but in reality, she'd just been working for the Lynchpin, helping Lila to hurt people and steal and… A shiver ran down la Gymnaste's spine. Some "Hero of Paris" she had turned out to be.
"Hey," the Lancer called abruptly, drawing la Gymnaste out of her thoughts. "What's wrong?"
La Gymnaste blinked. "Huh? Um… why do you think something's wrong?" Her stomach clenched anxiously.
The Lancer alit on the ground and started walking once more, slowing to match la Gymnaste's pace. "Sorry. It's just… you've been staring at me for the last five minutes."
"Oh." La Gymnaste looked down the street. "I didn't mean to. I was just… thinking."
The Lancer hummed. "Sometimes that's a dangerous thing to be doing – depending on what you're thinking about," she mused. "I should know: I've…" She let out a breath. "I've done way too much overthinking lately. First, it was what–what happened over the winter. Then it was everything to do with the Tarasque, the evacuation, all of it. That part, at least, was almost okay, even with how badly we lost the first time. But then it was all that crap with M. Loubet – finding out that Killer Bee knew my identity… That M. Loubet was working with the Lynchpin…" She fell silent with a heavy sigh before adding, "But when you think about it too much, you can really start to get yourself into trouble."
"I suppose I might be overthinking things, too," la Gymnaste admitted, looking away. It had never been a problem for her before; on the contrary, Philippe had sometimes needed to remind her that she didn't need to talk so much! But lately… She wasn't sure if it was because Philippe had been spending so much time working over the last few weeks, or if it was because they'd moved into their own apartment and she was spending so much more time by herself, or if it was because she'd never really felt safe telling Lila what she felt. But she couldn't remember the last time she'd really let herself talk – even when she saw Sabrina for counseling, she couldn't fully open up, not all the time. She gulped.
"You know, you're among friends here," the Lancer told her, a comforting tone to her voice. La Gymnaste gave a humorless half-laugh. The Lancer cocked her head. "We are friends…" she added, though with a questioning inflection at the end of the statement.
La Gymnaste blinked. "Oh – of course! I just…" She swallowed. "I was thinking about back in school, that time we were sitting together at lunch and I said…" She fell silent, her shoulders slumped.
The Lancer sighed, placing a hand on la Gymnaste's shoulder. "It's okay – I'd all-but forgotten about that, to be honest. I shouldn't have reacted the way that I did – at that point I had just started to be the Lancer, and I thought I was starting to take back some of the control that I had lost. But I wasn't nearly as 'over it' then as I'd thought I was." A low growl of frustration came from her throat. "I was … especially raw still at that point, after all the crap with the trial and the arrest and… all of that. What you said – it merged in with what I was already thinking and just compounded the shame and guilt and anger that was already there."
"I've been thinking about that a lot since it happened," admitted La Gymnaste. "I knew that there had been a lot of victims; I should have realized that I knew one or two of them."
With a humorless snort, the Lancer shook her head. "You have no idea. I found out afterward that he even tried Marinette…"
La Gymnaste started. "Wait… Ladybug!?"
"Yep." The Lancer chuckled bitterly. "You can imagine how that must have gone over."
La Gymnaste hummed. She had known Marinette for years, of course. But finding out who she really was, after the Heroes of Paris had rescued her from Lila's clutches, had put all of that into a completely different perspective. Could she really say that she knew Marinette, if she never even considered the possibility that Marinette might be Ladybug? And yet, now that she knew, it seemed so obvious that the girl who had taken the lead in so many projects at school, who had stood up to Chloe dozens of times when she was a bully only to turn around and befriend her in the end, who always tried to help anyone who needed her, had to be Ladybug. But la Gymnaste had believed Lila's lies, so she just hadn't seen it.
How could she ever make up for what she had done, for what she had allowed?
Looking up at the Lancer, la Gymnaste steeled her nerves. "Saying what I did, knowing how it could hurt someone…" She swallowed. "I'm… I'm sorry for everything I said about… um… Fernand." La Gymnaste dropped her voice to barely above a whisper as she said the name. "I–I swear, I didn't know what he'd done to you. I–if I had–"
"There's nothing for you to apologize for," the Lancer assured her. "You didn't do anything wrong; you didn't say anything wrong. I just… I wasn't in a good place then. But I've been trying to get better since then." She fell silent for a moment. "You weren't the first one to say something about it around me, nor were you the last. At a certain point, I just had to stop listening. Otherwise, it would have driven me insane."
"After I had to testify in the trial," la Gymnaste began, before sniffling. Her voice broke. "It – it was so hard… I almost couldn't get through it – if Philippe hadn't been there. And Mylène and Ivan." She forced herself to draw a breath. "I realize just how difficult it must have been for you back then."
The Lancer chuckled wryly. "Actually, I'm not too upset about that anymore. Fighting the Tarasque, then stopping Lila, both of those things helped some. Sure, I didn't get to punch Fernand's head off his shoulders, but I could at least vent some of that frustration." She glanced in the opposite direction as they passed another alleyway. "But to be honest, being a hero, working with the Heroes of Paris, that's what really helped. Maybe I couldn't stop what happened to me, but I could help another girl who was possibly going through that same thing." She shook her head. "Even if I did turn out to be feeding information to the bad guys…"
La Gymnaste cocked her head, her eyes wide in shock. "Wait… you?"
The Lancer nodded. "You weren't the only one they were using. Lila knew my name. The only person who could have told her was M. Loubet, the man who gave me the lance." Her hand drifted back to the lance handle. "That wasn't the only thing he knew because of me." La Gymnaste's eyes widened, and the Lancer quickly held up a hand. "No – not anyone's identity, of course. But our plans. I'd told him about some of our plans, and that had tipped him off so we failed. People got hurt, or got put in danger. Because of me." She put a hand on la Gymnaste's shoulder. "I realized that could either give up and run away, or I could try to make it right. If I gave up, then Loubet would have won. He would have been the second man to force me to do something I didn't want to do, or to stop doing things that I needed to do. And I was not about to give him that satisfaction!"
"I wish I had been that brave," la Gymnaste murmured. "Like you, or Ladybug."
"Funny," the Lancer mused, stopping and turning to face la Gymnaste. "I was just thinking that you were the brave one." La Gymnaste stumbled over her feet and stared up at the Lancer in shock. "You did something I could never do: you actually confronted Lila. You faced her in Lyon, then you faced her in court to make sure that she would go away for what she'd done. I wish I could have been brave enough to face Fernand in court, to tell people just what a monster he was and make sure he would never be able to do that to another girl ever again. But I couldn't even bear to be in the same building with him, let alone to speak out against him."
"He was still convicted," la Gymnaste protested. "In the end, it all worked out!"
The Lancer let out a breath. "Sure, he was convicted without my testimony," she admitted. "He's going to be in prison for a long time now. But I still wonder. How much longer would he have gone away for if someone – anyone – had stood up to testify against him? And regardless, I still have this nagging question in the back of my mind: if I had testified against him, would I have started to get over what happened to me sooner? Might I even have been able to escape from getting taken in by M. Loubet?"
La Gymnaste pursed her lips. "But you are brave. You stood up to the Bear! And the Tarasque! That's something I couldn't do! I was almost petrified with fear when the Tarasque showed up."
The Lancer glanced over at her. "Nadine, bravery doesn't mean that you aren't afraid. If you hadn't been afraid of the Tarasque, that would have made you crazy! Bravery isn't the absence of fear but how you deal with your fear. You were terrified of Lila, but you still faced her and stopped her. You faced your fear, and you overcame it." She lifted a little off the ground. "In my mind, that makes you every bit as brave as any of the rest of us."
