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There’s a fox in the city.
Reports are varied, but most suggest she’s reddish-brown in color, and that she’s not a fox exactly but something more akin to an akuma. The knowledge that their fox is a girl has had Chat Noir making jokes on the subject all week.
Ladybug’s rebuttals have been a little harsher than usual and he would stop but he really can't because there’s a whiff of something in the air and it might just be jealousy but he can’t tell. If he could just smell it for a second longer maybe-
“There!” Ladybug says, her arm coming out and pinning his chest to the wall behind them. Her other hand comes up to put a finger over her lips.
There is a part of him that would stand there and watch her lips forever.
The part of him that is also a part of Plagg, however, focuses on the mission. The mission being the woman who sits on the rooftop across from them, watching them curiously with a look he can’t quite decipher.
Unlike him, she doesn’t really have a tail so much as she has very long hair that is tied at the end in a way that almost mimics a tail of a fox. A belt that looks a bit more like a tail is wrapped around her waist. Her hair is in that style that his father is trying to make all his new models wear ever since that new one showed up with it and he decided it was the best fit for his designs. What was it…? Ombre? Red-brown fading into platinum blonde.
She’s older than them. Not surprising. Despite the fact that what feels like half of the akuma victims so far have been their classmates, most of the ones he doesn’t know are adults.
Her eyes are exceptionally sad, though, and when Ladybug sends out her yo-yo to cross the rooftop, Chat puts out a hand to stop her.
She raises an eyebrow at him.
“She’s not attacking us,” he says in explanation, “it doesn’t feel like she’s an akuma.”
“Who is she then?”
“Maybe another miraculous user…”
“In that case I should go ask Al- that girl from the Ladyblog if there are any other known Miraculous users. Don’t leave the area. Keep an eye on her.”
Chat nods his head, and Ladybug jumps away from him, across the rooftops of Paris. He watches her go.
And then he jumps down to a balcony on the other side of the building from where the fox sits watching them and de-transforms.
When he reaches the street, the fox is there.
He knows she hadn’t seen him transform, but she’s still looking at him like he’s still in his Chat Noir getup and it’s bothering him.
“Can I help you?” he asks, trying his best to sound like anything but Chat Noir.
“Would you mind talking to me, for a second, Chat?” she asks, and he freezes. “I would really appreciate it.”
“I’m not- What?- How do you know my name? Who are you?”
“Name’s Volpina. That’s the fox And I know you , pretty kitty, a lot better than you might think.”
His first thought, beyond the fact that whoever’s in charge of naming this sort of thing has got to stop using such obvious names, is how weird it sounds to listen to anyone but Ladybug tease him like that.
She then takes a piece of paper out from her tail-belt, which he suspects must have some sort of pocket in it.
It’s a newspaper clipping- a eulogy for… another Chat Noir?
“Oh, don’t you know, pretty kitty?” Volpina says, but this time her tease has no energy behind it. She lets out a small smile, and he knows she doesn’t really mean it. “You died.”
It’s true, when Adrien Agreste is Chat Noir he looks so much like Felix that Nicola’s heart almost stopped beating the first time she saw him in action.
She’d barely been in Paris a few days, having been tugged there by Zapho with a melancholy heart and little to no desire to continue being Volpina after losing them, sitting in a little coffee shop when she saw a black cat with blonde hair and those mischievous green eyes scampering across the rooftops.
The teenage girl sitting at the other table took a selfie with Chat Noir in the background. Nicola forgot how to breathe. It couldn’t be him, she knew that. Plagg had a tendency to choose Chat Noirs who already had green eyes, the explanation of which he’d once waved away as some sort of “solidarity.” Many teenage boys in the world have green hair and blonde eyes. And he’s a teenage boy. Not the twenty-something that Felix had been when he’d been taken from them so soon.
Still, when she’s sitting there in the hot afternoon sun, sleepy and basking in the heat, he looks like a ghost to her. A reminder of when she was young and naive and hopelessly in love with the two of them.
It’s just coincidence that she happens to see him transform. The warm wind blows away the phone number on her table from the agent she’d just met with, into the alley across from the cafe, and she follows it.
She stops just in time to see Felix’s double descend from the rooftop into the alley and watch his mask and leathers fall away to reveal a boy who couldn’t be out of highschool. The differences between him and Felix are more obvious out of costume, she decides.
He doesn’t even see her.
Mostly because Zapho pulls her by the collar of her blouse behind the corner. She’s always been the more rash one out of the two of them. Zapho tends to drag her away from things for her own good. She was the one who said she wasn’t ready to start the heroics again, and revealing herself to the boy would have just moved her back into the spotlight.
She does her research on him, though. Adrien Agreste. Paris’ young modeling talent. Son of famous designer Gabriel Agreste. Recently attending public high school. And now, now sitting in front of her, facing Volpina but not quite Nicola, asking why it’s taken so long for her to come out of the shadows.
“Oh, don’t you know, pretty kitty?” she tells him, trying not to let the scene that’s been playing over and over in her head for almost a year now overtake her. The one where the snow is falling and the butterfly hits him right in the chest. The one where there’s too much blood. The one where the rooftop becomes stained redder than Bridgette’s suit. The one where she’s left alone, left behind by the cycle, and this Hawkmoth may be gone, defeated by their sacrifices, but there will be another one, and she gave an oath when she put this on.
She just didn’t think she’d be left behind by the two people she loved most.
She didn’t think she’d be shoved into a new city and suddenly be the older one out of their trio. She didn’t think she would get there and want nothing to do with the life that had taken everything away from her.
Adrien asks about Felix. Nicola answers.
“He looked so much like you. But he was… difficult to talk to. It took so long for us all to work together as a team. He- You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
“Who?” Adrien asks, shaken by the question. She can’t blame him. She has a tendency to hold conversations in a slight runaway train manner.
“Ladybug. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
His face is all the answer she needs.
“I suspected as much. It always happens eventually. I hate to throw around the word destiny in front of teenagers, but… it always happens. Felix was a slightly harder nut to crack. He didn’t want the power. Somehow Plagg had let him believe a kiss from Ladybug would take it away, which, obviously it doesn’t, but by the time he figured it out he’d stopped just pretending he loved her.”
“ Destiny?” Adrien asks, and she knows she should slow down, should stop this runaway train before she breaks him, should stop throwing around words like destiny when there’s also another destiny for Chat Noir and it’s not one that she should tell someone so youthful and full of hope.
“Something like that. Sometimes it doesn’t survive the reveal.”
He looks at her with wide eyes and she supposes the easiest way to explain it to him is to show him, so she touches a finger to the pendant on her neck and the fox form falls away.
Adrien’s mouth falls open, much like hers had the first time she’d seen him, when he realizes the new Italian model his father has hired for the winter collection is the same woman as the fox who’d known his predecessor.
She smiles. “We tend to be blind when it comes to other miraculous users. It’s worse when you already have an established relationship with someone in civilian life.”
“I know her?”
Nicola runs over his question, full speed ahead. She pulls a few bobby pins from her bag and sets them on the table he’s been leaning up against. She props four of them up against each other, like the beginnings of a tent without any support on the bottom. They tentatively balance each other out, but just barely.
“You know her in more ways than you think you do. Each of your relationships with each other, in and out of the mask, are something special. If the reveal destroys even one of them-” she pulls out one of the bobby pins and the whole thing collapses.
Adrien looks horrified.
The runaway train comes to a stop in a glorious piece of wreckage.
“Of course, it’s not likely to happen, but it’s always a possibility when there’s knowledge of all of them. Especially when there are feelings involved.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s destiny that Chat Noir and Ladybug fall in love with each other, but what I had with them was just coincidence.”
“Oh-” his face is a mix of emotions and she’s not sure if she can explain it to him.
“Things… changed when our identities were revealed. Their relationship began and whatever I had with the two of them fizzed out. Which is probably just as well because the two of them tended to sacrifice themselves for people they loved and- Well, you’re here now.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My point is that the reveal is coming, and it’s always better if it happens before you meet Fu.”
“Who?”
“I’ll help you two when you get this mess sorted out.” she grabs her bobby pins and tries not to feel like she’s running away again. “Until then-”
Adrien watches her go.
Volpina is just as much of a force of nature as he’s heard his father say Nicola is.
He didn’t get to tell her that he thinks he knows, that he’s had his suspicions since they fought Anti-Bug, and he’s sure she’s had hers.
But now that Volpina’s presented him an ultimatum, he wonders if maybe she’s right. Maybe everything will fall apart once the reveal happens. The worst part is that Ladybug may not be the voice of reason this time; she would see the necessity for them to have an ally in an experienced, older Miraculous-user, especially after his recent reckless self-sacrificial acts.
She worries about him, he knows that. He’s worried she’ll worry more when she finds out who he is, especially now that Volpina has told him they know each other in every form.
She might already worry.
He hopes she doesn’t worry.
He’s not worth that.
Nevertheless, when the sun falls back behind the horizon and the two of them walk their usual route across the rooftops of Paris, he brings it up.
“I found the fox, although, I must say, foxes are not quite as fun as cats.”
He jokes. He always does that when he’s nervous. He doesn’t want to tell Ladybug about the way Volpina feels similar to him to a degree, in that both of them tend to hide behind a mask of puns and flirting that feels liberating but also like an easy way to avoid letting what weighs you down in real life seep into your heroics. He also doesn’t want to tell Ladybug that Volpina called him pretty kitty.
“An akuma, then?” she asks.
“Not exactly.”
He tells her about the fox, about her own identity reveal and the story of their predecessors, about how she said she wouldn’t work with them until they’d moved past their own identity issues.
“I don’t think she can go through losing her partners like that again.”
He doesn’t tell her about the bobby pins, about them collapsing on the table like the Eiffel Tower had multiple times during different akuma attacks. He doesn’t tell her that Volpina was in love with the both of them and maybe she feels the need for them to tell each other so when she looks at them she’ll be able to see Adrien Agreste and whoever Ladybug’s alter ego is instead of her old dead partners. Most importantly, he doesn’t tell her about how Volpina’s already told him who she is.
He doesn’t want Ladybug to feel like this is a competition. Because it isn’t.
Destiny. Or something like that.
He doesn’t tell her about that either.
Ladybug isn’t looking at him; she turned away somewhere in there, but her shoulders are tightened with the same sort of determination that she has when they’re facing an akuma. Except now the only thing that they’re facing is each other, and that might just be scarier.
Finally she turns back, and takes a deep breath before talking.
“I know you think you’re in love with me or something-”
Something like that.
“-but you’re not in love with the real me, Chat, and… I just don’t want you to feel like you have to be. I’m not going to be crushed, Chat.”
A penny drops in a bath of water and it begins to overflow. The last tick of a clock signals the end of a day. Chat suddenly begins to realize why Ladybug’s been pushing him away all this time.
Because if she hadn’t, and the reveal had gone badly…
The fragile hairpin imitation of the Eiffel Tower falls, giving the watcher a small amount of anxiety .
“That sounds like a terrible fate; not letting yourself open up to someone just because you’re worried they only love the person you are with your mask on…”
And then when Volpina’s words of the fragility of the whole situation echo back to him, it finally clicks. There’s not just one way this could fall apart. There’s not just one way they both slink back, wounded and hurt from something that could’ve been great.
He’s been so blind.
Suspicions can either shatter or further and they’ve just done one but he can’t jump to a conclusion when the answer is closer than the newest rooftop.
“So…” she prompts, “who’s going first?”
A blush brushes across his cheeks. He hadn’t even considered that there would be a first . In his mind it had always just… happened. They’d both just known.
Chat clears his throat. “I can go.”
“Oh!” she exclaims, a little surprised, mouth parting to the degree that always makes him look at it. “Are you sure? I mean, I can go…”
“Yes! I mean, only if you want to, of course, my lady.”
Ladybug echoes his blush.
Two hands reach for a video game controller. When they touch they both pull away like they’ve been burnt.
Chat makes a decision. He holds out his hand so she can see the ring, and he doesn’t look at her eyes to see if there’s any flicker of resignation in her pupils; he’ll know soon enough.
“You’re gonna love Plagg.” he tells her.
It’s not a very meaningful statement. It’s just as much of a mask as the one on his face. Why does it feel like he’s about to stab himself in the chest instead of get the reveal he’s wanted since he first started falling for her?
He can see the Eiffel Tower behind them. He imagines the bobby pins falling again. He takes a deep breath.
And then he takes his hand to his ring.
Before he can even press the button, however, her red-gloved hand covers his.
“Together.” Ladybug says.
God, he’s in love with her.
“One…” he starts, and she begins to move her hand up to the earrings that everyone has tried so vainly to take from her, and he keeps his hovering above his ring. “Two…”
It’s on three when he can’t see her anymore, when that little momentary slice of green light covers him and he can see all in color again. It’s on three when he wonders if maybe this is a big mistake; if he’s about to see Nathalie or something on the other side of him. It’s on three that Adrien relaxes into just knowing , because she’s right, Volpina was right; a love with secrets is nothing but fragile.
Somehow he’d had a feeling they’d both reached this conclusion before this had all went down, yet it still sends a drumset through his heart to see it in action.
Marinette stands in front of him, not even looking at him, and if his own heart wasn’t beating so hard he’s sure he’d hear hers thumping away inside her chest. She said they’d go together but now he’s looking at her and she’s looking at the ground.
One last piece clicks.
Adrien holds out his arm, where the lucky charm she’d given him when they’d played videogames together still hangs on his wrist.
“I understand why it’s so lucky now,” he says.
She gasps upon hearing his voice, and it’s something a little deeper than her usual timid gasp whenever he speaks to her. Now there’s a sense of depth to it that’s almost inexplicable. Except it’s not. It’s destiny. Or something like that.
He expects a stutter then. Or possibly a squeak. Something that will put them right back on the path they’re on as civilians, something that might ruin what they’ve got as Ladybug and Chat Noir.
None of that happens.
Marinette looks up, blue eyes wide and wonder-filled. The same determination still fills them, and he thinks it’s really the first time he’s seen that look directed at him without any masks separating them.
“Chat…” she starts, and he’s glad of that. He’s glad she’s not compartmentalizing because now she’s talking to him with the easy carefreeness she’s always had around him as Ladybug, but now there’s this added element he can’t quite decipher… “I had that long before I became Ladybug. The luck depends on the wearer’s belief in it, not the bracelet itself. You’ve been lucky all along.”
“I guess I have,” he tries and, she cocks her head a little, a pigtail brushing along her shoulder. “I certainly must be lucky to have you as my lady.”
It might be then when she makes the connection that stretches an element beyond partnership, because he watches her breath catch in her throat and once again the question of his continued blindness consumes him almost wholly. He tried to set Nino up with her.
He is both happy and dismayed by her surprise that the reveal has changed nothing. And it hasn’t. He’s looked inside himself and realized that the fear of love being marred by a mask had dissipated, and with it the wall that had been keeping Marinette out for fear of her not knowing him the way Ladybug did.
He is ecstatic. He is also trying his best to hide it since she seems to be keeping her cool fairly well.
“Oh my god.” she brings her palm to her forehead and he wonders how he’s upset her and then it clicks for him really that they’re one and the same and Ladybug was never really a fan of his puns and nicknames, but she’s still smiling like something he’s never seen before. “I can’t believe I have a crush on you.”
That last part is barely mumbled but Adrien still hears it and both his smile and his blush grow indefinitely bigger. “You have a crush on me, huh, my lady?”
Her face remains buried in her hands, only lifting to look him in the eye when his hand reaches her shoulder.
He swears the lights of the city grow brighter when she looks at him.
Ladybug - no, Marinette - stutters for a second before finally letting out. “We should go tell Volpina that everything’s alright, then, right?”
“Everything’s just purrfect , princess.”
He’s surprised when she grabs his hand, but he supposes he shouldn’t be.
Their faces are both bright red but whatever lingers in the air feels strong and heavy and when he looks at the Eiffel Tower he no longer thinks of anything collapsing.
Destiny. Or something like that. As long as it survives the reveal.
They’re going to be just fine.