#halcyon writes

After hours of work, everything was perfect. The picture staring back at her from the screen was indistinguishable from any other real photo. No one would be able to tell it had been edited, and no one would ever find out. Addy grinned; this was her chance to become a part of the Ladyblog, and this picture would catapult her into the limelight as one of the best hero journalists in Paris. 

Quickly switching back to her article document, Addy added a few more details. 

Ladybug and Chat Noir had been spotted flying over buildings on the eastern side of Paris, evidently in a hurry. Onlookers speculated that there was an akuma attack somewhere nearby, though there were no other signs to confirm it. Hours later, sources saw Ladybug and Chat Noir arguing but none were close enough to hear what was being said. Only Addy had managed to capture an image seconds before the duo realised there were civilians around and left.

Everything lined up perfectly. The photo showed an angry Ladybug and Chat Noir, carefully constructed from images of previous akuma fights and civilian sightings, shadows of an alley falling over their faces as they tried to remain hidden. It all looked so real, and who wouldn’t want to hear about a possible fight between Paris’ beloved heroes? The viewers on the Ladyblog would skyrocket. People would be clamouring for the latest scoop, which only Addy could provide them. 

With a grin on her face, Addy spun and fell onto her bed, falling asleep to images of journalistic fame and success.

The next day rolled around in the blink of an eye and Addy was sitting back at her computer, ensuring everything still looked as perfect as it had the night before. Nothing had changed. She quickly printed everything off and got ready for school, hoping to find Alya Cesaire before classes began. Once she saw these pictures, she would have no chance but to publish them. Not even she was discerning enough to notice that they were fake. 

Addy nearly skipped the entire way to school. She arrived just as Alya was about to walk through the doors into the courtyard, madly typing on her phone. Maybe it was another Ladyblog update. Whatever, no matter how good it was, it wouldn’t be as attention-grabbing as Addy’s article. 

“Alya! Wait up!” She called out and ran up the stairs, dodging people as she went. “I have a scoop for the Ladyblog! I was walking last night and saw Ladybug and Chat Noir arguing.” The paper was shoved in Alya’s face with a crinkling noise. 

“I see…” Alya took the paper and examined it, reading the article a few times before turning her full attention to the picture. The longer she looked at it, the more Addy’s anticipation grew. Her editing was holding up perfectly. 

“It’s an interesting article, isn’t it? I wonder if we can really trust Ladybug and Chat Noir to protect an entire city if they’re arguing in public like this.”

“This is fake.”

“What? It’s not fake, I took the photo myself.”

“You didn’t take the photo. It’s clearly edited, and the article is full is misinformation. I know that Ladybug and Chat Noir weren’t fighting last night because Ladybug was giving me an interview at the same time you say this photo was taken. I don’t know where Chat Noir was but you can’t have an argument with someone if they’re not with you.

“Also, this photo is clearly edited. Ladybug’s arm is pixelated at the edge on one side, but the rest of her is a far higher quality photo. Chat Noir’s hair is blurry, and he’s looking in two different directions. I don’t know why you thought this would fool anyone.” Alya paused to hand the paper back to Addy. “If I published this, I would ruin the credibility of the Ladyblog and destroy my own reputation in the process.”

“No one else would see any of that! Most people don’t go around examining pictures to see if they’re fake!”

“Those aren’t the only problems, and the rest are even bigger. Ladybug’s hand is disproportionate to the rest of her, and the wall behind their heads warp in a weird way. Even if this photo wasn’t completely faked, it looks weird to edit it at all. People also don’t want to see heroes fighting. When Ladybug and Chat Noir are the ones that have been protecting us since the first day they appeared, writing articles questioning whether they’re still doing their jobs is horrendous. This entire article lacks journalistic integrity and has no place on the Ladyblog. Maybe if I ran some cheap tabloid that doesn’t care about the subject of its articles or reputation, I would publish this. But not on the Ladyblog.”

“What if I have more photos that are genuine?”

“I don’t want to see them. After this,” Alya gestured to the paper, which Addy was gripping to the point of scrunching, “there’s no way I could trust you for real photos or information. I don’t know what you were trying to gain by this, but it hasn’t worked. Have a good day.”

Alya turned on her heel and left, leaving Addy surrounded by everyone pointing and whispering about her. When had they all arrived, and how much had they seen? It was unfair of Alya to treat her like this! How dare she? Addy turned and stomped back down the stairs. There was no way she could go to class after this.

She wanted revenge. She wanted Alya to see that rejecting her article like this was the biggest mistake she would ever make. And she would get her revenge. Somehow. She just needed a plan. Maybe a competitor to the Ladyblog? Maybe an expose about Alya and how cruel she was?

Or… was there a better way to get revenge?

"My article would have made more people view her dumb blog than ever before. She should have published it and then she would be thanking ME!" Addy shouted, kicking the closest wall to her, not caring about the pain in her foot. 

She was so caught up in her anger that she didn't notice the purple butterfly fluttering towards her until it had already landed on her hairclip.  "Mind's Eye, how would you like to get revenge on Alya and her Ladyblog for not publishing your article?

"I will give you the power to do so if you bring me a couple of little things, a ring belonging to Chat Noir and a pair of earrings belonging to Ladybug. Do we have a deal?"

“Yes, Hawk Moth.” Addy stood straighter as she was consumed by purple smoke. When it cleared, she had changed. Addy was gone, leaving only Mind’s Eye in her place, a gleam in her eye that promised trouble for anyone that stood in her way. 

If she could defeat the heroes and take their miraculous, there would be nothing for Alya to write about. Her entire blog would crumble and all the work she had put in would be for nothing. It was the perfect revenge plan. And she was the perfect one to accomplish it.

Kim wouldn’t usually say he was over-competitive, but Marinette would. And she was only saying that because today was the third time this week that Kim had asked her to help him master Ultimate Mecha Strike III to win a bet against Max. It was Tuesday. 

“You’ll just have to practise on your own, Kim. I’m busy.” Akuma attacks had been more frequent recently and Marinette barely had time between them to finish her homework. Designing had been shoved to the backburner, despite how much Marinette loved it because it was simply taking so much time just to keep her identity hidden. Being around Kim enough to help him beat Max was practically asking for something to go wrong. 

“I bet once I beat Max I’ll be a better player than you.”

Marinette shook her head, not wanting to be dragged into one of Kim’s bets. After he had lost the race to Alix he should have stopped, but the temporary hiatus only lasted a month at most before he was back to his old ways. “You can think that all you want, but I’m not agreeing to any bets.”

“Really?” 

“Yes, Kim. We all know how your bets turn out. Something will go wrong and one of us might end up akumatised.” Marinette knew she wouldn’t be akumatised, and that it was unlikely Kim would become akumatised after losing a little friendly competition, but there was no guarantee that someone else in Paris wouldn’t be akumatised. Coming up with excuses to rush off, possibly even out of her own house, in the middle of an akuma attack would strange. Marinette knew that one day people would start to realise that she was always missing during akuma attacks, but that hadn’t happened yet. People were just a little more oblivious than she had thought. 

Kim knew he wouldn’t be able to beat Marinette. She was easily the best Mecha Strike III player in the school, she had beaten both Max and Adrien with ease. Even if Kim beat Max, which was he wasn’t sure he could, he would still only be the third-best player in the school. Marinette would crush him like a bug. But she would be nice about it, at the very least. That was one of the things he liked about Marinette; she was nice to everyone. And while that was just something any of her friends would say, Kim wasn’t saying it just as a friend.

It had been a while since he last admitted to having a crush on anyone. The last time he could think of was the disastrous Valentine’s Day that had ended with him being turned into Dark Cupid, something that he didn’t want to repeat any time soon. But Marinette was different from Chloe and she definitely wouldn’t take a picture of him to laugh at and send it to everyone they knew. 

But could he really just ask her on a date when they hadn’t spent that much time together? Kim felt awkward just thinking about it and the only way he could think to spend time with Marinette was a bet and one that he was almost guaranteed to lose. But that was okay. If he could spend just a little bit of time with Marinette as friends, then maybe he could work up the courage to ask her out. Maybe. He couldn’t really tell right now. 

|||

Almost as if it had been summoned by Marinette’s thoughts, another akuma attacked the school that afternoon. The class had just returned to their classroom after lunch and were settling down for the final lesson of the day when a resounding crash echoed through the walls and the akuma attack sirens began to wail. Miss Bustier had dismissed the class early, calling their homework out as everyone evacuated the building in an attempt to find a safer area. With all the teenagers getting akumatised, the school was easily one of the worst places to be hiding out. 

Marinette scanned the crowd as they moved, looking for a chance to escape. When the akuma attacks had first begun, the chaos of everyone panicking had been more than enough for her to slip off undetected, but now that it was a multiple times a week event everyone knew what to do. Her class noticed when she disappeared from their group. 

Today, Marinette didn’t get a chance to transform until she was almost home. She slipped into an alley, hidden from the view of the street by a dumpster and whispered the words that would turn her into Ladybug. Then she was on top of the roof next to her, yo-yo spinning as she surveyed the area for the akuma. Where were they?

Another few seconds of searching yielded nothing so Ladybug leapt off the roof and swung her way back towards the school. If the destruction had been loudest over here, that meant the akuma couldn’t be far, right?

She was right. The akuma was pacing around the basketball court, grinning at something that Ladybug couldn’t’ see beneath the walkway. When she dropped down to fight, she saw that Kim was standing against the wall, trying not to look threatened by a much larger and more terrifying akuma. She had to save him. 

Working on instinct alone, Ladybug threw her yo-yo and wrapped it around Kim, glad that the magic from her earrings helped the yo-yo act as if she was controlling it with her mind. It made her job a lot easier. A single tug brought Kim flying towards her. She grabbed him out of the air and threw her yo-yo again, this time aiming to pull them both out of the school courtyard. They were gone before the akuma could react.

“What were you still doing at school? You should have evacuated with everyone else!” Ladybug placed them onto a roof a safe distance away from school, trying to work out where the best place to leave Kim would be. If she could keep the fight contained to the school she could just lower him to the ground and tell him to go home without passing the school, but if the akuma was searching for someone now she couldn’t predict where they would go. She should have confronted the akuma while they were still at the school. 

“I couldn’t see my friend Marinette, she left last out of the class and I wanted to make sure she was safe.” While he had seen Marinette just as she was leaving the classroom, she had disappeared into the crowd when he looked away for only a second. He tried to look for her when the group began splitting, but even when he looked towards the bakery he couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been that far apart, so how could Marinette have disappeared so quickly? It was only when he turned around to check back inside had he been cornered by the akuma, asking where Chloe Bourgeois was, just like most akumas did. 

He had put himself in danger to check if she was alright? Marinette felt heat rise to her cheeks beneath the mask and hoped that Kim wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t used to someone looking for her that closely since Adrien usually disappeared pretty quickly, and Alya dragged Nino off with her to try and capture footage for the Ladyblog. It was an easy pattern to learn and it allowed Marinette to slip off and transform with only a little suspicion from Alya if a group of them were trapped together. Kim noticing that she was gone put a dent in the whole plan. 

But she didn’t really mind. He was just being a good friend. That was all. 

Standing this close to Ladybug made Kim realise she looked remarkably similar to Marinette, something he wouldn’t have noticed unless he had spent as much time looking at her across the room as he did. Not in a creepy way or anything, but he always found his eyes drifting over to her, if only for a few seconds.  Her smiles lit up his day, even just being in the same room as she made the world seem a little brighter. But he was standing in front of Ladybug, not Marinette. And even though they weren’t the same person, the way he thought about Marinette made him realise that his feelings weren’t going away any time soon. 

The next time he saw Marinette, he was going to find a way to spend time with her, and then he would ask her out. No bets, no need for competition. It was going to go better than when he asked Chloe to be his Valentine and he was sure of it. 

|||

“Marinette, can I talk to you?” Since their encounter when she was Ladybug, Marinette had been thinking about Kim a lot. She couldn’t work out whether Kim was just caring about the other people in his class a little too much, or if there was a deeper meaning to his words. Well, from the nerves clear on Kim’s face it would be safe to bet she was about to find out. 

“Sure!”

He could do this, it would be fine. There wasn’t a single reason in the world that he should be worrying about this so much. “Do you want to hang out sometime, maybe play some video games? Not for a bet or anything, just to spend time with each other?”

She had to remind herself that everything was okay a lot these days. After the events following Chat’s akumatisation in the timeline Bunnyx had dragged her into, Ladybug had been a bit jumpy whenever the colour white was too close to her partner. And she was the only one that knew what had happened, what had barely been prevented. She wished she could talk to someone about it. 

Ladybug only realised how badly she needed to tell someone about what had happened one snowy day. Even if she couldn’t tell them exactly what had happened without revealing her identity, it was hard to explain why she had dissolved into tears when Chat Noir had appeared next to her covered in snow. The colours were just a little too similar to Chat Blanc and Ladybug couldn’t handle it. Chat and the snow reminded her of the world he had been trapped in, all alone, after he was akumatised and accidentally destroyed the planet while under Hawk Moth’s control. 

As soon as he had seen the tears in her eyes, Chat had brushed the snow off himself and pulled her into a hug. “What’s wrong?”

Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: Miraculous Ladybug Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir/Kagami Tsurugi Characters: Adrien Agreste | Chat Noir, Kagami Tsurugi Additional Tags: Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Post-Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth Identity Reveal, Arrested Gabriel Agreste | Papillon | Hawk Moth, Adrigami Relationship, Fluff, Light Angst, ML Secret Santa, ML Secret Santa 2020, MLSS 2020 Summary:

When Adrien had given Marinette his umbrella on his first day at school, he certainly hadn’t expected it to be handed back to him months later by Ladybug of all people. Of course, he hadn’t realised it was the same umbrella until he was at home, staring at the practical black umbrella material, wondering why it seemed so familiar. Then he looked at the base of the handle and everything clicked together. 

The umbrella he was holding was Gabriel Agreste branded, with the familiar logo and everything. It was one of the few prototypes made during testing, and his father hadn’t been happy when he returned from school without it after just a single day. But that didn’t matter in the face of the new information he had just discovered. 

Marinette was Ladybug. And all it took for him to realise that in the end was an umbrella. 

Discovering Ladybug’s identity hadn’t been his intention when he went on patrol earlier that afternoon, nor had his intentions to have been caught in the rain. He had just been trying to get out of the house after Gabriel had promised to eat lunch with him and then didn’t show, only condescending to send a note with Nathalie after Adrien had waited for an hour. Which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary for Gabriel. This time it just hurt much more.

Not quite knowing how to process his emotions, Adrien had returned to his room and transformed into Chat Noir. It only took him a few seconds to be out his window and leaping over Paris, letting the wind pushing past him take all the negative emotions that had been swirling around inside him. Today had been a bad day for Adrien, but for Chat Noir, he was just as free and unbothered as usual. 

He knew that Chat Noir and Adrien Agreste were the same people, but sometimes it was easier to just pretend they were completely separate. Especially on days like today when he just needed a break from the everyday Adrien Agreste the famous model lifestyle. 

And that desire to escape his normal life meant that he didn’t even spare a glance for the darkening edges of the sky. Rain was coming, and from the looks of the clouds, there was going to be a lot of it. But Chat didn’t know that until there was water bucketing down on top of him. And that meant it was too late to get back under any kind of cover before his hair was soaked, the magical suit barely keeping water out. He managed to take refuge under the overhanging signs of the Dupain-Cheng Bakery, but by that point, he looked like he had just crawled out of the ocean. 

From this point, he only had two choices; either he could wait out the rain (which didn’t look like it would be ending anytime too soon), or he could rush home in the rain and run the risk that he was caught out by his hair. Neither option was great, but they were the only ones Chat could think of in that moment. The cold from the rain was starting to seep through his suit and into his skin, and his hair was already getting stuck to his face and mask. It was getting irritating. 

Then she had appeared. Ladybug. Carrying an umbrella. Carrying his umbrella. Not that he knew it upon first glance, because a lot of umbrellas are the same practical single-coloured black. He also hadn’t bothered to wonder how she found him, and why she had been out with an umbrella, but now it all made sense. She had probably seen him through the windows of the bakery she lived in. No wonder she didn’t mind him taking the umbrella home because she lived just upstairs. 

Now that he knew Ladybug’s secret identity, he was noticing a lot more things that probably would have slipped past him before. The hairstyle, the colour of her eyes, the way that Marinette spoke more and more like Ladybug confronting an akuma when she was facing down with Chloe, even the way that they both walked. It was all the same, or at the very least incredibly similar. He really had been oblivious, huh?

Another thing that was similar between Marinette with and without the suit was the way she motivated people. When she had ‘stumbled’ upon Chat, she had asked what was wrong. He had given her a few vague details, his civilian life wasn’t great, someone he had been waiting for had ditched him without any prior notice, this wasn’t the first time and he knew it wouldn’t be the last, keeping any too revealing details to himself. 

In response, she had given him a pep talk that sounded almost identical to something he had heard Marinette say to another of their classmates. Even if the words weren’t exactly the same, Chat could imagine Marinette saying them to him instead of Ladybug. Of course he could, what was he saying? He was hearing Marinette say those words, not just imagining her handing him an umbrella and telling him to be careful in the rain. 

There were so many clues, and he had missed them all. All it took for him to realise was Marinette being a little too kind and giving him an umbrella that wasn’t as common around Paris as it looked. 

Where did he go from here? They both knew their secret identities were supposed to remain exactly that; a secret. But he knew. Well, he was pretty sure he knew. Even if he didn’t being so convinced could be dangerous if he somehow let the secret slip. Hawk Moth could start targeting Marinette, her friends, and her family, and Chat wouldn’t be able to forgive himself if innocent civilians got hurt because of him.

He would have to keep his newfound knowledge secret until Hawk Moth was defeated. Only when it was safe would Chat tell Ladybug that he had worked out her secret identity and reveal his own. It was only fair, after all. But was this really a secret he could keep that long, possibly even indefinitely? When they had fought Timetagger, they found out there was going to be another Hawk Moth in the future. He would have to keep the secret until they were adults, and Chat worried he would slip up one day and put people in danger.