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The only thing he can hear is the gentle melody of the wind chime.
It is a familiar sound, one that is already lulling him toward a peaceful sleep. His mother had hung it before the wide windows of his room a week before his birthday. Perhaps she had done so because Adrien was reaching the age when he was beginning to understand what loneliness meant, old enough to know that a person was supposed to have someone waiting for them when they woke in the morning, someone they could expect to see when they came down for breakfast.
Old enough to understand that, when it came to his father, he could never expect such a thing.
Old enough to realize that perhaps, somehow, that meant something.
Had his mother hung the wind chime there so that, carried on the soft spring breeze drifting through the open windows, its sweet melody might keep him company? So that it might break the kind of silence that could become loud enough to hurt his ears? So that, in the quiet of his room, Adrien would never have to feel quite so alone?
The gentle breeze that set the chimes singing caressed his skin, ruffling his golden hair and making the strands tickle his cheeks.
But something was wrong.
The chime sounded impossibly far away now. There was a dull ache in his back, keeping him from slipping into the sweet sleep that had been waiting for him, and the ground beneath him was far harder than the polished floorboards of his own room.
And something was digging into his ribs.
But it was all right.
Whatever it was that had been hurting him, whatever had gone wrong, it would all be better soon, because he could feel a warm hand resting on his shoulder. His mother had probably woken that morning feeling a little better than usual, on one of those rare days when her illness allowed her a measure of strength. Perhaps she had wheeled herself to Adrien’s room without anyone’s help, wanting to be the one to wake him herself.
Days like these were the most precious days to Adrien.
When he blinked away the last traces of sleep, the first thing he would see was a head of golden hair so much like his own, and a pair of soft green eyes that reminded him of his own. And for a little while, Adrien could simply lie there in the softness of his bed and smile sleepily at his mother.
For a little while, it didn't matter that his father wasn't there with them. It didn't matter that he would eat breakfast by himself, or that he would spend the rest of the day among the cold marble walls, quietly playing hide-and-seek all on his own so he wouldn't bother his father.
On mornings like these, none of it mattered. Because his mother was there.
“Adrien,” she would murmur, brushing his hair away from his face. “Time to wake up, sweetheart.”
But the hand on his shoulder shook him with a force that stood in stark contrast to his mother’s gentle touch.
“Chat Noir?! Are you alright?”
Oh. Right.
He wasn't Adrien right now. He was Chat Noir. His mother had disappeared years ago. And the sound of the wind chime wasn't coming from the red ornament hanging beside the window of his bedroom. It was coming from a chime hanging in the shattered window of the ruined shop, barely a meter away from the hole he had just been thrown into.
And instead of stretching lazily, as he normally would, basking in the warmth of his mother's presence, Adrien needed to get back on his feet. He needed to get up and return to whoever—or whatever—he had been fighting.
A small groan escaped involuntarily through his dry, cracked lips, but thankfully, he managed to pull himself upright without needing anyone’s help, rising from the fracture his body had carved into the asphalt. Chunks of asphalt sifted through his hair like sand, tumbling into his lap as he tried to make sense of where he was. His trembling hand searched blindly across the ground for his baton.
Luckily, his gloved fingers found the cold metal beneath them. The moment he closed his hand around it, its familiar weight grounded him, anchoring him firmly enough for him to finally understand where he was, and what he was in the middle of. They were in the middle of an akuma attack. He remembered now.
In a desperate attempt to shield Ladybug from the akuma’s blast, Chat Noir had shoved her out of the way. He hadn’t been fast enough. The blast had caught him by the very edge of it, sending him flying several meters through the air. Adrien remembered hitting the ground twice, bouncing like a stone children might throw into the sea for the sheer fun of watching it skip across the water, before finally disappearing into the asphalt.
His suit—and, more importantly, Plagg—had absorbed much of the impact. Even so, for a moment, he had nearly blacked out. And he already knew his back was going to hurt like hell once the transformation dropped, whether Ladybug’s magic managed to heal him or not.
Using his free hand for support against the broken asphalt, Chat Noir pushed himself to his feet. His eyes immediately swept across the surroundings, searching the rooftops for a flash of red, a dancing blur at the edge of his vision, any sign of the akuma.
But while he had been out, the fight seemed to have moved farther away from this part of the city.
“Take it easy, Chat Noir.”
It was the same voice as the one belonging to the hand that had shaken him awake.
Chat lifted his head and found himself face-to-face with a middle-aged man wearing a stained apron and a shirt with its sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A butcher, judging by his clothes. His workday—and probably his entire day—had been interrupted by the akuma attack, and yet when he had seen Chat Noir come crashing down from the sky like a meteor, he had come out to check on him.
Despite the pain radiating through his body, something warm unfurled inside Chat at the stranger's concern and kindness. He opened his mouth to thank him, but the man continued before he could get a word out.
“Ladybug took care of the akuma.”
“Here it comes!” A young girl came running up behind them, laughing as she pointed toward the sky with one finger. Chat blinked against the sudden wash of brilliant pink light surrounding them. The ground shifted beneath his feet. And then the asphalt began to mend itself.
The cracks and shattered pieces his body had carved into the street moments ago drew together and smoothed over, erasing every trace of the impact as though it had never happened.
“Ladybug is the best, truly!”
“Yeah, she is,” Chat Noir said, his gaze falling to the asphalt beneath his feet, now flawless save for the faint tire marks. His heart swelled with pride at the young girl’s words, pride on behalf of his partner. His Lady really was amazing.
Ladybug swung through the air and landed gracefully atop a nearby rooftop, doing what she always did: giving the city one final sweep, making sure her magic had set everything right. It always did. Ladybug’s magic had never once failed her.
As she stood at the top of the rooftop, looking like an untouchable goddess with sun shining behind her, the people around Chat Noir began emerging from their hiding places. Applause erupted through the street, phones were raised to capture photographs of their savior. Voices called her name, cheering for her.
And sometimes, despite being partners, Chat wondered if this was where he truly belonged. Up there, beside Ladybug, standing at the pinnacle with her? Or down here, among everyone else, looking up at her in wonder just like they did?
Sometimes it felt as though the wall between them grew thicker with every passing day. As Ladybug climbed the steps toward something almost divine, each one taken with unwavering certainty, Chat Noir remained where he was.
Watching her ascend.
And waving from behind.
Chat sighed as he watched his partner wave to the people who were still singing her name, and disappear from sight. For a moment, he simply stood there. He had never had any trouble blending into the crowd. People didn't stop him. They didn't corner him with questions. More often than not, they simply flowed around him as though he were almost invisible.
Ladybug was a source of light, and all of Paris was drawn to her like moths to a flame. Standing beside her without being noticed had always felt perfectly natural. Perhaps that was why he had never minded it.
Perhaps.
Then he felt a weight in his right hand. Every instinct in him snapped to attention. Reflexes honed over years of guarding the ring that had rested on his finger for just as long nearly had him wrench his hand away and strike at the would-be thief, or activate Cataclysm before he could even think twice.
But his eyes dropped sharply to his hand instead.
The reason the weight curled around his fingers and tugged at them did not carry the threatening presence of someone reaching for his ring was that, it belonged to a little girl who had wrapped her tiny fingers around his hand, not wanting his ring, but simply asking for his attention.
She was probably five or six, with thick brown curls spilling around her dark skin with the almost doll-like perfection of a storybook illustration. A wide blue headband kept her hair away from her face, allowing Chat Noir to see her bright eyes clearly as they watched him with unabashed curiosity and interest.
“Hello, little one,” he said in the soft voice he usually reserved for children and civilians still trembling from the shock of being akumatized. Without letting go of her hand, he lowered himself onto one knee until they were at eye level, offering her a warm smile. “What’s the matter? How can this kitty help you?”
For a moment, the little girl simply stared at him with those enormous eyes. Chat wondered if he should be worried. He was just beginning to glance away, searching the crowd for her parents, when she held out what she had been clutching in her other hand.
“Chat Noir, my mom said I shouldn't bother you, but... would you sign this comic book for me?”
She finally released his hand and pulled a glittery pink gel pen from the crossbody bag hanging at her side, holding it out to him. Chat took the comic and the pen carefully, mindful of his claws, making sure not to hurt her in the process.
A Ladybug comic.
His partner stared back at him from the cover, frozen mid-swing in her simple yet dazzling crimson suit, black spots stark against the red, a bright smile on her face beneath the title:
TALES OF LADYBUG: PARIS' GREATEST HERO.
“Oh.” Chat stared at it for a moment. Then he smiled at the little girl and held up the glittery pen between the claws of his black-gloved hand, where it looked almost absurdly delicate. “Would you like me to get Ladybug to sign it for you?” he asked. “She isn't here right now, but I could have her sign it and bring it back to you later?”
The little girl shook her head so emphatically that her curls bounced around her face.
“No, that's okay. I'd just be happy if you signed it.”
Chat blinked, a little surprised, but if that was what she wanted, then he was more than happy to oblige. Holding the glittery pen carefully between his fingers, he signed his superhero name across the cover of the Ladybug comic. As Adrien, he was accustomed to being asked for his autograph. He had never particularly enjoyed it. But as Chat Noir, being asked for his signature was a rarity. And somehow, he found that he liked it.
Maybe the difference was in the way people looked at his two identities. Or perhaps it was simply that, when someone handed a pen to him—the boy who could so easily fade into the background beside his dazzling partner—they did it because they genuinely wanted his autograph.
“You know, this isn't actually the first time we've met,” the little girl told Chat as he clicked the cap back onto the pen.
There was a certain seriousness in her voice that only children seemed to possess, the kind they carried at that age when they spoke freely, without wondering whether grown-ups would take them seriously, when everything around them was still new and exciting and every little thing felt like a matter of great importance.
“Is that so?” Chat Noir asked, genuinely intrigued.
“Three months ago, when my mom took me and my best friend Élise out for ice cream, you saved us from that singing akuma. She was so scary! But you were so fast! And you got us all out of there. I went and told all my friends about it afterward.” The little girl scrunched up her face at the memory. “Although my friends didn't think it was that cool. They kept asking me about Ladybug, whether I'd seen her, whether she was really as amazing as everyone said she was. But I think you're amazing, too, Chat Noir.”
As the little girl took back the pen and comic book he offered her, her eyes immediately fell upon the signature he'd scrawled across the page in glittery pink ink. She didn't notice the astonished smile spreading across Chat Noir's face.
When his catlike eyes lifted over the little girl’s head, he found her mother standing beneath a streetlamp, her hands clasped together around a cream-colored handbag as she smiled at them. The resemblance between mother and daughter was unmistakable.
When their eyes met, the young woman’s smile widened, becoming a genuine expression that crinkled the corners of her eyes. Her painted-red lips moved silently, but no knowledge of lip-reading was needed to understand a phrase so simple, so universal.
Thank you.
For a moment, Chat simply remained there, kneeling in the middle of the street beneath the gentle Parisian spring sun. Whenever the softness of spring settled over Paris, one part of him would always fill with wonder, while another sank into a quiet, melancholy dread. There was no way to preserve moments like this. No way to cup them gently between his palms like a living butterfly and keep them from flying away.
These minutes would pass. They always did.
And once they were gone, they would become nothing more than memories—memories that would grow harder to reach with every passing year, their colors slowly fading until all that remained was something dull and grey. Even when there was no joy left in them, he would still ache for it. He had felt this way about every season since his mother died.
It didn't matter whether snow covered the city or blossoms opened on the trees. Every moment carried its own particular beauty, and the next would arrive with a beauty uniquely its own. But somehow, he always felt as though he were trapped in the past.
He wasn't ready to let the moment go.
He wasn't ready to let her go.
What a small act of kindness it was, to sign a little girl’s comic book. Chat spent his time in this city being thrown around like a ragdoll, hurled from one end of the street to the other, erased from existence, bleeding, dying.
And yet someone was thanking him for signing a comic book.
How absurd.
But perhaps it wasn't the act itself that deserved gratitude. Perhaps it was what lay behind it.
After all, who could understand better than him how often the grown-ups of this world kept their eyes fixed somewhere far ahead, so focused on where they were going that they trampled the children beneath their feet? How often they pushed away the little hands reaching for them with interest, with affection.
How often they failed to hear them. Failed to see them.
Chat blinked, gave the mother a small nod of acknowledgment, and turned his attention back to the little girl standing before him. She was still watching him with open curiosity. Chat smiled at her and rose to his feet.
“This kitty has to run now. Take care of yourself, all right?” Chat pointed at the comic book in the girl’s hands with one clawed finger. “And remember, Ladybug will always be here to save the day.”
“And Chat Noir.” The little girl hugged the comic book against her chest with both hands, holding it as though it were the most precious possession she had in all her short life. The smile on Chat’s face softened into something unmistakably Adrien-like, and he nodded.
“And Chat Noir,” he repeated. “It’s a promise.”
The comic book he normally treated with such care—always reading it at the table so he wouldn't even crease its pages—was now crumpled between his little hands.
Permanent wrinkles had formed across the pages, marks that would never truly disappear, no matter how much he tried to smooth them away with his palms, no matter how desperately he tried to erase every trace of what had happened minutes ago.
His green eyes—the feature he was most proud to have inherited from his mother, and the one that always drew his attention whenever he caught his own reflection in a mirror as he had never seen that particular shade of green, so vivid and soft like spring grass, in anyone but his mother—now wandered uncertainly, unsure of where to rest.
His father’s tall frame made him feel smaller than he usually did, as though he were one of the ants he loved watching in their enormous garden, the ones he would kneel down to observe for hours without caring about getting dirt on his shorts.
“Your mother is not feeling well.”
The coldness in Gabriel’s voice was something Adrien was accustomed to, but today it seemed to draw away even the smallest trace of warmth from the colorless world created by the cold marble around them. Not even the faintest light seemed able to reach inside. No color caught his eyes. Adrien lowered his head, staring at the tips of his shoes, and wondered if his father would be angry with him for this, too.
He hated it when Adrien looked away while speaking to him. Hated when he bowed his head instead of meeting his eyes. It was childish, his father would say. But Adrien was only five, and he did not yet know how to stop himself from being a child.
“You shouldn’t bother her with such foolish things.” Adrien wanted to explain. He hadn't meant to bother his mother. He didn't even care about that comic book. Not like this. It was worry that had carried his little feet to his mother's bedroom door. Perhaps fear.
He was afraid that, behind that closed door, while his mother was supposedly resting, as Father and Nathalie called it, she might feel as lonely as Adrien did whenever he was left all alone in his own room. But he didn't have the words to explain that yet. And he didn't think his father would want to hear them anyway.
So Adrien lifted his head, straightened his shoulders, and stood as an Agreste was supposed to stand.
“I'm sorry, Father.”
“Ugh.” Plagg flew out of Adrien’s inner jacket pocket before Adrien had even managed to close the door behind him, his face twisting with unmistakable disgust. Adrien’s brief worry about being caught vanished almost as quickly as it had appeared. No one ever came to this side of the mansion anyway, not unless it was Nathalie, knocking on his door to remind him of something on his schedule. “Your father is the worst.”
Adrien knew he probably shouldn't be surprised that Plagg disliked his father. Gabriel Agreste was all stiffness, rules, perfection, and emotional silence.
Only the immature can't control their emotions, Adrien. He had said it once when Adrien had tried, again, to protest about going to school. The immature…
Plagg, on the other hand, was all chaos, destruction, authenticity, and freedom. Adrien could cry, complain, protest, even throw a tantrum and behave as “immaturely” as he wanted. At most, Plagg would throw a few sarcastic remarks his way. But he would never tell Adrien to stop.
Never try to make him into something he wasn't.
“Remember that one time we got stranded on the other side of the city without any cheese, and you said, ‘No, Plagg, we don't have time to go to that cheese shop you love. Ladybug needs us,’ and dragged me into that awful, cold, soulless supermarket instead? The stuff you bought me wasn't even cheese! It was a tasteless, joyless white brick that had absolutely no business calling itself cheese! Yeah, your father is just like that!”
Adrien had long since stopped telling Plagg that he shouldn't speak about his father that way, that Gabriel was still his father and that, despite everything, he still loved him. (“He’s been through a lot,” Adrien would say, offering it as a weak defense. These days, even the words sounded wrong to his own ears. Because now that his world had widened, now that he had stepped beyond the walls of the mansion and seen the real world for himself, he knew better.
“So have you,” Plagg would reply. “And you’re a kid, Adrien. You’re always working so hard for him. Wasn’t he supposed to be here for you, too?”
Adrien never had an answer to that.
And somehow, having no answer hurt even more.)
Gabriel Agreste's imposing frame stood in stark contrast to Plagg's tiny body, yet despite the destructive power contained within that little creature, Plagg was the very opposite of his father’s coldness. These days, the small body that Adrien had pressed against his chest throughout the day, or the one that curled itself against his neck when he slept at night, was the only warmth he ever seemed to feel.
Adrien sat thoughtfully on the edge of his bed, rubbing a spot on the inside of his elbow with his fingertips without really looking at it. A small bruise.
To this day, Adrien still wasn't entirely sure how Ladybug's healing magic worked. Plagg could probably explain it, but he had always brushed him off by saying it was far too complicated for a human mind to understand.
Perhaps Plagg's bad luck interfered with Ladybug's magic in certain places. Sometimes, after an akuma battle, Adrien would find small traces left behind on his body. A bruise from being thrown into a wall. A tiny cut from jumping in front of Ladybug. Adrien didn't mind them. He wasn't worried. They never hurt badly enough to bother him, nor were they noticeable enough to send Nathalie into a panic.
“That bug doesn't do a very good job,” Plagg complained. Adrien's fingers immediately darted away from the bruise, an instinctive gesture of protectiveness. He wanted to defend his partner, his Lady. But he was tired. And with the evening sun spilling across his room, he wasn't sure he wanted to have this conversation. Because then they would inevitably reach the fact that he hadn't even made it to the end of the akuma battle.
“She does way more than I ever do,” he mumbled. Because it was true. How many akuma attacks had he missed because he had been brainwashed, incapacitated, or otherwise taken out of the fight? How many times had no one even noticed he was gone?
Sometimes, he was more of a hindrance than a help.
“Shouldn't be that hard,” Plagg grumbled. He was rummaging through the small section of Adrien's mini-fridge reserved exclusively for him, eventually pulling out a piece of Camembert. It was a particularly good, rich, creamy Camembert that Adrien had bought and tucked into his suitcase when they had unexpectedly needed to travel to Orne. He'd been in a good mood that day and wanted to spoil Plagg a little. “Someone is constantly watching your back, and protecting you. The least you can do is win.”
Plagg's tiny paws carefully peeled away the paper around the cheese.
“After all, she always gets the glory while you get the bruises.”
Adrien's arm throbbed, almost as if in answer.
“It’s fine,” he replied. Because it really was. Adrien had understood what he had signed up for by the second day. He had accepted his role, and he was determined to play it as well as he could. “I’m the shield.”
“To Ladybug, maybe.” Plagg licked his lips eagerly at the sight of the smelly, creamy Camembert now fully exposed before him. “But to people like that little girl you met today, the one with the glittery pen…” He added without looking up at Adrien. “You’re their hero.”
Adrien said nothing, simply watching his kwami companion savor his favorite thing. Even this godlike little creature knew how to enjoy the simple things. After an exhausting day, all Plagg wanted was a piece of cheese and a place to curl up and doze among Adrien’s hair.
But what did Adrien want?
What did he have?
What was there waiting for him at the end of the day besides sitting here, thinking about how useless he had been, or wasting time in the quiet solitude of his room, listening to the wind chime hanging in front of his window and waiting for yet another day to end?
What truly made him happy?
Was it running across the rooftops with Ladybug, saving people? When it was over, Ladybug would take off her mask, return to her real life, and turn her attention toward the things that mattered to her.
What did Adrien have to turn his attention toward?
Noticing that Adrien's mood hadn't lifted, Plagg sighed and set the half-eaten piece of cheese back onto its wrapper before turning to face him.
"You know, you're allowed to be upset, kid. You don't have to act like a statue when they are not even looking."
It was such a strange thing for a kwami to say. So absurd. Plagg telling him that it was okay to be upset stood in stark contrast to the life Adrien was living—a life spent fighting a villain who weaponized people's emotions day after day.
If Adrien didn't control his emotions, he could be akumatized. But just because Adrien had learned, from a young age, to swallow everything down and hide behind his perfect mask didn't mean he didn't feel those things. Of course he did. And that was what mattered to Hawkmoth. He didn’t read your face nor your brain, but your heart.
And Adrien's heart was boiling like a volcano desperate to erupt. Perhaps one day, it would. Perhaps all of it would finally force its way to the surface, creating the perfect conditions for an akuma. And then it would destroy everything.
He remembered seeing a poll online once:
What kind of akuma would you be?
People loved things like that. They treated them like personality tests, eagerly discussing the answers as though they revealed something essential about who they were. Perhaps people clung to those little things because they wanted to believe there was still something that made them special. In a world that could feel so colorless, maybe having a little bit of color that belonged uniquely to you was proof that you were more than just another number in a set of statistics.
If Adrien were akumatized, what would he become? What would his Lady be forced to face? Would she know it was him?
And if she did...
Would it make a difference to her?
Adrien's hand had frozen over his mouse that night, the evening he'd come across the question. The bright lights of his room reflected against the window, obscuring the darkness outside, while Plagg slept behind him on the bed, snoring softly.
For a while, Adrien simply stared at the screen. Then, eventually, he typed beneath an anonymous username:
An akuma that feels nothing.
Wouldn't it be nice, he wondered, to feel nothing at all?
Wouldn't it be peaceful to finally be free from the voice inside his own head, telling you, you aren’t enough?
But that night, when he curled up beneath the covers and waited for sleep to take him, Plagg’s small, warm body eventually found its way to the crook of Adrien’s neck and curled against him. And Adrien thought that it would be such a terrible thing to feel nothing at all.
His Lady’s rejection hurt because he loved her so dearly. But loving her made him happy, too. Even if that love existed only within him, even if she would never return it, he was glad to have known what it felt like to love someone so completely.
It hurt to pass his mother’s portrait hanging in the hallway. But it hurt because she had lived. Because she had been kind to him. Because she had kissed him goodnight when she could.
All those feelings were proof that he has loved, been loved, and actually lived. Proof that people had entered his life and left pieces of themselves behind in him.
And if that was what they left him with—love, grief, longing, joy, pain—Adrien would choose all of it over loneliness.
Every time.
Adrien thanked the Gorilla distractedly as he stepped out of the car, shuffling through the notes for the assignment he was supposed to turn in as he made his way toward the school entrance. Nino had said he would be in the library early, doing some last-minute checks, so Adrien didn't have to waste any time searching for him beneath the old stones of the entrance, gleaming in the sunlight.
Adrien had long since learned how to shut the world out whenever he needed to focus on something. It was how he'd managed to spend hours practicing the piano, repeating his language lessons, and drilling his reflexes during endless fencing sessions from such a young age, simply by tuning out every distraction around him. He suspected it was probably the same habit that had carried him through school, too, and was largely responsible for the grades and academic success he'd managed to maintain.
So naturally, the giggles and lingering looks around him weren't enough to break his concentration. He knew his writing was impeccable. He knew he was about to hand in a flawless paper, and he was quietly, almost matter-of-factly certain that he would receive the highest grade, as he always did. It wasn't arrogance, just confidence coming from long hours of studying.
And yet, he couldn't stop himself from going over everything again and again.
The first one to crack the illusion of comfort was the red-haired girl from the year above. Adrien didn't know her very well. She was a year older, and they weren't in the same class, and Adrien simply didn't spend enough time at school outside of lessons to know many people properly. Still, she was friendly. She always greeted him when they passed each other, and Adrien felt vaguely guilty that he still couldn't remember her name.
“Adrien,” she called from the bench at the end of the corridor. Adrien paused at the top of the stairs when he heard his name and looked up. When their eyes met, he offered her a polite smile. The girl waved the magazine in her hand toward him, and the other three girls beside her giggled. “The photos are amazing. Congratulations!”
Adrien was confused, but he thanked them all with the same polite, gentlemanly smile (that made them giggle again), giving them a small nod before continuing up the stairs. As he climbed, he mentally ran through the months. His father's spring collection was still some time away. They hadn't even begun the photoshoots yet. And he hadn't done a shoot for any magazine recently.
Oh.
He understood what they meant when he caught sight of the magazine in the hands of a boy passing him as he entered the library. A sports magazine. The World Fencing Championships were going to be held in Hong Kong that summer, and after the team had been announced the previous month, they had done a team photoshoot together. Adrien didn't need to see the inside to know what was there.
Photographs of him in his pristine white fencing uniform, holding his sabre at different angles, posing with an expression far more serious than the ones he usually wore for his father's campaigns or teen magazines.
Now, rest the sabre across your shoulders and look at the camera, Adrien. Perfect.
Now put your feet together in a V and hold the sabre in front of you. Ah, it's wonderful working with a model!
Adrien shook his head and tried to focus on the papers in his hands again, pushing the thought from his mind. When he entered the library, he found Alya and Marinette sitting beside Nino. And, contrary to what Nino had told him, none of them were looking at the assignment.
They were all looking at the magazine.
Adrien sighed.
The magazine lay open between them. Alya and Nino were sitting side by side, while Marinette sat across from them, kneeling on her chair and leaning over the table to get a better look at the page. None of them had even noticed him arrive. Adrien set his bag and papers down on the table. All three turned toward him. Marinette let out a small shriek when she saw him, flinging her hands into the air, and promptly toppled off her chair.
“Oh my God, Marinette, are you okay?!”
Adrien hurried around the side of the table, worried that he had startled her badly enough to make her fall. He slipped his hands beneath her arms and helped her back to her feet. Marinette gave him a nervous giggle as she dusted herself off. Alya shook her head at a spot Marinette had missed and reached over to pat the dust away.
“I’m really sorry if I startled you,” Adrien said sincerely. But Marinette quickly shook her head, and the two of them took their seats across the table from Alya and Nino.
“Oh, no, don’t worry! I mean—haha, it’s nothing. I’m fine. It’s not your fault. We just got a little… distracted.”
“We were looking at your magazine, model boy,” Alya said, pointing at the magazine and turning it toward him. “Or should I say fencer boy?”
Adrien rubbed the back of his neck, a faintly bashful expression crossing his face. Alya and Nino watched him, while Marinette kept her eyes fixed on the table as though she were hypnotized by it, refusing to look at either him or the magazine.
“Oh, yeah. Well… I finally made it onto the French national men’s sabre team.”
“Congratulations!” Alya exclaimed excitedly. Nino reached across the table to give Adrien a friendly smack on the shoulder, while Marinette murmured softly, “Congratulations, Adrien.”
Adrien thanked them all, and Nino looked at him over the top of his glasses.
“So? Your old man must've at least congratulated you for this, right? I mean, isn't that why you fence in the first place?”
It was a good question. Because until recently, Adrien had never really questioned why he did the things he did. He fenced because… he fenced. He studied languages because he was supposed to. Did he enjoy his piano lessons? He had never once stopped to ask himself. But ever since becoming Chat Noir, ever since throwing himself into real battles, he had discovered just how much he actually enjoyed physical sports.
The fact that his father had been the one who enrolled him in fencing lessons, did that somehow make his enjoyment of it any less real? Or, no matter how much he loved it, was he supposed to give it up simply to prove that he could build an identity of his own?
He wished there were an instruction manual somewhere that told him what he was supposed to do. When you've spent your entire life having everything placed in front of you and being told simply to just do it, suddenly wanting to take the reins yourself wasn't nearly as easy as people seemed to think.
But Nino could read the answer in Adrien's expression. His lips twisted into a disappointed frown, and his eyes narrowed with something dangerously close to pity as he closed the magazine. Because Gabriel Agreste hadn't congratulated Adrien. He hadn't even spoken to him about it.
Two days after the announcement, Adrien had finally crossed paths with his father inside the empty, deathly quiet mansion. Nathalie had formally reminded Gabriel that Adrien had made the national team. Gabriel had merely adjusted his tie, glanced at Adrien from the corner of his eye, and said, “Keep it up.”
As though he had any other choice.
Adrien was used to his father by now, so unlike Nino, he wasn't disappointed. If anything, he was simply relieved that the subject was over. Finally, he turned his attention back to his papers, only to notice a boy named Rémi, who was in the same class as the red-haired girl from the year above, taking a seat at the opposite end of the long library table where he, Nino, Alya, and Marinette were sitting. Adrien immediately spotted the magazine in his hands and sighed.
It was going to be a long day.
“Everyone at school is talking about it, Agreste,” Rémi said with a grin. Rémi wasn't a bad person at all. But to Adrien, he had always been a little too… loud. Too talkative. Too prone to saying whatever came into his head without thinking. Adrien gave him a strained smile in response, hoping that would be enough to end the conversation.
“Of course, I don't mean the fencing,” Rémi said, giving him a you know what I mean grin. Adrien said nothing, he was too focused on maintaining the strained smile on his face. Rémi propped his feet up on the library table. Marinette frowned at him, but no one said anything as he dramatically flipped through the pages of the magazine.
“They even wrote an article about you, Agreste. Fencing, piano, how many languages do you speak again? And you're good at school, too. You model. I mean, God…” He laughed as he tossed the magazine onto the table. “Aren't you just so perfect, Adrien?”
Adrien felt his palms growing damp against the tabletop, face too hot, as Rémi winked at Marinette.
“No wonder ladies love you. You're making the rest of us look lame, man.”
Adrien had no idea how to respond. He felt stupid for being so… disconnected. As though there were a numbness spreading through his body, as though the thread connecting his mind to the rest of him had somehow been severed. But he didn't need to say anything.
Marinette suddenly slammed both hands against the table, shaking it with a force that seemed almost impossible for someone as petite as her. Rémi let out a startled yelp as his feet slipped from the tabletop and he tumbled out of his chair.
“Don't you have a class to go to, Rémi?” Marinette demanded, fire practically blazing in her eyes.
“Go away, Rémi,” Alya added, backing up her friend. “If you're not going to study, stop distracting us. This is a library. You're supposed to be quiet.”
Rémi raised both hands in surrender, grinning as he made no attempt to retrieve the magazine he'd tossed onto the table. Instead, he pressed two fingers to his forehead and gave Adrien a playful wink.
“See you around, Mr. Perfect.”
“What is his problem?” Alya muttered, watching him walk away. Nino leaned his arms against the table, following Rémi with his eyes as well.
“I think he's picking fights with everyone because Cecilé dumped him again.”
Adrien said nothing. He wiped his hands against the table as he gathered his scattered papers and began arranging them again. Then he felt the slightest pressure against his arm. He looked up, expecting to find yet another person looking for a reason to bother him. Instead, he met a pair of large blue eyes.
Marinette's eyes had always fascinated him. Their color was so vivid, so clear—the blue of a summer sea beneath a cloudless sky—that sometimes they seemed almost too bright to be real, too full of life. Nothing like the icy blue Adrien was accustomed to seeing in his father’s eyes. Not distant like Nathalie's, nor as sharp as Chloé's.
This was Marinette blue.
There was no other name for it. And now, in those eyes, there was something almost painfully fragile.
“Are you okay, Adrien?” she said. “If you need anything… you know I'm here.”
The strained, awkward smile on Adrien's face softened into something gentler, more genuine. He hoped the gratitude he couldn't quite put into words—thank you for trying to understand me, for seeing me, for being my friend—might somehow reach her through his eyes.
“I'm fine, Marinette. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure everything was in order.” He lifted the papers in his hands as if to prove it. But, as he'd expected, relief didn't appear on Marinette's face. Her eyes lingered on his for a moment before retreating. There was something almost longing in her expression, as though she didn't know how to bridge the distance between them, and the uncertainty of it seemed to hurt her. And if he was the reason she was hurting, Adrien knew he would feel terrible.
“Don't worry, Adrien,” she said at last. “I'm sure everything will be fine.”
You're making the rest of us look lame.
Maybe the reason Adrien had frozen during that exchange was simply because he hadn't understood him. He wasn't sure what kind of reaction Rémi had been expecting from him, but Adrien suspected that, in the end, Rémi had been just as confused by him as Adrien had been by Rémi.
Because this whole time Adrien thought they were the ones making him look lame.
Whenever he saw them heading down the school steps, joking among themselves, playfully shoving one another, laughing loudly, sometimes even jumping onto each other’s backs as they wandered off together, that was how he felt.
Lame.
They were normal kids.
When Adrien had been younger, standing outside his father's office and begging Nathalie to let him speak to his father, he used to imagine that if his father would only let him go to school, perhaps one day he could become a normal kid like them.
But too much time had passed, and perhaps Adrien no longer remembered what the normal boy he'd once imagined becoming was supposed to be like. With his hands in his pockets and his back perfectly straight, he walked down the school steps feeling strangely detached, as though he were making his way through a sea of people who all belonged to the same indistinguishable whole.
As though he were invisible.
Because, despite what Rémi seemed to think—that every eye in the school was always on him—no one ever approached Adrien the way they approached Rémi.
Adrien considered himself lucky to have managed to become friends with Nino, Marinette, and Alya. Having people he could call his friends had always been something he'd dreamed of. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life listening to the wind chime, counting its gentle chimes with his eyes fixed on the door, waiting for someone to walk through it and reach out a hand to him.
And yet, despite their bright presence in his life, Adrien still felt as though he were trapped behind a pane of glass. He could see them. He could talk to them. But there was always a distance between them, a barrier he could never quite figure out how to cross.
Those kids had had friends since they were little. Some of them had known each other for as long as they could remember. That was their normal.
When someone talked to Rémi, they talked to him because they actually wanted to talk to him. Even when Cecilé broke up with him, she always came back because she loved him. Rémi's friends shared everything with one another.
No one usually looked at Adrien and saw someone worth getting to know. No one was willing to spend their time trying to find a way through that glass. To them, he wasn't interesting. He was an interesting object. Something that existed in their space, occasionally wandered into their lives, and then disappeared again, and during the time he was gone, they didn't think about him at all.
He was more of a brand than a person. When people looked at him as he climbed those stairs, they were just looking. And yet Rémi seemed to look at him with something almost like envy, as though every compliment, every word about his “perfection,” were some kind of privilege or gift.
But that perfection simply got boring real quick. Perhaps it made people uncomfortable. Perhaps it made him seem less human.
So everyone simply took a step back, walked around him, and carried on. And he continued, quietly playing the role he was always expected to play.
What, then, had he actually won that day? He had convinced his father to let him go to school. He had finally managed to leave the mansion. But had he really been naive enough, back then, to think that would solve all his problems?
He felt like a puppet with no say in how its limbs moved, yet when the order came, it was still him who had to expend the effort to move them as he was told.
It didn't feel fair that he had to burn his own energy just to maintain his prison.
That was the perfection.
The perfect posture. The perfect smile. The perfect son.
A prison he had to keep building himself, one movement at a time.
That was what he thought about as the small bruise on his arm faded, the purple giving way to an ugly shade of blue. Chat Noir was allowed to bleed. He was allowed to bruise. He was allowed to hurt. He was allowed to feel human. While Adrien Agreste was kept pristine, untouched, and utterly empty.
And perhaps no one had noticed the bruise, not because it was too small to see, but because no one had thought to look.
It was as though people cared about Adrien in fragments, but almost no one understood him as a whole person. That little girl cared about Chat Noir because, in her eyes, he was the hero who had saved her and her mother. Ladybug cared about her partner because, from the very first day, he had been the one unwavering presence beside her in the impossible situation they'd found themselves trapped in.
Nino cared about the friend who had sat beside him on his very first day of school, excitedly asking questions about what it was like to finally be there, the friend who, for all his courage in a mask, could never quite bring himself to stand up to his own father. Even the Gorilla cared about the little boy he'd first been entrusted with, a child who hadn't even reached his knees.
Adrien wasn't sure which of those versions of himself people cared about more.
Perhaps that was the problem.
Perhaps none of them had ever really met all of him, because even Adrien himself wasn't sure which version of him, all of him perhaps, to show to whom. As he was hiding different parts of himself to survive in this confusion, no one—not even himself—had ever met the whole person.
“She makes him look so lame.”
The sound of laughter came from the back of the classroom. Alix and Kim were sitting on top of the desks in the back row with three kids from the neighboring class, laughing as they watched something on Kim's phone. Adrien was busy suppressing a yawn, doing his best not to let on how little sleep he'd gotten after last night's akuma had managed to evade them for two hours.
“What are you watching?” Alya asked as she entered the classroom, Marinette following close behind. Unlike usual, Marinette's pigtails weren't even; they sat slightly crooked, and when her foot caught on the doorway, she stumbled into the room after Alya.
“A video from last night's akuma attack,” Alix said, leaning back against the desk behind her and looking over at Alya. “One of your followers got a great shot!”
“Oh,” Alya said, realizing what they were talking about. “A Chat Noir video?”
That caught Adrien's attention enough for him to turn his head toward them, though he said nothing. Usually, he didn't show much interest whenever his other identity came up. As Adrien, he had learned to keep a certain distance between himself and Chat Noir.
“Yeah,” Kim answered Alya, still laughing without taking his eyes off the phone. “God, look at him. He falls like a cartoon character.”
Hey, Adrien still wanted to say as he kept his quiet, that actually hurt, you know?
“Isn't it hilarious that Ladybug has a partner like that?” said the ponytailed girl from the neighboring class. She was sitting on the desk beside Kim, one leg crossed over the other. “He looks so lame next to her.”
“Hey, now,” Alya said, setting her bag down on the desk. “The guy's clearly doing his best. Ladybug being a perfect superhero is a different matter.”
Adrien felt foolish for how something as small as Alya acknowledging his effort could make warmth bloom inside his chest. It was just that… people usually laughed at Chat.
And, well, it was true that he found himself in some genuinely ridiculous situations. Besides, he liked making people laugh. If his alter ego could bring even a little happiness to people, then he was glad for it. After all, everything that belonged to Chat Noir—every mistake he made, every stupid thing he did—disappeared the moment the magic ring left his finger and the mask went with it.
All that remained was Adrien's flawless image, perfectly intact.
And yet, it still confused him.
If people kept their distance because Adrien was too perfect, if that perfection was what made them uninterested in getting to know him, then why was it that whenever Adrien finally had the chance to shed that exhausting image of perfection and allow himself to be openly vulnerable, people turned around and laughed at his vulnerability?
It seemed like he can’t win in either life.
Chat Noir was doing everything he could to protect this city, one way or another. He played the role he was supposed to play in their partnership, throwing himself in front of akuma attacks, being tossed around like a ragdoll, dying, having his very existence erased—
And at the end of the day, footage of it all would be uploaded to the internet accompanied by clown music.
Adrien still wasn't sure how he was supposed to feel about that.
If Adrien's image made him untouchable to people, turning his loneliness into a source of entertainment, then were Chat Noir's struggles destined to become entertainment for them, too?
Adrien's perfection made him seem less than human. Perhaps Chat Noir's anonymity did the same to him. People didn't seem to think about the boy beneath the mask—the teenager who went home at night and collapsed into bed with an aching back that even Ladybug's magic couldn't erase.
It seemed like people didn't actually see him in either mask.
If Adrien Agreste was a hollow brand, then Chat Noir was comic relief. And neither identity allowed him to just be a human being who hurt and wanted to be understood.
With everyone's voices reduced to little more than a dull hum in his ears, Adrien rested his head on his folded arms on the desk and waited for class to begin.
His Perfect Lady and Her Lame Partner.
Lying on his back, breathless, with the broken marble of the fountain digging into his ribs, the first thought that crossed his mind was, for some reason:
Oh, no. They're going to upload this to the Ladyblog with some stupid music again.
One of the things making it difficult to breathe was the weight of a human body lying across his chest, right over his lungs. The young woman placed her hands against Chat's chest and lifted her head, shaking it with a dazed, confused expression. Loose strands of hair had escaped her bun, tickling Chat's chin, but he stayed still, waiting for the akuma victim to come around.
Before Ladybug's magic could repair the fountain, however, he carefully caught her and helped her slide down through the broken marble, making sure she wouldn't notice how badly he'd been hurt. The fact that he couldn't see even a trace of his own pain reflected in her was, at least, a small comfort.
“Chat Noir?” the woman said, still bewildered. As Chat helped her to her feet, she struggled to keep her balance and gripped his black-clad arms tightly. “What—what happened?”
Then her eyes suddenly widened, and she let out a frightened gasp. Chat was used to that reaction. He immediately turned his arms and placed his hands gently on her shoulders, leaning down slightly to keep her from breaking eye contact.
“Hey, hey. It's okay, ma'am. Don't worry. Everything's all right. Just take a deep breath.”
“I… I didn't mean for this to happen. I was just so angry, and my boss—”
“Don't worry. It's okay,” Chat said quickly. “Don't think about it, all right? Just take a deep breath. You've been through something difficult. Everything's going to be okay.”
The woman nodded tiredly, then leaned forward as though she no longer knew what to do with herself, resting her forehead against his black-clad chest. Chat gently rubbed her back, making sure she was beginning to calm down, while a medical team finally arrived and waited patiently for him to hand her over so they could check her blood pressure, pulse, and overall condition.
At last, he carefully passed the woman into the medics' waiting arms. The young medic, a woman with short, curly red hair, gave him a nod.
“Thank you, Chat Noir.”
Chat merely returned her nod with the same quiet respect before turning away. He stretched, cautiously testing his body as he checked whether Ladybug's magic had truly taken away all the pain.
A moment later, Ladybug descended from the sky in a blur of red and landed beside him.
“Good work, Chaton. And thank you for catching the akuma victim in midair. If you hadn't… Of course, the magic would've fixed everything, but we never would have wanted that to happen in the first place.”
Ladybug's eyes were still on the fountain where she and the victim had landed, its waters now running crystal clear as though nothing had ever happened. Finally, she turned toward Chat, a tired but genuine smile touching her lips.
“And for staying behind to look after her, too.”
“This cat was just doing his job,” Chat said with his usual grin, pointing his thumb at his chest.
But Ladybug didn't respond playfully as she usually did. She didn't roll her eyes or tease him. She simply placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
“You do so much more than that, Chaton,” she said sincerely. “Sometimes I… sometimes I lose myself. I get so focused on the battle, on winning, that I forget to see the person behind the akuma.”
“Hey, Ladybug.” Chat understood the seriousness in her voice. He stepped closer and placed his own hand on her shoulder.
“You already have enough on your shoulders. Let me worry about that part.”
But Ladybug was looking at him strangely.
Her eyes are so blue, Chat thought.
It was an entirely automatic thought, with almost nothing romantic behind it. Their color was simply so striking. So captivating.
“You really are the heart of this team, Chat,” she said at last. “I don't know what I'd do without you. I don't always show it.” She gestured toward the city with one hand. “We don't always show it. But we're… we're so lucky to have you.”
Chat simply stared at her, unsure what to say.
Sure, Ladybug occasionally reminded him that he was a good partner when he felt inadequate, or when he allowed himself to be vulnerable. But there had always been a certain distance between them, and Chat had usually assumed she only said those things because she wanted to make him feel better.
He hadn't expected something this open. Something this heartfelt.
“Uh… thank you, Ladybug.”
What he really wanted to say was that he was happy he could help people. That he liked knowing there was someone there to hold their hands when they were frightened. That he liked making sure they knew they weren't alone.
It was perhaps the most horrible feeling he could imagine, and if he could help it, he wasn't going to let anyone else experience it.
But he couldn't say any of that.
So he settled for a thank you.
Ladybug merely nodded, letting the rare moment of sincerity come to an end as she reached for the yoyo at her waist. For a moment, Chat wanted to reach for her again.
If you need anything… you know I'm here.
Blue.
Of course. Blue.
Ladybug wasn't Marinette. She didn't have the warmth Marinette showed Adrien, nor that delicate light that appeared in her eyes whenever she looked at him. But Chat knew he could always trust her.
“Ladybug.”
He couldn't stop himself. Ladybug's hand paused over her yoyo, and she turned back toward him with a curious look. Chat knew that being Ladybug didn't mean the same thing to her as being Chat Noir meant to Adrien. Their experiences with fame and anonymity were fundamentally different. Ladybug's fame disappeared along with her mask. The mask was what made her famous, and she could shed it whenever she wanted and return to her ordinary life. For Adrien, Chat Noir meant true anonymity. It was difficult for the two of them to ever meet in the middle, to compare their experiences.
But maybe everything didn't have to make perfect sense.
Wasn't that what friendship was?
Sometimes, wasn't it simply about choosing someone who was so completely different from you?
So, for once, could Adrien ask for something?
For himself.
Without a reason. Without some logical explanation to disguise the fact that he simply wanted something.
“Do you want to stay… for a moment?” The moment the words left his mouth, he saw the questioning look in Ladybug's eyes and immediately threw his hands up, stumbling over himself as he realized how that might sound considering their past conversations.
“Not like flirting! Just to… hang out? As… friends? I just—” Don’t want to be alone.
Ladybug looked at him for a moment.
Her answer wouldn't hurt him, he realized with some surprise. The important thing was that he had asked. He had wanted something—for himself—and, for once, he had allowed himself to say so. He had admitted that he didn't want to be alone and trusted someone enough to ask them to stay.
It was a small step.
But it was still a step.
Because, oh, how he wanted to connect. To have friends. To let his shoulders sag for a moment, to look down at his feet, to be childish for as long as he wanted. Not only in the privacy of his room, where no one could see him, but in front of someone else, too. To let himself be vulnerable and trust that they wouldn't leave simply because they finally saw him that way.
Then, despite the exhaustion in her eyes, a smile slowly appeared on her face. She turned fully toward him, placing her hands on her hips.
“Sure. How about we get coffee and meet at the top of the Panthéon? I need coffee so badly!”
She groaned dramatically, and Chat laughed. He could feel the glass wall between them thinning. For the first time in a long while, it felt as though a weight had been lifted from his soul. They were going to drink coffee together.
Just two friends.
Tired, but together.
“My treat.”
Nino's books covered half the table they'd divided between them, and Alya was constantly typing something on her open laptop, the soft tap-tap of the keyboard filling the space between them. Morning sunlight streamed through the library's wide windows, falling directly across Adrien's notes and making them difficult to read. And yet, despite all of it, Adrien realized he didn't want to be anywhere else.
There was a strange lightness in his body, one he hadn't noticed until now. The bruise on the inside of his arm, where it rested against the table, had almost completely faded. It was barely visible anymore. Not just to other people. To him, too.
His thoughts were interrupted by the rustle of a paper bag entering his field of vision. His eyes followed the hand holding it, then the arm, and finally the face attached to it.
Blue.
Marinette set the bag down and tossed her backpack beside her chair before shrugging off her jacket.
“What's that, girl?” Alya asked. Marinette hung her jacket over the back of her chair, then reached into the paper bag. A wonderfully familiar smell reached Adrien's nose then. And he remembered where he knew the logo from.
Two paper cups hanging between two pairs of dangling legs from a rooftop.
“Coffee,” Marinette announced brightly. She read the scribbled order on the first cup and decided it belonged to Alya, handing it to her. Nino barely lifted his head from his book as Marinette passed him his, mumbling a distracted thank-you.
And finally, Marinette turned to him.
Something in the smile she gave him made Adrien suddenly aware of the burning behind his eyes. He blinked quickly as he accepted the paper cup from her.
“Thank you, Marinette.”
She smiled at him with that same warmth.
The sunlight streaming through the windows caught her eyes, bringing out their blue until they looked almost luminous—like sunlight glittering across the sea on a beautiful summer morning.
“No problem. I just remembered that, there’s nothing better than a coffee shared with friends,” she said, never taking her eyes off Adrien's green ones.
Green and blue.
They suited each other so beautifully—two colors that carried the same beauty of spring and summer, each revealing it in their own way.
“Yeah,” Adrien mumbled, finally breaking eye contact as he turned back toward his notes and took a sip of the warm liquid. The taste was exactly as he remembered it.
For some reason, that surprised him.
“You're going to be late, you know?” Plagg whispered from inside Adrien's jacket pocket. “Then that cold robot-like woman is going to tell your father, and he's going to give us an earful.”
“First of all,” Adrien whispered back, covering his mouth and pretending to cough so no one would notice him talking to himself, “if anyone's getting an earful, it's me, not you. And besides…”
He cut himself off as he moved between the shelves, searching for what he'd come for without attracting anyone's attention. He waited until he was sure no one was nearby before crouching down and rummaging through the bottom shelf.
“…it'll only take five minutes. Then I'll go to my piano lesson. It has to be somewhere around here…”
He muttered to himself as he scanned the numbers on the comics shelf, most of them arranged in a confusing jumble.
“There!”
His voice came out a little louder than he'd intended, excitement getting the better of him when he finally spotted what he'd been looking for. If anyone looked at him, he didn't care. He'd been coming to this little bookstore whenever he had piano lessons on this side of the city, and this time he was hopin that he'd get lucky and find the old comic book issue Nino had been searching for forever.
And today, he had.
Hah.
Maybe his luck was finally turning around.
He straightened, clutching the comic, and started toward the register. If he hurried, he might only be three or four minutes late for his lesson. Then something caught his eye. He stopped dead.
“Adrien?” Plagg's voice came from his pocket. “Why aren't you moving? We're going to be late. Hey, what are you looking at?”
Adrien didn't answer. He took two steps toward another shelf, his attention fixed on the middle of the new releases. His hand reached out.
That Ladybug comic.
But this new issue had someone very familiar on its cover.
Ladybug stood at the front, yoyo poised and ready to fly, wearing her usual confident smile as she prepared to face whatever villain came next. She looked exactly like the hero she was. But right behind her stood a figure dressed in black, blond hair catching the sunlight, green eyes bright beneath the mask.
TALES OF LADYBUG: PARIS' GREATEST HERO
Featuring Ladybug's Loyal Partner, Chat Noir
Just a guest appearance.
But that was something, wasn't it? Adrien couldn't stop the stupid smile spreading across his face.
“Huh. Look at that,” Plagg said, poking his head out of the jacket to look at the cover. “It was about time.”
Adrien tucked the comic beneath the one he'd come to buy for Nino and headed toward the register.
“Hey,” Plagg added, “maybe if we run into that little girl again, you can sign this one for her.”
It was Friday afternoon, and Adrien was sitting at his desk with his schoolwork already finished, hours before the sun would even begin to set. He leaned his head back against his chair and looked around his room with a sigh of boredom. Plagg was somewhere behind him, tucked away in his usual corner, doing whatever it was he did when he wasn't eating cheese or complaining.
Adrien's eyes wandered from one object to another. Everything was the same. And yet, somehow, everything looked a little different. The room no longer suffocated him.
His eyes settled on the comic book resting carefully on the shelf beside him, still in its plastic bag. He pushed his chair back and stood. His feet carried him toward the shelf, and for a moment he simply stared at the cover.
At his own face.
Chat Noir was grinning back at him with absolute confidence. He looked so free. So confident. So strong.
Is that how they see me?
No matter how lonely, frightened, and trapped Adrien sometimes felt—no matter how much he felt like a boy locked inside a golden cage—someone had looked at his alter ego and drawn him like this. And it wasn't an illusion. It wasn't a lie. That person on the cover was him.
Behind the mask, beneath the costume, with the power of the ring at his fingertips, it was still Adrien. A person he sometimes was. A person he could always choose to be, if he wanted.
He wasn't just the lonely boy who had to sit in this room and count the chimes of a wind chime while waiting for the hours to pass.
He had a partner.
Friends.
Plagg.
And freedom at his fingertips.
Maybe everything was still the same. But somehow, everything was different now. His mother had hung that wind chime there once to keep his loneliness company. But Adrien no longer had to be that lonely little boy.
The wind chime chimed again.
The window was open.
For once, the sound didn't mean that he was waiting. It meant he could leave. The door wouldn't open to his mother's wheelchair anymore. She wouldn't come in to check on him. She was gone, but Adrien was still here, trapped inside.
Now the wind chime chimed because the window was open.
And that was freedom.
He wasn't alone.
Not alone.
He could go wherever he wanted. He could do whatever he wanted. And, perhaps most importantly, he could choose.
Adrien straightened and turned toward Plagg.
“Hey, Plagg.”
The kwami lifted his head from where he was buried beneath a soft blanket, grumbling at the interruption. The familiar sight made a smile spread across Adrien's face. A real one.
“You know…” he murmured, walking toward him, “I think Astrocat could make it to Orne and back in an hour.”
“Huh?” Plagg pushed himself out of the blanket and floated in the air, looking thoroughly confused. “Why is Astrocat going to Orne?”
“If you're willing to make the trip…” Because Adrien had made himself a promise. Whenever there was no danger involved, he would give Plagg a choice. He wouldn't make decisions for him just because he could. He would never abuse his power over Plagg. He would never make decisions for him, like his thoughts, and feelings didn’t matter. This was a partnership. And it was all Adrien ever wanted. “…wanna get that Camembert you liked so much?”
Plagg's eyes widened.
“Oh, rebellion!” he declared, his green eyes gleaming almost dangerously as a wide grin spread across his face, one that would have looked downright creepy to anyone but Adrien. “Boy, I would give you two transformations for that Camembert.”
Adrien couldn't help laughing.
“Let's go.”