29. Chapter 29

Ten seconds.

Adrien took ten long, heavy seconds to think.

He took three seconds to convince himself not to spit out a loud curse. (Ladybug wanted an explanation, not an expletive.)

He took six seconds to map out his situation. (He was on the roof. He was on the billboard. He was in deep shit.)

He took only a single second to breathe before launching into his opening. (Despite his shock, he knew she was reeling far more than he was. He needed to handle this right. For her sake.)

“So…” Adrien began, keeping his voice calm and light in an attempt to iron out the nerves in the airspace around them, “…any point in trying to convince you that’s not me?”

The wind whistled around them, chilling the rooftop the two heroes stood on. At his question, Ladybug shook her head, blue eyes swimming in disbelief. ‘Ah, didn’t think so,’ Adrien thought, immediately backpedalling. ‘Guess it’s time to take the direct route.’

“Well, all right then. In that case,” he said, giving a sheepish grin before extending one gloved hand out before him. “I’m Adrien.”

‘I’m introducing myself to my own girlfriend. What a night…’

Ladybug’s eyes crossed, gaze focusing on his offered appendage but folded arms never unwinding from their bunched up position under her chest. An awkward silence filled the space, broken only by the distant sound of the city below. Adrien gulped at her rejection, retracting his outstretched hand and instead rubbing the back of his neck with a grimace. ‘Of course she doesn’t want to shake your hand! Not when you're mid identity reveal and certainly not after you all but jumped her a few minutes ago. Asshole…’

“Right, right! You probably don’t want me touching you right now and that’s fine!” Adrien rushed to assure her, maintaining a respectable distance as his girlfriend just continued to stare in the most unsettling way. He soldiered on. “I’m really, really sorry about kissing you earlier by the way. I didn’t… uhh… I didn’t think this would be going down right now.”

‘Awesome, more silence.’

“So anyways… My name is Adrien Agreste.” This time he tried for a friendly wave. “I'm a model… and of course I now realize you already know that because I’m staring down at you from a billboard… ah shit…”

‘BE. BETTER,’ the voice in his head screamed, mentally socking Adrien again and again for his poor attempt at consolation. The young man tried to draw on his well of Chat Noir confidence, only to find that particular pool of energy woefully empty as he struggled to string a few words together.

“Sorry. I was hoping to be more… suave, I guess?” Adrien winced out, peering down at Ladybug’s unreadable expression. “H-honestly I’m just as blindsided by this as you are. I swear, if I'd known they were going to use this exact image I would have made some phone calls, but I didn’t, obviously. Aaaaaand now you know who I am aaaand you wanted to wait aaand everything is just kind of a mess aaaand you still aren’t saying anything…?”

‘Why isn’t she saying anything??’

Adrien wracked his brain, searching desperately for the right thing to say as she continued to stand in shell-shocked silence. Obviously the situation was less of a disaster to him, but then again, he wasn’t the one so adamantly against their identities being exposed. If it were up to him they would have gone through this years ago, but knowing Ladybug’s stance on the situation, knowing she wasn’t quite ready for this to go down yet, he couldn’t help but let his heart ache for her.

How was he supposed to convince her this wasn’t the end of the world?

“Hey, c’mon, bugaboo…” Adrien soothed, instinctively reaching out to grasp her arms but pulling back right at the last second, instead letting his hands flutter in the space between them. “I know this sucks, and I know this isn’t how you wanted us to reveal ourselves, but it doesn’t mean we have to make it a bad thing, right? I mean, there’s gotta be some good to come of this, I know there is!” He snapped his fingers, pouring as much excitement as he could muster into his voice as he glanced down at girlfriend.

“Dates! I can take you on dates now, anywhere you want to go. We could take trips to the movies or the park. I can treat you to dinner like a respectable boyfriend should and maybe even walk you to your door. Doesn’t that sound like a good thing?”

Ladybug made a move to interject, mouth opening for just a second before she snapped it shut once again with a shake of her head. Adrien’s heart plummeted, shoulders dropping alongside it as the girl remained unconvinced. The way she screwed her face up shot ice into his veins, as if she were tossing something dangerous around in her mind.

“Ladybug, you—“ He broke off, brow furrowing in growing dread as a sudden realization crashed down upon him. “You…”

‘She’s not… she doesn’t want to…’ Ladybug shifted from side to side, her ducked head and guilt-ridden expression all but confirming his suspicions in the most wrenching of ways.

“You aren’t going to tell me who you are… are you?” Adrien whispered, steady and slow as he tried to process the situation. His words were clipped, accompanied by an unidentifiable emotion that landed somewhere at the cross-section of disappointment and frustration as Ladybug’s eyes delivered all the reply he needed. The red-suited hero gave a jerky nod, the motion carrying with it a shattering sense of clarity.

“Why?” he asked, still trying desperately to decipher anything from her stoic demeanor. Ladybug’s silence was now verging on worrying, and something about her lack of response made his stomach turn. ‘She doesn’t want me. She’s seen me now and she doesn’t want me.’

“Why is Adrien Agreste not good enough for you?” Adrien asked, trying and failing to not sound upset. Anger wasn’t what he was going for, but it was what showed up anyway, seeping into his words with a biting heat. “What do I have to do to be good enough for you?” he repeated plaintively, bringing his hands up to rub at his temples. Something about his civilian self being a disappointment just seemed to open the floodgates, years of pent-up shortcomings rushing out in a scorching plea. “What do I have to do to be good enough for anyone?!”

Adrien deliberately captured Ladybug’s gaze, needing to get some kind of reaction, some kind of answer from her. Ladybug let him stare her down, latching on to his ire and narrowing her eyes dangerously as she spoke for the first time.

“You don’t get it,” the girl ground out, flaring up in a shade to match her mask. “You don’t get it and I c-can’t explain it to you!” She stomped down on the corrugated rooftop, the motion that had once brought a grin to Adrien’s face now turning hot coals of frustration in the pit of his heart.

“What can’t you explain? What’s so difficult about admitting you don’t like who I turned out to be under the mask?”

“Oh you’re kidding!” his partner said, laughing in incredulous derangement as she stalked away. “I’ve seen your face in my fashion magazines since I was ten! TEN! I used to cut out your pictures and post them all over my bedroom wall!” She whirled back on him, gesticulating broadly. “I used to pass your ads on the street, used to read your interviews and watch your commercials and sit and wonder what it must be like to know someone like you! Then when I was thirteen you—“

Ladybug suddenly interrupted her tirade, seeming to swallow down her next thought as she let her arms fall dead to her sides. Adrien could only stare.

“When I was thirteen, I met Chat Noir,” she continued, much softer than before. “I met you a-and… and how was I supposed to know who you were? How was I supposed to know what we’d b-become?”

In a matter of seconds, all of her fury had fled, draining his alongside it. Adrien watched Ladybug cross her arms and sigh, his heart twisting at her utterly defeated stance.

This wasn’t like her.

The silences, the stuttering, the way she could hardly seem to get a word out around him before retreating in on herself, it was all wrong.

Yet Adrien couldn’t help but latch on to the hope that they could fix this. ‘If she’s sad, it means she still feels something, right?’ the boy rationalized, taking a single step in her direction. ‘I can still fix this mess…’ 

He was about to wrap her up in his arms and assure her that everything could still be okay, that they could still be okay, when—

“I-I… I can’t do this any more…”

Ladybug’s words took a moment to sink in, but by the time they did… Adrien was already deflating.

“What do you mean by 'this'?” he asked in a hoarse whisper, fingers shaking as he tried to move closer to her. His body didn’t listen. His mind was silent.

“Us,” Ladybug spoke, never looking up from her feet as the words dropped from her lips to shatter on the ground. “I don’t think I can do us right now.”

‘Us,’ his mind echoed, the phrase repeating until it created a grating screech against his eardrums.

Normally, hearing her say that word brought on a flurry of giddy excitement. Now, it all but broke him.

‘No… No. No. No. Please. God. No.’

“You’re breaking up with me…” Adrien wasn’t sure if his whispered words were a statement or a question, so he just let them dangle, feeling their steely weight dig into his heart with the harsh grip of realization.

“I’m not—” Ladybug swallowed thickly, seeming to gather up her thoughts. “—I’m not breaking up with you. I just… I need some time.”

“Time away from me?” Adrien clarified, knowing the answer even as the question flew from his mouth.

“Time to think.”

“Away from me.”

“Yes.”

There was another silence.

“I still love you.”

It was perhaps the worst thing he could have said in that moment, but Adrien might have imploded if he didn't let the words out. If he didn't remind her.

He’d always remind her.

“You shouldn’t say that,” Ladybug murmured, voice cracking on the last syllable in a way that drained all the bite from her retort. She was still slouched over, lips between her teeth and looking smaller than Adrien could ever remember seeing her. The usually so proud heroine trembled like a leaf, seeming like she might blow away with the next big gust of wind.

“But I mean it,” Adrien said. His heart still thudded painfully in his chest, but it was a dull ache compared to the sight of her so shaken. “I really do love yo—“

“You can’t possibly know that!” Ladybug shrilled, making the young man jump with her sudden volume.

“Why not? Why can’t you just believe me when I say I love you?”

“Because you don’t even know me! You don’t even know who you’re talking to under this suit!”

He should have kept his mouth shut after that. He should have just stayed silent and let her simmer. But black cats were unlucky for a reason.

So he spoke.

“Well, whose fault is that?!”

Ladybug shifted away from him then, wincing at the sting of his words in a way that almost made Adrien want to shovel them back into his mouth. Watching her pace away was torture, but the physical distance was nothing in comparison to the emotional gulf that now spanned between the heroes. Adrien felt the past few months melting away with a sharp pang, felt all the closeness and comfort the pair had come to cultivate being torn further apart with each hollow step his partner took.

August had never seemed so long ago as it did on this October evening.

The casual touches, the easy banter, those whispered hints of something beyond mere infatuation… it was all being ripped from his hands like some cruel nightmare. Adrien had stopped crying years ago (one can only have so many bad days before tears start to become a real inconvenience) so the moisture that now clouded his vision was an unfamiliar sight.

He’d forgotten he even knew how to cry.

“I need time,” Ladybug repeated, so low that Chat had to strain his heightened senses to hear her across the distance between them. “I need time and I need space. A-and I need it away from you.” Each little word was a bullet lodged in his shattered ribs, the barrage of fire never ceasing as Ladybug edged her way ever farther from him.

She’d been his Princess in his arms, his Lady by his side.

Yet it was a stoic heroine who spoke from the lip of the roof.

“Please don’t call me, and work-related texts only.” Ladybug’s words were clinical, precise, and somehow their metallic tone made Adrien wish she would scream at him again. At least her yelling had heat, had some semblance of a feeling person behind it, had some echo of her usually vivacious self.

Now she was colder than the night air surrounding them.

“Patrol?” Adrien murmured, not trusting himself to speak more than one word at a time.

“Cancelled.”

“Akuma?”

“I’ll keep doing my job if you keep doing yours,” she said, pulling her yo-yo from her hip as her tired eyes scanned for a ledge.

“All right,” Adrien breathed, feeling himself break down more and more with each passing second. ‘Her job. Being Ladybug is no more than her job.’

He couldn’t help but wonder if that meant everything she did as her superhero self was just a job.

He also couldn't help but wonder how he was going to get home when his arms were numb with grief.

Luckily (‘doesn’t she just have it all?’), Ladybug seemed to have no problems with coordination, shooting off into the skyline without so much as a backwards glance. The young man’s body ached with her departure, tears rolling freely but without feeling as he stared into the empty space before him.

Just minutes ago Adrien had been so sure that she was his. That he was hers and they were each other’s. He’d been so sure that they’d have forever… or at the very least a next time.

But as he stood there now, alone on the rooftop except for the unwanted company of his own smiling picture (the image was taunting, damning), Adrien knew with a sharp clarity that he no longer had any sort of claim on the heroine. He probably never did.

Ladybug had, and always would, belong to Paris.

Not to Chat Noir. Not to Adrien Agreste.  

And certainly never to him.

Cataclysm usually burned as it engulfed his hand with destructive energy. This time, Adrien felt nothing.

By the next morning, whispers of a wild animal loose in the city were running rampant. News stations, websites, nearly everyone was discussing the possibility of another zoo breakout as theories became wilder and wilder with each passing hour.

Because what else could reduce a billboard to nothing more than a pile of shredded ribbons and shattered rubble?

Her Tuesday began with sobbing, feral and body-shaking.

The second Marinette opened her eyes, the entirety of the previous day descended upon her chest like a deadweight, bringing with it a poignant conglomeration of all the feeling and frustrations she had been dealing with since The Sighting™.

This time the tears were instantaneous. No silence, no argumentation, just the sudden and jarring sensation of being wracked with sobs.

Tikki breathed with her through the spell, murmuring reassurances to the shuddering teen and eventually coaxing her down from a borderline anxious episode. Marinette lay clutching her one-eyed cat pillow, willing her heart rate to even out and trying to think past the regret. She wanted to scream, or maybe sleep.

She did neither of those things.

What she did do was force herself up and out of her room. She showered and combed her hair. She put on a clean set of clothes, she persuaded herself to apply some makeup and she made herself gather up her backpack. She was going to school, goddamnit.

Marinette liked to think she wasn’t the type of girl to let a boy get in the way of her education (despite what evidence the last 24 hours could provide), so she pushed her way down the steps, out the door, and all the way to the threshold of her homeroom in a bout of righteous pride.

But that strenuously assembled grit all but fled when she set foot into the classroom. See, while anyone else would assume the boy sitting in Adrien’s spot, wearing Adrien’s clothes, would, in fact, be Adrien… Marinette knew better.

Because she wasn’t anyone else. She was his girlfriend, his partner, and the only person who also knew the other face of the coin. She knew his face, and she knew it well enough to know it should never look like that.

Adrien looked about as wrecked as she felt, slumped over in his seat with his fingers scratching at the desk. His eyes were dull, strung with heavy bags that told her he had probably slept about as well as she had. ‘You did that to him,’ her mind supplied helpfully, berating Marinette as she walked with heavy strides to her seat. ‘You’re to blame for this whole mess.’

The one thing, the only thing that kept Marinette from vaulting the desk and settling in his arms with murmured apologies and pleading looks was the fear of his inevitable reaction. She could see so clearly in her mind’s eye the way Adrien’s face would screw up, then drain of all color as he realized who she was. Being a gentleman he would probably conjure a polite smile, gently guide her off his lap, and then calmly explain to her why this wouldn’t work out.

Why they couldn’t be together.

And at that point Marinette would nod, swallowing the heart in her throat and assuring him that them being no more than partners (in French class and crime fighting alike) was just fine.

But truthfully, the idea made her want to black out.

Because as much as Chat promised to love Ladybug no matter what, Adrien would never see Marinette as anything other than a friend, and she wasn’t ready to face that particular rejection. Not yet. Perhaps not ever.

The school day was torturous. Each time her gaze snagged on that oh-so-familiar head of blonde hair, Marinette felt her need to flee increase tenfold. She had told Chat she needed time and space, to think on what came next, but unfortunately she didn’t have that luxury with their civilian identities — and with every minute that ticked away in his presence came another little flicker of emotion. Flickers of doubt and trepidation. Flickers of longing and sorrow. Little flames that charred her nerves to ashes and burned her alive with indecision.

Lost in thought, Marinette hardly registered her classmate ducking out of the room, subtly wiping one sleeve across the bridge of his nose as he muttered something about the bathroom.

Her Tuesday ended with the vision of tear-drenched green eyes.

Her Wednesday began with a text from C.N., one so unlike his usual wakeup calls that she nearly tossed the phone in childish discontent.

[ Akuma at Champ Elysees ]

Marinette knew he was only following her wishes (‘Please don’t call me, and work-related texts only.’), but she still found it hard to fight down her wave of displeasure at the absence of his trademark heart-eyed cat emoji.

Waking up had never been harder.

...

Actually, she took that back… Akuma fighting had never been harder.

Unsurprisingly, Chat Noir was already on the scene when at last Ladybug reached the monument. He offered no greeting spare a single fleeting glance before he was vaulting off and after their target, and his avoidance was both blessing and a curse. Quelling the rising wave of guilt that crested in her chest, Marinette set herself on autopilot, allowing her kwami-granted instinct to take over as Ladybug’s limbs followed the subconscious commands.

The fight took much longer than it should have, and both heroes took much more damage than they should have.

They were reckless, working more like two single forces instead of the duo they should have been as each teen took their own approach to the battle. It was messy, and irresponsibly so. It was petulant and ineffective and it ground on a very deep nerve inside Marinette’s gut as she watched more and more of Paris being torn down because they couldn’t get their act together.

“This isn’t working!” she finally admitted in a shout, wheeling to where her peripheral vision had tracked a blur of black and forcing the words not to come out as a sob. “We need to do better than this.”

‘I need to do better than this…’

For a moment Chat (‘Adrien,’ her mind unnecessarily interjected, ‘That’s Adrien’) didn’t react, seeming to decide whether or not she was addressing him before tentatively calling an answer of his own.

“Just tell me what you need me to do in order to make this work.”

Marinette swallowed at the duality of his statement, looping down towards him with a repressed apology on her tightly closed lips. Reaching the pavement, she planted herself a few feet from where his boots stuck to the ground and launched headlong into discussion. They strategized, voices clipped and sentences short as two pairs of eyes dutifully danced around each other in a synchronized shuffle of denial. A minute later a solution was reached.  

For one of their problems, at least.

It was two blocks away from their original battleground that the final confrontation took place. Frankly, Marinette had no interest in the akuma’s name or its goal, having too much on her mind to register anything past the fact that the monster was hell-bent on covering Paris in a thick blanket of flour.

And when one of the heavy projectiles went sailing towards her partner’s turned back, Marinette didn’t even have to think about intercepting it.

Being a baker’s daughter, she was no stranger to industrial sacks of flour (all burlap and twine and solid mass), but she'd never been so intimately acquainted with one until her leap sent it crashing across her unprotected abdomen.

The force of it knocked the air from her body and her body from the air, throwing the huffing heroine in a sprawl across the powder-strewn street with a deep cough. ‘Oh, that’s gonna twinge for a while,’ she thought with a wince, rolling onto her back and breathing through the ache that radiated out from her lungs as she took a moment to clear the stars from her vision.

When at last the constellations cleared she was greeted by a brilliant yellow halo, wavering in the sky with a deep frown that told Marinette it was not, in fact, the sun.

“Why did you do that?” Chat hissed, kneeling down immediately to cup one hand around her abdomen and outright ignoring the fact that there was still a raging monster bent on destruction just yards away.

Marinette bit back her “Because I care about you”, instead flinching as his touch raised a thrumming pain along her body. Chat (‘Adrien’) lightened up at once, the scowl sliding off his face to be replaced by such a tender expression of concern that Marinette had to look away for fear of melting under its concentrated warmth.

“I need to get you—“

“You need to get the akuma,” she cut in, thinking past her physical and mental turmoil to focus on the task at hand. “I’ll be up in a few minutes, and it would really help me if you managed to grab the cursed object by then.”

For a second it looked as if he were about to argue, but her partner ended up giving no complaint. With one last lingering caress of her ribs (could he feel the way her heart beat beneath his gloves?), Chat Noir sprinted down the street, leaving Marinette to force down her discomfort with gritted teeth and a hiss of breath. Luckily for her, corporeal pain was much easier to work through than its emotional counterpart.

The fight resolved quickly after that, her partner sealing his end of the bargain with stunning speed and ferocity as he delivered her the rolling pin only minutes later. Marinette wrapped it up from there, dazzling the gathered crowd with her healing magic while she tried to not let anything show on her face as she tossed the artefact upwards in a burst of light.

The fans screamed, chanting for their heroes to embrace in a bittersweet cheer that made Ladybug’s fabricated smile sting her face. With a quick glance of shared understanding, she and Chat slid up beside each other, the boy draping a dead arm across her tension-filled shoulders as they played the happy couple. It took everything Marinette had not to burrow into his side and never come out.

Her Wednesday ended with a white butterfly, a bruised rib, and a meaningless fist bump for the cameras.

On and on it went.

 Mornings and evenings of conflicted contemplation, afternoons filled with nothing but dread, midnights that brought out the longing in her, until she inevitably gave in and reread the last text he’d sent her before she’d made a mess of everything.

[ of course, my love <3 ]

It seared her in more ways than she could count.

To her infinite shame, Marinette couldn’t actually recall the first time Chat Noir had declared his love for Ladybug. It had to have been sometime after they reached high school, perhaps even the summer before, but she couldn’t seem to pin down an actual date.

There had never been a grand poetic confession on his part, no swelling strings and narrowing spotlight as time froze around them. There wasn't really anything to make the alarms go off in her mind like “HEY, THIS PERSON IS IN LOVE WITH YOU!”

In fact, Marinette was about 75% sure his first “I love you” came when they were joking around after patrol, the endearment slipping out amongst their laughter to flow organically through their banter. From there it had just become a part of the cat’s natural vocabulary, dropping as easily from his tongue as any pun as the declaration morphed more into a well-known truth.

“That was a cat-tastrophe, wouldn’t you say my love?”

“Your jokes aren’t even remotely funny, but it’s a good thing I love you anyway. Right, Buggy?”

“Oh please, my love for you could outmatch an akuma any day!”

Those were the times Ladybug never seemed to catch the sincerity of his words, their burning truth buried beneath a snarky smile and a lilting tone. Of course she saw it now, in the bittersweet clarity of 20/20 hindsight, and the realization made her want to go back and scream “IT’S HIM!”

“IT’S HIM!” she’d scream to middle school Marinette, startling the girl from where she sat staring at the blonde head sitting before her in class.

“IT’S HIM!” she’d cry, smacking pre-summer Ladybug over the head as she rolled her eyes at one of Chat’s hidden declarations.

“IT’S HIM!” she’d beg and bide and plead, chastising the girl who’d left him standing alone on that rooftop just a few days ago. “IT’S HIM AND YOU KNOW IT!”

For years Chat had shown her his affection, never once withdrawing his adoration due to a lack of reciprocation but instead continuing to love her regardless. Not because he was holding out for a change of heart, not in some attempt to wear her down and strike when she was weak, he quite simply continued to love her as a reminder, unhurried and without remorse or expectation.

He loved her when she was oblivious to his feelings.

He loved her while she knew.

Hell, he even loved her after Ladybug had all but said she didn’t want to see or hear from him!

But most of all, Adrien had said he’d love her no matter who she turned out to be under the mask…

…and, needless to say, that was the one that dug at Marinette the most.