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“I have to say, I thought you were joking at first,” Chat Noir admits, his suit masking his footsteps so that they’re almost soundless. She watches the Paris skyline, the distant orange blots of bedroom lamps and store windows, as he takes a seat next to her. “I mean, an extra patrol shift? You?”
“Sure, because I’m the Guardian who hates doing anything above the bare minimum, and you’re well-known for working overtime,” Ladybug returns, nudging him so he knows it’s a joke. He’s been too on-edge lately. She’d hate for one of the few people in the world she really trusts to think she resents him.
“And here I thought my effort was the reason you liked me so much,” he says, feigning hurt.
“It is,” she says, “I just don’t want you to get a big head about it.” She pointedly doesn’t look at him when she says it, but she knows he’s smiling.
“I’m always humble, milady,” he responds after a moment. “Really, I’m paw-sitive that—”
“Please,” she interrupts, before he can finish the rest of his cat pun, “spare me this once.” He grins at her, turning to face the city.
“So why’d you call?” he asks. A couple of years ago he’d probably have assumed she was going to take away his Miraculous or something similar, especially when they were going through that first rough patch after she’d become Guardian, but he seems unworried now.
It had felt like a good idea when she was typing out a message to send him, but now, she just feels awkward. “To be honest,” she starts, “well. I had… boy problems.”
Chat blinks. “And you think I could help?”
“No,” she says, because, well, it’s Chat Noir. She doesn’t think he ascribes to the same thought process as most boys. Especially not someone like Adrien. “I just wanted you to listen.”
“Oh, thank god,” he says, “guy stuff is so complicated. People stuff is so complicated, really. Okay, tell me about him.”
“Well,” she starts, and hesitates. “I can’t tell you everything, you know.”
“I know that,” he says, seemingly amused. “I’ve always known that. You made it very clear.”
“It’s the guy I told you about,” she rushes out. “The first time I really…”
The first time I really rejected you, she doesn’t say. Chat, for all that it’s worth, doesn’t really react to this. “Do you want advice on asking him out?” he asks. “Because I don’t know if I would be very good at…”
“No,” she corrects, “no, no, we’re together.”
“Congratulations,” Chat says, not insincerely. “So what’s the problem?”
Well, when he says it like that, it feels like there shouldn’t be one in the first place. “It’s just… I don’t think we’re very honest with each other,” she says. How do you tell your boyfriend that his father died because he was the one terrorizing Paris for a year and a half straight, and not because he was going back inside to save someone? It had been easy to tell Chat Noir at the time that she just didn’t know who was behind the mask, especially since the butterfly Miraculous had been picked up and repurposed by a new holder within hours. But she doesn’t think she and Adrien will ever be able to be normal when she has to keep this from him—because he can’t know she’s Ladybug, can’t find out his father was a domestic terrorist, can’t even begin to know about half of her life. She’s keeping even more secrets from him than she did with Luka, and she’s determined to not let it end the same way; not when she’s spent so long wanting this.
“Maybe you should be having this conversation with your boyfriend,” Chat says carefully. But he’s a good listener, and everything with Adrien is still so fragile, and this feels so much easier.
“It’s just… it’s not what I thought it was going to be like,” she says. “It’s probably not supposed to be perfect, right?” Maybe she’s spent so long building Adrien up in her head that it’s no wonder he can’t live up to her idea of him.
Then again, he’d asked her out, and now all their conversations are awkward and stilted. She’d chalked it up to nerves at first, because God knows if Adrien had backed away from Marinette for the crime of being awkward they probably wouldn’t have even made it to the friendship stage of their relationship. But three months in, they’re still where they were on day one, and Marinette’s starting to feel like Adrien might not even like her.
“No one’s perfect, milady,” he says. “But don’t give up just because you have to keep secrets. You’re always going to have to do that.”
Ladybug sighs, resting her chin on her hand. He’s right, but it’s not like she doesn’t feel bad about it. “I know,” she says. Chat nudges her shoulder.
“Hey, who knows? Someday you might even be able to tell him.”
She thinks about bright blue sclera, the twitch of white cat-ears, how unnatural her name had sounded coming out of his mouth. There’s a lot of reasons she can’t tell Adrien, but that’s still the one she finds herself remembering most often.
“I guess,” she says. “But until then it’s you and me, right?”
“Always,” he tells her, and she smiles, squeezing his hand in thanks. “ Paw-lways, if you will,” he adds on, and she smacks him in the side.
(That’s where it starts, she thinks. Not when they first met, years before, or the first time they cross the line, months later, but—here.)
Getting her insecurities off her chest by talking to Chat Noir about them turns out much better than Marinette had expected—she and Adrien are more normal the next few weeks. Or, as normal as the two of them have been in a while, which is a low bar. But he laughs lightly at some of her jokes and she feels a little less like he secretly hates her, so it’s enough.
On Thursday night, just as she’s finishing the last of her homework, her phone buzzes with a text from Adrien. Good night! :), it reads, an objectively harmless, cute little message. He just wants her to know he’s thinking of her. It’s sweet of him.
Her mind erroneously drifts to Chat—she didn’t do anything, but a sense of guilt lies under her skin, making her insides feel prickly.
Marinette sighs, whispering her transformation to Tikki and clicking open her other phone. She types and deletes about five different messages that are only slightly more dignified ways of saying u up? before finally settling on Free in a bit?
Of course, milady, Chat returns. Marinette dutifully ignores the feeling that rises in her throat.
“And it’s like, he doesn’t even… suspect that I’m Ladybug,” she tells him, leaning back against the rooftop, cold against her back. Chat Noir just hums. “In case you thought…”
“That your identity rules don’t apply to anyone besides me?” he jokes. “No, I get it. We’re creation and destruction. It’s a little different for us than it is for everyone else. Still more dangerous.”
“Yeah,” she says, relieved that he doesn’t protest it. Maybe once he would have, but they’re older now, and more than capable of understanding the consequences. She’s been thinking about reveals lately, because—knowing Chat is around her age—they’re on the brink of adulthood, and much more mature now than they were when they first started out. But they work together just fine right now. Something would have to change for her to consider it to be something necessary, or even just something helpful.
She wishes, not for the first time, that someone who understands could help guide her. Ladybug’s phone has a good amount of user guides, but there isn’t one on when the right time is to reveal your identity. There aren’t any on being the Guardian and explaining your identity to your civilian boyfriend, either, but at least she hadn’t really expected any guidance in those areas. “And he’s great,” she continues. “Really. I love him. I’m not going to leave him.”
“Okay,” Chat says, and even though his expression is unreadable she knows the question he’s asking: Why are you telling me this?
“But sometimes I don’t know if he really likes me,” she says. “The real me.”
“Like, you you? Or Ladybug you?” he asks.
“You think Chat Noir is the real you?” she counters. He shrugs, tapping his nails on his baton. She doesn’t think it looks quite like a nervous habit, but then again, what reason would he have to be nervous?
“Somewhere in the middle,” he says. “I’m kind of repressed in my civilian life. But obviously this is a bit over the top, too.”
“I think,” she admits, “I think no one’s ever going to be able to love me. Because they’d have to love both sides of me.”
For a moment, she thinks that he might respond with a confession of his own, one that she’s heard from him a hundred times before in a hundred different contexts: I would. I do. But he’s never connected the dots between Ladybug and Marinette, so it wouldn’t be true, and she doesn’t think she could really bear to hear it right now.
But he doesn’t say any of that—just nods in acknowledgment. “Our lives are just… performance after performance,” he says. She watches his eyes, wondering what Chat Noir could possibly be like in his everyday civilian life for him to feel this disconnected from himself.
“Are you performing with me?” she asks. He turns to her, his green eyes glowing softly in the dark with magic.
“You know me,” he says simply. “You might be the only person who does.”
She kisses him first and thinks, belatedly, that she might be a very bad person.
“You know I have a girlfriend, right?” he asks her.
The remnants of their latest akuma—blocky, pixel-like facsimiles of all sorts of local buildings—sink into the Seine. She’s almost too focused on sending out her ladybugs to repair the damage to register it. “What?” He’d never mentioned going on dates in his normal life, but then again, she hadn’t asked. She doesn’t think she’d really wanted to know.
“It’s kind of a recent thing,” he says. “I wasn’t going to mention it.” They’re silent for a minute. Wordlessly, Ladybug traces her fingers down the length of his arm.
“Before or after…”
“Before,” he confirms, without her finishing the sentence. She pauses, her fingertips pressing lightly above his pulse point.
“Okay,” she says softly, circling it with her thumb.
“Not your fault,” he says. “It’s not like I said no.”
“Okay,” she repeats. “I just don’t know why you would… if you’d finally moved on, then why would you…”
“I love her,” he says. “She’s a great friend, and a great girlfriend. But it’s…” He hesitates. “It’s complicated. I didn’t stop loving you.”
“You can’t just say things like that, chaton,” she tells him. He shrugs.
“I can if it’s true, my Lady,” he responds, and she presses their lips together, losing touch with the wind against her back and the zinc rooftop under their feet.
At fifteen, Marinette would’ve been horrified at the thought of approaching Luka with a relationship problem—hadn’t he already heard all about Adrien without even asking to?—but at eighteen, with the romantic side of their relationship far behind them, he’s just easy to talk to. She definitely doesn’t want to go to Alya, who’s been dutifully posting about how all the recent rumors about Ladybug and Chat Noir are just that—rumors—so Luka it is.
“If I tell you something, do you promise not to judge?” she asks.
Luka looks up from tuning his guitar and shrugs. “Sure,” he says. He twists one of the tuning pegs, plucks at a string, and then frowns. He carefully adjusts the peg again before turning to Marinette expectantly. She still hasn’t said anything.
“I cheated on Adrien,” she rushes out, and then it’s real and out there in the world.
“Huh,” Luka says, his eyes narrowing before he looks back down at his guitar. He doesn’t seem surprised. Shouldn’t he be surprised? She thinks that deep down, she might’ve wanted Luka to be angry—to ask her why she’d throw away a relationship she’d clung on to for so long even when everything else hadn’t worked out.
But Luka must not care that much anymore. That, or he’d just expected something like this from her, which does make her feel a little bad. “You’re not going to tell me I should break up with him?” she asks.
“I’m not your therapist, Marinette,” Luka reminds her. “You’re my friend, and I’m happy to listen to you, but I’m not getting in the middle of your relationship.”
She waits for another moment, like he might have some advice left to offer, but Luka doesn’t say anything else. “But like,” she starts. “Don’t you think that…”
“You just asked me not to judge, right?” he asks. “Look, Marinette, I… are we talking about Marinette or Ladybug?” Ladybug. But also Marinette. Both, really. She shrugs. “Seems complicated. Maybe just be honest with him.”
“You know I can’t do that,” she says.
Luka smiles at her, almost pitying. “Yeah,” he says. He offers up his guitar, and just like that, the conversation is over. “You want to give it a try?”
“I’m going—to be late,” she sighs, a hand trailing over the front of his suit. “I have plans tonight, mon chaton.”
“I do too,” he admits, “but we’ll be done with patrol in a minute anyways, right?” She’s about to protest—not because she doesn’t want to stay in this space with him, because she’s found that she feels much more at ease in her stolen moments with Chat Noir than she does around her actual boyfriend, in which her brain goes a hundred miles a minute trying to make herself into someone who works with someone like Adrien. But she’s really going to be late. “I wish your plans were with me,” he murmurs.
Something heavy settles in her stomach at the thought. “You know that’s not how this works,” Ladybug says. It doesn’t matter how many grainy videos of Ladybug and Chat Noir talking too close or maybe-holding-hands taken from far-away phone cameras trend on Twitter—and the reason it doesn’t matter is because they don’t know what’s behind each other’s masks. If they did, this would be something totally different.
“Wouldn’t it be so much easier if it was?” Chat asks. She wishes Ladybug and Marinette were the same person. Or maybe she doesn’t—maybe she wishes she was neither of them at all.
“I don’t know,” she answers honestly. Both of their communicators buzz with an alert.
“Looks like plans change,” he says with a shrug, but she can tell he’s happy to spend more time with her. I’d give up everything for just that, he’d told her once, almost four years ago, and she hears the echoes of it every time she looks at him, even now.
Marinette’s already fifteen minutes late by the time she sits down across from Adrien at the cafe down the street from her apartment. She cringes as she catches a glimpse of her reflection in one of the wall decorations, her still-ruffled hair. It’s really because of the superhero duties, not anything else she’d been doing before that, but it’s not like she can use that as an excuse. “So,” she says, breathless, “that study date.”
Adrien doesn’t seem to notice. Or if he does, he doesn’t say anything. He just smiles at her and pushes a copy of their philosophy textbook across the table. “Chapter nine, right?”
She knows that it’s not really the kissing that’s the problem. You could take the brief moments of physicality out of the equation entirely and she’d still be talking to Chat the way she’s supposed to be talking to Adrien.
There are too many people out tonight for anything to happen between them—they’re sitting on the top of the Palais de Chaillot, overlooking the Trocadéro, and it’s one of those nights where even just looking at Chat Noir makes her feel guilty. “Are we bad people?” she asks.
“I think there are plenty of Parisians who would think otherwise,” he answers.
“You know what I mean.” He shifts his baton from one hand to the other.
“If you’re a bad person,” he says after a pause, “I’m a lot worse.”
“That can’t be true,” Ladybug says, thinking of Adrien, of how kind he is, of how he isn’t really trying to hurt her at all. She knows he doesn’t mean to ever make her feel like she’s on the outside, he just can’t seem to tell. That’s not his fault. The problem is all her, and her guilt, and the fact that there are some things she just can’t tell him, no matter what. Whatever Chat Noir has done, she has to be worse.
“You know when I told you things between me and my girlfriend were complicated?” he says. “That wasn’t the whole truth. I’m actually kind of the problem.”
“Really,” she deadpans. He smacks her arm.
“I thought you wanted me to be serious!”
“I do,” Ladybug assures him. “Sorry. It just feels weird when you’re the one being serious.”
“Look,” he continues, “in my civilian life, I’m serious, like… most of the time. To the point of being closed off. I’m kind of the worst boyfriend ever.”
Imagining Chat Noir not being forward with his feelings is an alien concept entirely. You’re not to me, she wants to say, but that would probably be crossing the flimsy boundaries they have in place. Of course he’s not a bad boyfriend to her. He’s not her boyfriend at all, and he never will be. That’s kind of the whole point.
“Anyway, something big happened in my life a bit ago—a couple of things, really—and we were friends before it, maybe even more than that, but it kind of… brought us together? Like, I don’t think we got really serious about each other until after. I honestly think that half the reason we started dating is because she feels bad for me, because I don’t know what I even bring to the table. And that’s without her even knowing the full extent of what happened. And she’s so great, and I would hate to burden her with the reality of everything that’s going on in my life, because I just… I don’t want anyone else to have to deal with that.”
“So why…” she hesitates. Why me? Why Ladybug?
“Because that’s just… it’s not how we work, you know? We’re not our civilian selves with each other, and everything we go through as Ladybug and Chat Noir, we go through as a team. With us, the expectations are different. You don’t expect me to share any of that with you, because we’re not supposed to.” He shrugs. “And I love you. That’s the big one, I guess. But you already know that.”
“Sometimes I wish you’d stop reminding me,” she says.
“Kind of seems like you need it,” he says. She does, and she resents the fact that Chat can tell, that he knows her without really trying. This is how she and Adrien are supposed to be, isn’t it?
“I know, I just…” she pauses. “I can’t love you back the same way. I don’t know who you are. That’s just not how I work.” Love is such an achingly normal word that she can’t imagine ever using to describe the two of them. She’s watched him die for her sake what feels like a thousand times in the last five years. It’s not that she doesn’t care about him—she can’t imagine living without him, but she doesn’t think there’s a single other person in the world who could look at their relationship and understand it. It’s too different in comparison to what other people—normal people—have.
“That’s why we have this,” he says. “Because it works.”
She doesn’t see Adrien at school as much, nowadays. Marinette’s focus is engineering science and he’s doing something with literature, so they don’t really have all that much in common. And she’d hesitated when choosing a path—there was so much she liked to do, and it’s not like she’d really be sacrificing anything to maybe choose something with classes that Adrien would take, too, but now that she’s looking into the specifics of mechanical and aerospace engineering degrees she can’t say she regrets it. Figuring out problems, putting things together just to see how they work, constructing intricate solutions—it’s what she’s good at, even outside of her role as Ladybug. And she still does art and design, just not for school. She likes it. It’s a good balance.
And it’s okay, really, being away from Adrien. It makes her feel like she’s growing up. Sometimes, she wonders if there’s some other girl flirting with him over French novels from the 19th century, whether or not Adrien smiles and is all genuine back in that way he always is; but then again, she’d be a bit of a hypocrite to get upset over it, especially when it’s just a made-up scenario in her head.
They still have philosophy together, like everyone in their year. Adrien smiles when she enters and gives her a little wave, and she takes a seat next to him, like always, and pushes the guilt that rises in her throat back down. So maybe they’re a little better now than they had been—but she still can’t bring herself to stop. Until the Butterfly miraculous is locked in her miracle box, she can’t tell him everything.
“Marinette?” he says, louder than normal, like he’s repeating himself.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she says, shaking herself out of her thoughts, “totally missed that.”
“It’s fine,” he says. “Nino was just asking if you’d checked Twitter lately.”
“Um,” Marinette starts, trying to decide whether or not lying would be worth it, before realizing that this is Adrien and this isn’t some trick question. “No.”
He turns his phone towards her. Under the hashtag #ladynoir, there are apparently hundreds of tweets talking about how Ladybug and Chat Noir have been more touchy lately. (Which Marinette hadn’t realized she was doing, like, at all, swear to god.)
“I don’t get why it’s such big news. I mean, it seems kind of… inevitable.” he says, looking back down at his phone.
“What do you mean?” she asks, leaning forward. It’s the first time Adrien has started a conversation instead of just responding to her in what feels like forever.
“I mean, all of Paris thought they were in love,” he says. “I guess they… caught up.”
In love. Marinette’s been in love with Adrien since they were fifteen, but Chat Noir’s a whole other story. And hearing those words from Adrien’s mouth sparks something in her that she’s been working at keeping down for a long, long time.
“I guess,” she says, pulling out her notes for class. Marinette doesn’t write A + M in little hearts in the margins anymore. When she really thinks about it, she still wants a future with Adrien—she’s just not so sure what it looks like anymore.
Ladybug and Chat Noir are more in sync now than ever, too. While she hasn’t brought any of the other Miraculous holders back into play in years, too on-edge after finally getting them back from Monarch and haunted by the memory of readily trusting not-Adrien with the lives of thousands, they haven’t needed to unify at all recently, either. The gaps between akumatizations continue to widen with no real explanation until Chat talks to an exhausted janitor who swears that the butterfly holder said her mind was breaking apart while giving him instructions.
Something must be wrong with the butterfly Miraculous—meaning Paris is all the more safe, if the practically-ineffectual recent powers being given out are anything to go by.
“That was faster than usual,” Chat comments after an easy takedown of a disgraced office worker whose powers involved endless paperwork (and endless minor papercuts).
“It’s weirdly relieving,” Ladybug says. “I mean, imagine a Paris that doesn’t need Ladybug and Chat Noir all the time.”
He watches her for a moment. “I think—Paris—might always need Ladybug and Chat Noir,” he says. She gets it, in more ways than one—he doesn’t have to elaborate.
“Wouldn’t matter, anyway,” she adds quickly. “I’m staying in Paris for school.”
“Which university?” he asks. “Come on, there are thousands of students. It’s not going to narrow it down.”
“Sorry,” she says. “You know how it is.”
Her tone is playful, and she assumes he’s going to shrug it off until he turns back to her. “Do you think you could ever…?”
It’s been on her mind, recently. Papillon was one problem, and he’s gone for good, and now the power of the butterfly Miraculous itself seems to be waning. They’ve spent years tip-toeing around each other, but things have undoubtedly been getting safer. Master Su-Han doesn’t even berate her about responsibility anymore—you’re getting older, he tells her, I don’t have to do that anymore.
“If things were different,” she answers. She doesn’t specify any further than that, mostly because she isn’t sure what would have to change. She’s the Guardian; she’s the one who has to set the rules. And if things were different, she thinks, she would know.
He kisses her in lieu of a response—one slow, gentle kiss that she can still feel even after he vaults over several roofs and disappears into the night.
A week before the end of lycée, Adrien meets her at the café they usually frequent with Alya and Nino in tow. They’re alone this time, and Marinette’s gotten used to being alone together in nine months of dating, but not with the intention of doing this.
It’s the right thing to do, she reminds herself. “I think we should break up,” she says, a sentence that had never been a part of the fantasy scenarios she’d imagined when she was thirteen and Adrien was the only boy in the world she thought she’d ever be able to love.
Adrien looks at the ground. She doesn’t know what response she expects from him. A normal one, maybe, like why?, or a worse normal one, like me too. But Adrien’s always been sort of non-confrontational. “Is that what you really want?” he asks, not looking up. She wishes she could see his eyes as he says it.
I cheated on you, she imagines saying, but that would raise too many more questions. Besides, even if she told him—Adrien’s always thought of Ladybug as a hero. She’d hate to be the one to break it to him that she’s just as human as everybody else. “I just think it would be better for both of us,” she says truthfully. “Especially you.”
“Especially… you don’t think you’re not good enough for me or something, right?”
“No,” she says, even though it’s true, because it’s not true in the way he means it. “It’s just… don’t you feel like there’s something wrong with us?”
He’s silent for a second. She feels like it’s as close to a yes as she’s ever going to get. “I would never want to hold you back from anything,” he says.
“Me neither!” she says. “Like, that’s… yeah. I just think…” she squeezes her eyes closed and puts out a hand. “Friends?”
It isn’t what she wants. And even though she’s been doubting herself recently, she thinks she knows how to read Adrien, and it doesn’t look like it’s really what he wants either.
But he’d never fight her on it. “Friends,” he agrees, shaking her hand. She doesn’t think they’d ever truly be able to start over, but this is as close as it’s going to get.
When he smiles at her, it looks awkward and too big for his face, like in those cologne ads that used to be plastered everywhere. Marinette doesn’t comment on it. She doesn’t think it’s her place.
She thinks it’s the idea of moving forward in life—well, that, and the broken butterfly Miraculous. That must be why she feels like she can say it.
It’s August, and it’s hot out, and Alya drags her to parties and her friends from school invite her to hang out and Marinette still feels empty when it comes to love. She still sees Adrien around, because they’re close and their best friends are dating, but it’s all detached and awkward. Fall term starts in two weeks and she feels less like an adult than ever.
Chat Noir, of course, never really changes. She thinks that for anyone else, that might be a bad thing, but here it’s a comfort—he’s a constant at her side when fighting akumas, and late at night, when they patrol far too long just for the sake of spending more time with each other. It’s still not exactly love, she doesn’t think, but it’s definitely something.
“I think we should do it,” she says. A step in front of her, Chat Noir turns to look at her, his expression unreadable.
“What?”
“We should… yeah,” she says. It feels a little lame that she can’t even say it, but she knows he understands her.
“Why?” he asks. “And why now?”
“Papillon—Monarch—whatever. Papillon is gone. And the butterfly Miraculous is damaged, we know that. There’s never been a safer time for us to say it.” She pauses. “And… I want to know. Because of…”
“Because of this,” he finishes for her, gesturing between them.
“Yeah,” she says. “This.”
“This is what makes you want to do it?” he asks, quieter.
“I know that it’s selfish,” she tells him, bracing herself for an argument.
“It’s not,” he says quickly. “I mean, it’s a lot of things, and not all of them good, but… you spend every day doing everything for everyone.” He’s quiet for a second. “I don’t think it’s selfish.”
“I can’t think of a selfless reason to do it,” she confesses. She’s been trying to think of one, and maybe they’d work together better afterwards, but that’s it. But she wants to, and that’s starting to feel like good enough of a reason on its own. “And I know you’ve never liked it when I bend the rules,” she adds. “But I want to bend the rules for us this time.”
He nods, looking down at his ring. “I’ll go first,” he says, because while he’s always followed her lead, he’s always wanted her to know. She knows now that he’s loved her since day one, and the thought is almost frightening.
“—Wait,” Ladybug interrupts, almost cringing. She’s the one who brought it up, so it’d be odd for her to back out. But she has to give him an out somehow, just in case. “What if it goes wrong? Like, what if… what if you’re my best friend’s boyfriend, or something, and we realize this is way worse and complicated than we thought?”
Chat thinks this over. “That’s not going to happen,” he says.
“And how do you know that?”
“Because I know my ex-girlfriend’s best friend, and I’m a hundred percent sure she isn’t you,” he says. “So cross that scenario out.”
She tries not to stay stuck on the word ex-girlfriend. But that’s just it, isn’t it? She and Adrien broke up, and Chat Noir and his girlfriend broke up, and now there are even fewer reasons why they should keep up the wall between them.
“Let’s do it at the same time,” she says finally, “so neither of us can back out. Close your eyes.”
Chat nods, doing so without a second thought. Ladybug shuts her eyes tightly. She isn’t sure whether she’s hoping that the face behind the magic of Chat’s mask is a perfect stranger, or someone she knows—someone she thinks she could fall for. She wonders if she knows his now ex-girlfriend. She wonders if she’ll feel more guilty if she does.
“What if you don’t like the person behind the mask?” she whispers, not daring to open her eyes to look at him. She doesn’t know if Marinette or Ladybug is easier to love. He fumbles for her hand, running a thumb over her wrist.
“That could never happen,” he says. “We’ve faced everything together. We’ll face this, too.”
She almost nods before realizing he wouldn’t be able to see her, so she squeezes his hand instead, and he sends it back.
“Spots off,” Marinette says softly.