ANOTHER WEEK, YET ANOTHER PATROL.

Paris sprawled out before Ladybug like a carpet of tan and ivory, taller buildings closer to the city centre casting dark silhouettes against the night sky. The first Friday after Adrien's disaster birthday party, she'd taken Vesperia with her.

The second Friday, days after she met with Heloise and started recruiting Miraculous investigators, her patrol partner was King Monkey.

Last Friday, it was thankfully Rena Rouge, to whom Ladybug could vent her confusion and frustration about Chat Noir going away and sending a buttoned-up pretty boy in his stead.

This Friday should have been him. It should have been the first time they saw each other since they turned Hawk Moth over to the authorities together.

A month.

Nearly a month since anyone had heard from Chat Noir. Ladybug had resorted to asking Alya whether anyone had turned any footage or reports into the Ladyblog. Was this what their communication had come to? She had to consult a civilian blog for updates on her partner?

But the bulk of the content was now dedicated to the trial of Hawk Moth and ostensibly Mayura, which was considered the greatest victory of the superheroes of Paris. Ladybug was certain the city could not handle their beloved chaton's absence well, considering the state of everything else—the protracted investigation, and the worsening protests at Le Grand Paris.

Now more than ever, the superheroes needed to present a united front.

To cover up Chat Noir's disappearance, she'd been waxing inspirational to the media, emphasising the importance of specialised and diversified teams.

Reporters were desperate to have the inside word on the Agreste case, and Alya also helped to propagate Ladybug's messages—which planted the implicit idea that Chat Noir might have a special investigatory role that sucked up all his spare time. The public might not see him for a while, not on patrols nor on social media, and that was completely fine.

He was fine.

Tonight, Ladybug could either call on Cat Walker—which was the last thing she wanted to do—or skip down the roster to the next person in line.

Viperion.

Luka Couffaine was one of the most competent and dedicated superheroes on the team. He never failed a job—or maybe Ladybug only believed that because he'd never let himself fail at a job. Either way, in the intuitive way that people couldn't teach, the boy was smart. Probably too smart for her own good.

Case in point: the probing edge in his voice four seconds after they set out.

"Haven't seen Chat Noir for a while. What about you?" His sea-foam eyes held the tiniest hint of scrutiny.

"Oh," she huffed lightly, carefree. "Chat Noir's crazy busy. I gave him one of the hardest jobs in the investigation, so he's going light on the patrols and media appearances."

"You don't have to lie to me, Ladybug," Viperion murmured, voice soft and low. See? Intuitive.

Damn it.

She turned her head as they jogged atop a line of connected apartment buildings. Inquisitive eyes made her shrink with discomfort. "What? I'm not lying. Chat Noir is fine."

The row of apartments ended well before the wide pavement at the upcoming intersection in the street, and Ladybug sought out a street lamp with which to anchor her yo-yo. Under the guise of building momentum for her leap, she averted her eyes and sprinted in front of Viperion.

The boy was silent behind her for a few beats too long. When she looked back, he shrugged. "Okay. If you say so."

Clearing the intersection, chilly night air slipping past their superhero suits, Ladybug resumed the conversation. "Of course he's fine. Why wouldn't he be?"

The bite to her voice must have made Viperion retreat. The next moment he was all softness and acquiescence. "No reason. I'm sure that he's working really hard at the job you gave him."

God. Even to her, it sounded phoney.

After that night's patrol ended and Luka returned his Miraculous to her, Ladybug stayed behind. She had held off on leaving voice messages, in case Cat Walker still had the Black Cat Miraculous. Sure, he was perfect on paper, but he wasn't allowed to hear what was meant for her kitty's ears only.

Curiosity was stronger than privacy now.

Her willpower was steadily crumbling with each day with no Chat Noir sightings and each patrol that was with someone that wasn't him. She paced nervously on the rooftop of her and Chat Noir's rendezvous point, Bug Phone pressed to her ear.

"Has the cat got your tongue? Leave a message."

"This is a message for Chat Noir," she began, lest Cat Walker was at the other end of the line. "When are you returning to work? As you know, the superheroes of Paris have important tasks to carry out in the Agreste investigation."

She spoke quietly, cautious as ever of being overheard. "I was hoping to include you, but that can't happen until you come back. Whenever you're ready, you know where to find me. Friday patrols, the usual spot. Bug out."

Ladybug snapped her Bug Phone closed and swung away.

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Fame was a beautiful monster.

Adrien knew it well. Ever since his first runways and red carpets, fame had latched on and started leeching. The times he'd tried to escape—declining interviews, deactivating his social media, running from his fans—the teeth came out. Why did he run from the cameras? Why was he so ungrateful? Did he not expect this as part of his responsibilities?

Fame is so beautiful, why do you shun it, spoilt boy?

This monster was what he had signed up for, apparently, at an age when he didn't even have a signature.

"Do not engage with them, Adrien," Roger told him through the phone.

The man had graduated from his field work days, but he was calling Adrien in a weird supervisory capacity. It felt like being checked up on, especially since he had no obligations to: he was working with the corporate crime division, and he wasn't even one of the officers stationed outside Le Grand.

Roger tried to keep his voice nonchalant, but the fact he was calling in the first place revealed the truth. Things were getting bad.

Adrien's fans were still down there—had been for the entire weekend.

Fans that claimed to love him and support him, fans that then tried to hack into his private documents, fans that spouted false rumours about him as gossip and proclaimed how well they knew Adrien and how much they loved what they 'knew'.

If they knew the real him, would they love him as much?

The situation was worsening. At first the protests had just been clashes between tabloids and his fans, but now other factions with other agendas had turned the sprawling avenue into a hotbed of turmoil. The reporters had turned into spectators again, funnelling the developing events straight to Adrien's newsfeed.

Adrien ‌tried not to read about himself on the internet.

He'd long learnt to ignore the fame, following him like his own shadow, otherwise the darkness would be all he ever concentrated on. But this time, he had to pay attention. It was his fans down there. He felt responsible.

"The institutionalists will settle, eventually," Roger continued. "The legalists have been complaining about inequalities in the court system for months now. You are just a catalyst."

The institutionalists were people that were convinced that Adrien was at least—if not wholly guilty of aiding his father—a suspect in the investigation, and therefore should be in prison like the two others. With Adrien's blatant lack of alibis, the Peacock Miraculous still missing, and finally a face to Hawk Moth, the institutionalists thought the risk was too great.

The legalists were neither here nor there on Adrien's innocence, but despised the fact a person of interest got a five-star hotel suite instead of public housing—while other suspects got remanded without bail. It was such a white, blond, heterosexual thing to do. It reeked of privilege, and so they protested the system, not the person.

Another glass bottle smashed against the stone brickwork of Le Grand.

The sudden crunch drifted into his suite on a breeze from the window. Over the last few days, chased inside from his study spot, Adrien had learned to keep it open for fresh air but draw the netted curtains. No-one could see inside, so the mob of people on the street didn't know which room specifically he lived in.

But they knew he was here, somewhere. The voices below all clamoured to be heard until they mixed together. He caught rising snippets like dandelion seeds.

"Lock him up!"

"No prejudice!"

"Adrien is innocent!"

No-one wanted him at the hotel. His fans called for his privacy in the same breath that they stole it. The institutionalists didn't trust him so close to the city centre. The legalists didn't think he deserved velvet cushions and a mini-fridge.

"Wouldn't it solve everything if I just moved?" Adrien wondered, cheek sticking to his iPhone screen. "Can't you put me in a quieter neighbourhood?"

"What are you talking about, kid?" Roger scoffed. "It's already a hassle to escort you to and from meetings. You're about as close to Heloise and the other departments as you can get. We don't want you to move further away. Plus, if anything ever happened, Le Grand is one of the safest places to be."

It was hard not to think of the broken glass and wet splotch on the concrete somewhere outside his room. They were closer than it seemed.

"What about you? Do you think anything will happen to me?"

If the protestors tried to storm the hotel or remove Adrien by force—not that the police barricade would allow them—he could handle himself.

He was more worried about the civilians, all of them passionate for different reasons, hurting each other in the search for their version of justice. Far outside the limits of the protest, waiting to treat bruises and scrapes, the ambulance service had set up a small camp for the week.

"Not if they aren't stupid. Don't go down there. Don't even think about it. I don't want you mauled by zealots or filmed saying anything that could be misconstrued." Roger leaned away from his phone to bark at someone, "I said print double-sided— and the officers will not suppress the protestors. I know this city. Hawk Moth terrorised us for four years and no-one has been able to heal, to vent, to claim justice. Now that your dad is powerless and in prison, people are looking for targets."

"And I'm the closest target."

"Well . . . kinda. People are angry. People are afraid. They're in pain. They just need to feel heard in that regard, and then they will go home. Cracking down would not sit well. The public would view it as brutality."

"So be quiet and look pretty?" Adrien had so much experience doing that. "Got it."

"Make sure the printer doesn't flip it weirdly! Thanks, Adrien," Roger said, sounding scattered. "I'm sure this will all blow over within the week."

Adrien knew better than anyone how deeply Hawk Moth had hurt the city. That type of grief and injustice could simmer for years.

So he couldn't help the quiet remark that followed Roger's well-intended consolation: "That makes one of us."

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The investigation was wearing on Ladybug's nerves.

No. Correction. If her nerves were twine, the investigation was the load, but Chat Noir was the one fraying them at lightning speed.

She was the Guardian, the person monitoring all the other superheroes in Paris, thus everything they were monitoring—which spanned from international crime syndicates to urban terrorism to the minutiae of Nathalie Sancoeur's employment history. In short, a shit ton.

The next Friday, Ladybug patrolled with Pegasus, who was full of updates about his work for the investigation.

She knew him outside the mask—Max Kanté, a programming prodigy who loved computers more than people. Pegasus had written an algorithm for searching the CCTV footage records. It used image recognition and a convolutional neural network—whatever the hell that was—to recognise public sightings of Hawk Moth and Mayura and classify them in a user-friendly database.

Sifting through the records was supposed to take at least another month, but Pegasus had run his code and the database was waiting for Ladybug to peruse.

So many websites had shed harsh light on the fact that Adrien was seldom at the site of any akumatisations. For a boy with such proximity to some of the most frequent akuma victims, it was admittedly suspicious that he was missing from video footage and oral reports.

But when she saw the idiotic reasons people wanted Adrien in jail, she got a headache.

Gabriel and Nathalie were in prison for verified crimes. Authorities had enough evidence, despite the silent game they played to prevent making more evidence (either barred from speaking to interrogators by their lawyers, or just smart enough to know that nothing they said would look good).

One had the Butterfly Miraculous‌ personally ripped off of him by Ladybug—even the milder defendant, Nathalie, was racking up tax fraud and money laundering schemes, identity fraud with the passport scandal that outed her, as well as evasion of justice when she tried to flee the country.

The next step was to get a Mayura confession out of Nathalie. With no footage or eye-witness accounts, the prosecution couldn't prove that these two women were the same—even if the entire city thought the same thing. Ladybug was an investigator. She had to be a paragon of justice and fair trial. No verdict without evidence.

The same principle went for Nathalie Sancoeur as for Adrien Agreste, but the conclusions were not the same. How could the protestors take such an unfounded leap?

Heloise's office couldn't give input either way—supposedly being neutral, remaining above the fickle tides of public gossip—until the pretrial hearing, but Ladybug had used Alya's interview logs and Pegasus' database of footage to verify it for herself. The clips of Adrien were so infrequent. Most of them showed him running out of sight, to God knew where.

Her nape prickled whenever she considered that the protestors might be right. Was Adrien an accomplice?

He has no alibi.

She would have to ask him about him in the next interview.

"—and then I got bored," Pegasus was saying, talking as fast as they were speeding around the city. "I started thinking about how much you have to configure when you talk to all of us. Currently, you rely on word of mouth and blind faith that we'll wait at the specified meeting points."

"Yup. Good ol' blind faith."

"Wouldn't it be easier if you could contact our civilian phones without comprising our identities?"

So then he explained—in great detail and with an enthusiasm that Ladybug couldn't, wouldn't squash—about the Miraculous chat app he was designing. She nodded and oohed and aahed.

He'd feed all the heroes' IP addresses to a remote server, and messages would be encrypted. Only the intended Miraculous wielder could understand the text with a login and decryption key that Ladybug would hand-deliver to them.

So long as each wielder took care to use the app in private, Pegasus couldn't know who was using the app, and neither would anyone else.

"What should I call it?" he wondered. This seemed to be his most pressing concern, all code-related issues negligible. "Miraculous Messages? Mira-Message? MM, for short."

Pegasus was so talkative that he didn't ask about Chat Noir at all, not once, unlike Viperion had, which made Ladybug feel terrible because that stupid kitty was the only thought she could hold the entire time. No offence to Pegasus, and his magnificent brain.

It was just, this hiatus was so unlike Chat Noir.

Yes, everyone was shocked at Gabriel Agreste's machinations. Yes, patrols had quietened considerably since Hawk Moth was taken prisoner. But the heroes' work was far from done just because they'd beaten the villain.

The Agreste investigation was a colossal project on its own. Brainwashing, assault, theft, money laundering, destruction of property, conspiracy, terrorism—the sheer amount of resources needed just to convict one of those charges. . .

She had hoped that these nightly patrols with Chat Noir would be a time that she didn't have to work—they could talk and banter and make silly little games up between themselves—but the universe had to shit on this parade, too.

He had never replied to her first voicemail.

He usually communicated better than this.

"Hi, Chat Noir. I hope you are safe and doing well," Ladybug said, pacing back and forth at their special spot. "Maybe you're on a deserted island with no internet and no postage and no birds that you could train to carry messages, and therefore that is why there's been no communication. In that case, it sounds like a great alpine vacation."

She stopped trying to be delicate in her language. Cat Walker could hear it and have his sensibilities offended, if he was so inclined. Whatever.

"Please have fun, get some fresh air, and don't feel any rush to return to Paris," she continued, trying and failing to keep the exasperation from her voice. "Or me, or the team. Ya know. The ones who are trying to bring justice to the world's worst supervillain? See you soon. Maybe. Maybe not."

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A / N :

OMG I've been seeing the season 4 ending everywhere and ahhasjgdalsdahsk I need to watch it. A double update this week! As always, love hearing your thoughts. x

Aimee