BREAKING NEWS BULLETIN: SENTIMONSTER ATTACKS Le Grand Paris!

Chat Noir was in the Agreste mansion when his Cat Phone buzzed with the notification. After the city authorities had packed up their crimes scenes and investigation units, the gates had been locked and the grounds closed to the public. He'd vaulted over the back wall with ease and taken the secret elevator down to the underground cavern.

His purpose was to search for any missed hints about the Peacock Miraculous, but he wasn't optimistic. This lair had been scoured by multiple teams of professionals. The water still lay clean and blue over the exposed piping below, the metal walkways still glinted in the afternoon sunlight filtering through the mosaic window, and the grassy platform still teemed with inexplicable life, summer in the middle of winter.

"Fuck," he muttered to himself, thumb scrolling down his phone screen.

From the news report, Chat Noir gathered that everyone was stunned (except himself, because he'd been suspecting an attack ever since seeing the amok). The city had let its guard down since the last sentimonster attack, and at least back then Hawk Moth and Mayura were household names. Now, there was no-one to pin this on. He and Ladybug were chasing phantoms.

Chat Noir sent the news bulletin into the MM chat and raced to the scene, sprinting and vaulting across rooftops. The closer he got, the more the screams cut through the air. People sprinted from the hotel like ants from fire. There was fresh panic in their eyes, distant yet visible like lighthouse flares.

This attack affirmed his suspicious that the current wielder of the Peacock Miraculous was truly villainous. And one thing further. They wanted a spectacle.

When he cleared the corner to the hotel, he saw an oversize spider crawling up the side of the building. Its black body was bulbous and shiny, legs spindly and light furred. Out of its razor-toothed mouth it spat a clear slime onto the window pane.

The glass started smoking and melting, and before long it had dissolved into a simmering pile on the balcony. The spider squeezed its body inside. When it emerged, it was dragging a round white cocoon of silky webbing. A writhing cocoon, with a person inside.

To the top of Le Grand his eyes drifted, where a nest of similarly-sized human eggs had been deposited on the rooftop. His stomach flipped twice over. The civilian footage on the news bulletin had not done justice to this monster.

From out of one of the broken windows came Ladybug and Vesperia, acrobatically climbing their way up to the sentispider. He joined them on the thin railing of a balcony, and Ladybug unexpectedly threw her arms around him. "Chat Noir, thank God."

He tamped down the heat in his stomach and spun his staff in a theatrical circle. "What's the plan, ladies?"

Vesperia pulled her stinger from her belt. "I immobilize the creature to stop its acid attacks, and that will give us time to find where the amokized object is."

"Okay," Chat Noir said, "We'll draw its attention."

With seamless coordination, he and Ladybug darted into the sentispider's path as Vesperia crept behind. He saw the opalescent compound eyes and the gnashing mandibles and a shiver ran down his spine. When the sentispider spewed up another round of acid, Chat Noir leaped backwards onto another balcony and Ladybug jumped into open air, swinging herself down a level with her yo-yo.

But, surprisingly, once unobstructed the sentispider only blinked lazily and scuttled forward, dissolving another glass window. "Venom!"

Vesperia launched herself forward and pressed her stinger into the body of the arachnid. Her Venom took effect instantly, and the spider halted halfway through the window frame, its weight sagging onto the sill. Chat Noir and Ladybug both made their way back to the arachnid.

Strange.

"I thought so, too," Ladybug muttered.

"Pardon?"

"Sorry," she apologised, tapping her ear. "Rena's on the line. We were just saying that it seems like the spider wasn't interested in us. Like, does it not want our Miraculous?"

"Evidently not," Chat Noir said. He tipped his head up to the rooftop. "Maybe it wants civilians." And then, thinking of his own suite on the other side of the building, a bolt of dread slammed into him. Perhaps one hotel resident in particular.

"I'll go free the people in the spider's nest," Vesperia offered, her blonde braid whipping after her as she climbed. "And then I'll meet you at our rendezvous point, Ladybug."

"Good. Chat Noir and I will look for the amokised object."

"Actually..." Chat Noir glanced down at the ground, where the hotel was undergoing a mass evacuation. Hotel security in pressed black shirts were positioned in the roads, stopping cars from drawing any nearer. Some were speaking into radio walkie-talkies, their lips moving rapidly and inaudibly. "I need to go check on something. I'll be back in a minute."

He extended his staff and leaped clear over the roof, angling his body against the wind to drop right onto his own balcony. Thankfully, the window hadn't been broken in. He eased it open and slipped inside just as his door was unlocked from the outside.

"Oh, Chat Noir?" The security guard blinked at him, scratched behind his ear. "Uh, I was here to escort Adrien to the meeting point. We're doing head counts of all the guests."

"Great minds," Chat Noir winked, aloof as ever. "Consider Adrien counted. I'll return him here after it's safe to do so." The guard nodded and turn on his heel, barking an update into his radio. Phew.

Chat Noir allowed himself one glance around his living room before slipping back out of the window. By the time he rejoined Ladybug, she had already called her Lucky Charm.

"How are we going to find the amok?" he prompted. "It could be anywhere, and Vesperia's Venom won't work after she detransforms."

Ladybug held a mere postcard, and from the uneasy expression on her face, he knew she didn't have a plan. Below, at the checkpoint for the staff and guests of Le Grand, Chloé was rabidly fighting the beefy arms of the security guard controlling the crowd, trying to get closer to the action.

"I don't know," Ladybug whispered. "I don't know." With one hand, she pushed her fingers into her fringe, eyes downcast and unfocused. "What do you think, Rena?"

Chat Noir took the postcard and examined it.

The photograph was of a typical street in a typical residential area, pastel storefronts hemmed in by apartment buildings. It looked familiar, and after digging through his memory he suspected the road was a section of Rue de la Moyenne Ronde. The road where Nathalie's hideout apartment was—but like the mansion, that had also been thoroughly searched, no? What would await them there?

"I know where we need to go," Chat Noir said.

The frozen sentispider disappeared into the vapors of a cobalt ether. Chat Noir instinctively flung an arm to the side, toward Ladybug, but when the blue haze cleared the creature and its webs had gone with it.

"I think the postcard was leading us to Nathalie's apartment," he posited. "Maybe we missed something—maybe there's something worth investigating there."

"But I need to stay here and use the Lucky Charm to fix the damage," Ladybug reminded him, gently kicking a shard of broken glass across the stone with her toe, "and get the Bee Miraculous from Vesperia. Plus, the media will be showing up and the staff will probably be shaken, so I should stick around to answer their questions and help guide the guests inside."

Chat Noir glanced at the huddle of hotel staff and guests across the road, watching with fearful upturned faces. When the security detail started herding them back into their rooms, they would be expecting Adrien Agreste to turn up. Shit.

And just to lighten their workload, at once both their cell phones vibrated with a text. Shit, shit.

"Heloise?" he wondered, skimming the contents of the message. The investigating judge had called an emergency meeting at her office in one hour's time.

"Heloise," Ladybug confirmed. She heaved a quick sigh, one that lifted the ends of her fringe. "Okay. I stay here to tie up loose ends—"

"I follow the Lucky Charm," he added, after Adrien shows his face, "and we both meet at the Palais in an hour." He bent to spring off the balcony, but Ladybug stopped him with a calm whisper of his name.

"Yes, my Lady?"

Ladybug gave him a resigned smile before taking the postcard back. "Feels like old times, doesn't it?" The action and instinct smothering any flickers of doubt, a smooth wipe of adrenaline to take away the anxiety.

It did feel like old times, and yet so much had changed.

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Ladybug's eventful day had actually started long before the sentimonster attack.

Each academic year, the student body council was required to plan the graduation formal for the terminale students. Demonstrating near-comical duality, lately she (the student body president) had to attend pretrial hearings and deliver evidence to the highest felony court in the country, while refereeing contentious discussions on where the formal venue should be and how to settle the theme poll that returned three equally-favoured options (Masquerade, Starry Night, and Under the Sea) and if there indeed should be a print photobooth at the expense of cheaper tickets.

After one such infuriating student body council meeting, Alya and Marinette had gone back to the bakery to prepare for the next pretrial hearing. Rena Rouge would be attending to summarize Hawk Moth's activities in Shanghai. Sifting through all the evidence was a protracted process, but it was necessary for Gerard, the President of the Court, to determine whether there was evidence of the right quality and quantity to convict the defendants, and how best to arrange the schedule of his questionings. There could be no mishandling of a trial like this.

Then Chat Noir's alert came through Mira-Message. A sentimonster attack. The first of a new year.

Ladybug had raced with Alya to the hotel; recruited Zoe Lee to help; had a brief freak-out about the giant wrench this new villain threw into her plans; returned her Lucky Charm to patch over the physical damage; and finally patched over everyone's unsettled nerves, hers included. It hadn't taken the whole hour.

On the ground floor of Le Grand Paris, Ladybug wandered into the restaurant (ghost-town empty after the afternoon's calamity) and found the women's bathrooms. They had fancy circular backlit mirrors on the walls, marble counters with minimalist black faucets, reed sticks sitting in amber pots of incense.

Choosing and locking a stall, she lowered the toilet lid and sat down exhaustedly. All the late-night practice she'd been putting in had helped tremendously today. Where she once only had five minutes after calling her Lucky Charm, Ladybug had been able to stretch her limits to over half an hour in the field. Although, her adult powers weren't yet second nature, unthinking and seamless, as Chat Noir had mentioned his were. She felt drained by her magic as much as she felt empowered by it.

"Tikki, spots off." Pink sparks swept her body, leaving her limbs feeling even more fatigued, her human weight even more burdensome. Marinette chose a vanilla macaroon from the cardboard box in her purse and offered it to her kwami. "Here, eat up."

Tikki gratefully swallowed the dessert and then asked, "Are you okay, Marinette?"

She should be the one asking her kwami that question. It must be upsetting to know for sure that Duusu was being misused again.

Marinette cleared her throat, preparing to speak, but as the adrenaline of battle receded, anguish washed into her lungs like saltwater. Instead she could only release a weak, discomfited whimper. "Sorry, Tikki. Just give me a moment."

Her heartbeat galloped, her breathing was simultaneously too shallow and too deep. I can't do another year of this. Each time she inhaled quicker and quicker, yet the air felt thinner and thinner. They had been so close. The Agreste case was so close to being heard in court, and the judiciary had already commenced the preparatory hearings. All the efforts of the Miraculous team, all the sacrifices of Adrien, all the months of sleeping poorly and walking tightropes.

So close.

And now, so far.

Even if Gerard decided to move ahead with the trial, she wouldn't be free. With a verdict, all the victims and witnesses (Adrien included) might finally be able to move on with their lives. But without the Peacock Miraculous, without knowing the capacity of the villain on the other end of the chessboard, Marinette would be stuck where she had been for the last five years: Guardian, defender, alone.

Well, not alone. She had friends and family in abundance and she loved every single one. But she would never fall in love. Who could she even fall in love with, truly, deeply, unreservedly? She and Adrien would never be true equals, not after everything. Chat Noir was her equal in every way, but he wanted the one thing she couldn't give right him now: honesty.

Feels like old times, doesn't it?

She'd been lying. This didn't feel like old times to Marinette at all. In the old times, she'd been younger, blinder, hoping that things would get better. In the old times, they knew how to handle familiar threats Hawk Moth and Mayura. In the old times, her chaton had been in love with her.

Now that his feelings had changed, she felt jealous and lonely. Abundant friends and family be damned, she was lonely and she wanted him. Since their kiss, she'd become more invested in his personal life than ever before. She thought about him at school and at home, with school friends and with Tom and Sabine. Who was the person he lost? What sort of abode did he return to every night? Did he have siblings? For some reason she could picture him so vividly as an older brother. Every sliver of information Chat Noir had already given her was precious, and still it wasn't enough.

All the other sweethearts Marinette knew were living inside a picturesque snow globe, rosy cheeks and winter mittens in perfect tableaux, and she was the outsider peering in, larger-than-life, hideously distorted by the curvature of the glass. She wondered what the world felt like with a lover by her side.

Well. She would never know while she was Ladybug.

Usually she pushed that resentment away, this wall separating her experiences from the rest of the human experience, being incredibly grateful for Tikki and the ways she could serve her city—but now, in a moment of weakness, she cried about it. Now that Paris had a new supervillain, one that made weapons from strong emotions, all it would take was an untimely heartbreak or the amokization of a person who knew too much—telepathic access to head and to heart—and it would be game over.

Marinette put her elbows on her knees and touched her forehead, only for her hands to come away wet with cold sweat. Her breathing still hadn't settled. Tikki was trying to coach her through but she couldn't even hear her kwami's voice over the ringing in her ears, the angry thump of her pulse.

"Don't worry, Tikki," she said faintly. "I'm just going to..."

Marinette slid from the toilet seat and onto the floor. She put her head between hers knees and tried to reign her breathing in. Perhaps this position would get more blood to her head—or was the problem too much blood?

"Should you call for help?" Tikki said. "You don't look good, Marinette. All the colour is gone from your face."

"I'll be fine," Marinette wheezed. Her fingers scrabbled for something to squeeze, and she ended up with the toilet paper roll gripped in her hand. Counting breaths. In. "I'm." Out. "Fine."

In. Out.

She'd make it to the meeting with Heloise and Chat Noir on time. She was fine.

In. Out.

She always had been.

Always had to be.

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Ladybug placed the grimoire, which had been requested by Heloise, down on the stained oak side table.

"I'm sorry, Heloise. We can't access Duusu, at least not with anything I've read," she informed. "On a kwami's Cycle Day, the other kwamis can communicate with them through the Miracle Box—but kwami Cycles are different from human years." This form of communication had been Ladybug's first idea, months ago, to recover the kwami of Emotion, but Tikki had told her all the reasons it wouldn't work. Namely: "Duusu's next Cycle Day is in seventy-three years."

Heloise sighed. "I understand."

Across from the judge, legs daintily crossed and wearing her usual red and black, Ladybug looked pristine as ever. Her hair was slick and bouncy, magically prevented from ever flying into her eyes or mouth, and her skin had a healthy, rosy glow. (She knew because she'd checked the Bug Mirror before walking into the Palais.)

No-one would ever think this superhero could be capable of nearly breaking down in a women's bathroom.

When she had arrived outside Heloise Hessenpy's office, Chat Noir had already been waiting in the lobby. He'd been watching reporter footage from the sentispider's—now dubbed Arachne—attack on his Cat Phone, slumped in an arm chair, long legs stretched out on the thick woven carpet. He'd liberated one of the investigation binders from its storage location in the Palais office, in the basement of this same building.

Since Chat Noir was in charge of recovering the Peacock Miraculous, she and Heloise both deferred to him. Ladybug was relieved to not do most of the talking. "So what do we know about this new villain?" Heloise said.

Chat Noir answered, "It's not Gabriel or Nathalie directly responsible."

"Directly?" both women asked.

"I've had both prisons' security upgraded," he answered. "At the time of a previous amok sighting, Gabriel and Nathalie were in their civilian forms. I've also requested contemporaneous footage of today's attack. Same thing. The Miraculous can't be with them."

"But you're not ruling out their involvement," Ladybug added.

"Only because I can't trace exactly how the Peacock Miraculous disappeared. The defendants have been interviewed so many times, but never without their lawyers. Nathalie maintains when she tried to flee the country, she left behind the Miraculous in her hideout apartment."

Chat Noir flipped through the pages of his binder, pointing with his claw to an image of a five-storey apartment building.

"But her apartment has been turned inside out, multiple times over. By police, which didn't produce any leads, nor any evidence that anyone else but Nathalie had been in the apartment. No prints, no foreign DNA. By Ryuko, who couldn't see any hidden safes marked by displaced ventilation, piping, and insulation systems like the one in the Agreste mansion. By me—and again just half an hour ago, in fact—and I genuinely don't think the Miraculous is there."

"But today my Lucky Charm gave us a photo postcard," Ladybug pointed out. "It showed the exact road this building is on."

"Not the building itself?" Heloise wondered.

"No," she admitted, "It was another building, on the same road. But the Lucky Charm works in mysterious ways. Why would it even point us in that vicinity, if it truly is a dead end?"

Heloise had been listening with a deep furrow between her brows, knuckles pressed to her mouth. The woman usually wore makeup with heavy lipstick; this evening, she came in bare-faced. "Maybe Nathalie or Gabriel arranged for it to disappear?"

"Maybe." Chat Noir shrugged. "One of my earlier theories was that they were sitting on the Miraculous to use at an opportune moment. Gabriel could want to revive his wife, Nathalie could want to escape. Suppose those are the two motives," he said, placing each of his hands far apart on the desk. He tapped one, making an audible thud on the mahogany. "In the first case, I expected Gabriel to use some kind of leverage to get our Miraculous and unify them for his grand wish—as usual. But Ladybug and I threw ourselves into the sentimonster's path and it could have cared less about our Miraculous."

Chat Noir inclined his head to meet Ladybug's eyes. His eyes were alert, alive, green like a summer meadow. She simply stared back until he blinked, tilting his head slightly, and she realized he'd been prompting her support. Get a grip.

Ladybug blurted, "That's true. There was no supervillain or a proxy making any sort of demands, which was Gabriel's calling card, every single time."

"So the second motive: escape. Maybe they wanted to cause enough chaos to distract the prison guards. But from when I called the prisons, no escape was attempted today. Stupid to lose the element of surprise and not even capitalise on it, oui? In fact, there's no indication that Gabriel and Nathalie are aware of today's attack yet."

"They could be good actors." Heloise leaned forward on her desk. "Interesting that it happened at the hotel where Adrien is staying."

Before Ladybug even registered, she'd interjected, "Adrien is innocent. There's no way he knows anything about this."

Meanwhile, Chat Noir had noted, "I was the one to evacuate Adrien Agreste from his hotel suite during the attack. He was not transformed into some Peacock villain. It couldn't have been him using the Miraculous."

"I'm not suspecting him," Heloise clarified. "Just that Arachne only makes sense if Adrien is a link—otherwise, an unprovoked attack, on a random location, with no ultimatums or escape attempts? If whoever has the Miraculous is trying to gain access to him, then at least we have a motive. Logically speaking."

Ladybug and Chat Noir glanced at each other. She shook her head imperceptibly. I don't know. Chat Noir sighed, scrubbed his hand down his face. He seemed tired of talking about Adrien Agreste, tired of the investigation, so tired he might vanish for a year just to sleep. If finishing the trial sated his sense of duty, would he finally take the recovery time away she'd been recommending?

Which is a good thing, she reminded herself, soothing the sting in her throat.

Ladybug tried to picture continuing her Guardian duties without Chat Noir and in panic couldn't imagine herself as a hero at all. The best part of saving this city was the person sitting next to her.

Her fingers slid down to the side of his chair. Her knuckles brushed against Chat Noir's knee, and a moment later he took her hand and squeezed it softly, his thumb drawing whirls and loops on her wrist. All obscured by the mahogany desk before them, all without Heloise noticing.

The judge kept rolling through logistics—the security around Adrien Agreste in advance of the trial, the costs and benefits of relocating him so suddenly, and then to the trial itself, whether Gerard should and would postpone it—but finally, finally, in this absolute clusterfuck of a day, with his hand in hers, relief finally found Ladybug.

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a / n: 

ladybug pining scenes are some of my absolute favourite to write. she's so deeply in love but can't admit it in those words yet (but she's pretty much there. can u tell?).

as i was reading this chapter for editing, i became so excited for the rest of the fic. this is where Adrien and Marinette finally confront themselves and i think every chapter from here has some heart-palpitating moments. no. more. fillers. buckle. up.

p.s. i have officially started plotting my next Miraculous fanfiction. when I drafted Under Oath, I thought it would be this detailed-but-compact 80k-word fic and HA. BEHOLD HOW I FAILED. the mlb universe is so rich with scenery and side characters to explore and i totally got carried away with describing it all, but i wouldn't change this melodramatic, angst-filled epic for the world.

but to switch up my writing palate, my next fic is going to be slimmer, lighter, less high-stakes. a rom-com for the summer. One word as a teaser, with more info to come:

FELILA