CARAPACE WAS STILL ON CLOUD nine after being entrusted with the Turtle Miraculous.

He'd hardly been able to sleep since the early morning, when he and Rena came to help Ladybug and Chat Noir. An effervescent mix of glee and anxiety and anticipation sloshed around his stomach. He still didn't quite understand how Chat Noir's negative emotions had been used to create a sentimonster, unless Chat Noir agreed to let Pavona do it, which Chat Noir would never do—but Ladybug had assured him that she would explain everything eventually.

Till then, the most important thing was the plan.

Ladybug had one thing—and one thing only—on good authority: Pavona would be at the Agreste v. Paris hearing today. "I don't know who she is exactly, and I don't know if she'll be at any later hearings," she'd said in the alleyway, after Chat Blanc had been dealt with, "so this is the one shot we have to catch her."

Then, the steps had been laid out. Rena would use her Mirage to make Ladybug appear as usual, sitting with her fellow heroes on the foremost wooden bench. Carapace would be ready to cage anyone that Ladybug signalled out. Chat Noir was still absent, for personal reasons. And Ladybug herself would be searching for Pavona, using the technique of all her previous nemeses: Hawk Moth, Mayura, Pavona. They'd hunted down emotionally vulnerable people, and now Ladybug would become Ladymoth, huntress. She would use the Butterfly Miraculous to give this final supervillain a taste of her own medicine.

Carapace thought the idea—probing everyone's emotions while they sat unaware until she found the culprit—was wicked, insane, ever so crafty, toeing the line of right and wrong. It was totally different from the head-on fights, moral ultimatums and high-octane pursuits that Ladybug excelled at. When he commented on it, Ladybug smiled solemnly and said, "I took a page out of his book."

He knew who she was talking about.

An hour before anyone was allowed to enter the Assizes Court, Ladybug donned the Butterfly Miraculous, took to the chandelier, and had been perching there ever since, made invisible and replaced by Rena's illusions.

The hearing was proceeding as planned, until a girl suddenly bolted from her chair and sprinted for the door. The general audience was startled, the judiciary was confused, but the heroes were ready. Rena Rouge, pressing her earpiece deeper, confirmed to Carapace: "Ladybug says it's Lila!"

"Shellter!" A green sphere, tessellated by hexagons, formed around the fleeing girl.

Elegantly curled auburn hair, a modest shift dress with pearls stitched into the collar. She didn't look anything like a villain, she looked like a schoolgirl. Like a friend. Their friend.

Carapace held the force field solid in his mind, even while it reeled with shock. Lila Rossi. She'd been one of the people sending Adrien well wishes in the group chat. She'd participated in organising the Christmas party in his honour. She'd said good luck two fucking days ago, before this trial went to court.

How could she?

Carapace was livid, devastated, and could only watch Adrien's expression as he held Lila (who was raging inside the green cage, kicking hopelessly at the boundary) captive. His best friend's face was pinched but passive, and more than that he couldn't discern at this distance.

When Rena's Mirage vanished and Ladymoth glided down from the ceiling, the inhabitants of the room descended into a rumble of chatter. They'd never seen this hero before, with the same blue eyes but two long, silky ponytails. She wore polka-dots on her bust, upper arms, and thighs. The fabric on her calves, forearms and waist was coloured black, and her legs disappeared into flexible, conforming boots that stopped just below her knee. At her hips wound a utility belt with various tools and compartments.

The real fixture were the wings, sealed all along her arms like an extension of her body, that allowed her to soar down from any height like a butterfly. At the sight of her, Adrien leaped to his feet before his attorney restrained him with a hand on his shoulder.

"Order!" Gerard was saying, banging his gavel on the wooden block.

It was a lost cause. Gabriel and Nathalie (who had absolutely nothing to do with any of this, but the court was jumpy when it came to them) were immediately detained and escorted out by the bailiffs. It was a good thing all cell phones had been handed in at the door, video recordings prohibited in court. Carapace dropped the force field. Ladymoth and Lila collided, the latter kicking and clawing. People scrambled to get away, people scrambled to get closer.

"Order in this court!" The clacking wooden strikes only added to the din.

Lila was almost feral in her efforts to get away, screaming, "You don't get to win!" as Ladymoth trussed her with her yo-yo string.

She searched the captive girl with unbothered hands until she found the final piece of this puzzle, the object that could start to make everything right again. The Peacock Miraculous. Carapace and Rena caught sight of it, brilliant cobalt and safe with Ladymoth. Then it disappeared into the yo-yo—on its way home to the Miracle Box.

"Everyone out!" Gerard had given up on restoring order, but the gavel continued. "We will reconvene after the authorities stabilize the situation." Now a mass exodus was added to the equation, along with the police officers and Heloise moving against the current, trying to question Ladymoth about what was going on. Lila was writhing on the ground still, unable to get out of her restraints. Adrien refused to be kept from Ladymoth much longer, and his lawyers seemed to know it.

But Carapace had finally found the answers that had eluded him this whole winter. He crossed his arms and sighed in satisfaction. Everything would be alright.

In the midst of all the chaos, he and Rena shared a triumphant smile and bumped their knuckles together. "Pound it."

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

Court never did reconvene that afternoon.

Once Ladymoth explained the situation to Heloise—Lila Rossi was somehow the person to steal the Peacock Miraculous from Nathalie—the flurry of activity only worsened, derailing the hearing until Gerard called it a day and went to get himself a (ill-advised by his cardiologist) third cup of coffee. Orders were sent to the police department immediately. Lila was to be detained then questioned. CCTV footage was to be searched for her entry into Nathalie's hideaway apartment. Forensics was dispatched to that safe house. The key that Pavona had dropped was to be compared to the lock of the Rossi apartment, and the fingerprint lifted from the fob was to be compared to Lila's.

Adrien was certain that all the evidence would come back in support of Ladybug's conclusion. She had read Lila's emotions like a book. Lila was driven by obsession—with Ladybug's downfall, with revenge, with him. He thought of her showing up at the hospital when he was visiting his mother, and the sticky print of her lip gloss on his cheek, and wanted to shed his skin like a layer of clothing.

But he wasn't totally surprised. Lila may have wrapped the world around her finger, and presented her best face (of many) to Adrien Agreste, but she had never cared much for Chat Noir. And in the hero's previous dealings with her, he'd seen many times over that she was a liar, and that she hated Ladybug above all else.

Miss Bustier's class was taking it hard, though. They'd all been given permission to take the rest of the day off of school (if they weren't in the courtroom as witnesses to begin with) and Marinette took the opportunity to be with Adrien. By sundown, he'd be lying if he said he was thinking much of Lila or the police or his trial. He was only thinking of her, the feeling of her body in his arms, the taste of her lips. Now that all the Miraculous were back with the Guardian of Paris, he was very happy.

Marinette however was less content to spend all of the evening making out on the couch, and kept pulling away to ask him questions, tell him things from her side, clarify all the miscommunication between them which she thought was such a pressing emergency. (But she was content to spend part of the evening making out, because after the talking, she kept coming back to his mouth.)

"The person Chat Noir said he lost," she whispered, her inky hair dishevelled, "it was your father." Adrien nodded, smoothing his thumbs up and down her waist. Her face twisted with pity. "Adrien. Why didn't you tell me who you were as soon as I had the Butterfly Miraculous again? There was no danger of akumatisation anymore."

He sighed heavily. "Because by the time I came back, you were already knee-deep in the investigation, and I was guilty about leaving you and the team hanging, and I didn't know what sort of wrench I would throw into everything if I told you who I was."

Marinette's brow furrowed in concern. She hadn't been mad about any of the things he worried she would. All his fears seemed so small now that he was on the other side of things.

"I mean, investigating myself... I know it's not the right thing to do. It's patently unethical. But I knew it was the best way that I could help you, as Adrien and as Chat Noir, because I'm so close to everything and I knew how to get information from my father but— I wanted to make things right. Repay the city for everything he did."

"His crimes are not your debts."

"I felt like they were," he said, shaking his head. "I did what I did. We can't change that. Now we're here."

Marinette glanced down, somewhere around his collarbone, and traced the stitching of his t-shirt along the shoulder with her forefinger. "Chat Blanc—"

"—was my fault," Adrien admitted. "I'd been telepathically speaking to Pavona, to Lila, trying a new way to get leads. When the attacks started again, I couldn't sit here helplessly just cleaning up the damage like we used to do. I'm sorry. I could have destroyed everything."

"Actually I was going to ask, if you really felt... I mean, you don't have to answer. I'm not here as an investigator this time."

Adrien pressed a kiss to her jawline, let his fingers slip just underneath the hem of her t-shirt and relished the way her eyelids fluttered closed. "Clearly," he smirked.

Marinette chuckled drily and soldiered on: "Not to get dark, but are you okay? Honestly."

"I... maybe not."

She was silent for a beat. "Chat Blanc. I was going to say that I've seen your sentimonster before."

"What? When?"

"I never told you this," she began, her hands stilling on his shoulders. Adrien watched, more than a little confused. "Last year, on St. Athanase's Day, Bunnyx came to find me."

"That was the day you delivered a gift to me," he recalled. On his last fifth name's day, in May, he remembered walking into his old bedroom in the Agreste mansion and seeing Ladybug standing by the open full-length windows. "A beret, from my Brazilian fan club because there was a postal strike."

For some reason, she blushed beet-red. "I lied. It was from myself. I signed the gift as Marinette instead of Ladybug."

Adrien smothered a smile. The gift was from Marinette. "I didn't see any signature from Marinette."

"Because Bunnyx intervened. That signature set off a chain of events that culminated in your future akumatisation by your father."

Adrien didn't know how to take this. He'd been akumatised and didn't even know it? He always thought, falsely just like when he was courting danger with Pavona, that he was a little untouchable, incorruptible. He'd been wrong twice, and twice Ladybug had had to fix everything.

"In the alternative timeline Bunnyx took me to, I met Chat Blanc—your akumatised self. The spitting image of your sentimonster last night."

Ladybug hated thinking of these memories, he could tell. Her skin bleached of its rosy colour, and her lips flattened into a hard line.

"What happened there?" he prompted, when her silence started crystallising.

"Chat Noir— you," she corrected, flicking her eyes up and down Adrien's face with muted disbelief, "and I had apparently fallen in love, and it destroyed the world. You should have seen it. Paris was completely underwater. Everyone was dead, or frozen, there was ice all around, and Chat Blanc was so heartbroken and so casually cruel because he couldn't feel anything. He knew Ladybug was Marinette."

Adrien held his breath. What had happened in that alternate timeline? What did it mean that there were emotions in him that could reproduce that being exactly?

Marinette said thickly, "I released your akuma and de-evilised it, of course, erased my civilian name from the gift, but ever since that day I learned to keep my distance from Chat Noir. In case I hurt you, and you hurt everyone else. It would have been my fault. My selfishness."

The tail of her sentence rose in pitch and she dropped her face into her hands, shoulders trembling. "Marinette," he whispered.

"It's not this reality, Bunnyx told me as much," she spoke from behind her hands, refusing to look up, "but in the back of my head I always was afraid it could be. I still had nightmares about it. So I pushed you away. I'm sorry."

Adrien hated to see his Lady cry. All the heartbreaks in the world he could—and had—survived but this one he would never know how to tolerate. So he said, "But it was my fourth name's day in November and you didn't give me anything."

She laughed like a wailing cat. He hugged her tighter, breathed in her sugar and vanilla scent. She smelled like the bakery. "And I've never received anything on my second or third name's day, from international fan clubs or otherwise," he continued, "so I guess my only question is why you hate me so much that only my fifth name's day gets celebrated."

"Stop," Marinette chuckled, one hand wiping her eyes and the other pushing fondly through his curls. Adrien hadn't had his hair played with since he was a little kid, and it felt so criminally good now to have the girl he loved do it that he might have started purring, if he was Chat Noir.

"If you kiss me," he said.

And she did.

(When she was of sounder mind, Marinette did pull away once to retort, "If you want me to celebrate your second, third, and fourth name's day this year, I will."

Adrien, despite everything that had happened to him, felt lucky, and lighter than air. "Please don't."

Marinette chuckled and playfully skimmed his nose with hers. "See? That's what I thought.")

▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬

The Agreste v. Paris case did close eventually.

The part that Paris cared about: thirty-five years imprisonment with parole for Gabriel Agreste, twenty years with parole for Nathalie Sancoeur. The part that Marinette cared about: Adrien.

Lila's unexpected detainment on the second day of the trial meant that all the witnesses meant to testify were pushed to the successive days. It was in the following week that the Assizes Court reconvened to finish trying the case. Since Ladybug and her heroes had delivered their reports, evidence and testimonies before Pavona's discovery, Marinette was free to attend as her civilian self. Nino and Alya came with her, as well as select others from their homeroom class who had been called as witnesses.

When it was time for Adrien to give his victim impact statement, Marinette watched from the back of the room with her heart in her throat. The distance separating them—rows of wooden benches, worn down over the decades; the guard railing beyond which stood the defendant and plaintiff tables, the semicircular arch for the Attorneys General, and finally the witness stand—seemed to stretch beyond metres into a horizon.

He wore a starched suit with strong shoulders and an olive green tie. Chat Noir colours, on Adrien's angelic face. Sometimes, in quiet moments, Marinette was still in disbelief that she could call both of those boys hers. Adrien swore his oath, answered all the questions of the judges and lawyers, and recited his statement. Marinette had heard it before; she'd been sneaking out of her bedroom to Le Grand Paris, and she and Adrien would (unwisely but inevitably) stay up all night talking. One of these times, he recited the pre-written, memorised paragraphs to her.

His statement described the loss of his mother, the abuses of his father, and pain of being among the students most targeted by Hawk Moth. He highlighted the efforts he had gone to aid in the investigation and his fervent hope that justice was served, in correct proportions and with swift timeliness.

Pretty, but they weren't his words.

After Adrien concluded, he did something no-one expected.

He went off-script.

"Father. Do you know what I did after I found out who you were?" he blurted suddenly, after a brief silence that had seemed final at the time. Marinette put her hand over her mouth. Alya gasped, and Nino's spine rippled into a straight line. The witnesses and jury shifted in their seats. From the back of the room, she watched his lawyers exchange a baffled look. But the judges and attorneys didn't interfere. "I went on a rampage, trashing everything I could get my hands on, and then in detainment I drank enough hotel mini-fridge vodka to knock myself out. I fucking hated you that night."

The lawyers were aghast now, terrified of the picture Adrien was painting with the swearing and the drinking and the destruction of property. Heloise, sitting on the foremost row, cleared her throat, and somehow this signalled to them that it was okay. Let him speak. Marinette relaxed and, meeting Alya and Nino's eyes, listened.

"I hate you now, because I know you could have done better," Adrien went on. He was speaking directly to Gabriel, who sat with his back to Marinette at the defendant's table. She wished she could read the expression on Adrien's father's face. Was he like stone, remorseless and unflinching? Or was his son's vulnerability finally enough to thaw him?

"One day you were just my father, and the next you were this cold, controlling, abusive monster masquerading as the person raised me, who— who loved me. I was too young to realise any transformation had happened. I spent my entire adolescence trying to please you. I mastered being the perfect son so entirely that now I don't know how to be myself."

Marinette observed Adrien's face. Whatever Gabriel looked like didn't seem to sway him. She understood now that it wasn't about his father anymore: these words for himself. He was himself at last. Pride, pain, warmth swelled in her chest, pressing outwards like a king tide.

"So I hate you for choosing revenge over healing. I hate you for clinging to Mom so hard that you let go of me. I hate that you still won't apologise for any of it, even despite whatever you say today, pretty words written by your lawyers, because I know in your heart you aren't remorseful." At this, Gabriel's lawyer started to object, but Gerard waved it away. The President of the Court seemed wholly invested in the improvised testimony. As did the whole court. "I hate you because I still love you, and because of what you did I have nowhere to put that love anymore. I can't give it to you. You don't deserve it."

Adrien turned away from Gabriel, his hands—gripping the edges of the stand—falling loose to his sides. "But other people do. My classmates, who kept me connected to all things normal and sane." He grinned at the row of them, all the way in the back, when they waved. "Alya, who learned this case back-to-front so I didn't have to." Alya dipped her head in acknowledgment. "Nino, who constantly steered me towards the light side." Nino put his fist to his heart.

"Marinette," he whispered, "whose heart is bigger than any of you will ever know."

Marinette couldn't bring herself to do anything. She was already full of emotions, any sudden movements would tip them all out of her in a very unbecoming manner.

"The heroes of Paris, who did in a few months what takes other cities years. And Ladybug, who is off heroing as we speak." His one and only lie while under oath. "I don't know who I would be without her."

His eyes met Marinette's, and the supposed distance between them shrank in a nanosecond. From a horizon, to a court room, to the length of a wooden bench, to mere inches—like when they were lying in bed together two days ago, passing conversation between themselves like breath; like when they'd been soaring through the sky on patrol one year ago, the wind whipping their hair together; like neck-and-neck racing through the arches of the Eiffel Tower two years ago, their favourite playground; like that golden sunset before all this legal intrigue, when she'd promised to never abandon him in favour of any other partner.

Like too many other moments to count. Ice-cream, red roses, dancing, flying, kissing, crying, fighting evil, fighting each other, the Earth spinning slowly beneath them, the water closing over their heads, the ground returning to their feet.

Magic and miracles.

"Thank you," Adrien finished, and left the witness stand.