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Cold night air laps at her face, and she tries not to cry. Chat Noir is gone, again, even though he promised, he promised to never leave her again, and now perfect Cat Walker is back on his silent soles, with clipped claws and gentle eyes that remind her so much of her partner’s.
Marinette straightens her shoulders and turns back into Ladybug; she has been in the suit the whole time, but for a moment there, she had to let herself sit with the grief. It’s not just Chat Noir leaving. It’s a bunch of things that add up and eat away at her constantly: the secrets she has to keep, regrets about the choices she made last summer; also the way Adrien retreats into himself more and more, and she can’t help him, maybe she’s even the one to blame for his current misery, and that made her upset, and in her anger and sadness and helplessness she had lashed out at her partner, and one stupid fight later, Chat Noir decides to just leave and this time, he didn’t even give her a warning.
No argument from which to stomp away. No ring left on a roof for her to pick up. Nothing but a lovely, twisted replacement mannequin with a polite smile now waiting for her at their meeting point for patrol.
“Ladybug.” Cat Walker’s voice breaks the silence they shared on the rooftop until now. She wishes her heart wouldn’t skip a beat as she looks at his graceful figure. This is not the time and place, and she has Adrien.
“Ladybug,” he says once more; it’s not a question, not even a proper call for her attention. He simply says it, seems to learn it anew. It’s been a while for them, after all. Ladybug waits for him to continue – she’s afraid that if she replies now, she will start crying, and for all she admired his kind and understanding nature the last time they met, she is tired of troubling him with the same problem all over again.
“If it’s any consolation,” Cat Walker says as he puts a hand on her shoulder, “he said that he did it for you.”
At the speed of lightning, she has shaken off his hand and turned around, her eyes now wild on his astonished face.
“He said what now?”
Cat Walker, visibly confused, clears his throat. “I spoke to Chat Noir when he passed on his Miraculous. He claimed it’s too dangerous for him to remain as holder of the Black Cat Miraculous. Mostly because he feels you two have grown closer as of lately and that he fears you’re about to share your identity with him. He said you… heavily alluded to it over the last few weeks.”
It’s true. Marinette is tired of all the lies. If she can’t reveal to Adrien what really happened (because that would just break his heart and his spirit), at least she can finally tell Chat Noir the truth, why Nooroo is still missing, and the reason she subtly bristles each time they pass that damned statue on patrol. She wants to give him the whole story, even if it hurts — and unfortunately, that story only makes sense if he knows how she relates to Monarch. To Gabriel Agreste. How she relates to Adrien. There is now way around this.
It’s also very much true that Chat Noir had seemed strangely uncomfortable with her hints, always eager to change the topic, always eager to get away with some excuse. And she didn’t understand, she still doesn’t – didn’t he wish for them to share their identities, didn’t he always push for it?
The world has been upside down as of lately, and it still is, and she doubts that it is Cat Walker who will set it right. Maybe this was all part of Gabriel Agreste’s Wish. His final revenge: tear Chat Noir and Ladybug apart for good.
Ladybug opens her mouth, and only then she notices how dry it is; she closes it again, the sound embarrassingly loud on the quiet roof. Her next words come out hoarsely.
“He never thought so, before. He was always eager to share identities.” Share identities. Not reveal them. Because that what it used to be to him: to share lives, to really get to know each other as partners, whether they ended up as friends or lovers or acquaintances. “I just… I wonder what made him change his mind.”
She laughs, and it sounds shriller to her own ears than she expected. She twirls the end of one of her pigtails, her fingertips trying to smooth over the split ends. Finally, she dares to look at Cat Walker’s face again. It’s not what she expected.
Cat Walker looks pained. Is he really that compassionate, or is he mocking her? The last time she met him, he was friendly, but kept his emotions under wraps. Then she remembers that she has only met him once, and that she doesn’t know him. Not really.
But why does it still feel like she has seen that pained look before?
A second later, Marinette isn’t sure anymore if she imagined the pain in Cat Walker’s eyes. His face would be back to its neutral expression if it weren’t for a tiny, optimistic smile sitting in the corner of his mouth just for her.
“You should be glad, Ladybug,” he starts, and she wonders how Chat Noir leaving her again could possibly be a good thing. “I don’t know the details, but from what Chat Noir told me, he got a glimpse into a very unfortunate possible future, so he decided to take caution and not risk a disaster. A smart decision, really.”
“A disaster? How? What did he say?”
Cat Walker does not look her in the eyes.
“He said something about the dangers of his destructive power. Of akumatization. That it would be dangerous to know who you are, and that he… that he didn’t want to risk hurting you. Seeing you turn into dust.” He finishes his words, and pain flashes over his eyes again as he focuses on her. “Do you see now that he did the right thing? Surely that was sensible, don’t you think?”
But Marinette is barely listening anymore. All she hears and sees and feels is static.
“But I prevented that,” she whispers to no one in particular, least of all to the boy in front of her. “I erased my name. It never happened. He never could have known, and he said it was Hawk Moth who used our love against us. Hawk Moth is gone. How did I mess this up again?”
Her hands find the back of her head. She curls up on herself, sinks to her knees, and the static creeps from her head to her heart and down her spine, panic rising like bile in her throat. How did she mess up? Why did her partner have to save her again, this time by quitting? Didn’t he do enough already?
There are hands on her shoulders, and the gesture feels so familiar she wants to throw up. It’s Chat Noir who always knows how to calm her when she’s panicking. Who knelt before her, held her shoulders as she was hunched over in cold fear, who comforted her with soft words. Just after she lost all of the Miraculous. That was him, right? She would know the feel of her partner’s hands everywhere.
“Ladybug, please, calm down. Take deep breaths with me, won’t you?”
Cat Walker’s soft voice manages to break through the static, and strangely enough, the hands on her shoulders do the trick. Her rapid breathing slows down, her heart stops wanting to leap out of her chest. Piece by piece her mind returns to her body, and green eyes anchor her all the way.
It’s night. She’s on a roof with her new partner. Chat Noir is still gone.
But she may find out why he left, and she might even have a chance to get him back.
With her history of deeply justified anxiety attacks, Marinette knows that for her, taking deep breaths is easier when she lies down. So that’s what she does. Cat Walker doesn’t seem to find her flopping down on the flattest part of the roof strange. He just keeps his eyes on her as she spreads out her limbs.
Once her breathing is back to normal, she hears his voice again.
“I don’t want to overstep, but what did you mean? You said you prevented something that never happened. But I assume something must indeed have happened.”
Marinette takes another deep breath.
“Would you lie down next to me?” she whispers into the dark. “I… I think it’s time I talked about it, and if I manage to fix this, it’s—Not that I don’t want to, you’re a good partner, I guess, but I won’t see you again”—in the corner of her eyes, she sees Cat Walker flinch at her words—“and I don’t want you to think badly of me, and I know I will start crying or stop making sense at all if I look at you when I tell you.”
Cat Walker makes a little huffing sound, but he, as always, does as requested. His perfection is almost annoying now – Marinette half wishes he would refuse to get down next to her, or demand an explanation first, or do any of the things she would do in his position.
Instead of complaining, though, she listens to him: his breathing slightly faster, the little noises he makes while getting comfortable on the hard roof, the tense silence between them in the cold night air.
She takes a deep breath. “Sorry. In advance. I am not good at storytelling. Tangents, and all that. That’s what my best friend says. Or that I catastrophize or ramble too much. You must think ‘Ladybug, are you kidding me, I saw you give a speech on TV last week!’ Public speaking is different! It’s okay. Personal stuff is hard. Especially when I’m nervous. I get my words twisted sometimes… it helps to practice exactly what to say. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. And I couldn’t practice this, right now.” She waves her outstretched arm in the no man’s land that lies between their bodies. “Chat Noir used to have to listen to my rehearsed speeches. He is better at finding the right words for the right person at the right time.”
“Wait, Ladybug,” Cat Walker intercepts. “This won’t reveal your identity to me either, will it?”
She snorts. Seriously? “That’s what you—you worry about that, right now? This is hard for me!”
His reply is a heavy sigh. “Fine. Of course, I mean. Continue your story. My apologies for interrupting you.”
“It’s okay.” She swallows, blinking away the shallow tears the cold air has brought to her eyes. “So… it was about a year ago, I think. Way before Monarch was defeated, and before I took over the guardianship – you never met Master Fu, did you? He used to be guardian before me, and I am beginning to think he choose the wrong successor, even though he did always put his trust in me. Anyway. I won’t bore you with much detail, but… I made a stupid mistake.”
Ladybug is surprised to hear him interrupt her again. Isn’t he supposed to be polite? “I know you lost the Miraculous, Ladybug. But you got them back, right? You shouldn’t still beat yourself up over his!”
Oh, of course he was just trying to be nice. She shakes her head before she remembers that Cat Walker might not be looking at her. “No, that’s not what I was talking about. Like I said, it was before I even became guardian. I used my powers to resolve a personal issue and, uh, I might have revealed my identity to a—a friend of mine.”
She never told this to anyone before. Not to Alya, not to Luka, definitely not to Master Fu when he was still guardian. Up to this point, this has been between her and Bunnyx from the future. Though, in another life, she would be telling this story to Chat Noir after they had retrieved the Butterfly Miraculous, and she would tell him that the guy to whom she accidentally revealed her identity now is her boyfriend. It would be a funny anecdote amongst the pain of telling him about his never-happened-Akumatization. In another life, she wouldn’t have to leave out the details about the silly beret and forgetting to sign the card and rolling around on Adrien’s bed. Chat Noir would have a good laugh. But Cat Walker? He doesn’t know her like that.
“Apparently, my friend—I don’t know what happened, but he must have told someone my identity once he found out. I never found out Chat Noir’s identity, though. Bunnyx appeared, the holder of the rabbit miraculous – that is the one with the power of time travel. She fetched me to fix a broken future.” Her heart starts galloping away from her again. Another deep breath. “I’ve never talked about this before, you know.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“She dropped me off in Paris… but it was broken and flooded. Everyone was… gone. The moon was broken. No more tides. I found my own body under the surface.” Marinette remembers the empty stare of terror on Ladybug’s ashen face. “I guess I was frozen in time. And turned to ashes. Dead.”
She hears Cat Walker’s breath hitch. That’s why she didn’t want to have to look at him. No pity for her, no grace. But it’s easy to talk about it, now that she has started. It pours out of her like a monsoon.
“Chat Noir had been akumatised. He was all wrong, inverted colours, his suit white and his eyes an icy blue. He was immensely powerful. He was scary, and yet I felt so sorry for him. He still was my kitty, you know?” Ladybug allows herself a small smile as she looks at sky above. Is he okay, wherever he is in this city? Is he lonely without Plagg? Does he blame her? Knowing him, he is probably past his anger and somehow found a reason to blame himself for the rift between them.
“I couldn’t find out much about what happened, I didn’t want to, and Bunnyx never told me either, but the akumatized Chat Noir called me by my civilian name. He said we had been in love, and that Hawk Moth had found us out, and that our relationship had caused a catastrophe.”
Ladybug hears Cat Walker shift back and forth nervously, and the temptation to turn her gaze to him, to see his reaction, is palatable. But she won’t turn her head; seeing the ever calm and collected Cat Walker show so much emotion would be too much. Right now, he’s the empty canvas on which Marinette can paint her version of this story. A corrupted version of the exact kind of rehearsal she talked about earlier. Only this time, she never found the courage to talk about this with her partner, and now his substitute helps her practice. A rehearsal for a confession she might never be able to make.
She sighs once again into the night. There’s still the coda to this story, and now that she has pulled Cat Walker into her mess, she at least owes him closure.
“He wanted my earrings so he could make the wish to make it all right again – that wouldn’t have worked, of course, so I—I had to fight him. Most of the time I just ran from him—he was so powerful, I don’t even think he himself realized how powerful he really was. And I’m not sure how much of his insanity was the akuma talking or if it was the loneliness that got to him, all alone in an empty world…”
She chokes. Deep breaths. Take your time. The past few months, it had started to feel like it had been a stranger who met Chat Blanc. It had slowly turned into something that had happened to someone else instead. Distraction works, the nightmares never stopped, but they are less frequent now. It had helped to see Chat Noir almost everyday by her side, charming and cocky and normal; grinning at her, cracking his stupid jokes, granting her his casual affection, always in his black suit, flashing his green cornea at her, the corner of his eyes crinkling the tiniest bit when he smiled.
But now, with Chat Noir gone from her life and with Cat Walker beside her, it catches up to her.
She remembers Chat Blanc’s empty glare, so unlike anything she had ever seen from her chaton. Chat Noir could be angry, sure, or simply bitter, but he was never, ever cold. Chat Noir lashing out had always been a release of the fire inside of him, one he tried to hide underneath charm and puns.
Chat Blanc was cold as ice and ruthless and so unbelievably sad. It had been this sadness and desperation that had made Marinette afraid of him in a way she had never been in her life, before or after.
In the occasional nightmare she still has, the words Chat Blanc had screamed at her still echo in her head. Silly, silly kitty. As if she would ever stop loving her partner.
(Even if it’s not in the way he wishes she would.)
Ladybug tries to shake off these thoughts, and opens her mouth again to continue the story, but her voice breaks on the first try. She clears her throat, chokes this time. Embarrassing.
“But there must have been some of the real him left, after all,” she finally gets out. “In hindsight, I think he gave me clues to where the akuma had nestled. He flicked—”
“—his bell,” comes Cat Walker’s voice from her left, sounding thick and heavy.
Against all better knowledge, Marinette turns her head to see the terror in Cat Walker’s face. “How did you know?”
His mouth is agape. He just shakes his head, and Marinette could swear his whole body is slightly shaking, too.
Why is he so upset? Shouldn’t he be composed, comforting her, offering words of wisdom and clarity?
Ladybug doesn’t look away. There’s something in his look, something she knows she could grasp if she only concentrated on it, and then the fog that clouds her thoughts would lift.
“Yes, he flicked his bell,” she says slowly, studying his face still frozen, “and that was his clue, I think. He wanted me to know. I didn’t even have to fight him. All I had to do was trick him into thinking that I was giving him what he so desperately wanted. And you know what? Somehow, that was worse.” She turns back to the sky above, cloudless and starless, just a dark dome setting the scene for her confession. “I destroyed the bell. I freed Chat Noir. I went back into the present, just a few moments earlier, and destroyed the evidence that had led my friend to find out my identity. End of story.”
It is quiet for a long while. Marinette feels hollow, but it’s not exactly a bad feeling. More as if she were a single sheet of paper, and someone finally moved the paperweight.
“I assume that’s why you didn’t want to know his identity for the longest time, or for him to find out yours,” Cat Walker finally says quietly. “Is that why you rejected his advances, too?”
Her laugh is instinctive and joyless; a loud bark into the night. She thinks of kissing Chat Noir in the moonlight on a beach in the Seine; she thinks of Chat Noir confessing to her on a candlelit rooftop, the full moon their backdrop; she thinks of how it must be a new moon tonight. As always, you can barely see the stars in Paris anyway. But with the way only city lights shine in the distance, there is something missing from the sky above.
“I don’t know,” she says, “I honestly don’t know.”
She hears Cat Walker move, and when she dares to glance over, she sees him sitting now, his knees pressed up to his chest, his back very straight. It’s the way Adrien sometimes sits, so rigid and unnatural, and it looks even weirder on Cat Walker with his long limbs in over the knee boots. He must have kept his gaze on her a while ago, and he doesn’t avert his eyes when he sees her looking back.
“I am sorry you had to go through that, Ladybug. No one should have to see oneself as a corpse.”
She shrugs. Seeing herself submerged in sea deep water, eyes and mouth wide open? That hadn’t been the worst part of the experience. Not easy to stomach, either, but it wasn’t her own face crumpling to dust she has seen in her nightmares ever since.
No. Both dreams and nightmares are filled with Chat Noir dressed in white. But Cat Walker doesn’t have to know that.
He is still looking at her, his brows drawn together, as if he is figuring out the solution of a riddle and there is one part missing. Then he asks, “You never told him. Did you?”
She just shakes her head. “I couldn’t do that to him,” she whispers, barely audible over the faint noise of the city beneath them.
“I see.” He says nothing more for a while, only turns to look into the distance, and as if he had planned it, the bells of a nearby church start to chime. The Eiffel Tower in the distance lights up, glittering and blinking and twinkling like a Christmas tree. Marinette joins the bells in their count to eleven, all while they both watch the tower in the distance.
“I could talk to Chat Noir, if that’s your wish,” Cat Walker finally offers, “to let him know that you would like to talk to him.”
“Do you know who he is?” she blurts out before she can stop herself.
His reply is filled with the most snark she has ever heard from his lips. “How else would I be able to talk to him?”
Her face turns red. “I don’t know! Maybe Plagg arranges your meetings at a place where both your identities can be concealed. That’s what I assumed. And Chat Noir and I… we used to hide in the sewers. When we still had to detransform and recharge during battles, that is. Opposite sides of a wall. I only ever saw his bare hand.”
Was that too much for him to know? She shouldn’t have mentioned the sewers. They didn’t really have to meet there anymore, but if they happened to need a timeout, would Cat Walker be the type to stake out places at which he knew Chat Noir and Ladybug would meet?
Why would he do that, though?
“It’s just that, m- Ladybug, I told you about Chat Noir’s worries. If I promise to convince him to join your team again, can I also give him your promise to not reveal your identity?”
“This is not just about Chat Blanc,” she sighs. She hadn’t even used the Akuma’s name — to her, it’s a name for the incident rather than for her akumatized partner —but she assumes Cat Walker understands. “This is about the final fight against Monarch, too. I can’t promise… I need to be honest with him. Unfortunately, identity issues are kind of involved in what I need to confess.”
“If you really want to be honest, you should start by telling Chat Noir what you just told me. About the future you prevented. He deserves to know, even if it’s hard.” His smile is tense but determined. “I’m sure he can take it. You two have been through a lot. You will work it out.”
Ladybug’s face flushes red. Cat Walker is probably right. And he too tends to find the right words at the right time. “I just don’t want him to suffer for nothing.”
Cat Walker stretches out his legs and looks up to the sky. “I think the greatest suffering you could inflict upon Chat Noir would be for him to know that he can’t help you. And he cannot help you if you don’t let him, or if you endanger your partnership by revealing your identity. That’s not nothing, I would say.”
He turns to her and very gently takes her hand in his. “To come back to what you rudely, but quite charmingly said to me before you started telling me about Chat Blanc: I, too, wish that I won’t have to see you again, Ladybug. Even though it’s always my pleasure. I will tell Chat Noir to be brave and risk talking it out. And I wish you two the best of luck.”
He gets up, but before he can leave, Ladybug has grabbed his hand.
“Cat Walker!”
He looks down at her. Marinette is sucker-punched with déjà vu: Once again, it’s Adrien staring at her, eyes wide and bright and inquisitive. If she is honest with herself, there are a couple of things about Cat Walker that remind her of Adrien: not just his polite and gentle demeanor, but also the feeling that he never quite says what he’s thinking. Marinette often wishes she could decipher what Adrien is really trying to say, that he would care less about other people’s opinions. She guesses that’s what a lifetime of holding your tongue (or being ordered to) does to a boy, though.
But there’s the lovely things, too; Adrien’s kindness and fairness she sees mirrored in Cat Walker. Adrien would surely try to defend Chat Noir and argue his case. Always looking out for the ones who can’t defend themselves.
Another boy they had in mind for Chat Noir, Plagg had said. Someone even better suited. She doesn’t think there could be a better black cat than her Chat Noir, at least for her. But she can’t help but wonder.
Ladybug knows what a dangerous path this is on which to let her mind wander, so instead of voicing her suspicions, she holds her tongue and swallows the whiplash, smiles, and quietly says, “Thank you. For listening. And for understanding.”
His feline eyes crinkle into a smile as well. “Always, Ladybug. Like I said, it was my pleasure.” He squeezes her palm, briefly, and looks at their joint hands for a long second before he presses the briefest of kisses on the back of her hand, and lets it go. Then he extends his baton into the night, and without another word, he has disappeared.
Her skin burns where his lips have touched it.
Marinettes stretches back out on the roof. She’ll get up in a minute. The truth has tired her out. As much as she wants Cat Walker to waste no time in getting the ring back to Chat Noir, she hopes he’ll at least wait until tomorrow. She is not quite ready to face her partner’s questions yet. But come tomorrow, she’ll do it: come clean with him, argue with him if necessary, be honest in any way he requests, let him be upset with her and sad and feel anything he wants to feel while she looks out for purple butterflies. And then they can come back here and watch the sunset, as they are meant to be.
He is her partner, after all. And a little lady shouldn’t be all alone on a roof without her kitty.