Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

For a little while, the world had seemed… perfect.

From the alcove in Adrien’s garden, from that little marble bench draped in shade and flowers, Marinette sat and watched the clouds drift by. They were so white , so pale and wispy, like fine dustings of powdered sugar: sweet, but also always a moment away from melting.

Most of her friends were there. The whole class, along with Luka, Marc, Zoé, Kagami, and Félix, all hanging out together around the pool. A bit of decompressing one week before school started back up again, organised by Nathalie and Amelie.

In the distance, Adrien was chatting with someone who sounded like Nino and maybe Ivan. She couldn’t see him, but she could hear his laughter — and she couldn’t help but smile as she imagined him looking happy, as the slivers of his laughing voice drifted to her on the wind from the other side of the house. It was impossible not to be infected by his joy.

But also, it was impossible to hear that laughter and not feel the sting of guilt deep inside her chest. That sting had been growing stronger over the past few weeks, at the same pace as the tiny pain in her foot, as the rest of the world settled into some kind of blissfully ignorant peace.

It was all so… complicated.

For a little while, just after Gabriel made the wish, Marinette had thought she could fix the world Gabriel left behind by just — papering over the cracks. But there were too many moving parts, too many people who knew, too many things that just wouldn’t go together.

Because Gabriel didn’t really sacrifice his life. It wasn’t some noble gesture of selfless devotion he performed to leave the world a better place. Instead, he ran away from the consequences of what he had done. Rather than try to fix things for Adrien, rather than accept responsibility for his actions and try to make up for them, he escaped into non-existence to be with his wife. He got exactly what he wanted the whole time, because Marinette hadn’t been able to stop him. And now she was left to pick up the pieces, to figure out a story to tell, to hide all the wrong details.

Not to mention the other thing Gabriel had left her: a reason she could no longer allow anyone to see her left foot.

The decision to keep Monarch’s identity secret had been hers. So had the decision to canonise him as a hero who helped Ladybug. She didn’t do it out of respect for him: it was all to spare Adrien, and it had seemed like a good idea at the time. She didn’t want to rob Adrien not just of his father, but also of the memory of his father.

But every time she saw him, she had to ask herself the same question: was she protecting him, or was she protecting herself?

She sighed and fell back against the wall. Obviously she was protecting Adrien. But maybe he didn’t need to be protected, maybe what he really needed was the truth. When she fought Gabriel next to Emilie’s tomb, she told him that Adrien had managed to move on. Adrien lived and he was alive and he was so much stronger than Gabriel had been. Where Gabriel had failed to grapple with his mistakes, maybe Adrien would be able to.

Marinette wondered how long she would be able to grapple with them all on her own. Sure, she had told Alya; sure, Su-Han knew; of course, Nathalie had to know. But they didn’t have to keep it from Adrien as an intimate secret — and they didn’t have to bear the knowledge that they personally failed.

Footsteps approached from the right. And Marinette sat back up again, put on a smile, shifted her left leg back a little.

But when she saw that the person coming over was Kagami, she allowed the smile to fall. Because Kagami knew too.

“Hello, Marinette,” said Kagami. She smiled, but her eyes were serious. “Why are you sitting here?”

“I just needed a break,” Marinette replied, a little too defensively for her own liking.

The two of them hadn’t really talked for the past month, not talked talked. That was partly Marinette’s fault. It was also Tomoe Tsurugi’s fault, and the fault of circumstance, but Marinette hadn’t helped. They had waved and said hello, and they had talked in groups, and they had texted briefly on the phone, but she had avoided any conversation that would have taken longer. Because right now, Kagami also represented Marinette’s personal failure to keep the secret.

She would just have to grin and bear it. The problem wasn’t Kagami, it never was. Just like always, the problem was herself.

“We have not spoken much lately,” said Kagami.

Marinette took a deep breath, and looked Kagami in the eyes. And for a moment, she saw herself reflected in those eyes, except — it wasn’t her, it was Ryuukomori, sitting by the Seine and wrapped up in her own loneliness. Another nail drove itself into Marinette’s heart. Sure, she had failed to keep her identity. But Kagami didn’t deserve to be avoided like this.

“No,” said Marinette, and patted the bench next to her with a faint smile. “Sit down.”

Kagami’s eyes bulged for a moment. Then she nodded, and sat down on the other side of the bench, keeping a small distance.

“I’m sorry we haven’t spoken much,” said Marinette. “It’s not because of you.”

Kagami smiled. “Is it because of Ladybug?”

“... Yeah,” said Marinette. “It is.”

“Is that also why you told Adrien that Gabriel was a hero?”

Marinette swallowed. “I’m not sure.”

“Félix and I know the truth. As do Nathalie, and Amelie, and Mother.”

And Alya, and Su-Han, and the kwamis. Marinette glanced over at Kagami. Was Kagami making a threat? Did she disagree with the lie so strongly?

But she didn’t seem to want to push the issue. Instead, she dropped the subject. “I hope you aren’t upset that I found out your identity,” she said. “I admire you a lot.”

The problem wasn’t Kagami. The problem wasn’t Kagami. Marinette couldn’t say that she was upset, because Kagami wasn’t the problem, it was her own stupid mistake. The problem wasn’t Kagami. “How did you find out?” she asked weakly.

“Do you remember when I was akumatised into a cloud giant? When I thought you no longer wanted to be my friend?”

Kagami seemed determined to stay just a few seconds behind Marinette’s own galloping thoughts. Marinette winced. “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to do that to you again — wait,” she said, looking at Kagami’s semi-perplexed expression, feeling the memories of that day grow clearer. Below decks on the Liberty, when she and Alya talked about the Ladybug stuff, and then only a few moments later Kagami arrived around the corner…

“Yes,” said Kagami. “I overheard you on the boat.”

“Did… did anyone else hear me?”

Kagami nodded. “Yes. Alya.”

Marinette felt like she had been sitting in a runaway car that suddenly shuddered to a halt. “... Right. Of course.” She buried her face in her palms and pulled in air through her nose. “I just… really messed that up, didn’t I…”

But Kagami had shifted to her own track. “At first, I didn’t want to believe you were really her,” she said. “I thought I misunderstood. I didn’t trust you, because I felt like you were failing to be my friend. I want to apologise for that.”

Marinette chanced another look at Kagami. Kagami was… smiling, for some reason. “Well, clearly I’m not very trustworthy, so I can’t say I blame you.”

“Is it untrustworthy to work so hard to save me, even when I seemed to hate you?”

“I didn’t keep you happy,” mumbled Marinette.

“No. But you tried. You tried poorly,” Marinette winced again, “but I trust you because you always try. So… I apologise for letting my jealousy take hold, and for causing you trouble.”

Was it really that simple for Kagami? To just let go of being treated poorly? Marinette shifted her legs again — and felt a twinge of pain from her left shin as she did so. But it wasn’t big. It was just… something she’d have to live with. “Kagami,” she said, “you have nothing to apologise for.”

The silence that fell then was…

… it was nice, in that Kagami seemed comfortable. Nice, in that the weather was nice. Nice, in that they had all their friends here. That, at least, was nice.

“Are you upset that I told my boyfriend?” said Kagami eventually. It was a probe for sure.

But Marinette couldn’t answer honestly. Because Kagami wasn’t the problem. Kagami was never the problem. Kagami had never once been a problem. “I… no,” stammered Marinette.

Kagami frowned deeply. “That is your lying face. You are lying.”

“No! I mean — yes — no! I just… my identity’s supposed to be a secret.” Marinette lowered her voice to as quiet as it could be, scanning the area to make sure nobody else was nearby. “You did nothing wrong. I did something wrong. Nobody was supposed to know. You’re fine, okay? I — I’m not upset with you.” She tried to force a smile at the end, which didn’t entirely seem to convince Kagami.

“... I apologise for upsetting you,” Kagami said after a few seconds of doubtfully creasing her eyebrows. “I will not tell anybody else.”

“Alya already knows.”

“I know.”

Marinette sighed, put a hand to her face. It was too hard to keep track of everything. Even simple things seemed to falter before the enormity of the Gabriel lie, before the nagging stings in her foot.

“I suppose that the butterfly wasn’t recovered,” said Kagami eventually.

“Yes.” 

“I suppose you would also tell me if you knew where it ended up.”

“I don’t. Kagami,” moaned Marinette, “I don’t know anything. I’m supposed to be responsible for the kwamis, and I failed to protect Nooroo. I’m a terrible guardian. I let all the Miraculous be stolen, I let my guard down in front of Gabriel, I couldn’t retrieve his Miraculous. I hurt you a ton of times, and I might be hurting Adrien. I’ve just… failed, and failed, and failed.”

Kagami’s hand was suddenly on her arm. She jolted into silence and looked over at Kagami. “And you succeeded in getting back every Miraculous except for the butterfly. You even have the peacock now, with Félix. Those are victories. I don’t know what happened when you fought Gabriel… but you are still here, and he isn’t, so you succeeded. At least a little bit.”

Kagami didn’t know, of course, how mocking she sounded. She wasn’t there. But Marinette felt like the words were kicking her legs away. Both Félix and Gabriel had won, because they were the ones who dictated to her how things should end. She had needed to accept their terms, because she was stupid, because she didn’t pay attention, because she was too trusting.

She curled her toes, feeling the socks scratch against her skin. If she had truly managed to change Gabriel’s mind, then everything would look so much different. If she’d succeeded… she wouldn’t be in this mess.

“... I guess things could be worse,” she mumbled.

“I like your socks,” said Kagami.

Marinette lifted her feet up. It was a reflex. The socks were quarter length, and coloured in broad alternating stripes of yellow and black and red. “Thanks,” she said.

“Why are you wearing them now? You are in a swimsuit.”

“I… don’t wanna get a sunburn on my feet.”

Kagami didn’t frown deeply at her. Maybe the lying face had been successfully averted this time. “I see,” said Kagami, and stood up. “I would still like to see you have fun with us. Do you want to come back to the pool with me?”

“Um… I’ll come later,” said Marinette, and she knew she looked sheepish but it was better than looking insincere. “Th-thanks.”

Kagami bowed, then walked away. Marinette waved in return, but lowered her hand as soon as Kagami was over by the stone steps. She dropped her feet to the ground again, too, felt a small sting as the left one made contact with the soil.

Gabriel’s life hadn’t been enough to pay for his wish. He restored Nathalie from her imminent death by giving his own life, but he was also about to die. In order to bring Nathalie back — so Marinette had realised in time — his wound from the Cataclysm had needed to be transferred somewhere else. She could only guess as to why it came to her. Maybe it was because she was the closest. Maybe it was because he still fundamentally hated her in his soul.

She didn’t know how long she had left. Only that the black rot, which was barely a tiny dot two months ago, had now grown to cover most of her left foot.

It didn’t yet hurt enough stop her from walking. But she knew that it would climb upwards, steadily killing more and more of her. She would have to wear more and more clothes over time, as it crawled like a lurking predator, waiting to strike at her heart and lungs — because she could never tell anyone.

And she didn’t know what would consume her first: the rot, or the lie.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

Zoé was starting to get tired from being in the water. She’d carried Alix, Alya, Mylène and Luka around on her shoulders within the past half hour, and every time Sabrina and Marc had kicked the ball into the pool on accident she’d had to throw it back to them. Not that she minded helping out, but she really needed a break or she’d collapse and have to be carried out. So she pulled herself up to sit on the side of the pool, waving at the others to indicate, ‘I’m fine, keep playing.’

It was a beautiful day, marred only slightly by how Marinette didn’t seem to want to partake in it. Actually… that was a pretty big marring, but at least Marinette was here.

It was… a fine day. Zoé knew she didn’t have any claim to Marinette’s time, she knew Adrien was her main priority, she knew Marinette had enough friends to completely cover her schedule in meetups twice over. But now that they were all together, Zoé had been hoping to see more of her.

Also, Adrien wasn’t with her. He was here, in the pool, playing with Nino and Ivan. And that meant Marinette should — technically — be free.

It was a pretty good day. Marinette wouldn’t mind if Zoé went and found her, probably. But Marinette had also been reluctant to keep Zoé’s company lately, for whatever reason… and that made Zoé worry she had already made a mistake.

Like with the confession. Sure, there had been a trace of hope in it, a tiny flame of hope that she always tried to blow out, but that always ignited again. A flame that said, ‘you still have a chance. If she wants to, if she loses Adrien, you could take her for yourself.’ But she had really just wanted Marinette to be happy, and Marinette was happy with Adrien.

Maybe her jealous regard for Marinette had showed, and Marinette had pulled away out of fear. Maybe Marinette thought there would be conflict between her and Adrien. Maybe Adrien had heard about the crush and told Marinette to stay away from her, because he was jealous. But Adrien seemed happy, right? She tried to wave at him, and he caught sight of her and waved back. Not a trace of hesitation or resentment.

But it was something, and it was clearly nagging at Marinette.

Zoé breathed in, filling her whole chest with as much air as she could muster, and lifted her legs out of the water.

But before she could leave to find Marinette, Alix called out to her: “Hey! You’re not leaving, are you?” Alix was currently spray painting the wall along with Nathaniel, and she’d put on a mask to block the fumes — and that mask made her sound a little bit like she was speaking into a pillow.

“No, I’m just —” Zoé started, and then caught herself. She was just about to launch into a lie — and an incredibly meaningless one at that — about wanting some shade inside. “I wanna find Marinette.”

“Oh, yeah, I think she went round the building. Kagami went to find her. Try there.”

“Could I have the pink one?” said Nathaniel.

“Yeah, sure,” said Alix, and threw her spraycan over to him; now, nobody was looking at Zoé.

Zoé sighed with relief — at least now, she wouldn’t be tempted to lie again — and walked along the side of the building. She found Kagami straight away, but Kagami was headed back towards the pool.

“Hey, Kagami!” said Zoé, waving.

Kagami came to a stop and bowed stiffly. “Hello, Zoé,” she said. “If you seek Marinette, you are on the right path.”

“Um, okay! Thanks.”

Then Kagami walked on without further ado. Zoé shrugged. Kagami was a peculiar soul, but Zoé liked her. There was something of a performer in Kagami, but in a way that didn’t lie: she never seemed to perform anything other than the truth, at least not as far as Zoé could tell, but she performed the truth like she was on some kind of stage. Always clear, always forthright, always a little bit artificial — but genuine.

Zoé, meanwhile, acted because it was the easy way out. It was too easy, in fact, and she hated doing it. Being genuine was how she’d gained friends, how she’d been allowed on the team of heroes. She wasn’t going to give that up now.

And Marinette… seemed to act the same way whenever she didn’t want to bother anyone. Zoé spotted her on the bench before Marinette spotted her back, and briefly stopped walking. It was almost like Marinette was off in a different world, that was how out of it she seemed.

Because Marinette’s eyes were looking over her shoulder into the alcove she was sitting in, her shoulders slouching, her mouth curved into a lost little frown. It was like looking at a painting of loneliness. But when Zoé started to move again, Marinette sat up and transformed herself into a smile. More acting — and acting that barely kept the secret underneath.

“H-hi! Zoé!” said Marinette, lifting one hand awkwardly to wave.

“Hey.” Zoé walked up, came to a stop in front of the bench — but placed so her shadow landed over a potted plant, not Marinette. “Are you okay? You’ve barely been by the pool today.”

“Yeah, I… didn’t feel like swimming. Come, sit down, sit,” said Marinette, patting the space next to her on the bench. Her act had quickly improved; Zoé could barely tell she was hiding something now. But still, the hesitation before she answered… there was definitely something there.

Still, if Zoé wanted to dig, then sitting down was probably the first step. “You didn’t feel like swimming,” she said, “and yet you wore a bathing suit.”

“I just changed my mind,” said Marinette, adjusting her straps a little. Zoé forced herself not to look. To act like she didn’t know how lovely Marinette was. Like she didn’t want to sing the girl’s praises to the heavens. Because Marinette belonged to Adrien.

“I see. But… you’re okay, right? Because —”

“I’m okay.”

“— ‘cause if you aren’t,” Zoé reached out and took one of Marinette’s hands in hers, but she didn’t dare meet Marinette’s eyes — “you can just talk to me. Okay? I’ll listen to whatever you have to say.”

Marinette breathed out through her nose, bent her fingers around Zoé’s hand. “Thanks,” she mumbled. “I appreciate that. I’m fine right now, though, so don’t worry about me.”

“Did you talk to Kagami?”

“Yeah. We talked about… things.”

“Things.”

“Yep,” said Marinette, giggling awkwardly.

Zoé glanced down. “Why are you wearing socks, by the way?” It was hard not to notice them, but they also weren’t the first thing on her mind when she saw Marinette.

“Oh! I — I — I hurt my right foot the other day. It’s a bit black and blue still,” said Marinette, and once again Zoé was impressed by the speed of Marinette’s shift. She needed time to charge up her lying engine if she ended up in unfamiliar waters, but once it was started it let her go fast and nimble. “So I wanted to cover it up to not worry people, but I couldn’t just cover up one foot so I had to put socks on both. And I like these socks, too, so…”

“They’re very cute,” said Zoé. “I prefer ankle socks, but I’d wear those.” She nudged Marinette’s left foot gently with her heel —

— and Marinette almost jumped away, yelping with pain.

“I — sorry!” said Zoé, all other thoughts suddenly ripped out of her head. As Marinette half curled up on the bench, holding her shin in both hands, Zoé gingerly reached out to touch her shoulder. “I didn’t realise — was the injury that bad?”

“... It’s, nn, it’s okay,” said Marinette, clearly lying; that said, the pain did seem to fade quickly. “I just, I think… I think you hit right on the worst part, it’s better than it sounds…”

“Do you need a doctor?”

“No!” The force of Marinette’s voice, the sudden terror blazing in her eyes, were so immediate and so strong that they were definitely the most genuine she’d been so far. But her expression quickly shifted back underneath a mask again. “I’m, um, I’m okay. R-really. Don’t worry. It only hurts a bit. Don’t call the doctor, please.”

Zoé knew better than to argue. “Sure, but… that sounded pretty painful. Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah. I just… I’ll have to keep the socks on a while, I think. Okay?”

And then Marinette was smiling, and the smile looked real. But just like Zoé knew better than to argue, she knew better than to trust. Marinette deserved more than to be trusted, she deserved to be seen. Just like she’d seen Zoé.

Was that trust? To believe in someone even if you don’t believe what they say? To support someone even if they’re lying to you? If not, then Zoé didn’t trust Marinette. But if it was, well…

“Well, they are very cute.” The yellow and black reminded Zoé ever so slightly of Pollen. And the red lines between them, of her own beating heart. She could be a hero for Marinette, and love her in those moments when Adrien wasn’t there. Like right now. “I’m sure nobody will mind them.”

“Thanks,” said Marinette. She flushed slightly pink.

“So… you’re not gonna sit here all day, are you? You should be hanging out with the rest of us. It’s your boyfriend’s party, right?”

“I —” started Marinette, though she immediately cut herself off. There was another change in her eyes, like a painful memory flitting across them. And Zoé guessed Marinette wasn’t going to say anything about that, either.

“I’m sure people will understand the sock thing. You told Adrien, right?”

Marinette nodded. “Of course.”

“I’m sure everyone wants to hang out with you too.” Zoé smiled, because the thing she just said was as true as it could possibly be. As truthful as ‘two plus two equals four.’

She wasn’t really being genuine right now, but at least she was being upfront. She wanted to wrap Marinette into a hug and tell her that she loved her. Tell her that whatever was wrong, it was going to be okay, and that she would be at her side every step of the way. But… that was Adrien’s territory now. Zoé had to restrain herself.

“You’re probably right,” sighed Marinette. She pushed herself more upright, then got to her feet — and didn’t seem bothered when her feet pressed down against the ground. And she turned back to Zoé and offered her hand back. “Let’s get back. Okay?”

Zoé took the hand, only slightly stunned by Marinette’s radiant glow. “Okay. Tell me if something happens with the foot, though, will you?”

“... Sure.”

And they walked back towards the front of the house together. But Zoé lagged slightly behind, watching Marinette’s gait. Marinette said it was her right foot, but Zoé had touched the left foot when the pain happened. And now it seemed she was walking without easing the weight on either foot. Something was going on…

… and Zoé wanted to find out, but Adrien’s territory was Adrien’s territory. He was the one who would walk beside Marinette, and carry her secrets.

But Zoé could walk behind, and help wherever she could.

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▧▧▨ ▶▷

In her own personal estimation, Kagami would award — based on her own enjoyment, the information she received, and the statements she provided — six out of ten points to the conversation she just had with Marinette.

She was not unhappy with her own input. She said clearly that she admired Marinette and supported her, and that she wanted her to come back to the pool. Her effort was perhaps rote, but it was fit to purpose.

In a way, she also wasn’t unhappy with Marinette’s input. Marinette had been pleasant, had answered questions and acted with concern. There was nothing to fault about her performance, nor her willingness to answer. No, Marinette herself did very well. But it was impossible to overlook that Marinette seemed unhappy — and that was unfortunate. In fact, Kagami might even go so far as to describe it as ‘regrettable’.

She stopped halfway along the building to greet Zoé, and point her in Marinette’s direction. Perhaps the presence of another friend, one without knowledge of the Ladybug situation, would be better at cheering Marinette up.

Kagami kicked a piece of soil that had been dislodged onto the path, back into the grass. It wasn’t an aggressive gesture, she didn’t do it violently, but in the moment she kicked she felt a flash of anger in her. And she didn’t know where it was from, or what it was for, only that it had been there just for that one moment.

Immediately afterwards the pool came into view, and with it all the people. The playing seemed to have relaxed now; some people sat on the edge with their feet submerged in the water, but most of the people in the pool were either just floating around with only their heads out, or hanging out of it with their shoulders and arms and heads over the edge. Adrien was one of the latter, and he immediately raised his hand to wave to her — as did Alya and Juleka, who were both edge sitters. Everyone was smiling, even the adults on sunbeds under the parasols.

When Marinette came back here and saw everything going on, she could surely not remain unhappy. She loved everyone here, and everyone here loved her. Zoé would bring her back, and things would get better. Surely.

And Félix… was sitting on another sunbed in the shadow of the wall, in the same spot he’d been earlier, just watching everybody else. Kagami smiled too, and moved over towards him.

“Hey,” said Félix, and grabbed Kagami’s hand. “Princess.”

“Prince,” said Kagami. She let him pull her down to sit next to him. “Don’t you want the sun?”

“It would feel awkward,” he said, squeezing her hand once, but looking down at Adrien in the pool instead of at her.

“Why is that?”

He sighed wistfully, and his eyes dropped to his knees. She followed them there for a moment, in case there was something interesting to see there, but quickly looked back at his face. “Just a feeling,” he concluded.

But there was something to his posture that felt not unlike how Marinette had looked. Right now, he was just in his swimming trunks, and the brooch — she knew — lay in a swaddle of cloth behind him. Perhaps it was just that she wasn’t used to his nakedness, and perhaps that was also the case for him about his own nakedness.

“Are you all right?” she asked him. “Talk to me.”

“... I feel unsafe,” he said.

“Unsafe?”

He let his eyes drift away from the pool and onto his own knees. “They don’t know the truth about us yet. Not even Adrien.”

Kagami creased her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

“We’re aliens to them.” He turned his head to look at her. “Most of them would turn on us if they knew.”

“That isn’t true,” said Kagami, squeezing his hand back. “Many of them are my friends.”

“But if they found out we were made the same way that Gabriel’s and Nathalie’s beings were made…” There was a special barb buried inside Nathalie’s name, somehow even stronger than the one within Gabriel’s. His face hardened, and he lowered his voice. “Nobody would hurt her. But if they got their hands on our rings…”

Kagami’s hand twitched involuntarily. It would be very easy to break them. But… friendship was harder to break, right? Alya and Juleka had waved at her. Luka was incredibly friendly. Everyone here would drop everything to help Adrien, and the same would be true even if they knew he’d been created by Duusu’s magic. So the same thing would be true for her and Félix… right? It had to be… it —

She shook that thought before it took her too deep down that spiral of doubt. Even if nobody else would be on their side, Marinette had no qualms about them. And Marinette was Ladybug. Her opinion didn’t just matter more to Kagami than any of the people in the pool’s, it mattered for everybody else’s opinions.

“... You sounded excited to come yesterday,” she said, trying to move the conversation a little bit further away from the uncomfortable topic of whether or not people thought they deserved to exist.

“I changed my mind.” His voice made him sound more edged than he looked.

“Nobody has treated you poorly yet, right?” she said. Her eyes drifted across the pool; Nino caught her eye and reciprocated with a smile. But… Kagami had made friends with everyone. Félix hadn’t made friends with anyone except Adrien, and that had been a shaky friendship as of only a couple of weeks ago. He had attacked the city as a supervillain and locked everyone inside Red Moon. He probably had a bit of a reputation with them. And he wasn’t exactly the best at socialising; even Kagami could tell that, and Kagami knew her social skills were inadequate at best and woeful at worst. On a good day, she might rank them a five out of ten, perhaps five and a half.

“They look at me like I’m gum on their shoe,” he said. “Especially Nathalie.”

“Marinette doesn’t.” Kagami pulled his hand over and put it on her thigh, locking it in place with her own hand. “Even if nobody else likes us… she can get them on our side.”

He breathed out through pursed lips. “She defended Gabriel.”

“... Yes?”

“Can we really trust her after that?” Kagami was ready to reply with ‘Yes,’ even though she knew it was a rhetorical question — but he barely left any room to speak. “She prioritised Gabriel’s reputation over us. He created dozens of senti-beings and killed them, and she made him out as a hero. She protects Nathalie, too. She threw a senti-being into the sun. Do you still think she cares about us?”

His hand was clenching hard against her thigh now. Not to the point of causing pain, but hard enough that she felt she could feel his heartbeat through his fingers — or maybe that was just her own heartbeat. “I think so, yes,” she said, though she suddenly felt less certain. “She is my friend. She loves Adrien.”

“She’s keeping the truth from Adrien. Is that love? What if she just loves him for selfish reasons?”

“Félix… can you stop asking rhetorical questions?” said Kagami, loosening his hand and clasping it with both of hers. “I think we can trust her. She fought for us.”

“No, she didn’t,” he said. He looked very intently at Adrien. “She fought for herself. Until she reveals to the world what a monster Gabriel was, what a monster Nathalie is… I can’t trust her.”

Kagami opened her mouth — but realised she didn’t have a counterargument. She would also have preferred for Gabriel to be outed, even for Adrien’s sake. Sure, she trusted Marinette, but… she could see every argument why Félix wouldn’t.

If only she’d been there during the final battle and heard the things that were said, maybe the reasons would have been more clear. Maybe she could have argued Marinette’s case.

Or maybe she should have argued Félix’s case to Marinette earlier.

“I still trust her,” Kagami murmured. Another nagging doubt came to her: she had also broken Marinette’s trust when she told Félix about Ladybug. That much was clear from the conversation they’d had earlier. “We could speak to her. We could ask her to apologise to us, and also apologise to her.”

“Why should we apologise to her?” said Félix, barbs out. His brow was furrowed deeper than she had ever seen it before. “She’s the one who let the wish happen.”

“... I should not have shared her identity without asking her first,” said Kagami. She sounded meek. She should not be sounding meek.

“She doesn’t deserve an apology. Not until she fixes things,” he said, tearing his hand out of her grasp.

“Félix… please don’t make me choose between you and my best friend.”

He sighed, but didn’t move otherwise. “Would you pick me?”

“I — yes,” said Kagami. But… she wasn’t really sure. Félix was her boyfriend — of course she should choose him. And yet, the thought of un-choosing Marinette felt incredibly strange to her, in the same way that she imagined it would feel strange to put her palm on a hot stove. She sincerely hoped she wouldn’t have to choose.

Félix, unaware of the contents of her head, smiled for just a moment. “Thank you. I would pick you too, princess.”

And the thought of that felt strange, too, because her choosing him and his choosing her wouldn’t just mean that they were together… it would mean loneliness. Picking only one person would mean letting go of all her friends.

But she swallowed those thoughts, because complaining about them wouldn’t fix anything. The best way to solve this would be action.

She got to her feet, and took Félix’s hand with her. He looked up at her with surprise — but she only smiled back. “Come with me,” she said.

“... Why?”

“You are not friends with anyone yet. We should try to fix that.”

He was reluctant at first, but when she tugged his hand so hard she very nearly pulled him out of the sunbed, he had to get to his feet. She wasn’t going to let him wallow — and if anybody else tried to make him feel unwelcome, she would be very stern with them.

She led him to the pool, while his feet dragged more and more, and made him sit down with her by the edge — where she cranked those dragging feet into the water. Then she waved at Alya and Juleka, who were sitting a little ways away; Alya immediately grinned and pushed herself into the water, and nudged Juleka to do the same.

“Stay,” she told Félix, when he twitched at their approach; she held his hand tightly, too. “You need to meet people.” He set his jaw, but he stopped trying to escape — and soon Alya and Juleka were right by them, standing in the water.

“Hey, Kagami!” said Alya, beaming. But she was noticeably less smiley towards Félix. “Félix.”

“Hmnfm,” said Juleka.

“Hello. I would like you to meet my boyfriend.”

And because Félix had been brought up to have proper manners, and was only in his swim trunks and therefore had nothing to hide behind, he bowed his head with his hand to his chest. “I’m Félix. Pleased to meet you.”

“Yeah, we know who you are,” said Alya, raising an eyebrow. “So, since you’ve got Kagami now, that means you’ll behave yourself, right?” Juleka, next to her, seemed to take the question as a cue to fold her arms.

“I —” started Félix.

“And be warned, if you say no, I’m gonna splash you.” Something about Alya felt forced: she was still grinning, or perhaps smirking, but there was a tone to her voice like she wasn’t just playing around. Maybe she had taken the Red Moon situation personally?

But Félix didn’t seem perturbed. He sat prim and straight-backed. “I will not raise a stink again,” he said, with that tone Kagami was starting to recognise in him — he wasn’t lying, but he was giving himself an unspoken clause that would free him to raise a stink if he felt it was called for.

“Good,” said Alya — and lobbed a handful of pool water at his face.

“Hey!”

“That was a friendly splash.” Alya laughed a little bit, before reaching out her hand. “So long as you treat Kagami well, we’ll be fine. Nice to meet you, Félix.” Beside her, Juleka nodded mutely. But both she and Alya still seemed a little stiff.

Félix wiped the worst of the water off his face. “... Fair,” he said, perfectly impassive.

But that impassivity faded quickly. Someone closer to the house said “Hey, Marinette!”, and Alya and Juleka turned around, and Adrien climbed out of the pool to go meet her, and Zoé was holding Marinette’s hand and Marinette actually looked happy, and she still had her funny striped socks on, and Kagami looked back to Félix —

— and Félix looked like Colt Fathom had just risen from the dead again to torment him again.

She squeezed his thigh. “I’m sure she would fight for us,” she whispered.

“That’s easy for you to say.”

“I will speak to her. I promise. I will explain how we feel.”

Just for a moment, it looked like he was about to protest. To ask her to choose him again, but for real this time. But then he closed his mouth and nodded.

Kagami turned back to Marinette. Marinette smiled beautifully at her. But Kagami could only muster a half-smile in return.

Because she knew what she would have to choose, if push came to shove. And it hurt too much to admit.

Chapter Text

“Tell me what’s on your mind,” said Adrien.

The sun wasn’t setting yet, but it was about to touch the rooftops outside the windows of Adrien’s bedroom. Lying down on her back in his bed, with his arm under her head as he lay on his side and looked so sweetly at her, Marinette felt…

… like she was breaking some kind of rule by being here so late.

“It feels like I’m breaking some kind of rule by being here so late,” she answered. She needed her surface thoughts to answer, because if she were ever honest about the frantic and murky waters that lay underneath, she would be opening a box that could never again be closed.

His hand tugged lightly on her pigtail. “Is that the only thing you’re thinking of?”

“It also felt weird using your shower,” she said, putting on a smile for him and letting her head fall sideways so they could see eye to eye. “I thought it would be mysterious and full of secrets, but… it’s just a fancy shower.”

“It’s very big,” he said, smiling lopsidedly in return. “I don’t blame you for feeling weird.”

If only ‘feeling weird’ was where it stopped, then maybe she could have enjoyed this. Not that she didn’t enjoy it — he was here, he was her boyfriend, he was being so soft and warm with her — but that only made her feel more guilty.

“Was today fun?” she said. “For… for you?”

“Yeah. I loved it.” He inched forward, struggled a bit to get past his own arm as he lifted himself above her — but then he reached her forehead with his lips, and stayed there for a while. When he let off, he murmured, “Even though you didn’t come into the pool.”

“I had socks on…”

“You still do,” he said with a chuckle. “But you don’t need to do that. I bet your feet are lovely. Just as beautiful as the rest of you.”

Marinette swallowed. The compliment floated by like his breath, dispersing before it even reached her. Yes — she was as beautiful as her black and flaking foot. In truth, all the wound was doing was to expose her soul.

Adrien was so gorgeous. He was kind and joyful and gentle and she couldn’t believe he actually wanted her. He deserved so much better than a liar and a coward like her.

Her guts twisted queasily. The truth needed to come out, sooner or later — but she didn’t know when, she didn’t know how, she didn’t know where, she didn’t know anything except the truth itself.

She needed someone to help her tell him. Someone who could just tell her what to do and give her the right words to say. Someone to stand next to her while she talked, or someone to talk while she stood next to them…

… like…

His other hand was suddenly on her cheek. “Thanks for coming today,” he said. “I always have fun when I’m with you.”

“... Thank you,” she mumbled, and her cheeks burned uncomfortably hot. “R-really?”

“Yeah. I wish you could just stay here all the time.”

“I — I can’t —”

“I know,” he sighed. “But one day. One day, we might get married, and we could live here together, and we could…”

All of Marinette burned uncomfortably hot, like she was being roasted alive under his tender expectant eyes. “Could what?”

“Do you want to have kids, Marinette? When we’re married? Not straight away, but… I wanna have kids, I think, and… if you want them too, maybe we could… you know?”

Adrien was blushing. But Marinette had gone from the searing flames of hell’s eighth circle down to the frozen wastes of the ninth. She could barely breathe, let alone move, and her thoughts flowed like a glacier. “Adrien…” she murmured, shocked at the coherence of her voice, “we’re only fourteen… it’s too early to discuss this, when we — we only just started dating…”

“Yeah, but…” Adrien seemed about to protest for a moment, but then he tickled the back of her neck a little bit. “Yeah. You’re right. We’ll talk about it later… when we’ve had a little more time, right?”

“... Y-yeah,” said Marinette. She couldn’t look him in the face, because she didn’t deserve to look at him. She could never admit to him that his father had been Monarch. She would die from her rotting foot long before she could marry anyone. There was no promise she could possibly give him that wouldn’t be broken. “Adrien… what if something happens?”

“If something happens to you, I’ll take care of you.”

“But what if I hurt you? What if I do something that makes you hate me?”

He cupped his hands around her neck, and she had to meet his eyes again. Emerald green dreams consumed her. “Marinette,” he almost whispered, “I could never hate you. I swear I’ll love you no matter what.”

“But… what if you don’t? What if —”

“I promise. I can’t imagine anything that would make me stop loving you.”

She wanted to challenge him. To tell him the truth right then and there. To get it over with. But she would choke on her fear before she even got the first syllable out.

If only she had that someone to help her talk to him…

Nathalie knew. Amelie knew. Félix knew. Tomoe Tsurugi knew. None of them would work, they were all too distant from her… but Cat Noir might work. He didn’t know yet, but if she talked to him, he would definitely know what to do. And if Adrien got everything explained to him by a hero, especially one as confident as Cat Noir, then he might not be angry afterwards…

“You look tired,” said Adrien.

“Yeah… I am. Sorry.” The worst and most awkward giggle she had ever heard in her life escaped from her lips. “I should… I should get home.”

“I’ll walk you downstairs, okay?”

“Okay. Um… thanks.”

He took her hand and led her out into the hallway, where he briefly let go as they put on their shoes outside the door. She was very careful with her wounded foot, winced only as much as she absolutely needed to as she placed her heel into the shoe, and made sure to smile before he took her hand again and led her down to the ground floor. He took her to the living room doors, too, and not even being tied up in a nest of cables could have stopped her from following wherever he wanted to go.

“Marinette’s going home now,” said Adrien, after he’d pushed open the door to what had been Gabriel’s — Monarch’s — old workspace. Nathalie and Amelie, from their couch, waved daintily at them.

“Have a safe trip home,” said Amelie.

“Thanks for coming today, Marinette,” said Nathalie and smiled.

But next to Amelie sat Félix… and he wouldn’t even look towards the door. Marinette raised her hand gingerly to wave. “Um… bye,” she said. “You too, Félix.”

Was he scared she would take his Miraculous away? Or offended that Kagami hadn’t received hers yet? Or was this about Gabriel, or about Adrien? Marinette found no answer from his avoidant eyes, so she turned away before it got too awkward.

Or maybe he was worried she’d be angry with him for imprisoning all of Paris inside Red Moon. Maybe he was worried she’d punish him for taking all the Miraculous and giving them to Gabriel. And sure, she was definitely still cross with him — or perhaps ‘cross’ was the wrong word, perhaps she was scared or distrustful or perhaps she did want to twist his arm behind his back until it broke and perhaps she wanted to scream at him until her throat was raw — but she no longer had the right to complain about him. If she were to throw a stone, then the glass all around her would shatter before the stone even left her hand.

Adrien brought her to the front doors while she churned over Félix, but paused at the doorstep, where he fiddled with his rings — his amok — while talking. “Will I see you again before school?” he said.

“I’m not sure,” she mumbled, temporarily fixated on the rings as they spun loosely around his finger. “Only three days left…”

“But we’ll talk on the phone, right?”

“R-right!”

“Should I walk you home?”

“Adrien.” Marinette sighed, looked at his face but not into his eyes. “I — thanks, but I can walk home alone. Talk to Nathalie and Amelie instead, okay? And, and Félix. You’ve barely talked to them all day.”

He nodded with an awkward smile. “Yeah… you’re right. I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t be —”

“I’ll call you tomorrow!” He didn’t interrupt her, not really. She’d barely raised her voice, had tried to stammer in a few words in the middle of his words without the energy to see it through.

“--- okay,” she said.

An hour that was probably just a second passed. And then she threw herself forward, wrapped her arms around him, and pressed her nose into the nape of his neck. “I love you,” she said, and it wasn’t enough, it could never be enough, but it could maybe help a little bit while she worked out how to tell him. “I… I love you.”

“I love you too,” he whispered, and he didn’t hug her back tightly — but the squeeze from his arms was so much more than enough.

She swallowed the sob that was trying to push its way out, and she spent the several moments before she finally let go just stabilising herself enough that he wouldn’t read the despair in her through her eyes. When she did pull back, he was smiling, and so was she.

And he kept smiling for as long as she could see him, but as soon as her back was turned to the house, she shed her first tear.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

The kwamis hovered around her while she worked. None of them spoke, not anymore — they got through all their questions long ago, and now they were just mutely watching as she carved and lacquered and inscribed box after box. The only sound, apart from what she made with her tools, was the news report on her computer screen. It was about Paris’s future. It sounded like a good future. It sounded like a future she would have loved to experience.

She was getting used to the pattern. She’d inscribed it on twenty different boxes by now, although five of them were ones she messed up on in some way or other; she’d shoved them carelessly off to the side for now. Skipping boxes for Tikki and Plagg and Duusu, that meant she only had one left.

After some hinge testing, she felt safe enough with it to put Stompp’s Miraculous inside. Then she glanced at the clock on her screen — 15:58. Almost time for A—

“Marinette?” said Sabine’s voice from downstairs; all the kwamis immediately dived back into hiding.

“You can’t come up right now,” said Marinette.

The hatch flew open either way. But the head that popped up was Alya’s, along with most of the rest of Alya. “But I can, right?”

“Yeah,” said Marinette, breathing out. “You’re allowed.”

Alya looked down the stairs. “Sorry, it’s not a secret or anything, she’s just a bit stressed. Dealing with fewer people helps, you know?” she said, and there were sounds of understanding from both of Marinette’s parents. Not for the first time, Marinette had to appreciate just how perceptive of a friend Alya was; she definitely wouldn’t have had the headspace to think of that explanation herself.

And then Alya climbed up, closed the hatch, and smiled at her. “Girl. You look like you haven’t slept.”

“Is it that obvious?” mumbled Marinette, swivelling her chair back to the table. She simply hadn’t had time to, because she needed to finish the work as quickly as possible.

“Marinette, please tell me you didn’t stay up all — you did, didn’t you…” Alyas’ footsteps came slow but unavoidable and steady, and soon her arms were flung around Marinette’s chest and neck. “I’m not leaving you until you’re in bed, okay?”

“Mmf,” said Marinette, inching the chair forward a little more. Alya hung on. “I have to hand these out tonight…”

“Tonight?” said Alya with obvious surprise. “Why do you need to do it tonight?”

“Because the butterfly Miraculous is still missing, and if I keep the Miraculous longer than I need to I might lose them all again.” It was a simple fact, with no emotion attached. “I’m going to make all the holders responsible for their own Miraculous.”

Alya sighed and let go of the back hug, leaving only one hand on Marinette’s shoulder. “Yeah, I assumed as much from your message. But that means I can save you a trip to my place, right? Or do you wanna keep Trixx longer?”

“Nope!” said Trixx, popping out from the pencil drawer; all the other kwamis soon stuck their heads out too. “I’m going with you today!”

“And you could help Marinette hand out all the others, Alya,” said Tikki, emerging from behind the computer screen. Marinette winced and reached out for the final box, which was already mostly complete: she only had the pattern on top left, as well as a finishing varnish.

“I was already gonna do that,” said Alya. Then it sounded like she was hugging Trixx. “Oh, you little rascal, I’ve missed you…”

“We’re gonna make the best illusions together!”

“Rena Rouge back in action!”

“Yeah!”

“Yeah!”

There was a pause, as the kwamis all came back outside and settled into watching Marinette’s woodcutting again. Alya joined them, hunching down by the desk and folding her arms over it. “So… did you just call me over for the company?”

“No,” said Tikki. “Master Su-Han is coming. And Marinette doesn’t want to talk to him alone.” Marinette cringed only a little bit at that, trying to maintain focus on the line she was chipping out.

“But he is late,” said Wayzz. “I hope nothing has happened to hi—”

Knuckles rapped on the balcony window, and Marinette quickly ushered the kwamis to hide again. “Um, Alya, could you check if it’s him? I’m a little…”

“I got you, girl.” Alya walked away and went to climb up to the bed, where she crawled unseen for a little bit. A short while later, the hatch opened with a pop and she said: “Yeah, that’s Su-Han.”

“Guardian,” said Su-Han’s unmistakable voice, “why is this girl here?”

“I’m Marinette’s best friend,” said Alya, and Marinette imagined the girl was sternly folding her arms. “And she invited me.”

Nothing happened for a moment. Marinette kept her eyes on the box, started chipping out another line. Eventually, Su-Han said: “Fine. I’ll permit it.”

“Don’t care. I only need her permission. Don’t get your sandal dirt on her bed when you climb in.”

There was some rustling and creaking and grunting above, and then Alya and Su-han came down the ladder. They whispered something between each other that Marinette didn’t catch, and then they came to stand on either side of her.

Then Su-Han cleared his throat to her left. “Guardian.”

“Hello,” said Marinette, flicking out a chip of wood onto the desk. She was very close to finishing. “I’m a bit busy…”

“I can see that.” A moment passed, and Marinette guessed he was taking in all the pages and notes and translations from the grimoire, as well as the boxes. “Why have you permitted your friend to see the kwamis, and the contents of the grimoire? This is highly irregular.”

But not, Marinette noted quietly, so irregular that he was commanding her to give back the box. His tone was sharp, but it lacked the bitterness it had held so many times before; instead, he almost sounded worried.

“She’s permitted me because I’m her best friend,” said Alya, with her own brand of sharpness. “She trusts me, and I trust her.”

“You mean to tell me… you have also been inducted into the secrets of the Miraculous?”

“I’m also a holder.” There was a small ‘Hey there’ from Trixx. “I help Marinette because she needs it, and what she doesn’t need is some old jerk shouting at her when she hasn’t slept for forty hours, so do not test her.”

“Alya…” said Marinette, digging another furrow into the box. “Don’t. Please. We’re all on the same side.”

She imagined the things that might be happening behind her: Alya and Su-Han frowning with steely glares, their eyes shooting daggers at each other, Alya raising a threatening fist, Su-Han stepping back. Whatever it was, it ended with a sigh from Su-Han. “Fine. I suppose you have been disconnected from the Order. I permit it.”

“You better. Marinette tells me everything, and that’s just how it’s gonna be.”

Marinette felt like she’d been stabbed in the heart. Neither Alya nor Tikki knew about her cataclysmed foot — nor would they ever know. It was the one secret she’d allow herself. “Thank you,” she croaked, and put the tool down.

The pattern was complete — now she needed to sand it, and then only the varnish and lacquer were left, and she picked up a piece of sandpaper and ran her thumb across it and she would much rather focus on what she was doing with her hands than anything else right now.

“What is the purpose of so many boxes?”

“Holding the Miraculous.”

“The Miracle Box —”

“Nuh uh,” said Alya. “Don’t start complaining about her again.”

Marinette cleared her throat while she put down the sandpaper. “It’s fine, Alya. I can handle this,” she said, picking up the lacquer brush and dipping it into the pot. “From today on, every single holder will have their Miraculous permanently.”

“What? That is unacceptable!”

“Hey, old man —”

“Alya, please,” said Marinette. She focused on the brush, on making the lines right, because the less she had to look at anybody else the easier it was to present her case. “Su-Han, I’m still the guardian. That means I’m the one in charge of the box. I’ve proved myself to be capable time and time again, and I believe this is the right course of action.”

It was a lie. She had proved herself to be incapable every time it mattered. But projecting confidence about this meant that she wouldn’t have to explain the extra reason that was currently eating her foot.

“The Miraculous have always been kept together!”

“And you know what happened as a result of that,” said Marinette. She put the brush down — the final box was ready. She lifted up Mullo’s Miraculous and put it inside, before closing the lid and placing the box next to the others. “Careful, Mullo. The varnish won’t be dry for a few minutes.”

Mullo chirped joyfully and dived down towards the box, and immediately hugged the lid. Marinette could only hope that the kwami was phasing through it, otherwise she was going to have to add a new layer as well as clean Mullo’s whole front. All the other kwamis soon joined Mullo, approaching their own boxes — but Marinette had to maintain focus. “The Miraculous are still in danger, as long as Nooroo is out there.”

There was silence. And a lot of it, concentrated into the space between the three of them like a black hole. Even the kwamis’ chatter seemed to completely die away, and only the meaningless babble from the screen remained, as Marinette reached for Nooroo’s empty box and lifted it off the desk.

The next two things happened at the same time. Alya reaching forward to turn off the broadcast was expected, but Marinette didn’t expect in a million years that Su-Han would put his hand gently on her shoulder. “Still no trace of the Miraculous of the Butterfly?” he asked — and she allowed herself to look over her shoulders at him to catch his worried eyebrows. She shook her head.

“After the wish, all I could find was the double wedding ring, along with the Miraculous that Monarch had turned into rings and Cat Noir's and mine. I transformed into Aquabug and searched the basement but nothing. Even after repairing everything, it's as if the brooch had... disappeared! But whatever happens, we'll be ready.”

She sighed and turned her chair around fully, so she could see both Alya and Su-Han at the same time. “When Monarch seized my yo-yo, he suddenly gained access to all the Miraculous at once. This can never happen again, which is why I'll remain the guardian, but only to support and help my fellow heroes. From now on, each holder will be responsible for the Miraculous and their kwamis. To be sure that power is used for the greater good, it needs to be shared.”

“Master Su-Han…” said Tikki, moving to hover in front of Su-Han. “I agree with Marinette, and I trust her. Please listen to her.” Several of the other kwamis flew forward to do the same, including Wayzz and Roaar.

Su-Han frowned. But his eyebrows gradually unfurrowed, until he looked more sorrowful than disapproving. “I accept,” he said, and Alya nodded appreciatively somewhere in the corner of Marinette’s eyes. “And I apologise for my… outbursts. I didn’t come here today to chastise you.”

“You came here for updates about the butterfly,” said Marinette.

“No. I am here to offer an apology on behalf of the Order.” He bowed — he bowed — with his hands pressed together and his eyes closed. “We failed to respond in time, and as a result, Monarch got to make his wish. We ought to have been here to help you sooner.”

He stood up slowly from the bow, and Marinette realised she was gaping. He had been back in Paris this whole time — they had talked the day after Gabriel’s wish, when she brought the freshly restored Miraculous to him and he asked to hear what had happened. She had seen him several times during her nightly reports. He’d been anything from short to curt to snappy to stern, but never anything else. And now he was bowing to her?

“Why are you telling me this?” said Marinette, and her voice was low and wobbly. “You — you complain about me for a whole half year and tell me I can’t do my job as a guardian, and you, and you, and now is the first time you try to be nice to me?”

Whatever was in his eyes — fear, surprise, concern, sorrow — it did nothing except add kindling to the rising flame inside her. Why was she angry? She had no right to be angry when all he had said was the truth. And yet, she could feel her breath going faster and shallower, could feel her hands tighten their grasp onto nothing whatsoever, and whatever he said next she knew she couldn’t accept it. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I know we were too late, and I know I haven’t helped you to become a better guardian —”

“And you’re apologising by saying I’m not good enough,” snapped Marinette, and her voice was rising in intensity but still wobbling. “You’re saying that if only I weren’t the guardian, then everything would have been fine. That’s what you’re saying, right?” And the flame licked up higher, consuming more and more of her insides.

“No, I — that is not what I meant, guardian. You performed exceptionally well. I only meant to say we should have helped you sooner.”

“Then why didn’t you?” She could feel tears pushing on her eyes now. “If you’d actually been here to help, then maybe I would have Nooroo back! Maybe I wouldn’t have lost at all! Maybe you could have stopped Gabriel Agreste from making the wish!”

“Marinette —”

“No, Alya. I wanna know.” The flames were raging inside all of her now, and the pain in her foot was rising with them. “Why did I have to bear the consequences? Why did everything fall to me, when I wasn’t qualified? Why was I alone all the time?” And her tear ducts melted and she started to weep, her voice subsiding into sobs, and Alya was there an instant later with a tight embrace and Su-Han just stood there, mouth open, robbed for words.

“It’s okay, Marinette,” said Alya, fists pushing tight against Marinette’s spine. “It’s okay. You did well. You did everything you could.”

Marinette clamped her arms around Alya in return, helpless to stop herself. She sat there quietly while Alya spoke, only barely aware of the kwamis’ arms also touching her. It was somehow harder to forget Su-Han’s presence, even though he didn’t come closer and he was hidden behind Alya’s hair.

And when he interrupted Alya’s murmurs, she already knew she wasn’t going to listen. “Your anger is justified,” he said. “I apologise that we didn’t help. Your conduct was exemplary —”

“Shut up,” hissed Marinette. “G-go away. I, I don’t want to hear it.” Alya’s arms stiffened for a bit and just for a moment, everything was quiet.

“... Then I will go. Have a good night. We will see each other again soon.”

Marinette saw him climb up the ladder and heard the bed shift and groan, and the flame inside kept burning her until the skylight thudded shut. Only then did she allow herself to unwind.

Alya hung on a little while longer. But when she pulled back, she wasn’t smiling, not even with her lips. Her hands remained on Marinette’s shoulders, like clamps. “Marinette… are you okay?” she said.

“... Yes.”

“You know he was trying to mend bridges, right?”

He hadn’t. He’d been trying to save face. “Yes. I know.”

“Okay, because…” Alya’s thumbs rubbed against Marinette’s shoulder blades. “You sounded really intense. And I don’t blame you, but… you were like… you didn’t need to snap at him, you know? And I thought maybe you had something else on your mind, and if I can help…”

Marinette looked down. Her left foot still hurt. “No,” she lied. “I’m just… tired, I guess…”

“I can imagine,” said Alya, and leant in for another hug. “That settles it. I’m coming with you on every delivery, and then I’m brushing your teeth for you and putting you into bed.”

They spent an hour going around to houses, leaving the kwamis and their Miraculous in people’s rooms. The one exception was Kagami, whose house was probably under close surveillance, and whose mother had been in cahoots with Gabriel — Marinette left Longg in Kagami’s locker, with a special note saying to hide the Miraculous from Tomoe, in addition to the other note she gave everyone.

Alya didn’t brush Marinette’s teeth, but she did put her to bed. She hovered on the ladder with the necklace around her neck and Trixx over her shoulder, as Marinette — with her socks pulled up as far as they would go — curled up under the covers. Of course, she was supposed to sleep, but she only pretended to. In time, Alya whispered a soft “Good night,” and slipped down and out of the room. A short while later, Tikki started to snore.

In the murky silence, Marinette sat upright and rolled down her sock. She couldn’t see a difference for sure from yesterday, but it felt like more. She took her phone from the side of the bed and snapped a picture, saving it in the same folder she’d used for the past two weeks. And she rolled the sock back up and fell back into bed.

And finally, she slept.

Chapter Text

Kagami was extremely calm and measured when she saw the little hexagonal box in her locker. Perhaps she was surprised for a moment — but only for a moment, before she made her expression as impassive as it could be. She put the box and its contents into her bag, walked slowly and deliberately towards the washrooms, and checked to make sure she was alone. When she was satisfied in her search, she went into a stall to open the box, and lifted away the two pieces of paper that lay on top of her necklace — Longg’s necklace.

Longg materialised into a hug. “Kagami-san! I am back!” he said, a little too loudly for her liking.

“This is a public space,” she whispered, and patted him with a hand.

“Ah, naturally. I apologise.” He cleared his throat as he pulled back, and the next thing he said was in a sort of stage whisper. “Oh! This is one of those famous water enclosure stalls. Tikki has told me many fascinating stories about them.”

“It is good to see you again, Longg-sama.” She bowed. “Am I being called out for a mission?”

Longg shook his head. “Ladybug has seen fit to give you my Miraculous in perpetuity! In her wisdom, she decided that the most advantageous path forward for the safeguarding of the Miraculous was to make all holders permanent. Now you can jump into action with alacrity and vigour whenever you are needed, at only a moment’s notice, and dazzle foes with your martial prowess and enhanced elemental powers!”

So… they were all being deputised to try and find the butterfly. Which implied a level of responsibility — they would be expected to help at a moment’s notice, as long as Marinette needed them. That was good for Marinette. And for Kagami, because now she would have someone to talk to whenever she was stuck at home and Félix couldn’t come visit. Or with Félix there, they could transform together and jump along the rooftops, feeling the wind on their faces and the air underneath their feet and the vast atmosphere above them.

“I will do my best, Longg-sama,” she said, bowing only her neck this time.

“I know you will,” said Longg. “Ladybug also graciously wishes for you to meet with her, as well as all the other holders, on the roof of the Trocadéro at ten minutes past five this afternoon.”

“Oh. I see.”

“She furthermore desires to implore you not to wear the necklace in the presence of your mother, to maintain as much secrecy as possible.” Kagami nodded. That made — sense. Somewhat. “Finally… she wishes for you to relay the time and place for this rendezvous to Félix.”

Longg, usually so enthusiastic, suddenly sounded a bit dour at that final message: his little smile turned into something more resembling a straight line. “Longg-sama,” said Kagami, “are you all right? Is something the matter?”

“There is nothing to be concerned about, Kagami-san,” he said and went back into a smile, though he clearly required a bit of a run-up to get his lips curling again.

“Is there something the matter about Félix?” Did Marinette already know he hated her for what she did? Or was this about the Red Moon incident?

“Any problems will be resolved between him and the Guardian,” he replied. “I should not be talking about this further. However, she still wishes for him to attend the meeting, and I trust her instincts.”

But Marinette hadn’t seemed specifically bothered by Félix at the pool two days ago. Marinette just seemed bothered in general, whenever she thought nobody was looking at her. The look in her eyes when she looked at Félix hadn’t been angry or judgemental, it had just been sorrowful. 

Three sets of feelings, all interlocked. And Kagami was having a hard time of it figuring out what was actually going on.

Kagami really needed to talk to Marinette about the Félix situation. Perhaps she would have a chance after the all-hands meeting. Then she could present Félix’s side of the situation, get a reassurance from Marinette, bring the results to Félix, and then she would be a good girlfriend to Félix and a good friend to Marinette for undoing the knot between them.

“I will tell him,” she said.

“Ladybug also wanted me to tell you,” said Longg — how many things had she told him to say? — “to read carefully the small slips of paper she enclosed within the box.”

“Oh,” said Kagami, and flipped the two notes over. The writing on them was neat and small, and also familiar in more than one sense. “These are the same things you just told me.”

“Indeed,” said Longg with a beleaguered sigh. “The honoured Guardian loves to be thorough.”

Kagami didn’t roll her eyes, and didn’t really want to, but she imagined she felt the same way as people who did roll their eyes did whenever they rolled them.

Although, in one sense Marinette hadn’t been thorough enough. Gabriel had known that Kagami was Ryuuko, and therefore Nathalie must know the same. If secrecy was a concern, then her being Ryuuko was perhaps inadvisable. Even more so because Mother would also know. And Mother… Kagami didn’t know where Mother’s true allegiance lay anymore, but she barely had much hope left for the woman.

Perhaps Kagami could switch with someone. Perhaps Marinette could arrange for somebody else to take Longg, and Kagami could become a different hero. Though that felt cruel to Longg…

“I look forward to transforming with you again soon,” said Kagami, because it was true, even if it might be the last time.

“And I with you.”

Perhaps Marinette had a plan. Because she always did.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

The first arrival was Miss Hound. She was fifteen minutes ahead of time, and she was also why Marinette had decided to come twenty minutes early. Not long after, Viperion and then Polymouse appeared, and next Rooster Bold and Pigella.

Conversation started between the early arrivals, even though it was awkward. The heroes had met up during akuma fights before, and Marinette — as Ladybug — had given them pep talks, but this was the first time they’d been called together outside of immediate danger. Some of them were seeing each other properly for the first time, too.

Vesperia popped up alongside Minotaurox, then Caprikid and Purple Tigress. Pegasus jumped onto the roof exactly five minutes before, and then there was a lull as everyone tried to greet each other again. But the greater number of people also seemed to make talking easier; more of them had worked together now, and the ones who had already gotten introduced could introduce each other to the rest.

But Marinette held back. She stood on the far side of the roof, trying to project an image of leadership and authority. She didn’t know if she needed to — but since she was friends with everyone out of costume, she had to make sure she didn’t give that away while in costume. Being austere and separated helped.

It also helped her prepare for the conversation she hoped to have with Cat Noir afterwards.

Bunnyx and King Monkey showed up about two minutes before ten past, not together and not even from the same direction. But Rena Rouge and Carapace did show up together and from the same direction, and the look Alya gave Marinette as they touched down said clearly, ‘I wanted to come earlier, but he dawdled too much.’ And Marinette tried to give her one that said in return, ‘That’s fine. I’m glad you’re here.’ Whether that look worked or not… Marinette had no idea.

Almost exactly at ten minutes past five, Cat Noir landed right next to Marinette. “Nice to see you again, my lady,” he said.

“... Hey,” said Marinette. Her breath caught in her throat. “It’s good to see you too.”

“So what’s this meeting about?”

“Just… briefing everyone. Everyone’s getting to keep their Miraculous now — I mean, I already told you that in the message — but I just want to let them know what we’ll be doing.”

He put the staff into the ground and placed his hands flat on top, resting his chin atop them. “I’d also like to know what we’ll be doing,” he said, halfway between sighing and sassing.

“We still have a job to do. Until the Butterfly —”

“Yeah, I know,” he said with a grin. “You said that too. I’m not worried, though. You’re still the hero who will save us all. And I’ll be by your side the whole time, as your loyal knight.”

“All right, Casanova, you know we’re both taken,” she said.

“I’m taken by you,” he said, winking.

Her heart wasn’t fully in the banter, though. And it didn’t feel like his was, either; he sounded more like he was just indulging for old times’ sake, to remind her of what they used to be like before Félix stole all the Miraculous.

It was like he was there in spirit and substance, just with a new frame around it. And that was… nice.

“Hey, Cat Noir… after the meeting, I need to talk to you. Alone. Could you stay behind a bit? It’s very important.”

His eyes went wide for a moment, but then he nodded. “Sure thing. I’ve got time.”

“Good. Thanks, kitty.”

Marinette looked out at the gathered heroes, saw that they’d split up into three smaller circles: there was active conversation going on in all of them, though not everyone was talking. King Monkey was laughing loudly at something, while Rena Rouge off in another group was practising melodies on her flute as the others around her watched. That was also nice. The heroes were already working together, even those who didn’t know too much about each other yet.

But Ryuuko and Argos were still not there. Marinette checked the time on her yo-yo: it was five minutes past starting time. And Kagami was good at being punctual… had she not found Longg in her locker? Maybe she was ill? Had there been some trouble with Félix?

“Where are they?” she mumbled, flicking into the contacts list to see if she could maybe reach one of them via call.

“If you mean Argos and Ryuuko, I think that’s them over there,” said Cat Noir. Before Marinette had the chance to look where he was pointing, he added, “Yup. That’s them.”

True enough: Ryuuko and Argos were approaching from the southwest, bouncing from rooftop to rooftop; they touched down on the Trocadéro’s roof barely a second after Marinette saw them, though, and dashed the rest of the way while holding hands.

She had to admit it: she didn’t like that. Félix hadn’t earned his place on the team yet. Kagami was a good friend, and it was Kagami’s judgement that had made Marinette decide to hold back her anger. Kagami clearly loved him, and she deserved to be with someone she chose for herself. And Marinette loved Kagami, as a friend, and wanted to fully trust Kagami’s judgement because Kagami also deserved that trust. But with everything Félix had done to help Gabriel, despite clearly hating the man; with the way he’d treated her, and the way he’d treated Adrien…

And yet, Marinette really didn’t have any right to complain. She had also helped Gabriel, in a way — was still helping him even now. She had also treated Adrien poorly, and for that matter she’d treated Kagami poorly too. In a way, she didn’t even have a right to complain about him holding a Miraculous, because Kim was also on the team. He was not alone in having a Miraculous she didn’t give him, and he was not alone in having hurt her.

Even Adrien seemed to support Félix. He always seemed a little bit distant whenever Félix came up, but ultimately he would always speak positively about his cousin. And that was… also a good thing. Adrien was good. Adrien was trustworthy. Adrien was amazing.

So she swallowed her bile and instead stepped forward to address everyone. “Hello,” she said, and not everyone caught it — but Viperion, Vesperia, Ryuuko, and Rena Rouge immediately turned to look at her. “Hello!”

The sound of talking quickly faded as people hissed at each other that the meeting was about to start, and soon the whole team was looking her way. The only sound left between them were a few straggling whispers.

“Thanks for coming,” said Marinette. “I’m glad everyone could make it.” She didn’t mention that she’d specifically looked into everyone’s schedules, except Cat Noir’s, to make sure that everyone would have the time.

“Woo!” said Vesperia.

“As you might have heard, from today onwards, you will all be permanent holders of your Miraculous. You’ll be expected to take care of your kwamis and feed them, and to hide them and the Miraculous from everyone else in your lives. You’ll be responsible for keeping your identities secret… and also, to be a superhero when and where it’s needed. This could mean helping a kitten out of a tree, or it could mean fighting a supervillain.”

“Ladybug,” said Pegasus, raising his hand.

Marinette nodded. “Yes?”

“Will we all be expected to join in every time something happens?” Pegasus adjusted his glasses so Max-like that Marinette almost wanted to chastise him, but the glamour would probably be enough to hide him from anyone who didn’t know the connection. “I calculate that there would be some logistical issues if every hero starts to fight a villain without a collective plan.”

“I’ll get to that later. Don’t worry. Now… you may be wondering why I bring up” — here, Rooster Bold’s hand shot up — “supervillains, even though — yes?”

Rooster Bold’s hand shot down as quickly as it had gone up. “Er, sorry. I just realised that’s what you were about to say. Carry on.”

“... Okay. Um, I hope so?” Marinette breathed in. This wasn’t the most important meeting in the world, but she still had to appear in charge. Everything was going to change now, and while she would be less of a leader, she would still be the one everyone looked to — her and Cat Noir. “I have given you all your Miraculous because… despite Monarch’s defeat, the butterfly Miraculous he wielded has not yet been recovered.”

There were a few gasps from the collected heroes. Several of them looked uncertainly at each other. “We don’t know what happened to it,” Marinette said, pushing on. “So… it could just be lost. We just don’t know yet. But just in case, I want all of you to be ready in case a new butterfly holder emerges. And in the meantime… I would like to ask all of you to help me recover the lost Miraculous. It looks like a butterfly-winged brooch, and might have been dropped into the sewers, as the last battle happened above a large basin that was connected to them.”

“I can help look,” said Bunnyx, not even bothering to raise her hand. “I can look back in time.”

Marinette swallowed. “Could we talk about that later? There might be some… things we need to get in order first.” She glanced sideways at Cat Noir, who gave her a lopsided smile.

“Sure. I’ll pester you later.”

“Now, about your question, Pegasus. I don’t want everyone to transform for every little thing. If there’s a fire, or a boat capsizes, don’t be afraid to jump in to help. But if there’s an akuma, or another supervillain suddenly appears… it’s fine if you use your powers to save people. But… the first thing you should do is to message me that you’re available, and I’ll give you a rendezvous point so we can lay a plan. If you want to do something on your own, you should ask me or Cat Noir. Don’t try to actually fight a villain without contacting us.”

Her eyes drifted across the group. Several of the heroes were nodding, although Purple Tigress and Polymouse and Caprikid seemed more than a little nervous. But then she caught sight of Argos, and saw that he was glaring at her like he was hoping to sear a hole through her head. His frown was so sharp and intense that she almost took an instinctive step back —

— but then she remembered Flairmidable, and bit her teeth together. If he had a problem with her, he was damn well going to have to tell her to her face, not just boil himself red about it. “... I have complete trust in your abilities,” she said after looking away from him. “I just want everyone to be on the same page about what we’re doing. Many of your powers are dangerous and could easily cause trouble for other heroes if you don’t coordinate them. That’s why I want everything to go through me.”

“What if you’re not available?” said Pigella.

“Then you go to Cat Noir. And if he’s not available, Rena Rouge.”

Rena Rouge raised her hand slowly as Marinette spoke, but started talking even before being called on. “I tested in my room yesterday, and found out I still have a timer. All of us probably still have five minutes between using our powers and detransforming. That’s not going to be a problem, is it?”

“No, and that’s another reason why you shouldn’t use your powers without asking me,” said Marinette. “Most of you have limited time, while Cat Noir and me do not. If we coordinate, then you probably won’t have to leave to feed your kwamis in the middle of a dangerous situation. But…”

She sighed, a little more weary than she’d expected to be. They still knew so little. But it was better to be ready than to wait any longer. “I hope it turns out that the butterfly is just lost. Or maybe, it’ll turn up somewhere else. Like I said, I don’t know that anyone has found it yet. I gave you the Miraculous as a safety measure, but even after the butterfly is recovered, I want all of you to keep your Miraculous. Like I said, you are permanent holders. I’ve put a lot of trust in you with this, but… I think you deserve it.”

“I won’t use my power.”

Everyone looked towards Argos. He hadn’t spoken particularly loudly, but everyone else had been silent, and something about his tone made it impossible not to pay him notice. It was at once distant and severe, like a hurricane out at sea. “... What?” said Miss Hound, though Marinette guessed she was less specifically confused about his refusal and more just generally confused.

“I will never create another senti-being,” Argos stated. He was staring forcefully at Marinette, arms folded, a sneer on his lips. His fan was folded up in his hand, straight as a baton or a knife. “Do you have a problem with that, Ladybug?”

“I —”

“Senti-beings are not weapons. I won’t let you use u— use them to help in your ridiculous plans.”

“Hey,” said Cat Noir. “Her ‘ridiculous plans’ have saved the city dozens of times.”

“She couldn’t save the butterfly Miraculous,” said Argos.

“She did her best, all on her own —” said Rena Rouge.

“Everyone. Please,” said Marinette, stepping forward with her hands raised. “I… didn’t find Nooroo. That’s fair for him to say. Argos,” she turned towards him and forced herself not to glare, “feel free to talk to me afterwards if you have an issue with me. But I don’t want to fight with everyone else here to watch.”

Argos’s mouth twisted into a nasty grin. “The last time we fought, I beat you easily,” he said — and at that point, Ryuuko squeezed his hand harshly and he whimpered in surprise. “... Fine. We’ll talk later.”

“Yes,” said Ryuuko. “We will.”

Marinette looked between the two of them for a moment — wondering if Kagami meant that all three of them would talk, or that she would come to Marinette afterwards to talk, or that she’d talk to Félix. Whichever one it was, Marinette couldn’t be distracted now. She had to get the meeting back on track.

“All right,” she said, taking a few steps back so she’d be in front of everyone again. “You’ve all talked to your kwamis now. You know what they’re like, and you know what kind of food they want. I’m sure you’ve also thought about how to hide them. I’m trusting all of you —” here she did shoot a glare at Félix — “to keep the secret and to treat your kwamis well. But if you ever feel like you need help, or you can’t help out as a hero for a while, or you have any other problems, I want you to get in touch with me. I’m the guardian of the Miraculous, and that means I’m here to support and guide you as you become full time heroes. Okay?”

“Okay!” said Rena Rouge, raising her fist; Pigella and Rooster Bold soon did the same, and then most of the others followed suit. Félix’s interruption hadn’t killed people’s spirits.

Marinette could only hope that her own failures didn’t kill their spirits instead.

“Any questions? Yes, Minotaurox?”

Minotaurox looked sheepish as he lowered his hand. “Um… Stomp likes grass.”

“Yes?”

“They don’t have grass at the store.”

“She can eat carrots and cabbage and most fruits too. But if you get a small flowerbox and plant some grass seeds in it, she can snack on those at home and you can bring brussel sprouts or fruit cubes when you’re outside. Yes, Polymouse?”

“We eat vegan at home, but Mullo likes cheese. She said she’s fine with non-dairy cheese, but will that hurt her?” said Polymouse, rattling off the words like she was reading off a note she’d memorised.

“No, she’ll be perfectly fine with any type of dairy replacement cheese. Carapace?”

Carapace grinned. “Thanks for getting back my bud, Ladybug,” he said. “I missed him a lot.”

“... Sure. I’m glad to hear that,” said Marinette. It was a small consolation when she was the one who’d lost Wayzz in the first place, but at least Nino was happy.

The questions stopped after that. Marinette announced that the meeting was over, and a few heroes like Vesperia and King Monkey immediately excused themselves to go home, but most of them stayed and fell into conversations. A team was building. The team would keep going, even without her.

She turned around towards Cat Noir, and started to walk — but then someone grabbed her wrist. She swivelled her head back and saw Ryuuko, with a mouth that was as straight as a pencil but eyes that were strangely animated.

“Ladybug,” said Ryuuko. “I would like to talk to you.”

Marinette glanced past her, at Argos who was still glaring; however, the moment she caught his eye he looked down, then jumped away. “A-alone?” she stammered.

“Yes.”

“I’m supposed to talk to Cat Noir.”

Ryuuko didn’t seem deterred. “That is fine. I can wait.”

For a little while, Marinette scrambled for an explanation as to why. But… slowly, it dawned on her that Kagami already knew all the secrets that would be divulged. The only thing Kagami didn’t know was what happened during the final battle, but she knew everything that needed to be said. And that meant…

“... Actually, Ryuuko. Could you come with me to talk to him?”

Ryuuko paused for a moment. “What are you talking to him about?”

“I… need to tell him the truth,” Marinette mumbled, only barely enough to be heard between them. She glanced over at Cat Noir, who stood expectantly behind her, with a faint smile on his lips. “About Monarch.”

“You haven’t told him yet?” Even though Ryuuko didn’t raise her voice, the surprise inside it was obvious. And it was warranted, too: it had been almost two months, and she hadn’t met him regularly but she did talk to him before and after a couple of interviews, and she ought to have told him, and she could have just messaged him about it, and being afraid was not an excuse, and she was about to open her mouth to confirm it but then Ryuuko just nodded and said, “I will come with you to talk to him.”

The kindness in that statement was almost lost on Marinette. She knew she should have done this a long time ago, she should have contacted him and gotten it over with, she should have had the bravery to talk to Adrien a long time ago, and Kagami’s surprise at hearing that she hadn’t said anything was another nail driven into her coffin. But the kindness was still there, and while Marinette felt that it was misplaced, it still dug into her just enough to conjure up a smile.

“Thank you,” she said.

“Of course. That’s a friend thing to do, right?”

“For you? Y-yeah.” For herself? No.

They walked over to Cat Noir, who twirled his staff up on his shoulder and grinned. “I get two lovely ladies all to myself?” he said, again with that undercurrent that he was playing around.

“We already have boyfriends,” replied Ryuuko.

“I know. I just think you both deserve compliments.” He smiled gently. “What’s up, Ryuuko?”

“Actually… it’s about the meeting we were supposed to have,” said Marinette. “Do you mind if Ryuuko comes with us?” In her head, the words please please please kept running on repeat, a cry to the heavens. It wasn’t that she needed Kagami to be there. She might well be able to do it herself. But with Kagami present, there would be no way around it. There would be no backing out.

Cat Noir raised his eyebrows. “Wasn’t this supposed to be private?”

“Yes, but —” Marinette glanced sideways at Ryuuko. “She already knows what I’m going to say, and —”

“She did not tell me,” Ryuuko shot in.

“Yeah! She already knew for other reasons. And she needs to talk to me afterwards, so it’d save us some time…”

“... Yeah, sure,” said Cat Noir. If he was surprised about Ryuuko knowing something, he didn’t show it, though his eyes did betray a small bit of uncertainty. “Where to, then, ladies?”

Ryuuko cleared her throat, fist to her lips, and said, “The Eiffel tower.” Then she glanced between Cat Noir and Marinette. “Is that okay?”

“Er… okay,” said Marinette, and Cat Noir nodded. “Let’s go to the Eiffel tower.”

And Ryuuko smiled, and so did Cat Noir, and Ryuuko’s smile helped a little even though Cat Noir’s only filled her with dread. Because… what if she was about to ruin his day? What if he lost faith in her for the way she lost to Gabriel? What if he hated that she’d lied to him, and wouldn’t help her talk to Adrien?

They set off, leaving the other heroes on the rooftop. Getting to the Eiffel tower was basically a half minute of jumping, until they landed on the very top — and then came the part where Marinette would have to put in effort.

She turned to face Ryuuko and Cat Noir, and found herself faltering as she looked at the latter. Why was she so nervous to talk to him? He was her trusted partner. They had fought together against almost every single akuma. Was she really that afraid of the truth coming out?

Or was it that the way he looked at her, the green eyes and the messy blonde hair and the lopsided smile, somehow reminded her of Adrien?

But then she turned to Ryuuko. And Ryuuko didn’t dispel her worries, but the worries faded somewhat. This was something she had to do. Getting the truth out mattered.

“... Okay. We need to,” she breathed in and turned her gaze to Cat Noir again. “I mean, I need to tell you about the final battle with Monarch. The things I said to the press… they were wrong. But I promise, I lied for a good reason.”

Cat Noir was silent for a little bit, as she searched for the words to say. But after a little while, he shifted his feet. “That’s okay. You didn’t really say much to start with, so you can’t have lied too much.”

“No, I — I did.” The things she’d told him directly — that the butterfly was lost, that she fought Monarch below ground — were true. But the omissions overshadowed both of those, and the big lie behind them overshadowed everything. “It’s about who Monarch was.”

“You never said who he was,” said Cat Noir, momentarily clenching his fist around his staff. “Was he famous? Do I know who he is?”

“Yes,” said Ryuuko.

“You’ve definitely heard about him. He was… Gabriel Agreste.”

Cat Noir blinked a couple of times. “You mean… Gabriel Agreste helped you defeat him, right?”

She’d already dipped her toes. She was up well past her knees now. And the only way to get the cold bath over with was to dive all the way in. “No. I mean that Gabriel Agreste was Monarch. He never helped me behind the scenes… he was Hawk Moth, and Shadow Moth, and Monarch, and I lied because —”

“Because what?” said Cat Noir. His voice was sharp ice creeping across the water, and when she looked into his eyes she saw something in them she had never seen before: an intense and sudden rage. “What possible reason could you have?”

“Because — because I wanted to protect his family. His son, Adrien Agreste, is an orphan now — and, and Nathalie Sancoeur, his assistant, used to be Mayura. But she regrets what she did, and —”

“Why?” he snapped, and his voice cracked. “Why would he be Monarch?”

“He w-wanted to use the wish to, to bring his wife back.”

“You’re lying,” said Cat Noir. “This is fake. There’s a statue to him. Everyone loves him. He can’t — he can’t —”

The ragged cold he was emanating had locked her below the ice. She needed to find a way up and through. “It’s true,” she whimpered. “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“Then why did you lie to me? Why did you lie to everyone?”

“To protect his family —”

“Yeah, well, you messed that up,” said Cat Noir, jamming his baton into the floor. And he extended it so suddenly that she didn’t have time to react until he was already over the edge, and she glanced at Ryuuko who seemed just as confused as her, if it were even possible to be as confused as her.

“Cat Noir! Wait!”

They jumped off after him, and saw that he landed on the lowest platform and walked underneath the canopy with slow, faltering steps. And she kept calling out for him as they sailed down to land behind him and saw him and ran towards him, or at least she ran and maybe Ryuuko did the same, and she ran until he suddenly turned around and looked at her — and she was once again stuck in the ice.

“Ladybug… tell me why you lied. Why you really lied,” he said, and there was a wobbling to his voice now, and he was almost cowering where he stood.

“I… I wanted to protect his family!”

“That’s not why you lied, is it? Why would you care about them? Did you even ask them if they wanted to be protected? Did you think about what they’d like?”

She bit her lower lip. “I didn’t ask, but I —”

But he retracted his baton with a zip and dropped it onto the metal. “You put up statues to Monarch in the parks. You talked about how good he was on television. And now — you didn’t think about what would happen when the truth came out, did you?” He sounded on the verge of tears, and she had no idea why, and she wanted to run up to him and hug him and ask him what was wrong but even in her frazzled state she could tell that would be a horrible idea.

“Cat Noir… I didn’t want to hurt anyone. I didn’t want to hurt you. I — I messed up. I’m sorry.”

His icy eyes crackled and broke apart. “You don’t get it, do you?” he said.

“Get what?” she almost whispered.

He only held up the back of his hand to her, and placed his thumb and middle finger around the ring on it. “I can’t be Cat Noir anymore,” he said, and he sounded right on the verge of tears. “I’m sorry.”

“No, don’t —”

But he pulled off the ring. And the light consumed him only for a brief flash, and then he stood there and every inch of water froze and she was frozen with it, because those green eyes and that messy blonde hair were still there but there was no lopsided smile, only a terrible frown that threatened to sink her to the bottom of the ocean. Cat Noir was Adrien. Adrien… was Cat Noir.

“I’m sorry. I can’t trust you anymore. Not when you wouldn’t even give me the dignity of telling me my own father was a supervillain,” he said, holding the black cat ring in his open palm — before tipping it onto the floor, where it clattered with a bright metallic noise that was far too light, far too flimsy, for the situation. “I need some time to myself, with someone I can actually trust. I’m sorry.”

She glanced aside at Ryuuko, just to make sure she wasn’t seeing things, to get a confirmation that Ryuuko was also shocked. And Ryuuko glanced uncertainly between her and him, and it was all the confirmation she needed to tell that she’d just ruined everything.

Except — maybe she hadn’t. He said he loved her and if only he knew, then he would, then he could, then he might —

“Adrien! Please don’t go,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s too late for that,” he said, turning away.

“No! It’s not! I — I love you, Adrien.”

She barely caught Ryuuko’s hissed-out “Ladybug!”, because Adrien turned his head and looked at her over his shoulder.

“You don’t,” he said.

“Yes, I do! I always have! Tikki —” Ryuuko protested again, but she was a thousand miles away by now — “spots off!”

His eyes grew wide. Then they wavered. “Y-you knew,” he said, after a million billion centuries had passed.

She lifted her hand towards him, took a step forward. “I did. Adrien, please believe me. I never wanted to lie to you, I was just trying to —”

“It’s over.”

His voice was quiet and broken, but also louder than a church bell. And she stopped completely — stopped talking, stopped thinking, stopped moving, stopped breathing.

“Marinette… it’s over. I’m sorry.” He sounded on the verge of tears. “I can’t see you anymore. Good luck finding a new C-C-Cat N—”

And then he was choked by a sob and she couldn’t see his face and he started running towards the elevators and she couldn’t see his face but she could hear him crying and she both wanted to and didn’t want to see his face and she fell, limply, to her knees.

Her foot jolted with pain. Not the knees. She didn’t notice her knees at all. She barely even noticed her foot, only registered that there was pain, but she could do nothing about it. Adrien’s quavering figure stepped around a corner and into an elevator going down, and he was gone.

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▧▧▨ ▶▷

A hand landed on Marinette’s shoulder. It was gentle. She didn’t remember whose it was at first, not until she heard the voice: “I’m sorry.”

“... Kagami…”

“Do you want me to pick up the ring?”

“... Please,” she mumbled.

It wasn’t really a ‘please pick up the ring.’ It was more of a ‘please help,’ a ‘please fix what I broke,’ a ‘please talk to me’, a ‘please hug me.’ But Kagami only walked forward and bent down, then returned with the ring in hand.

“Marinette,” said Kagami, hunching down in front of Marinette with the ring nested in her palm. “You… shouldn’t be sad.”

Marinette sniffled. “Why n-not?” And her own brain replied with: because this is all your fault, because you didn’t consider how Adrien would feel, because you ruin everything you touch and Félix was right to steal all the Miraculous from you —

“Because the butterfly is still out there,” said Kagami. She placed the ring into Marinette’s hand. “As long as you are Ladybug, you can never let yourself be taken by an akuma.”

Those words rattled back and forth inside Marinette’s dank and cavernous mind for a while, echoing between the walls. And every time they clanged off a side, they rang out with a hideous noise — but they didn’t shock her, and they didn’t calm her. They only made her annoyed.

“... What, so I’m just… I’m just supposed to never be sad?” she said through gritted teeth.

“Ideally, no, but that was not what I —”

“I just screwed everything up! I lost my boyfriend and superhero partner, because I’m stupid and a coward and I lied to people!” Marinette pushed herself to her feet, wincing for a moment as she put pressure on her left heel again, but she bit it down. “And I’m not supposed to be sad?”

“Marinette,” said Kagami, and she grabbed Marinette by the shoulders, and it was only now that Marinette fully registered that Kagami had also detransformed. “I’m sorry. I misspoke. But I don’t want you to be sad, or angry. I want you to be happy.”

“Well, it’s… too late for that,” said Marinette, echoing Adrien from a million billion centuries ago, and all the irritation poured out of her like air from a balloon as she met Kagami’s eyes. She only had empty defiance left now. “I never wanted to lie.”

“Why did you lie, then?”

“Because — because…”

But before she could even begin to put her thoughts in order, she caught on to the noise of distant screaming. Kagami seemed to hear it at the same time. And both of them seemed to realise the implication at the same time. “I’ll have a look,” said Kagami, already running towards the edge of the platform — and Marinette tried to follow, but she hobbled too much to keep up.

And the words that came out of Kagami’s mouth were perhaps the worst ones that anyone had ever said in the history of humanity: “It’s Adrien.”

Marinette threw herself against the railing. Down below, someone was being eaten by dark magic, and people were fleeing away from him — and she trusted Kagami that it was Adrien, but all Marinette could see was that he transformed into some kind of grey and scratchy spider-like shape, with a murky human-like torso where the spider’s head would be, and a large antenna on his back.

And the sight of another akuma, the knowledge of what just happened, suddenly made Marinette’s thoughts flow clearer and faster than they had in a long time.

“Plagg!” she said, holding out the ring — and he popped up with a worried expression. “Take the ring to Kitty Noire. Now. We need a cat.”

“R-right!” he said, and he too moved clear and fast.

Then she looked at Kagami, and pulled out her own earrings. “Kagami. You must be Ladybug. Right now.”

“Marinette —”

“Don’t protest. He knows who I am. We can’t let him get a hold of the earrings. Transform, get away, don’t let him know it’s you.” Kagami’s eyes were wide open. “Don’t fight him yet. Let him do whatever he wants to me. Try to look like you’re coming from somewhere else.”

Kagami was silent for a moment, mouth half open like she’d been frozen in the middle of an objection. But then she steeled her eyes and took the earrings out of Marinette’s palm. “I understand,” she said, before putting them into her own ears. And then she stepped closer and crushed Marinette into a hug. “I will not protect you. But I really want to. Don’t forget that.”

And then Kagami transformed into a costume Marinette barely had time to register, and she flew off into the distance.

And Marinette pushed herself away from the railing, and she walked out into the middle of the floor, and she stood there and waited for her just desserts.

Chapter Text

“So… let’s try this again. You like honey, right?” said Zoé, tapping her chin as she looked at Pollen.

“Yes, my Queen,” said Pollen with a gracious, near-regal tip of the head.

“Is there any specific honey you prefer?”

“Honey made by bees!”

Zoé sighed. Same as Pollen answered when she asked yesterday, too. She supposed that caring about brands was a very human thing. “Well, we’ve definitely got honey made by bees. I could even try to get some honey glazed doughnuts for you?”

Pollen seemed to brighten at that idea. “The guardian always baked special honey butter tarts for me!”

“She did? She must have been good at baking, then —”

They were both zapped out of their conversation when a lamp clattered off the windowsill and the bulb shattered against the floor. Zoé turned around to see what was going on, and saw…

… Plagg.

Plagg, with the black cat’s ring.

“Kitty Noire!” said Plagg, audibly out of breath, looking frightened. “I need you!”

Zoé got to her feet immediately. “Did something happen to Cat Noir? What about Ladybug?”

“Cat Noir… has been akumatised.” Plagg pulled on the words a little bit, like he was reluctant to speak the truth. And she could guess why: this meant she would figure out who Cat Noir was. “And Ladybug is in grave danger.”

She was already resolute before he finished speaking. “Understood. Give me the ring. Pollen… I’m sorry, but you’ll have to stay home right now.”

Pollen didn’t exactly look sad as she got the comb back — but there was a trace of reluctance hiding behind those big eyes. “I understand, my Queen. I will await your return.” And Zoé felt a hammer of guilt against her stomach, but that hammer was far weaker than her sense of duty. Ladybug needed help, and the city needed saving.

“Plagg… claws out.” Even before the words were spoken, she felt his power crackle at the tips of her fingers. The costume wrapped itself around her, and the baton appeared in her hands.

And she flew out the window as fast as Plagg could carry her.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

Kagami did not go far. She swung her way onto the nearest rooftop along Avenue de la Bourdonnais, and dashed behind the chimney and ridge so she couldn’t be seen from the tower.

Kagami could not go far. She had promised that she would keep her identity a secret, and she had promised she would take time before she returned to fight, and she wasn’t going to break those promises. But she wasn’t going to do nothing.

Kagami would not go far. So she climbed up on a rooftop and hid behind a chimney, and peered out towards the tower, towards the distant figure of Marinette — and very soon, towards Adrien’s akuma.

Hearing that Marinette was Ladybug… that had been hard to believe. Kagami had been too caught up in her fears and judgement, and she hadn’t seen the proof of it — not until she looked into Marinette’s eyes soon after Ladybug’s and saw that they both harboured the same kindness and interest and concern.

In contrast, seeing that Adrien was Cat Noir felt completely natural. Perhaps Kagami was just desensitised to it now. Perhaps seeing him detransform made it impossible to deny it, so it felt normal. Perhaps they were just more alike, on some deep inner level that made them recognisable.

But the Adrien that was currently approaching Marinette on eight spider legs was nothing like him at all. Kagami couldn’t see his expression, nor Marinette’s, but she knew from his movements that whoever was commanding him had his mind completely under their control. He was rash, she could hear the distant noise of his spidery legs as they crushed the floor he walked on, and his physical presence loomed even this far away. He wanted to be large.

Her heart raced. She promised she wouldn’t protect Marinette, but that was a horrible promise to make. Marinette had made many mistakes, but they were mistakes from a good heart bearing too many burdens. She was now facing the consequences of her most recent mistake, but if the spider-Adrien killed her for it…

… then Kagami would bring her back. It was as simple as that. But it was too simple.

Marinette suddenly ducked away and tried to run, but Adrien moved incredibly fast and she was soon cornered. And then he pointed both arms at her and shot out — something, a wire or a cable — and hit Marinette straight on, and she froze completely stiff as she was lifted off the floor.

Suddenly, the yo-yo rang. And Kagami was not oblivious to the fact that phones all around the neighbourhood were also ringing. She didn’t open it, just in case something was about to happen, because she knew there had been akumas that did mind control through phone calls. Instead, she watched the scene on the tower carefully, saw Marinette get lifted up into the air, saw an electrical pulse move through the antenna —

— and then Marinette’s voice rang out all around her, from the streets, from the balconies, from the parks. “I am Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” the voice said, an endless echo from a thousand screens. “And I am Ladybug, the so-called protector of Paris.”

Kagami’s mouth ran dry. She pulled out the yo-yo and flipped it open, because she knew what was happening, and it wasn’t mind control. It was far more sinister than that.

Marinette was being projected into the air above the yo-yo’s screen with almost perfect but semi-transparent clarity. The wires had wrapped themselves tightly around her torso and legs and lifted her up like she was a cocoon, but her arms were instead held forward like she was speaking from a pulpit. A cable lay around her neck, like a threat that she would be strangled if she tried to flee. Her eyes glowed a green-like electric blue. There was no expression on her face.

“I come to inform you all that I have lied to you,” Marinette went on. Every word slotted into place so neatly and yet so robotically, it was clear she wasn’t speaking for herself. “Gabriel Agreste was Monarch. The man I praised as a hero for helping me defeat Monarch was instead the villain who attacked you throughout the year, from the first time an akuma emerged to create Stoneheart. He wrecked the city on countless occasions, he killed innocent people, and he made your lives miserable. And I helped him get away with it.”

Kagami had no idea how other people were reacting to this news. The roaring cacophony of Marinette projected through so many screens was so loud, it was impossible to hear anything else. But she guessed that most people watching this were getting increasingly angry with every word spoken, because she knew that she would do the same if this were news to her. 

“After the terror of the Miraculised, you all noticed a flow of magic that circled the globe. This was a powerful spell that I gave to Monarch. He got his heart’s desire, and I offered it to him. I allowed the butterfly Miraculous to be lost, and put you all in danger of future akuma attacks… like this one.”

She wanted to jump in and interrupt. But it was too early, and at the same time it was too late.

“Furthermore, Gabriel Agreste was aided by Nathalie Sancoeur, who terrorised the city under the name of Mayura. I also protected Nathalie by not telling anyone about her. I protected Tomoe Tsurugi, who knew about Gabriel’s crimes and did nothing to stop them, and aided him by developing the Alliance rings to further his diabolical goals. I deceived Cat Noir, my own superhero partner, and let him think I didn’t know Monarch’s identity. I have even kept the secret from Gabriel’s son Adrien, while selfishly trying to date him.

“I am unfit to be a hero. I am unfit to be praised like I have been, both as Ladybug and as myself. I deserve the utmost condemnation for my actions. Thank you for listening.”

The silence in the aftermath was deafening all on its own. It was a collective breath held by everyone in the city, like they were waiting to be told that this was just a prank, some kind of performance that was about to pull back the curtains.

But of course it was all true. It was cruel, and it was deceptively framed, and there were several things in there that Kagami had only guessed before. But the events themselves were irrefutable, and Kagami stood frozen in place because of just how inconceivably, viciously callous the akuma was.

And she remained frozen until a single, desperate voice cried out from the other side of the park, as its owner soared through the air: “Leave her alone!”

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▧▧▨ ▶▷

Zoé didn’t take the call when her staff started to ring. She didn’t have time. But she stopped dead when she passed by the big screen overlooking the Sorbonne plaza and saw the face projected onto the screen, the grotesque posing, the alien glow to her eyes.

Marinette.

“I am Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” said the screen, and Zoé heard the voice mirrored from a thousand other screens around her, inside houses, out on the streets, even inside the cinema. “And I am Ladybug, the so-called protector of Paris.”

Zoé’s first impulse was: Marinette is Ladybug.

Zoé’s second impulse was: Marinette is Ladybug.

Zoé’s third impulse was to overflow with pride and admiration and joy, because the girl she loved was also the girl all of Paris loved, and the hero who had protected the city.

But then the fourth and fifth impulses hit her at the same time with enough force to almost make her stagger: Marinette was under the control of an akuma. And she probably wasn’t speaking for herself. The akuma might have control over her vocal cords.

“I come to inform you all that I have lied to you. Gabriel Agreste was Monarch. The man I praised as a hero for helping me defeat Monarch was instead the villain who attacked you throughout the year, from the first time an akuma emerged to create Stoneheart. He wrecked the city on countless occasions, he killed innocent people, and he made your lives miserable. And I helped him get away with it.”

Every single word from Marinette’s mouth strengthened Zoé’s suspicion. This was all just a ruse, a trick by another akuma just like Hoaxer. Marinette had just been caught in the crossfire.

And Zoé was going to save her.

She leapt forward, didn’t pay any attention to the rest of what was said. She caught the names of Nathalie Sancoeur and Tomoe Tsurugi, and she caught spiteful bile and the words, “I deserve condemnation for my actions.” The akuma was lying. It had to be lying, there was no way a single word it spoke wasn’t some kind of malicious falsehood meant to hurt Marinette and Ladybug both. And she was going to save both of them.

She threw herself off the nearest roof towards the Eiffel tower, spinning the staff to keep herself airborne until she landed on the tower’s leg and grabbed a beam to stabilise herself on it — and she shouted, “Leave her alone! You monster!”

The akuma — she didn’t recognise him, although she felt like she should. He was still halfway shaped like a human in one end, but the other end was a spider’s and his whole body looked like it was made from old corrugated iron that had been badly cut. His face seemed more like a series of dents than anything human. And it would have been horrible to look at, if not for the even more horrifying sight of Marinette tied up in a cocoon of composite wires.

“... Kitty Noire,” said Marinette, as the cables twisted her around to face Zoé. Zoé forced herself not to shiver as she jumped down onto the floor and held out her staff. But the akuma — didn’t move at all, didn’t even turn his head.

“Hang on, Marinette, I’m getting you out of there. Hey, you! Akuma! I’m talking to you — let her go!”

“... He can hear you,” droned Marinette. “But he can’t answer.”

Zoé unconsciously let her staff drop a little bit, only noticed once she fully registered the look on the akuma’s face. There wasn’t one. It was just a blank metal surface, like a reflection of whatever it looked at except matted and jagged. “Wh-what?”

“His name is Web. He is Adrien. He is angry with me.”

“No!” said Zoé. “The akuma is angry with you, not him!” She raised the staff again, gripped it with both hands, held it aloft with straight arms. “Tell him to let you go!”

But her grip was still, somehow, weakening. Because Adrien was Cat Noir. Unless Marinette was lying, but Marinette wouldn’t lie, Marinette wouldn’t —

“He heard you,” said Marinette. “But he doesn’t want to.”

“Then — then —” Zoé had Catalysm. Could she use it against the antenna? Against the cables, against the spider body? Or did Adrien — Web — have something else on him? But no, she needed to wait, she needed Ladybug, she only had the one shot…

“... Don’t worry about me,” said Marinette. “Just s-stop h-h-her from —”

But in the middle of Marinette’s sudden and suddenly non-robotic plea, the whirr of Ladybug’s yo-yo rang out bright and beautiful like birdsong, and the thread wrapped itself around the cables right behind Marinette and pulled —

The wires snapped and broke. Marinette tumbled to the floor. And Zoé threw herself forward to stand between Marinette and Web, to stop him from attacking again — but she didn’t need to, because Web pulled back immediately, moving backwards at an incredible speed towards the edge then scuttering down one of the tower’s legs.

She didn’t even consider following him. Instead, she turned around to Marinette, who was still lying flat on the metal floor, still caught up in the wires. “Marinette,” she gasped, and went straight to pulling them off — but she quickly realised that the wires were just draped loosely on top of Marinette, not actually holding her back, and the girl was just lying still, and her eyes were no longer glowing green but they were wet like puddles. “Marinette, please be okay, please don’t be hurt…”

“... So I already know you in real life,” mumbled Marinette, but her voice was dry and empty like an open bottle in the wind.

“W-what?” Zoé froze stiff, hands full of cables.

“Otherwise you couldn’t possibly care so much about me now…”

Zoé would curse herself later. “Of course I care about you! But who I am doesn’t matter. Why did he go after you? Why did he make you say all those horrible things about yourself?”

The yo-yo whirred again as Zoé spoke, and she was vaguely aware of Ladybug flying through the air towards them from the roof of a nearby building. She heard the feet touch down as she tore the last of the cables away, as she lifted Marinette off the ground and pulled her into a hug.

“... He didn’t make me say anything,” said Marinette. This time, her voice was completely shattered. She sounded like she was on the far side of tears, the place where crying would be less sad — and yet, a single tear did roll out and hit Zoé’s shoulder. A little point of wetness, spreading slowly, but not reaching far.

“He made you say a lot of things. You probably don’t remember anything. But they were all lies.” Ladybug’s footsteps came closer, but Zoé wasn’t looking, she only focused on Marinette. “Ladybug, did you see what happened?”

“I am not Ladybug.”

Zoé felt like someone had slammed her in the back with a chair. “What?” she said, looking up — and even from the feet on she realised what a stupid question she’d just asked. Because this Ladybug was almost completely black in front, except from three sets of white segmented stripes that implied the legs of an actual ladybug, one set stretching into her upper arms and another her thighs, and the third set curved like a parenthesis around her stomach. Along her sides she had a dark orange border, which seemed to extend into an entire orange-with-black-dots back. And her hair was an airy black bob, with spots of white at the bottom.

“I am Namitentou,” said the hero, yo-yo in hand. “As you can see, Ladybug herself is indisposed.”

Zoé gaped up at her, feeling like the words Namitentou just spoke had just bounced off the outside of her skull and not actually entered her ears. “... What?”

Marinette stirred slightly in Zoé’s embrace, like she was trying to push away. Zoé let her, met her wet-but-not-crying eyes far too close. “I’m… Ladybug,” she whispered. “I was awake the whole time. He didn’t tell me what to say, he — he — all those things were already in my head. Everything I said… was the truth.”

Zoé glanced up at Namitentou, who nodded, and back down at Marinette. And a bomb went off in her head, blowing away everything else apart from that one revelation: she really was holding Ladybug in her hands.

◀◁ ▧▧▧ ▨▨▨ ▷▶

Kagami wondered what could possibly come next now. Not for the akuma: she strongly suspected that Web was headed straight for either Nathalie Sancoeur, or for Mother. Akumas were seldom unpredictable, and Web had clearly identified future targets.

But for Marinette, the immediate future was less certain. Kagami knew that Marinette had at least one ally in Alya Césaire, and Alya was likely also a hero, and from the way they interacted in costume Kagami assumed Alya was Rena Rouge. However, there were fourteen other heroes. Would they believe what she had said while Web was broadcasting her, or would they think it was a horrible lie? If they believed it, would they still support her? They had only just been told to go to Ladybug or Cat Noir to organise together — what would happen with both of them gone?

And what about the public? Would they support Marinette, or would they hate her? They had supported her after Monarch stole all the other Miraculous from her, but that was a simple question of good versus bad, the hero against the villain. Today, the question was whether she had even opposed him in the first place. There had been no mind control, either, and that meant everyone would still remember everything.

Kagami clenched her fingers hard around the yo-yo. She knew that Marinette was trustworthy. She was going to offer Marinette a hug after this, if the girl wanted one. But that didn’t mean she could convince anyone else. For the time being, it mattered more to stop the akuma from ruining even more lives — including Adrien’s.

As for Mother… Kagami had no sympathy left to spare for her. After she had tried measured conversation only to be met with anger and restriction, after the things Félix revealed to her, after the padded cell in London, Kagami only had antipathy. Besides, Mother would be able to wriggle her way out of this situation with ease.

“Kitty Noire… please get on your feet. We need to get to the Agreste mansion.”

The cat hero glared up at her. “Marinette needs help.”

“While that is true,” said Kagami, achingly swallowing her desire to join in the hug, “the akuma is about to claim another victim. We can help Marinette afterwards.” She looked out across the plaza, and saw that several other heroes were traversing the distance towards them. So at the very least, they were going to fight. “One of the others can take care of her for now.”

“Kitty Noire…” said Marinette. Her voice was frayed to pieces. “You have to go. Go with… Namitentou… and the others. You have to defeat him, but… don’t hurt him. Please.”

Kagami took a deep breath. Once again, Marinette was making it far too hard to step away from her. That constant drive to push people away until she reached boiling point was going to kill her one day. And she somehow wasn’t at that boiling point yet, despite the fact that the secret she had fought to keep hidden for so long had just been blared out across the city, and only two days ago she had still been upset about just Félix knowing. The whole city was about to bear down on her with questions, her boyfriend had just left her, her parents would surely punish her severely, and she was still mentally acute enough to suggest plans and plead for someone else. She should be only vapour at this point.

After this, Kagami wasn’t just going to offer Marinette a hug, she was going to force it on her.

As Kitty Noire got to her feet and left Marinette half-slumped on the platform, the other heroes arrived. First Purple Tigress, then Pegasus, then Minotaurox, then Polymouse, then Pigella. Kagami could tell they were all a lot more nervous than they had been only ten minutes ago, all of them keeping a distance from herself and Marinette and Kitty Noire. And she couldn’t really blame them for that.

Even Rena Rouge, who arrived shortly after Pigella, hesitated on the edge. Nobody ran up to give Marinette the comfort she deserved.

“Was that all… true?” said Polymouse, looking at Kitty Noire more than Kagami, and Kagami more than Marinette. “Was Marinette really Ladybug?”

“We should —” started Rena Rouge.

“Yes,” interrupted Marinette. “Everything I said was true.” She didn’t look up at anyone, except — Kagami caught this one mostly because she expected it — a single glance at Rena Rouge. “And you need to stop Web before he gets —”

“Marinette.” Kagami stepped forward. “You are not in charge. I have taken the Miraculous away from you, as you can no longer bear it. As the new ladybug holder, I relinquish you of your responsibilities, and command you to stay out of hero affairs.” It was just an impulse — a way to redirect attention from Marinette, but also a way to get Marinette to stop trying to involve herself. There was no plan behind it except the two main necessities in Kagami’s mind.

And yet, it seemed to work incredibly well. Everyone now looked at her rather than Marinette, and Marinette looked like she was actually listening.

The only exception was Rena Rouge, who did look at Kagami but with a distinct frown on her lips. “And who are you?” she said.

“I am Namitentou. Rena Rouge,” Kagami was pleased to see surprise fly over Rena’s face, “I am giving you the task of looking after Web’s first victim. Make sure she is safe and all right. Everyone else will come with me and Kitty Noire to the Agreste mansion.”

“Why the Agreste mansion?” said Pigella, as Rena Rouge hurried over to pick up Marinette with apparent gratitude in her eyes.

“Because he is going to target Nathalie Sancoeur next.” A round of ‘Oh.’ rang out from the others. Kagami scrutinised them in turn.

She hoped that Marinette’s friends would be kinder to her once this was all over. Only half of the heroes had shown up for her — and yet, Kagami was certain that they must all be her friends out of costume. She had not attempted to guess anyone other than Alya as Rena Rouge, but Marinette seemed to be the type to trust her friends. If they had now abandoned her…

“... Only seven heroes,” she said, speaking her thoughts aloud. Not that the akuma seemed to be overly dangerous: he had not attacked Kitty Noire, and had escaped once two heroes arrived to fight. The danger was that Marinette seemed to have made poor choices in her friends.

“Shouldn’t we… go and fight?” opined Pegasus. “Before he catches Mlle Sancoeur.”

“Don’t we need a plan?” said Minotaurox.

As one, everyone turned to look at Kagami. Their stares pierced through her. They needed a plan, and quickly. They had Pegasus, and they had Polymouse, and they had Pigella, and Kitty Noire’s —

Their tools all started ringing at once. Pigella said, “I’ve got it!” and tapped the tambourine — and out from the drumhead rose a circular projection that looked all too familiar. Nathalie was being suspended in the same way that Marinette had been, except her eyes glowed yellow, and her arms were bound behind her back. Her voice was straight and flat, just like the one she’d used to talk to Gabriel the last times Kagami had seen them together.

“I am Nathalie Sancoeur, and I betrayed the city of Paris in favour of my employer Gabriel Agreste, whom I knew to be Hawk Moth the whole time…”

There was no time to dawdle. Kagami could see that the background of the projection corresponded to Adrien’s bedroom; the climbing wall was in full view. “We need to get there as soon as possible,” she said. “Once there, we must disable Web and break his akumatised object.”

“I can get us there straight away,” said Pegasus.

“I can hold him in place!” said Pigella.

“Let’s go,” growled Purple Tigress.

Kagami nodded grimly. It was time to end this.

But she had no illusion that defeating the akuma would really end it. Unless the cure could erase all memories, Marinette and Nathalie would still be facing dire consequences in the days and weeks to come. And Kagami could only hope that Marinette’s friends would show up more for her out of costume.

If nobody else, Marinette would at least have Kagami.

She looked down at Marinette one last time as Pegasus used his Voyage. Marinette met her gaze directly and immediately, like she had been waiting to do so. Kagami smiled for a moment, not out of happiness, but out of a sense that Marinette deserved a kindness.

And then she stepped into the portal, to defeat an akuma too late.

◁◀ ▧▧▨ ▧▨▨ ▶▷

Marinette was Ladybug.

Marinette was Ladybug.

Marinette… was Ladybug.

Zoé’s thoughts could scarcely move at all. It was like those three words were chains attached to her foot, or perhaps to her neck.

It wasn’t a bad realisation. It was just… unexpected. And too much else was going on right now, but Zoé wasn’t going to let the realisation go. She was going to hang on to it as a reminder to love Marinette even more.

That thought rolled through her as she snapped back at Namitentou, as Marinette struggled against Zoé’s embrace and told her to go deal with the akuma, as all the other heroes appeared — and only after that did she start to recognise that she had no idea who Namitentou was.

The thought had crept over her for a while, but she only noticed it once it was strong enough, once Rena Rouge was commanded to pick Marinette up and help her. Namitentou spoke confidently and arrogantly, and it gave her an aura of authority that Zoé realised had just made her… not accept, but just not question, that there was a new ladybug holder.

And sure, some of it was that Marinette was there, and if Marinette was truly Ladybug, and Marinette was Ladybug, then — she would have protested, wouldn’t she?

Or maybe… the akuma did have mind control, and they hadn’t fully grasped what was going on…

Zoé was going to follow Namitentou, and Namitentou’s far-too-dark-to-trust costume, and Namitentou’s far-too-casual dismissal of Marinette’s pain, and she was going to see the plan through. But she would save her Cataclysm, and if this turned out to be a ruse… she would use it on Namitentou’s face, and make her crumble into a pile of fine dust.

For now, Namitentou seemed genuine, like she wanted to defeat the akuma. But the way she spoke to Marinette, like Marinette didn’t even matter, left a bad taste in Zoé’s mouth. Marinette, commanded to stay out of hero affairs — for what? Being a hero for a whole year? That was ridiculous.

But the plan took shape, and Zoé remained quiet. When everyone else lined up in front of Pegasus, she bent down by Rena Rouge — who was still cradling Marinette on the floor of the tower — and tried to give both of them a smile. “We’ll fix this. Don’t worry,” she said, and kept smiling even as Marinette didn’t.

Pigella tapped off her tambourine, in the middle of Nathalie Sancoeur saying, “I created the sentimonster that attacked the city while Ladybug was in New Yo—”

And then Pegasus opened his portal, and it was right into the room where Web was holding Nathalie Sancoeur, and he was holding her up into the air with her back to him and with the same cables that had held Marinette but she looked like a complete cocoon and he was right behind her with his empty face and then they all jumped through as one unit —

“Gift!” shouted Pigella, and a pink ball floated in front of Web but behind Nathalie’s head, and Web just stopped moving, and the heroes all landed in a wide circle around the freaky display.

For a moment, everything was quiet. Zoé looked around, tried to see if anything was out of order, but the room seemed almost untouched: there was no sign of struggle, no upturned furniture, just a vast bedroom with one wall that was all windows, and apart from Web and Nathalie the only thing that was destroyed was a single pane of glass. That shattered glass lay sprayed all across the floor in front of it, but had gone no further.

And there was nobody else in the room. Only seven heroes, an akuma, and a victim. A nagging feeling started to creep over Zoé, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was…

“... Pigella,” said Nathalie, and Zoé was wrenched back. Nathalie’s orange eyes were fixed on Pigella.

“Is the akuma frozen?” said Polymouse, looking over her shoulder. “We should — we should make sure.”

“Yes, Web is frozen,” said Nathalie. “But he is still angry.”

“Irrelevant. All akumas are angry,” said Pegasus.

Everyone stood still for a moment. Then Namitentou said, “Where is the akumatised object, Mlle Sancoeur?” And the same uncomfortable feeling again came over Zoé, like she had realised something without knowing. She stared more intently at Nathalie, as Nathalie swivelled her head as far towards Namitentou as she could go.

“He does not want me to tell you where the object is,” replied Nathalie.

“Is it the antenna?” said Pegasus.

“He does not want me to confirm whether or not it is in his antenna,” said Nathalie, and standing there and listening was getting to be like pulling teeth without anaesthetic.

“... Guys,” said Zoé. “She is being controlled by the akuma. We shouldn’t be listening to her!”

“I am not being controlled,” said Nathalie. “He only tells me what I cannot say.”

Zoé wanted to whimper. Something was wrong, and she couldn’t figure out what it was.

As she fretted, though, the others seemed to make up their minds. Minotaurox gripped his sledgehammer tightly and stepped forward. “I think we should try the antenna,” he said.

“Yes,” said Purple Tigress, also stepping forward.

But Namitentou jumped in front of them, between them and Web. “Stop,” she said. “Before we proceed, I need to use my Lucky Charm.”

And she did so, and the charm came out as a small radio with an antenna, and Namitentou simply nodded at Purple Tigress and Minotaurox and stepped aside, and it was all wrong, it was all too easy, it was —

When Minotaurox broke the antenna off Web’s back, and Purple Tigress grabbed it and snapped it over her thigh, and the butterfly emerged and Namitentou caught it, and Nathalie fell to the floor and landed on her knees and immediately turned around to face Adrien, who emerged from the dissipating metal coating that had surrounded him, and she picked him up and cooed over him, and Namitentou threw the radio into the air with a “Miraculous Namitentou,” and Adrien blinked in confusion before focusing on Nathalie’s face, and he turned away —

— Zoé realised what had been chewing at her insides this whole time.

If Web was created to be so easy to defeat, if he could only deal with one target at a time… if he didn’t even control his victims, if all he did was to forbid them from saying stuff… if he had been created with such an obvious point of attack on his back, if he had been sent in to fight a group of heroes so much stronger than he could deal with, and if he had gone straight for Marinette…

… then this wasn’t an akuma that was ever meant to get the Miraculous.

It was only meant to hurt.

Chapter Text

Kagami walked slowly towards Marinette’s home, with the earrings on her earlobes and the necklace around her neck. She was dressed like a regular house visitor, which was what she needed to look like, because a superhero wouldn’t be able to go inside through the balcony right now without getting caught on dozens of cameras.

Is Marinette Dupain-Cheng Truly Ladybug? The Tale That Has Paris Shaken — Agreste Family Rocked by Scandal — The Heroine’s Downfall — Akumas Have Returned! Here Is How To Protect Your Family — The Run on the Bakery: How Paris Is Reacting To The Shocking News — Infamy and Deception: The Tale of a Teenage Girl — the news of the day was as unavoidable as it was aggravating. Everyone seemed to be talking about it. Or at least, the news was giving that impression, and people tended to follow where the news led.

Every single daily paper Kagami could see had large-type front pages with lurid headlines and pictures of Marinette suspended by Web with her arms out and her eyes glowing. The television was churning through endless reminders of what happened yesterday, along with endless updates on what was happening around the city, all narrated by either Clara Contard or Alec Cataldi in the studio. A large amount of people could be seen outside the Dupain-Cheng bakery every time the cameras showed the place, and every time Clara or Alec would say something like, “Neither Marinette Dupain-Cheng nor her parents have been seen since the early morning hours, but we will keep you updated on any developments…”

Occasionally they would cut over to a panel of commenters, consisting of Bob Roth, Roger Raincomprix, Véronique Berecz, and — of all people — André Bourgeois. The panel was largely… against. Against Marinette, against Ladybug, against ‘vigilante justice’, against Marinette some more, against villainy, against Nathalie Sancoeur.

Somehow, despite the only proof being two forced confessions, people seemed to think it was correct that Marinette was Ladybug. Many papers had already taken that stance definitively. The television news couldn’t state outright that what Marinette and Nathalie had said was correct, but the way they acted made it clear that they wanted it to be.

And it was true. Marinette was Ladybug. But they didn’t know that. Perhaps they could argue that Marinette had said it on screen, perhaps they could argue that a different ladybug had shown up to save Marinette as evidence, but they were just rubbernecking. They were taking Marinette’s words for granted in the same breath as they were calling her a consummate liar.

And Kagami was about to step into the view of those very same cameras and that very same crowd.

The throng was obvious long before Kagami turned the corner around Collège Françoise Dupont. There wasn’t really noise but there was the expectancy of noise, a kind of solid wall of cotton and nothing in the air that warned of the noise about to happen. And there was a certain dispersed throng of the type you get when there is a greater throng beyond, and the people coming and the people leaving meet each other, or maybe just move a little slowly in the liminal in-between. Kagami weaved quickly through, practically running at times; it was harrowing to deal with even here.

And then she turned onto the plaza and stopped dead.

There must be hundreds of people, perhaps even thousands, gathered outside the Dupain-Cheng bakery and on the plaza in front of Françoise Dupont. No — not even one thousand, she realised that after the shock wore off, but the visual impression was a chaos nonetheless.

The police had put up fences and several officers to hold the crowds away from the bakery, and a vast amount of people were pushed all the way up to the barrier like ants around a piece of honeyed bread, and several news crews were standing around further backwith their cameras pointed towards the bakery, all of them with sufficient distance that they could presumably catch a large amount of the crowd but close enough to see relevant details. People were yelling and the cops were roaring back. Kagami couldn’t hear anything that was being said, couldn’t filter the noise properly, but she bore no illusions that it could be good.

She took a deep breath and started to walk again, resolutely and as directly as possible, opening and closing her fists as she walked. A walk that she knew would normally take her a minute and anywhere between fifteen and thirty seconds, now took her twice as long as she was interrupted and almost-jostled by small crowds and by careless people with press stickers on their shirts and jackets. She isolated the area of the fence that was the least populated — the one that was the farthest away from any of the entrances, between the school and the block — and with an even deeper breath, she forced herself past the two-three people in the way and hoisted herself onto the barrier.

“Hey! You! No entry!” yelled a policeman barely five feet away, and also barely concealing his nasty attitude. His scowl was severe and his hand hovered above the baton on his belt. “Get off there right now!”

“I am Marinette’s friend,” said Kagami. She was Marinette’s friend, and nobody was going to get in the way of her being a good one.

“I said get off! No entry!”

“I want to see my friend,” said Kagami.

“Hey!” yelled another voice, from up on the balcony. “Let her through! Kagami, hang on, I’m coming down.” Kagami looked up and saw Alix, from Marinette’s old class, up on the balcony. The girl was waving and seemed to have been waving for a little bit when Kagami saw her; the moment their eyes met, though, she dropped her arm and walked out of view.

Kagami paused for a moment. Then she saw that the policeman was still scowling at her — and decided to climb down again. She stood and waited, tried to mentally close out the sound, opened and closed her fists some more with a steady rhythm.

It took three minutes for Alix to come outside, though Kagami didn’t actually see her. Instead, Kagami heard the voices from the other side of the building go into an agitated squabble. Cameras flashed rapidly. Then Alix came around the corner, an uneasy frown over her mouth and her cap pulled down as far as it would go. She caught sight of Kagami again and waved for her to cross over, and then she approached the closest police officer and said something loud.

The noise was practically unbearable when Kagami came over to Alix and Alix led her across to the back entrance. People were yelling loudly, whistling derisively, everyone was making lots and lots of sounds all the time, rattling the bars and shouting into megaphones, and the closer the door was the more intense it got and the crowd was no longer people, just a trembling wad of red and —

When the entrance door shut behind them, it wasn’t quiet. But the pressure was a lot… less. Alix turned her head at a weird lopsided angle towards Kagami and gave a half smile. “Sorry about all that,” she said, and Kagami could finally get a handle on reality again. “They’ve been like this a while. Marinette wanted to see you, actually, so it’s good you came.”

Kagami jolted. “She… she did?”

“Yeah. You all right?”

“... No,” said Kagami. She crumpled up her hands one more time, driving the nails into the back of her hand.

“Fair enough.” Alix put her foot on the stairs and waved for Kagami to follow. “Saw your mum on the news, by the way.”

“Yes,” said Kagami diplomatically.

That interview had not been worth the air time. Kagami had been forced to sit behind the computer screen and not interrupt while Mother lied confidently and brusquely that she had no idea about Gabriel’s alleged villainy, nor about Marinette’s involvement with him — but she pledged to examine the matter closely and, if everything turned out to be true, she would rename the Gabriel brand and donate an unspecified amount to a mental health charity. The only followup question had been, “And you never suspected any foul play from him?”

Tomoe Tsurugi would take a small economic hit, probably. But her reputation would remain unsullied, except in the minds of conspiracy theorists. The law would remain silent and meek towards her.

They walked up the stairs and through Kagami’s thoughts, up to the front door where Alix made a complex series of knocks that sounded like a coded message. Thirty seconds later, the lock clicked and the door opened just a little bit — and then all the way, as Tom Dupain stepped aside to let them in. “Come in, quick,” he said.

Alix took Kagami by the upper arm and pulled her inside, and Tom immediately shut the door and locked it again. Kagami had actually never been inside the apartment before, and it was smaller than she’d imagined — on the right, there was a bathroom with an open door and a set of stairs leading up to a hatch, before a small kitchen section. There was small-scale clutter everywhere, pictures and frames and small figurines and a bowl of fruit, and dainty little candlesticks atop lacy doilies.

On the left there was an open bedroom where the double bed had no pillows or duvets or blankets, before a set of bookshelves and a couch, and in that couch sat Sabine Cheng and Nadja Chamack. There were three teacups on the table in front of them. Every single curtain was drawn and carpets had been hung over them. There was nobody else in the room.

“Oh — hello, Kagami,” said Sabine. She sounded glassy. “Are you here to see our Marinette?”

Kagami bowed deeply. It was a stupid question, but she understood why it was asked. “Hello, M Dupain, Mme Cheng, Mme Chamack. I would like to speak to Marinette, yes.”

“She’s upstairs,” said Tom, walking over to the thin kitchen island. “Alix will take you.”

“Be kind to her, all right, Kagami?” said Sabine, with a smile that was even glassier than her voice. Kagami hesitated at the base of the steps, glancing between Sabine and Tom — neither of them seemed angry or disappointed. They seemed helpless and scared, but the way they spoke about Marinette was… kind. They didn’t seem to want to limit Marinette’s access to friends.

In fact… they were nothing like Kagami had expected them to be. To be strict and punitive. Or perhaps they had been like that yesterday, and now they regretted it…

She shook the thought out of her head as they climbed up the stairs, and Alix lifted up the hatch, and the room above was dark and quiet and felt almost cold. The walls were pink, and the pink was too bright to give warmth, and the space was too wide and too open.

It was not altogether surprising to find Marinette huddled in her bed, wrapped up in what seemed like both her own duvets and blankets and the duvets and blankets from downstairs, and with pillows piled around her like a wall, under the only light in the room. It was even less surprising to see that Alya was huddled in there with her. Marinette hugged her knees to her chest, apparently still in her pyjamas underneath her blanket, while Alya sat with her legs folded. She, too, wore long-legged pyjamas.

“Kagami,” whispered Marinette, the first of them to speak, as Kagami climbed into bed after Alix. She didn’t smile.

“Hello,” said Kagami. She sat down like Marinette, though she made sure to arrange her skirt so that it hid everything worth hiding. Then she turned to Alya. “Hello.”

“Hey. How’s outside?” said Alya, throwing her duvet across Kagami’s shoulders too. Kagami looked to Marinette, who didn’t look like she’d been hit at all, nor like she’d been deprived of food. Perhaps she was wearing long legged pajamas to hide her bruised legs — but the faint smile on her lips didn’t feel like it came from someone who had been hit. Kagami smiled back, then allowed herself to consider Alya’s question.

The noise from outside was still audible. But here, inside the messy heap of blankets and duvets, it felt more distant. It still dug at Kagami’s ears and she wished she had something to cover them with, but it was… less awful. Her hands twitched a little. “It is loud and crowded,” she said.

“It’s been exactly like this since the early morning,” sighed Alya, a fact that Kagami already figured from the news coverage. But she didn’t realise that Alya would be able to state it so confidently.

“How do you know?”

“I slept over,” said Alya. She smiled sadly, put a hand onto Marinette’s knee, and Marinette almost seemed to cower at the touch. “I saw the broadcast yesterday. And I came straight over, because I wasn’t going to let her go through this alone. Right?” Marinette nodded quietly.

And Alya was the person behind the Ladyblog, which thankfully was the only news source that wasn’t currently preoccupied in broadcasting everything to do with Marinette and Ladybug. Every other outlet was circling Marinette’s house like a flock of seagulls above a dropped hamburger, but the Ladyblog had remained honourably silent.

“I didn’t sleep over,” said Alix. “I came today.” Kagami scrutinised her briefly. Yesterday, the only two heroes who had seemed to be in Marinette’s corner were Rena Rouge and Kitty Noire. Did that mean Alix was Kitty Noire?

“Um, Kagami…” Marinette sounded like she was incredibly tired. “Why did you come?”

Kagami glanced at Alix for a moment. “I wanted to see you,” she said.

“Oh. Good. Um… thank you,” she said, letting her gaze fall to her knees.

“You’re lucky I was up there,” said Alix. “I was just out to get some fresh air. You would’ve gotten a baton to the face if you stayed on the fence, you know.”

A shaky silence fell between them, which meant that the cacophony outside became more apparent again. Kagami hitched the duvet higher and put her knuckles to her ears to block it out. “It’s so loud,” she murmured. “How do you deal with it?”

“Ear plugs,” said Alix, pointing to her ears, which were stuffed with orange now that Kagami looked more closely at them. “Want some?”

“No. She likes ear muffs,” said Marinette. “I have a pair on the desk.”

“I’ll get them,” said Alya, unwrapping herself. She piled her half of the duvet and blankets next to Kagami and crawled across to the ladder.

Kagami followed Alya with her eyes. But then she felt fingers on her knee and turned back. Marinette had reached out with a hand. “Sorry about this,” she mumbled.

Alix sighed loudly. “God, Marinette. It’s not your fault, we’ve told you a million times.”

“It’s my fault I —”

“It’s your fault you were Ladybug for a year and saved the city over and over again, yeah yeah.” Alix’s eyeroll was wide and exaggerated. “You’re a hero, that’s an end of it.”

Marinette’s head dropped onto her arms. “I’m not. I — I couldn’t — I just…”

“You did everything you could. That’s all,” said Alix. She hitched herself closer to Marinette, near enough that she could put her hand on the other side of Marinette’s neck, and gave her a brief side hug. “I’m proud of you, and I’ll noogie anyone who tries to tell me I shouldn’t be.”

“Yeah,” said Alya, clambering back into the pillow fortress. “We’re all proud of you.” She had a set of pink and fluffy earmuffs — or, apparently, a pink and fluffy headset, with cord included — in her hand. Kagami grabbed it and eagerly pulled it over her ears. Immediately, the noise became a lot more bearable.

“Yeah. Even though you can’t be Ladybug anymore,” said Alix, her voice cutting through the earpieces well enough to hear. Marinette visibly jolted, and her head shot up, and her eyes were wide and terrified as they landed on Kagami.

But it wasn’t like Kagami hadn’t already discussed this with Trixx and Tikki since yesterday. In fact, not being Ryuuko was better, because several people knew who Ryuuko was. Nobody knew who Namitentou was… except the one person who needed to know. She smiled briefly, with her mouth only. “I guessed as much.”

“Y-you did?”

“Yes.” Kagami reached up to the back of her neck then and unhooked the necklace, and held it forth to Marinette. “That is why I wanted to give you Longg’s Miraculous.”

“Kagami!” yelped Marinette. “Don’t — not in front of —”

“Alya and Alix are also holders, are they not?” Kagami glanced at each of them. “Alya is Rena Rouge. And Alix is…”

“Bunnyx,” completed Alix, raising a thumb. So… maybe that was why Bunnyx didn’t show up yesterday, because she had to hold the black cat… “Yeah. That’s me. And you’re Ryuuko, then. But I didn’t know about Rena Rouge, damn.”

Alya was gaping. “Um… how did you…”

“I once overheard you and Marinette talk about her being Ladybug aboard the Liberty,” said Kagami, a little surprised to learn that Alya didn’t seem to have been told that detail yet. “That was months ago. I thought it made logical sense for you to be Rena Rouge.”

At that, Alya seemed to shrink a bit. But she did end up smiling faintly. “Okay. You got me. I’m — well, you already know…”

“I only found out Marinette was Ladybug from the akuma,” said Alix, nudging Marinette in the leg —

— and that was when they all noticed Marinette’s expression, which was still a wide and gaping terror.

“Marinette?” tried Kagami. “I have spoken to Longg about this, and he would love to come with you.”

“But you — why did you — Kagami, you can’t just, I have to, I’m the — gh — what about you?”

The question in Marinette’s eyes was different. Kagami would not have understood it if she didn’t currently have Tikki’s earrings on her, hidden underneath her hair. It was: “Are you really okay with taking over as the ladybug holder?” It was: “Won’t you miss Longg?” It was: “I can’t do this to you — can I?”

“You already found someone to hold the ladybug Miraculous, and she helped you yesterday,” said Kagami, because it was easy to understand that Namitentou would have to be secret. “But for your own protection, you need a Miraculous more than I do. Longg will help you.”

“But what about you?” half-stammered Marinette.

Kagami pulled her knees closer. “My boyfriend already has a Miraculous. He can protect me if necessary. Not everyone needs to be a hero.”

“I… see,” said Marinette. Her whole body seemed to become smaller, her spirit more distant. She still didn’t take the necklace; she ended up staring into the empty space above it instead. And Kagami realised some more convincing was in order.

But she couldn’t do that with everybody else around. “May I speak to Marinette alone?” she said, looking at Alix and Alya in turn. They looked at each other and then Marinette, but didn’t seem to have any objections. So they climbed down the ladder, patting Marinette on the shoulders or arms on the way, and then vanished down the hatch.

Marinette no longer seemed frozen. She seemed like she was lost in the middle of a vast and still lake. Kagami proffered the necklace to Marinette again, and Marinette reached her hand out part of the way, but she didn’t actually touch the necklace.

“There is nothing to worry about, Marinette.”

“You — you’re sure you’re okay?”

“Absolutely.”

“You’re sure sure?”

Kagami nodded. “Yes, I am.”

“About being Namitentou? Is that —”

“Yes,” sighed Kagami. “Marinette, I would love to help you. That is a friend thing to do, correct?”

The previous time Kagami asked that, by the pool, Marinette had seemed distant and unenthusiastic. The same was true now. She looked like she was trying to force some positive feeling out of herself. “Y, yes. That’s very friendly for you…”

“You aren’t being honest with me.” She didn’t mean to come off as harsh, but perhaps she did, because Marinette shrank together again.

“I… I mean it, Kagami,” she replied, before dropping her forehead back onto her knees. “It’s not about that. I just… I screwed everything up, and it should be up to me to fix everything, not you. The last time someone took over for me, she got found out the next day, and I can’t — I can’t do that t-to —” this was where her voice broke. A sob pushed through, and no more words came out.

“Marinette…”

“I don’t… I d-don’t know what to do…” All of Marinette convulsed with the next sob. “I was supposed to s-save Paris. I was supposed to, to be a good partner. To Cat Noir and Adrien. I keep burdening everyone a-a-and if, if you keep being Namitentou…”

“I want to do it,” said Kagami. “I want to —”

“Can I have a hug?”

The question was abrupt and yet very small. Like a punctuation mark. A comma, maybe. Kagami only hesitated to answer because it was so surprising, but when she got her thoughts back in order she said, “Yes. Now?”

“Yes,” breathed Marinette. “Y-you can keep the muffs on, if — if…”

Kagami shifted her way across the mattress until she was exactly where Alix had been, on Marinette’s right-hand side. It almost sounded like Marinette was holding her breath, because she didn’t sob or speak and she barely even moved, and most of that movement was because the mattress was shifting underneath her. But as soon as Kagami clumsily started to ease her arm around Marinette’s waist and the hand with the necklace onto Marinette’s far shoulder, the girl’s breaths became deep and heavy.

This was probably a moment that called for comforting words. Kagami didn’t know any, though, and she stayed silent. She pushed her forehead against Marinette’s cheek so as to not hit her with the plastic, and Marinette’s breaths eventually shallowed and relaxed, despite the lack of words. And her head fell sideways onto Kagami’s collarbone.

“... Thank you,” Marinette whispered. “You can let go now.”

“Do you want me to?”

“No…”

“Then I will keep hugging you.”

It was strange — Kagami didn’t feel physical comfort. Marinette, Félix, Adrien, even Alya and Luka, they had all hugged her before. And those hugs were warm and felt safe. But now she was just mechanically holding on and it wasn’t warm or safe like she was used to. Even so, she had a kind of mental warmth, a feeling that she was the one helping and providing heat. It was a satisfaction she hadn’t really known before.

“Marinette… I will be Namitentou. You will be the dragon. That way, nobody except us will know our identities, and you will have one less burden to bear. I will lead the team.” Nobody except Alya and Alix, but they were here for Marinette — and that meant they were trustworthy.

“It’s too much to ask of you,” protested Marinette, but without much energy.

“You are not asking me. I am demanding it of you.” Kagami let go of Marinette’s shoulder and held the necklace in front of her.

Marinette didn’t react for a moment. But then she raised her hand and grabbed the necklace, and she slowly put it on. Just like her protest, there was no real energy to her acceptance. When the necklace was on, she cleared her throat and lowered her head onto Kagami’s shoulder.

“Kagami…”

“Yes?”

“What did you want to talk about yesterday?”

Kagami curled up her toes rather than her fingers. This was hardly the time to bring up Félix’s concerns. They would only add to Marinette’s burdens and bring her further down — no, Kagami needed to wait a few days at the very least.

Besides, Félix did not seem to be in a mood to rush. He did not come to her yesterday, but they did have a brief video call. He said he was happy the truth had come out to everyone, and that there would be consequences. That was the totality of his input.

She did not — could not — feel the same way. The truth was good, but the consequences…

Adrien had asked to be alone once he recovered from the akumatisation. When Kagami returned to the tower with the other heroes who had fought, a message popped in on the yo-yo that Rena Rouge had taken Marinette back home. Kagami disbanded the team soon after, with little fanfare. And then she, too, had gone home. To sit in her room and make plans with Longg and Tikki, and worry about Marinette.

In one day, Marinette had lost her boyfriend, her reputation, her status, Tikki, every single Miraculous, and probably at least a few friends. So Marinette did not deserve another concern dropped on top of that pile.

“It’s fine. We can discuss this later.”

There was, relative to what was there before, silence. The din from outside was barely audible through the headphones, and Marinette’s breathing was just a rhythmic pushing against Kagami’s ribs and arms. And the duvet lay over them, like hands telling them to stay like that.

Slowly, Marinette’s arms started to crawl across Kagami’s torso. Kagami could feel her own muscles tense up in anticipation, waiting for the hug to be reciprocated fully, for the comfort she was giving to Marinette to also come to her.

But it never did. Because once her arms were locked in place, Marinette murmured, “Can you… promise me something?”

There was a portent to her words. Kagami knew her well enough that her requests were usually less intense-sounding than this — but to promise was to be a friend. “Yes,” Kagami replied.

“When you’re Namitentou… please act like you hate me.”

Kagami’s throat constricted. “... Are you certain?”

“Act like you took the Miraculous from me. Like you’re disgusted by what I did. Call me a traitor and say I’m never gonna be Ladybug again.”

“Marinette —”

“It’s for your own safety. If anyone finds out you got them from me, after — after everything… Nobody can trust me. I have to be the villain.”

“I trust you.”

But… did she really? Kagami searched her thoughts for a moment. She didn’t trust Marinette’s decision right now. She also wanted answers for what happened during that final battle, why Marinette decided to valorise Gabriel in the first place. She wanted to know if Marinette supported Nathalie over Félix.

And yet, she wanted to hear those things from Marinette’s mouth. She trusted Marinette to be genuine, even if she didn’t trust her to be right.

“I trust you,” she repeated, squeezing Marinette’s shoulder slightly. “I will do as you ask, but I will not stop trusting you.”

“That’s what Adrien said, too.” Marinette sounded like glass shattering. “He said… he said he’d n- he’d ne-never stop loving me…”

Kagami squeezed harder. She hadn’t wanted to bring the topic up herself, but if Marinette was going to… “Adrien is hurt. He needs time. But he will take you back.”

Marinette sniffled, and her arms squeezed a little tighter around Kagami. “... Ho-how can you trust me?”

“Because —”

But that question was harder to answer than Kagami had thought before she opened her mouth. She couldn’t claim that if she were in Adrien’s situation, she wouldn’t feel the same way as him. The only answer that felt right to her was that she wasn’t Adrien, that she already knew Mother was terrible, that she already knew Marinette was Ladybug. But that didn’t feel like the right thing to say.

Besides… Kagami had already done the same thing as Adrien. When she made the mistake of letting Lila poison her mind towards Marinette, and became akumatised for it… she had tried to end her friendship with Marinette, twice, in the span of only eight days. Thinking back on it now… she had thought at the time she was jealous of Marinette for taking Adrien. But in truth, she was more jealous of Adrien for stealing Marinette. For occupying so much of Marinette’s time. And angry with Marinette for not devoting time to her.

And then Marinette… had proved she actually wanted to still be friends. And Kagami had found someone else to love her. And that — that was really what had made the difference.

“— because I know better now,” she finished lamely.

“Know better,” echoed Marinette, her voice trailing away already from the second syllable.

“I still don’t know what happened when you fought Monarch,” said Kagami. “But I know you had a reason.” She said it with hope: it was true, but it was also a reminder to herself that she would ask to hear the reason the next time they met.

Marinette sighed raggedly. “Kagami… please, promise me that you’ll let me be the villain.”

Kagami didn’t reply. She didn’t know how.

There was no sound between them for a little while. And the thing that broke it was neither of them — it was the harsh noise of a knocking on the hatch, and then the hatch flipping open. Alya’s head popped up, turned to look at Kagami. “How is she?”

“She is sad.” Marinette stiffened, curled her legs up.

“Yeah… yeah, of course.” Alya spoke very softly, to the point where Kagami needed to flip away one of the earphones. “If she needs time, let her have it. But, um, could you ask her if she’ll be able to do that interview?”

“I’ll never be,” said Marinette, her voice stronger than it had been the whole day as far as Kagami had heard it. She sniffled shrilly, and it was clear that her nose had been lodged with snot. “But I h-have to do it some time. I… I’ll come down.”

“Interview?” asked Kagami. She didn’t think she’d really felt anything physical from the hug, but when Marinette let go and pulled away it was like a rush of cold air had entered the room. “What interview?”

Alya smiled the saddest smile that Kagami had ever seen on anyone. “She’s going to talk to Paris, and tell them the truth.”

“... I see.”

“And I’m going to tell them I’m ready to accept the consequences of what I did,” said Marinette. She was not even smiling. She seemed to be in some kind of mental basin far beyond emotion, where she’d cried all she could and the only thing left was just her determination, a shining lump of metal. Longg’s necklace shifted on her neck. It looked like a chain.

“I will come with you,” said Kagami. It seemed to be the only thing she could do.

Marinette still didn’t smile. “Thank you,” she whispered, and perhaps there was a fragment of feeling in those two words, but if so it was very slight.

As they crawled out of bed, Kagami saw Marinette’s socks. These were also striped, but only in light grey and dark brown. Marinette winced slightly as she started to climb down — a cramp, probably, given how long they’d sat up there.

When they got downstairs, the couch was empty. Tom and Sabine sat by the kitchen island, while Nadja Chamack stood next to the couch with her hands folded. Alix stood by the window with a phone in her hands. Everyone was smiling the same terrible smile as Alya — and Alya put her arms around Marinette’s shoulders and led her over to Nadja.

“Come sit with us, Kagami,” said Sabine.

“Are you ready, Marinette?” said Nadja. Marinette nodded.

“Don’t you want to wear proper clothes?” said Alix.

“Would it help?” said Marinette, and it was clear she wasn’t asking. Nobody contradicted her

Kagami went to sit next to Sabine and opposite Tom, and the three of them watched as Marinette sat down with Alya — both of them in their pyjamas — on the sofa next to Nadja, in her almost mockingly proper trouser suit. Alix counted down from five, and the air turned dry and cool, and the three on the sofa breathed it in deeply.

Alix stopped counting at two. Nadja sat up straight. Two seconds later, she spoke: “Hello Paris, hello Ladybloggers. I’m Nadja Chamack, here with Alya Césaire to report on the story that has been on everyone’s lips since yesterday: about Ladybug, Monarch, and Marinette Dupain-Cheng. In the interests of disclosure, Marinette has babysat my little daughter, and I am good friends with her parents.”

“And I am Marinette’s best friend, and I still am,” said Alya with a deep and resolute frown.

“However,” Nadja went on, “despite our bias, we are the only ones that Marinette wished to speak to for this interview. We will not comment on the truthfulness of anything Marinette says. We only want to break the story so that all of Paris can hear it from Marinette’s own lips.”

Alya squeezed Marinette’s hand. But Marinette didn’t react. She only stared into the camera. “H-hello, Parisians,” she said. “I’m Marinette Dupain-Cheng… and everything you heard yesterday is true. Every part of it.”

And somehow, it was so much worse to listen to today than it had been yesterday.

Chapter Text

It was almost eleven in the evening, or more accurately the night. And Zoé was sneaking across the rooftops under cover of darkness.

Not that Paris was ever truly dark. The pavements were cast in the yellowy glow of streetlights, and most buildings gleamed with shining windows and blaring signs. The night was drowning in the city’s efforts to make the day keep going. But up on the rooftops, it was grey and faded, and people on the streets would be too blinded by lanterns and lamps to register a grey cat.

She’d seen the interview with Marinette. The whole thing. It was half an hour long, and it was painful, but she had still seen it four whole times that day — at first on the Ladyblog, where it was streamed directly, and then on TV when André called her down to watch with him, and then two more times on the Ladyblog. She didn’t know why, but it had felt like a duty: if Marinette was going to suffer through doing the interview, then Zoé owed it to her to suffer through watching it.

It wasn’t like the hurt was Zoé’s. But Marinette’s dead expression as she talked, and the way she described herself contra everybody else, had dug a pit in Zoé’s stomach and filled it with chilly water.

“I received the ladybug earrings from an old man one year ago,” Marinette had said. “I won’t say his name, but he chose me to be a hero. He chose poorly.”

That was how she spoke. She was slow, deliberate, and pulled everything back to herself. The guardian who gave her the Miraculous wasn’t identified. She never mentioned that Cat Noir was Adrien. She didn’t talk about any of the other heroes by name, and in fact specifically brought up that nobody else had influenced her to hide Monarch’s identity. She mentioned Nathalie only once, when Nadja pressed her on it — “Yes, Nathalie Sancoeur was Mayura. I won’t say anything else about her. Please, talk to her.”

The only person she named deliberately was Gabriel Agreste. And she mentioned him multiple times, and every time she did she looked like someone was pointing a gun at her head. “Gabriel Agreste was Monarch. I found out months ago, thanks to… an anonymous tip. I won’t speculate on why he did it. I lied about him for selfish reasons, and — and I was wrong.” 

And the final impression an uninformed onlooker would get, an onlooker who didn’t know the situation and didn’t know Marinette’s heart, was that Marinette was somehow the true villain — greater than even Monarch. His crimes became mere background details, while her failure to stop him and desire not to tell the truth about him were horrendous and unforgivable. His attempts to destroy Paris, for reasons Marinette never disclosed and maybe didn’t even know, were barely even mentioned by Nadja and not at all by Marinette.

“Like I said yesterday… I don’t deserve any praise. I’m unfit to be a hero, and I only made things worse. And I’m prepared to take whatever punishment you want for me.” At that point, there had been multiple raised voices in the room, and Alya had glared into the camera and grabbed Marinette’s wrists protectively. The camera itself had swerved briefly.

But Nadja had turned to face her viewers and said, “And there you have it. The story, right from Marinette’s own mouth.” She had a strange look in her eyes, and her voice wavered in a manner that was unusual for her, but she tried her best to keep up her professional face. “We’ll be sure to give you more updates later, when… when there’s more to discuss. In the meantime — don’t be bemused, it’s just the news, and… stay connected.”

The last glimpse of Marinette had been entirely obscured by Alya. The camera had cut out, and someone’s hands — Zoé guessed they belonged to one of Marinette’s parents — just barely got into frame before that.

Plagg and Pollen had seen the whole thing with her when she watched on the Ladyblog. Both of them had been strangely quiet. Plagg had shot lightning bolts with his eyes, but he didn’t interrupt once even on the second watch. And even the raging storm he had inside was stilled a little by Marinette’s bare honesty.

“She shouldn’t have done it,” he repeated when they talked it over afterwards. “Any of it. She shouldn’t have done it.” It was a plea and an admonishment, a burst of rage at a past that couldn’t be changed. But he didn’t protest when Zoé defended Marinette, and he didn’t protest the plan. And even his anger was nothing compared to that of the city.

The city now was… strange. The air itself felt anxious. There had been a protest outside city hall when Zoé went past; it wasn’t large, but the maybe a hundred people who were there made it pretty notable — it just hadn’t been long enough yet that it could have been pre-arranged. There was fresh graffiti on several walls, tags or hastily designed throwies. Every television screen seemed to be turned to the same channel, or at least to the same subject. And it all seemed to be against Marinette somehow.

A lot of the throwie graffiti had drawings of ladybugs, the insect, but twisted in some fashion — with fangs, or horns, or just crossed out. Comments sprayed on next to them called her a traitor or a liar, or both. One work was just an outline of a ladybug and a butterfly holding hands, with hearts between them: underneath, in big runny letters, the words ‘MA LADIE’ . Cat Noir’s nickname for Ladybug, but twisted to compare her to a disease.

Someone had also tagged the front walls to the Agreste mansion. But there was nobody gathered there when Zoé went past. The writing was a loud argument all in itself, though: the two largest things sprayed on were opposing messages. In large black letters, someone had written ‘ARRÊTEZ LES AGRESTES’ — arrest the Agrestes — and right next to it, someone else had sprayed ‘WE LOVE YOU, ADRIEN’ in English. She didn’t bother trying to read the rest.

Eventually, she landed on one of the roofs overlooking Place des Vosges, only a short stride away from Marinette’s balcony. She snuck into a space in the shadow of a chimney and tried to blend in with the roof as she looked down at the park. There were a number of police officers inside a fence ring around the statue of Gabriel Agreste, and a large group of people surrounding that ring — perhaps as many as had been at city hall. They were clearly simmering, and there were signs that things had been thrown at the statue, though the crowd at present didn’t seem to be belligerent.

And then there was the crowd around Marinette’s home. It was smaller than it had been on TV an hour ago, but that still didn’t make it small. There were people pushing up against the temporary fences, several large and hastily-made signs, and a lot of talking at cross purposes.

However… the road between the bakery and the school was now empty, partly blocked with fences and police tape. The crowds were entirely on the park side, around the entrances.

Zoé crawled around the chimneys, becoming as one with the roof as she possibly could. The cooling tiles felt strangely distant from the streets, like a different world — the raucous streets and the calm rooftops — even though she could fall off the roof and be in that world within seconds.

But she couldn’t fall off. She had to get to Marinette.

She slipped around the final chimney, sticking to the shadowed parts, and lay down on her front. There was no rise in sound, no loud comments about someone on the roof, for maybe a minute. That, at least, was a good sign. She inched herself forward on her stomach until she reached the skylight, and peered down — and it dawned on her straight away how weird it was to do what she was doing, once she realised she was glad to see that Marinette wasn’t asleep. She wasn’t spying: she was doing a service for Marinette.

Zoé carefully rapped on the glass with her knuckles. The sound was audible here, but only barely over the chatter from below. Nothing moved below. She waited for what felt like a minute and then a bit more, and then knocked again, harder this time.

— but Marinette could be downstairs, or she could be wearing ear plugs to block out the noise, or she could be sleeping with the lights on and just at a weird angle so she was hard to see from here —

As Zoé considered the ethics of breaking in via a simple Cataclysm to the frame, though, she saw movement in the sheets. She pulled herself forward a little bit and knocked again, three knocks, and the back of Marinette’s head appeared at the third knock.

Marinette turned her head, and her eyes went wide. Her mouth moved too, but Zoé couldn’t read lips — so she just made an opening gesture with her hand and tried to smile warmly. After a short pause, Marinette reached up her hand and unlatched the window, then pushed it up without a word. Zoé took hold of it and inched her way down, front first, so as not to be visible from the ground.

But Marinette didn’t seem happy to see her at all. She rushed to fasten the latch again, and then she hissed, “What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be a good guy!”

Zoé hesitated for a moment, the words lodging in her throat. Marinette seemed — strangely okay, in the sense that she didn’t seem to be sobbing or actively distressed, but she did look roughly as dishevelled as her bed. She was in her pyjamas still, the same ones from the interview, but her pigtails had come half undone and the crawl across the bed had unsettled her top ever so slightly. It was a little disconcerting to slip into her room like this, like Zoé had interrupted the sacred rituals of Being At Home and Being Alone.

“... I wanted to speak to you,” said Zoé, a little meeker than she’d meant to sound.

“Kitty Noire, you’re a hero. I’m a villain.”

“You’re not a —”

The severe look on Marinette’s face was enough to still Zoé’s protests. “You heard what I said yesterday. You must have seen the interviews… right?”

Zoé nodded. “I saw them. But you’re still a hero.”

Marinette’s expression seemed to melt. She frowned, blinked a few times, dropped her gaze onto the bed. “I — I’m not. And even if you think I am… everybody else knows. I have to be the bad guy. That means, means you can’t be seen with me.”

“No. No,” said Zoé, snatching Marinette’s hand. “You can’t just isolate yourself. And besides, I don’t think anybody saw me.”

Marinette only threw a single glance at Zoé. Her hand remained perfectly limp in Zoé’s. “You can’t be sure about that…”

“I wear black and it’s dark out.” Zoé smiled, squeezed the hand. “Nobody saw me.”

“... Why do you care about me?” said Marinette. It wasn’t a whisper, just a broken mumble, but it felt like a whisper — there was no power to what she said, and yet the words penetrated the air between them.

“Because… because you’re my friend.”

Marinette had guessed yesterday. Today, she’d said she would no longer be Ladybug. So admitting it was no longer a problem. That same recognition flashed across Marinette’s eyes now, as Zoé’s gaze met hers.

“Thank you,” said Marinette. “But you still shouldn’t risk it. If you’re seen hanging out with me…” Her eyes drifted to the windows; Zoé followed them, and saw that curtains were drawn thoroughly across the rectangular ones, while the small peephole out towards the Seine had frosted glass panes. “If anyone… if anyone saw you, tell them you came to interrogate me. About my secrets. They can’t think you’re on my side.”

“Marinette…”

“No. I’m the villain now.” Marinette’s eyes were lanterns as they sought out Zoé’s. Her voice was remarkably steady. “You have to act like you hate me. I’m toxic goods. I’m… I’m actually toxic goods. I mean it.”

Zoé opened and closed her mouth a few times. She knew what she wanted to say: you’re amazing, you’re brave, you’re worth defending; but the way Marinette looked at her made her throat dry out. It was like looking at a book: no matter what she said to it, she couldn’t change the words on the page. “... How can I act like I hate you?” she said, loathing how weak she sounded; she should sound fierce and determined and protective, like she would stand on the battlements to defend Marinette’s honour.

“I — I don’t know. I don’t know you.” Marinette looked down at Zoé’s hand. She, too, was meek — but she sounded more determined than Zoé did. “Or maybe I do, but I don’t… know who you are. But you have to. You have to hate me, you have to… please hate me. Please.”

And she looked Zoé in the eyes, and Zoé swallowed, because Marinette had faltered into nothingness at the end and it was like watching someone fall off a bridge in the distance. A helpless and frightened animal cowered somewhere inside Marinette’s pupils, almost but not quite resigned to what she was saying.

“... Marinette,” said Zoé, but her voice was such a shambles that she cleared her throat and started over. “Marinette. I can never hate you.”

“Everyone keeps saying that. But what if I end up lying to you? About something big that you care about and it hurts you, and you start to hate me?” said Marinette, fizzling out entirely over the space of the last sentence.

“I…”

Zoé swallowed. Her mind was made up. She couldn’t back down now, not after she’d talked it over with the kwamis. Three days ago, at the pool, she’d decided to trust Marinette rather than believe her. To have faith in Marinette’s heart even if she knew that Marinette was lying. 

Perhaps these lies were bigger. That was what happened when you were a superhero, after all. But Zoé was at least going to try.

“... I know you’ve lied to me already,” she started, because she didn’t know how else to start replying. She put her free hand on Marinette’s knee, and Marinette’s eyes became the sirens on a fire truck, wide and bright and impossible to ignore. “And you’ve lied to the city. Maybe I can’t trust what you say, but I think I can trust you. Because you trusted me.”

“... You can’t trust me,” said Marinette.

“I think that’s my choice to make.”

Marinette finally pulled her hand back, the first time she’d moved it since Zoé took hold of it. It wasn’t a forceful gesture, but it was quick. “And you’ll change your mind about it later. Everyone will.”

Zoé pulled back her own hands too, and took hold of her own shins just so she had something to hold on to that wasn’t Marinette. “I already said I was your friend, Marinette,” she said, and there was no response. She sighed, closed her eyes. “And I want you to trust me, too. So… claws in.”

She didn’t see Marinette’s reaction, but she felt the shift in the covers and heard Marinette’s gasp, and waited with a quiet smile for the moments it took for Marinette to pull herself together. “... Zoé! Why did you — I can’t know your identity —”

“I told her to,” said Plagg’s voice. He sounded about as charitable as could be expected. Zoé opened her eyes, kept her smile on even as Marinette’s horrified expression painted itself across her vision.

“P-Plagg!”

“You’re the guardian, and that means you act like a guardian, or you give it up and lose your memories,” said Plagg. He practically barked at her. “You know everybody else’s identities, right? So stop being so afraid of cats!”

Zoé winced. But she couldn’t really fault him. She knew he’d be like this, because he’d spent a good half hour ranting at her and Pollen about this yesterday.

“Fu knew who everyone was. And you already told Alya who you were,” he went on. “Adrien never got to tell anybody, so the least you can do for Zoé is to let her tell you!”

“... Are you mad at me?” squeaked Marinette; she’d shrunk together like crumpled paper at this point.

“Yes,” snapped Plagg. “I’m mad. You kept the secret from my cat for months. You didn’t trust him. And I had to sit there and listen to him gush about his dad, and I couldn’t tell him anything about what really happened.”

“Um…”

“And you let Monarch get away with it! You let him take the ring!”

Marinette looked at Zoé, her mouth an ‘O’ of horror. “You… you know?”

“I don’t,” said Zoé, twiddling her thumbs against her ankles. “That’s all he’s said.”

“And I said you’re a naïve idiot.”

“Y-yeah,” said Zoé. “He said that too. And I really don’t know what happened… but like I said, I trust you. And Plagg does too, even if he’s not going to tell you now.” Plagg, hovering between them, folded his arms and turned away. “You’re not a villain. And I won’t pretend like you are one, either.”

Marinette’s eyes flitted rapidly between the two of them. She seemed to be struggling for a voice, let alone the words to use it with.

“You messed up hard,” said Plagg. “And the only way you can make it up to me is to treat Zoé better for as long as she’s Kitty Noire, and to make things good again with Adrien.”

“... How do I do that?” said Marinette.

Zoé glanced at Marinette’s lap. Her own fingers twitched impatiently. “You’re the people person, aren’t you?” said Plagg. “Everyone loves you, right?”

“I —”

Before Marinette could finish replying, Zoé shot her hands forward and grabbed Marinette’s again. Marinette’s eyes and mouth both fell about as open as they could go. “I don’t mind,” Zoé said. “If — if you said everything and it was true, it’s fine. Plagg’s just being defensive. And I can help you talk to Adrien, if…” Here, Marinette’s face fell back into closed despair — “I mean, if I can help. And I want to. But don’t worry about me. You don’t need to — I’m fine.”

“Don’t let her off the hook!” said Plagg.

“I’m not! There’s no hook!” said Zoé. “Please, Plagg. I’m fine.”

— but was she really? She knew she loved Marinette. She wasn’t seeking to date Marinette just because she and Adrien had broken up, she wasn’t, she wasn’t she wasn’t but she knew she would rather be here with Marinette, be on good terms with Marinette, support Marinette…

… just like she’d wanted Chloé to like her, to be respected and on top of the school, so she’d let herself be mean to everyone just to achieve that. Just like she’d tried to hide that she liked girls at her old school, to fawn over the boys just like all the other girls, so the others would like her. And that had come crashing down on her once she couldn’t hide it anymore, when the truth came out like a quiet fart and only days later, everyone was wrinkling their noses at her —

No. No, this was different. She was supporting a friend who had been genuine to her, and who had been genuine to the whole city only a few hours ago. Asking for even more truths from Marinette right now would just be to torture her.

“Hmph!” said Plagg. “You may be fine with being treated like a second-rate cheese, but I know what a fine camembert like you deserve, Zoé! And if you don’t store them well, Marinette, you’ll get mould on them and they’ll go rank on you, and you won’t get to taste them anymore!”

“Plagg,” sighed Zoé. “Marinette, he really does mean well.” And at this point, now that he was back to cheese metaphors, he’d clearly calmed down a little bit. “And I’ll help you make things good again with Adrien. I don’t know how, but… I’ll try.”

Marinette didn’t pull her hands away, but Zoé could feel her weighing up the choice of doing so. She was looking down at the bedding again, or perhaps at her lap, at her pajama bottoms and striped socks. “I don’t know what else I can even tell him,” she creaked, like a wooden door in the wind.

“We’ll figure it out,” said Zoé, stroking Marinette’s hands and holding onto them like Marinette would fall through the mattress if she didn’t.

But Marinette just looked up with obvious pain in her eyes. “... And I can’t promise you the truth,” she said, and this time she barely whispered — the wind that had moved the door stilled to a faint breeze. “I have… I have things… I can’t tell you, there are so many things I can’t tell you —”

“That’s fine,” said Zoé, though her chest was contracting. Maybe this was different from pretending to be someone she wasn’t to appease people, but… she was still denying a part of herself to please Marinette, wasn’t she?

But maybe in time, Marinette would trust her more, just like she trusted Marinette…

“I can live with not knowing everything,” Zoé said, concluding that thought. That, at least, was true. “Just… I want you to…” to tell me the things that actually matter, to trust me, to love me back… “I want you to be okay. Okay? And Plagg does too. And we’ll figure it out.”

“... Nobody deserves to have to deal with me.”

“Marinette…”

“I — I mean it. I have something…” Marinette’s gaze was fastened to her own feet. “I just… it’s better for you if you don’t bother with me. I’m dangerous. I’m a villain. I’m, I’m poison and —”

“Marinette.” Zoé squeezed hard on Marinette’s hands. “You can’t push me away. I’m not going to go away. I’m going to stay right here with you.”

There was agony in Marinette’s expression. But for once, she didn’t look away from Zoé, and she didn't try to protest. She just sat there like she’d heard something so profound she had to leave it unchallenged. And Zoé wanted it to be that level of profound, because it was — she was profoundly serious, but the Marinette she loved wasn’t quiet.

“... I won’t abandon you,” Zoé said. She didn’t say, “I’m still in love with you.” Nor did she say, “Please let me be your girlfriend.” She didn’t dive in for a kiss. But she did add, like a challenge to the heavens: “I will only go away if… if you really don’t want to have me around.”

Perhaps it was hope against hope, but she didn’t believe that Marinette truly wanted to be alone. Otherwise, Alya wouldn’t have been on screen and hugging Marinette during their interview. There wouldn’t have been reports of friends of Marinette’s coming to visit and remaining there for hours. Perhaps it was hope against hope… but if Zoé was allowed to, she hoped she could be one of those friends.

“I —”

“Do you really want me to go?” said Zoé.

Marinette’s eyes suddenly became oceans. Vast and open and heavy and incomprehensible and wet, and they fell to the space between them yet again, and she spoke words like feathers blown on the wind that Zoé had to snatch out of the air: “... No. No, I d-don’t…”

“Then I’m going to stay,” said Zoé, pulling her heart out of the immeasurable depths and lifting it high into the sky, as it thumped triumphant and brave and loud. “I’m going to support you. Even if everyone else abandons you, I won’t.”

She breathed in, then out, and let go with her right hand. It was time. If Marinette had trusted her with Pollen, then she would trust Marinette in return.

“And… I’m going to be Kitty Noire now, right? So as long as I’m her… I think you should have Pollen back.” She reached up to the back of her head and pulled out the comb, presenting it to Marinette in an open palm.

“Y-you — no! Zoé, no…” said Marinette —

— it was only now that Zoé realised how terrified Marinette seemed, as the staccato voice planted itself into her ears and the bluebell eyes burrowed straight through Zoé’s soul.

“... What’s wrong?”

Marinette’s fingers nervously fumbled against her choker. “I… I can’t take Pollen… It’s not right…”

“Of course it’s right! You know exactly how to care for her!” Zoé smiled, turned Marinette’s hand around and put the comb into it. “She loves your lemon tarts, and she wants to be with you. And you already know everything about her, so you’ll make a great bee holder! And, well… you’ll be less alone.”

Marinette’s face displayed a slideshow of about fifty different emotions in rapid succession, but she ended up in a mellow pool of what seemed to be… nothing much. “... Okay,” she mumbled, and closed her hand around the Miraculous. “I’ll take care of her. I, I promise.”

“Good,” said Zoé. “I’m glad.”

Marinette seemed the opposite. Or rather, she seemed almost devoid of feeling. Little by little, she fell back towards the wall behind her, bowed her head towards the bed, straightened her legs and then bent the knees back towards her chest. She seemed like a sigh made manifest.

“... Sorry,” Marinette said, after a length of time that Zoé had been completely tongue-tied, but that she wished she could have filled with a hundred words of praise. “I’m just…”

“Yes,” said Zoé. She pulled back now, put her hands in her lap and didn’t try to touch Marinette. Even holding Marinette’s hands was starting to feel like a transgression. “I get it.”

Again, a hopeless moment from Marinette — where she looked like she wanted to protest, where in the space of the blink of an eye she seemed to carry every burden in the world on her shoulders — but then the ocean faded into a still pond on a mountaintop. “Th-thank you,” she muttered. “I don’t deserve it, but —”

“You deserve it.” Zoé did not reach out for Marinette’s hands again. She did not reach out to touch Marinette’s foot, even though it was tantalisingly close. Instead, she distracted herself by looking around the room.

It was only now that she really internalised how empty it was. Empty and silent, like a chasm of nothing. Up here, Marinette was a warm light — even sad and broken, she was the most beautiful girl in the world — but even she couldn’t fill the void that the rest of her room felt like.

“... Where’s Alya?” said Zoé. “Did she go home?”

“Her parents wouldn’t let her stay longer…”

“What about the others?” said Zoé, looking back at Marinette. Marinette’s eyes waxed a little wider.

“... Um… they went home? I… who do you mean?”

“They said on TV you had more guests,” said Zoé. “I don’t know who.”

Marinette breathed in slowly through her nose for a second or two, then breathed out, “They went home too.”

Plagg cleared his throat. “It’s almost midnight, Zoé,” he said. “People go home to sleep before midnight.”

“... Right. Of course.” She squeezed her own shins. “That makes sense. Are… are they also on your side?”

“I… I guess…” said Marinette. Then steel flashed in her eyes. “No, I mean… yes. They are. They’re my friends.” She stuck the comb into her hair then, so it went through at the base of her pigtail. “They’re on — they’re on my side.”

“Zoé.” Plagg nudged Zoé in the side of the head. “People go home to sleep.”

A moment passed like the blink of a flashlight. Then she caught on. “R-right. I — I have to go home too… or André will wonder where I am…”

Marinette nodded slowly. Now, too, she was firmer than before. “Yeah… that’s for the best.”

And that firmness made Zoé worry. “Will you be okay by yourself?” she half-stammered, feeling halfway like she shouldn’t ask the question — because she knew she couldn’t offer to sleep over. Not tonight. Not without asking at home first. Not without asking Marinette for permission, either.

“I will.”

“Can — can I give you a hug before we leave?”

She regretted saying it even as the words escaped her lips. But Marinette didn’t falter — the firmness seemed to have gone all the way through her now. She still seemed brittle and broken, but there was a rod of iron piercing straight through her soul, keeping her uprightt. “Yes,” she said, finally raising her head up. She didn’t smile, however. “I… I’d like that.”

If sad and broken Marinette was the most beautiful girl in the world, then a determined Marinette — even in the ashes of the world she used to live in — still outshone her. Zoé untangled herself, got to her knees, and hugged Marinette from the front. There was still warmth in Marinette’s cheeks, still a softness to her arms, and Zoé relished in the embrace until Marinette seemed to want to pull back.

“... Thanks for coming,” said Marinette as Zoé pulled back.

“Of course. I couldn’t just… not come see you,” said Zoé, letting go of Marinette completely. The big empty room crept over her again. She sighed away a shiver. “I’ll come over again tomorrow. And… you’ll be at school too, right?”

Marinette didn’t answer. She just looked down. “It was good to see you,” she mumbled.

The warmth in Marinette’s cheeks — the softness to her arms — Zoé couldn’t do anything about those now. But she would return to nurture them, until Marinette was back to her full splendour. She would see Marinette, always the most beautiful girl in the world, return to being the most beautiful she had ever been: standing proud and free atop the city, as Ladybug, as the hero she’d always been.

“Thanks,” Zoé said. She turned to Plagg, who was still frowning at the wall — though his expression had taken on a tinge of regret. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” he said. He cast a single glance towards Marinette, so quick that it could almost not have happened, but Zoé caught it. “Let’s go.”

“Okay. Cla—”

“Wait,” said Marinette. “Plagg… it was good to see you too.” Her voice carried the emphasis of shattered glass. “And, um… I’m sorry.”

Plagg sighed and turned his back to Marinette again. Zoé could see on his face that he wasn’t angry — but he had more pride in him, and more love for Adrien, than forgiveness for Marinette right now. “I’m not the one you have to apologise to,” he huffed.

“... Yeah,” she breathed. “Yeah…”

“We’ll see you tomorrow,” said Zoé, cutting the moment short before the air got too thick to breathe. “That’s a promise. Plagg, claws out —”

— and she was Kitty Noire. She waved with her fingers at Marinette, and gave her a wink for good measure, as the first droplet of water out of many gallons to be poured into Marinette’s heat-and-softness garden. She whispered a goodnight, opened the skylight, and climbed slowly onto the balcony — where she lay herself flat on the floor to listen.

There was noise from the park side of the house still. There was the distant noise of city living. There were raised voices, although — and Zoé had to think it was because this was so close to midnight — there seemed to be so many fewer of them.

But there were some insistent whispers, and a high-pitched monotone sound that clicked on and off, like a showerhead intermittently sprinkling water — she quickly recognised them as spray cans. She lay silent, because she couldn’t risk being seen, but the noise came from the street that was supposed to be empty.

The whispers were agitated, but hushed, but still aggressive, and it sounded like there were two or maybe three people down there. She couldn’t tell what they were saying — the only thing she heard was “Hurry!”

It only lasted for a minute, perhaps two, perhaps five, but she was sure it was less than that. Then there were hurried steps, the clanging of metal and shoes hitting the pavement, and the voices disappeared towards the school and the Seine. And then there was silence except the ambient noise, a dog in the distance, some chatter from the other side of the building.

Zoé pushed herself up and climbed onto the roof, around the chimney, into the shadows. There was nobody left in the closed-off street. Which meant that whatever the taggers had been doing, they were done with it. There was nothing left… except, Zoé knew, whatever they’d sprayed onto the wall.

She knew it wouldn’t be good. She expected curses on the Dupain-Cheng family, on Marinette’s name, on Ladybug and all the heroes. She expected another ‘MA LADIE’. But when she jumped across to the other side and crawled into a nook where nobody would see her, when she cast her eyes towards the bakery, she saw something that was almost worse.

The last thing Zoé read that day — because once she got home, she simply threw herself into bed to sleep — were words painted careless and large and pink against the glass and wood: ‘MARI-MENTEUSE N’EST PAS LADYBUG!’ — Liar-nette isn’t Ladybug.

Chapter Text

Morning came like a brick to the head.

Marinette had slept the whole night, but that mattered little when her dreams were so bad she still had them burnt across her inner eye after waking up. Dreams of Adrien as a real spider spinning her into a real web. Dreams of the bakery being trampled by a giant metallic foot with her parents inside. Dreams of Kagami and Zoé dying in pain and terror because they had to go up against an akuma they couldn’t handle, only because Marinette had ruined everything and forced them into roles they weren’t meant to have.

That was all one dream, but stretching on into interminable lengths, repeating in a cycle with the same images: dead Zoé and Kagami, angry Adrien, her parents gone.

And then there was the second dream, which happened only once, but it was the one that woke her up: the one where she pulled down her socks and saw that her foot was no longer rusted black. Instead, her foot was Gabriel Agreste, and he was laughing at her.

She sat up in bed and looked at the ledge where she’d put the Miraculous and her phone.The time was twelve past seven. Somehow, that time felt like a joke at her expense, and she could only resign herself to it. In less than two hours, she would be at school again. And school would just be painful. It was going to be — it was going to be Chloé and Lila times a million. Maybe even worse, because it would also all be her own fault.

There were five messages on the screen, three of them from Alya and the other two from Alix and Kagami. The message from Alix was simple, and only twenty minutes old.

Monday, 3 Sep – 06:48

Alix
hey, message me when ur fine with me coming over, k?

Kagami’s was elaborate.

Monday, 3 Sep – 06:30

Kagami
I hope Longg is doing fine, and you as well. If you don’t mind, I would like to message you frequently, so that you don’t forget I’m still your friend. -Kagami

But Alya’s messages… they were mostly screenshots. One was of an online article in Le Parisien where Mayor Bustier announced a press conference today at eleven thirty, during lunch hours, to address ‘the Ladybug issue’. And though Marinette would rather shrink into a little shelled nut that could never again bother anyone and just be dropped into some dry well far out of sight, she’d known something like that press conference was coming.

The other screenshots Alya had sent, though, were of a personal conversation with Nino.

Sunday, 2 Sep – 18:12

Nino
dude
how can you just be like that?

Alya
like what?

Nino
like that. on screen. with her

Alya
I don’t know what you mean

Nino
she’s a criminal als
actually idc about that. i just care about what she did to adrien
he’s suffering man. i got him at my place and he’s going thru it
how are you still defending her on screen when shes confessing to all that stuff

Alya
she’s my friend, nino. of course I’m going to defend her
like you’re defending Adrien

Nino
wtf man? he didn’t lie to her

Alya
right sorry that came out wrong

Nino
or pretend like her supervillain dad was a good guy
it came out shit, als.

Alya
I’m sorry!
I didn’t mean it like that
but

Nino
please don’t say what i think youre saying als

Alya
I’m still her friend. even if she messed up, I’m still with her

Nino
DUDE
wtf dude

Alya
like I’m sorry. and she’s sorry too. she really hates herself rn
and she needs me and I love her

Nino
yeah well i also hate her rn

Alya
Nino. Don’t do this

Nino
adrien’s been crying and people r saying he should be in prison
do what alya.
i dont want to ever talk to her again

Alya
I think we should talk in the morning.
Sleep some first. Calm down a bit

Nino
yeah. ok ig
gn

22:23

Alya
Good night

Those screenshots were gathered in the second message, which had been sent around midnight. The third message wasn’t a screenshot — it was just the words, ‘thought u oughta know.’

Marinette felt like her brain was filled with pan scourers. She dropped the phone on the bed and fell back against the mattress, and the thump of her body planted itself as an earthquake in her ears.

Nino was right. Of course Nino was right. Adrien was right. Bob Roth and Roger Raincomprix were right. Plagg was right.

Every hero who didn’t show up to help her after Web, was right.

And Nino’s acid convinced her of one thing: she couldn’t go to school today. It wouldn’t be worth the pain either for her, or for anyone she met.

Unmoving except for her arm, she groped for her phone and lifted it up to her face. It took seconds to find Alix’s messages, and she typed a response in about the same amount of time.

Marinette
It’s best if you don’t come over ever.

Then to Kagami — she had to swallow before sending this one:

Marinette
I don’t think you should message me at all. Please leave me alone.

As for Alya… she needed a bit more time. What could she even say? That Nino was right? That the world would be better off without a Marinette Dupain-Cheng in it? She couldn’t burden Alya with that. She buried her phone under the pillow, then climbed down the ladder. She would at least handle the not-going-to-school thing first, before she had to disappoint Alya too.

A sound, or perhaps the imagined ghost of a sound, passed into Marinette’s ears. Maybe that was her phone vibrating. Maybe somebody wanted to talk to her. She paused for a moment, wobbling on the balls of her feet — she couldn’t feel anything from her blackened left foot, only the pressure on her right sole — but she swallowed, and bent down to lift up the hatch.

“Mom? Dad?” she croaked, hoping at least one of them would be down there.

“Honey?” said Sabine’s voice, moments before Sabine’s feet started tapping rashly across the floor. “You’re up! Are you okay?” Soon, her worried face showed up in the crack between the trapdoor and the frame.

“I’m — fine,” she said. Yet another lie to throw on the massive pile she had already built underneath her pyre. “But… I don’t think I can go to school today.”

Sabine’s smile was weak and fragile and unbearable. “Sure, honey. Do you want us to bring up breakfast for you?”

Did she? No, she didn’t. But she wanted even less to argue about eating breakfast at all, and she wasn’t going to come down. “Okay,” she said, and then nodded when she realised she hardly even heard her own voice.

“Okay. I’ll get something ready for you.” Sabine paused for a moment, then added, “Tom’s… downstairs. He’s looking at something that… happened, last night. But he’ll be up soon, I hope. I’ll send him up with breakfast, okay?”

Marinette nodded again. “You’re not opening the bakery today,” she said, not as a question, because she already guessed and she already knew.

“No,” sighed Sabine, looking down to the side. “Honey… we might not be opening the bakery at all for a little while. There’s so much going on right now, and there might be… unhappy people coming, and we don’t want to let them into the building. Especially if Miss Bustier says something mean today, and —” She froze for a second. Her hands opened and closed a few times. “Marinette… I’m going to come up the stairs.”

“I… I’d rather not,” mumbled Marinette.

“I am your mother, Marinette, and I’m coming up to hug you,” snapped Sabine, with an intensity that didn’t sound at all like determination and more just like fear, sharpened to an edge and weaponised. She was moving up the stairs before Marinette had a chance to even order her thoughts.

“Mom…” she said, and she lifted the trapdoor away completely despite every screaming instinct in her body. Giving in to the temptation of being a family was dangerous…

Sabine’s arms wrapped around her. She didn’t leave the top step of the stairs, and simply pulled Marinette down into a carelessly warm hug that sent shivers all the way through Marinette’s body.

“I don’t know how you’re feeling right now,” said Sabine, and Marinette realised that she didn’t know herself, either. “But we love you very much. You’re our precious daughter, no matter what happens. And we’re proud of you for everything, even the things you’re not proud of yourself.”

The hug ended with a dry kiss against Marinette’s cheek — and then Sabine sighed and tottered back down the stairs. “I’ll get your breakfast ready, honey. I’ll talk to the school, too. They’ll understand.”

Marinette was left still and quiet in her unlit room. Slowly, the realisation crept over her that she couldn’t do anything. She couldn’t make things better, and she couldn’t alleviate any burdens for anyone. Anything she could do would only make things worse. She closed the hatch again, feeling far too numb and nowhere near sad enough.

Tom and Sabine were suffering because of her. ‘Something’ had ‘happened’ last night. Perhaps somebody had thrown a brick through the window, or broken in to steal something. Either way, all of yesterday had been noisy and chaotic for them because of her. And now they were stressing over her, because of something they had nothing to do with.

She would have to leave home. Find some place to live alone, where the only person who’d be bothered by crowds would be her. Or maybe, hopefully, Mayor Bustier was already planning to lock her up.

The phone suddenly vibrated for real up on her mattress. Two vibrations close together. People she would need to also tell to go away, probably… but she was ready for it this time.

She climbed onto the bed — winced for a moment as feeling returned to her left foot with a jab of pain — but gritted her teeth and pushed it back down. The time was an hour and twelve minutes until school started, and the most recent message was from Alya. Kagami had also replied, but Marinette skipped past that notification and went straight for Alya’s.

Two more screenshots had ticked in.

Monday, Sep 3rd — 07:47

Alya
No. I’m upset
I don’t like how you’re talking about her, Nino

Nino
shes a big girl. she can take it.
just like she took adrien and stomped on him

Alya
You’re exaggerating
How does Adrien feel

Nino
hes too sad to be angry
im doing this for him
i hate her
that hasnt changed

Alya
is this how it ends, then?

Nino
how what ends?
…
wait

Alya
I’m going to be spending a lot more time with Marinette.
She’s my best friend, Nino. I’m not abandoning her

Nino
yeah. yeah i guess this is how it ends, then
bye Alya

Underneath the images, there were two messages to her, from Alya.

Alya
i just wanted to
girl i.. 😭

Marinette stared at the screen, heart thumping in her chest. Not just thumping: shattering the ribcage to pieces. She reached for her Miraculous on reflex, soon followed by conscious thought — she pulled the necklace and the comb off the side of the bed and clenched them inside her fist, and she said, “Pollen, Longg, I renounce you.” Then she punched the fist hard into her pillow. She had thought she was prepared, but this was somehow worse than anything she’d imagined happening, worse than the noise coming from outside all of yesterday, worse than all of her nightmares.

This was how it ended. Because she wasn’t just destroying her own life, she was also destroying Alya’s, and anyone else’s who’d want to stick by her. She would lose Kagami her boyfriend and mother, too, and she’d lose Zoé and Alix their friends, and she’d lose her own family their bakery and livelihood and reputation.

She wasn’t crying. She should be crying, because she cried yesterday when she was wallowing over herself, but now she had Alya and Nino and Adrien to be sad about. They actually deserved to be cried over, but she was too horrible to muster up a single tear. Too selfish to care about people the way they deserved to be cared about.

She raised the phone to her face again. She needed to conclusively push Alya away, without accidentally hurting her more. Her breaths ran deeper as she considered how to type for a moment, before typing a few words into the open textbox.

‘I’m so sorry, but’ — no. ‘I think you should leave m’ — no. A message from Alix popped up and she dismissed it immediately. ‘Leave me alone’ — no, no. She watched the screen a little longer, and then tried to type again, and decided that whatever came out would be what she sent.

Marinette
Take Nino back and don’t talk to me.
Bye

Then she took the phone and the Miraculous and wrapped them up inside her duvet, which she rolled up and pushed into a corner of her bed. Maybe that would stop her from hearing her phone ever again.

But when she climbed down from the bed and had two feet on the floor again, there was a flash of blue in front of her and a crackle of something almost electric, and then there was a Bunnyx. A young Bunnyx, stepping out of a still-open Burrow portal.

“Alix!”

Bunnyx folded her arms. She seemed — incredibly, intensely — angry. “Look, you. I didn’t ask if I could come over, I asked when. What the hell did you text Alya?”

“... You’ve talked to Alya?” said Marinette, feeling like she was babbling. She didn’t know what else to say, other than ‘get out of my room’, which — even though she felt she should say it — wasn’t something she ever wanted to tell anyone. Not after the last time.

“No. I haven’t talked to her,” said Bunnyx.

“Then — um, how —”

“Doesn’t matter. Look…” The harshness in her eyes faded a bit, and her arms unwound a little bit — but not completely. “I’m headed back to see who took the butterfly Miraculous. Don’t try to stop me, I won’t listen. Just tell me if there’s any reason you didn’t want me to do it other than you being Ladybug and Adrien’s dad being Monarch.”

Marinette could only stare for a few moments. She — had said something to that effect, yes, two days ago. But in the swirling aftermath of the thing (the Big Thing, the Very Big Thing) that happened that day, she had basically forgotten everything else. Why did she say she didn’t want Alix to check back in time?

— because she was carrying too many secrets to bear the idea of anything spilling out without her control, without her knowing about it. But now, it had all spilled out and she had no control over anything. She could still feel the tug to tell Alix not to do it, could explain at length about all the things that felt private or all the risks of going back alone, but —

“I… no,” she mumbled, looked away.

“Okay. Because this new holder doesn’t seem to like you very much, and because I’m a good friend, unlike you I might add, I’m going to figure out how to stop them before this all goes off the deep end.” Bunnyx sighed. “I’m headed back. And we’re gonna have words later, and you best be ready for that. Just… be careful, okay?”

“B-be careful?” Marinette frowned, despite herself. She knew she was being a bad friend, but only because it was better in the long run. She was being cruel to be kind, as they said. But there was something else in what Alix had said… “The holder doesn’t like me? What — a-am I going to be akumatised?” she yelped, horrified.

“No.”

“Then wha—”

“Just be careful, okay?” snapped Bunnyx. “You’ll see pretty soon, anyway. And when I’m back and Namitentou and Kitty Noire have dealt with the akuma, I’m going to — I’m going to do something to you until you get it through your thick skull not to push us away! Got it?”

It was hard to say what was worse: the fury that flashed like lightning inside the stormcloud of Alix’s words, or the fact it seemed to pain her to let it shine through at all. Marinette knew she would have had a thousand protests right now if not for the intensity that surrounded Alix, but at the moment she was dumbstruck. She nodded the least certain nod she’d ever nodded in her life.

“Good,” said Bunnyx, and the intensity faded ever so slightly. There was a crackling jolt from the Burrow portal that almost seemed to disperse along her body, just for a flash. “I’m gonna leave, then, before the akuma turns up.”

“No — wait. Please, what’s going on?” said Marinette, half taking a step forward. “What akuma?” — but when her left foot landed, a stab of pain ran up her whole leg and she froze stiff to stop herself from crumpling up and yelling.

Bunnyx didn’t really look at her. She just turned around towards the portal, and looked half over her shoulder. “I’ve got to go,” she said. “Just… be careful. Don’t trust your senses. And… hang in there. Got it?”

“Alix —”

But Bunnyx stepped through the portal, and she was gone. And Marinette let out a brief and half-choked scream, and hobbled over to the chaise longue, where she gingerly patted her shin to try and distract herself from the pain. It mellowed little by little, but it didn’t go away.

She didn’t take a picture yesterday. Or the day before. She changed her socks yesterday morning, but she hadn’t yet had time to today. Maybe the cataclysm had gone a lot farther, or deeper — that would explain why it hurt so much more today than she could remember. But… she couldn’t check now. Could she? There was an akuma coming, and Tom was about to bring her breakfast…

There was an akuma coming. What for? And why was it coming for her? And Alix had said… to be careful…

She couldn’t roll down her sock. Not right now. But she could maybe shift it a little, shine a light down it with her phone, to see if the mark had reached above her ankles yet. She pulled her pyjama leg up above her knee, reached into her pocket —

— the phone was in bed. Wrapped up in a mountain of covers. Where she’d meant for it to be. But maybe, if she aimed her leg towards the ceiling lamp…

A knock on the trapdoor chased her thoughts away. “Marinette?” said Tom’s muffled voice.

“— Yes, Dad?” said Marinette, hurrying to roll the trouser leg back down.

“I’ve got breakfast for you. Can I come up?”

“Y-yes! Come, um, come up,” she said. She was calm. Her heart wasn’t racing. Her leg wasn’t currently being eaten up by magic, and she wasn’t in the middle of a horrible media storm about everything she did wrong as Ladybug. Everything was fine.

The hatch creaked open. Tom’s face, then the rest of him, emerged. He held a tray against his chest, with a plate of food and a glass clattering gently atop it. There were two pieces of toast with a fried egg atop each, and some cubed bell peppers and leaves of lettuce… and there was a macaron, and the glass was filled with orange juice.

He moved slowly with steps that looked like he was approaching a lion, but wouldn’t be deterred in coming up to the lion even if it bit him. And he put the tray down right next to her, and stood up straight to watch her.

“Do you want anything else? Fruit, tea, hot chocolate?”

She looked up at him — at his gentle, worried face — and remembered the phone she’d buried, the decision she’d made. Alix’s visit had thrown off her rhythm, made it hard to remember why she made the choice she did, but now she was taken over by fresh determination. She was going to have to leave home too. Her parents didn’t deserve to deal with her, either. And she didn’t deserve their kindness.

“... No, this is good,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Okay… but you’ll call for us if you want anything, right? We’re here for you.”

“Y—” She swallowed. Looked down. Away from the tray, to her own knees. “Yeah.”

She expected, but still wasn’t ready for, the hug he gave her. It was like being smothered. “We love you very much,” he said. “Don’t let the people outside get to you, okay?”

The people outside. “... What happened downstairs? With the bakery?” she croaked against the wall that was his shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” he said, pulling back and rising up to his full height again. “There was some graffiti. You don’t have to worry about it, sweetheart. Insurance will cover it… hopefully…”

“I… see.” Graffiti against her. Of course.

She didn’t look at him. She kept her eyes firmly locked onto the floor — but she knew his lip would be quivering right now. He’d be worrying about whether to say something else, but then he would end up deciding against it, and he’d go downstairs to talk to Sabine, and Sabine would say she’d handle it and then come up later. Or maybe Marinette would be invited downstairs for a full family talk.

All this stress and work for her. Hundreds of people gathered outside, police posted at her door, friends coming over and putting themselves at risk — for her. Kagami and Zoé offering her their Miraculous, her parents skipping work to protect her, Alya breaking up with Nino for her, Alix coming over to be worried about her and warn her. Alix didn’t want her to push everyone away, but Alix was wrong. She was naïve. She didn’t know how terrible everything was going to be for anyone on Team Marinette. Marinette didn’t even know herself, only that… only that when people don’t like you, bad things happen. Cockroaches in your locker, spiders in your hand, the school wants you expelled and everyone starts to hate and distrust you, your things disappear and get broken, a man wants you dead and there are akumas everywhere —

She pressed her hands hard against her forehead and groaned. The most important thing now was to get away from everyone, so nobody else would have to suffer for her. She just needed to figure out how, and where she could go. Could she turn herself in at the police station and get put in prison? Was she even old enough for that?

Whatever she needed to do, she’d have to do it fast. Decisively.

Sighing, she reached out for one of the fried egg toasts. It was still a little hot, slightly damp on the underside, but rough and textured against her fingers. Elbow on her thigh and her chin in her palm, she lifted the toast to her mouth and took a bite, hoping that food might flood her mind with ideas.

But the moment she bit off the first chunk, she felt the inside of her mouth chittering with a thousand spiny legs. She spat it out onto the tray and dropped the toast onto the floor — and she felt even before it left her hands that it wasn’t toast anymore. The tiny prickling legs were on her hand and arm now, too, scattering upwards towards her elbow.

She knew it from her nightmares, but this was so much worse than any horrible dream had ever been. Spreading across the floor, swarming in a damp pile among the rest of the fake breakfast, crawling up her arm and inside her mouth — hundreds and hundreds of spiders and cockroaches.

Chapter Text

Monday, 3 Sep – 06:30

Kagami
I hope Longg is doing fine, and you as well. If you don’t mind, I would like to message you frequently, so that you don’t forget I’m still your friend. -Kagami

Marinette
I don’t think you should message me at all. Please leave me alone.

Kagami stared at her screen.

It was hard to say she was surprised. Expecting the unpredictable was one of the adaptations one had to make in order to handle Marinette, and Kagami had long made her peace with it. But even if she maybe wasn’t surprised, she wasn’t expecting… this.

In one way, sending a message like this was exactly the type of exaggerated declaration that Marinette could engage in. She had spent enough days being overdramatic over Adrien for Kagami to be under any sort of illusion about that. But yesterday, the mood had been different — or at least, it had been so for Kagami. Marinette had seemed reluctant, but she’d still clearly yearned for company. Except…

‘Please leave me alone’. Something in those words stung Kagami on a level that was as deep as when Adrien lied to her and she decided to break up with him. The feeling was less all-encompassing now: she was more stable, she wouldn’t go as far into despair this time. But it was the same type of pain, just… a lot stranger. She had been so certain that everything went well yesterday.

Could she really have misread the situation so badly? Had she been forcing herself upon Marinette against the girl’s wishes? Or had she maybe done something so terrible yesterday that Marinette no longer wanted anything to do with her? Social situations were always hard, but they were even harder when things were as pressured as they had been. Maybe Marinette’s cues had been subdued heavily by all the people outside, and she thought the hug had gone on for too long.

Kagami had left the house before Alix and Alya. Perhaps she could message one of them to ask what the problem was. Or perhaps that would be an invasion of privacy.

Or perhaps she was worrying too much, and Marinette was just concerned about people searching through her phone to find messages. But… then she wouldn’t have said to leave her alone, right?

The alarm clock buzzed for breakfast, and Kagami tapped it off immediately. She was already sitting upright in bed and fully dressed, and she was done with her ablutions in the en suite. This was a school day, her first one attending the same school as all her friends, and she needed to be clean and ready and punctual. She would not give anyone a poor impression of her.

This message had thrown off her rhythm, however. She needed to know what it meant, and she strongly suspected that Marinette would not be a good person to ask about it.

She held onto the phone as she stood up and walked over to the window. The small balcony outside it was always a small mercy, a bit of openness that allowed her to breathe unsullied air and feel it brush against her skin. Her room was the most pleasant room in the whole building, because she had made it so: she had paintings on the walls and trinkets on the shelves. But the room was still just a step through a doorway from the rest of the house, and that meant it was its own kind of containment.

But the balcony was a place where she could talk to Félix, and have him carry her away into the city sky. It was a door she could escape through, which she never could with the front door — which had locks and cameras on it, and a Mother sitting somewhere along the way and demanding to know where she was going.

Now, however, the balcony felt different. Because an escape was also an entrance. With Tikki at her side, she needed to be more secretive, because not even Félix could know that she was the new ladybug holder. She had to keep this identity under wraps far more than she’d needed with Ryuuko —

— why? Marinette’s identity had been known by multiple people —

— and look where that got her. —

— but Félix was her boyfriend; surely he was trustworthy —

— no. This wasn’t about him being trustworthy. This was about the danger of sharing. The last thing the city needed now was for Namitentou to be revealed as Kagami Tsurugi, the daughter of Monarch’s business partner. And that business partner was a woman who almost certainly collaborated with him, despite her protestations during interviews.

The balcony today felt like a missing piece of wall, an uncurtained spy hole lodged between the large blinded windows around it. And without Félix on it, it also felt like a void — a gap to be filled. Right now, she could technically escape through it, but that would be suspicious to Mother if she didn’t return the same way before too long had passed. She could only climb out of it for frustratingly short amounts of time, and then the outside would mock her. The balcony, with nobody on it, was a false hope.

She tried to imagine Félix showing up out there right now — because maybe he would have some advice for her. Sure, he didn’t like Marinette and said he thought she deserved what was happening, but he would surely help if Kagami wanted to speak to her…

… but the only face that popped up on her fantasy balcony was Marinette’s. Not sad Marinette, either, but the smiling Marinette from friendship day, taking pictures over glasses of orange juice.

A hope for better times for everyone. Not a temporary escape, but a permanent reprieve.

Maybe.

Kagami shook herself and looked back at her phone. There was no time for daydreaming when she had problems to solve. She tapped into her contacts list and decided to send a message to the first friend of Marinette’s on it by alphabetic order: Alix Kubdel.

There also wasn’t any time to worry that this was the first occasion she had ever messaged anyone — for any reason — except Marinette, Adrien, or Félix.

Monday, 3 Sep – 07:44

Kagami
Hello. I am Kagami Tsurugi, Marinette’s friend. Sorry to be a bother. Do you know if I insulted Marinette yesterday? She seems to be upset with me, and I would like to find out why. Thank you in advance. -Kagami

Alix’s reply was almost immediate.

Alix
I’m gonna strangle her
dw its not ur fault
ill msg u l8r

Kagami did not find herself soothed by this. If it wasn’t her fault, then what was the problem? And strangling Marinette also seemed like a rather drastic solution. But… at the very least, this meant that she would be fine to message Marinette.

Monday, 3 Sep – 07:48

Kagami
I’d love to speak with you. Please. -Kagami

The ‘please’ felt awkward to Kagami even as she sent it, like she was begging Marinette to respond, but the message also felt too empty without it. Like a question without a question mark. Then again, there was little she could do about that now it was sent. She pocketed the phone with a deep sigh and went downstairs for breakfast.

“Kagami,” said Mother, the moment Kagami walked into the dining room with her harsh school shoes, the heels thumping echoes against the sterile and near-metallic walls.

“Yes, Mother.” Tomoe already knew, of course. Even if Kagami hadn’t worn the hard-soled shoes, Mother could tell people apart by their footsteps almost as well as most seeing people could tell others apart by sight. And the chef would be at work in the kitchen right now, not working the hallways.

“You are late.”

Kagami pulled out her chair from the side of the table; Tomoe was at the head of it, her usual seat. “Yes. I was sending messages with a friend.”

Mother’s eyebrows were severe above her shades. She clenched her fist around the handle of her bamboo stick. “What friend?” she said, voice sharp as a sword.

“Marinette.”

“You are not to talk to her anymore,” said Tomoe, wrinkling her nose. “You are to stay away from her. I won’t have our family dragged through the mud by associating with the girl who protected a supervillain.”

Kagami didn’t snap back that Tomoe was more than willing to associate with the supervillain on her own. And she didn’t want to make it apparent that she knew about Gabriel beforehand and was well aware of Tomoe’s collusion with him. That she knew she was a senti-being, created by the power of the peacock Miraculous and bound forever to the signet ring that Félix now held for safekeeping.

The limits of Kagami’s knowledge were for herself to know, and her alone.

“You were fine with me visiting her yesterday,” Kagami said instead.

“I intended for you to say goodbye to her,” retorted Tomoe. “And the continued pressure from the media has convinced me that I shouldn’t have allowed you even that. You will give up talking to Marinette forever, Kagami.”

Perhaps, if Marinette hadn’t asked Kagami yesterday to hate her as Namitentou, Kagami might have complied. She wouldn’t have enjoyed it, but she would still have been able to visit Marinette in her ladybeetle suit. But she had already promised to Marinette that she wouldn’t do that. She wasn’t going to stop meeting Marinette, and she was going to comply with Marinette’s request over Mother’s.

“Yes, Mother,” she said. They were going to be attending the same school from today on. There was no way they wouldn’t see each other regardless.

“We must move carefully from now on,” Tomoe went on. “I have yet to decide how you should act with regards to Adrien.”

“Mother —”

The thump of Mother’s cane was harsh and sudden. “You will listen to me. If you defy my will, Kagami, I will take back the family ring that I so graciously gave you before your age of maturity.” Her thumb stroked against the signet ring on her finger: the ring she thought contained the amok. If Félix hadn’t switched the rings, Kagami would have been forced to follow Tomoe’s commands… but now, all she needed to do was pretend.

But then Mother sighed, a strangely feeble gesture. “We are being watched carefully by the media and the world. Preserving our family’s reputation is more important than anything, Kagami. You carry my legacy. Do not mess it up, for the sake of your own future.”

Kagami said nothing. She just reached out for a piece of toast from the centre of the table.

The whole room felt strange now, after observing Marinette’s kitchen yesterday. Here, and at Adrien’s house, the dining rooms were clean and free of clutter at all times. Adrien had had a few pictures of his family up on one of the walls, which was more than what existed on the polished whiteness of Mother’s interior design; the sole piece of character were the Parisian blinds that obscured the only window. A bookshelf, even an empty one, would have been interesting to look at.

And Kagami knew why the house was so empty — it was for Mother’s sake. Less clutter meant less danger, because things wouldn’t fall on the floor or be moved in her way, and while she always had her cane with her to make sure her path was clear she had also constructed the interior to be minimalist. That was… fair. It was good, even. It was also fair that Mother didn’t bother with decorations she would never see. 

But for Kagami, who could see, and who decorated her room with her own drawings and interesting things she found, the rest of the house felt like a prison cell. Not least because it always had a warden.

“Are you listening to me, Kagami?” said Tomoe. She didn’t sound harsh right now. More… inquisitive, perhaps.

“Yes, Mother,” said Kagami. She deflated a little — it was hard to keep her anger up when Tomoe was being this mild. Of course, it wasn’t true mildness, but compared to the usual…

“You should have a good future.”

“... Yes, Mother.”

Kagami bit into the toast. It was sharp against the inside of her mouth, and just a little bit too cold. But that was what she got for being late for breakfast.

And the meal continued in silence, until Tomoe let her go.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

Zoé stepped out of the elevator and was at school.

She imagined that not even Marinette, who lived across the street from her old high school, felt as strange as this. But with Mayor Bustier’s ascension, she had proposed a new plan for education that included all-ages schools, which as a program was going to be rolled out gradually to the whole city. As there weren’t any school buildings or campuses in the city that could possibly accommodate that model, the first pilot trials were carried out in large venues that could be quickly converted.

André had offered Le Grand Paris as a location for one such school, because it already had a cafeteria and a gym and a pool and a whole lot of conference rooms that were now classrooms. Whether he did it out of genuine heart was difficult to say, but Zoé was very aware that through the deal he made with the Mayor’s office he would retain ownership of the top floor, which included the best suites. And because the building now belonged to the city, the city paid for electricity and property upkeep. And he got a lot of money from the partial sale. Zoé had been stuffed into Chloé’s old room, which was luxurious, but not really the type of room she’d wanted to live in.

Maybe if she had a live-in girlfriend, the vast space could have been comfortable. There would even be room for two live-in girlfriends. But that was an outlandish idea even in her wildest fantasies.

And no matter what, André was a better parent than Audrey. That was damning with faint praise, but he really was. Only… she worried that he was still more attached to status than to doing the right thing.

And now, whenever she had to leave her home, she would be walking through the school building.

The clock on the wall said there was still an hour until the meeting in the common room, at nine. Which hopefully meant that nobody else had arrived yet. There were teachers there, and workers — she spotted Mme Mendeleiev down a hallway, talking to two men in construction gear, next to a large cabinet that was clearly mid move — but the student body would hopefully be missing for a while yet.

Zoé didn’t expect Marinette would roll in until after the bell rang. But she wasn’t going to take any risks on that either. So she sat down on a bench with a view to the door, surrounded by an ostentatiously golden lobby that surely wasn’t appropriate for a public school building, and ate her packed breakfast while she waited for those dark pigtails and blue sky eyes to arrive.

What would Marinette look like, first day of school? The first time Zoé met her, Marinette was exuberant, joyful, kind, direct, forgiving, welcoming, attentive, — Marinette was everything all at once, she was confident and she was everybody’s friend. But since Saturday, she was at the centre of a media storm that had clearly broken her confidence. Marinette yesterday was sullen, sorrowful, still kind but also apathetic, still forgiving but reticent. A shadow, but still clearly shaped like Marinette.

Briefly, Zoé wondered if confessing to Marinette again and trying to become her girlfriend for real would help.

Then she put her head into her hands and groaned for even daring to think something so selfish.

Then she got the first thought again, and didn’t manage to smother it — only to partly bury it under guilt and horror. She couldn’t be selfish. She needed to fix things between Adrien and Marinette, so Marinette could be with the one she deserved, the one she wanted to be with.

But maybe —

— no. No, Zoé, no no no.

Except —

The front doors slid apart and pulled Zoé back out of her head, and also admitted a girl who looked about eighteen, with thick-rimmed spectacles and her brown hair in a bowl cut. The girl glanced around a few times, clearly uncertain, and lingered on Zoé for a few seconds before glancing further. She fidgetted a lot, and seemed like she was about to fret out of her own skin.

Then she looked back at Zoé, and — without breaking eye contact now, like she’d made up her mind about something — walked closer. Her hands twisted nervously the whole time.

“... Um,” said the girl in vaguely accented French, “is this where the new school is?”

“Yes,” said Zoé. Maybe this girl was supposed to start her final year of lycée or something?

“I’m… I’m supposed to enroll today,” she said. “I’m, um, I’m troisiéme, last year of collège, and… yeah?”

“Collège?” said Zoé, accidentally emphasising the final syllable a little too hard.

The girl shrank. “Yes. I, um, I was held back a year. Do you know where I… where I can register myself? I just moved here, so they need to sign me into the system, and…”

Zoé cleared her throat, a little embarrassed. Now that she looked closer, the girl seemed younger than before. Fifteen or sixteen could well be the case. “Well, er, if you head down that hallway —” she pointed down where Mme Mendeleiev had been a few minutes ago — “you’ll find the head teacher for my troisième class. She’ll probably know… she’s got black hair and glasses.”

The girl lit up a little bit. “You’re also troisième? N-neat. I’m also troisième. Um… I said that already… what’s your name?”

“Zoé,” said Zoé, smiling a little bit. She glanced at the front door; nobody else was there.

“Zoé,” said the girl. “I, um, it’s nice to meet you. Um… could you help me? To… like, to find your teacher? I’m not sure if I’ll recognise her…”

Zoé glanced over at the door again. Nobody was visible outside. And it was still fifty minutes before school started… “Okay,” she said, getting to her feet. “I’ll help.”

“Th-thank you!” said the girl. Her cloudy blue eyes were fixed on Zoé. “I’m — thank you!”

“Don’t worry about it,” said Zoé. She nodded her head towards the hallway. “Come with me. What’s your name?”

The girl beamed. “Iris,” she said. “Iris Verdi.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Iris,” said Zoé. “I’m sure we’ll be good friends.”

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▧▧▨ ▶▷

Kagami still hadn’t heard a word from Marinette by the time she reached the new school building. She had half expected it, and she also half expected that if she were to talk to Marinette today she would have to aggressively seek the girl out by digging her out of some corner or, perhaps, her bed.

It was thirty minutes until school started, which was early by Mother’s reckoning — she preferred Kagami to arrive no more and no less than three minutes ahead of any event, purely because punctuality was to be preferred at all times, but also being too early left space to dawdle and get into hi-jinks. However, even Tomoe was not immovable on everything, and Kagami had argued that being earlier than normal would be both useful and work as a good example on a day like this. Morning kendo practice had been moved to the evening, provided (in a promise that Kagami would not keep) that she revised her Chinese lessons ahead of class if there was time.

The hotel was a strange location for a school, and she wouldn’t question the logic, because she had no business dealing with the inner workings of regional government. But she did feel strange, walking through the sliding doors without being bowed at by the doorman and without an occasion to attend.

Although, the first day of school was always some kind of occasion. Perhaps even more so today, given the circumstances.

There might even be another akuma. That, too, would be an occasion. And Kagami needed to keep a waking eye.

The first thing her waking eye caught, though, was Zoé — who sat in the lobby with a stranger. The stranger wore heavy-looking spectacles and had eyes that were a murky blue against her tan skin, and she wore a black leather jacket and a simple lavender-coloured top. She was smiling, and so was Zoé, though the characters of their smiles were different: Zoé smiled kindly, but the stranger seemed to have relief on her lips instead.

Zoé quickly noticed Kagami, too, and waved. Kagami took this as the invitation it hopefully was and moved over.

“Hey,” said Zoé; at the same time, the stranger looked up with wide eyes.

“Oh — is this your friend you were waiting for? Marinette?” she said.

“No, no, this is Kagami. I, er, Marinette is — she has pigtails,” said Zoé.

So Zoé was also on Marinette’s side. That was good. Alix, Alya, Zoé, and — whenever she didn’t have to play her part as Namitentou — Kagami.

“Oh! Um, I, I’m sorry!” said the stranger. “I didn’t mean, I’m new here, sorry, um. Hi!” She smiled awkwardly now, not so much with relief, and twisted her hands in her lap. “I, I’m Iris. Iris Verdi. I’m starting in maybe Zoé’s class today…”

Kagami bowed. “Kagami. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance,” she said, more because it was polite than because she was sure. Iris was clearly nervous, perhaps to the point where she was playing it up a bit, but the emotion underneath was probably genuine. As for whether the meeting was a pleasure or not, that depended entirely on how Iris acted from here on.

“Um! You t-too,” said Iris and looked down at her lap. “What… what grade are you in?”

“Seconde.”

“C-cool,” said Iris, glancing up and then straight back down again. “It’s nice to meet you, Ka— Kagami.”

“Have you seen Marinette today, Kagami?” said Zoé. “Or talked to her?”

Kagami shook her head.

“Oh…”

“Are you, um, you’re also Marinette’s friend?” Iris kept failing to look straight at Kagami — which felt off-putting to Kagami, though she knew she sometimes got that impression wrongly. It was just a gut instinct, or perhaps it was just that Iris felt like she was actively trying to remove herself from the conversation.

Kagami kept her face impassive. “I know her,” she said. Immediately, Zoé’s expression turned strange and unreadable; Kagami felt her thoughts stop for a moment. Did she say something wrong?

“O-oh,” said Iris. “Zoé, um, from what Zoé says she sounds nice. I’d l-love to meet her.”

Perhaps the gut instinct was wrong. The feeling inside didn’t leave, but it turned less barbed. “You will,” said Kagami, before looking back at Zoé, who definitely looked… strange. There was a frown there, but not an angry one, or — was it?

“She’s the best friend anyone could ask for,” said Zoé, with conviction and without moving her eyes off Kagami. “I’ll introduce you when she arrives, Iris.”

“Oh! Th-thanks!”

Kagami wasn’t sure what to say, so she said nothing. Her support for Marinette was one thing, sharing random information with strangers was another. Instead she looked around the lobby to see what changes had been made. Unfortunately, the changes seemed very small. There was no signage indicating meeting spaces or classrooms, and the entire room here seemed mostly the same as it had been before.

Her phone buzzed. She didn’t check it. She needed to finish this conversation first.

“We’ll be meeting in Conference room #1,” said Zoé, as though she’d read Kagami’s curiosity on her expression. “To the right. Miss Mendeleiev said they’re putting up temporary signs soon.”

“Ah,” said Kagami.

“It’s pretty big in there. I think there’s room for everyone.”

“This is very exciting,” said Iris. “I, um, I’m very, it’s scary but cool.”

“I think so too,” said Zoé. “I’m going to see a lot more friends now than I thought I would, because of the new system.”

Iris made a small noise that sounded like a snort, but it was too muted and choked to really play the part of one. “Like Marinette?” she said; then, as Zoé started to blush a little bit red — a blush? Curious — Iris’s eyes went wide, and she pulled her fists to her chest. “S-sorry! I didn’t mean to be so, so familiar, we only just met…”

“It’s fine,” said Zoé and smiled, in a way that seemed genuine.

“I, um, thanks,” said Iris, looking down at her lap with a smile that seemed less so.

Kagami clenched her fists a little tighter. She had only just met Iris, so it would be mean to decide that she didn’t like the girl. However, there was definitely something to Iris’s personality that rubbed Kagami the wrong way. Perhaps it was the way Iris seemed insincere: not entirely, because Kagami didn’t disbelieve that Iris was nervous about moving to a new school. But the nervousness seemed to be played up far too much. Then again, playing that up could just be a defence mechanism…

She would give Iris more chances. But this first impression was not good.

And now that she also had a message on her phone to deal with, she would rather focus on the possibility of hearing back from Marinette.

“I will go to the conference room,” said Kagami. And because she didn’t want to be impolite, she added, “Bye.”

“Um, bye!” said Iris; right afterwards Zoé added, “See you later.”

As Kagami walked towards the conference room, she pulled out her phone. There were two messages on screen, and they weren’t from Marinette — but from Alix. Her heart sank in her chest for a moment; inexplicably so, because Alix had promised to message back, hadn’t she?

Monday, 3 Sep – 08:33

Alix
jsyk theres an akuma at marinettes
n shes after her
cuz m is being a major jerk

Kagami stopped walking before reading, but she didn’t feel like she really stopped until she’d read every word — because that also stopped her head. Had someone gotten so angry with Marinette for the Ladybug thing they’d been akumatised over it? She started typing out a response, but as she did so a new message ticked in:

Alix
its alya btw. u no what that means

She actually didn’t. Presumably, it meant that Alya had been akumatised, and that Marinette had done something —

— it meant that Rena Rouge, the holder of the fox Miraculous, had been akumatised. A superpowered holder with the ability to project illusions. The realisation dropped in so fast that Kagami almost felt like someone had walked into her.

And then, as she stood there reeling, a message came in from Marinette. It was a photograph of… a half bitten piece of toast.

Despite the image being absolutely bizarre in itself, and even more so given the messages above — the ones where Marinette told Kagami never to contact her again — Kagami felt relieved. Even after those messages, Marinette had still reached out. There was an akuma happening, and Kagami would have to deal with it, but knowing that Marinette had reneged filled her with a brave confidence.

She turned around and went back into the lobby and called out to Zoé and Iris, “There’s an akuma. It’s at the Dupain-Cheng bakery. We should find a safe place to hide.”

And then she turned again and ran, towards the nearest place she could hide and transform, so she could see Marinette again.

◀◁ ▧▧▧ ▨▨▨ ▷▶

An akuma. An akuma after Marinette, again. Zoé felt like she’d swallowed an ice cube. Marinette didn’t deserve this; she deserved hugs and comfort and kisses —

— Zoé flew to her feet. “Iris, we need to hide.”

“W-why?” Iris looked more curious than scared.

“Because — because akumas are dangerous villainous monsters! Haven’t you heard about them? They’ve been around in the city for a year!”

“I only… I only moved here this weekend… I lived in Italy before…”

“But —” Zoé caught herself before she protested too much. Adrien had been akumatised this weekend, the story of Monarch and what he did had been exposed, and akumas had therefore been all over the news… but maybe it was possible to just have missed everything in the chaos of moving. After all, Zoé hadn’t really known much about akumas before she got here, and now she was here she was surprised that akumas hadn’t been all over the news in America. “Okay. Well, akumas are dangerous, and we have to go hide. Here —”

And she reached out to hoist Iris up, but Iris just dodged away with some kind of fear in her eyes and got to her feet on her own. “S-sorry,” she said, “I’m not good with, um, touching.”

“Sorry,” said Zoé, a pang of guilt barely registering over the background noise of everything that needed to be done. “But we have to hide, or it might be dangerous. Come with me.”

“Are, are we hiding together?” said Iris. The notion of danger didn’t seem to have completely gone through to her yet. Or rather, she seemed to be keeping up with what was happening, but there was something underneath that made Zoé think that Iris hadn’t yet realised just how dangerous an akuma could be.

Zoé shook her head. Those realisations would have to come with time and experience. “No,” she said. “But I’m going to show you a good place to hide. Follow me.”

She set off walking towards the stairs, stopping to make sure that Iris would follow. And Iris did so, with fast steps that still managed to look uncertain. Once they hit the stairwell Zoé led Iris to the basement, which was full of storage spaces and clutter, especially now with the construction going on.

With Chloé’s prohibitions on where Zoé was and wasn’t allowed to go, she had sometimes made use of it to get around; it was possible to go downstairs on one end of the hotel and emerge back on the ground floor basically anywhere, because there were stairwells and elevators and even a few hidden shafts, like the dumbwaiter to the kitchen.

But she wasn’t going to show all that to Iris. It was enough just to show her the door with the broken lock just to the right of the stairwell, which could still be latched from the inside. And the room past the door was a comfortable size despite the metallic shelves stacked with old cardboard boxes, and had a ceiling lamp and a couch and a handful of books; the couch and books were things Zoé had moved inside with Armand’s help, because it was just the easiest place to avoid a Chloé or an Audrey on the warpath.

“Wait in here,” said Zoé. “Don’t close the latch, I’ll come back for you later. Okay?”

“... Okay,” said Iris. She looked around, eyes lingering on the boxes. She seemed kind of pitiful, though it felt horrible to think that. She was new, she was uncertain, she was being thrust into an unfamiliar situation and had no idea what was happening. Like Zoé had been half a year ago, when she arrived in the city and met Marinette. “But, um, where are you hiding?”

“Somewhere else,” said Zoé, and this time the pang of guilt was nearly loud enough to startle her. Marinette would never have left Zoé alone like this: she might have run away to transform, but then she would have been right back. But Zoé had to be out there as Kitty Noire now, and going back as Kitty Noire at this point would be suspicious.

She’d have to make it up to Iris by winning as quickly as possible, and then coming back.

But then she’d have to leave Marinette alone…

“I — I’ll be back,” she said and quickly stepped back, pulling the door with her. “Later!”

And then she ran up the stairs, headed for her own room, where she could transform in peace.

“You’re too sentimental,” said Plagg, his head appearing out of her cardigan after she’d passed the landing for the ground floor and started on the steps for the first.

“You’re one of the most sentimental people I know,” she said back, gulping for air.

“Maybe I am.” He sniffed. “But you kind of have someone waiting for you.”

She looked around, wary of being spotted with a kwami. But it was just an empty stairwell all around them. “I know,” she said.

“So just transform already!”

“But what if someone sees — oh,” she said, as it fully dawned on her that this was no longer a hotel and her sister wouldn’t suddenly appear out of nowhere. There weren’t people everywhere, at least not now when school wouldn’t start yet for half an hour. She didn’t need to be in her room to transform. “R-right. I’ll find a broom closet.”

“Good.”

A minute later, she was Kitty Noire, and she was scaling the outside of the hotel to get to the roof. If there was an akuma, then hopefully she’d be able to see what was happening from a distance…

… except she got to the top and saw no change in the area around Françoise Dupont. No gaping holes in the ground, no bizarre monsters, no flames, no screaming people running away. She got to her full height and looked closer, but there didn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary — nothing beyond what could be contained inside Marinette’s home, at least.

Just as she was about to jump off the roof, though, a voice from behind almost startled her into losing her balance. “Kitty Noire,” it said.

She whirled around to see who had spoken. There, standing just a short ways away and with her shockingly dark ladybeetle costume, with a sharp frown and even sharper eyes, stood… Namitentou?

“Did you hear about the akuma?” said Namitentou, walking closer.

“I — I did. Yes.”

“What did you hear?”

Zoé pondered what she could say for a moment. It was probably fine to say she knew Marinette was under attack, even though there wasn’t anything visible… she just needed to avoid saying that it was Kagami who told her. “I heard it was after Marinette.”

“Correct,” said Namitentou, clutching her yo-yo tightly. “Bunnyx informed me of the details. She has spoken to Marinette. The akuma is Rena Rouge.”

“Rena —” said Zoé, before the meaning of the name fully struck. “We have to fight an akumatised holder?”

“Yes.”

An akumatised holder who could make illusions. Maybe that was why the district wasn’t damaged — illusions didn’t damage anything. Or maybe there was a lot of destruction, and they couldn’t see it because there was an illusion to hide it…

“Is Marinette… is she okay?”

Namitentou paused for a moment before answering. “She probably is not.”

“Poor Marinette,” said Zoé, swallowing as she adjusted her grip on the staff. Namitentou was right: whatever was happening to Marinette right now, it probably wasn’t good. But it was impossible to say what was actually happening. “We need to go help her.”

There was a moment of quiet from Namitentou. Zoé glanced aside at her and saw that she seemed to be frowning. “... She is experiencing the consequences of her actions,” Namitentou said, though she almost seemed to be testing out the words.

“Con— consequences? She’s being targetted by an akuma!”

“This akuma is her fault,” said Namitentou, with a bit more conviction this time.

“How can you say that?” Zoé could hear her voice going slightly edged, perhaps a little bit shrill. “She has helped the city countless times! She’s amazing! She doesn’t deserve this — whatever is going on, I don’t know, she doesn’t deserve any akumas at all!”

Namitentou breathed in slowly through her mouth. She didn’t look at Zoé, only at Marinette’s home in the distance. “... We need to get going.”

If not for the fact that they really did need to get going, Zoé would have shouted at Namitentou. Marinette ought to have everything good in the world, not… not whatever this whole thing was. Did the new butterfly holder have a grudge against her? Was this a ploy to get the Miraculous by targetting the guardian, or turning everyone against her? What could they possibly want?

But those questions were far too big to answer while an akuma was still roaming around. So Zoé nodded, but with a severe frown on her lips. “Yeah. We do.”

And they jumped off the roof, headed for the girl to whom they both owed everything.

◁◀ ▧▧▨ ▧▨▨ ▶▷

Kagami saw Marinette on the balcony while they were still blocks away from the bakery. Her heart rose briefly, before she could stop it with her second and then her third thoughts. Still in mid-air, she let herself fall to the rooftop below and dashed up to the chimney in a half crouch. There she stopped, holding on to the clay ledge with her fingers and poking the top of her head over it.

It was like turning on a switch in Kitty Noire. The girl landed on top of the chimney and hissed, “Why are you stopping? She’s right there!”

“... It might be a trick,” said Kagami, a little taken aback. “She might be an illusion.”

Kitty Noire turned her head back and forth between Marinette and Kagami for a bit. “... It’s her,” she said, not with confidence, but with something similar: it sounded like she didn’t know for sure, but she was going to throw everything she had behind the fact that it was.

“Even if it is, Rena Rouge could be waiting with a trap,” said Kagami. She peered across at Marinette again. Those were only her fourth thoughts. Her second thoughts were that Marinette was under attack by an akuma, and it was weird to feel joy at seeing someone who was in that situation. And her third…

Right now, Marinette seemed to be trying to climb up on her little table. There seemed to be nobody else there — was there something on the floor? Because she seemed to be trying to do everything she could to avoid it. That seemed like an unnatural thing for Marinette to do, when she was one of the bravest people Kagami knew.

A scream of ‘Help!’ passed to them on the wind. It stung in Kagami’s chest, and she knew she wanted really badly to go out there and do the thing she couldn’t. “... We should observe more closely,” she said. “Until we know what’s going on.”

“... What?”

“We need to wait. Until we know what this is, we should lay low.”

“She needs our help,” said Kitty Noire. Or no: she growled it. Kagami could see there was some type of roiling emotion in her eyes, suffusing both the surface and the depths.

“She… could just be a fake,” said Kagami.

She could tell that Kitty Noire understood that, by the way her feline eyes squirmed and the way she didn’t reply immediately. But again that roiling emotion lay there as a thick carpet that made everything harder to interpret. “So we should just leave her to suffer?”

“Until we know what is going on —”

“I know perfectly well what’s going on.” Kitty Noire bared her teeth and clenched the baton tight in both hands. “And I’m putting a stop to it.”

Kagami didn’t protest. She let Kitty Noire go, with an exhalation caught in her throat and a tight grip on the chimney.

She couldn’t go herself — 

— because she was supposed to be the level-headed leader.

— because she was supposed to make plans and keep an overview of the situation.

— because she knew who they were fighting, and that Rena Rouge would have stronger powers now that she was akumatised.

— because she was supposed to pretend to hate and distrust Marinette.

— because… because Kitty Noire was right that they needed to help.

Kagami was hesitating. She was used to doing that, even though she sometimes pretended not to. She was decisive on occasion when she knew what she needed to do, but when what she wanted ran counter to what she’d been asked to do, when she wanted to listen but felt her brain compress when she even imagined doing it —

Kitty Noire arrived on the balcony. Marinette shrieked again. Kitty Noire said something that didn’t come across on the wind. Nothing disappeared, nothing changed: illusions always disappeared when someone touched them. Everything had to be real, except… where was Rena Rouge?

A quick scan of the area revealed nobody. Perhaps down on the ground somewhere, behind a building — or inside one, or below ground, or even crouched down on a rooftop just like Kagami was, or even hiding behind the true illusion which was somewhere else…

What would Félix do? He certainly wouldn’t struggle like this. He’d swoop into action. He would have made a grand entrance and swept in decisively: he was the one who truly never hesitated.

She clutched the yo-yo to her chest and stood up fully. It was time to be brave.

It took five jumps to get to the balcony, but only four jumps to recognise that something was wrong. There was something indescribably heavy in the air, like she had suddenly dropped down to the bottom of the world’s deepest pool: she could still move freely, but it felt like the air was trying to crush itself through her skin. She made the last jump while feeling like her eardrums would burst, and she staggered as she landed on the chimney.

Below her, Marinette was still trying to climb onto the table. Kitty Noire was trying to stop her from doing so, or perhaps just to help her keep her balance, but Marinette squirmed away and jumped off to a ledge instead. “G-get away!” she yelped, with eyes that were wide in — terror?

Kagami scrunched up her eyes and formed fists, then released them. What was going on? She could barely think. It felt like something was trying to crawl inside her ears.

“I’m just trying to help you!” wailed Kitty Noire. “What’s wrong?”

“Don’t, don’t, don’t come closer!”

“Why ca—”

“Go away! Y—”

“I —”

“Th— un—”

Kagami put the backs of her hands to her ears. It was getting harder and harder to hear Kitty Noire and Marinette — or no, it was harder and harder to interpret what they were saying. She had no idea why, but she was still clenching and unclenching her fingers, her crowd response, but there was nobody else up here…

… or no, now that she thought about it, she could hear them. Hundreds, thousands, of voices, roaring on the wind, talking over one another and flowing together so that it became impossible to hear what they were saying. And they were also drowning out Marinette’s and Kitty Noire’s voices, despite being weaker and more distant; even though the three of them were alone on the rooftop, Kagami felt like she was in the middle of a massive crowd where nobody wanted to control the volume at which they spoke, where nobody had any sense of personal space —

— and then she felt people brushing past her, jostling her with their heavy shoulders and inconsiderate feet, and they were all around her and she knew on some level somewhere that it must be Rena Rouge’s doing, but every other level was screaming. She hunched down, making herself into a little ball.

Things — or not things, she couldn’t tell — buffetted her. It was like she could smell people’s odours and sense their bodies moving all around her, and she felt blows against her body like hips and shoulders clocking her or knees and shins stroking past her, and the voices were so strong that everything was just bamboo, sharp and spiky and harsh.

But then a touch, one that felt different because it was a hand with fingers, brushing against her ear. She lashed out with her arm and jumped away and she made contact, it was too solid to be imagined, too direct to not be there, and so was the scream of surprise and the clatter of a body hitting the tiles and sliding down towards the edge of the roof.

She didn’t realise until she was in the middle of the jump that the world wasn’t pushing in on her anymore. The voices were suddenly gone. Her head was still pounding but there wasn’t anything left outside her, and when she landed on the balcony next to Kitty Noire she saw that Marinette, too, had stopped panicking.

“... What happened?” said Kitty Noire.

“I hit someone,” replied Kagami. “I think.”

“You hit someone?”

“Where… where are all the spiders?” said Marinette. She might have stopped panicking, but she hadn’t stopped freaking out. “There were spiders — I sent you a picture of spiders —”

Kagami frowned and jumped up atop the chimney again. If she hit someone, and the pressure immediately stopped, then maybe she’d hit Rena Rouge and knocked her out…

… but there was nobody there. Had those feelings also been an illusion? No — no, they couldn’t be, they were too real…

“I think I hit Rena Rouge,” said Kagami, without looking away from the roof tiles.

“Re-Rena Rouge?” said Marinette. “Why did you hit her? What’s going on — where are all the bugs…”

“Rena Rouge has been akumatised,” said Kitty Noire. 

Kagami could tell from the pause, and the tiny non-vocal sound that Marinette let out, exactly what the look on Marinette’s face must be. Her eyes would be bulging, her mouth would be slowly falling open, and then she would say:

“... What?”

“Rena Rouge has been akumatised,” repeated Kitty Noire, with surprising patience. “And she’s after you.”

“But wh— oh no — oh no, this is all my fault…”

“Yes,” said Kagami. “In a sense.” She looked over the edge of the roof, down at the ground. There was nobody there either.

“It’s not your fault,” she heard from Kitty Noire. “This is the new butterfly holder’s doing. You haven’t done anything wrong.”

Haven’t done anything wrong… except, she sent out messages telling people to stay away from her. Kagami had received one, and Alya probably had too, given her current reaction. And Alix seemed convinced that the messages were a bad idea, and she had access to both the past and the future, so presumably she had an acceptable overview of the situation.

She set her jaw and jumped back down to the balcony. “We don’t have time to talk,” she said, letting her eyes drift between Kitty Noire and Marinette. “Rena Rouge is still akumatised. And she is probably somewhere around here.”

Marinette looked like she had seen a ghost. She was pale and jittery, almost moreso now than she had been right after the illusions ended. “I — I’m so sorry… this is all my fault…”

“It’s not your fault —”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Kagami, cutting through Kitty Noire’s protestation. She set her eyes deep into Marinette’s. “The important thing is to put an end to it.”

Kitty Noire stared daggers at Kagami. She stepped a little bit to the side, and held her hand out at four o’clock in front of Marinette. But Marinette didn’t even seem to notice: she was standing with wide eyes and a mouth barely cracked open, apparently struck dumb.

“Rena Rouge can make illusions. Don’t trust what you see or hear, until we know where she is —”

— but then, suddenly, the voices and the jostling started again. And this time, it was ten times as forceful, and Kagami crumpled to her knees and keened.

◀◁ ▨▨▨ ▧▧▧ ▷▶

“W-what’s going on?”

Namintentou suddenly faltered in the middle of a sentence, and bent to her knees. Zoé turned around, staff raised, in case someone was taking pot shots from somewhere or sneaking up — but she only saw Marinette, who was staring wide-eyed at Namitentou.

“Marinette! What’s going on?”

“It’s — I think she’s overstimulated,” said Marinette. “But… oh no… I — no!” Her face turned pale as she spoke, and she jolted with her whole body, taking several steps backwards and half tumbling into the wrought-iron fence. 

“Marinette?”

“S-s-spiders! They’re c-coming out of th-the — help!”

Again, Zoé turned around. But there were no spiders anywhere. “Where are they?”

There was a deathly pause. For a third time in what felt like barely a moment, she spun around, terrified that something had happened to Marinette. But Marinette just stood there with horribly wide eyes, grasping the arms of the fence like lifelines.

“You h-have to go into my r-room and find my h-h-headphones,” said Marinette, speaking quickly and slowly in turn as she rushed from one stutter to the next. “On my d-d-d-desk.”

“Why?”

“For Namitentou.” The reply came with enough force that Zoé didn’t even question it. She didn’t understand it, but if Marinette could say it this clearly after so much stuttering, it had to be important in some way.

So Zoé nodded, hesitated for a couple of breaths as she saw Marinette climb up high again with increasing panic, then dived for the skylight and opened it. She would be out again in a few seconds, and then everything would be all right, and they could get to fighting Rena Rouge.

Down on the bed, flip over the edge, touch down on the floor, scan the desk — there, a set of pink and fluffy headphones, with a rolled-up cord, next to the computer screen. Zoé grabbed it…

… and then she heard a clunk from above, as though from the skylight clapping shut again.

She ran out on the floor again and leapt up on the bed. The skylight was shut. And then she heard voices from up on the balcony, muffled by the glass: they were clearly Marinette’s and Namitentou’s, and they no longer sounded frightened or upset.

“She fell for it,” said Marinette’s voice.

“Good,” replied Namitentou’s voice. “Now we can call all the others over, while she’s stuck down there.”

“I can’t stand her. Can’t believe I was able to keep myself from screaming at her for so long.”

Zoé stopped everything — crawling, looking, thinking, breathing — everything except listening. The voices sounded so hateful. So… so bullying. Schoolyard we-know-you-can-hear-us-but-we’re-pretending-you-can’t voices, we-hate-you-but-we’re-also-deliberately-exaggerating voices. School-is-unbearable, have-to-move-to-a-new-country voices.

“I don’t envy you,” said Namitentou’s voice. “Didn’t you invite her to see a film once?”

“That was the day of the Diamonds Dance!” Marinette’s voice cackled. “I excused myself from the queue so I didn’t have to sit with her. What a loser.”

A third person joined in. Zoé felt cold daggers in her blood. “Can’t wait to get Plagg back from her. He told me he’s never hated a holder more,” said Pollen’s voice. “Honestly, I agree. I’m so glad she gave me to you instead, my Queen.”

“And do you know the worst thing?” said Marinette’s voice.

A tiny thought at the back of Zoé’s head was screaming. It said, ‘The akuma is Rena Rouge! The akuma is Rena Rouge!’ but — that felt so immaterial. What did it matter who the akuma was, when Marinette and Pollen and Plagg and Namitentou were all turned against her?

“Tell us!” said Pollen’s voice.

“She’s actually in love with me! Can you believe it?” This time, Marinette’s voice didn’t just cackle: it laughed with such terrible derision that it felt like it might kill Zoé dead. “Lesbo freak!”

“Hah!” said Namitentou’s voice. “Stupid bitch. Who’’d ever love her? I bet not even boys want her.”

Was the thing about Rena Rouge… illusions? But the voices couldn’t be illusions. They were too sharp, too alive, they were exactly like she remembered them from boarding school except worse. They had to be real, the illusions had to be somewhere else. Maybe the life she’d had so far was the illusion.

Should she — should she take off the ring? Leave it here and go out through the front door? Then everyone would be happy, clearly, and she could ask her dad to move her to a different school on the outskirts of Paris where she wouldn’t need to meet Marinette ever again.

Never.

That word was like nails across a chalkboard to her inner ear. It wasn’t just Marinette, either — it was everybody else, too, like Mylène and Ivan and Rose and Alya and all the others. But the idea of going through another round of what happened at boarding school…

… the confession to Monica, whom she’d thought was a friend, and then the weeks and weeks of sabotage and slurs and accusations in the locker room, and the way Audrey treated it like a stain on her reputation until Zoé renounced her ‘leanings’ in front of the whole school, and the way it didn’t stop the bullying but only transformed it into something else…

… she was already living the start of that scenario now. But if she cut it off early, it might hurt less.

Or no. She needed to repair things — she needed to go up there and renounce her confession again, to apologise, to hand them the ring and somehow convince them that she wasn’t bad and they should still hang out with her. She didn’t know how, but there was probably something she could say that would make them stop hating her, she could do whatever they wanted, just so long as she didn’t have to move again, didn’t have to stop being with them.

But then… a fourth voice appeared. And this one turned the cold daggers into jagged tridents. “Is my so-called daughter down there?” it said — it was Audrey.

“As long as she hasn’t run away, like the gay little coward she is,” said Namitentou’s voice.

“Ah! This again? Well, I can see she needs some discipline. I am taking her with me to London, where she can sit with her sister and think about what she’s done. Ugh! Oh, Zebra! Zebra!”

And —

— Zoé made the decision in a flash. She stood up without detransforming, raised her hand to push the skylight away, because even with everything else she couldn’t imagine anything more horrifying than doing what Audrey wanted her to —

— she felt a brush against her other hand as she stood up, but it disappeared quickly —

— and there was no skylight. She went straight through it like mist, and up on the balcony, nothing was happening, except Marinette was still trying to escape the floor and Namitentou was still hunched up and rocking with her hands over her ears, closing and opening her fingers, and the realisation was immediate but not complete.

“... What’s going on?” she said. She thought she could see Audrey in the corner of her eye, but when she turned she saw they were all alone up there.

“Give her the earphones!” said Marinette, and Zoé — went into action like Marinette had pushed a button. Of course that was the important thing. But… hadn’t Marinette and Namitentou just…

She approached Namitentou and tried to hand her the earphones. Namitentou didn’t notice, she just kept rocking.

“Hel- hello?” she tried. There was no response. She glanced over her shoulders at Marinette, who only shot her a terrified look before whimpering and inching up against the wall

“Namitentou? Do you want earphones?” she tried, though her voice faltered a little bit — should she really be helping someone who had just called her a bitch?

Something clattered behind her. Then: “We hate you,” said Marinette’s voice. It sounded like it was coming through glass again. “When are you going to get it through your thick skull? This is a prank.”

“No —” Zoé whirled around. Marinette was there, and she stood upright now atop the chimney, arms folded. “No!”

“And now it’s time to lose that ring,” said Namitentou’s voice, and there was a brush against Zoé’s hand, and she almost held the hand up behind her so it would be easier for Namitentou to just take the ring off, but then — another flash decision. She formed her hand into a fist, and jabbed it behind her, and it connected —

“Ow!” said — Namitentou. And reality shifted again, and Zoé could see that Marinette wasn’t up on the chimney but still whimpering on the table, and behind her was Namitentou, who hadn’t left her crouch — but had her arm out and was looking up.

Zoé glared at Namitentou. “What?” she snapped.

“Head… headphones,” groaned Namitentou. She seemed to be in genuine distress.

And something about that image, the absurdity of a ladybug hunched on Marinette’s roof, asking for a set of pink fluffy headphones — made something click in Zoé’s head. There was something so impossible about it that it had to be real, and the confident rancorous jeering Namitentou that sounded like she was on the other side of a window… probably wasn’t.

“She’s not making illusions,” Zoé said, reaching the headphones over. Namitentou grabbed them greedily and slipped them on with haste, and she seemed almost pitiful as she remained on her haunches with her eyes closed, pushing the muffed earpieces tight against the sides of her head.

And Marinette — Marinette told Zoé months ago that it didn’t matter who she loved. If she hadn’t, Zoé would never have had the courage to admit her crush. Why would Marinette turn nasty about it now?

“I think… I think she’s affecting our sense of reality,” Zoé said, more to herself than to the other two. Because if Rena Rouge wasn’t doing that, Zoé couldn’t have believed the voices. She was being pushed to believe that Marinette and Namitentou were doing something they weren’t. “I think…”

“Lucky charm,” whispered Namitentou. It was quiet, faltering, but intense enough that Zoé stopped talking, and the light that flashed in the sky seemed oddly comforting. And out of that light fell… a hand mirror.

Which would be useful for…

… something…

Zoé grabbed it as it fell, because Namitentou was still crouching. And she looked into it, as though she’d see anything other than herself.

“Maybe… maybe there’s a secret on the glass?” she said.

“... No,” said Namitentou. She didn’t look up. “It’s different.”

“Different how?”

“Give it to me.”

“I said —”

“Look after Marinette. Give it to me,” said Namitentou. It sounded insistent, demanding, almost derisive, even the part about Marinette — a command and not a desire.

Zoé didn’t reach the mirror out. “Marinette?” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

But Marinette just whimpered. She didn’t seem to hear anything.

Zoé turned back to her so-called hero partner. She was pouting, she knew, and she felt childish for it. But Namitentou seemed so… weird about Marinette. It felt like the only reason she respected Marinette was because she felt obligated to acknowledge her. She said Marinette was at fault for what was happening, she wanted to stay behind rather than help Marinette, she told Marinette to stay back and not get involved in anything to do with heroes, and now she was only giving Marinette a mercy because Marinette was so distressed.

How did she even get the earrings in the first place? When it was Marinette who held them? Did she just… come past and steal them off her? Was she a different hero who’d been called in by Marinette’s kwami?

And she was so blunt and direct. Demanding — like Chloé. A less bad Chloé, but the same tendency. Someone who wanted her own way.

Then again… Zoé didn’t have any other ideas. And she did want to look after Marinette.

“... Fine,” she said, and reached the mirror down. Namitentou took it and stood up. The pink headphones looked so out of place against her expressionless face.

“What did you say about the akuma?”

“I… it’s a… it’s affecting our brains. We think the illusions are real. I think.”

Namitentou nodded. Then she handed the mirror back to Zoé. “Take this to Marinette. And…” 

She took off her headphones, too. Once they were off, she winced visibly, in what seemed to be pain. “Ngh. Wear these yourself…”

“W-what?”

“It’s important you do as I say,” said Namitentou. She winced again — and then leapt up past the chimney, to the other side of the roof.

“Wait! What are you — agh,” cried Zoé, stomping her foot. But there wasn’t time to get worked up too hard about Namitentou now: she needed to get back to Marinette.

Slipping the headphones over her ears, more as an effect of not thinking about it than because she wanted to, she hurried over to the table where Marinette was cowering. There was no change in Marinette; she trembled with her eyes closed, and as Zoé stopped by the table she flinched with a yelp before going back into her rolled-up position.

“... Marinette?” Zoé really wasn’t sure what to do.

“H,” said Marinette.

She was seeing spiders. Zoé didn’t know why, but she guessed it was because of something Chloé did. For a moment, she glanced at the mirror like it might help… but she put it down on the table instead. Marinette jolted.

“Marinette, how can I help?”

“... Why am I so u-useless,” said Marinette.

“You — you’re not useless!” said Zoé, and she put her hand on Marinette’s shin — and Marinette kicked out with the leg, but then it relaxed.

“I… I thought I w-was, I was o-over this…” mumbled Marinette, her voice shaking like a leaf.

“Over what?”

“I r-r-rejected an akuma over this… I should be s-strong enough…”

If Marinette yesterday had been a Marinette-shaped shadow, then this was more of a mist with her voice filtered through it. She was still struggling, even though she was no longer Ladybug, so she shouldn’t need to worry about doing things anymore…

… though she did get the bee, and right now she didn’t seem to be wearing the bee… was that a safety measure? Had it been stolen? Or — could this Marinette actually be an illusion, meant to trick her? But she was holding Marinette’s leg —

“Unacceptable,” said Audrey behind her. The voice, muffled by the earphones, felt incredibly close. “I can see I’ll need to take you to London like your half-sister.”

“... You’re not real,” said Zoé. “You’re not here.” In front of her, Marinette shot her eyes up wide.

“You really think you could get away with traipsing around as a superhero? When Chloé was denied the same thing? You’re getting a big head, Zonky.”

“You… you’re not real,” Zoé repeated. But she could feel her confidence in that statement slipping away. She knew it was fake — she knew there was no way — but she couldn’t make herself turn around to confirm it, because if Audrey actually was standing there Zoé knew she would crumple.

“Oh ho! How ridiculous, utterly ridiculous!” That was… Chloé’s voice. Zoé felt her stomach start to churn. “She thinks she’s worth something!”

“Do you want to take her place again, Chloé-poo?” said Audrey. “Return to Paris, and I’ll put Zuko in a British boarding school. They’re so much stricter there, sure to give her some real discipline.”

“Please, don’t —” Zoé’s knees were buckling now. The onslaught felt so strong, and the part of her that could tell they weren’t real was fading away, almost like it was a memory, a lie she’d convinced herself of — yes, a lie, or a memory of a lie, or a speck of a grain of something she couldn’t even recall.

“And I’ll return triumphant to Paris as Chloé N—”

Everything cut out. The sound, the spiral, the pressure on Zoé’s brain: in the blink of an eye, it all just vanished into thin air. And in the deafening silence of an empty city that followed, as Zoé scrambled to get her bearings again, struggled to pick apart what had just happened and what hadn’t… there was a cry from up on the roof.

“I’ve stopped the akuma!” Namitentou called out. “Bring Marinette, and the mirror!”

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▨▨▧ ▶▷

Legs. Marinette remembered thousands of tiny keratinous legs, crawling all over the balcony, crawling up on the table, crawling onto her legs, she remembered them swarming, she remembered hearing chitters and clacks and she remembered them swarming out of her mouth. She remembered vibrating in terror.

She remembered Zoé, Kitty Noire, putting a hand on her shin. She remembered Kagami, Namitentou, turning up and getting her large-crowd response. She remembered telling Zoé to find the earphones, and then Zoé stayed down there for far too long but she couldn’t go down there to look for her, because that was where all the legs were coming from and she knew they were fake, she knew even before Zoé said it was Rena Rouge, she knew but the way they’d crawled all over her, the way they were so many, she couldn’t convince herself to move.

She’d stopped hearing them now. She’d stopped feeling pricks on her skin. But she still didn’t want to look at the hatch, in case she could still see them there. She didn’t even dare look at Zoé in case the spiders were still on her, crawling all over her face and body like they had a minute ago.

But Zoé was still there, even if Marinette had closed her eyes again. “Come on, Marinette,” she mumbled, and she slowly reached her arms around Marinette to pick her up, and Marinette shivered for a bit before falling limp. She was so weak that she needed to be carried — so helpless that she couldn’t even do what Kagami asked her. What good was she to anyone, if she couldn’t do people the basic courtesy of not being in their way? What was she other than a burden, when she caused akumatisations and forced the heroes to help her?

She needed to get away. More than anything. To escape and hide, because if they didn’t have to deal with her, they would all be a lot more happy.

Zoé carried her over the chimney in a single jump. The tiles on the other side were only shocks against the backs of her shoulders and thighs, transmitted through Zoé’s arms and shoulders. But Alya was a series of grunts and shifts.

“Good,” said Kagami. “Please hand me the mirror, Kitty Noire.”

Marinette felt herself lowered to the roof, and hated herself for not stretching out her legs so Zoé wouldn’t have to bend all the way down. She opened her eyes slowly and sat up, looked at Zoé’s back as she approached Kagami — at Alya’s writhing form atop the tiles, wrapped up in the yo-yo’s string and pushed down on her stomach by Kagami’s foot — and waited to see the hatred as they looked at her, so they would finally leave her and she could stop bothering them.

“Here’s the akumatised object.”

“Let me go!”

“... How did you catch her?”

“I looked over my shoulder.”

“Let! Me! Go!”

“Right. Cataclysm.”

“No more evil-doing for you, little butterfly…”

“Let m— agh…”

Not one of them had even looked at Marinette yet. They’d only looked at each other. Even as Alya’s costume vanished— she had looked like Rena Rouge, but with blue tears under the eyes of her mask, and the long coattails at the back had flapped out and looked like an upside-down heart that had been torn in two. Still orange, but with a red line along the jagged inner edges.

But as the item broke and those new features disappeared, the rest of her costume also faded away. The necklace seemed to have been loose, and now it fell off and slid down a few tiles away from her neck. Zoé gasped as Alya appeared, Kagami lifted her foot and relaxed her grip on the string, and Alya blinked —

— and looked straight at Marinette.

The look wasn’t hateful. It was something sharp, but it wasn’t that.

“Alya…” said Marinette.

And Alya… curled up and started to cry.

“A-Alya!” Marinette pushed herself up halfway, slipped with her hand on the rough tile but scrambled forward on her hands and knees, reached Alya without even thinking about what she was doing and she wrenched Alya up off the roof and wrapped her into a hug.

“Alya, it’s okay —”

“No… it’s not,” gurgled Alya.

“I swear it’s okay. Please —”

Marinette suddenly found herself pushed back. She didn’t make the connection that it was Alya who pushed her until her shoulderblades struck the terracotta tiles. That was when Alya spoke, too: “It’s not okay! It’s seriously not okay, Marinette!” she said with a damp growl. “I — it’s not okay!”

The sky was far too blue for this. Marinette winced in pain as she pushed herself back up, and saw that Alya was kneeling, and her eyes were filled with anger and not hate, and also with tears. “Seriously! I broke up with Nino for you! And you tell me to just… to just leave you alone?”

“Alya —”

“No!” Alya struck out to the side with a flat hand. “Don’t talk back! I, I’m going to talk, and you’re going to li, listen, and you’re going to l-l-learn. I’ve been there fo, for you the whole time I’ve known you. I was at your house a-all day yesterday and I, I defended you on TV, and, and, and Nino didn’t like it. And he was so angry with you and I d-defended you to him, and I broke up with him even though I l-love him, because I knew you needed support, and because,” she stopped talking for a moment, and Marinette could barely even breathe because every new word felt like getting shoved back onto the roof again.

“I — I thought, I thought you needed the support, and I wasn’t going, going to let you do this alone, and — and what do you do? You tell me I can’t talk to you? I — I love you, Marinette, but you make it so hard and I’m so mad and I want to strangle you sometimes and especially now, and I know you’re going through a tough time but the least you can do, the least you can do is to let people help you!”

Marinette felt like her throat was filled with glue. “I… I didn’t… I didn’t mean to…”

“I know! You don’t mean to do it but you do it anyway, be, because you’re just so dense! I watched you hurt people over Adrien for a whole year because you couldn’t t-talk to him! I saw you hurt yourself as Ladybug for months because you didn’t ask for help! I should have known you couldn’t get your head around what I — what o-other people want, but I guess I’m also just dense.”

“Alya, I’m so s—”

She was cut off when Alya dove forward and planted a kiss straight on her lips. It was harsh, rough, intense, Alya’s damp cheeks stained across to hers, it was like being kissed by a wet clamp, and then it was over and Alya pulled back and stood up. Framed with Namitentou’s wide-eyed and open-mouthed expression behind her, Alya’s frown looked all the more severe.

“... I still love you,” Alya said, and her voice was finally steady. “But I guess I know now that I could never trust you with my heart.”

Marinette’s mouth had fallen open. She didn’t close it. Her heart was beating like an engine’s pistons, hard and rough and fast.

The voice at the back of her head was quiet, but it was completely alone. It said: ‘You hurt her more by pushing her away.’

Alya sniffled, pulled her sleeve across her eyes. “I’m still visiting you after school. I’m not leaving you alone. But I’m going to twist your arm until you scream if you don’t get wise about other people.”

“... Alya, are you okay?” said Zoé, the first of the heroes to speak for way too long.

“No. I think…” Alya let out a shattered chuckle and looked up into the sky. “I think school’s going to suck today, honestly… Kitty Noire, can you take me to the school building?”

“...Um, I, yes, I suppose,” said Zoé. She moved forward, concerned eyes hitting Marinette several times as she glanced back and forth.

And before Marinette knew a word of it, Zoé was carrying Alya away across the rooftops, leaving Rena Rouge’s necklace behind. Numb and silent, Marinette picked it up and pushed it to her chest, wondering if Alya had wanted to leave it behind or if she just forgot it.

Then she saw that Kagami was watching her. There was no hate in her eyes, either, and it was slowly dawning on Marinette that it maybe wasn’t nice to expect that from others.

Kagami — like Alya, like Zoé — they’d all promised to be there for her. Alix, too. Maybe she ought to finally show them the courtesy of not making life harder for them.

“I… I’m so sorry,” she said. She could feel tears pushing at the corners of her eyes, but she didn’t want to let them out, because she didn’t deserve them. “I never wanted any of this…”

“You should tell Alya that,” said Kagami.

“I know. I… I know.”

Kagami threw the hand mirror into the air, and the miraculous ladybirds swarmed all over the city. But for the first time ever, they couldn’t fix a single thing.

Chapter Text

“... Can you carry me to school?”

Kagami blinked. She felt like the world had rotated completely around its axis about five times, while she’d just stood still. As her eyes refocused on Marinette, she wondered — on the scale of things Marinette would ask for — whether this would rank closer to ‘should be listened to’ or ‘shouldn’t be listened to’.

But because it contradicted an earlier request, one that Kagami had already promised to fulfil, she decided that this one wouldn’t go. It wasn’t what Namitentou would do.

“You have to make the walk yourself,” she said, and found it easier than she’d imagined to add an edge to her voice.

Marinette’s eyes fell. “Oh… Okay…” she mumbled, and Kagami felt like she had just been kneed in the stomach. It was a queasy, awkward sensation, probably unlike the actual thing, but it didn’t feel good either way.

“I… can carry you down to your balcony.”

“That… would be good,” said Marinette. She gave a half smile. “Th-thank you. I’m sorry for giving you so much trouble…”

“As you should be.”

The words felt strange. They were both right and wrong — right as they came out, and then wrong as she saw their effect. Marinette’s eyes shot up wide, and then they slowly narrowed, before dropping to the floor. The sight jabbed Kagami’s insides, but… the words still felt right, on some level.

Of course Marinette knew what she had requested. Kagami could see it in her eyes: she was readjusting herself. Right now, she was talking to the hero who succeeded her, who was supposed to dislike her. Not to one of her friends.

A chill ran through Kagami as she put her arm around Marinette and held her close, side against shoulder and hand against elbow. She leapt over the chimney and put Marinette down, and then she simply let go and jumped away without saying a word or giving Marinette another look.

It was rude of her. But she needed to do it.

Because…

… she honestly had no idea. But something about the churning in her stomach and the spinning in her head made everything feel bizarre.

Alya… loved Marinette. That shouldn’t be surprising, and yet somehow it was. She had kissed Marinette on the mouth, and — it felt like a something that was just in the middle of everything, something that she couldn’t really focus on next to everything else. It was notable, but not more notable than everything else, and yet…

… the image of it had been so strange. Tears going into a kiss, a kiss melting into anger, an angry scowl meeting a contrite frown: they didn’t feel like they should go together, and yet they did, physically, for a single moment.

Kagami swung her way to the hotel and dipped down into the back alley. She gave Tikki a helpless look as she guided the kwami into her pocket along with a cookie, and she didn’t know why the helplessness was there. She only knew that that was how she felt, and that it must have shown on the outside.

She decided to wait in front of the entrance this time. If she’d played her part as Namitentou, she now needed to play her part as Kagami: to be Marinette’s friend. To be… something. Everything felt so strange now. The image of Marinette sad on the roof, the lingering impression of a thousand people bustling and shoving and chattering, the strange way Kitty Noire had acted and the stranger way Alya had acted, the kiss, and now the shame of having told Marinette ‘no’ —

— it felt like the akuma was still there. The feeling of being jostled and talked over was gone, but something about the way the world felt like it had shifted, was still shifting… that hadn’t disappeared.

She placed herself off to the side from the front door, in a position where she wasn’t immediately obvious to people aimed for the school but where she would see Marinette well ahead of time. She was sure she wouldn’t be especially notable to most people, because there would be nothing peculiar with standing away from the entrance and watching as her fellow students walked in. But those who knew her would take notice. It was fifteen minutes before the introductory greetings. She would wait exactly there until Marinette arrived.

Time passed, and people flowed by. Most of them were strangers. A couple of people waved at her — like Mylène and Sabrina, who were Marinette’s friends. Ivan and Juleka didn’t appear to notice her, lost in their own thoughts. Luka paused at the door and pointed inside, like he wanted her to follow, but he didn’t press the issue when she shook her head.

It was eight minutes before the introductory greetings. She was starting to wonder if Marinette could have been held up somehow, even though she knew it was an eight minute walk and Marinette hadn’t been ready to leave. Nathaniel and Marc arrived, and Marc glanced in her direction but didn’t greet her except by raising his eyebrows. Kim arrived with his arm over a red-haired girl’s shoulders and they were both too preoccupied with each other to see her.

It was three minutes before the introductory greetings, and she was starting to worry that Marinette wouldn’t turn up at all. After all, there would be a lot of pressure, and perhaps Marinette would rather be without all that. Or perhaps Kagami had insulted her too badly. Max arrived, and so did Nino, and Max nodded at her while Nino didn’t see her.

Why did she even agree to be rude to Marinette in the first place? Because Marinette had asked her to, of course, but the whole of it felt so different today. It churned in her stomach, twisted inside her head.

It was two minutes before the introductory greetings, and Adrien and Félix turned up. Adrien noticed her but didn’t greet her; Félix hurried over and pulled Adrien along.

“Hey,” Félix breathed.

Kagami smiled and bowed, though she kept her smile small, wary of Adrien’s mental state. “Hello.”

“Ready for school?” Félix held out his hand; Kagami took it, and he rubbed his thumb against the backs of her fingers.

“I…” She glanced at Adrien, who didn’t really look at her: his eyes were on the ground, near the stairs leading up to the entrance.

He knew she had been complicit in keeping the secret from him. She had stood next to Marinette and supported her as she explained the great lie about Gabriel. Of course he must be upset with both of them.

But he didn’t seem upset at Félix. And Félix had known about Gabriel for far longer. Perhaps they had already talked it out and become friends again. That was an uplifting thought.

“... I think so,” she finished.

Félix’s rubbing thumb became a fast grip around Kagami’s hand. “You’re coming in with us, right? We can sit together.”

Kagami pulled her hand back, and Félix blinked in surprise. “... I’m waiting for someone,” she said, pulling on the words also.

“Who?”

Adrien’s eyes shot up. He had almost certainly guessed. “Marinette,” she said, just to confirm it.

“... Oh,” said Félix, and the icy edges were there immediately. “Why are you waiting for her, of all people?”

It wasn’t unexpected that he would behave like this. Kagami had figured he would look this upset — no — annoyed, had thought he would sound rough around the edges. But now that it was actually happening, it felt worse than when she’d imagined it.

“I need to apologise to her,” she said, with a shockingly weak voice. She tried to add more force and bravado to it as the sentence went on, but she found herself unable to.

“She doesn’t deserve your apology, whatever it’s for,” said Félix.

Now Adrien awoke. He didn’t look at Félix, but he frowned. Something about the rest of his face, though, made him look sad more than angry.

Then Félix reached out for her hand again, and grabbed it with both of his. She didn’t protest or pull away again, even though part of her wanted to. “Don’t you want to come inside with us? Just… be with us.” And he added, with a meaningful squeeze, “You know, the people she hurt.”

“I need to apologise to her,” Kagami repeated. She sounded a little bit more determined this time, even though she felt less so. Fighting with Félix, especially on a day like this, seemed like the worst thing in the world —

— hadn’t Alya broken up with her boyfriend for Marinette?

Félix’s grip loosened, but his expression hardened. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll wait for you inside.” He waved, but his disappointment was clear.

But as Félix turned around and made to go inside, Adrien looked fully at Kagami for the first time. He had some impossible emotion in his eyes, something she couldn’t possibly interpret — she knew him well enough to recognise his joy or anger or sadness, but this emotion was beyond all of those.

And then he turned away and followed Félix into the building.

It was half a minute before the introductory greetings, and Kagami’s heart was an entire drumset. Félix was trying to make her choose again, and she knew what she would have to pick when he finally put his foot down — but the mere force of his disapproval was already putting her off kilter. Everything else, from Adrien’s intense gaze through the akuma’s aftereffects to the scene with Alya and Marinette’s sudden kiss, she felt like the whole world was barrelling down on her again.

She hummed, to comfort herself, to try and regain some stability. She would be late for the introduction, and that was a bad thing, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to handle another bustling crowd right now. She wasn’t even sure if she could handle Marinette, and she certainly couldn’t handle Félix and Marinette at the same time. If she didn’t find a way to split them apart —

“Hey,” said a voice. “You good?”

Kagami refocused with a strain of effort. In front of her stood… Alix.

“Aren’t you going inside?” asked Alix.

“I am waiting for —”

“Right, yeah, nope, no, you’re not.” Alix shook her head so firmly that Kagami almost found herself following the movements with her gaze. And then Alix shot her hand out and grabbed Kagami roughly by the wrist.

“Ow!”

“Sorry, but you’re not waiting out here for Marinette,” said Alix, pulling Kagami along up the steps and in through the sliding doors. “You’re going to come with me.”

“... Why?” asked Kagami, at a loss for anything else to say.

“Because she’s not coming for a while yet, and you have an introductory meeting to get to. With me.”

“We are late for the meeting.”

“Sucks for the school,” said Alix.

It was hard to describe the air that Alix was giving off, but it was somehow calming. She was brazen and brash, she was clutching Kagami’s wrist, she was being very snappy, but… there was something to the air she exuded. Maybe it was the way she was providing a clear direction, removing the burden of choice for Kagami. Or maybe it was that she’d given reassurance about Marinette — that Marinette was coming — even if she hadn’t meant it like that. Either way, Kagami felt her nerves relax and her tension fade away as she was pulled through the lobby and towards the conference room, where the entrance doors were already shut.

Alix walked up and pulled the door open, and the voice from inside — muffled at first, though it quickly became audible — paused at the interruption. “... now that we’ve int… excuse me, young ladies, but you are four minutes late.”

The speaker was the old headmaster from Françoise Dupont: M Damocles. He stood in front of a row of teachers, some of whom were familiar to Kagami but most of whom were not. And he seemed quite affronted.

But Alix was unperturbed. She only stopped for a fraction of a second to look up at the stage; when Damocles was done speaking, she called out “Medical emergency” with a firm voice and then walked towards the closest empty seats, which were mercifully far from the front.

‘Medical emergency’. Did Alix know, or did she just guess? As they took their seats, with Damocles sputtering into a continuation in the background, Kagami took a careful look aside at Alix. She had never called one of her own episodes an emergency before, and in a way it seemed weird to call it that, but maybe Alix just had a different terminology for it.

“Why did you say there was a medical emergency?” she mumbled.

Alix shrugged. “Teachers always stop hounding you if you say it’s medical. Well, sometimes they tell you to go to the nurse about it, but not if you don’t seem sick anymore.”

“I see.” Kagami curled her hands into fists in her lap. A coincidence, then.

She glanced around the room: Marinette obviously wasn’t there. But she could see the back of Zoé’s head in the front row, sandwiched between Alya and — Iris, that was her name. Elsewhere she spotted people like Luka, or Rose, or Nino. Adrien and Félix were in the second row across the first aisle, pretty far away from her.

The meeting continued for a little while longer. Then, the projector screen showed lists of names. M Damocles said that all age levels were divided in three, and that everyone should report to their first class in the rooms assigned to them.

Breathing became faster for Kagami as the years rose through Primaire and into Collège. Zoé was put in the same class as Iris and Marc. Those were the only names Kagami could recognise, however. And then, the slide flipped into the Secondes.

She would be in Seconde 1 with… the only names she recognised were Alya, Juleka, Nathaniel and Rose. Adrien and Félix were in Seconde 2. Her eyes hunted down the list of Seconde 1 a couple more times just in case she’d missed it — but nothing. Marinette had been put into Seconde 3, along with Alix. There was an audible increase in murmurs as people read down the slide, moreso than with any of the other classes. Kagami had the horrible suspicion that Adrien and Marinette were both causes of that.

Kagami sighed. These groupings were not ideal. Alya was nice, but the others were just vague acquaintances. And the one person she really wanted to be in a class with, wouldn’t be.

Though… from the room numbers, at least, they would be close by. It wasn’t a consolation, but it was something.

The room was abuzz as the next slide came on. The noise was almost certainly louder than it was at the start, but Kagami also didn’t have her own anticipation to keep her focused any longer, and the noise was starting to get to her. It wasn’t quite the same as a huge undulating crowd, she had a chair to sit on and hold tight to, she knew she wouldn’t be sitting here for long. There were only two years left. Things would be fine.

“Hey,” said Alix, as she nudged Kagami in the thigh a minute later. “Let’s go meet Marinette, okay?”

Kagami frowned. “Is she here now?”

Alix nodded, and opened her mouth — but at that point, M Damocles’s voice resounded from the podium again. “Now that everyone has their classes, everyone should get moving! Your teachers will be expecting you in their classrooms in ten minutes! And no using the elevator unless you’re handic—”

He was cut off by one of the other teachers literally slapping the back of his head. “The lift is only for those with mobility issues,” she clarified.

Alix was out of her chair even before that teacher was done speaking. She pulled Kagami along, at the head of a wave of other students, and while she was happy to avoid the throng she had no idea what was up with Alix.

The only one who pushed ahead of them was… Alya. Who somehow walked even faster than Alix, probably because her legs were longer.

Over the din behind them, Alix said, “We’ll be meeting her alone, I’m pretty sure.”

“Who?”

“Marinette, you doofus.” Even though Alix was looking straight ahead, and that straight ahead was towards the exit, Kagami could tell from the voice that she was rolling her eyes. “Didn’t I just say?”

“... You did. I apologise.”

“Nah, don’t worry about it.” Another peculiar response. “Sorry, I’m a bit… you know. About stuff.”

Kagami didn’t reply. She just followed, out the front door, at which point another question had come to mind.

“Why did you know she wouldn’t come to the meeting?”

“Because I told her not to.”

“When?” said Kagami, recalling that Marinette had asked her not fifty minutes ago to carry her to school.

“Just before school.” Alix turned towards the back alleyways and kept walking. “I told her to wait at home, because I think if she got into that conference room with everyone else there it wouldn’t be very good at all. And I planned this meeting, too.”

“I see.”

“Yep.”

They ended up more or less where Kagami had landed when she returned from Marinette’s, where Alix pulled to a stop and started looking around. “Hey, Marinette, you here?” she said in a slightly raised voice. There was no response.

“She is often late,” commented Kagami, though she hoped very much to be wrong in this instance. She had certainly spent some time forgetting about Marinette’s time habits today.

“Yeah, that’s for damn sure —”

“Alix!” said Marinette’s voice, coming from the other side of the back alley. They turned around to look at her, and as they did she continued, “K-Kagami!”

She looked surprisingly well, though ‘surprisingly’ was the most significant word there. She didn’t look like she had just been dragged through an akuma that had mentally paralysed her, but instead like she hadn’t slept too well. She didn’t look like she was currently at the centre of a media storm, but like she had been scolded by her mother. She was dressed properly, but she didn’t seem to have put on any makeup.

Kagami didn’t say anything. She just started to walk towards Marinette, with legs that seemed to move before she asked them to. There was a queasy feeling in her stomach, one that felt like it was sloshing back and forth, but she ignored it. Marinette’s eyes widened. Kagami closed the last few steps and hugged her.

“Hello,” said Kagami, and felt a little stupid that she didn’t say it before she started walking.

“H-hi,” croaked Marinette.

“I —”

But Kagami quickly remembered that they weren’t alone. She couldn’t comfort Marinette about the akuma, because only Namitentou was supposed to know about that. She couldn’t apologise for the things Namitentou had said, because Kagami wasn’t there. She couldn’t ask any of the questions she’d wanted to ask yesterday, because they were all just too private to take here.

“— I’m happy to see you,” she said. It was partly a lie, but true enough that it didn’t matter. The queasy feeling was still there. She kept ignoring it as best she could.

As she pulled back from the hug, though, Marinette looked despondent. There was barely any reaction to the hug at all. Her dull eyes stung somewhere inside Kagami, somewhere other than the stomach.

A different hug popped up in her memory. The one after she had been Riposte Prime, and Marinette and Adrien had tried to comfort her, and she broke down in despair in front of them. That one had felt like Marinette wanted to be in it. Marinette had felt like she wanted the hug yesterday, despite her lack of warmth. Now she just felt avoidant.

Alix’s footsteps came up on Kagami’s left, cutting off her thoughts before they could dwell for too long. “So,” Alix said. Marinette jumped a little. “Marinette. You know why we’re here.”

Marinette nodded. Kagami glanced between the two of them.

“So Alya —” But Alix ended up sighing and putting her face in her hand. “Ugh. Like. Keep in mind we were both in your house yesterday, okay? And we both care about you.”

“Yes,” said Marinette, more as a breath than as a response.

“Right. So. Like. Please don’t talk to Alya today. Not until you’re off school. She says she needs to not think about you right now. Got it?”

Marinette nodded again. She didn’t seem to have too many words left inside her.

“You got put in my class. We’re Seconde 3. Sabrina’s also there. And Nino.”

“Okay…”

“Everyone else is in other classrooms. There are… sixteen people in our class, I think.”

“Second floor,” said Kagami. She wanted to fidget with something, but she had nothing in her hands. “The room is next to ours.”

Alix kicked the paving stones under her feet with her left foot. “So, yeah. That’s the school stuff. Are you fine with Kagami knowing the superhero stuff?”

Marinette’s eyes bored into Kagami. They didn’t seem to be seeking an answer so much as deliberating on an answer of their own. The queasy feeling was still there. “... Yes. I trusted her to be one.”

“Right. Ryuuko.” Alix kicked again, but this time her foot flew wide, sending a small spray of sandy dust into the air. “Well, I’m fine with her knowing, because everyone’s gonna figure it out sooner or later. The person who stole the butterfly Miraculous… was Lila. Like, from our class.”

“I see,” said Marinette in a quiet and dry voice, but —

— Kagami felt like her insides were plummeting. Lila? The Lila who had tried to be her friend?

“Lila Rossi?” she asked, just for confirmation.

“Yeah,” said Alix.

“But…”

How would she even voice the complaint, though? She knew Lila disliked Marinette strongly. From the ways Lila had described it, she might even have good reasons for that dislike. But Lila had been kind and attentive the times they were together, and when Marinette wasn’t the topic things had been light and friendly between them.

It was absurd to think that dainty little girl, the one who looked like she’d fall over in the slightest breeze, who frequently complained about her various physical disabilities, could possibly have known about Monarch’s identity… or had the opportunity to snatch the butterfly away. The gifts of water bottles and attention seemed to be all that Lila was good for, in terms of her capacities.

On the other hand, this new butterfly holder seemed to have it out for Marinette, and was both specific and methodical in her attacks. Maybe it made sense for Lila to have that, even if nothing else.

Kagami turned to Marinette and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Did you do anything to her?” she said. “Did you cause her to do this?”

Marinette’s eyes almost bulged out of her head as she looked back at Kagami. “I…” she started, in a voice that seemed a little bit loud, perhaps a little bit defensive. But then her eyes dropped to the ground, and she breathed in. “... Yes. I… I did.”

“If you’re going to start spiralling again, so help me —”

“Alix,” said Kagami, interrupting her. “Are you certain it was her?”

So Lila and Marinette did have a history, and Marinette seemed to regret it. That was really all that needed to be said about it. Kagami kept looking at Marinette, kept holding on to her shoulders even though she didn’t quite know why: she knew she wanted a reaction, but not what kind. But Marinette kept her eyes on the ground around them.

“I — yeah, I’m sure,” said Alix. “I’d recognise her anywhere. Also, she blared it all across the city.”

“Okay,” said Kagami, still turned towards Marinette. “Fine.” She tried to think back to the names on the lists of students, but through all of Seconde’s slide she couldn’t remember seeing Lila’s name at all. Nothing that looked like it, either, and she scanned the lists several times. “We just need to find her, and talk some sense into her.”

Now Marinette reacted, by tensing up and almost lifting her head, but the head quickly fell down again. Alix, though, laughed. “Yeah, no, not going to happen. She had this whole evil plan for how to get everyone to hate Marinette,” something in Kagami’s throat tightened briefly, “and now it looks like she’s trying again with a new one. She won’t listen to anything.”

“Maybe,” said Kagami. Marinette still didn’t look up. Holding on to Marinette’s shoulders felt more and more important. Lila… if she had lied about Marinette, then maybe she had also lied about wanting to be friends. It was fully possible. But maybe it was true that she wanted friends.

Marinette was more important right now. Dropping her to reach out to Lila was out of the question. But there was something that felt wrong about everything, like Lila wasn’t really the person behind it. Maybe that was just hopefulness speaking, but Kagami was already friends with people who didn’t like each other. As long as they weren’t villains…

… her thoughts were drifting away from her. She swallowed.

“... did you say… Lila blared it out across the city?” said Marinette. Kagami blinked, realising that she’d missed an important detail.

“Yeah. Right, okay, I said I was going back to the fight with Monarch, didn’t I?” Alix briefly appeared in Kagami’s side vision as a head and a leg, then both disappeared again . “Well, I felt kinda bad about it. So I didn’t look back. I looked ahead instead just in case there were hints there, and it turns out she’s about to make a pretty big announcement.”

“What?” said Kagami, turning her head towards Alix. It was a reflexive response. If the Lila that had taken the butterfly seemed incongruous with the Lila that Kagami had been friends with, then a Lila that announced herself as a villain in public seemed utterly bizarre. It didn’t fit with either version of her.

Alix lifted one hand in a sort of shrugging motion. “Yeah. Can’t say much more, because I can’t spoil what’s gonna happen in the future, but… yeah. That’s what I saw.”

“That… doesn’t make sense,” said Marinette.

Kagami turned back towards her, and for a moment — with Kagami’s hands still anchored on Marinette’s shoulders — their eyes met. A sudden burst of images flashed across Kagami’s eyes. The hug between Alya and Marinette during the interview. The embrace Kagami herself had shared with Marinette, and the image of Marinette in her arms. A flash of rain, and an umbrella. A glass of orange juice. Alya kissing Marinette on the mouth, then pulling away in anger.

She let go of Marinette, stepped back, looked away. Her heart was beating heavily. She didn’t see if Marinette, too, had looked away.

“Nah,” said Alix.

“She’s always tried to hide… something must be going on,” Marinette insisted. Her voice had gained a bit of certitude from before, though not much.

“You don’t say,” said Alix.

Kagami clutched her hands to her chest, and looked at Alix’s feet. Black shoes, bare shins. A single glance up at Marinette, who mercifully didn’t look her way, before she looked down again.

“Is she… enrolled in the school?”

“Not that I saw.”

Marinette didn’t respond. Maybe she breathed. No, she definitely breathed. Kagami found it difficult to breathe for herself. Again, her eyes quested towards Marinette, and this time Marinette noticed.

“We’ll find her,” said Alix. “She’s just a girl. We know where she lives. Anyway, those were the important bits. Any questions?”

— Kagami had many. She still needed to hear what happened during that final confrontation with Monarch, why Marinette had decided to turn Gabriel into a hero. She needed to know how Marinette felt about Félix. She desired to hear what was inside Marinette’s head right now. She wanted to know what had happened between Lila and Marinette, but — she couldn’t ask those questions now.

“... No,” mumbled Marinette. “Thank you…”

“Okay, there’s one more important bit.” Alix’s voice was firm. Kagami desperately wrested her eyes over to the girl, in order to not have them drift around. And Alix looked — strange. Cross, yet soft. Hot, yet mellow.

“Marinette, I swear to everything that’s holy and good in this world. I love you, like a friend. Alya loves you too. I’m sure Kagami feels the same.” Kagami briefly choked on her own breath. “But you’re making it really hard on us right now. I know you have it hard too, but… for god’s sake, I’m just asking that you let us help you. If you tell anyone else to leave you alone for their own good, I’m going to slap you and, and, I don’t wanna do that. Okay?”

Again, Marinette went quiet. Maybe she was looking at Alix, maybe she wasn’t. Probably she was still looking down at her feet.

“It really sucks for us when you do that. Yeah? And I know you don’t wanna hurt people, so just let us fricking be there for you. I — yeah.”

“... Okay,” said Marinette.

“Okay,” said Alix. Her lips curled a little bit upwards. “Ready to get to class, then?”

“Okay.”

Alix grabbed Marinette by the hand, and pulled her towards the nearest door. Kagami hesitated for a moment, feeling another sting of something in her chest — then followed.

Nothing made sense in the stairwell, as Kagami climbed it behind Alix and Marinette and struggled to take her eyes off their joined hands, which didn’t disconnect until they got to the second storey. The two of them waved to Kagami as they split apart, and Kagami’s stomach was a whirling drain until she sat at her desk in the Seconde 1 classroom.

Nothing made sense in the classroom, either, where Alya sat like a beacon signalling who-knows-what. She acted like nothing was wrong, although Kagami — who sat on the same row as her, in a small conference room that had been inexpertly converted by shoving in eighteen desks and a table and chair next to the podium — could see that she looked dejected on occasion. Yet compared to her anger earlier in the day, which kept returning to Kagami’s mind’s eye, she seemed perfectly adjusted.

“We will spend this week letting you all get to know each other within the class,” said Mlle Craquelin, who was almost perversely chipper. “Next week, you’ll get started on your lycée tracks, and you can start to mingle with all ages outside your class schedule, but this room will be your base throughout the year.”

Nothing made sense at lunch, where Kagami found herself compelled to sit with Alya. Juleka and Rose and Marc and Nathaniel were also at their table, and all of them talked together with near-practised ease; Kagami mostly listened, except when Rose and Alya pulled her in. She found more and more questions to ask of Alya, but she kept quiet about them, because they would reveal too much about what had happened that morning: ‘do you really love Marinette?’; ‘what caused you to be akumatised?’; ‘how are you feeling?’; ‘why did you give up on loving Marinette?’ — they were questions that needed to be asked either one on one, or not at all, because in reality she shouldn’t even know to ask them. The akuma remained a secret.

Nothing made sense through the rest of the school day, as they had bonding activities with all the other students in the class. There was no Lila Rossi there, of course. The other students came from three other schools, all of them from within the twenty-first arrondissement. Everything floated past, nothing stuck except a name and face here and there.

And nothing made sense as they left school, when all the other students started to flow out of the building around her. She was supposed to go to the park now to practise with her sword. But it made no sense to go, not when Marinette was about to meet with Alya and Alix, and both of them acted towards Marinette in ways that made no sense at all.

Or — no. That wasn’t it. On an emotional level, Kagami understood parts of it. She understood the ambivalence that Alix had expressed, she understood the anger that had burst out of Alya, she understood that Marinette had been rude to both of them; she understood that of course, that would lead to some conflicting feelings. She understood bits and pieces, but the whole still eluded her and she needed to see more.

If she walked to Marinette’s house now, she would have an hour and a half before Mother arrived, and she could easily act like she had practised the whole time. She hitched the kendo bag up on her shoulder and walked as fast as she could, certain that she was ahead of everybody else when she reached the bakery. She tried to go in through the main entrance — until she realised that the lights were out, and the shelves were empty. Cautious, she stepped back and looked at the upper window, where the lights seemed to be on.

Knocking on the door seemed like an absurd thing to do. It might upset Marinette’s parents, which might upset Marinette. So Kagami decided to wait instead outside the entrance to the apartment. She had a view to the park from there: the statue had been covered up with tarpaulin and rope, presumably because it had been defaced. There were no protesters today, though, other than a handful of people on the far side who seemed to have put up a tent.

She touched her finger to the flips of her ears. The earrings were secured on them, as smooth and hard as ever. In a way, they connected her to Marinette. Despite the role she had to take as Namitentou, she was at the very least part of Marinette’s lineage.

A slow warmth crept across her, and she pushed the ear to her head, leaning into the comfort of it.

But that was when Marinette arrived.

“K-Kagami?” she said, and Kagami opened her eyes to see Marinette about eight feet away, looking like she was trying to make herself as small as possible.

“Marinette,” said Kagami. She could not help the faint little smile that curled her lips. “I… how are you?”

“Not here.” Marinette made for the door with rash steps, almost stumbling on a paving stone on the way but keeping her balance the whole time. She pushed her key into the door and opened it, then waved for Kagami to go inside. The exigency in her eyes made Kagami hurry to follow the command.

Once they were inside, Marinette pushed the door shut, casting a relative shadow over both of them.

“... How are you?” repeated Kagami. She didn’t yet know the limits of ‘here’, and therefore she also didn’t know what ‘not here’ entailed.

“Mmn,” said Marinette. She looked up — and Kagami again felt that weird sting inside her, and dropped her gaze. “I… how are you?”

“I am fine,” said Kagami. She didn’t know if it was true — but she knew, because her question hadn’t been answered, that Marinette wasn’t fine.

“That’s good.”

“Was there trouble at school?”

— Marinette audibly breathed in through her nose. Her arm and shoulder shifted at the edge of Kagami’s gaze. “Can we… take it later?”

“Yes. Fine.”

All of Marinette stepped into Kagami’s field of vision now. Kagami didn’t dare to look up, in case she’d get stung again. “How long do you have?” asked Marinette.

“One hour and twenty minutes.”

“Okay. Good.” There was a pause, and then: “Thanks.”

Kagami didn’t get the chance to consider if she was going to answer. Just then, Marinette’s phone vibrated, and after a short scramble she’d pulled it out to read the message. Without another word, she turned to the door and flipped the lock and handle. The door opened to reveal Alix and Alya, both of whom hurried to come inside.

“Hey,” said Alix. “Hey, Kagami.”

“Hi, Kagami,” said Alya, and pushed the door shut. Neither of them hugged Marinette, not even after Marinette grabbed her own elbow with her hand.

“Upstairs? It’s kinda dark here,” said Alix.

“Y-yes,” said Marinette.

They climbed up to the living room, which was empty — though they could hear a single and unintelligible voice speaking behind closed doors, maybe into a phone. Then they ascended the stairs to Marinette’s room. The whole thing happened in silence, other than some small grunts and flinches from Marinette as she climbed. As they settled in the bed again, Alya took place between Kagami and Alix, not quite opposite Marinette.

“... Thanks for coming,” said Marinette, after a short silence. “Even though…”

“Don’t mention it,” said Alix. “We’re here for you.”

“Yeah,” said Alya, though she sounded kind of hollow.

“How was… school?” said Marinette.

Alya didn’t answer. Kagami didn’t answer for her. Everything had seemed more or less fine in class, other than the obvious, and the obvious was the parts she wasn’t supposed to know about.

“Did you talk to Nino?”

“Shut up, Marinette,” said Alix, and placed her hand on Alya’s knee.

Marinette’s eyes went wide. When she spoke, her voice was as crinkly as before, but with a bit more urgency. “... I… no, that wasn’t what I… Alya, I’m so sorry, I just wanted to know if you said anything to hi—”

“I didn’t,” said Alya. Her smile was very small. “I’m not going to talk to him for a while, I think.”

“Alya…” Sighing, Marinette closed her eyes, only opening them again halfway through her next sentence. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realise how you felt, and I never wanted to hurt you.”

“I know,” said Alya. “I know you never want to hurt people.” The ‘but you still do’ was left heavy enough in the air that probably anyone would have caught it — or maybe that was just because Kagami had already heard it on the rooftop, eight hours ago.

“Oh, yeah,” said Alix, turning towards Kagami. “there was an akuma before school today. We never said that, did we… Alya got akumatised.”

Alya’s frown was obvious. “I’d rather not talk about that,” she said.

“We don’t need to,” said Marinette. “We can… talk about anything you want.”

“How was your day, Marinette,” replied Alya — almost like an automated message because of how immediate it was. It sounded flat, devoid of inflection.

Marinette fell quiet and looked down.

“It’s a bit hard to have icebreakers when you’ve been all of the news for the past two days,” said Alix. “There were some strong opinions in class.” She didn’t smile, and neither did Marinette.

“Sabrina was nice.”

“I was there too.”

“I didn’t — sorry,” said Marinette. “It’s just… you’re here now. I wasn’t…”

“I know,” sighed Alix. “You’re good.”

“Did anything else happen?” said Alya. It was simply impossible not to notice the care in her tone, but also the wary air over all of her. Something about the way she sat, the way she looked at Marinette, felt like a retread of what had happened on the roof: a message that she did love Marinette, but she didn’t want to. She wanted to love Marinette, but she couldn’t. She could easily love Marinette, if only she did.

Kagami watched Alya carefully. She wanted to learn more about the way Alya felt things, because it seemed so… unnecessary, and yet so honest. She wasn’t being honest, but her behaviour didn’t lie. The conflict between love and anger, fear and trust, was playing out on the battlefield of her face.

“... No,” said Marinette. “I ran home right after school, so nobody would follow me…”

“Okay.” Alya almost lifted a hand, almost shifted forward, but then pushed herself back down.

Wanting something she didn’t want, asking for something she wouldn’t allow herself to have.

Then Alix put her hand on Alya’s knee again, and something shifted in Alya. She leaned closer to Alix, enough to be noticeable, and some of the tension seemed to dissipate from her. She didn’t smile, but she did frown less.

Kagami frowned deeper. She finally allowed herself to look at Marinette again, to take in the soft lines of her face and the airy blue of her eyes, the slightly bushy hair that hadn’t been dealt with after a stressful day. Marinette was looking at Alya, and she too could clearly see the struggle in Alya’s eyes.

Marinette, who cared so much she pushed people away, thereby hurting them more.

Then, briefly, Marinette’s eyes met Kagami’s. A bolt of lightning struck from clear skies and illuminated the truth that should already have been obvious inside Kagami’s mind.

She was angry with Marinette. She hadn’t allowed herself to feel it yet, but it was there and it was justified. Just like Alya, Kagami had wanted to be there, had asked to be by Marinette’s side, and in the space of a single day Marinette had reneged on her promise and told both of them to leave her alone forever. Kagami wanted to grab Marinette by the shoulders again and just growl at her, to let it all out at her and let her know how worried she had made them, how much it had… hurt. It had hurt worse than she had realised, until she saw the force of Alya’s feeling and noticed the similarities.

Months ago, she had knelt in front of a fountain after Marinette and Adrien broke her out of an akumatisation. She had been angry with Marinette then, too, but she hadn’t been honest with herself about why. It had hurt in a different way, to see Marinette and Adrien devote so much time to each other, and she had bottled it up because she didn’t want to break them apart. Like Marinette, she had tried to push them away, and she had ended up hurting them in the process — only in a different way.

And yet…

It was time to finally admit it to herself. She hadn’t realised until today, but now she knew it for sure. She, Kagami Tsurugi, was in love with Marinette Dupain-Cheng. And she had probably been so for months.

But she didn’t feel it the same way as Alya. Alya had been warded off by Marinette’s betrayal. She didn’t want the thing she wanted, wouldn’t let herself have the thing she was asking for. Kagami did want those things. If Alya hadn’t been there, Kagami would have dived forward and kissed Marinette, just to see what would happen. Even if it didn’t go anywhere, she wanted to try.

The only complication was… that her boyfriend hated Marinette. And she loved him too. Which meant that Kagami would also have to deny herself the thing she was asking for. She was asking for something that she just couldn’t allow herself.

The queasy feeling in her stomach was still there. She knew what it meant now. And therefore, she knew it would be staying around for a while.

“I can defend you,” said Kagami, without realising she was about to say anything before her mouth opened itself. She frowned for a moment as Marinette’s eyes went wide, then smiled awkwardly as Marinette relaxed.

“Th-thank you. I —”

But at that point, there was a knock on the hatch. From below, Sabine Cheng’s voice sounded: “Marinette? Are your friends up there?”

Marinette almost seemed to be holding her breath. “Yes!” she replied.

“Okay. Can we talk to you? Something’s happened, and…”

“... Sure,” said Marinette. “Come up.”

There was a pause. Then the door opened, and Sabine and Tom both climbed into the room. Sabine had a torn-open letter in her hand, and Tom his mobile phone. Both of them had downturned lips and worried eyes, and they remained standing in place for a while, switching between looking at Marinette and each other.

“Mom?” Marinette sounded quietly agitated. “Dad? What’s wrong?”

“... Honey, are you okay with everyone being here?” said Tom.

“Yeah,” said Marinette. “Of course.”

Tom sighed. Sabine stepped forward, clutching the letter, and stopped in the middle of the room. “You’ll have to read this letter,” she said. “But what it says is… there’s going to be a criminal investigation. Into you, and Ladybug, and everything. And you might have to go to court. We already talked to a lawyer, and it’s going to be okay, but…”

Kagami looked back at Marinette. Her heart was speeding up. Her stomach still felt queasy, but for a different reason this time.

And Marinette… looked like a wilting flower, about to curl up into nothingness on the arid soil underneath.

Chapter Text

The torn-open envelope weighed five hundred pounds and Marinette almost had to drag it towards her across the bed, out of Alix’s proffering hands. The letter felt like it was glued fast within it. She tugged at it, almost hoping it wouldn’t come out.

But when it did, it was ominous in the way that only an official letter could be: sharp, severe, serifed letters cutting their blackened path across the deathly white paper. It read,

To Marinette Dupain-Cheng / Ladybug and her legal guardians,

It is advised that Ms Dupain-Cheng only read this letter with her guardians present.

You — along with your guardians — are hereby called into court for questioning at the following time and location:

Tuesday, September 6th at 09:15
Cour de Cassation, 5 Quai de l’Horloge, 75001 Paris

A court official will meet you there in order to escort you to the proper location.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng is not yet charged with a crime, but will be treated as a suspect by the law. Due to the unusual and uncertain nature of the subject matter, we are not presently able to describe the extent of the case, which will only be determined by police and legal counsel after a thorough investigation.

However, it is advised that if you fail to comply with this summons, you will be held criminally liable for that action and be subject to legal penalties.

Signed —

— and then there were the signatures of mayor Bustier, the police commissioner, and a court judge.

“A policeman and a city official came to the door to hand over the letter,” said Sabine. “And they talked to us, and…”

“We’ve been trying to get them on the phone since, and… well, it’s real,” said Tom. “Honey… are you okay?”

Marinette blinked. She realised she’d been staring into blank space ever since she lowered the letter into her lap. Was she okay? She wasn’t even sure what ‘okay’ meant. All the words from the letter were swimming around in her head, and her head was filled with thick sludge so the words were struggling to get anywhere.

She’d have to attend court tomorrow, during school hours. That at least was clear. Cour de Cassation, she knew that place too. That was where trials and hearings were held.

But. “Er… what does that mean? The — the extent of the case thing, or… legal penalties?”

“It means…” Sabine paused for a moment, before Tom laid his hands around her arms. Her eyes were swimming. “We just don’t know. We just… have to show up tomorrow.”

“You mean… Marinette could be put in prison?” said Alix, wide-eyed. Marinette felt like the word ‘prison’ should sting. It did, a little bit. But she felt that it should sting more in some way. “They — they can’t do that, right? She’s not even fifteen!”

“Is that the age of criminal responsibility?” asked Kagami.

“Yeah! I guess! Whatever you call it!”

“We just don’t know,” said Tom. “But the lawyer advised us to show up. She’ll be there. And she said If anything is out of order, we can… complain?”

“We know nothing about law,” added Sabine. “But we’ll read up on it and figure out what’s going on, and… oh, honey… honey, please come down here…”

Marinette was on the move even before Sabine’s voice cracked. She had never experienced her mother like this before, but she knew enough to see that a hug right now was just necessary. A required part of the machinery. Not a penance for making Sabine cry, but just something that needed to happen if the world was going to keep turning.

She climbed down the ladder with slow and aching movements, the foot protesting with every other step. And once she was on the floor, Sabine's arms were practically around her already.

Marinette liked hugs. They were the best way to talk without words. Even the kwamis, small as they were, could transfer their feelings and body heat and touch in a hug.

This hug, though, felt like a weight on her shoulders. Like Sabine’s arms were a heavy backpack. A part of her wanted to step out of it, to pull back and just let her mother’s arms fall down. If she was the one who was on trial, who might get put in prison and who would definitely get jeered at during school while she waited for that verdict, why did she have to comfort other people? —

— she bit the inside of her cheek. That was a terrible thought. Everything happening to her right now, that was her own doing. She made her bed when she allowed Gabriel Agreste to get at her heart, when she allowed her heart to feel for Gabriel Agreste. She was ten miles down a tunnel she started digging when she became Ladybug and she would have to keep moving forward until she found the light at the other end, or maybe suffocated like a canary. Anything else would just lead to… to… to hurting Alya again. And Adrien. And everybody else.

Tom’s hands were also around her. Maybe they had been for a little while. She was just a body in the middle of everything. 

“It’ll be okay,” she mumbled. “I’ll be fine.”

“Oh, honey… I really hope so.”

Hope. A thing she ought to bury right next to her heart.

Ms Bustier had seemed so nervous at the press conference yesterday. She had said nothing, except that things would be fixed and her office was working tirelessly to figure out what to do. And she had looked like she'd rather be anywhere else than on a podium, in front of five hundred journalists, with a bunch of microphones pushed in her face.

That made sense, of course. Bustier hadn't been speaking for herself, but as a public figure. She probably hadn’t expected that her tenure as mayor would include, almost immediately, denouncing one of her ex-students in public. Or if she did, she wouldn't have expected that ex-student to be Marinette.

It was all too familiar — the way Bustier had looked during the press conference was almost exactly how Marinette had felt when doing interviews after Monarch’s defeat. She had to stand there and pretend to be composed, because the city was happy, and so she couldn't just vent her own feelings of anger and frustration.She had gritted her teeth underneath her smiling lips, and hoped that everything would be all right in the end.

Everything wasn’t all right. But she had made the bed, and now she had to lie in it, even if it was made of nails.

“Mme Cheng,” said Kagami's voice, strangely firm. “M Dupain. I will defend your daughter.”

Marinette froze. If Kagami was about to reveal her identity as Namitentou here, now, then —

— “All of us will,” Kagami continued. “She is our friend.”

The hug ended then, with Sabine pulling away and sniffling and Tom putting his arms around Sabine’s shoulders instead. “That — that’s good to hear,” said Sabine. “It’s good that she has friends.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Yes.”

But it didn’t feel that way. Kagami hadn’t said she would be there. She had said ‘defend’. Even though Marinette couldn’t push Kagami away again, couldn’t try to shove everyone out the door, that didn’t mean the ladybug holder should be focusing on her. It didn’t mean she should be defended when there was nothing about her to defend.

Then her eyes met Kagami’s, and she realised that the voice had sounded urgent, too. Sharp, unplanned, even rash.

“Kagami, please —” she tried to protest.

“I will defend you,” Kagami repeated. Her certainty had grown a thousandfold. “I will stake my honour on it.”

Briefly, Marinette imagined protesting. But she didn’t think she could possibly be able to. A Kagami who staked her honour on something was a Kagami that wasn’t going to back down.

And there was something in Kagami’s tumultuous eyes that Marinette couldn’t get to grips with. It gave her the feeling that something was passing her by — that ‘defend’ really meant something else.

“... Okay,” she mumbled.

“Don’t worry,” said Alix. She had her fingers over the edge of the bed, clasping the corner like a cat on a box. “We’ll be there for you. Whether you want us to or not.”

“We’ll… contact school and tell them you’re not coming in tomorrow,” said Tom. “Alya, Alix, Kagami — feel free to stay for as long as you like.”

“Thank you,” said Alya.

As Tom and Sabine’s downturned faces vanished down the hatch, Marinette remained standing on the floor. She watched the trapdoor as it fell gently into place, and then she watched the nothingness above it, the particles of dust that hovered in the light above it, a withered nothing.

Her foot stabbed again, but she ignored it.

She wondered how much of the trial — or whatever the letter had been talking about — was going to be hovering in the light. It would be naïve to think it would go completely under the radar, but… would everything be broadcast? Most of the news was already about her and Gabriel Agreste, and Tomoe Tsurugi and Nathalie Sancoeur and Amelie Fathom and the statue and even Adrien, and — and of course it was, and it wasn’t going to stop, and there was no way the trial wasn't going to be know by the public and the media. She just hoped it wouldn't all come out. Not like this.

Like an answer to the opposite of a prayer, Alya’s voice broke into the silence: “It says on the TV 5 website, a breaking update… ‘Marinette Dupain-Cheng to attend court examination, says City Hall sources’.”

“Are they allowed to do that?” said Alix. “To, like, just let that go to the news?”

“I don't know,” said Alya.

It didn't matter either way. It was already done. Just like she’d already told the lie to protect Gabriel and keep Adrien in the dark, just like the secret of that lie had already come out. They just needed to deal with the fact that it had. Besides, it wasn't like TV 5 had said anything about how much they were going to cover it, they’d just mentioned the examination, and that was always going to happen.

She just hoped it wouldn't all be on TV.

“I don't think that's legal,” said Alix. “You know, equal protection before the law? That whole bullcrap?”

“Maybe… it's, maybe it's that whole special circumstances thing they talked about?” From the sounds of it, of fingers touching glass, Alya was still scrolling through the article as she spoke.

“Yeah, but you're still supposed to be innocent until proven guilty, right? They can't just —”

“She is guilty,” said Kagami. “She confessed.”

It wasn't that Kagami sounded particularly grave as she said it. It wasn't that she was loud. It was just that when she spoke, it was like a needle that punctured a balloon, and everything after it felt empty and still.

Marinette’s heart was beating slightly faster. Not rapidly, not even far above average, but she could feel that it was agitated.

“... Hey, Kagami, that's not fair,” said Alix, with a subdued voice. “She didn’t do anything bad.”

“She lied about Gabriel Agreste. To Adrien as well.”

“Yeah, but you don’t have to put it like that!”

“Like what?”

It shouldn't be upsetting to hear what Kagami said. She had said something that was true. But it still jabbed a little at Marinette's heart to hear it said so straightforwardly. She kept staring at the dust as it slowly sank to the ground, didn't dare look at the girls on the bed.

“Like she did something evil, or whatever!” Alix was getting upset. She was speaking louder, a little more frayed.

“I didn't say that. I said she is to blame for her own actions.” Kagami was between confused and insistent, from the sounds of it.

“Guys, let's not fight,” said Alya. Her voice was small and trembling, without much authority. It was the type of voice Marinette wanted to hear right now, but that was just for her own comfort. She needed to hear what Kagami was saying — needed to hear the truth.

“I am not fighting,” said Kagami.

Marinette finally turned around to look at them, away from the settling dust. Kagami was the only once to notice her turning, glanced at her for a moment before looking back to Alix.

“Well, you're not exactly —”

“Guys,” said Marinette. “Kagami is right. I did lie.”

They all looked at her now. She met their eyes with as much steadiness as she could muster, which was more than she expected to have.

“But you shouldn't go to jail for it!”

“She didn’t say I should,” said Marinette. She didn't know if it was true, but it was easier to say that than to explain. “All she's saying is that I did something bad. And she's right. Just let it be, okay? I don't want you to fight.”

“I’m not fighting,” repeated Kagami.

“I know. But Alix is getting upset. Just let it be, okay?”

“I’m not upset!” snapped Alix.

“Just stop!” said Marinette, a lot more gruffly than she had meant to. She pulled her voice back a little, tried to adjust her face to hopefully seem less annoyed, but she couldn't tell from their eyes if it had worked or not. “I… I don't want you to fight. You're all on the same side. You're my friends. I want you to be friends, too.”

No — she could tell from their eyes that it hadn't worked at all. It had only put the issue off for later. They glanced at each other, and then Alya said in a quiet and gentle voice, “Whatever you want, Marinette.”

Then Kagami said, “I apologise if I did something wrong.”

“No,” said Marinette. “You were right. I’m getting what I deserve.”

“Marinette —”

“I mean it, Alix.” This time, she wanted a tone of warning. “It's okay for there to be a court case. It's not like I wasn't the most prominent superhero. They can scrutinise me, I deserve it, I did do a bad thing, right?”

“... You don't deserve to be treated like a criminal, though,” said Alya, as Alix frowned at the bed covers.

Marinette swallowed her protest. If she didn't want them to fight, she couldn't start fights with them. And she needed to not make them upset. She needed to appease them, so nobody else got akumatised over her. So nobody else got hurt by her, ever.

“I’m just going to be questioned. It's fine.”

“I sure hope you're right,” said Alix, with a bitter undertone to her voice. “They better not put you in jail.”

“I’m sure it's just to get to the bottom of everything,” said Alya. “And we’ll be there for her. Right?”

Alix frowned again, but she nodded. Kagami said “Yes.”

A court case — maybe. A day in court, at the very least. Would any of the others be there? Adrien, Nathalie, Amelie, Tomoe? She hoped not. What were they going to ask about? What would they do to her parents?

‘She is guilty.’ Of course she was. The words had been harsh to hear, but they were purposeful and they were direct and they were necessary. It didn't matter that Kagami could be tactless because tact had been the problem in the first place — the fear of saying something wrong to Adrien. Of hurting him.

“I’ll be fine,” she said out loud, forcing a smile for each of the others. Only Alya responded in kind. Kagami’s peering stare turned more intense — more suspicious. And even though that hurt a little, it was the kind of hurt that woke her up, a pinch on the cheek.

It was a different, less useful pain when Kagami then said, “I need to leave. Mother expects me at the park in half an hour, and I want to be there early.”

Or maybe it wasn’t even pain, it was just a kind of chilly gust of wind. Something to remind her once again that she was just one person in a world full of problems.

“Thanks for coming,” Marinette said, with an annoyingly tiny voice.

“Yeah, good luck,” said Alya. Alix just nodded.

“I will check in on you again tomorrow,” said Kagami. She climbed down the ladder from the bed, and came to a stop in front of Marinette. “I will come to your door. Do not try to lock it.”

Marinette shook her head. Glanced at Alya’s glassy gaze, and then at Alix, whose glowering eyes felt like they were trying to light her on fire. “I won’t,” she said. Locking them out again would only hurt them more — she knew better than to do that now.

“Good.” Kagami seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then she stepped forward and crushed Marinette into a hug, without a word of warning and without even changing her expression first. Marinette could only stand there, didn’t dare to speak up, because just saying ‘Kagami?’ felt redundant — pointless.

Three seconds later, maybe, Kagami let go and stepped back. She picked up her bag off the floor and walked over to the trapdoor; then, just as Marinette was about to say ‘Bye,’ she said “I apologise for this morning.”

“Um… thanks,” said Marinette.

And then Kagami was gone.

“Ugh,” said Alix.

“What’s wrong?” said Alya.

“I don’t… is she messing around, or something?” Alix rolled her eyes. “Like was she being funny?”

Alya’s eyes drifted to Marinette for a moment. “I don’t think so?”

“So what was the whole deal with all that?”

“She didn’t mean anything bad,” said Marinette, finding words again. “And she’s right. I’m guilty.”

Alix’s eyebrows could have crushed a large egg. “That’s a real funny thing to say when you’re headed to court in the morning.”

“But it’s true,” sighed Marinette. The letter — she suddenly realised she had brought it with her from the bed, how light and flimsy it felt despite its contents. She pinched it a little tighter and moved towards the ladder. “I’m guilty. And besides, we don’t know what they want. Kagami doesn’t either. All she said, I mean, all she wanted to say, is I can’t act like I’m innocent.”

“She had a funny way of saying it,” said Alix.

Marinette paused at the top of the ladder, looked down at the covers. Maybe it was funny, but that didn’t make it wrong. Everything Kagami had said had been correct, every single word. Alix — well, Alix wasn’t wrong really, she was just… not catching on. It didn’t sound like she was trying to fight anymore. Rather, she sounded resigned.

“She means well,” said Alya. Marinette looked up to see that Alya put her hand on Alix’s knee. “Don’t worry. We’re all on the same side.”

“I’m just saying, that all was a funny way of ‘defending’ someone,” said Alix.

“Alix.” Alya now sounded firmer, sharper.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m sorry,” said Alix, putting her hand on Alya’s. “I’m just… I wanna punch something. I wanna punch Lila. Y’know?”

Sighing, Alya pulled her hand back. It was like she didn’t want to answer the half-question. Instead, she looked at Marinette, nodded towards the letter.

“Can I see that?”

“Y-yeah,” said Marinette. “I guess.” She handed the letter over, then pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them. While she did so, Alya and Alix pored over the letter, Alix moving her mouth every now and then as she sounded out certain words under her breath.

It felt weird to even think about tomorrow. Like thinking about a box with the lid off. She could see everything in it, and it wasn’t very interesting. But other people could still put things into the box. Something she knew everything about but also nothing. And yet, even if someone did put things into the box, that didn’t change anything about the box itself. She was still going to have to sit inside it.

Mum and Dad were worried. Alya and Alix were worried. Kagami might be worried. But she herself was just… someone who needed to go sit in a box, and who was going to do it. Whether the box had bars around it or not.

Alya and Alix kept reading. Then they offered words of support. Then, like time, they slipped down the hatch and vanished.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

Marinette hadn’t expected Zoé to show up that evening. Even so, she wasn’t entirely surprised to hear the knock on the window above and look up to see Kitty Noire’s concerned face.

“Hey,” said Zoé, sitting down cross-legged on the bed. “Claws in.”

“You shouldn’t just keep dropping in here. Someone might see you…” said Marinette, as she pulled back a little to give Zoé more space.

“There are no more TV cameras. And it’s nine in the evening,” said Zoé, with just a hint of reproach. That hint disappeared as she twisted her lips upwards and added, “It’s like you don’t wanna see me.”

That — just wasn’t a fair thing to say. Not now, not when Marinette’s whole day had circled around pushing people away. “N-no,” said Marinette, and then she had nothing else to say, because any words she did come up with would be smashed together with words she didn’t want to come out.

“I can’t just let you be on your own right now,” Zoé went on, almost like she hadn’t heard the response — like they both knew it was just a formality. Zoé sounded quiet, anxious. “I… I heard people talk about you at school. They said all kinds of things. It was so cruel.”

“Was it really?” said Marinette — no, she didn’t, but she wanted to. No matter how cruel it was, it wasn’t any more cruel than what she did to Adrien.

“Yeah,” said Marinette — for real, out loud, another formality.

“Did they say things to you too?” said Zoé, and she apparently got her answer just from a single look. “I’m so sorry. I can’t believe how mean everyone is being.”

“Mmh,” said Marinette.

Plagg hovered next to Zoé. His frown was different from hers. Irritated where hers was gentle, sharp where hers was soft. But he wasn’t unfeeling. He just… wasn’t acting like Marinette was innocent.

He, and Kagami. Maybe they would have been a better pairing. The people in touch with reality, bent on destroying the public image of Ladybug. The hero of Destruction doing what she was always meant to do: cutting away things that shouldn’t be.

Zoé would have been a good fit with Tikki, too. She could have been the hero that Ladybug could never be, because Zoé at least was honest and straightforward. Not someone who buried herself in fifteen layers of secrecy just to avoid telling the truth to those who deserved it. But… that was just a dream. Zoé was Kitty Noire, and Kagami was Namitentou, and that was how things needed to be.

“Um,” said Zoé. Then she cleared her throat. “Just so you know, you can call me whenever if you need something. If there’s another akuma, or whatever. I only found out about Alya by chance, and if I didn’t, then… maybe I couldn’t have come to help you, you know?”

“... Maybe,” said Marinette. It was better, easier, than protesting.

“Because I really want to be there for you.” The words came hurried, half-jumbled, from a wide-eyed face. “I wanna help. And I was late to get there when Adrien got akumatised, and today I almost didn’t hear about it because it was just here at your house, and please tell me, okay? You know I’m Kitty Noire, so…”

It was exceptionally hard to meet Zoé’s gaze. The stark, pleading blues which seemed like they wanted to burrow into Marinette and curl up somewhere deep inside. Because Marinette knew the risk, the ruin, that would come from it.

“Zoé… you know how everyone is very angry at me now, right?”

“... Yeah?”

“And,” started Marinette, a little too quickly — because she could see the anguish in Zoé’s eyes already. She hesitated, looked away. “And… I’m not going to be very popular with anyone.”

“I’m not angry at you,” said Zoé, with absolute conviction. “I’m on your side.”

“Yeah,” said Marinette. She swallowed now, still kept her eyes away from Zoé. She focused on the trapdoor again, on the memory of her parents climbing up it earlier in the day. “I know that. But… you shouldn’t be on my side as Kitty Noire.”

The silence that followed was a cloud of dust, settling slowly in the twilight.

“Marinette… I’m going to be on your side no matter what.”

“You shouldn’t be —”

“Marinette,” repeated Zoé, more insistent; a rustle, and then her hand was around Marinette’s wrist, tugging it, holding it, and Marinette had to look. “I won’t leave you alone. I promise,” Zoé went on, firm and warm at the same time.

“But I’m supposed to be the enemy of the city!”

“You’re not my enemy. You’ll never be my enemy.”

“That’s not the point —”

“You think I should’ve just left you there?” said Zoé, her voice cracking painfully near the end. “With — with the akuma?”

Marinette opened her mouth. Closed it again.

“I couldn’t do that. I can’t do that, Marinette. You mean too much to — it’s not right! I’m supposed to be fighting for the innocent, right?”

The innocent. “I have to go to court,” said Marinette. The words came out smoothly, easily, not with force but louder than a mumble.

Zoé’s response was immediate, yet delayed — first the widened eyes, and then the “... What?”

“I got a letter,” Marinette went on. “I have to… I don’t know what’s happening yet. It might be a lawsuit. But I have to go and talk to the police and stuff.”

“But… why?”

“Because I — because I did all the things I did. I lied about Ga, about Adrien’s dad, and I didn’t stop him.”

She didn’t have more than half a moment to consider Zoé’s half-pained, half-churling-up expression before Plagg’s voice cut in. “That’s just stupid,” he said, sharp and almost guttural on the ‘stupid’.

“Wh— why?” said Marinette, staring at him, not closing her mouth after.

“What the hell did you do that’s illegal?” Next to him, Zoé nodded.

“I lied —”

“That’s not a crime,” said Plagg. “They have no business judging you!”

“But I didn’t stop him!”

“That wasn’t your fault! Well… maybe it was, but not like that! You were just naïve. You shouldn’t be punished for that.” Plagg was halfway growling, and Marinette had no idea if he was growling at her or at the idea of the trial in the first place. “The only thing you did wrong was lie to Adrien, and the only person who gets to judge you for that is Adrien!””

“... He’s right,” said Zoé, as Marinette sat there without a single coherent response either in her brain or in her mouth. “You don’t deserve this.”

Marinette pulled her hand back, out of Zoé’s grasp. “It’s not about deserve,” she said. Was that a lie? Maybe. But it was true, too, a lie and a truth at the same time. She did deserve it, but even if she didn’t, she would still have to deal with it. “I’m bad news right now. If people think you’re on my side… they’re going to turn on you.”

“Well… so what?” said Zoé, pausing before the ‘so’ like she needed to push it over a little ridge before it could come out of her mouth. “I’m not afraid.”

“Because it matters more that people trust the heroes!” said Marinette. She didn’t sound frantic, but she felt it. “If they can’t, then bad things will happen!”

“You matter more than stupid hero stuff!”

“I don’t —”

“You matter more to me than anything,” said Zoé. Then her eyes went wide, like she had just surprised herself. It only lasted for a moment, and then she seemed to settle down. “I… yeah. You do. Because I love you, Marinette.”

If only Marinette could take that as a good thing. Her love for Adrien had doomed her, had made her hurt him worse than she could ever have imagined. Maybe Zoé was smarter about love than she was, but there was always the risk. And besides, even if Zoé were perfect and did everything right… Marinette didn’t deserve to be loved.

“... Maybe you do,” she conceded, the furthest she was willing to go in acknowledging the crush this time. “But if nobody trusts the heroes, then the bad guy will win. She’ll turn everyone against you, too.”

“And I don’t care about that,” said Zoé, her defiance ringing out from the empty corners of the bedroom. “I care about doing what’s right.”

“So… what if it isn’t right to love me?” Marinette tried.

Zoé looked for a moment like Marinette had grown a second head, her mouth lolling open. “Then… first of all, that’s not — I mean — I don’t care. I still do. And, and it could never be wrong to love someone. Anyone. Especially not…” Zoé looked down, her earlier confidence now apparently faded. A slight flush reddened her cheeks.

Marinette felt the flush in her bones, but not in her face. It wasn’t right to be loved, so she couldn’t — oughtn’t — get any positive feelings from it. “I just think… I think you shouldn’t,” she managed. “It’s not right.”

“That doesn’t change anything,” said Zoé, though she sounded even less confident now. She didn’t so much hesitate as lag slightly behind her normal tempo with every individual word. Her eyes were on her own knees, not Marinette. “I… that’s not how it works, Marinette. You know that…”

“Y-yes, but… I’m not…”

“Shut up, Marinette,” said Zoé, sudden but still quiet. “Just… shut up. I love you whether you want me to or not. I — whether I want to or not, that’s just how it is.” She wasn’t just lagging now; she wobbled, damply, uncertainly, only driven by what she was saying. “S-stop trying to m-ma-make me feel bad about it!”

“Zoé…” started Marinette — but she had no idea what to say. She had no idea if it would even be right to say anything. If she said sorry, then Zoé might get the wrong impression; but if she said something else, she would only make things worse. “I —”

“When are you going,” said Plagg.

Marinette grabbed the lifeline immediately. “To… tomorrow,” she said. “In the morning.”

Then she looked at Zoé again, at the tear that was starting to push out of the corner of Zoé’s eye, and she felt a sting in her chest. This wasn’t right, not right at all. She inched forward on the bed.

“So you’re going to trial tomorrow?” Plagg asked.

“No.” Marinette reached out her hand, placed it on Zoé’s knee, soft, cautious, terrified. “It’s just a meeting. They’re going to… question me, or something.” She could feel herself trembling.

Zoé, though, seemed steady despite her wet eyes. She breathed in deeply, then placed her own hand on Marinette’s, landing right after the ‘something’. But she didn’t speak.

“Well… good luck with that,” said Plagg. A formality, again, like earlier. “Be safe.”

“We should go,” said Zoé. She sniffled, pulled her sleeve across her eyes in one slow arch. Then she let go of Marinette’s hand and looked at Plagg. Not at Marinette. “We… we need to get home. It’s late.”

“Zoé…”

“I’m tired,” snapped Zoé, still not looking at Marinette. “I need to sleep. I was, I was up early today.” She pushed herself up to her knees, slow but deliberate. “Right, Plagg?”

“Yeah,” said Plagg, drawing a little on the word. “Yeah, that’s right.”

“And Marinette…”

This time, Zoé did look. She didn’t look happy.

“Tell me next time. Just… just tell me if something happens.”

“I…”

“Yeah,” said Plagg. “You better tell her.”

“Claws out.”

Not a word more was exchanged. Only a single sound ringing into the night above the roof access window, as Zoé leapt her way back home.

Marinette crawled over slowly, reached up and pulled the window closed. It was slightly chilly outside, but also somehow warmer than inside. She slumped down on the bed again and jammed her face into the pillow.

She had done it again. She had hurt a friend who was just trying to help. She had tried her hardest not to, but it had still happened. She hadn’t known better at all.

Even so… she didn’t really feel it. She felt like nothing. A scrap of paper with nothing written on it, not even folded or torn in any way, just — blank.

The only thing she felt was the final sound she heard from Zoé as she left: a single, damp, helpless, lonely, choked little sob.

Chapter Text

Zoé threw herself onto the bed straight from the windowsill, and didn't say “Claws in” until she was already curled up on the duvet.

Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid stupid stupidstupid Marinette.

Stupid Zoé, too. Stupid everything. Stupid new Monarch or whoever. Stupid old Monarch. Stupid all the Agrestes, stupid Marinette, stupid stupid Marinette, stupid law, stupid.

She grabbed fistfuls of covers and tried to jam them deep into her face, kicked her legs out.

“Um, Zoé…” said someone — Plagg. Plagg, of course, he needed food —

“The camembert is in my nightstand,” she managed.

“I don’t need cheese,” he said. His voice came slightly closer. “Not right now. I just wanna know if you’re okay.”

How funny. To have a demigod who cared for her, when her mother and sister didn’t and her stepfather really only pretended to. When the girl she loved obviously didn’t care, either.

A shiver ran through her at that thought. But it was true, wasn’t it? It was at least true in the way that mattered. Marinette cared, but it was the wrong type of care.

“I’m not,” she said; then, with shuddering voice, she felt herself continue with, “H-how could I b-be o-okay?”

He didn’t reply at first. She could just barely hear his breathing. Then he said, “Yeah.” Like that was helpful in any way.

“It’s not fair,” she said.

“No.” He sounded safer in that statement, spoke it a little bit quicker.

“She’ll never love me. Never.”

No response this time.

“I — I’ll never get what I want from her. R-right?”

“... I don’t know.”

“I s-still love her, Plagg. It’s so stupid and — and, but I do. I love her.”

She turned to look at him. His eyes shot up wide in something that might have been terror. “You should follow your heart,” he said, and it was equally pointless as insecure.

Could she really blame him for that, though? It wasn’t exactly like she was being fair to him. It wasn’t like Marinette was being fair to either of them. Nothing was fair right now, in fact.

“I don’t want to love her,” she said, and it was the easiest thing to say so far. Perhaps that meant it was honest. Perhaps a lie was just easier to deal with when the truth hurt so much. “Why do I have to love her?”

Her stupid, stupid eyes had looked at Marinette’s stupid, stupid refusal and stupid, stupid avoidance, had breathed in the stupid, stupid air that smelled like stupid, stupid Marinette enough to make her chest crumple inwards, and her stupid, stupid heart had taken stupid, stupid pity on Marinette. Like Zoé was a tin can tied to a cat’s tail, and Marinette was the cat. The cat trying to run away, and the can helplessly yanked around in its wake.

Love… it wasn’t a choice. It was a wound. Something that wasn’t going to go away just because Marinette didn’t reciprocate. It would either keep bleeding, or it would fade to a scar over time.

“There’s nothing wrong with being in love,” said Plagg.

“There is, if she’s never going to love me back.” Zoé closed her eyes, curled up just a little tighter.

Marinette wasn’t stupid. Not really. She just didn’t know what was going inside Zoé right now. Zoé was the stupid one, because she was the one who knew, yet still didn’t know any better.

Everything was stupid.

Love was stupid.

Alya Césaire was stupid. She had been allowed to kiss Marinette, and they weren’t even dating and Alya didn’t even want to.

Everything was so, so stupid.

Stupid Marinette. Marinette was stupid, because she wasn’t stupid. She was terrible, because she wasn’t. If she were terrible, it would be so easy to stop being in love, it would be so easy for Zoé to argue with herself that she should stop. But because all she could see when she looked at Marinette was a soft little girl who deserved to be loved more than anything, because she could tell despite everything that stupidstupid Marinette did care about her, the little kindling of hope still burned. She still wanted Marinette to fall in love with her, and that was a horrible thing to feel.

The thing Alya had done — to tell Marinette no, to tell her off — Zoé knew she could never do that. Not like this. She would keep bleeding, even though she wanted nothing more than to stop.

Zoé curled up again. Maybe she looked like a cat. If she did, that was a small consolation — because Plagg, at the very least, wasn’t stupid.

“Plagg…” she mumbled, almost hoping he wouldn’t hear her.

But of course he did hear her. “Hey,” he said, exceedingly gentle.

“You know people say that hate isn’t the opposite of love?”

She couldn’t see his expression. But she could guess it when he replied, “I haven’t heard that, but… if you say so…”

“Well… I think I’m feeling that right now,” she said.

Her temples hurt. As did her jaw, for whatever reason.

“I’m sure it’s going to be okay,” said Plagg. Somehow, it helped. Just a tiny bit.

“Yeah.” She swallowed. “Yeah…”

“I’m… I’ll have the cheese now,” he said. “I’ll be back soon.”

She was out cold before he returned.

Chapter Text

Marinette was torn out of her worried daydreams when she felt Sabine’s hand on her shoulder. “Are you okay to go in?”

The large cement structure of the Cour de Cassation towered in front of them. Inside, hundreds of people worked every day to ensure some kind of justice would happen, or so they were told in class. It was a place that imposed not just through its size but also because it commanded introspection. The kind where Marinette wondered if this was truly her only crime: if lying to Adrien and the city about Gabriel Agreste, if failing to stop his plans, were the only thing she deserved punishment for.

She couldn’t believe there wouldn’t be anything. She had made enough howlers in her time. Maybe they would uncover more during questioning, and put her on trial for that too. When she was in New York and a sentimonster attacked Paris. When she stole Alya’s phone. When she hurt all kinds of people just by being an idiot in love. Maybe those weren’t crimes, but they didn’t look any better on her resume for that.

She sighed quietly and tried to pull back to the present.

Sabine’s question wasn’t an easy question to answer. If she could choose to do anything, she would rather be anywhere else — she would pay her penance to Adrien by apologising to him, by grovelling at his feet. She would do anything he wanted, and then she would leave him alone, and then she would keep on going through life as an anonymous nobody. She would say sorry to Nathalie and Kagami and Félix and Amelie for forcing them to play along with her, and then leave them alone as well.

But she was here. She wasn’t okay, but she knew she needed to go inside. Going in was perhaps one of the few things she actually was okay in regards to, if only because she knew it had to happen.

“I’m okay,” she lied.

Sabine nodded. “You go first, okay, honey? We’ll be right behind you.”

Tom, who had been silent for the past five minutes except to clear his throat, cleared his throat again. “Erm, I could hold the door for you if you want?”

But Marinette didn’t answer that question. Maybe she ought to be punished for that too, but she didn’t want to have him do anything for her and she also didn’t want to reject his offer. It was easier to just walk up the steps to the entrance and pretend like she didn’t hear. And when she reached the top she held open the door for them, because it was the least she could do for getting them into this mess. Tom smiled awkwardly as he passed through, and she knew he knew she’d heard him.

The Cour’s lobby was way too long and echoed with every footstep. A reminder, perhaps, that they were being watched. And as they came near the middle of that cavernous space they could even see scattered groups of people turning to look at them. More accurately, they were turning towards Marinette.

In specific, a young white man in a brown pressed suit approached them from a corner. He had a mousy look about him, and didn’t give off the impression of anyone with authority. “Marinette Dupain-Cheng and family?” he said, extending the last two words as though he was unsure about them.

“We are, yes,” said Sabine. “We’re here for a meeting?”

“Indeed,” said the man. “I’m Jean Dupont. I’m here to guide you to the meeting room. I will also be present during the meeting, but only for protocol reasons.”

“Then who will we be talking to?” Sabine asked, maybe a little insistent this time.

“Well, there will be police present, and also a lawyer.” The man coughed into his fist. “I should take you there, and they can answer your questions better.”

Tom reverently whispered, “Huh,” under his breath as they started to walk. Their footsteps were dampened on the lacquered stairs compared to the marble floor below, but the echoing was still loud, and stayed that way until they entered a door into a smaller hallway — where the noise level mercifully dropped. But the roof was still high up, and there was still ample space wall to wall; there was nowhere to hide.

They kept walking for several minutes. Their guide was incredibly quiet — Jean, that was his name, but she had completely forgotten his last name. He said nothing, and even his feet seemed to echo less than hers. As a result, the only sounds their little group made as it progressed through the courthouse were three pairs of clacking shoes, and Tom’s unconscious gasps as he saw new hallways, new paintings, new doors. It was crushing, like everything was set up just to make her break and spill more secrets to fill the massive void between floor and ceiling.

Eventually, though, Jean stopped outside a door that seemed not much unlike any other door they passed. Marinette scanned it; the main difference was that this one had a golden plate beside it that read, ‘Meeting room 31’. At the very least, she presumed that was a unique quality of this room.

Jean knocked. Then he said, “Mlle Dupain-Cheng has arrived,” his cheek almost touching the wood as he did so.

There was some kind of motion inside. A table’s legs scraping against the floor, perhaps. Then, footsteps approached rapidly.

And then, the door opened, and Miss Bustier — no, Mayor Bustier — stood in the opening, dressed in her usual bluish-white suit, her hand on the doorknob. Her eyes found Marinette immediately.

“Marinette!” she said. She sounded relieved and distressed at the same time, and stepped forward and took Marinette by the shoulders; her lips seemed like they couldn’t decide if they wanted to frown or not.

“M-miss Bustier!” said Marinette, committing yet another sin that should be put into the case against her.

“Are you okay?” said Bustier.

“Er,” said Marinette. Why was Bustier here? She wasn’t a lawyer, and she wasn’t a cop. She was a mayor. Was she meant to be a witness or something, to corroborate that Marinette had indeed been gone from class a lot during akuma attacks?

Bustier’s eyes widened suddenly. She let go and stepped back, and brushed her jacket straight. “Ahem. I’m sorry, Marinette. I’m not supposed to be here. I just had to make sure you’re doing fine in the middle of all this.”

“Ermhm,” said Tom, clearing his throat yet again. He stepped forward and pretended to take off the hat he didn’t wear, giving a little bow in the process. “What a surprise to see you here, Caline.”

“Yes,” said Sabine. “What an unexpected honour for the mayor herself to welcome us.” She bowed a little stilted.

“It’s good to see you too,” said Bustier. She glanced at Jean, who shrugged; then she turned to Marinette. “So, I just wanted to make sure everyone’s all right. Given the nature of the case… if this all goes to court, I’m technically a spokesperson of the side against you, Marinette. I won’t be involved in the actual proceedings in any way, but I represent the city, and that means I… ah.” She finished that sentence by swallowing. “You see.”

Marinette felt her chest contract. ‘Please hate me,’ she wanted to say. ‘Please don’t let me off the hook. We both know why I’m here. You were always so forgiving to Chloé, and Chloé was terrible, but the things I did wrong actually matter.’ But she couldn’t say that out loud, not here, not to her. She could only pray the words in her head and hope they made it through the empty air.

“I also made sure your first meeting was on more neutral ground,” Bustier went on, looking to Sabine. “Originally, they were going to interrogate Marinette alone at the police station, but… given the circumstances, I don’t think she needs that pressure. This room is a little nicer, and there are windows… and, er. I shouldn’t say more. Officially, I’m not even here, and I’d rather you didn’t tell anybody I came to see you. I just had to know… Um,” She spoke like she was in the middle of being chased. Maybe she was. It just wasn’t right for things to be like this. Marinette should have come to the police station, alone, and be put into a cage while they talked to her.

“How is Harmonie?” Marinette asked, to try and change the topic. “Isn’t she with you today?”

“She’s with Giséle at home,” said Bustier. For the first time since she appeared through the door, it sounded like she wasn’t out of breath. She even smiled faintly. “She’s usually there. I only bring her to work when Giséle’s at the doctor’s and we can’t find a s— oh, I really need to go. But thanks for asking, Marinette.”

Marinette didn’t say, ‘You’re welcome.’ She just nodded. There were too many other words first in line for her to open her mouth, those would all fall out first.

“Thank you for helping,” said Sabine. Tom made a ‘m-hm’ sound. “I’m sure Marinette appreciates it.”

“Yes,” said Tom. “Thank you.”

“This is a very difficult case,” said Bustier, and her smile turned a little sour before fading. “I’m only glad to help, if — oh, I really need to go, I have meetings… I hope you’ll do well, Marinette.”

And with that, and a last look straight into Marinette’s eyes, she turned to go back out the corridor they had just come through to get here. Tom and Sabine attempted goodbyes, but Bustier only acknowledged them with a throw of her head, and then she went through a door and was gone.

“The mayor is very concerned for this case,” said Jean. “She believes it started off on the wrong foot.”

The wrong foot. Like it wasn’t a wrong foot that was behind everything. Marinette’s, when she decided to lie. Marinette’s, when she stepped forward to detransform and allowed Gabriel to stun her. Marinette’s, the way it ached even when she was standing still. If Bustier was going to put herself in danger by breaking protocol, just so Marinette could be more comfortable while proving herself guilty, then the wrong foot was Marinette’s only. She deserved so much worse.

It wasn’t just Bustier on the line, either, but Harmonie and Giséle too. It was her parents. It was Alya and it was Kagami and Zoé. It was Nathalie and Adrien. It was everyone.

A lot of people hated her right now. She was resolute in not reading comments anywhere lately, and in not engaging with social media, but she heard people at school talking. She heard the news on the television downstairs. She saw the way the people who still cared about her looked at her, like there was an obvious reason to sympathise with her. People hated her, and they were right to.

Even the people who hated her before probably had good reason. Chloé had probably realised where things were going, and bullied her to stop her from ruining Adrien’s life out of friendship. Félix, exactly the same. Lila… she hated to give Lila anything, but she did treat Lila horribly at the start. Maybe Lila only did what she did because Marinette had provoked her — as Ladybug, as herself.

Gabriel… she wasn’t going to give him any grace. But he had at least given the cataclysmed foot to the one who most deserved it other than him.

Maybe the police officers inside would hate her, too. If they did, she wouldn’t hold it against them. Maybe Jean hated her too, and was just hiding it.

“Either way,” Jean went on. “Let’s get you inside. They’re waiting for you.”

“Yes,” said Sabine. She grabbed Marinette’s hand, firmly but without squeezing. “Are you ready, dear?”

Marinette looked at the side of her mother’s head and imagined what the expression looked like from the front. Angry, maybe, or determined. Disappointed.

She sighed to herself. Of course she knew her parents supported her. Alya, Alix, Kagami, Zoé, they were all on her side. Even Bustier was, from the way things looked. Even if she wished things were different, she couldn’t just tear herself away now and go in by herself.

“I’m okay,” she lied again. “Let’s go.”

Jean led them inside. The room looked a little like the art room at Françoise Dupont. It was about as spacious, and there were windows that let in plenty of natural light, Other than that, though, the similarities were over: the décor was ostentatious and was probably bought for a significant sum of money, and there was only one area where you could sit: around a long, slightly oval table in the middle of the room. The rest of the floor was covered in carpet and nothing else. Yet more empty space.

Seated around the table were three people: two police officers in uniform, one of them with an open laptop in front of her and the other with a stack of paper; and a middle-aged brown-haired white woman dressed in mostly green, except for a scarf in many shades of purple. Her somewhat-dishevelled appearance made her stand out against the thoroughly clean look of not just the suited-up officers, but also the room itself.

“Mlle Dupain-Cheng and her parents,” announced Jean. The police officers got to their feet.

“Hello,” said one, a clean-shaven white man who was quite tall, and whose medium-length blonde hair was slicked down his neck. “I’m Emmanuel Champs-Leclerc, police lieutenant. And this,” he held out his hand towards his companion, who was a slightly-older-looking Asian woman, “is police sergeant Liên Colette Nguyễn.”

“Hello,” said Liên, with a very slight nod.

The woman dressed in green — who didn’t stand up — also nodded, but with somewhat more gusto. There was a pen in front of her, placed on top of an open but empty notebook. “I’m Sylvie Schwarz. Lawyer.”

Sabine stepped forward and bowed deeply. “Good morning. I’m Sabine, Marinette’s mother.”

“And I’m Tom Dupain,” said Tom, and he bowed a little less and didn’t step forward. “I’m Tom, her father.”

Marinette didn’t say anything. She figured it was obvious who she was.

“Please, have a seat,” said the police lieutenant, and held out his hand towards the free chairs at the table; there were eight in all. They took their places in chairs that were as far from the cops as they could, while Jean picked one of the chairs up and simply carried it away from the table, bringing it to one of the windows and sitting down there. Marinette glanced at him; he raised his eyebrows, and she turned away again.

“Now,” said the police lieutenant, once everyone was in place. “Before we get started, let me explain the procedure of this meeting. We are going to collect information about events connected to Gabriel Agreste, Monarch, Ladybug,” here he looked directly at Marinette, “and this entire situation. We want to get a clear picture of all the events of the case, and everyone who was involved.”

He didn’t sound like anything. There was no real emotion in anything he said. He was reading something off a sheet of paper in his head, maybe, even though his diction was a little bit strange in places, like he was still improvising the wording if not the contents.

“Colette will be taking notes,” he went on. “She may also ask questions, but I will be the main interrogator. Everything that happens in this meeting will be recorded and also written down.” He put a small recording device on the table and pushed a button on it; a light started to glow red.

“And I,” said the lawyer, raising her hand, “will be here to ensure that everything happening is above board. You are not accused of anything yet, Mlle Dupain-Cheng, and this is not a trial against you.” Here, Sabine sighed with something that could have been relief. “You may end up going to trial later, but for the time being, the police are only gathering information. If I feel they are going too far at any point, I will interrupt. I should also point out that I am hired by the city, but I'm not your lawyer. I'm a neutral party who will observe proper conduct.”

Mme Schwarz did have emotion in her voice. It was a strange kind of overbearing compassion, but it was there. Her expression, framed over flat-rimmed glasses that rested at the tip of her nose, gave off an air of — perhaps not superiority, but at least the kind of attitude that a teacher could have towards a student. Condescending, but not aggressive. Marinette nodded, but only because she didn’t feel comfortable doing nothing.

“Is everything clear?” said the lieutenant. He barely waited for a second before pushing on. “All right. This is an interrogation of Marinette Dupain-Cheng and her parents Tom Dupain and Sabine Cheng, held on Tuesday the 6th of september this year. The time is 09:29.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “First, we need to establish basic facts about this case. You, Marinette Dupain-Cheng, are the heroine known as Ladybug. Correct?”

“... I am,” said Marinette. She didn’t look him in the eye, but instead focused on a point on the table that was directly between the two officers. Her breath felt heavy. Liên’s fingers clattered against the keyboard.

“And do you still claim that Gabriel Agreste was the supervillain variously known as Hawk Moth, Shadow Moth, and Monarch?”

“I, um, I do.” Marinette fidgeted a little. “He was.”

“Do you have proof for this allegation?”

“I… fought him?” she said. It felt like the wrong answer as soon as she said it. “I, I saw him. We were at his house.”

She didn’t see his expression clearly, but she saw him folding his hands on the table. “You see, Mlle Dupain-Cheng, the accusation you have made of him is very serious. We can’t put into our records that he was a supervillain without unquestionable proof. He was a very important and beloved man, after all.”

A very beloved man once she started lying about him, maybe. Before that, he was considered a cranky old git. She gritted her teeth. This was a stupid thing to talk about — telling the truth about him was the one thing she had done right in this situation, and it hadn’t even been her choice to do so. Not — not to all of Paris, at least.

“If I may, lieutenant,” said the lawyer. “Most of the response to the akuma event has fully accepted that everything she said while the akuma controlled her was true. She must be confused about the question. If everyone thinks it’s true and blames her for it…”

“Not everyone does,” replied the lieutenant. “I ask because as an officer of the law, I have to remain impartial. We are here to gather information.”

“My daughter would never lie about something like this,” said Sabine. “She isn’t the kind of person to do that.”

The lieutenant cleared his throat. “Mme Cheng, there can be many reasons for a lie. Maybe your daughter simply believes it to be true, but someone lied to her. Maybe she misremembers. All we are asking for is corroborating evidence.”

“I fought him. I saw him transform,” said Marinette. She could hear the underlying snarl in her own voice. “He hur— I know it was him.”

The sergeant’s fingers kept striking the keyboard rapidly. She was definitely typing more than just the words that were being said.

“Lieutenant, I suggest you abandon this line of questioning,” said the lawyer. “She is clearly not prepared, so there’s no information to be gained. There will be other interviews that can give you what you’re looking for.”

The lieutenant sighed. Marinette still didn’t look up at him. “Fair. I apologise for the confusion, mademoiselle. If you can come up with anything that can support your statement during the course of this interview, please let us know, but we’ll move on to the next question for now. Do you remember the events of August 31st?”

August 31st. August… “What day was that,” she said more than asked.

“The day that a spider-like akuma tentatively known as ‘Adrien’ transmitted your confession and allegations all across Paris,” he replied.

“Oh. Right.” She swallowed. “Yes, I remember. I remember everything.”

“Do you remember when it tied you up and held you in front of a recording device?”

“Yes.”

“Do you have clear memories of everything you said?”

“Y-yes. I… I think so.”

“Marinette,” said Liên, half interrupting the ‘think so’. “Were you in control of what you said?”

Marinette glanced up at her, just for a moment. The sergeant was watching her carefully, with her fingers at the ready above the keyboard. “... I was not.”

“Were you mind controlled?” she asked, typing this time.

“N-no. I — I think maybe, um…” She felt a hand on her back, knew it was her dad’s from the weight of it, the direction of the thumb. “I was awake the whole time. The akuma didn’t make me — he didn’t make me say anything I didn’t have in my head.”

“So the akumatised person only transmitted your own words out to Paris,” said the lieutenant.

There was something in what he said that made Marinette wary to respond. Some hidden lure, asking her to just say ‘yes’. “No, he didn’t,” she said. “He, he forced me to talk. But he didn’t make me, um, he didn’t make me say anything that wasn’t… true. I had everything in my head, um, yeah.”

“I see. You were made to speak, but only your own words?”

“Ye, yes.” It still felt wrong to say it like that, but she would much rather get the question over with. The spinning in her head, the words that rolled out of her mouth, the way everyone looked at her once she was freed, just — just everything about the day, it was something she’d rather forget.

“Would you stand by every word you uttered while under the akumatised person’s control?”

She thought about it. It wasn’t exactly something she could stand by or not stand by, because they weren’t really her words. They were more like her thoughts, put into words that were only halfway under her command. But then she thought about it again, and realised he was asking for the same reason he asked about proof before. He was thinking about Nathalie, Tomoe, Adrien.

“I wouldn’t,” she said, trying to sound firm, convinced. “I said… I said things I thought, but maybe they’re not true…”

“You just said you weren’t made to say anything that wasn’t true.”

“I meant, everything I said was — um — it was stuff I thought.” Ugh. This was hard. The man was clearly trying to catch her in something. And he was asking questions that would let him incriminate more people. “I don’t know if, if they’re true, but everything about me specifically was true…”

“I understand.” His folded hands thumped twice against the table. “Do you know who the akumatised person was that day? You identified him by the name of Adrien.”

She wanted to fall into a hole. Why weren’t they talking about anything she actually did? “I did,” she said, very quietly. “He —”

“Could you repeat that?”

“I, er, I did. He’s Adrien Agreste. We had a f-fight and he got akumatised, and it was — it was him.”

“Colette, make a note to confirm that Adrien Agreste is also a person of interest in confirming these statements,” said the lieutenant. 

A rush of terror crashed through Marinette's chest. “N-no!” she said, “he was akumatised! He doesn’t remember anything — he didn’t know anything — when the akuma is purified, you lose your memory! And he didn’t know anything before!”

“He transmitted your words across the city. It’s natural to ask him how much of the situation he remembers, and how much of it he knows.”

“But —”

“Your exact words were, ‘stuff I thought’,” supplied Liên.

“— um.” That was all irrelevant, wasn’t it? She wasn’t arguing about that. She was saying Adrien didn’t deserve to be part of this at all. No matter what. He didn’t know anything, because she never told him anything, and that was the problem in the first place. “I don’t think you should… do anything to him.”

“He is an important part of our investigation regardless,” said the lieutenant. He sounded airy as he said it, almost regretful, but she still wanted to shout at him for it.

But… this was all her fault in the first place, wasn’t it? She couldn’t act like some righteous hero and tell them to stop, because the only reason they were even here was because of her. She swallowed her complaint and nodded, but she knew for certain that she still looked cross.

“Well then,” said the lieutenant. She hated looking him in the eyes, so she didn’t. Eyes on the table. “Do you remember your statement that you ‘helped’ Monarch achieve his goals?”

She nodded. Her mouth ran dry.

“Explain to us — if this is a statement you still stand by — how you helped him.”

“I gave him the Miraculous.” She lifted her hands now, put them flat against the side of her head. She needed to choose her words carefully here. “I didn’t mean to. I made a stupid mistake, but he got the Miraculous because, um, because of me.”

“I don’t understand,” the lieutenant went on. “Can you give us a bit more detail?”

“I did. I, um… I told him… I already defeated him,” she said. “We battled in his basement. He, er, he lost his Miraculous and I defeated him. But I tried to talk to him, and he tricked me. So he got the Miraculous from me, and that’s — that’s how he won.” This also felt stupid. This was the one part that made her look less bad. “And, and then he asked me to make sure Adrien only remembered the good parts. And I, and I did that. I helped him by lying afterwards.”

“Please clarify. Did you actively help him achieve his alleged goals as Monarch, or didn’t you?”

This time, she looked him straight in the face. It was just out of sheer annoyance. “I helped him as Gabriel Agreste,” she said in a low growl. “On purpose. I didn’t mean to help him get the Miraculous, but that happened because I wasn’t good enough. But I still helped him by lying.”

“Marinette,” said Sabine, “don’t you think you’re exaggerating a little?” She was obviously trying to sound gentle, but even just from her voice it was easy to tell that she was frightened. A look to the side confirmed it; Marinette saw the anxiousness in her eyes as they darted to the police officers and then back again.

“I’m not,” Marinette said. The agitation made her voice sound muffled, almost twisted. “I know what I did.”

“Excuse me,” said the lawyer. “I think this is getting off the actual topic.”

“I’m telling the truth!”

The lieutenant’s hand struck the table. “Order,” he said. “I want everyone to calm down.”

Marinette glared at him. He could be calm, sitting there with his inane questions. She… couldn’t. There was no way to be calm about anything.

“Mlle Dupain-Cheng,” he continued, after a moment of silence. “We will move on from that question for the time being. Instead, can you tell us about your… hero colleagues?”

She breathed in through her nose for as long as she was physically able. Then she breathed out through her mouth. Liên’s fingers tapped rapidly across the keyboard nonetheless.

“What do you mean by that,” Marinette asked.

“I would like to hear about the other heroes. You know their identities, correct? Can you tell us a little about them?”

“I won’t tell you anything.”

“You understand that as officers of the law, we are concerned with the safety of the city,” the lieutenant said. It almost sounded like she hadn’t heard her — but no, he was just ignoring the actual contents of what she said. He knew perfectly well what she meant, she could tell from his expression. “Naturally, we are also worried about superpowered teenagers running around. For their sake, as much as for the sake of everyone else. We also wouldn’t share sensitive information outside the walls of this room, unless it was deemed relevant to the case.”

“So what would make you deem something as ‘relevant’?” said Marinette, unable to keep the acid out of her voice. Her eyes landed on the recording device for a moment; the red LED was still on. “When you decide someone else is guilty too?”

“Nobody is guilty yet,” said Liên. “We are only gathering information about a case. You don’t have to worry, Marinette.”

“Yes,” said the lieutenant, nodding slowly. “We have no desire to prosecute anyone who isn’t guilty. And the heroes are, as far as we know, protectors of the city. Just like us. Correct?”

Marinette didn’t reply. She folded her arms even tighter.

The lieutenant sighed a few seconds later. “Very well. Is it true that you chose all the heroes, by giving them their Miraculous?”

Was that safe to answer? Maybe, maybe not. But if it was a way to redirect from the previous topic, she would take that chance. “Yeah,” she muttered. “Not Cat Noir. But the others.”

“Where did Cat Noir get his Miraculous?”

That was not safe to answer. “He… got it from someone,” she said. “I wasn’t there.”

“You say ‘someone’. Do you know this someone?”

“He’s not —” she started. Then the image of Fu, in London, with Marianne, flashed across her eyes. He wasn’t even worth bringing up to say she wouldn’t talk about him. He was a non-factor in everything that was going on right now. “I don’t know,” she continued — “I wasn’t there.”

“Hm-hm,” said the lieutenant. The sergeant kept tapping on the computer. “How did you receive your Miraculous, Mlle Dupain-Cheng? Or did you always possess it?”

She wanted the ceiling to fall down on top of them. But at least she had an explanation for this one. “I found it in a box in my room.” Sabine gasped.

“Do you know who put it there?” the lieutenant asked.

“Y— I wasn’t there!”

“It’s okay,” said the lawyer. “You don’t need to be upset. They are not accusing you of anything.”

Marinette shot her with a glare. That wasn’t what she was worried about in the first place.

“Are you sure you don’t know, Marinette?” said Liên. “What about your parents? If it was in their room, someone must have broken in, correct? Did you see anything, Mme Cheng? M Dupain?”

“I — I never knew,” said Sabine.

“We never noticed any signs of breaking in,” said Tom. “Honey… do you think that old Chinese man who visited the bakery, when —”

“Dad!” growled Marinette.

“So the suspected owner of these Miraculous is an old Chinese man,” said the lieutenant. “Write that down, Colette.”

“Already done.”

“He’s not!” said Marinette. “He isn’t! I’m the owner of — I was the guardian of the Miraculous!”

“Ah,” said the lieutenant. “So you were already in possession of the Miraculous before becoming Ladybug?”

She frowned and leaned back as far as the chair would let her. “I thought I was being interviewed to figure out how guilty I am.”

“Mlle Dupain-Cheng, you are not considered guilty —”

“I know that!” she snapped back at the lawyer. “I know they have a thing or whatever. But I know what I did.”

“Please relax. We don’t need to make a scene out of this,” the lawyer continued, as Tom’s hands landed on Marinette’s shoulders.

“All we want is to get a full picture of the situation,” said the lieutenant. “The more we know, the better our decisions. You understand, right?”

His eyebrows furrowed; his eyes were stuck on Marinette. They felt like probes more than points of contact. But she knew she wasn’t getting anywhere like this, so she shut her mouth.

“Let’s move on to another question.” He didn’t seem bothered to not have received an answer on his previous question. Liên typed rapidly even now. “Tell us about Queen Bee.”

Marinette blinked. “What?”

“Queen Bee. Also known as Chloé Bourgeois. You recruited her to be a hero, right?”

She nodded before she could help it.

“Is it okay for you to talk about her, given that her identity is publicly known?”

“Er,” she said, looking down. Chloé was a difficult person to talk about at all. But at least if she did, she would be discussing her own misdeeds, and she wasn’t that worried about Chloé coming under fire in the first place. “I… I guess.”

“As we understand, the two of you were not on good terms.”

“You can say that again,” said Marinette. She sighed, turned her head away.

“What was the cause of the bad blood between you?”

She didn’t answer straight away. The question just felt… pointless. “She bullied me,” was her eventual answer, a few moments later.

“Do you know why?”

“Officer,” said Sabine. Her hand grabbed Marinette’s; she sounded almost irritated. “Bullies don’t pick their victims for good reasons.”

He shrugged at her. “For strange or antisocial behaviour? Unusual interests? A perceived wrongdoing? Weird clothes?”

“I don’t know why,” snapped Marinette, to stop Sabine from saying anything else. “It doesn’t matter. She bullied me. We weren’t on good terms. That’s all that matters.”

This time, he nodded, like he agreed or something. “So. Would you mind telling us why you picked her to be a hero?”

Right. They were getting back on topic. “I wanted to give her a chance. I was wrong to.”

“A chance she immediately used to endanger civilians by nearly causing an accident on the metro.”

“Yes. I made a bad choice. She wasn’t a good hero.”

“Would you agree, then, that your judgement might be flawed?”

She stared, unsure whether she understood what he was trying to say but absolutely certain she didn’t like his tone. “I’m sorry?”

“Would you agree that you might have made bad choices with other Miraculous holders?”

“I trust them. All of them.” She shook her head for emphasis.

“Félix Fathom, also known as Argos. He —”

“I didn’t choose him.”

The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. “Did he also receive his Miraculous from this… ‘someone’? Colette, remind us of his description.”

“An ‘old Chinese man’ is all we have so far —”

“It wasn’t him! Félix got his Miraculous from —”

But she cut herself off. Even if she disliked Félix, she couldn’t sell him out as someone who had actively collaborated with Monarch at one point. Not even if — she recalled the earlier question about proof that Gabriel had been Monarch. Félix might be proof for that… but he didn’t deserve whatever he would get if that story came out.

“Yes?” Liên prompted.

“He… I gave it to him.”

“So you have given out Miraculous to two wearers who have since used them to endanger Parisian lives.”

Marinette looked down. Swallowed. Both her parents had their hands on her shoulders now, but they felt more like pressure than support. “Yes,” she said, bitterly accepting the fact she needed to take this blame. “I did. But I took it back from Chloé.”

“Do you think any of the other Miraculous wearers are at risk of threatening the city with their superpowers?”

“No!” She shook her head vigorously, but still didn’t look up. “I trust them. All of them.”

“I see,” said the lieutenant. “Let’s talk about your replacement, Namy Tentou. Some would say she looks quite frightening, given her costume. Do you trust her?”

“Y-yes,” she replied, before realising that was a really stupid thing to say.

“You know her identity, then?”

“No. No, I… I just think she’ll do a better job than I did. That’s all. And the costume doesn’t mean she’s evil.”

The lieutenant tapped all his fingers on the table in one, rapid, loud movement. “I take it you know more than you’re letting on, but our question about her isn’t to throw out accusations. We just want to know more about these heroes, now that akumas have returned.”

They were throwing out accusations with every word they said. But she couldn’t point that out, because this conversation was already bad enough and she just wanted it over with. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “But she isn’t evil. Don’t judge her.”

The look he gave her told her that she had just said too much. He leaned in and whispered something to the sergeant, who nodded and then typed extra fast for a few seconds.

“How about Kitty Noire, Cat Noir’s replacement? Do you find her trustworthy?”

She didn’t reply. She only glared at him.

“You find her untrustworthy?”

“No!”

“Do you know her?”

“No!”

“Are you lying to us?”

“No!”

He sighed theatrically. “Well, I suppose you’re not going to tell us anything about the other Miraculous users. What if I ask if you had any collaborators, though?”

“Collaborators?”

“People who worked with you as Ladybug without gaining superpowers. Friends, associates, someone who might have known you underneath the mask.”

“I’m not telling you about anyone!”

“No, I don’t suppose you will.” There was a trace of annoyance to his tone as he continued, “We have other people to interview as well. Perhaps they will be more willing to aid us.”

Her breath stopped for a moment. “Who.”

“We are not at liberty to say. We respect people’s privacy, Mlle Dupain-Cheng.”

Was he trying to force her to speak? It almost sounded like he was threatening her. Well — if he was, it was pointless. Unless…

… unless they spoke to Adrien, and Adrien told them about the other heroes he knew of, and the cops started piecing things together from that…

She couldn’t say anything. She wouldn’t say anything. She would keep mum, she had to, because nobody needed to be dragged into this. The people to blame were Gabriel and her.

“I respect the heroes’ privacy,” said Marinette.

“Alya Césaire.”

This time, her heart nearly stopped. She stared at him, hoping for even a tiny clue; his eyes revealed nothing.

“... She’s my best friend,” she said eventually. “What of her?”

“Did you reveal anything to her about your workings as Ladybug?”

“No.”

“Did you tell her anything about your suspicions on Hawk Moth?”

“No.”

“Did you ever give her a Miraculous?”

“No!”

This time, he was the one to scrutinise her. She frowned defiantly at him, hoping he would get nothing. Liên’s fingers kept crackling against the keyboard.

“Right,” he said eventually. “How about Alix Kubdel, also known as Bunnyx?”

“I didn’t tell her anything!” said Marinette. Her spine tingled uncomfortably. “Alix is not involved. I gave her the Miraculous, but that was — that was temporary. For safekeeping. She doesn’t know anything.”

“You mean to say that you never discussed your work as Ladybug with anyone, or received aid from anyone?”

“No, I — I got help. But only from the people I chose to be heroes. And I didn’t discuss… things, whatever, with them.”

She knew she didn’t sound convincing. But at least sounding unconvincing was better than telling them the truth.

“I kept secrets from everyone. The whole time. I didn’t tell anyone about Gabriel Agreste, or about what I was doing,” she finished.

“I see. Did you tell your parents anything?”

“No!”

“M Dupain? Mme Cheng?”

“I didn’t tell them anything!”

She looked at Sabine, then turned her head to Tom. It was a reflex, almost; she was asking them to back her up, because they knew she was telling the truth right now, but Tom just stared cautiously, and Sabine opened her mouth but didn’t say anything.

“Mum! Dad!”

Sabine finally breathed in. She glanced between Marinette and the police officers a few times, clearly worried — and when she did say something, it sounded like she was afraid to speak at all. “Excuse me, officer… how do you know so much about Marinette’s friends?”

“That is confidential. Did you know anything about your daughter’s activities?”

“No. No… we did not,” said Sabine, looking back at Marinette. “We only learned when the rest of Paris did…”

“She kept a whole base of operations in your home, and you never knew?”

“I didn’t!” said Marinette, snapping her neck back to the lieutenant. “All I needed was a box. It didn’t take up much space at all!”

“Did you ever suspect anything, M Dupain?”

“No,” said Tom, mercifully short.

“Maybe we noticed she acted strange sometimes, but we never would have imagined…” said Sabine, less merciful.

“I kept the secret from everyone.” Marinette sank even lower in her chair, staring at the middle of the table. “Everything that happened is on my shoulders. Mine, and Gabriel Agreste’s.”

“I see,” said the lieutenant. “We're back to this. You still maintain your accusation against Gabriel Agreste.”

“Yes!”

“How about your accusations against Nathalie Sancoeur? Or Tomoe Tsurugi?”

She closed her mouth. Just for a moment, she looked up at him — but she realised she would be giving something away if she kept meeting his eyes, that the truth might be written on her eyeballs in glowing letters. Nathalie had turned away from Gabriel. She was better now. And even worse, if she got Nathalie and Tomoe in trouble, that would cause trouble for Kagami and Adrien. Really, really bad trouble.

“... I was misinformed,” she mumbled, eyes on her lap. “I didn’t… I knew Tomoe was a business associate, so I assumed. And Nathalie was his assistant, so I also assumed. I didn’t know for sure.”

“I remind you again of what you said at the beginning of this interview, Mlle Dupain-Cheng. You said the akumatised person never made you say anything that wasn’t true.”

“I already corrected that,” she growled. “I said things I thought were true.”

“In your interview with Nadja Chamack last week, you also said that everything you were made to say on the day of the attack was true.”

“So I was wrong! I only meant the things I said about myself, not — I can be wrong about things, you know!”

“Indubitably.”

“Officer, I’m afraid nitpicking on word choice like this isn’t helpful,” said the lawyer. “It borders on antagonism. Please move on.”

The lieutenant sighed, and looked over at the sergeant. “Is there anything else we were planning to ask today?”

“Nothing that we planned for, sir.”

“Then you may be excused for today, Mlle Dupain-Cheng.” He was so — blasé about it. Like he hadn’t just implied repeatedly that she was a liar, suggested that Gabriel Agreste was innocent, tried to dig up dirt on everyone she knew. “We will call you back for other interviews. Please make sure, all of you, that you’re available on your phones at all times of day.”

“Yeah,” said Marinette, frowning. “Got it.” She pushed up from her chair.

“Marinette —” started Sabine.

“We’re free to leave,” said Marinette. “Let’s go!”

Without a second glance at anyone or anything, she turned around from the table and walked as fast as possible towards the door. Her chair fell over as she walked away, but she didn’t bother to turn around, or to fix it. She wanted out, before the air became so filled with bile that she choked on it.

Out in the hallway, she leaned up against a wall and gulped down heavy breaths. She closed her eyes, pushed her shoulders against the wood, kicked at empty air.

Urgh. Things were terrible, and it probably wasn't even ten o'clock yet. The cops had only asked awful questions, and the lawyer hadn’t been any help, and — and she would have to come back for other interviews later, they said that, they actually said that, and she had guessed this wouldn’t be the end of it but if she had to sit in that room again, with that police lieutenant, and answer more questions that were just wrong —

Things would have been so much easier if she just told the truth from the start. If she just… never told anyone that Gabriel was a hero, and instead used that press conference to say that he had been a terrible man who broke the city apart for his stupid wish. To expose that Tomoe was his collaborator, who built the Alliances on purpose to help him get what he wanted. That Nathalie had been Mayura. To tell all the hard truths then, when she still had a good reputation and people didn’t hate her and she could use Ladybug as — as a mask that gave her authority.

To… turn Adrien and Kagami into orphans. To put Nathalie in jail rather than let her live with Adrien, as they both so clearly wanted. To drag Adrien’s name through the mud…

Or no. That wasn’t even the problem. The problem was that she wasn’t good enough as Ladybug in the first place, that she had failed to stop his plans, that she had given him the Miraculous on a silver platter — twice — and let him use the wish because of her stupid idiot thoughts that he had actually reformed.

She hated telling the lies. Of course she did. They were lies and they were big, but… there was no way around them. When she stood there in the wreckage of his sewer graveyard and the light blasted past her, the truth was no longer an option. There were no bodies, no statements, not even a single thing that could have actually helped Adrien: the only thing Gabriel had left his son was a lie that she was forced to step into, because the alternative…

… did she even have an alternative at that point? Because the choice she had wanted to make, the thing she had wanted to do for Adrien, was to give him a father even just for a few hours. To make Gabriel see what he had put Adrien through. To make Gabriel face Adrien and actually speak to him, honestly, about what happened and why — so that Adrien would have had a chance to get to terms with everything, and maybe forgive Gabriel to his face. That would have been so much more valuable than… than a single thing Gabriel actually did.

She jammed her face into her hands and breathed out. Gabriel saved Nathalie — and she had to believe that was a good thing. But everything else he did was to run away: from the law, from responsibility, from Adrien. From the pain of his own Cataclysm wound. And that last one… if Gimmi truly read his heart and his soul, then he never regretted what he did. If he did, he would have given Adrien Émilie, not — not any of this mess.

In London, Kagami had said: “You are blinded by love.” Maybe that was true. Maybe she still loved Adrien, and that was why all this was getting to her so much even now. But… really, her only thought when she lied was: ‘I wish I had something better to give him.’ It was: ‘I wish I had taken Pollen off of Gabriel before I detransformed.’ It was… anger, regret, it was love too but the love wasn’t just for Adrien. It was for Nathalie, Kagami, Cat Noir. It was for Alix in the burrow, and for all the kwamis, because the sooner it was all over the sooner everything would be okay for everyone.

And it was the wrong choice. Of course it was. It was a stupid and cruel and terrible choice that was always going to blow up in her face in some way. But in reality it wasn’t really her choice to begin with — it was the final choice at the end of a sequence of choices that were all made by Gabriel Agreste, and the consequences had been foisted upon her. Her choice would have been to tell Adrien the truth, with Gabriel and Nathalie at her side. And when that choice was taken away, she had become an idiot. An idiot who now had to carry everything on her shoulders.

On her foot.

The door opened again as she tried to weight her leg a bit, check how numb it was. She quickly straightened out and tried to readjust her face — her parents stepped out, with downcast expressions. Tom glanced at her, but quickly looked back inside the door.

Then Jean stepped out. She had almost forgotten he existed.

“Thank you, officers,” said Sabine. “We’ll take your advice to heart.”

Jean closed the door. And three pairs of eyes landed hard on Marinette.

Tom made a noise first: he sighed. “Honey… we realise this is hard for you.”

She nodded.

“And this is all going very fast, and people are being cruel to you everywhere, but… did you really have to be so rude with the police?”

Right. They had talked about some things after she left. She breathed in deep. “I wasn’t being rude. I was — I was standing my ground. They weren’t listening to me.”

Sabine sniffed. Tom wrung his hands. “I… suppose they weren’t listening, no. But maybe, if you were a bit more forthcoming with them, they would have… listened more? They are just trying to help.”

She folded her arms and looked away. It was her fault she was here, she knew that, even though it was also Gabriel’s. But — those questions were just wrong. They wanted to involve everyone except her, when everyone except her was innocent. Or if they weren’t, they were too close to someone innocent.

“I’ll lead you back outside,” said Jean, after a few seconds of nothing. He sounded almost gentle this time.

They started to move through the corridors again — Jean in front, Tom and Sabine at the back. Until they had passed through a few doors, and Sabine’s quiet voice said, “Marinette… did you really not have anyone with you? Anyone to share all these problems with?”

Marinette thought: ‘If only you had asked this question at home.’ She thought: ‘If only we weren’t surrounded by echoey walls and people who might listen in.’ She thought: ‘This lie is also going to blow up on me, some day.’

But she also thought that this explosion would be a lot smaller.

“I… didn’t,” she said. It came easier than the lie to Adrien in London. And maybe she could even correct this one in time, so long as Mum and Dad wouldn’t go and tell on her friends to the police afterwards. “I did everything alone.”

It was quiet for a moment. Then Sabine rushed ahead and wrapped arms around her and cried into her shoulder, sharp and bitter. “I’m so sorry we weren’t there for you,” she said.

“Mum… you were there for me. What I did isn’t your fault,” said Marinette.

Sabine only cried more. But she kept walking, like she too wanted out of the building as soon as possible.

They got almost into the main hall — and then, just as Jean was about to open the door through, someone else came through the other way. First came a shortish black woman, with her hair done up in a tight bun — but behind her came Nathalie Sancoeur.

“Nathalie!” gasped Marinette, as Sabine pulled her back against a wall. She looked over her shoulder: Sabine still had tears in her eyes, but now she was frowning angrily. Her arms were wrapped tightly, protectively, around as much of Marinette as she could reach.

Nathalie stopped. She seemed… neutral. “Hello, Marinette. I hope your interview went well.”

“Um…”

“We have to move on. Until we meet again.” Nathalie spoke fast, direct, almost frighteningly so — and then she nodded at her companion, and they walked off again.

“B-bye,” said Marinette to their retreating backs.

Sabine moved to stand between Marinette and Nathalie. It looked like she was glaring at the woman over her shoulder. Tom also moved a little closer, but he was more cautious — he half held out a hand and said, “Are you okay, honey?”

“I’m fine,” sighed Marinette. “Don’t worry about me…”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. I’m sure.” She didn't add, ‘And Nathalie is fine, so don't treat her like that.’

Jean moved up to the door again. “Are we ready to leave?”

“Yes,” said Marinette. “Mum, Dad, let’s go back…”

“Okay,” said Sabine with a sniffle. “We need to be home. Thank you, M…”

“Dupont.”

“Thank you, M Dupont.”

He opened the door for them — but only followed them out on the landing. There he stopped and made a bow. “I’ll have to get back to my work. Safe travels home, M Dupain, Mme Cheng. And Marinette… thank you for your service as Ladybug. I don’t know how this case will go, but I wish you luck.”

Marinette stared, dumbfounded, until she got her wits about her enough to bow back. “Th-thank you,” she said, staring at the floor. “I’m sorry.”

“No apologies needed. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

He left. A short while after, Tom put his arms around Marinette and Sabine to guide them both down the stairs and out the doors.

‘“W-what a nice young man,” said Sabine as Tom opened the door.

“... Yeah,” said Marinette, still dazed. “I guess…”

They turned around and walked home in near silence. They had a solemn lunch in the living room, with Tom and Sabine both exploding to say something but failing to light their own fuses. And then Marinette went to school, alone, for the afternoon classes.

Chapter Text

Zoé peered out through the classroom windows. At the brick walls of the concert hall across the street. The walls were harsh, but also just… boring.

It was half past eleven. Probably. She’d glanced at the clock when it was twenty-seven past, and it felt like three minutes had gone by since. Right now, Marinette was maybe out of the interrogation room. Maybe she had gone home for some well deserved rest. Maybe she and her parents were at a café somewhere, enjoying a nice lunch.

Zoé’s only experience with interrogations was from detective shows. They were nasty and uncomfortable things, where the cops slammed their fists into the table and shouted but the suspects were also guilty. It probably — hopefully — wasn’t like that for Marinette. At least not if there was any justice left in the world.

Then again, if there were any justice left in the world, she and Marinette would be holding hands right now. Kissing, too.

No… that wasn’t justice. That was hope. A hateful hope that would eat her up if she didn’t give it up some time soon.

The bell rang. Zoé sighed, packed her books into her bag, and slung the bag over her shoulders. Just as she’d heaved it on, someone cleared their throat behind her; she spun around and came face to face with Iris.

“Um… h-hey!” said Iris, rolling on the balls of her feet. “Do you… wanna sit together at lunch?”

Zoé smiled, though it probably only came out halfway good. “Y-yeah, that’d be nice,” she said.

“Yeah,” sighed Iris. “I — I don’t have anyone else, um, to sit with. So th-thanks.”

“Really?” said Zoé. “Don’t you know anyone else?”

“N-n-no,” said Iris, scratching her lower arm and looking away. “I j-just moved here, remember?”

“Oh! Right, of course, you mentioned that,” said Zoé, hitching her bag to sit properly over both shoulders. “Well, you can absolutely sit with me. Maybe we’ll find someone else to sit with, too?”

Iris didn’t reply. She just nodded.

It was weird to be in this position. To be the one to welcome someone else who just moved here. Her French was still a little unsteady at times, particularly if she met older people who had southern accents, and she still felt like the new girl in almost every social situation she was in. Even her current class — with Marc and Mireille and Jean — felt so settled, even though there had been a lot of rotation, even though she could be friendly with all of them. She was still largely the outsider, and now she was the insider to someone else who was new.

Well, she didn’t dislike it. She was happy to help, if anything. It was a little bit like being a Marinette to Iris, even though that comparison was kind of upsetting right now.

She stretched out her hand for Iris to take. “Let’s go find a table, then, shall we?”

Iris’s smile was big, and excited, and exactly the kind of thing Zoé needed to see. But when their hands met, Iris’s touch was… underwhelming.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

Kagami sighed as the bell rang. It was lunch, and she wanted to get to the cafeteria before it got filled up. Which was why she hurried to pack down her schoolbooks, and then hurried towards the door, and then —

“Hey, Kagami! Wait,” said Alya’s voice, and Kagami stopped and turned.

“Yes?”

“Want to go to lunch together?” Alya nodded sideways with her head, at Juleka and Rose, who were in the process of packing Rose’s bag. Rose lifted her hand to wave; this was in contrast to Alya, who wore what might be a neutral or serious expression, or even a sad one.

“All right,” said Kagami, and waited in the door. Even though she was raring to go. Others left the classroom; the halls outside soon filled with suffocating crowds.

The packing didn’t take too long. Just over a minute later, Alya walked up with Rose and Juleka in tow, and then the two others walked a little faster than Alya so they ended up ahead. No — Alya seemed to be deliberately holding back her speed a little, which was frustrating.

“What do you think of the school so far?” asked Alya, as they milled through the throngs of prospective lunchgoers.

“It is… full,” tried Kagami, stepping aside to avoid a group of three older boys walking not only the wrong way, but also all three of them side by side.

“Yeah,” said Alya. “Good thing they’ve staggered the lunches, at least… I think the classroom’s nice. You?”

They all stopped at the line to the elevator, which mercifully wasn’t too long. Kagami squeezed her thumbs into her index fingers, pushed her fingers into fists. “Yes,” she mumbled. “It’s nice.”

“I like the teachers,” interjected Rose, beaming. “Don’t they seem nice, too? Especially M Bégonie.” Juleka nudged Rose in the shoulder, frowning; Rose responded by giggling and grabbing Juleka’s hand, which seemed to have a placating effect.

They got to the elevator, and Kagami wished they had gone up the stairs instead; it was only two floors. Instead, they squeezed into the elevator with five strangers, all of whom were quiet but still far too close. Her breathing got deeper, heavier, as the floor underneath their feet surged upwards.

The last ping happened. Kagami pushed outside as fast as she could, and off to the side so she would be out of the way of everyone else. When Alya and the other two left the elevator, they came up to her with curious smiles; she nodded and said they could go now.

Once they were inside the cafeteria, everything was already chaos. People moved and screamed and sat everywhere, and all the safest tables were already taken, and the line for food was a snake ready to bite. Every corner was full, or placed behind a gauntlet of unfamiliar faces and bodies and swirling limbs. Kagami stopped completely at the mere sight of it.

Some time may have passed before she registered someone tugging at her sleeve. Or not. But when she turned around, Rose was giving her an unassuming smile. “Won’t you come sit with us?”

“I…”

“Come! There’s plenty room at the table.”

The Marinette method. Brute-forcing social engagement. Kagami nodded and followed, nearly holding her breath.

Soon they arrived at a table that was in a corner. That meant there were only two cardinal directions from which disturbances could arise. It was also empty, but there were six chairs by it, which was less optimal.

Alya pushed herself into the farthest corner. “I’ll keep the table,” she said. “You guys can go get food.”

“Sure!” said Rose. “We’ll get food for you too, then.”

“You don’t have to —”

“It’s better if we all eat at the same time!”

Kagami turned to look at the line. There were so many people that she could only really register them as a blob. Plus, they were separated here from the main room by half a glass wall, which sheltered a cleaning station, and that wall blocked out some of the noise — enough to make this spot bearable.

She swallowed. “Rose? Could you bring food for me as well?”

Rose gave her a curious look in response. “Oh? Well, okay. Sure!” she said, in spite of the little wind-up. There was no indication she was being resentful. “What do you want?”

“A — a salad. Any salad is fine. And a boiled egg.”

“I’ll take a couple croissants with jam,” said Alya. “And a glass of apple juice. Thank you so much, Rose.”

“And Juleka!” said Rose, beaming. Juleka, beside her, nodded seriously. “What do you want to drink, Kagami?”

“Water is fine.”

With a couple more okays, Rose and Juleka left. Kagami sighed and took her seat directly opposite Alya, where she had the relative safety of a wall on her left.

“How are you doing, Kagami?” asked Alya. “Since yesterday?”

For a moment, Kagami thought Alya must have noticed her discomfort with the room. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved or bothered that that was the case.

“I’m doing fine. Thank you.”

“You haven’t talked to Marinette yet, have you?”

She shook her head. “No. She is staying home today, isn’t she?”

Alya sighed, though. “Actually… I’m pretty sure she’ll be here later. I haven’t talked to her either, but she’s very good at making bad choices.”

“You think attending school is a bad choice?”

“For her it is. Everyone knows she’s Ladybug. She’s a celebrity now, but she’s a celebrity that a lot of people hate. And she’ll have had a stressful day, so she won’t exactly be at her best, either.”

There was something distant in Alya’s eyes as she spoke: a look to the past, or perhaps to a place that had never been. Her voice had a fragile quality to it.

“She’s stupid,” she continued. “She’s an idiot. She doesn’t know what’s good for her. Or… anyone else, for that matter.”

“She’s struggling,” said Kagami, feeling that a defence of some sort was required. It didn’t really feel like a defence, though: it was more of an explanation.

“Oh, I know,” said Alya. “I know that all too well. It’s just…” Her eyes caught on something past Kagami’s shoulder. “Oh… hey! Zoé!”

Kagami turned her head. She saw Zoé approaching — at a pace that suggested she had been approaching even before Alya called out to her — furthermore, Iris followed, both of them holding trays with lunch.

“Hey, Alya, Kagami,” said Zoé. “It’s absolute madness everywhere else… can we sit with you?”

“Well, Rose and Juleka are coming later,” replied Alya. “They’re getting food right now. But there’s room for you two, sure.”

“Um, th-th-thank you,” said Iris.

Two more. So their table would be full, and one of the occupants would be more or less a stranger. It wouldn’t do to complain, though, so Kagami nodded to Zoé and looked down at the table.

“Why don’t you scooch in with Alya?” said Zoé. “Alya, this is Iris, she’s in my class. Iris, this is Alya, she’s a good friend from seconde. And that’s Kagami, you met yesterday, she’s also in seconde and also a friend.”

Just ‘a friend’. Not a good one, like Alya. Was this about the thing Kagami had maybe said wrong yesterday?

Iris shook her head rapidly. “Um, I think… I don’t wanna be squeezed in, can we, c-can we sit on Kagami’s side?”

“If you say so,” said Zoé and shrugged. She was smiling, though, probably for Iris’s sake. “Do you wanna sit next to Kagami? That way you’ll be at the centre. Easier for introductions.”

“Um, yeah,” said Iris.

Despite her misgivings about Iris, Kagami dutifully inched her chair to the side to give room. It wouldn’t do to complain, because it never did do to complain.

“So you’re a new friend of Zoé’s, then?” said Alya, once Iris and Zoé had sat down on Kagami’s side.

“I, um, I wouldn’t say —”

“Yes,” interrupted Zoé. “She is. She only just moved to France from Italy, actually!”

Alya nodded. “I thought you had a bit of an accent. Welcome to Paris!”

“Um… thank, thank you.”

“She didn’t even know about akumas until yesterday,” said Zoé.

Kagami froze, looking at Alya. And Alya’s eyes dropped along with her smile. Zoé didn’t know, of course, that Alya had been the akuma — the only reason she knew about that akuma in the first place was that Kagami had told her there was something going on.

Even so, Zoé seemed to catch on that something was wrong, because a second later she started to babble. “Er, that is… she wasn’t aware that akumas were a thing, so I told her what’s going on. And, and, to stay happy!”

“Yeah,” said Alya, only smiling for a very brief moment. “That’s good.”

“Akumas sound s-scary,” said Iris. “I, um, I hope I don’t get akumatised…”

“Nobody wants to be,” said Zoé, with a strange emphasis.

“You’ve been akumatised?” said Iris. She said it like she was surprised, turning towards Zoé. But Kagami caught her glancing sideways at Alya, too. “What, what’s that like?”

“Well…” Zoé also looked at Alya for a moment. “It sucks. You can’t control yourself. You just do bad stuff, and then you forget. But you still know you did the bad stuff, so… it super sucks.”

Had Alya or Marinette told them about what happened? But… why would they do that? That was a very intimate akuma — it had only involved four people, and those four people all had very good reasons to keep what happened secret: shame, fear, upset, respect. There was no need to air anything out with anybody else. And yet…

“Actually,” said Alya. She seemed strange, almost out of place. “I… escaped an akumatisation on my own once. With, er… Marinette’s help. I remember how I felt when I was… I felt good, but in a bad way. I was sad and angry, but I felt like being akumatised gave me the power to do something about it. I mean, it didn’t, but it’s — it felt like it worked. When I got free, it was like someone turned on the light.”

Escaping akumatisation on her own. Kagami had also done that, once. She had felt so serene and peaceful as Ryuukomori, like she could finally stop worrying about anything. And then Marinette organised a group of people to show up and show appreciation for her, and her feelings changed on the spot. It was harrowing to look back on that day now and realise that for all intents and purposes, Monarch had akumatised her into a suicide attempt.

It was also harrowing, but less so, to know that he’d akumatised her amok. So that if Marinette and Adrien had broken her ring to get the akuma out, she would also have died.

She somehow survived. She escaped the akumatisation. And — it wasn’t really something she did on her own, because it was Marinette who helped her out of it, her and everyone else and perhaps even providence. Even so, the memory lingered. The feelings were gone, but they had branded themselves across the inside of her mind, even more so than her feelings from any of the other times she was akumatised.

“Really?” said Iris. “Um, okay… yeah, I don’t, I don’t think I want to be akumatised…”

“Yeah, nobody does. Alya… I’m sorry for bringing up bad memories.” Again, it sounded like Zoé knew something. There was a weird emphasis to ‘memories’.

Or… maybe that was just Kagami’s imagination… it felt uncharitable to assume so much without concrete proof. There was probably an explanation for everything, just like there was a charitable explanation for why Iris was rubbing her the wrong way so much.

“Have you been akumatised, um, K-Kagami?” said Iris — or perhaps there wasn’t. Even if Iris wasn’t doing this on purpose, Kagami still felt justified in having a distaste for her.

“I have. I don’t want to talk about it,” she replied.

“S-sorry! I didn’t mean… I was just curious…”

Kagami frowned, but not at Iris. The apology didn’t feel right — though whether that was because it was false, because it was exaggerated through Iris’s usual habit, or just genuine and filtered through Kagami’s disapproval, was probably an open question.

“Yeah. Let’s talk about something nice instead!” said Alya. “Iris, why don’t you tell us a little about yourself?”

“M-me?”

“Of course! There aren’t any other Irises around, are there?”

“Except in our eyeballs,” said Zoé. Kagami, despite herself, cracked a little smile.

“Oh, hang on,” said Alya, raising her palm — her eyes were lifted above Kagami’s head. “Rose and Juleka are coming now. We can do proper introductions once they’ve sat down.”

Rose and Juleka were indeed coming. They seemed barely surprised at all to find that there were more people sitting at the table than when they left, in the sense that Juleka seemed surprised but Rose hardly even seemed to notice.

“Hey, everyone!” said Rose, sliding in next to Alya; Juleka took the seat by the edge, opposite Zoé. Rose pushed a plate and glass in front of Alya. “Here, Alya, I brought croissants. They were out of apple juice, but orange juice is fine, right?”

“I love orange,” said Alya, with a hint of laughter under her words. “Thanks, Rose. Say hi to Iris, by the way! She’s in Zoé’s class.”

“Oh, of course!” said Rose, turning her smile on Iris. In the meantime, Juleka started pushing a bowl of salad with a fork in it across the table; she did the same with an egg cup. Rose helped guide them along as she said, “Hi, Iris! It’s wonderful to meet you!”

“U-um, thank you… J-Juleka?”

“I’m Rose! That’s Juleka.”

“Oh! So-sorry!”

The food arrived in front of Kagami. She nodded her gratitude and started to eat.

“We’re classmates with Alya and Kagami!” Rose went on. “We’ve been classmates for over a year, except Kagami.”

“Oh. That, that’s cool.”

Juleka nodded quietly.

“Most of my friends are from seconde,” said Zoé. “They really welcomed me when I first moved here. I know they’ll do the same for you, Iris.”

“Yeah,” said Alya, smiling. Rose and Juleka also smiled and nodded.

“On the topic of friends!” said Rose, turning to Alya. “We were behind Nino in line. When we said we were at your table, he looked upset and left. Do you know why he’s feeling down? We’re ready to help him.”

Everyone at the table turned quiet. Even those who shouldn’t know about what had happened. Alya’s eyes flickered, and her mouth became very tiny; Zoé let out a simple “Er…”

“Well…” said Alya. She didn’t seem to know how to continue from there. “I…”

“Is something wrong?” said Rose, her cheerfulness replaced by something else.

“It’s just…” said Alya. Her eyes landed in turn on everyone at the table, ending at Kagami; they seemed a little damp. She sighed. “I broke up with him. Yesterday. I’d appreciate if we could talk about anything else.”

Again, quiet. But only for a little while. Then Rose said, “I’m so sorry, Alya, we didn’t know…”

“I’m sorry too,” said Zoé. “Are you okay?”

“I’ll manage. Please change the topic.”

Rose’s smile was smaller than normal. “Okay. You can talk to us later, if you want. But let’s talk about this weekend instead,” her smile grew to its usual size again, “because you’re all invited to the Liberty for a practice concert with Kitty Section! You too, Iris, if you want.”

“Ki-Kitty Section?”

“It’s a band! I sing and Juleka plays the bass, and we have other friends playing the other instruments. We like to play for our friends sometimes, and you’re very welcome!”

“Um…” said Iris. “That sounds n-nice, but… I have to, I have to make sure I’ve got… time… um, excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom…”

She stood up and pushed back. The others said things like, ‘Okay’ or ‘See you after!’ as she got up. Kagami just watched in silence.

Iris’s standing up wasn’t really the brash and hurried reaction of someone who was overstimulated; the way she got to her feet was calm and measured, despite her averted eyes and half-frown. It was only once she had turned around that she started to walk fast, towards the elevators.

“Do you think I pushed her too hard?” said Rose, smile once again faded.

“I don’t know,” said Zoé. “I don’t know her that well yet…”

“Prob’ly just nervous,” said Juleka, putting her elbow on the table. “‘s fine.”

“I don’t think she was nervous,” said Kagami, spearing a piece of tomato with her fork. “She seemed fine.”

Alya loudly swallowed her most recent bite of food. “You sure about that? She seemed nervous the whole time.”

Kagami shook her head. “I think she’s acting.”

“That’s kind of mean,” said Zoé. “She’s just new. Don’t assume things about her like that.”

“Yeah, Marinette used to assume things about you, and that was super wrong,” said Alya. “And, uh, I also assumed. Did I ever say sorry about that? I’m sorry about that.”

Kagami looked between the two of them, and at Rose and Juleka, and realised she had spoken out of turn again. It didn’t really matter either way, because she didn’t know if Iris was a bad person — only that she personally didn’t like her. And even though she was right about Iris faking her timidity and anxiousness, that didn’t mean the others would appreciate being told about it.

“You’re right. I’m sorry.”

“All good,” said Alya.

“Yeah, we’re all friends here,” said Rose.”

Zoé sighed into a smile and a nod. Apparently, they were all friends.

“Oh! That reminds me,” said Rose. “Are Marinette and Adrien gone today? I haven’t seen them.”

The table fell into a brief, though severe, silence. Kagami could only imagine what Alya was thinking about, because she almost didn’t know what she was thinking herself. Too much had happened to really sum it up.

It was Zoé who first broke the silence by clearing her throat. “Actually… Marinette’s at court today. She got called in for some kind of meeting, so she won’t be coming to school.”

Alya blinked. “How did you know that?”

“I… um, I visited her? Last night?”

“Oh,” said Alya, breathing in through her nose afterwards. “Yeah. She’s in for questioning with the cops.”

“Why?” said Rose.

“Because she did all those things.” Alya frowned; Kagami thought she looked a little like she did yesterday, on the rooftop, after she pushed Marinette down on the shingles. “They’ve got to ask her what happened. Honestly, Zoé, I’m surprised she told you… I don’t think I would have known if I wasn’t there when she got the letter.”

“You were there?” asked Zoé, eyes wide.

“Yes. Me, Alix, and Kagami,” said Alya, nodding her head aside. “God… she’s so frustrating sometimes… I’m her best friend and I don’t even know if she would have told me, when it’s so important…”

Rose put her hand on Alya’s shoulder. “I’m sure she means well. She just doesn’t want to worry anyone. Like I did, with my condition!”

But of course, Alya had already had that conversation. With Marinette herself. “I know all that,” she said bitterly. “I know.”

“Yeah,” said Zoé. “I get you…”

“Anyway, she’s definitely coming back once she’s done. I don’t know when that is, but there’s no way she’ll stay at home.”

“How come?” said Rose. “Don’t you think she wants rest?”

“I think she doesn’t want to give herself anything she wants,” came Alya’s reply. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s already gotten back, honestly. I doubt it took her three hours to be interviewed.”

Zoé nodded. She seemed cautious about it, though. “So… who’s in her class? Maybe they’ll know.”

“Alix,” said Alya, as Rose and Juleka started to frown. Kagami thought she might know why. “Sabrina, too. And… well… my ex.”

“Oh — I’m so sorry, I didn’t kn—” started Zoé.

But she didn’t get to finish her apology. Because suddenly, a large noise outside shook the entire room. And they all seemed to guess, at the same time, what was happening: there was another akuma.

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▧▧▨ ▶▷

When Marinette returned to school, the first thing that met her inside the sliding glass doors — in the lobby, of all places — was Nino. Seated at a bench just past the old reception desk, he didn’t exactly seem to be in the best of moods, and the sour look he gave her was likely just an extension of that.

Could she even greet him? Her old friend, her classmate? Her best friend’s ex? The boy who seemed to dislike her more than anyone for what she did to Adrien, more than even Adrien himself?

They were both alone there, too. Not completely, there were obviously people deeper into the hallways and a small group of probably middle schoolers had exited the school just as she was going inside, but just for that small portion of air it was just the two of them. Adrien’s and Alya’s exes, meeting in the least liminal of all liminal spaces.

She only offered him a single glance, not even a nod, not even a ‘Hello’. It wouldn’t be worth it to tear open that old wound, because she knew how he felt about her.

But as she tried to walk past him, she heard him raise his voice. “Where have you been,” he said, with a surprising lack of a sharp edge. She could hear his resentment, but it was buried underneath something else.

She paused, but didn’t turn to look at him. “Cour de Cassation,” she said. “I was called in for police questioning.”

“Good,” he said. The word felt blunt, still not sharp.

“I met Miss Bustier there.” It was a futile attempt to build a bridge. Like their old teacher could paper over Marinette’s mistakes, make them somehow not matter. She still didn’t dare to look his way.

He didn’t reply at once. But she could hear him drawing breath, deep and heavy. “Did you meet Adrien too,” was his eventual response.

Adrien? Why would… “No. I… I didn’t.”

“Alya dumped me because of you,” he said. His mood couldn’t have been clearer, but despite that, there was still something resigned to his voice. “But I guess you’d already know that.”

Her reply was a nod. Then, in case he also wasn’t looking at her, she said “Yes. I’m s— I’m sorry.”

“I don’t care. Sorry’s not enough.”

She winced. Now — now he was where she’d expected him to be. She could feel his anger even when he wasn’t speaking, but those words had been sharpened like knives.

“You put yourself in charge of everything. And you don’t care what other people think, so long as you’re in control. Must be nice to be so above everyone else, right?”

“I’m not above anyone,” she said. She wasn’t sure if he would hear, because it was more of a croak than a statement. But he did.

“Yeah you are. Ladybug, hero of Paris,” he spat out. “Guardian of the Miraculous. Class rep. Teacher’s pet. Everyone’s favourite everything. Even Alya. Wasn’t anybody higher than you.”

Maybe she could have protested. At least, protested parts. She thought he was speaking from anger more than anything else, from the upset he had from losing Alya, from what she did to Adrien, from all the things he hadn’t yet been able to tell her directly. In class yesterday, he had been curt and angry-looking, but he hadn’t been able to let it all loose yet — now, though, they were off hours, and there was nobody else to interrupt him.

However… she also couldn’t deny the words he was saying. And she couldn’t deny the ultimate truth he was getting at. It was only the middle layer she could protest: she hadn’t wanted to do it. She hadn’t tried to put herself above anyone on purpose. But that middle layer was so small and insignificant, like a thin pane of ice that would still send you through to the frosty lake below.

“I guess you’re not above cops, though,” he said. “You know, I wish you were. You could have told them to not bring in Adrien, too.”

She turned around. “… What?”

“Adrien’s talking to the cops right now.” He almost bared his teeth at her. “All because of you.”

“But… he doesn’t know anything…”

“Yeah. Whose fault is that, huh?”

— they had asked her about him today, they had called him a person of interest, but that was based off her words. Why was he told to come in before that? Why was he told to come in without any reason? He didn’t deserve…

… was that why Nathalie was there? Had she also been called in for interrogation?

She could feel her heart pumping faster, almost juddering in her chest. Her breaths grew shorter, her vision narrowed, Nino vanished completely. Nathalie knew so many things, things that shouldn’t come out. If she spilled anything — if she implicated herself, and deprived Adrien of her guardianship — if Adrien spoke about Fu or Su-Han or the Order — if anything came out — everything would be ruined — everything —

“You’re not very smart, are you,” she heard Nino’s voice, through the wind tunnel noise of her ears. “His dad’s a supervillain and he’s Cat Noir, and you thought they wouldn’t talk to him?”

“No… that’s not…” she said, but the words choked in her throat. Adrien wasn’t the problem. She didn’t want him to talk to the police, but that was only for his own sake. If they talked to Nathalie, though — to Tomoe, to Alix, to Félix, to the people who actually knew anything — she needed to talk to all of them, to ask them to keep quiet. This was her burden to carry, not theirs.

She didn’t see what happened. She only knew that suddenly, she was called back to reality by Nino shouting “Shelter!” —

The shock took her completely out of her thoughts. He had used his power, which meant there had to be an akuma in the room.

But when she looked at him, she saw what the problem was. Because he wasn’t Carapace. He was… a very dark grey instead, and his shield weapon had been replaced with an actual shield on his back, except the shield was covered with sharp, twisted spikes. His hood looked ragged and his spectacles were tinted blood red, and his expression made it abundantly obvious where the akuma was.

And the Shelter… was around her.

“Too easy,” he said — and with a flick of his gnarled arm, he sent the Shelter rolling backwards. She fell over as the floor she’d been standing on tumbled over her head, and hit her shoulder hard against the bottom before rolling further. Something shattered; the Shelter had whirled through the front door, breaking the glass apart, and she crashed with it down the steps and onto the street outside.

Whole body aching, she could only lie still and whimper as he followed her out, with slow and heavy steps that felt like they should make the ground tremble. He snarled at her.

“Look at you. You’re so pathetic.”

“Nino…” she groaned. “You’re not yourself. Don’t listen to what… ngh… the voice is telling you…”

“Still trying to put yourself above others, aren’t you?” He laughed darkly. “You like being above everyone, don’t you? Well, you’re not. You’re the worst person who’s ever lived.”

She gulped, looking up to meet his fiery rage. Just like before, the only thing he was wrong about was her intentions. And on some level, about listening to Lila — but Lila wasn’t exactly wrong, either, not about this.

“But I’ll grant you your wish. I’ll put you higher than you deserve to be. Doesn’t that sound nice?” he continued, voice dripping with acid. He raised his arm, fingers clenched not quite into a fist, and the Shelter started to lift off the ground. Then he jumped on top of the nearest non-hotel building, and kept his arm raised, lifting the shelter even higher. It jolted every time, enough to be uncomfortable as she rolled against the sides, but the motions weren’t violent.

He landed on top of Le Grand Paris. There he left the Shelter hanging in midair, above the pool that once belonged to Chloé, and he glared up at Marinette.

“There,” he said. “Is that high enough for you? Are you above the consequences of your actions yet?”

Pushing herself up into a kneeling position, she just looked at him. How could she even respond? There were too many layers. If he were just Nino and not akumatised, she would have apologised. If he were being unreasonable, she would have contradicted him. But it was a challenge to even imagine opening her mouth right now.

He was so unlike himself. Even Rocketear hadn’t been like this, because Rocketear had a range of emotions even though all of them were negative ones. But this Nino was just angry.

“Feh. I guess you could never be high enough,” he said, and turned away. “Why don’t we call the news over? And the heroes, too. They’re just waiting for a chance to save you, I bet.”

She watched in silent — not horror, not really, but something like horror that just wasn’t motivated — as he called out another Shelter, which encased a large piece of the concert hall on the far side of the street. When he pulled it back, the wall and roof and inside structures pulled away with it, sheared impossibly neatly off the rest of the building. He pulled it all across so that it hovered right over the street, and then he called the Shelter away, so everything crashed into the ground with an immense crumbling boom.

Kagami and Zoé were at school, probably. They would come out soon. All the heroes might be inside, actually — most of them would be, at the very least. Though how many of them would actually come to this fight, she had no idea.

Nino didn’t seem to care one way or the other. Akumas seldom cared about matchups. He just turned back to her and gave her a withering sneer.

“The news will be here soon,” he said. “Count on it.”

“The news?” she asked. Her voice cracked even just from those two words.

“Yeah,” he said. He was so angry. It consumed everything about him, drowned the Nino that she used to call her friend. And she deserved it. “When the news folks come… they’ll broadcast to the whole city what a rotten person you are.”

◀◁ ▧▧▧ ▨▨▨ ▷▶

Zoé rushed away at the noise, only taking the time to grab two pieces of cheese off her plate and stick them in her purse — just in case she’d need them during the fight. She ran towards the stairs leading up, because she didn’t need to see anything through the windows to tell that a noise like that was bad news.

No, the uncertainty — the worry — was something else. Because she was starting to see a pattern with the recent akumas: they were after Marinette. And Alya had been convinced that Marinette would come back to school after her court meeting. Those two things put together were enough to raise red flags for whatever was happening outside.

She threw herself into her room and transformed there, with only a single mutual nod to Plagg before speaking the phrase. Then she ran towards the windows and looked down.

A large section of the concert hall across the street had somehow been scooped away. From the looks of it, that had all been dropped on the street below, in a massive heap of broken masonry and shattered wood. An icy spike of horror jabbed itself into her as she imagined Marinette crushed underneath all of that — but she swallowed that fear before her visual imagination could get going. If Marinette was in that heap, then the only way to fix it was to defeat the akuma.

She opened the window and climbed out on the outer sill. And she was about to jump down when she heard a voice from above — up on the rooftop balcony.

Which wasn’t supposed to be accessible.

Inching herself along the wall, she came up to the corner where she’d be hidden by the elevator shaft once she climbed up. Carefully, she climbed up to the balcony, knowing she should assess the situation before announcing her presence.

Something she only knew until she saw what the situation was.

Her first impression was that Carapace had been akumatised. That wasn’t good, it was in fact very bad, but with other heroes involved his advantage would get a lot smaller. He was standing with his arms folded as though waiting for something.

Beside him was a hovering Shelter, suspended above the pool, coloured in a bleak grey rather than its usual green. That was neutral, because at least it meant he was partly occupied.

But the person inside the shelter…

She stood up fully and rushed forward. “Marinette!” she cried, “I’ll save you!”

Carapace turned around to face her, and his sneer turned into a grin. She didn’t care. She was going to get Marinette out. She raised her hand and started to call for her power —

“No! Kitty, don’t!” screamed Marinette, so loudly and sharply and filled with terror that Zoé was left with her mouth open. “You’re still on a timer!”

She hesitated. Just for a moment, she came to a stop in the middle of her run. And Carapace capitalised on that by sending a Shelter right at her.

The shifting grey appeared in the corner of her vision just in time for her to dodge. She ducked away, rolling on the floor, only barely evading capture. Carapace lifted a finger, and another Shelter — though tiny — span atop it.

“You heroes are always so keen on protecting Marinette,” he said. “You protected her even after she confessed her crimes all over the city. Your priorities suck.”

She snarled at him. “We’re sworn to protect all of Paris from akumas.”

“You’re protecting someone who lied to protect the previous butterfly holder! Someone who’s caused several akumatisations! She probably gave the butterfly away to someone else just so she could keep playing the hero!”

“She didn’t!”

“She’s a pathetic loser who can’t stand the thought of anyone disliking her! So she made herself the centre of attention!” He launched another attack, but this time she was ready, and it flew wide into the sky behind her.

“She’s not!” Zoé shouted back — why was he like this? Just a few days ago he’d thanked Marinette for getting back his Miraculous, and he was one of the most experienced heroes. He’d fought alongside her dozens of times. Was he really this broken up about a lie? “She fought tirelessly for Paris for a whole year! And I’m going to rescue her no matter what you say — Cataclysm!”

Zoé jumped at the Shelter. She looked into Marinette’s horror-filled eyes, heard Marinette say “No!” just as the Cataclysm made contact, grabbed hold of Marinette’s body before she could fall into the water and spun around in mid-air to shield her, and then —

— another Shelter struck her in the back, encasing them both.

“How about I lock you in with her, then?” said Carapace. His voice was almost pure anger, but there was a nauseating sense of satisfaction lurking inside it too. “Since you love her so much.”

That anger seeped into Zoé, too. How dare he act like Marinette was a villain? How dare he pretend like Marinette hadn’t given him his Miraculous in the first place? How dare he say any of this like Marinette weren’t the most loveable person in the whole city?

No — how dare he act like Marinette was begging for love and attention, when every time Zoé tried to give it to her, Marinette refused it?

She clenched one arm around Marinette and wrenched the other one loose, shouted “Cataclysm!” one more time, and slammed her hand into the Shelter.

But nothing happened.

“Kitty… I told you not to do that,” mumbled Marinette. She hung limp in Zoé’s grasp, wedged between her and the wall, her voice the only thing that protested. “You don’t have infinite power use… now the timer has started…”

“You only have five minutes before you detransform, smarty-pants,” said Carapace triumphantly. “Maybe the TV cameras will get two scoops for one.”

“Scoops?” said Zoé, still mad with him.

“They’ll get Kitty Noire’s identity… and they’ll get Marinette, so-called hero, begging for her pathetic little life.”

“You —”

A hand grabbed around Zoé’s waist. Marinette’s hand. The indignant protest died in her throat and she turned to look at the crush that wouldn’t die, at the eyes that held every piece of Zoé’s heart and soul hostage. And unlike earlier, Marinette looked determined.

“Kitty Noire. Do you have any food for Plagg with you?”

The Marinette that was Ladybug had awakened. But even if this were just normal Marinette, Zoé would have found herself short of breath. “I… yes, in my purse…”

“Good. You can’t be discovered…” Marinette reached up to her pigtails and took off the bands that held them up. Her hair fanned out messily, uneven tufts falling on either side of her shoulders, as she wrapped the bands around the index and middle fingers of her right hand.

Then she wrested off her cardigan, and Zoé almost gasped. But Marinette looked back into her eyes and said, “Bend your head down. I’ll tie up your hair… you can detransform with the cardigan over your head. That way you won’t be discovered.”

Zoé wordlessly obeyed. She felt exceedingly gentle hands guide her hair up into a ponytail, and then again into a semi-bun. And she felt the cardigan — and all of Marinette’s scent, a mix of raspberries and vanilla and nervous exertion — wrapped around her.

“Where is the food…”

“Purse,” Zoé whispered back.

“I’ll cover you with my body. Be quick.”

There was another scoff from outside. But Zoé couldn’t focus on anything outside the little bubble she was trapped in. She was being embraced, coated, in Marinette. It had barely been twelve hours since she cried herself to sleep, and now Marinette was giving her so much attention that it was difficult to think.

It was just functional. It meant nothing to Marinette. It was only there to protect an identity from being spilled to this new butterfly holder and Marinette was working on autopilot and Zoé hated that this was how she finally managed to be so close to her. The day after the awful thing that was yesterday, they were wrapped into a tight hug and stupid Marinette had no idea what she was doing. How painful this was. How much Zoé hated her. How impossible it was to hold on to that hate and how impossible it was to let go of.

But she obeyed nonetheless. She whispered, “Claws in,” and suddenly felt Marinette so much more, felt her heat and skin and bones so much stronger without a suit in the way. And she felt Marinette fumble for the purse, heard her say “Here, Plagg,” and Plagg reply with just a wordless gulp as he swallowed, and she begged for everything to end, because if her face burned any hotter now she would singe Marinette’s cardigan.

“Claws out,” she said. And she almost pushed Marinette away in her efforts to get out of the embrace. She was Kitty Noire, defender of Paris and of Mar— of people like Marinette. Not some lost baby who needed coddling.

“Well, then,” said Carapace. When she turned her head to glare at him, he stood with his arms folded, looking bored more than anything. “I guess you're going to try to break the Shelter and escape with your girlfriend, right?”

“She’s not my girlfriend!” she snapped back.

“Whatever. I don’t really care if you reveal yourself, you know. I just need you to stay out of my way. So…”

He made a gesture with his hand. Suddenly, Zoé felt herself yanked aside, pressed against a new wall; when she realised what was happening it was already over. He had split them into two separate spheres, with Zoé’s flying away to the side of the pool, far enough away that she would be an easy target if she broke this Shelter and charged to rescue Marinette again.

No — even without that, she could only destroy her own cage, and she could do nothing to rescue Marinette after that. She needed help from the other heroes if she were to do anything.

Her eyes landed on Marinette again. Marinette looked back. And as their eyes met, she realised she’d been wrong. This wasn’t Ladybug, or even determination. The components had been there on the surface, to fool a mere observer, but the wispiness of Marinette’s touch and the hollowness at the centre of her stare had told a different story. Marinette had hidden her on autopilot, because it was the thing Marinette thought needed to be done. It wasn’t just functional, it was exclusively so. Because the voice that had told her to hide had been empty like a discarded bottle, and the Marinette that sat there now was functionless.

Marinette wasn’t motivated. She was just… doing stuff. A fist grabbed around Zoé’s guts and wrung them, harshly.

“Marinette…” she whispered, so low that probably nobody else heard. She didn’t dare speak it louder.

A sound shook her from her desperate thoughts. And that sound also roused Carapace, and made Marinette’s eyes flicker thinly. It sounded like an approaching helicopter.

“The news is here,” said Carapace. “And now, Marinette… Paris will see you for who you truly are.”

He was grinning. But his voice held only rage.

◁◀ ▧▧▨ ▧▨▨ ▶▷

Kagami had struggled to find a place to transform, as most locations were either chock full of people at this point, or they were too open. Even the nooks and stalls and crannies were so close to people that those people would surely see her both enter and exit. She was only barely escaped from the first floor cleaning cupboard she’d transformed in when she heard someone calling her name: “Namitentou! Namitentou!”

She turned and saw two other heroes — Pigella and Purple Tigress. Both of them were jogging across from the other end of the hallway.

“Is there a problem?” she asked, hoping it would sound sufficiently leader-like.

Purple Tigress’s face turned a little twisted. Pigella nodded firmly, but also spoke out loud. “Yes. You see… Ladybug told us that if there’s an akuma, we should contact her or Cat Noir. But… well, they’re not around anymore, so we need you to organise instead!”

“Ah,” said Kagami. She remembered, of course, and she had even organised everyone who arrived to fight when Adrien was akumatised. This was a different challenge, though, because she had no idea what was happening, and people were still looking to her. It was different, because this time it wasn’t stepping up to the plate out of necessity, it was… something that would be the norm from now on.

She swallowed and nodded. Pigella smiled; Purple Tigress just looked silently.

“Have you seen or heard from any other heroes?” she asked. They both shook their heads.

“We only just arrived. Should we look for others?”

“No. I just need to have an overview.” The word ‘just’ was carrying a heavy burden, but it was true that she did. She could only hope that nobody was fighting the akuma by themselves right now.

She turned to Pigella in particular. “I don’t know what we are fighting, but you should stay out of sight. Your power will be useful if we can catch the akuma by surprise.”

“Okay!” said Pigella. And even though she hadn’t been given a command, the fact that a command had been given at all seemed to reassure Purple Tigress as well.

Other useful powers… Alya was here. She could provide a distraction as Rena Rouge, enabling Pigella to sneak up undetected. But apart from that, Kagami didn’t want to presume anything about who would and would not be there. It was still too early to tell which of Marinette’s old friends would still be her friends now.

“We should —” she started.

But that was when another voice cut in. “Namitentou!” it said; Kagami knew it was Rena Rouge before she even turned to look.

But it wasn’t. It was Alya, who had just emerged from the doorway to the stairs, only a few metres away.

“Yes? Citizen?” Kagami said, feeling like she might be overdoing her persona.

“I — I have to talk to you… alone. Please.” Alya walked closer as she talked, and her expression became clearer: she was wild-eyed, and even Kagami could tell she looked upset. In her hand was a phone, whose screen was flickering but also turned in such a way that it was difficult to pick out what was on it.

“What is the problem?”

“I said alone!” said Alya, urgently, almost aggressively. “I, I really can’t… please…”

Kagami turned towards the other two. “Try to find out what is happening. But stay away from the akuma.” They nodded and took off, though not without giving Alya worried glances; Alya, meanwhile, looked about ready to burst with — something.

“Come with me,” she told Alya, and walked back into the cleaning cupboard. It had space for two people, but only barely. Still, it would have to do.

When Alya closed the door behind her, her breaths were almost ragged. Her eyes stuck to the floor, not to Kagami. The whole time, her phone kept flickering.

“As you know,” Alya started, then stopped to draw breath again. “I’m Rena Rouge. And, and, I can’t help with this akuma. It’s not going to work. It’s, it’s bad, I’m sorry.”

She didn’t sound as broken as she did on Marinette’s roof yesterday. But that was maybe an unfair comparison. Her voice was more subdued, but it was still full of energy.

“Why is that?” said Kagami.

“Because… because he knows who I am, because — it’s too much. It’s too much. It’s wrong. He… ugh. I can’t tell you, but it’s bad.” Alya put her free hand to her face, pressing the palm and fingers flat over the eyes. “And it’s Marinette again, too… it’s everything at once and I, I can’t do it…”

Kagami tried to get a look at the phone’s screen again. Was the akuma on there, or was Alya just trying to distract herself? Were there images of Marinette, too? “Who is the akuma?” she asked aloud.

“It’s… Carapace,” said Alya. She lifted her phone up and showed the screen. It displayed footage from what appeared to be a handheld camera, probably also a phone from the orientation. And the footage showed something that looked like Carapace a little bit, but his costume was darkened and bulked up and he had a shell on his back.

“You’re sure it’s him?” said Kagami.

“It’s him. I know him.”

There was no sound. But he was obviously talking to someone who was hovering over the pool in a grey-coloured but transparent Shelter. And that someone was…

… two people. It was Marinette, and Kitty Noire, wrapped together in some kind of embrace.

Something turned inside her stomach. She had almost assumed that Marinette would be involved again, but the sight of her with Kitty Noire in her arms was —

Had they been embracing before they were captured? Was this a reveal of some illicit relationship? Why were they so close?

Kitty Noire suddenly detransformed. It was difficult to see any part of her because of how closely Marinette was wrapped around her, but she was at least wearing blue jeans. And she had Marinette’s cardigan wrapped around her head, for whatever reason.

But… Kagami tamped her feelings down, because this wasn’t the time. The time now was for figuring the akuma out, and for taking him down, before anything terrible could happen. She pulled her eyes away and tried to think of ways to counter an akuma with the power of Protection.

“It’s Alix filming,” said Alya. “For, for my blog. My friend Alix. We went up to see what was going on but… I couldn’t take it. I, I, please don’t make me fight him.”

“… I won’t,” said Kagami, finding it surprisingly difficult to say. Someone who didn’t want to fight would surely do a poor job of it, and yet, Kagami’s plan had already involved Alya’s help. If even Alya couldn’t stand up for her best friend, then…

Alya’s smile lasted for barely the blink of an eye. “I… thanks. I, I’ll help next time. Ugh… I’m sorry…”

She tried to leave the room, but Kagami grabbed her by the shoulder.

“Wait. Please tell me more about this akuma. Why are Kitty Noire and Marinette locked together? Why is he upset?”

“Um…” Alya turned the screen up again. Just at that time, Carapace — if that was what he truly was — split the Shelter into two, carrying Kitty Noire aside from Marinette’s larger sphere. Kagami sighed.

“I don’t know why he’s upset… I can guess. He’s angry with Marinette, he… he said he was going to show everyone that Marinette is terrible. I, I, I don’t know anything else. Kitty Noire tried to save her but got caught. Oh, and um, he can send out multiple Shelters and…” Alya paused then, her voice almost cracking at the end. Her eyes were damp, too. “I want to go home…”

“Okay,” said Kagami.

She did nothing to stop Alya from leaving this time. There was no point. She only registered that this akumatisation, just like the previous one, seemed to have upset Alya a lot.

Even so, she left the question unsaid. It didn’t matter if the akuma was Alya’s brother or bully or something else, it would not help solve the problem at hand to talk to her further.

After a deep breath, Kagami exited into the hallway again. There were students there now, though only a few; they pointed in awe at her. She grimaced and ran towards the stairs, aiming to get down so she could climb the outside and find Alix. Perhaps Alix would have some more insights; plus, she would have seen and heard what happened when Marinette and Kitty Noire were locked up together —

— no. No, not that part. That was unimportant. But finding Pigella and Purple Tigress, that was presently vital.

She emerged to the outside and saw the pile of rubble in front of the hotel, as well as small crowds of people standing around and watching in anxious horror.

And she saw a small collection of heroes along the wall, overlooking the rubble: Purple Tigress, Pigella, Pegasus, and Viperion. Pigella immediately hailed her down, and she ran across to them.

“Reporting for duty,” said Pegasus.

“Did you find any other heroes?” asked Kagami; Purple Tigress shook her head.

“The others are probably busy,” said Pigella, something she seemed to believe. Kagami did not, at least not for all of them.

“We also haven’t seen anyone,” said Viperion. “Except Kitty Noire. She’s already up there.”

“Yes,” said Pegasus, taking out his horseshoe weapon and pushing a button on it, which brought up a holographic display. “There’s a live video feed —”

“I’ve seen it,” said Kagami.

Four extra heroes. That wasn’t a big group, but it was definitely a useful group. Pegasus could transport people out of a Shelter, and Viperion would let them try any tactic over and over again. Purple Tigress could help Kagami distract Carapace, and Pigella would be waiting to catch him with a Gift.

“So… what should we do, then?” asked Viperion.

“You should use Second Chance,” said Kagami. “Guard Pigella. If she gets caught, turn back time immediately. Pigella, when I give the word, you jump out and use Gift on the akuma. Purple Tigress, you will come with me and help distract him. And Pegasus… when I give the word, you will use Voyage to free Marinette, but not a moment sooner.”

Everyone nodded. Good — they accepted her authority on this, and hopefully none of them were only doing so grudgingly. Or perhaps hopefully they were, but only because her authority wasn’t Ladybug’s.

Marinette’s.

Perhaps they needed a second meeting, with all the heroes, to clarify the new situation. Something to say that Namitentou and Kitty Noire were now permanent and would take the same roles that Ladybug and Cat Noir would have had.

And — their stances on Marinette. They needed to make it clear that they disapproved of Marinette… even though they didn't. If they did, maybe this could have been avoided. Firmly denouncing her in front of everyone, just like she had requested herself, could reassure those who doubted and, ultimately, put the whole team on the same page.

Yes. But that was for later.

The Second Chance sounded almost perfunctory. Though Kagami supposed the perfunctory feeling must be looming over most of the heroes. She felt it herself, in that there was something awkward, wrong about everything. When she saw Carapace in full daylight, when she dodged his Shelters along with Purple Tigress under the watchful eyes of TVi cameras in an uninteresting helicopter, when she saw Marinette’s immobile expression tinted ashen by her cage, when Carapace finally caught Kagami and Purple Tigress in the same grey ball, it felt like going through motions.

Every akuma was after Marinette. Every akuma had difficulty dealing with the wide range of heroes that were against them — Pigella and Viperion could likely have handled this one alone. It was very possible that this was Kagami's hundredth time sitting in this ball with Purple Tigress, they were only there to distract until Pigella could make her move.

She wanted to save Marinette. But this didn't feel like saving her. It felt like dusting off a table that needed to be cleaned with soap. She was supposed to rescue Marinette as a hero and love her as a friend, but also hate her as a hero and reprimand her as a friend. The table needed to be sanded down. It needed to have its legs sawn off and replaced with something less twisted.

Once the Shelter locked around them, Carapace looked like he thought he'd won. But who was winning? Certainly nobody here.

“Only three heroes showed up to defend you, Marinette,” said Carapace, not even looking at her. “I guess you're less high up than you used to be, if you can't get even a handful of them to care about you.”

Marinette didn’t respond. Kitty Noire did: she roared at him, “It’s not a popularity contest! Stop harassing her!”

He pointed up at the helicopter circling nearby then. “It’s always about attention, Kitty Noire. And attention is slipping away from your little girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend!”

“I wonder how she's feeling now that she knows nobody cares about her anymore? Now that she's burnt bridges with her ex and most of her friends?” Carapace clearly didn't care for anything Kitty Noire was saying. “Will she start to beg? Cry? Or will she get angry and shout that everyone has to love her again? How low is she willing to go to get back to how high she used to be?” He turned to Marinette, and with him, his voice turned even more growl-like. “How pathetic will you get, Marinette?”

Kagami felt the impulse to open her mouth — what had Marinette even done that was bad today, other than embrace Kitty Noire? — but that wasn't what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to disparage Marinette, and provide stability as the leader. So she shut her mouth again.

But Marinette spoke, for the first time that Kagami heard that day. She spoke clearly, but not powerfully: “Carapace… this isn't you…”

“Hah,” he replied. “You got that right. Are you ready to show everyone how sad you are?”

Marinette’s eyes widened for a moment. Then they fell to the ground. “Sure,” she said, almost mumbling.

He turned away from her again, and changed targets. “Paris!” he yelled, pointing directly at the helicopter. “Look at the girl who pretended she was a hero! Not much to look at, is she?”

“Yes she is!” yelled Kitty Noire.

“And her successors are weak and disorganised! But even they are paragons of greatness next to pathetic little Marinette Dupain-Cheng.”

He paused. Kagami held her breath. Never mind the obvious truth he had spoken — they were absolutely weak and disorganised — there was something to the way he spoke now that felt evil. A promise of something terrible.

Nobody else spoke, either. Purple Tigress, normally quiet in herself, now only managed to make soft but slightly raspy breaths. Marinette didn’t even look at him: she looked at nothing, at the pool underneath her, at the emptiness somewhere in front of her knees.

Carapace's next words confirmed Kagami’s dreadful sensation. He said, “Paris — watch as your ex-idol gets crushed by a slowly collapsing sphere, and begs for her sorry little life!”

“No!” yelled Kitty Noire, even before Carapace was done talking. Purple Tigress’s breaths turned into a shredded gulp. The Shelter started to shrink, but it didn’t feel slow, it was losing centimetres from its radius every second. Viperion’s voice in her earpiece said, “Command?” Kitty Noire shouted, “Cataclysm!” and breached her prison, but Carapace immediately locked her into a new one. Purple Tigress whispered, “No… no…” Viperion asked again for a command. Carapace stood with his back to the sphere and his hand to his ear, as though he was waiting to hear Marinette’s pleas. And Kagami sat there frozen, unable to think, unable to find a single idea for what to do.

But Marinette — Marinette didn’t do anything. She sat quietly and watched, almost like she didn’t realise what was happening.

She did know. But the way she didn’t react as the crushing walls came nearer, didn't protest or move or try to do anything, didn't beg to not be crushed to death, the conclusion was obvious. Marinette was having her own Ryuukomori moment, except that she didn’t even seem relieved about it. Just… resigned to it.

The walls came closer and closer. Kitty Noire screamed in terror. Purple Tigress stood up and raised her fist as though preparing to use Clout. The sphere was about to grow so small that it would press Marinette together, start to break her bones — and Carapace turned around and said, in a tone so unlike what his had been until now, “… Marinette?” —

Kagami finally broke through. “Pigella! Now!” she shouted, and Pigella bounced out of nowhere and shot her Gift at Carapace, and Kagami nearly forgot the second part but she didn't and she yelled “Pegasus! Now!” and a portal opened —

— and everything was over.

◀◁ ▨▨▨ ▧▧▧ ▷▶

Marinette lay on her back on the rooftop, barely breathing what little her body needed. Right next to her stood Nino, paralysed by the Gift — and she couldn’t help but wonder, what did he see? Did he see perfect joy? Did he see a world where Adrien was happy and Alya never left him? Did he see a world where she, Marinette, had changed?

Did he see a world where she was dead and gone?

Hands were on her, then around her. They were Zoé’s. The armband broke and Kagami gasped as Nino, still entranced, was revealed.

Did he still see the same things now? Or had his entire soul, his goof and his joy, been drowned away by the akumatisation? She hoped he saw even happier things now. He deserved to.

Max, Luka, Rose, Juleka, they had all showed up for her today. Now they gathered vaguely around her, as the cure flowed out of whatever item Kagami had gotten and repaired the broken building and Nino’s shattered Miraculous, but could do nothing to repair a single broken relationship.

Where was Alya? Was she hiding somewhere, or had she missed everything? That, too, should be the latter in a perfect world. Even if learning about it later would be inevitable.

Marinette stared up at the empty sky. Drew a hollow, clanging breath. Felt nothing, except the distant impression of arms around her.

Then she heard firm feet approaching. Kagami — no, Namitentou, because that was what was lurking in her mask-covered eyes — came into view.

And Namitentou grabbed her by the shoulders and tore her away from Zoé, and pierced her with a fierce glare.

“You and I need to have a conversation right now,” said either Namitentou or Kagami.

And then they were both flying off the roof.

Chapter Text

They landed atop the upper level of the Eiffel Tower, just outside Gustave Eiffel's apartment, and it felt like a joke.

“I shouldn’t be this high up,” said Marinette, as Kagami guided her inside the apartment. “I… Nino said…”

“Nino was akumatised. His words aren't to be listened to,” said — or was this —

“Are you speaking as the hero Namitentou, or as Kagami?” asked Marinette. It was impossible to tell from Kagami’s demeanour because her voice sounded so business-like but her eyes were deep with emotion, but those eyes had also started out so business-like, but — maybe Marinette’s ability to read emotions was just broken right now. Nino… he had been so…

Kagami sighed. “As long as I am in costume, I speak as Namitentou,” she said.

So this was a reprimand, then. A verbal lashing for one of her many failures.

But then — Kagami physically pulled out her earrings. Both at the same time. Tikki appeared in the air above her head as the transformation fell away, eyes wide in clear surprise.

“I have several questions I need to ask you,” Kagami went on. “And things I need to say. Some are important for hero business, but all of them are important to me.”

Marinette glanced at Tikki, who seemed equally uncertain as her about where this was going. “Um… okay…”

“What happened in your battle with Monarch?”

The question was abrupt in one way and even more so in another. Enough so that Marinette was still trying to piece it together in her head when Kagami said, with a noticeable amount of impatience, “Are you trying to come up with a lie?”

“No! No, it’s just…” Out of all the questions she could have expected, this one was certainly on the list but it wasn’t anywhere near the top. “It’s just, um, couldn’t you have asked Tikki?” The kwami who was there the whole time, and who had been at Kagami’s side for days at this point, and whose expression said absolutely nothing to suggest the question had in fact been asked?

Kagami just shook her head, though. “You are the one who made choices that day. I want to know, from your own mouth, what you did and why.”

“She hasn’t asked me about anything,” said Tikki, as if to confirm.

Well… that meant this was a reprimand after all. Yet another one to add to the pile — even if Kagami wasn’t planning on shouting at her right now, the shouting would come. And it would be precisely deserved.

Even so, she still had to struggle to start to speak. Contrary thoughts swirled around her like large mosquitoes. “Um… I…”

There was no interruption. Even as seconds were passing between every coherent word. Kagami just stood there, arms folded, waiting to receive the answer she had requested. The question from earlier — ‘Are you trying to come up with a lie’ — was the only thing currently hurrying Marinette to actually respond.

“… Where should I start?”

Kagami glanced at Tikki too. Then she unfolded her arms. “I started that day inside a secure padded cell. I only knew what time it was from the clock on the TV when I turned it on. I knew that Adrien was locked in a different room at the same location, and that Gabriel and Mother were about to carry out their plan to defeat you and get back the Miraculous. I saw the TV news talk about you as though you were evil, but for the most part I chose not to watch, because I was too afraid that Gabriel and Mother would succeed.”

“Kagami…” said Marinette, almost purely on reflex. Adrien had spoken about his time in that prison, but he had only known the lie that explained why he was there. That it was done to protect him, something that Gabriel told him beforehand and nobody had contradicted since, once he was told that Gabriel gave his life to defeat Monarch. And Adrien, obviously, said that he hadn’t liked being there but he understood why, and that was where he stopped talking about it.

Even so, as Cat Noir, he must have been scared. Knowing that she was alone to stand against Monarch, wondering if the world would end or maybe just change to the unrecognisable and bad. If people would die without him.

And Kagami must have felt the same. She didn’t know Ladybug would be alone, but she knew the odds would be strongly in Monarch’s favour. And she knew the people who were behind it all, and that they had direct power over her. She knew exactly what the outcome could end up being, and sometimes it’s just worse to know things. Both her and Adrien must have been terrified for different reasons, but not to different degrees.

In a way, though… Kagami would have been scared of a world where she couldn’t love Félix, and she avoided it. Adrien would have been scared of a world that he ended up getting anyway.

“I turned on the TV one last time when I couldn’t stand not knowing what was happening,” Kagami continued. “I saw a bulletin that said the Miraculised had disappeared. Then you broke down the door, and you know the rest.” She nodded towards Marinette. “Now you have to tell me the story of the same day from your own perspective.”

“Um… okay,” said Marinette. Kagami’s style of asking was more than a little presumptuous, in that she assumed a telling of the same span of time would be an equivalent story to tell, but… “So. Um. I had a bad dream that woke me up. I don’t remember it, but… I think I had to save Adrien and I killed Gabriel, but it — it felt bad. So when I woke up I became Ladybug and went to go look for him. Adrien. I went to go find him. But then I got to his house and — I found out Gabriel was Monarch. And —”

“We already told you that,” said Kagami, eyebrows furrowed. “The shadow play that me and Félix performed for you, remember?”

“I — I know. Yes. I know. But… I think I didn’t want to believe it. I stored it in my brain as a dream and I really really wanted it to be wrong. I thought it could be true but I needed to see it for myself. I, um, I’m really sorry about that, but I just… you know? Even the parts about you two, the sentimonster stuff,” Kagami frowned at this, “I… I thought it was all a dream. I shouldn’t have but I did.”

Kagami folded her arms. “You’re saying you were so in love with Adrien that you couldn’t even believe his father was a villain?”

“No! I —”

“Also, we are not monsters.”

That… completely took the wind out of Marinette’s response. She looked down at the floor, at Kagami’s toes. Of course Kagami wasn’t a monster, just like Adrien wasn’t, just like the Ladybug that Mayura created hadn’t been. Just like always, she was hurting people without meaning to. “… You’re right. I’m sorry. What… what should I call you?”

Kagami’s frown turned even deeper. “You see us as different from you.”

“No! I, um,” what was she even supposed to say at this point? Was she supposed to just misspeak and let Kagami get angrier with her, so that the reprimand would come faster? But that would hurt Kagami, and that would be even worse. She glanced at Kagami’s face, but only for a moment, and then immediately went back to staring at the floor. “I didn’t mean… you’re human. I don’t see you any different from any of my other friends. I just wanted to know if… the thing you share with Adrien and Félix… if you had a word you liked better.”

She glanced up another time, at Kagami’s folded arms. The signet ring, which she had learned held Kagami’s amok just like Adrien’s twin wedding rings held his, didn’t seem to be on any of her fingers right now.

But everything she had said so far was honest, because the only difference between her and Kagami was that Kagami needed to protect that ring for her own safety and self control. Marinette wasn’t at risk of that. It was a consideration, like a disability, and if Kagami was inhuman for that then Rose and Juleka were also inhuman and — they just weren’t. They were all people. It was a difference that didn’t mean anything, it just existed.

“Senti-being,” said Kagami. There was a slight pause before she said the word, but Marinette could tell it was still guarded.

“Okay. I’ll remember that. But, um… you’re still my friend and I think… I’m sorry. You’re amazing, Kagami.”

There was, in fact, another difference between them. Kagami hadn’t lied to a whole city and to her own boyfriend. She wasn’t someone who deserved reprimand and ignominy. No, the inhuman person was Marinette, because she had chosen to be monstrous.

“Continue your story,” said Kagami. It was direct, but from the sound of her, she wasn’t as upset anymore. Perhaps a little, or perhaps that was to do with how preposterous said story was, how disappointing Marinette must appear to her.

“Right… I found out… um, she, I mean Nathalie was there. And I talked to her and then the Miraculised attacked. I kept fighting until they almost overpowered me, there were so many, I hid somewhere and detransformed, then Plagg arrived and said Cat Noir couldn’t come, I didn’t know he was Adrien at the time so… um. Yeah.”

“Yes. He was locked in with me.”

Marinette bit back her comment that she knew. Kagami was just being conversational. It was her own fault that she was so stressed about this. “Yeah… so… um, Gabriel found me but he was Monarch, and I transformed and fought him. He was already using several Miraculous, so…”

“Did you win?”

“Um?”

“Did you defeat Monarch?”

No — obviously Kagami was being serious. She didn’t see what happened, she only knew that there was a situation before and a situation after. And the situation after was that Gabriel was dead and Marinette was alive, but also that Gabriel got to make the wish and that Marinette had been left with a pile of secrets. It was impossible to know what actually happened without being told.

She sighed slowly. “I… don’t know,” she said, and immediately felt like an idiot. How could she be surprised about Kagami’s lack of surety, when she was there herself and didn’t really know, either? And… how could she know, honestly, whether she won or lost?

“I won the fight. I, I got the butterfly Miraculous off him. But…” She put a hand to her face, fanning it out across her cheek. “Ugh. I tried to talk sense into him.”

“You tried to talk sense into Gabriel Agreste.”

Maybe the tone wasn’t accusatory. But it was at least disbelieving. “Yeah… I did. I know it was stupid of me. I know I’m an idiot. I tried to tell him he should care about Adrien and at least say goodbye, try and set everything up so Adrien would have a good life after he died, but… he hit me with Venom and…”

Thinking about it now… she had blamed herself for what happened for a long time. And sure, she deserved the blame, because if she wasn’t such an idiot then she wouldn’t be in this situation. If she were honest with Adrien and Paris from the start, then it would have started out painful but probably — no, definitely — everything would be better now. Adrien would have come to terms with it, Paris would have put the blame solely on Gabriel and — no, they wouldn’t would they? They would have blamed Adrien as well, or at least suspected him, and his grandparents might have stepped in and done things, and — and who could even know what would happen if Paris knew…

But no matter what, no matter the things she told the truth about and to whom, she could never have been a bigger dirtbag than Gabriel. That was the feeling that swelled up in her now that she thought back on that day, more than anything. He was the man who had pulled her and Adrien out of bed to fight countless akumas, exploiting people’s negative emotions to make them his unwilling servants. He was the man who neglected Adrien and treated him like a marketable commodity for years, even before Émilie died. He was the reason any of this was a problem in the first place.

No matter how low she was, she was Eiffel tower height compared to him. She had a foot that was flaking off into black pieces because of him. She had lost Adrien because of him. She hated him, she hated him more than she could put into words. Even on his deathbed, hearing Émilie’s words tell him that he was mad and an awful father, even as he had a flicker of realisation that he had been terrible to Adrien… he still used his very last breath on Earth, his very last chance to do something good, to foist the responsibility of caring for Adrien off on somebody else.

‘Please make sure Adrien remembers the times I tried to be a good father’ — well, bad news, mister. You never did anything of the sort. Gabriel Agreste’s only good action in his life was to cease it, and he couldn’t even do that right. He had to make everything worse for everyone else in the process.

“I said he should spend his last hours on making things right for Adrien,” she pushed on. She only stammered a little, and it was all from rage. “I wanted him to make sure Adrien would be taken care of and, and to talk to him and I wanted to take him to London and they could have had a moment together and Adrien could have… I wanted him to set Adrien free. And he… I detransformed and he Venomed me and he stole the Miraculous and he made the wish to just escape everything. Kagami… I think I hate him. Is that wrong of me?”

Kagami seemed to give the question some thought before she answered. She eventually ended up with, “I think you’re allowed to hate him. I don’t know if it’s ‘correct’ to hate him, but I do it too.”

“Really? How come?” It wasn’t a question of confusion, because she knew there were many reasons to hate him. She only wanted to know what Kagami’s reasons were, in case they were the same reasons and they could share in their feeling.

But Kagami went back to frowning. “What would you have had him say to Adrien?” she said — there was no frown in the question. But her face stayed upset.

“I…”

That was the question, wasn’t it? She thought when she stood over him in front of Émilie’s coffin, when she had ‘won’, that he should make it so Adrien would have a secure future. Set up his affairs, finalise his will, make it so Amélie or maybe his own parents could have gotten custody of Adrien.

She wanted him to bring Adrien back from London and to have a conversation with him, a ‘human solution’, but… what on Earth would they have talked about? After so much time neglecting his son, would Gabriel have had anything meaningful to say to him? Would Adrien have been able to trust anything Gabriel said? And could she have trusted Gabriel to treat the conversation in a way Adrien deserved?

Well, no. Obviously not. He was a horrible man and she knew that for certain now, even if she didn’t want to believe it until she started to think about it more deeply. But before that, when he was still alive… what did she even want them to talk about?

“… I wanted him to be a dad, for once in his life. I wanted him to say goodbye.”

“Did you want Adrien to know the truth about Monarch?”

Another roadblock. But she had struggled with this answer for even longer. She had wanted Adrien to know, at least in time, but when she mentioned the ‘human solution’ she hadn’t thought through all the details. She knew she wanted something to happen, but she never got a chance to think about what, because Gabriel ruined everything.

Would Adrien have been more, or less, happy if the last he ever saw of his father was a crumbling arm and a tearful apology? Would he have been satisfied to know that his dad was Monarch and his replacement mum Mayura, or would that have horrified him? Now that she thought about it, even her proposed solution felt… so small, so meaningless, so terrible for Adrien. He deserved better.

He deserved better parents.

She wished she could have turned back time to fix everything for him. To take the butterfly away before Gabriel could use it and the peacock before Émilie could use it, except if she did that, there would be no Adrien. She wanted to wish for a world where Betterfly was Adrien’s dad, but… the wish had consequences. A price to be paid that was far too high. She wanted to go back and tell Adrien everything, and tell Paris nothing, but that would also have been terrible for Adrien. She wanted to go back to when Gabriel tried to Venom her and just Cataclysm all his Miraculous, because then she could have stopped him from doing what he did, from running away.

But if she did that, it would still be horrible for Adrien. And what if Adrien learned that he was the one who killed his father, however accidentally, and that his mother died to create him? It would be the worst thing possible for Adrien to hear. He was already so sad a lot of the time.

And it all came down to that first, original problem: Gabriel Agreste being a dreadful, dreadful man and father. She hated him, she loathed him. And she had still helped him, still praised his name in the aftermath of his final act of cowardice and neglect.

She wasn’t as bad as him, not by a long shot, but… she would be next in line when the terrible prizes were handed out.

Even so, when she proposed that he talk to Adrien and make things right in his final hours, she had thought — even if she hadn’t figured out any of the details, she was sure she had intended honesty.

“I’m not sure,” she said. And she hated how easily those words came out. “I never got a chance to think about it. But I… did want Adrien to know. I’m just not sure if… I don’t know if there’s anything I wouldn’t have wanted him to know. I don’t know if… I might have wanted the reason Émilie died to have been a secret. Or maybe I wouldn’t. Monarch yes, but everything else, I just…”

She put her arms over her head and groaned. “I just don’t know… I need plans. I need to map things out. I haven’t had time to figure out how that thing should have gone because everything’s been moving so fast and I just… I can’t deal with uncertainty. I’m scared. I’m still scared, even though it never happened. Agh…”

“Marinette?” said Tikki’s voice. “Do you think you were scared of Adrien?”

Marinette uncoiled. “… What? Scared of him? Why would I —”

“Do you think you were scared of how he would react?” Tikki was looking at her with concerned eyes, right next to Kagami’s stern ones. “Do you think… you were afraid he would break up with you?”

The question — felt wrong. It wasn’t on purpose wrong, but it was difficult to answer because…

“I think… no, I wasn’t afraid of that, I was… maybe I was scared he would when I decided to tell him late, but I think… maybe I was scared. But only because I wanted him to be happy and I was scared he wouldn’t be.” She sighed, but the sigh ended in another groan. “I don’t know. I’m so confused about everything.”

‘You’re blinded by love’. The thing Kagami had told her: ‘You’re blinded by love. But if this is your wish, I’ll honour it.’ Love for what? For herself? For Adrien; for the image of Adrien stuck in her head? For the reality where all the edges were sanded down and there wasn’t a villain with the butterfly Miraculous? For — Gabriel?

No. Absolutely not. If it was love that made her lie to the world about Gabriel, it was love for everyone. Not just for Adrien, but also for Kagami and Nathalie. For the people of Paris, who wanted peace, who wanted to know that victory had been won. A martyr was better than a villain because a villain would create new targets. She wanted peace, too, and she did everything she could to build it and keep it, but then it was all whisked away.

If she had been afraid to tell Adrien the truth because he might leave her — well, if she’d told him the truth from the start, he wouldn’t have. Or at least, the breakup would have been less abrupt. It wasn’t about keeping Adrien. It was…

… it was about keeping him safe in a padded cell. Of course that was what it was.

She was wrong to lie and she had known it since the start. She had just convinced herself otherwise, until reality came back in the harshest way possible. Of course she had been wrong. But it wasn’t selfish. It was wrong and stupid and evil, but not selfish.

Maybe she was lying to herself that she had lied out of love for everyone. Maybe she hadn’t cared about Paris and its citizens, and only wanted Adrien to have a comforting falsehood to cling to in the absence of his parents. Maybe she wanted to make Gabriel be a better person than he had ever had the capacity of being on his own, for Adrien’s sake.

She didn’t feel like she was lying to herself. But she was too confused about everything to know anything. It had only been three days since it all went wrong, and she had been attacked by three akumas since. And she deserved it, she deserved this and far more, but she just had no idea what her own intentions had been. The middle layer was too thin to discern.

“I honestly don’t know what I thought back then,” said Marinette. “I don’t know what I wanted to happen, I know bits of it but… I know if Gabriel didn’t steal the wish, everything would be different. He ruined everything I wanted to happen.”

“I see,” said Kagami, nodding once. “That explains a lot.”

“I’m not blinded by love,” Marinette added. “And I wasn’t. I, I wasn’t scared of Adrien, I could never be scared of him.”

Kagami didn’t seem to recognise the phrasing. Not Tikki, either. Of course not: just because it had been stuck in her head for months, that didn’t mean it mattered to anyone else.

There was something about ‘scared’ that still niggled at her, though. An unfinished connection somewhere at the back of her mind. Or maybe it was perfectly obvious and blaring right in front of her, and she was just too stupid, too broken to recognise it.

“I have another question,” said Kagami after a short wait.

Marinette found herself compelled to prod for it. “Y-yes?”

Something shifted inside Kagami’s expression for a moment. Then she said, “Félix.”

“Oh.” That whole thing. “Yes?”

“Félix is deeply upset with you.”

Of course he was. He had good reasons for it, and also — she thought, in her own mind, which she knew to be unreliable but still listened to — he had bad reasons. He had given her some scathing looks at school yesterday, and he wasn’t exactly shy about disliking her during the hero meeting before everything went to pot. But even before that, he hadn’t exactly been pleasant to interact with. Every single occasion they’d interacted was a bad experience.

Maybe he’d seen what she would become. She could accept the attacks against her if that were the case. But even if so, he’d treated her friends badly for no good reason.

“I’m aware,” she said. It sounded dismissive, and she hurried to correct herself. “Um… I’m sorry. I know. But…”

“He thinks you don’t support us.”

Marinette felt her eyes grow wide. “You mean… the two of you, dating?”

“No,” said Kagami, hurriedly, pinkly. “No. I mean… us, as senti-beings. Senti-humans. He thinks you don’t care about us.”

“Why would he think that? I — I was in love with Adrien — I’m friends with you, right?”

Kagami frowned again. But then the frown faded. “Well… I trust you. I think I trust you. But you did destroy lots of sentimo— of senti-beings as Ladybug.”

“Because they were destroying the city! They were hurting people!”

“Yes,” said Kagami. “But you showed mercy to Gabriel and Nathalie, even though they were the ones to control the senti-beings.”

There was no accusation in Kagami’s voice. But Marinette felt like she’d just been kicked in the stomach. It was true, even though that also wasn’t on purpose: she had given far more grace to the masterminds than to the weapons they’d ordered around.

But what could she have done with Reflekdoll, with Mega Leech, with Risk? Letting them continue to exist was the same as putting all her friends in danger. Risk had laid waste to most of Paris by the time she sent them into the sun. It was imperative to take them out before they destroyed everything, except…

… would she have Cataclysmed a human being in the face, like she did with Reflekdoll? Or an animal? Even if the Cure healed them afterwards, would she have taken that step with someone who was just akumatised?

No. She knew she wouldn’t. And even though she could never in a million years have wanted to Cataclysm Kagami, or Adrien, or Félix, she had caused the others suffering. She had ignored the suffering inflicted upon them by Gabriel.

Gabriel, who had created a dozen sentimonsters — senti-beings — only to throw them aside. Who had used living creatures, which he had made with his own hands and thinking brain, as weapons against the city and then flicked them away like they were the cores of apples he’d just eaten.

She couldn’t care for Reflekdoll the same way she cared for Kagami. She just couldn’t. But she knew that if this mattered to Kagami then she would also make it matter for herself. If it was about making sure her friends would feel safe, she would give sympathy to even Lollipop Boy.

And it wasn’t just Lollipop Boy. Because Gabriel had also discarded Senti-Nino with the same lack of care that he discarded Optigami. No wonder he cared so little for Adrien, when Adrien was created the same way he kept creating tools to crumple and discard the moment they stopped being useful to him. 

Maybe he would even have gone that far, if she made him meet with Adrien at the end. Maybe he would have held Adrien for ransom. Maybe he would have given Adrien commands. Maybe he wouldn’t — but she honestly couldn’t trust him on that.

Which meant… it was perfectly reasonable for Kagami to not trust her.

“Félix thinks you care more about Gabriel and Nathalie than you care about us,” Kagami went on.

“N-no. No, I — I don’t. I protected Nathalie for Adrien. Kagami, I’m so sorry… I didn’t mean to make you feel unsafe.”

Kagami’s eyes grew wider. “Unsafe? I feel perfectly safe. I’m saying Félix thinks you don’t care about us.”

“Oh.” Marinette looked away, grabbed her elbow with one hand and clenched the other into a fist. Félix also counted as someone she didn’t want to upset, because she had already done that enough. She just wished he would stop being so… Félix. “Okay. Well… I do care about you. I care just as much as I care for Alya or Nino or, or Mum and Dad. I’m sorry I messed up.”

“I will take what you said back to him, then. He will be happy to hear you’re on our side.” Kagami’s arms unfolded; Marinette didn’t look at her face to see if anything changed there as well. “He might still be upset about the lying afterwards, but I’ll do my best to clear up the misunderstanding.”

“Right. O-okay.”

“However,” said Kagami, before Marinette was even fully done with her response. “Longg and Tikki have suggested you also have a reason to be upset with Félix.”

That made Marinette turn back. Kagami stood there with no trace of anger or irony, she seemed to be expecting an answer. Despite everything, she seemed to be asking genuinely. Like an open book with empty pages that asked to be filled in.

“Um…” said Marinette.

But she couldn’t say anything else. Because Félix’s mistakes, much as they frustrated her, weren’t worth bringing up. He didn’t deserve it the way she did. It was enough for the fraught relationship between the two of them to be purely her fault, for her to be the only person who had helped Gabriel Agreste.

“I think… no. I think he’s… fine,” she managed, half swallowing the second ‘think’.

“Longg seemed deeply concerned about it,” said Kagami. “I could talk to Félix about it. I just want you to get along with my boyfriend.”

Get along? When he thought her to be — she didn’t know what he thought of her, not in detail or words, but she knew it wasn’t good. And on the other side: get along, when he was directly responsible for the kwamis’ suffering?

But Kagami’s expression was earnest, and her eyes were energised. She really was hoping to get something. And yet…

“No… d-don’t worry,” said Marinette. “I don’t have… a problem with him, he’s just… we got off on the wrong f-foot. That’s all.”

“Actually,” said Tikki. She floated down between them, to the side, but she looked towards Kagami. And Marinette almost opened her mouth to shut her up, but it was too late, because Tikki continued: “Félix was the one who gave all the Miraculous to Gabriel.”

All the enthusiasm visibly drained from Kagami. “What?”

“He stole all the Miraculous from Marinette after the battle with Risk,” said Tikki.

“Tikki… don’t…”

“No, Marinette. She is asking a question and she deserves to have it answered. Kagami, I’m sure he’s changed for the better now, but… the kwamis are still scared of him. He gave everyone over to Gabriel in return for Duusu, and until he created Red Moon we all thought he was working together with Monarch.”

Kagami opened, then closed, then opened, her mouth. Her eyes were incredibly wide. “So… he was the one who gave Gabriel the tools to…”

“No, he didn’t,” said Marinette, reaching out her hand, trying to grasp hold of the reins again. “He didn’t… mean anything bad, he just…”

The realisation struck her like a single raindrop against the shoulder. Duusu. The snap of the fingers that had erased Sentibubbler and Senti-Ladybug. He was afraid.

“… he wanted to get back the peacock so he could be sure Gabriel wouldn’t snap him out of existence. It was self defence, he didn’t —”

“Marinette,” said Kagami. Suddenly, her tone was severe and her eyes were lightning. “Be quiet.”

“W-what?”

“You’re doing the same thing you did with Adrien. You’re refusing to tell me the truth to spare my feelings.” Her hands were fists, too. “I don’t need to be coddled. If Félix gave the Miraculous to Gabriel, I ought to know about it.”

“But…” started Marinette, with no idea where she would go from there. It was a reflexive protest and not a considered response, she didn’t have arguments lined up in her head. In fact, the arguments she had in her head from before were all against Félix, not in defence of his actions.

Did she approve of Kagami and Félix dating? She supposed she did. She approved of Kagami getting to make her own choices, and if she loved him her only complaint would be if he didn’t love her back. She might not like Félix on a personal level, she might think he had done things that were bad, but if she were going to throw stones she needed to put her own glass house in order first. And Félix could still make up for himself, he just… needed to actually try.

“No, Marinette. You have to tell me things. This is important for me to know. Did Félix give Gabriel the Miraculous?”

Marinette hesitated. If she said yes… then Kagami would blame somebody else than her. It was her own carelessness that had caused everything, her — yes, her blind love for Adrien, in that instance — it was her mistakes that led to it happening.

But Kagami already knew. And she wasn’t asking to be told something. She was asking to be met with honesty.

“… Yes. He, he did. But it was my fault, I made so many mistakes that day and I didn’t… I should have done better.”

“Maybe,” said Kagami. And she smiled, but only a little, only for a moment, and only with her lips. “Thank you for telling me. Has Félix done anything else that’s upset you?”

Marinette hesitated again. Did Kagami know? She knew about Red Moon, of course, but did she know about anything else Félix had done? Like pretend to be Adrien and insult everyone, or try to force a kiss onto Ladybug? Was this another test?

Well… the details weren’t important. And Félix probably wasn’t going to do things like that again. If he hated only her, that was fine, and if he never again did anything to anybody else she would be okay with it.

Even so, though, she didn’t want to lie to Kagami. Not now, not after that reprimand, not when she so clearly wanted to know. “He, um… he was nasty to everyone for a while. Insults and, um. Stuff. Also Red Moon, when he snapped everyone away, but… yeah. You know that one already.”

“I see,” said Kagami. “Don’t worry. He has stopped being nasty to people. When we had that pool party, he talked to Alya and Juleka and everything seemed fine.”

“Okay…”

“And I will talk to him about the things he did in the past. I will explain that he hurt you and that he needs to do better. Perhaps he’ll agree to a meeting where you can apologise to each other.”

And Kagami smiled. Properly this time, like she had just offered a solution. Explain — he must already know, right? He should know perfectly well that what he did was terrible; he even seemed to take glee specifically in being terrible at times. A mutual apology would go nowhere, because he hated her, and she deserved to be hated, and it wasn’t like she’d be around for long enough that it mattered to make up with him.

But… at least Kagami was trying. She was making an effort to be conciliatory, and to bring the team together. She wanted Félix to do better. Those were good qualities in a Ladybug successor. Even if it had been a spur-of-the-moment thing to give her the earrings, out of necessity, Marinette could be proud of choosing her as a successor. When the Cataclysmed leg finally got its kill, Kagami could lead the team just fine.

“Th-thank you,” said Marinette. She forced a smile of her own. “I, um. It’s fine if he’s still mad at me, though.”

“It isn’t fine. I want my boyfriend and… best friend,” there was a strange pause where Kagami’s face morphed into something strange and gnarled, before going back to normal, “to get along. I will make sure everything is fine between the two of you.”

“Right. Er, okay,” said Marinette. She didn’t trust in this plan, but she wasn’t going to fault Kagami for that. It was fine for her to try. “But… you don’t need to tell anyone else, okay? Like I don’t want him to get into trouble. Just talk to him alone.” And not with, say, the police.

“Yes.”

“Okay. Good.” Marinette glanced at Tikki again; the kwami didn’t exactly look comfortable, but she did try a little smile.

“If there’s anything else I ought to know about, you should also tell me that,” said Kagami. She sounded more serious now than just half a minute ago.

In response, Marinette’s foot stung again. It wasn’t particularly bad this time, so she managed to mask it. But even so, it was a reminder that not even Kagami, not even Alya, or Zoé or Tikki or Alix or her parents, should hear everything. It wasn’t worth worrying them with the inevitable.

“Y-yeah,” she said, and hated herself for how easy she was to read. But maybe Kagami wasn’t reading right now. “I, I’ll do that.”

“I mean it,” said Kagami. “You have to tell me if there’s something wrong in your life.”

… was she that obvious? No — no, Kagami hadn’t even glanced at Marinette’s leg, and there was no way anybody could know that the Cataclysm got transferred. “Um…”

“You aren’t doing well, Marinette,” Kagami pushed on, and it felt like being in front of the police officers yet again, because she had no idea what was going on but she knew it would probably lead somewhere bad.

Tikki joined in, too. “Kagami is right. We can tell something is wrong.”

“No — nothing, uh, nothing’s wrong!” Maybe it was something else, maybe they wanted more details about Félix, maybe they wanted to hear more about Gabriel?

Kagami brought out the folded arms again. “Marinette,” she said, and the name was spoken firmer than granite. “You are Ryuukomori.”

— that put pause to Marinette’s spiralling thoughts. “Um?”

“You have too many thoughts and you want to die. Correct?”

Right. The topic Marinette had expected would come first had finally arrived. Ryuukomori: the cloud giant that wanted nothing except to disappear, to be left alone until the wind could blow her apart. And it all happened because of her, because she was a terrible friend to Kagami.

But… want to die? No. She just knew it was going to happen anyway. And if she suffered in the meantime, was crushed into a little ball of bone and blood because of an akuma, that was just the price she had to pay.

“I’m sorry,” she said, looking between Tikki and Kagami. “I didn’t mean to worry you. It wasn’t like that, I just… didn’t know what to do.”

Kagami’s eyes were full of distrust. “That’s not what you looked like. You looked like you had given up.”

“Really? Um…” Well, that one was true, at least. She had no expectations of anyone else coming to save her. And crying over it… why would she? It would all be the same in the end, anyway.

“Yes,” said Tikki. “You didn’t try to escape or beg to be let free. It almost looked like you were fine with it.”

“I remember what I felt when I was Ryuukomori,” said Kagami. “It felt good, because I was about to solve my problem. I thought if I went away, all my problems would be over, but once you broke me free I realised it wasn’t a good feeling after all. It was terrible and hurtful. You got everyone to show that I was appreciated and that feeling was so much better.”

Marinette gulped. “I’m so sorry to hear that, Kagami…”

“Why are you sorry? You solved the problem. I no longer feel that way, and it’s because of you.”

“I meant…”

No matter how much she’d tried to help afterwards, the initial feeling had been her fault. And even if it hadn’t been, it sounded like the feeling was bad enough to commiserate about anyway.

It had been such a strange akuma. The first one that Marinette could remember that didn’t even try to get the Miraculous. She had just walked around, like a storm cloud that didn’t want to rain on anybody else. And Kagami had described that she didn’t even see anybody else at the time, she had just seen… empty streets.

And the inevitable conclusion was that Gabriel had wanted to torture her. To punish her for no longer dating Adrien, or maybe for insubordination towards Tomoe. Maybe he suspected she knew Ladybug’s identity and wanted to pressure it out of her, though if he did, it failed.

Another surge of hatred pulsed through Marinette. She had caused Kagami to feel unwanted, by accident. That was bad enough, but compared to Gabriel Agreste — who had actively exploited that feeling and made Kagami feel like the only option was to die — he was a horrible, disgusting man. She didn’t want to throw stones, because she was a horrible person herself, but if she could have thrown stones at Gabriel Agreste’s head she would have.

“Kagami… I’m just sorry you felt that way. Okay?”

“And you?” said Kagami. “You feel that way now, don’t you? You think all your problems would be solved if you died, don’t you?”

That tone… it wasn’t an accusation, or it wasn’t just an accusation. It was also an offer to help. Kagami was often stingy with her emotions, but even when she was it was possible to read her. And right now, she was an open book with very small writing.

But… what was even the right way to respond? It wasn’t like dying would solve anything. She would still be guilty of destroying people’s trust in the heroes, she would still be the person who lied and ruined Adrien’s life and broke up Alya and Nino. Dying would be pointless because until the point she died, she would still feel the guilt for everything she did.

In fact, she needed to be alive, because if she wasn’t she couldn’t make up for anything. She had to carry the weights that she had taken up, or someone else would have to. And that wouldn’t be fair to them.

She was going to die. The rot in her foot would consume her eventually. It wasn’t a punishment for anything she did, not really, because it was inflicted on her by the only person in the world who was worse than her. And he didn’t do it as a judgement of her, he did it because he didn’t want to do even the bare minimum for his son. It was just… something that was going to happen, unrelated.

Right now, most of her foot was blackened. It was going to spread upwards, enough that she couldn’t wear shorts along with the socks, either. It would crawl onto her stomach and up towards her lungs and heart, decaying her entire body. She didn’t want that. She… just knew it was coming, no matter what.

With a faint horror, she realised she didn’t actually care about it one way or the other. She didn’t want it, but she didn’t not want it, either. She had no desire to die but also no desire to live, or at least no desire to live that wasn’t bound up in her desire to try and fix at least some of the things she broke. Whether she perished in the process was meaningless.

And she knew that if she died, some people would be sad. Her parents, Kagami, Alya, Zoé, Alix, maybe some other people too. She didn’t want to make them sad, either. But that alone couldn’t motivate her to live. Plus, it was going to happen regardless of what she did.

As for Nino’s akumatisation…

“That’s not it,” she murmured. She was going to be honest, but she wasn’t going to say the whole truth. “I don’t want to kill myself. I just… didn’t want to be a bother, because you’d fix me up again after anyway. With the cure.”

“A bother,” said Kagami, frowning. “Marinette. If you had stayed in there any longer, you would have been crushed into a goo. Even if you were healed afterwards, you would have suffered in the meantime. You’re saying you didn’t care about all the pain you would have gone through? That means you want to die.”

“I — it doesn’t!” said Marinette. “I just didn’t want to, I mean, I knew it would be fine afterwards, and Nino was so angry and I… I don’t know, I just didn’t have anything to do, that doesn’t mean anything?”

“No. The problem is that you weren’t scared of dying. A normal person would have screamed and tried to get out, because that’s an instinctual reaction. You just sat there, Marinette, and that means something is wrong.”

Marinette opened her mouth. But she closed it again, because she had no words lined up on her tongue or waiting in her thoughts. The explanation sounded right but didn’t feel right, or it felt right but sounded wrong, and she didn’t know which. She just knew that… either way, she was struggling to make herself care.

“I don’t… know,” she said eventually.

“I want you to be open with me,” said Kagami. “And with Alya, Alix, and Zoé. They care about you. Something is making you feel like Ryuukomori, and I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s because you lost your boyfriend, or because of all the pressure on you. Maybe it’s something else, but I want to help you escape. Okay?”

“But I —”

“Omori means burden. You shouldn’t carry burdens by yourself.”

Kagami’s eyes met hers. They were deeply genuine. Of course they were; Kagami would never joke about anything like this. Her honesty was as sharp and direct as her fencing sword. It begged for honesty in return.

Except…

Was she pushing Kagami away right now? No — no, she wasn’t telling Kagami to leave. She wasn’t refusing company or help. She just didn’t know herself what was going on. If she could have mapped out her own emotions, plotted them on a sheet and drawn lines between them in a way that made sense, then she would have. If she could organise her thoughts together in a useful way, she might have tried.

She also wasn’t saying anything about her leg. But that was a different thing. She was going to die from that, inevitably and inexorably, and telling Kagami or Tikki about it would only cause undue worry.

In the end, it was just her. Her suffering wasn’t going to make anyone else catch her Cataclysm. Being squeezed into a tiny ball of gore wouldn’t have squeezed anyone else.

“I know,” she muttered. Because she did know that. But this was different.

Kagami sighed. “When I was Ryuukomori, I broke free because I found out you cared for me. I don’t know what’s on your mind, so I don’t know if this will help. But I want you to know that I care for you.”

“Yeah,” said Tikki.

Marinette didn’t answer, though. Because she could tell Kagami had something else on her mind, too. The girl’s face was twisting and morphing, and her eyes were flickering back and forth, and there was obviously some kind of war going on inside her. And maybe Marinette would have liked to encourage her, to say that she could say whatever she wanted, but at this point she didn’t trust herself to try and not mess it up. So she waited, trying to quietly transmit her thoughts that it would be okay.

“Marinette…” said Kagami. This time, it was an obvious prompt, and Marinette had to answer.

“Yes?”

“I really care about you.”

“I… okay.”

“I love you. I’m in love with you.”

Marinette’s heart stopped completely. Did she hear that right? Was Kagami joking with her? No, this wasn’t Kagami’s style of joke either, but — it couldn’t be. Why would Kagami, of all peo—

Her thoughts also stopped completely when Kagami grabbed her by the arms and pulled her closer into a deep kiss on the mouth. It was forceful and clumsy and almost certainly unplanned but it was also so intense that Marinette couldn’t move.

However long it lasted, Kagami pulled back with the same speed she’d initiated. She didn’t let go of Marinette’s arms, though, and there was a steadiness to the eyes now that had momentarily disappeared in her palpable uncertainty.

“I have a boyfriend,” Kagami said. “Just like Alya, I can’t give you my heart. If I wasn’t seeing Félix, though, I would have tried to date you.”

There was a pause. Marinette filled it with a dumbfounded, “Um…”

“Please understand. I’m not good at social interactions. I am saying this so you know that you are loved and appreciated, and that you’re not alone. Everything I have said is completely serious and honest.”

Obviously. Kagami’s firm voice and sharp expression made that abundantly clear, and the kiss would make it impossible to forget. But… that still didn’t answer why. Why did Kagami, Zoé, Alya love her? Why, when she had hurt them so much and proved herself to be craven and unreliable? Why, when she had made her boyfriend break up with her?

Why now, when she couldn’t give any of them what they wanted, because the wound would kill her before she could offer them the happiness that they deserved?

“Kagami… I…”

“You don’t have to tell me that you reject me,” said Kagami, and Marinette realised she had been too obvious. “I love Félix too. I can’t leave him. I didn’t confess for my own sake.”

“… Okay,” said Marinette. She couldn’t say ‘that’s good’, because that would sound wrong. “I’m, um, I’m flattered…”

Kagami took out her phone and looked down at it. “We have almost half an hour before class starts again. If you want, we could discuss your negative feelings towards yourself for a while longer.”

“Er. I don’t think… I don’t really, um… I haven’t really… head is messy…”

“Okay.” Kagami sighed again and pocketed her phone, then put her earrings back in. “I understand. But please keep in mind that I would like to hear what is troubling you. You shouldn’t be carrying your burdens alone, and you should not become Ryuukomori. I will take you back to school, but I will come visit you in the evening. Unless you have plans?”

Marinette blinked for a couple seconds before she realised that she had been asked a question. “Um. Er. Yes? I mean, no, I don’t, I, um. I don’t. Have any plans, I mean.”

She could only hope that Zoé wouldn’t plan a visit of her own for the same time.

“Good. Expect me around nine o’clock, which is right after I have supper with Mother. I’ll also try to speak to Félix after school, and hopefully resolve the misunderstandings between you.”

Honestly… Kagami was trying so hard. More so than Marinette deserved, and possibly more than Félix deserved. And if the problem was truly that she didn’t feel loved, then Marinette could never have maintained that misconception in the face of Kagami’s earnestness.

Kagami was a good Ladybug. No, she was more than that: she was a good Namitentou.

“Okay,” said Marinette.

“Spots on,” said Kagami.

“Er,” said Marinette.

She was thinking back to earlier in their talk. Kagami had shown her so much consideration today. Never mind the deservedness of that, Kagami ought to be considered back. And there was a burning question that felt unanswered.

“Are you… afraid of Nathalie?”

“Hm,” said Kagami. She appeared to mull it over for a bit. “I don’t know. She loves Adrien, so she can’t be all bad… but Félix is scared of her.”

“But are you?”

“I don’t know,” repeated Kagami. “I haven’t given it much thought.”

“Oh,” said Marinette.

She only remembered the other question — why, specifically, Kagami hated Gabriel — when they were almost at school. And at that point it was too late.

They split apart and went to their separate classrooms with a careful wave. The whole rest of the day, Nino refused to meet her eye.

Chapter Text

Zoé left the classroom and went to pace the second floor hallway immediately after the bell rang. It wasn’t her floor, but she was desperate to see Marinette and check up on her. She also had Marinette’s hairbands still. Plus, she was intent on giving Nino a sharp look if she saw him.

It was because he was akumatised. Of course he wasn’t accountable for his actions. But he was accountable for getting so upset he would be susceptible to akumatisation, and that akumatisation had led to… had almost led to…

She didn’t see Nino, though. She saw and greeted Rose and Ivan and Kim, and she saw Alix and Nathaniel and Sabrina further away, plus a dozen people she didn’t know. And no Marinette.

As she was about to peek into Marinette’s classroom, though, someone tapped her shoulder. She whirled around and —

“Um! H-hi!” said Iris, shrinking together. “Sor, sorry. I was looking for you.”

“Hey,” said Zoé, managing a smile. “Sorry if I surprised you. Why were you looking for me?”

“Um. I, I, while I was in, in the bathroom, a-and that noise happened…” Iris looked down. “I, um, I went to hide in your, in that room you s-showed me. Be-because I thought it had to be, um, be an akuma. I hope that’s okay…”

Zoé nodded. “That’s fine. It was an akuma, so it’s good to be safe.”

“Does anyone… um, else, know about, about the room?”

“Nope,” said Zoé. “It’s my little secret. Well, our little secret now, I guess.” She winked, even though she didn’t entirely feel it; it was worth it to see Iris respond with a little smile.

“So, um… w-why are you here?”

And there, the reality that made her feel unfairly out of sorts for talking to Iris. “I’m looking for someone,” she replied cautiously.

“Oh!” Iris’s eyes shone for a moment. “M-M-Marinette?”

“Ah… yes. I’m looking for Marinette. The akuma went after her, so she was pretty… er…”

She could see the grey sphere contracting around Marinette again. And the even deeper grey in Marinette’s eyes, in Marinette’s sorrowful frown. It was only an hour since it happened but she was certain she would see it for years into the future. And if she didn’t, it would be because she stopped seeing anything.

“Is, is that her?” said Iris. She pointed past Zoé, into the hallway, and Zoé whirled around faster than she had ever whirled before and she saw —

She was running before her brain fully registered anything. Marinette was on her way back into the corridor, her hair hanging loose just past her collarbones and her arms bare, glancing around nervously as she emerged from the stairwell. Zoé wasn’t going to give her the chance to get her bearings. She wrapped Marinette into a hug and was rewarded with a yelp and with cold, stiff shoulders and it was horrible but it was absolutely necessary.

“You’re okay,” said Zoé. It was a prayer more than a statement, and both more than an assurance. “You’re okay.”

Her crush hadn’t faded since yesterday, because of course it hadn’t. It hadn’t grown stronger, either. She was feeling the same thing as yesterday and she wanted to crush Marinette, not all the way, just a little so Marinette could feel just a smidgen of what she was doing to Zoé’s throat and heart.

“Zoé…” mumbled Marinette. She sounded even more out of it than she did yesterday.

“I saw what happened on the roof,” she said, entirely truthfully, even if it was only a part truth. There were people around who didn’t know. “Why did you…”

“I’m okay,” said Marinette.

Then, shockingly, one of her arms joined the hug. It grabbed onto Zoé’s shoulder, put pressure on Zoé’s back, it was a hateful taunt of what could have been if only Marinette wasn’t so stupid —

But she swallowed it. She swallowed it, like needles and acid. She didn’t want to talk, not really; she only wanted to confirm to herself that Marinette was still here and to Marinette that she, Zoé, was here too. Having Marinette’s arm around her back, pulling away and looking Marinette deep into her oceanic eyes: it was the last thing she wanted, but she did also want it.

“Um, Zoé?” added Marinette. “I’m sorry.”

Zoé sighed inwardly. Yet another empty gesture, which could never reciprocate the horrible fathoms of her heart.

But a voice from outside them interrupted them both. “U-um? He, hey,” said Iris — and Marinette jolted, and Zoé completely let go of Marinette and stepped back so she could have both of them in view at the same time.

“Hi?” said Marinette, wide-eyed. “Um…”

“This is Iris,” said Zoé. “We’re friends. She’s in my class.”

“You’re M-M-M-Marinette? I, um, I’ve heard lots, um, lots of good things a-about you.”

Marinette shrank together. “Er, really? That’s… nice of you.”

“She only just moved here,” Zoé explained. Her voice felt stilted, because her head definitely was. As she talked, her eyes were on Iris and not on Marinette. “She didn’t know about akumas until yesterday. It’s probably pretty scary, right?”

Iris nodded.

“Okay,” said Marinette. And she made an obvious effort to smile. “Welcome to our school, Iris.”

This wasn’t the real Marinette. The real Marinette would have been enthusiastic, forward. Acted the way she did when Zoé first arrived and visited the bakery. Been all arms and legs and assurances in her efforts to make Iris feel welcome, offered all of herself. She would have been a shining beacon that convinced everyone around her they were safe and had nothing to worry about. Not… whatever this was, not fighting to do the bare minimum.

“Th-thank you,” said Iris. She looked straight down, though her eyes did flit up to Marinette a couple of times as she spoke. “Um… I’d love to, to be, I’d love to be your f-f-friend, too…”

A beat. Marinette looked like she had just seen an oncoming truck at high speed. “Um, that’s… very kind of you,” she said, still with the same expression, but then she seemed to make a decision. Maybe the decision was to let the truck hit, because she put on another barely-genuine smile. “Sure, let’s be friends.”

Iris seemed very surprised by that answer — to the point where she didn’t even stutter. “Really?”

“… Y-yes?” said Marinette, with her own species of surprise. “Er, did I misunderstand? S-sorry, I thought you said you wanted to be friends…”

“Oh! I, I d-d-did say that,” said Iris. “Thank you!”

Marinette, obviously baffled, only answered with a nod.

“Iris is from Italy, actually,” said Zoé. She didn’t know why. But she unwittingly furrowed her brows at Marinette after saying it, so it was probably because she wanted to goad some kind of reaction. “I’ve been showing her around school. Like you did with me.”

“That’s good,” said Marinette. Another performative smile. Maybe not performative, not in the fullness of the word, but definitely pushed beyond the natural and automatic. “You’re a good person, Zoé.”

Hah. Not half as good as the Marinette that had showed her around. Not half as good as the Marinette that had grasped the confession that late evening and taken it for what it was, assured her that she was lovable. But she was at least better than the Marinette that was now, even though… even though it was still impossible to look at current Marinette and not feel short of breath, pumped of heart. The curtain of hair was a good look on her —

— Zoé was an idiot. And her heart doubly so. Ugh. Ugh.

“Actually, Iris,” she said, turning entirely towards her. “We should introduce you to everyone later. The whole group. Marinette might —” she almost said, ‘isn’t really good company right now,’ but even at her angriest she could never utter those words and not be tortured by them — “might be a little too tired for conversation right now.”

It was true, and it sounded kind, and Marinette would know it wasn’t kind. In fact, Marinette cringed visibly. “Zoé… I really am sorry,” she murmured, as Iris looked between the two of them with wide eyes and quivering lips.

“Is, um… something wrong?” said Iris.

“Yeah,” said Marinette, drawing the word out longer than it needed to be. “It’s my fault. Don’t worry…”

It was only an hour ago that Marinette wrapped her arms and body and entire scent around Zoé. A rote, mechanical gesture; an utter torment. Right now, Marinette was turning herself into a doormat to please her. The Marinette that stood up and asserted her own wishes was just gone, blown away in the wind of whatever was going on inside her head, and Marinette could maybe perform similar actions to before but they felt so different. Like echoes of a faded photograph falling into a frosty lake. The Marinette that was now, who would reject love without a boyfriend standing in the way and who would push everyone away just to add more burdens to her own shoulders, was hurtful by her very nature.

But that wasn’t a topic for Iris. It was hardly even a topic for Marinette. It was something to be cried out against a pillow until the crush finally stopped taking hold, except… it felt wrong to think that.

Zoé was almost about to open her mouth when the door to the stairwell opened and nudged Marinette in the back, enough to make her almost fall forward. But she caught herself with a step, and the step made her pull in air sharply through her teeth, like she had twisted her ankle or something.

And then a face appeared from behind the door, a blonde white girl with her past-shoulders hair tied up in occasional small braids. “Oh! Sorry, I didn’t see you… are you okay?” she said, stepping fully into the hallway.

“I… yeah,” said Marinette, clearly still in pain. She lifted her leg off the floor with a bent knee, eyes slightly squeezed together. “I’m fine. Sorry I was in the way…”

“Wait, did you twist something down there? Did I hit you badly with the door?” said the girl.

“No, no, I just… I’ll be okay. Don’t worry.”

The girl raised an eyebrow. “Okay, then. You’d best get it checked out, though, or you’ll end up like me.”

She pointed at her legs, which — were mechanical. As all three of them stared down at the prostheses, which replaced everything from the knees down, the girl snorted. “Sorry, that’s my little joke. A bump won’t do this to you.”

“O-oh,” said Marinette. Her voice was very small. “I see.”

“Wait… hey,” said the girl. “Aren’t you…”

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” said Zoé. “Ex-Ladybug.” Again, she wasn’t sure why she said it, but she frowned and folded her arms. It felt so mean, so petty once she’d said it, but she couldn’t help herself. And Marinette, naturally, shrivelled up even further.

The girl nodded slowly. Nothing in her expression seemed to change. “I thought so. Knew you were at this school, but I hadn’t seen you yet. I’m Sublime. As in that’s my name.”

Marinette answered by giving Sublime a look of horror. “I… okay… nice to m-meet you…”

“Yeah,” said Sublime. She didn’t return the greeting. “Anyway, I’m sorry for interrupting, I was just meeting with a friend on this floor… maybe I’ll see you folks later?”

And then she turned around with a wave of her fingers, and stepped lightly towards the Seconde 1 classroom.

“Um,” said Iris, glancing at Marinette. “She, um, she s-seemed mean.”

Marinette sighed. “No… I think she seemed… perfectly nice…”

“Really?” said Iris, again baffled to the point where the stammering stopped. 

Well, whatever she was… Zoé felt the same way as Sublime. That she had to get away from Marinette. She was becoming a worse person by being in her company.

“I think we should go too, Iris,” she said. “Let Marinette have some peace and quiet.”

“Okay,” said Marinette, looking away. “Take care… both of you… I’m sorry…”

“Yeah,” said Zoé, and pulled Iris away — through to the stairwell, leaving Marinette on her own.

The last image she saw of Marinette, before turning fully away, was one of pleading eyes and sorrowful lips. And she so desperately wanted to kiss them until they stopped being that — but it was too late in the day to dream.

◀◁ ▧▨▧ ▨▧▨ ▷▶

Kagami walked out on her balcony the moment she got home. She held on to the railings and wondered, just briefly, if she might ever feel the desire to jump over them again. She didn’t now, she hadn’t for months, but it felt like a question she needed to ask today.

Of course, a fall like that wouldn’t kill her unless she were extremely unlucky. It was only two stories, two and a half, down to the garden below. It would be far more sensible to throw herself off a taller building, to ensure she would die and not just injure herself. Even so, she had briefly thought about it one evening, in her desperation and loneliness. It hadn’t been a serious consideration, not something she lingered on, but the thought had appeared to her: ‘I could jump off this balcony.’

She could scarcely even imagine feeling that way right now. Marinette was her friend. Marinette’s friends were her friends. She had people to talk to and confidence in her hobbies. She had been trusted as a hero. There was too much good in her life to even imagine ending it. Not to mention, she had —

“Princess,” said Félix’s voice. She turned halfway towards him and smiled; he was hanging off the side of the roof in his Argos costume.

“Prince,” she said.

She didn’t feel as happy to see him as she usually did, though. According to Tikki, and eventually Marinette, he had worked together with Gabriel. He had given Gabriel all the Miraculous. And he had, admittedly, had his episodes of being nasty to people.

That was fine, though, in itself. He hadn’t been nasty to her. If anything, he had been extremely nice to her. And — yes, she could see her Amok-carrying signet ring on his ring finger. Where it would stay for the time being, because it didn’t feel safe to carry it herself as long as Mother might still catch on that the one she carried wasn’t the right one.

No, the problem was just… he hadn’t told her about what he did. Like he was keeping it from her on purpose. She hoped he had just been embarrassed to tell her, and that he hadn’t intentionally kept her in the dark, but the possibility of the latter still stuck in her craw like a knife.

And — she didn’t like that Félix was so angry with Marinette for ‘helping’ Gabriel, when he had helped the man far more. She thought he must have his reasons, but she needed to know those as well. She needed honesty, openness, she needed to know she could trust him. And she hated that thought, because he had been trustworthy towards her, so it felt like demanding a white sheet be even whiter. Demanding a bright lamp shine even brighter. But she knew now she loved Marinette too, so it felt even more wrong to not demand some justice for her.

“How are you this fine afternoon?” he said, slipping down fully on the balcony, where he detransformed and put his hands on her arms. “Can I kiss you?”

“I… no,” said Kagami. “Inside.”

He blinked. “You don’t want a kiss on the balcony?”

Didn’t she? The request had almost felt like something someone else said through her. He was her boyfriend, it was completely fine to kiss him. But going back on what she said now would feel even stranger, so she simply pulled him inside. “I’d like us to kiss inside my room,” she insisted.

“Okay,” he said, and he rolled his eyes playfully as she placed him next to her bed. “You’re very princessy today.”

“Am not.”

He smiled, leaned in for a smooch on the lips. “I’ll bring you a tiara next time, princess.”

For as long as their lips were together, she answered the kiss. But when they parted she felt the chill of its absence maybe more than she should.

“Why did you want me to come over so soon after school?” he asked, with barely a pause from his tiara comment. “I don’t mind coming, but it sounded like you had something on your mind…”

“Yes,” she said. It was better to bite the bullet straight away. “I was talking to Marinette earlier today, and —”

“Ugh,” he said. “Why do you still talk to her? She’s the enemy.”

“I don’t think she is,” Kagami replied, a little sharply. “I talked to her today. Okay?”

He didn’t reply immediately. No, immediately, he seemed nonplussed. But then it settled into a slight frown. “Okay, princess.”

“… Thank you,” she replied. Yes. He was listening. “I talked to her to try and clear things up. She says she doesn’t mind that we are senti-beings. She supports us. You don’t need to be upset with her.”

“Okay,” he said, frowning. “I don’t trust her, though. She probably said that just to make you feel safe.”

… Of course she did? His words sounded more barbed than they should be — even though trying to make other people feel safe was an admirable thing to do. “I trust her,” she said, because the other part was just confusing.

His finger rubbed against her ring, almost like an unconscious gesture. “I think she’s manipulating you.”

“Why would you think that?”

“She manipulated Adrien.” He stood up in a single, rapid motion and folded his arms, his lips severe. “She manipulated everyone. She kept secrets from him all this time, just so she could stay close to him. If she cared about us, she would have handed Sancoeur over to the cops.”

Kagami found herself struggling to think of a response. “I… no, that isn’t… without Nathalie, Adrien wouldn’t have any caretakers…”

“He would have had Mum, and me. And he’s got grandparents.”

“But Nathalie has taken care of him for years!”

“And she killed a dozen living creatures with just a snap of her fingers. She could turn on him any time she wants.” He twisted his mouth for a moment. “And Marinette could turn on you. If she got your ring, she might command you to believe her or even break it to destroy you.”

She finally found some safe footing again. “No — no, she would not. Marinette isn’t like that. She even asked me today if I’m afraid of Nathalie, and if she didn’t care she would not have asked. You’re wrong, Félix.”

There was a terrible, long second where he was stone-faced as a gargoyle. But he seemed to falter slightly, and took on a more pleading tone. “I’m worried for you,” he said. “I don’t want you to be hurt. I think if you trust her, she’ll hurt you.” And then, before she could open her mouth again, he added: “Just like she hurt Adrien.”

“But…” she tried. Again, all words vanished from her lips.

“It might not even be on purpose. But she could hurt you anyway. She’s not one of us, so she can’t understand what it’s like. Sooner or later, she’ll hurt you in some way.” He took a step closer and stroked her on the cheek. “I just don’t want you to get hurt. Okay? I love you.”

“I love you too,” she murmured back. She disagreed with him, or she thought she did, but she still loved him. Of course he was scared, after what his dad did to him.

“So don’t try to make me talk to her, okay?” His smile was soft. “She’s not worth it.”

“How can you say that,” she said, still murmuring.

“I’ve seen what she’s capable of,” he said simply. “She’s killed our kind indiscriminately.”

“To protect Paris.” Indiscriminately? Marinette had been highly discriminate.

“To protect those she thinks of as real people.” He sighed. Again, his thumb stroked her ring thoughtlessly. “Kagami… please just leave her to herself. I don’t trust her.”

“Is that why you stole all the Miraculous from her?”

His eyes went wide. Hers probably did, too. She hadn’t meant to bring it up like this.

“Who told you that?” he said, speaking slowly.

“Marinette.” It wasn’t really the truth, but she couldn’t tell him about Tikki.

The moment he heard the name, though, he went into a deep frown. “She’s just trying to turn you against me.”

“No, Félix. I know you did it.”

He glared at her for a moment. Almost like he wanted to hide it from her after all — but just like before, he softened and sagged.

“You’re right,” he murmured. “I did take the Miraculous. But I did it to protect us. I got back Duusu’s Miraculous and that means nobody can snap us out of existence anymore.”

“But…” She couldn’t help herself from frowning, despite his admission, because she felt he still wasn’t being honest. “You didn’t know I was a sentimonster at the time.”

“We aren’t monsters —”

“I know. I know.”

“I just meant… I could protect all senti-beings. Not us two-us, but all of us.” He folded his arms then, and it gave the impression he wanted to say something more, so she allowed him the space to. “That day… Marinette killed Strikeback by sending him into the sun. It was horrible. I had to watch him die and I knew I had to make sure nobody could do that to us.”

“You gave Gabriel the horse Miraculous,” she said.

“What?”

She furrowed her eyebrows. “You gave Gabriel the means to send you straight into the sun —” he had given Gabriel so many ways of killing him, actually. Their eyes met and her breath hitched. If Gabriel had killed him… she would never have met him, and she would have been none the wiser. But the idea of never meeting him, never knowing he even existed, never holding his hands, it felt like sacrilege of some kind. He was taking care of her amok, and he was the one who came to her window to keep her company. He was hers. Even contemplating his non-existence made her feel queasy, in the same way that contemplating Marinette’s death made her feel queasy. So she forced herself onto a different track.

“You still gave Gabriel weapons that he used to destroy the city,” she continued. “He became more powerful.”

“But I protected us,” he argued. His fist closed around the brooch, as though concealing it. “I made sure we could exist safely.”

“Us,” she echoed.

He nodded. “Yes! We can determine our own fate now! Remember what I said to you that day we got together? When you bring someone into the world, you have a responsibility. To guide them and love them and help them find out who they are. When Gabriel held Duusu he didn’t do that. Nobody did that, until I got Duusu back. I’m the protector of all senti-beings now. I can help all of us to live better, safer lives.”

“That sounds like the explanation you used for Red Moon,” she said, quietly.

And Félix… went silent. His eyes flickered. His mouth opened, then closed. And then he said, “It’s not the same thing.”

He wasn’t wrong, not really, not in full. Red Moon and Monarch were very different. But she couldn’t help the feeling that he cared so much more for senti-beings than he did for anyone else. He didn’t care for her friends, or for random passers-by in the street. No, he wouldn’t make another Red Moon and swallow up all of humanity again, she trusted him enough to say that. But the way he talked, she really did have to wonder that when he asked her to choose him… he meant exclusively. Two lone cloud giants who would only see, and hear, and touch, each other.

“I just think —”

“Do you know what he tried to do to me?”

He sounded so small. She shook her head, because to reply with words felt wrong, somehow. Like she’d be muscling in when it was his turn to speak.

“He put an akuma into my ring.”

Her breath caught in her throat. Ryuukomori, yet again.

“He wanted me to die. And Sancoeur didn’t stop him. Ladybug didn’t save me. I had to free myself, all on my own, or I wouldn’t be alive. What was I supposed to do? Just let him destroy me? I needed Duusu. It was the only way to be safe. If I didn’t give him what he wanted, he —”

She rose to her feet and swept him into a hug. As her arms wrapped around him, he froze completely, but he slowly relaxed and placed his chin on her shoulder.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

And she didn’t say that he also put an akuma into her ring, because… if she did, she would absolutely be muscling in on his turn to speak. This was his time to rest on her.

“It’s fine,” he muttered. “We’re safe now. He’s dead, and everyone knows he was evil.”

“You were still scared.”

“I’m stronger than him. I’m stronger than Ladybug.” He breathed in, pulled back — she took the hint and let go, ending the hug. “I swear I’ll keep us safe.”

“Okay,” she said.

His finger worried her ring once more. It shifted slightly from its earlier position. “Princess… I won’t trust Marinette, ever. So just don’t try to convince me, okay? And… you should stop talking to her, too.”

She could only nod in response. Even though she thought it was wrong-headed, it wasn’t something she’d feel right in pushing him on.

“I love you. Never forget that.”

But she couldn’t say, ‘I love you too’. It would feel like a lie, when she still couldn’t agree with him. She loved both him and Marinette, but unless she stopped loving Marinette her love for him would be lesser than it should be. Because loving him ought to mean being fully on his side… right?

So she said, “I won’t.”

When they parted a short while later with another kiss, he seemed happy. But she felt more torn now than before he arrived.

◁◀ ▧▨▨ ▧▧▨ ▶▷

Zoé let herself fall backwards onto the bed, arms spread out. A weary sigh passed through her lips, though it could do nothing to express her heart.

“Plagg,” she almost-whispered, nearly-croaked. She tried again and managed a nearly-normal, “Plagg…”

He hovered into sight before he responded. “Yes?”

“I feel terrible.”

Probably he was trying to be considerate. But what he actually said to express that was, “I can tell.”

Not that it mattered. Because she was alone with him, and nobody could see her up here.

And nobody could see into her mind. She was even struggling to take a look for herself.

“Plagg… can you Cataclysm just a tiny part of a person? A piece that they don’t want to have any more? Or that they never wanted to have?”

To ask felt almost perverse. But she needed an answer more than she needed her next breath.

He shook his head, though. “If I use Cataclysm, it causes ripples. Even if all I wanted to destroy was your pillow, it would spread out and destroy the entire hotel. Maybe more. Without a holder, there’s no ‘just’.”

When she drew breath again, it was shaky and shuddering. “If someone wore you…”

“No. If Cataclysm is used on even a single cell, it’s going to spread out, slowly. Like a cancer. Eventually, you’ll die, and there’s no cure.” He sighed and closed his eyes, and his next words felt almost like a speech he’d heard from someone: “Life doesn’t want to stop living. It keeps going even through its own destruction, until the very last moment of suffering.”

She didn’t want to ask who said that. If she were to assume, it would be someone who was his holder at one point. Maybe even someone who had done something terrible with a Cataclysm. “So there’s no way for me to stop being in love,” she muttered instead.

There was a moment of stiff pause. “Why do you want to stop being in love?”

“Because… I think I’ve discovered that I’m not in love with Marinette. Not really.”

He watched her quietly. She moved her hands to the side of her head and squeezed it as hard as she could.

“I’m not in love with her. I’m in love with a Marinette that used to exist. The one who was happy and smiling and helpful to everyone and who gave me pastries and wanted to go see movies with me, even though she knew I was in love with her and she was dating Adrien. I love that Marinette.” She groaned into an exhale and let go again. “I want her out of my head. I keep seeing her in the Marinette who’s there now but she doesn’t exist anymore. She’s just… something that used to be. I hate it. I hate it, I hate it.”

“Zoé…”

She closed her eyes and rolled up into a ball. “Plagg… can I tell you a secret?”

Another pause. “You can tell me anything, Zoé,” he murmured.

“But you have to promise not to hate me.”

“I won’t hate you,” he said, faster this time.

As she opened her mouth to continue, though, her throat ran dry. Her breath felt like a plug in her throat. She’d promised to say it — she had to say it now — but it was rough to even imagine speaking the words out loud. The words were burning in the base of her throat, so saying them would mean also burning her tongue.

“Back in New York… I went to a boarding school,” she started. Obviously, he didn’t respond; he already knew that part. “I was a popular girl, actually. Not… good popular. People liked me. Boys liked me. I had… friends.”

“That’s good,” said Plagg.

“No. It wasn’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because…” She swallowed the lump in her throat. “Ugh. Plagg… being like that made me a worse person. I was a bully. I bullied people. That’s how I became popular. I was really awful to a lot of kids and I felt bad about it sometimes. But only sometimes. And people loved me for it.”

He was too quiet now. Not even a wordless vocalisation.

“Plagg…”

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Continue.”

“Do you hate me?”

Yet another pause. Then: “No.” Simple and straightforward, enough that she dared to believe it.

Anyway, she was past the part that was difficult to talk about. Now she’d reached the part that was painful to think about.

“One of the other… bullies… her name was Monica. We were… friends, yeah. She was cool and pretty and I thought she was the best thing to ever happen. I built up the courage to tell her one day and… the way she looked at me… I wanted to sink into the earth.”

A single sob juddered through her throat. She pushed on. “All the bullies turned on me. They were my friends but because I was gay, they just hated me. So much. I used to bully people with them but they didn’t care about that and I… I had to quit school, it… that’s when I moved to Paris.”

“At least you learned to stop bullying?” said Plagg, pulling on the words.

“No. I didn’t. I still joined Chloé to bully people after I got here.”

He didn’t have an answer for that. She breathed in through her nose, digging rifts into her slowly building snot.

“I don’t love Monica anymore,” she almost whispered. “I stopped fast when I became the bully victim. She wasn’t a good person, she was just… attractive. But Marinette… she’s a good person. Even now.”

“What do you mean?” said Plagg.

“I don’t have a good reason to stop.” She squeezed herself even tighter. As she did so, she became aware of the slight pressure against her thigh from Marinette's hair ties in her pocket. They felt horrible. “So I’m forced to keep loving her. She’s Monica, all over again. But she’s not a bully, she’s just… stupid.”

This time, the sob was painful, the lump in her throat that she swallowed earlier pushing its way back out. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes, but slowly, like they wanted to torment her. And Plagg said nothing.

“Plagg…”

He breathed in. She heard him do it, could imagine his expression while doing it, but she didn’t want to open her eyes to look at him. She wanted to be tiny, curled up, hidden away, a speck of dust.

“I don’t understand love,” he said quietly. “Not… your kind of love.”

“No,” she replied.

“Is Marinette like Monica because she doesn’t love you back?”

“No.” She drew breath through her nose. “I don’t know…”

“Because you’re in love with her?”

“No. She’s Monica because, because they told me it’s wrong to love a girl.”

“I don’t think that’s what Marinette meant.”

“That’s what it felt like,” she almost snapped. But she had no force in her.

His little hand touched against her shoulder. “Are you upset because it reminds you of being a bully? Or being bullied?”

Which one? She couldn’t even tell if it was either of them. “I don’t know…”

“Are you upset with Marinette? Or —”

“Yes. Yes, I’m upset with her.” Her stomach hurt. Her chest hurt and her throat hurt. “I love her but she hates me.”

She felt his hand stroke against her. “She doesn’t hate you.”

Maybe not. Probably not, even. But what did it matter?

“Would you be happy if she loved you back?”

What a stupid question. “Y-yes. No. I… I don’t know…”

Because honestly, she didn’t know anything. She was just a mess of emotions that might soon explode out of her. Obviously Marinette wasn’t Monica but she felt like Monica and the rejection wasn’t a judgement on who she was but with Alya’s akumatisation fresh in her memory, the acid that fake-Marinette and fake-Namitentou had spewed at her, it was… impossible not to think about it. And maybe that wasn’t fair to Marinette but Marinette as she existed now wasn’t fair to her. 

She might not even not be in love with current Marinette. Maybe she did love her. But it made sense in her clouded brain to think that she didn’t. It was more comfortable if she didn’t. If she was only in love with an image then the image could maybe fade, eventually, with enough time.

“I don’t want to love her,” she said, or possibly lied.

But the next thing Plagg said felt like it stopped her heart. “Is it bad to love a past version of Marinette?”

“… What?” she breathed.

“If you stay in love with her, maybe you’ll get old Marinette back.”

“That’s not how it works,” she said. “That’s not…”

“I also like past Marinette,” he continued. “But she’s not gone. She’s just having a hard time, right?”

She didn’t reply. She only wanted to hear what he was trying to say.

“Maybe if you love her, she’ll have it easier.” He sighed. “I don’t know. Human emotions are weird. But… won’t it be easier for both of you if you love her?”

“I… don’t know…”

“Love matters.”

But love wasn’t always good. It was possible to love bad things, or bad people. It was possible for love to hurt really badly.

“It does,” she whispered. “It does.”

“I don’t know,” he said. “But… you only got upset with her yesterday, right? And now you’re asking if I can Cataclysm your memories. You shouldn’t think like that. You should rest and relax, because the world hasn’t ended. You’ve only had a stressful day. Maybe it won’t be so hard tomorrow.”

He was wrong. She knew he was wrong. But… it felt nice to think that he might not be. That she might wake up tomorrow and not feel horrible.

“I… think I might sleep,” she said. Half to herself, and half to Plagg.

“Yes,” he said. “Sleep.”

She sat up in bed and wiped her sleeve across her eyes. Then she looked him in the eye and gulped. “And… Plagg?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks.”

And she went to clean herself up for bed, and went to sleep at about eight, where she stayed until her alarm rang the next morning. Which meant she didn’t see the announcement, and slept blissfully unaware.

◀◁ ▧▧▧ ▨▨▨ ▷▶

“Kagami,” said Mother.

It was eight fifteen, and therefore supper time in the dining room. A warm supper, like always; this time it was a vegetable soup.

“Mother,” said Kagami, and sat down at the opposite end of the table. The chef was ladling soup into Mother’s bowl with trained grace.

“I have received troubling news,” said Mother.

If the news was business related, or reputation related, Kagami welcomed it. But she didn’t want to let that show on the outside. “What news?”

“A neighbour called me earlier today and said that a boy was spotted on your balcony.”

Kagami’s blood froze. “… What?”

“Don’t play silly with me, Kagami. You’ve had a boy in your room.”

“I…”

“I hope for your sake it isn’t that Fathom boy.”

She shrank in her seat. Speaking up would be meaningless, even thoughtless; denying it would give away to Mother that it had been Félix, because she could register even the slightest trace of insecurity in Kagami’s tone. And confirming it would be — even worse.

“Kagami,” said Mother, before breathing in slowly. “You must take care how to move in this new world. We are immigrants to France, so everything we do will be scrutinised with unkind eyes. That is why it’s imperative you do not fraternise with criminals like him, or Marinette Dupain-Cheng.”

‘Criminals’. That framing again. But Kagami swallowed her protest, because it was an argument she’d lose. There was in fact no argument she could ever win against Mother.

The chef moved over to ladle soup for Kagami now, but Mother spoke unabated. “Do you understand? You must stop talking to them. Furthermore, you should make every effort to avoid Chloé Bourgeois.”

“Chloé Bourgeois is currently living in London.”

“Indeed,” said Mother. “But she was spotted back in Paris today. Perhaps it’s a simple visit, but that doesn’t reduce her danger to us. She is an insurrectionist who tried to overtake the government, and we can’t be associated with her in any way.”

“Yes, Mother.” Not that she planned to ever get anywhere close to Chloé Bourgeois. The other two restrictions mattered, even though she was going to ignore them; this one was entirely insignificant.

“When it comes to Adrien Agreste… I have decided that you may socialise with him. After all, he is entirely innocent in this matter —” a bold thing for her to say — “and you would appear sympathetic to Marinette’s wronged victim, as well as strong and principled for standing by him.” She took hold of her spoon then, and tapped it twice on the side of her bowl. “That is how we should appear to those around us. Strong, principled, honest, hard-working. We must maintain the pristine image of the Tsurugi line, or your future will be compromised.”

Kagami sighed. “Yes, Mother.”

“Do not sigh at me, Kagami. I am only looking out for your prospects.”

Of course she was. She was speaking through fear, but her fear was of being judged for the consequences of her own actions. And possibly, of Kagami getting to live a slightly less luxurious life than what she had in this house, which was not a legitimate concern. The chef’s ministrations — she had finished serving the soup now, and started to carry the tureen back into the kitchen — were not a necessary part of Kagami’s life.

“I know, Mother. I apologise.”

“Good. Now, we can eat.”

Meals with Mother were always so ritualistic. Patterns that needed to be observed, respect that needed to be paid. Things that needed to be said. In themselves, the patterns were fine — the ritual was a point of attachment, something to be sure of even if the rest of the day was a mess. Which, today, it was. But the ritual itself was also a stark reminder that Kagami had so very little control. Even with the ring in Félix’s hands, she was still required to follow orders and appease Mother. The rules of the house were still rules for her, no matter how free her mind was.

“I heard there was another akumatisation at school today,” commented Mother after some spoonfuls of soup.

“… There was.”

“I hear the boy who was affected is a Miraculous holder. Nino Lahiffe, also known as Carapace… correct?”

“Yes. Mother.” What was the goal of this line of questioning? To present yet another person she shouldn’t associate with?

Mother slurped another spoonful — her spoon was specially made, with half the spoon’s bowl covered by a flat metal plate that had a single hole in it. It helped guard against spilling, given that she couldn’t see the spoon, but also made her a noisy eater.

“I hear he attacked Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” she continued immediately afterwards.

Of course. It wasn’t about Nino, it was about Marinette again. Marinette, who would be waiting in her room soon for Kagami to arrive, in spite of Mother’s protestations. “He did,” said Kagami, her voice frustratingly weak.

“That should provide additional incentive to avoid the girl,” said Mother. Like Kagami had even tried to suggest visiting Marinette since yesterday’s breakfast. There was no reason to keep harping on about this, from Mother’s perspective.

“Yes, Mother,” she said, and hopefully hid her annoyance well enough.

Then Mother sighed. “Were you nearby during the attack?”

Kagami frowned. Why this concern, all of a sudden? “I was not,” she lied. “I stayed inside the cafeteria.”

“Good. You should not be injured.”

“I —” she started. But she was interrupted when both of their phones rang at once.

Obviously, it was another akuma. This was the same trick as with Adrien’s akumatisation, and so many others before. So Kagami didn’t take hers.

But Mother did. She lifted up her phone to her mouth, said “Accept call,” and then —

It was just a voice. It wasn’t even a commanding voice. Instead, it almost sounded sorrowful, hurt. And it was all too familiar.

“Hello, Paris,” said what was unmistakably Lila Rossi. “You’re probably wondering why akumas returned so suddenly, just at the end of summer break. Well… I’m here to explain what’s going on.”

“What is the meaning of this?” said Mother, like she hadn’t realised it wasn’t an actual call. “Who are you?” — and by the time she said the second part, Lila had already continued talking.

“You see… this is about justice. I was there when Gabriel Agreste escaped his. I saw Ladybug give him the Miraculous so he could get what he wanted. I was so horrified that I took the Miraculous of the Butterfly away, because I didn’t want it to fall into Ladybug’s hands. You see… Ladybug, also known as Marinette Dupain-Cheng, bullied me at school. She kept harassing me and calling me a liar, because she was jealous that I was interested in the boy she liked. This bullying carried on for almost the entire year, until she framed me for something I didn’t do and got me expelled. It was horrible.

“I chose to become the new Hawk Moth, because I couldn’t let Marinette get away with what she did to me. What she did to Adrien Agreste, and to the people of Paris. I promise solemnly that I won’t cause any harm to regular people, because I’m not here to terrorise. I’m here for revenge against Marinette.

“My name is Lila Rossi. Remember it.”

The transmission ended. Silence returned, except inside Kagami’s head. Of course this was going to happen — Alix had said as much yesterday, and that it would be coming soon. That didn’t make it any less surprising to hear. And… why now, why like this?

Never mind all the things she’d said: Marinette, a bully? Lila, speaking in that voice, the same voice she always used when trying to act like Marinette was a bad person? It was obviously yet more slander, phrased unkindly to make her look terrible to those who didn’t know her. But why did she try to present herself as a hero, after a day where she had commanded for Marinette to be squeezed into pulp? And why did she give her name away like that, so carelessly and yet with so much weight?

“Kagami,” said Mother. The pause was almost long enough that Kagami felt obliged to fill it, but then Mother continued: “This is who you considered a friend? A bully who has just unleashed a second Hawk Moth on the city? A, a villain who colluded with Gabriel Agreste to hide him from the public? You must never — never — speak to her again.”

“You already told me that,” said Kagami. She could feel her own frustration, could hear it in her voice. How dare Mother act like this?

“Are you speaking back to me?”

“Marinette is not a bully.”

Mother’s frown turned even deeper than it usually was. “You will listen to me, Kagami.”

“I already listened to you,” Kagami snapped back. “But Marinette is not a bully and she’s not a villain.”

“She helped Monarch!”

A barrier broke inside her. One she had placed there herself, for her own safety, but which she couldn’t maintain anymore. “I know you collaborated with him,” she said, and took great satisfaction in seeing the very tiny shift in Mother’s expression. “You helped him, and you hid his identity. You’re the villain, not Marinette.”

“Kagami. You will not speak back to me.” Mother spoke cautiously now — she wasn’t even trying to deny the truth. And Kagami felt her heart shudder with excitement.

“You will not tell me to stop seeing my friend,” said Kagami. “Or my boyfriend, Félix Fathom.”

— she knew, after she’d said it, that she had gone too far. Mother’s anger was always far greater than all her other emotions. “You will go to your room,” Mother said — she didn’t shout, because this was rage and it was deep and cold. Her hand clutched at the ring, twisted it sharply. “You will not leave your room until I say so. You will leave this… rebelliousness behind. And I will come up to your room every ten minutes to ensure that no boys, Félix Fathom or otherwise, are paying you a visit. Do you understand me?”

Briefly, she imagined protesting again. Not with her thinking brain, but with her own base anger. She pushed the idea away, because it would be terrible to resist: never mind Mother’s rage, it would also reveal that the ring didn’t work. Instead, she stood up and closed her eyes and said, with all the effort she had to give, “Yes, Mother.”

Before Mother had a chance to react, she had already turned around and started the walk towards her room. Her head was already swirling by the time she reached the stairs, and a whirlpool by the time she reached the top.

Marinette was not a bully. Marinette was not a villain. Marinette deserved better than any of what was happening, and Lila’s message now might send her back into Ryuukomori-type thoughts. Marinette —

— Marinette had also been intensely jealous of her for pursuing Adrien. She had admitted to it, even, in private conversation. Maybe that could be interpreted as bullying?

Kagami didn’t really trust Lila. From how Alix had talked about it, it was Lila who had bullied Marinette. But Marinette had also admitted that she’d given Lila reasons to do this. Marinette was lovely and admirable in so many ways, but she was also unpredictable and prone to emotionality. It was completely possible that Lila had legitimate grievances against her.

Not grievances big enough to explain what was happening now. Not at all. But still… grievances.

Opening her door, Kagami looked at the clock on her wall. Eight fourteen. She still had time before her visit to Marinette. So she threw herself into her chair and unlocked her phone, searching news sites for more information about Lila’s unexpected message. It scarcely took a moment to find what she was looking for.

According to TVi’s website… Lila had appeared in person, atop Notre Dame. Reports were that she had stood there for several minutes, while people assumed she was going to jump — and a crowd had gathered below. But then the phone calls had happened, and Lila had started to give her little speech. Her face had even been projected large above her, like a hologram of some sort, and the sole picture of that in the article showed her at her most contrite.

And then, after her ‘Remember it’, she had vanished completely. Not just the large head, but also Lila herself. TVi emphasised that there was no known akumatisation event connected to this appearance yet, but asked the public for tips of anything unusual.

Unusual? No, wrong. There was something wrong about everything, and about this in particular.

“Tikki?” she mumbled.

“Yes?”

“Do you think Lila was akumatised?”

Tikki didn’t say anything for a little while. Then she said, “I don’t know. But everything she said was a lie.”

“Are you sure? Marinette gets jealous easily, doesn’t she? And she did hurt Adrien.”

“Marinette did get jealous,” admitted Tikki. It almost sounded like she was reluctant to say it. “She made a mistake. But she tried to make up with Lila the same day, and Lila refused. Don’t listen to her.”

Kagami frowned. “I’m not listening to her. I just wonder if she could have been akumatised by somebody else. This doesn’t make sense.”

“… Maybe,” said Tikki. “But she really does want to slander Marinette.”

‘Maybe.’ That was hardly a good enough answer, but of course it wasn’t Tikki’s fault she didn’t know. This had to be examined more closely… maybe with Alix’s help? If she went out as Namitentou to visit her…

There was a creak outside her door. And her enthusiasm for examining drained out of her. She wasn’t free to leave — Mother would be checking in on her every ten minutes, if not more. She had been commanded to stay, and if she didn’t she would be giving away that the commands didn’t work. She couldn’t talk to Alix tonight.

More pressingly — she couldn’t go to Marinette’s, either. The promised visit would have to be cancelled, which was already bad enough… but Marinette would furthermore be left alone, stewing in thoughts about wanting to be gone from this world. And Kagami would have so many of her questions unanswered.

The door opened. Mother walked inside with morbid steps.

“Kagami.”

“Mother.”

“There’s nobody else inside this room. Correct?”

“Correct.” Apart from Tikki.

“Good. You will give me your phone, then go to sleep by nine.”

Protesting would be meaningless. But Kagami’s fingers were still tensed nearly into claws as she stood up and reached the phone out. Her heart was still beating very hard. Her voice was still constricted as she said, “Yes, Mother.”

And Mother, with her unerring sense of space in spite of her eyes, snatched the phone away and stuck it in her pocket. Without another word, she turned and left the room, using her cane to find the open door and then slamming it shut as she walked through.

Kagami let a whole minute pass before she said anything. She wanted to yell her frustration, because now she couldn’t even contact Marinette to explain what had happened. But if Mother were waiting outside…

“Tikki?” she asked, once she did speak. “Do you think Marinette will be okay by herself tonight?”

Tikki floated into view with an expression which said, very clearly, that Marinette was very rarely okay these days. “I don’t know,” she said.

“She will not take her own —”

“No. She won’t.”

Kagami sighed and let herself slip lower in the chair. “At least she has Longg to speak to.”

“Yes,” said Tikki.

The bed felt unnervingly cold that night.