LADYBUG TURNED HER LAPTOP AROUND to display a picture of the grimoire, laid on a metal table with an evidence tag below.

"This was in his safe, wasn't it? Have you seen this before?"

Adrien shifted in his seat, a knot forming in his stomach. He had been the one to hand Ladybug this spellbook, disguised as Cat Walker. He'd been the one to whisk it away from the mansion the night of Hawk Moth's arrest.

And years ago, he had discovered it in his father's possession. Ladybug herself had posited that Hawk Moth was Gabriel Agreste, but he'd looked for the first opportunity to dismiss the theory. He'd buried his head in the sand like a coward.

"I've seen it before. First time, I was fourteen. My dad said he found it on a trip to Asia with my mother. He said it was for artistic inspiration."

"Do you know where in Asia?"

"Tibet. The mountains. They went on a trek."

Ladybug nodded, folding her hands across her lap. At the last minute, she untangled her fingers and pressed them into the upholstered sides of the ottoman. "You know, around that time, I had a theory about who Hawk Moth was and it turned out to be right," she said. In a lower voice, "I still kick myself for not asking the hard questions that I should have."

Her expression was indecipherable.

Ladybug's features were relaxed in the manner of someone awaiting an answer they were owed—someone with enough time and power and security to feel safe. Adrien had no such luxuries. In her eyes was curiosity, suspicion that she tried to hide, and the same guilt that slowly squeezed his breath out of his lungs.

They had both been so close to outing Gabriel years ago. Both of them had failed.

She would not let herself fail again.

Adrien shrugged in a calculated show of nonchalance—innocent people did not fidget—and spread his hands. "Ask me. I know you want to." His palms landed on each knee, and he forced them to keep still.

Ladybug's eyebrows darted up. "You know what the protesters are saying about you. You're hiding the Peacock Miraculous or you're in cahoots with your father. But this will all go away if you have an alibi. Where do you go?" She cleared her throat. "Where do you go when you disappear from the camera records?"

He had to lie. Pre-shitstorm, Adrien had wanted desperately to spend time with Ladybug, to earn her trust, to eventually reveal their identities. Now, he wanted to take his identity to his grave.

Even if he could have bridged the growing distance in their relationship, Adrien couldn't change who his father was. Ladybug was an investigator. She was a harder woman because of all that she had seen, radiating a type of unwavering determination that told Adrien if he so much as appeared to have any secrets, she would come for them with a pickaxe and an apology.

If she found out, the conflict of interest alone would rip his Miraculous, and Plagg, away from him.

Hawk Moth stood between them before, and now it seemed he would always stand between them.

So, the only way forward was to lie. Pretend he had no secrets. Be vacuous and open and charming, showing Ladybug into the attics and basements of his life while hiding the trapdoors and vaults.

"Just, places. I guess. Whenever there's danger, I can't sit still. It doesn't feel right to let bad things happen and not try to stop them. Sometimes I go to call for help, or bring others to safety, or try to find a way to stop the trouble."

"And, coincidentally, you are never caught on camera doing any of these acts?"

"Coincidentally," he chuckled. Ladybug didn't react.

"Adrien, I think you know more than you're telling me." He stiffened on the couch before his restraint could stop it. "If you have anything you want to say, you can tell me. Don't be afraid. You won't be punished for being honest, and the courts always view honesty positively."

"What are you suggesting?"

"I mean. . . I can understand if you wanted to protect your father." The way she peered at him with those wide, midnight blue eyes—it was dangerous. "It's natural to want to love a good person. Even if it means telling yourself the person you love is good."

The soft-hearted always wanted to fall at her feet, and keeping his secrets felt like walking a tightrope with weights tied to his ankles. Ladybug didn't have a manipulative bone in her body, which is what made her such a weapon.

But Adrien knew she was pretending as much as he was. The way she spoke to Chat Noir in her voicemails was entirely different. "When are you returning to work?" said impatiently. "Don't feel any rush to return to Paris. Or me, or the team," as a scathing quip.

Knowing her barbed side made things easier. The messages Ladybug left for Chat Noir were the stinging antidote to whatever she said to Adrien Agreste—all honey and buttering-up, a sweeter, more insidious form of interrogating. But an interrogation all the same.

His eyes darted to the Bug Phone on the coffee table, propped in an L-shape to film his face and posture and record his every word simultaneously. Be careful.

"I know that," Adrien answered firmly. He leaked some of his genuine pain into his voice. "Maybe on a subconscious level, I overlooked all the clues. You won't blame me for wanting my father to be a heroic figure. Every little boy does."

Adrien intended this as a statement, but still fell silent until Ladybug nodded, graceful features pinched with encouragement.

"But consciously, I didn't know," he finished. "I wasn't sneaking off to help my father, or sabotage you and Chat Noir, or pinpoint his next victims for him."

"You never had a suspicion? None at all?"

"No."

"And you maintain that you are only trying to help others when you disappear from the CCTV records? Every time?"

He shrugged, trying not to fidget under her blazing stare. "Yep."

"If more evidence comes to light later that you are lying, Adrien, it's going to reflect‌ poorly on you. I don't want that."

"I know."

"My hands will be tied if you're found to have lied to the authorities," she warned.

He stayed quiet. His hands were tied tighter than hers could ever be.

Ladybug sighed deeply, shoulders sinking down. "Alright. Thank you, Adrien. Interview completed."

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Adrien took another sip of vodka from his mug, sinking lower against the couch cushions.

The bottle from last night still had a third of its contents. There was a growing stack of empty bottles under the coffee table, and he hardly believed all that alcohol had entered his body in the last handful of weeks.

On the wall-mounted TV screen, interspersed with footage of the protests and sport and weather, today's news recap played.

"Where's Chat Noir?" Clara Contard asked, outside the men's prison where his father was in pretrial detention.

The reporter was on the heels of a recent interrogation effort by Viperion and Purple Tigress, but Gabriel had remained silent till the end. Ladybug was here to collect their Miraculous.

"You've sent quite a few of your Miraculous team to help with different parts of the investigative process recently. Are you two at odds with each other?"

"Of course not!" Ladybug released a breathy laugh, facing the cameraperson. "It's just that, um, he's a partner like any other. The most important thing is to pick the best superheroes for each mission, with or without Chat Noir. No matter what, we'll always be here to protect Paris."

Adrien sighed, turned off the TV, and replaced the screen with another. His phone.

His kwami hovered by his shoulder. "Have you called her back?"

Adrien's silence was answer aplenty.

Plagg's tiny nose wrinkled up. Something about the alcohol offending his feline senses. He'd said once it smelled like poison. Adrien had replied that medicine wasn't supposed to taste or smell good.

There was nothing to do in this hotel room. His days were punctuated by the three meals that were delivered to his door, filled with contrived conversations with friends and pre-recorded lectures, and then capped by the yawning abyss of a sleepless night.

He didn't like vodka, either, he wanted to tell Plagg.

But it was his riverboat across the Styx, back to the land of the living, for another dawn.

"You need to reply to her messages. You're not being a good partner right now."

"Agree to disagree," he mumbled, stomach tossing hot waves against his lungs. "I haven't flaked on my responsibilities as Chat Noir. I searched the mansion for the Peacock Miraculous, and I even re—" he hiccuped, "—returned the grimoire to her, remember? Cat Walker. Good ol' him. Job well done, all things considered."

Then he realised. His stare focused on the iPhone. He'd instinctually opened his Ladybug photo album and her smile leapt for his throat.

A selfie of them at the pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower, snapped as she hung upside down from her yo-yo. Her eyes glinted with mischief and happiness, revealing that playful side of her which only emerged when it was safe. The software that threw anniversarial memories at his face told him‌ that the picture was exactly three years ago.

In the first few months that they worked together, back when Adrien was fourteen, Ladybug had been overly self-conscious and hard-working, thinking herself undeserving of the Ladybug Miraculous. She never let herself be. He had worked very hard to be able to joke and play with his Lady. He showed her how to have fun while staying accountable.

Adrien stopped on another picture of them at their spot. He'd been such a poser back then, such a model, propping the phone up against the stone ledge, setting the timer, demanding they retake the photograph when it returned out of focus.

Ladybug had laughed, surprised at his superficial perfectionism, and that sound—her laugh—was his favourite in the world, and Chat Noir had been happy. In the end, despite all his do-overs, the blurry images of her laughing had become his favourites.

But that was years ago. Maybe there had been a time that Ladybug did consider Chat Noir more than a partner, but it was obviously not the case anymore.

A partner like any other.

If Chat Noir had the words and the understanding to explain what had happened to him—enough to answer Ladybug's questions, not enough to give him away—he would have called her back or replied.

But his face was on prime-time news every night. It was his family and his childhood being splayed out for everyone's viewing pleasure. It was Ladybug collecting his secrets like antique coins, for spending instead of preserving. Given how close she was already, could she figure Chat Noir out with a simple slip of the tongue?

Whoever she was, was she paying attention?

Would explaining anything ruin him?

Why did he have to explain, anyway?

She never called out of care for him. Adrien was foolish for thinking her first response might be concern instead of professional disappointment.

Plagg yowled and swatted Adrien's ear with his claw. "How long is this going to last?"

Fuck knows.

If his father had taught him anything—and he didn't like to admit that Gabriel had left fingerprints on his soul and words in his head, but he had—it was that people could put a mask on and become something completely different. Love was nothing in the face of brutal reality, and the brutal reality was: this would never work.

Him and his Lady. Chat Noir and Ladybug.

He didn't want to keep getting rejected. He couldn't fake things around Ladybug, the person with whom he used to share his soul and not his face—now she had his face and cared for none of his soul. She would take his Miraculous if she knew. If he couldn't control his emotions, he would be discovered, and he wouldn't take the bet that he could.

Chat Noir would be a book splayed open to the messiest part of the story, and Ladybug would be a blank page. She would be impenetrable, and he didn't have it in him to go crawling after another person's love when they didn't want to give it, on bleeding hands and bruised knees. Again.

Just like he did for Gabriel.

It was pathetic to beg. It was pathetic to drown his pain in alcohol and stay in the hotel like a well-trained hamster with its water canister. It was pathetic to avoid a woman who had never asked to be fallen in love with. His feelings, his fantasies, were never her burden to carry. They never had been.

And then he decided.

It should have been the decision that destroyed him, the one he never thought he'd choose, the one that shook his brain so hard he saw stars. Instead, it clicked into place like the last piece of rubble from a demolished building. There was nothing more painful than what had already happened to him, so this was a mere puff of dust, a quiet final thud.

Adrien felt deep conviction. It was time to get over Ladybug.

"I've been acting so pathetic."

"That is what I've been saying!" Plagg growled, angrily batting the vodka bottle from his hands. Adrien would have worried about wetting the rug, had he not poured the rest of it into his mug seconds ago. It fell onto the carpet, didn't smash, and rolled forlornly underneath the couch. "You can do better than this!"

"Really? What can I do?" he challenged. "I can't leave. I can't even open the curtains without risking the paparazzi's attention. Can't be around Ladybug without giving myself away. Can't tell my friends that I have to pick and choose every single word I say, to everyone, otherwise the prosecution will tear me apart." Out of nowhere, Adrien barked a crazed laugh. "I can't even drive!"

He couldn't even drive. This was supposed to be the year he learned. He had refused a private instructor. He had wanted Gabriel to teach him, like a father-son rite of passage that he saw in all the movies.

"You are so wrong, it astounds me." Plagg laughed triumphantly. "You can do anything you want! You're Chat Noir, with the best, brightest and handsomest kwami!"

Adrien turned the ring on his finger around, tracing the smooth band with his thumb. "Uh-huh."

"I mean it," Plagg nodded, once, twice, growing excited now, tugging at Adrien's collar and hand and pulling him to his feet. "I will teach you."

"Teach me what?"

His kwami winked. "Exactly what you are capable of."

He let Plagg pull him to his feet.

Though he rarely voiced it, Adrien was deeply grateful.

In five years of partnership, his kwami had never been overly friendly. Some personalities were like sea urchins, prickly on the outside and soft-hearted inside. Plagg was a sea urchin. He had the talent of nuzzling close on his shoulder and looking like he hated it. He always complained when Adrien tried to drink or had to cry.

"Um," Plagg would invariably say first, laying a tiny paw on his hair. Then: "There, there, Adrien. Don't cry. You look ugly." Or one time: "You're just cheese being aged. The stinkier life is, the better you will emerge." And, of course, a beloved favourite: "PlayStation?"

The intention itself was usually enough to get him through his loneliest nights, even if the delivery was off. Plus, with his dependably antisocial kwami came the gravitas—Plagg was as old as the universe—the sense that empires had risen and fallen (some probably explicitly because of the kwami of Destruction), and people had met, loved, and died.

Now Plagg was with Adrien, and Adrien was with Plagg. People would continue to meet and love and die, and sometimes they would live. So everything would be fine. So many people had told Adrien this—everything will be fine, you'll see—yet it was his unsentimental, greedy, ancient best friend that really pressed it home with his usual grizzling.

Plagg reminded Adrien that, in a grander scheme, not much had changed.

"Okay," Adrien sighed, mustering a weak smile. "Show me what you got."

His kwami yelped with excitement and zipped away to retrieve a notebook and pencil. After they chipped the night away into black dust and glass shards, Adrien collapsed in bed. This time it was exhaustion instead of intoxication that swept him to sleep, so he felt slightly less pathetic. Momentary bliss that might last till sunrise.

Unsurprisingly, when he checked his Cat Phone voicemail, there was yet another message from Ladybug. She always, only, called on Fridays, probably to chastise him about another patrol that he'd missed.

Get over it. Get over her.

Without listening, Adrien deleted the message and turned the bedside lamp off.

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

A / N :

I promise I'm not torturing these babies for the fun of it. Conflict (internal or external) is the engine of any good story. The Miraculous universe has so much potential for both sorts of conflict - which means, hopefully, a really satisfying story when it all gets resolved. 

Adrien in the show might never, ever give up on Ladybug, but this Adrien - who started in the distant/tense phase circa Rocketeer/Scarabella and then had to question all the attachments he's ever made because of his father - is doing what it takes to protect his heart. The news report scene comes straight from Kuro Neko too ;)

See you next time <3

Aimee