Chapter Text
Marinette wakes to cries of her name and a boy whose eyes are alien green behind a carnival mask.
“I’m sorry,” she says, “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here.”
“Marinette,” he says in a voice begging something from her that she can’t remember promising, and she sits up and tries not to stare too obviously at the cosplayers crowding around her.
“I really don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” she repeats, stretching her neck to try and figure out where, exactly, she is. Bare concrete walls, no windows, butterflies neon-white under a looming ceiling. “I’m sorry, I don’t remember how I got here.”
She can practically see something shattering in the boy kneeling beside her, feel the shockwave passing through them all. The boy in the cat costume looks ready to cry, and empathy seizes her with a sudden violence. His despair is a meat hook in her chest, but Marinette doesn’t know where it comes from, can’t well tell him that it will be fine when she doesn’t know A from B about where she is, and who these people are, and what has happened since her lunch break.
“I think I’m supposed to be in school,” she says instead, looking up at the others, “I’m sorry if I’ve interrupted something.”
“You haven’t caused trouble,” says the girl in the fox costume as she kneels by Marinette’s other side, and then she hugs her. “Oh Marinette.”
Marinette accepts it stiffly. A shudder passes through the other girl, and Marinette counts the seconds passing as she wonders when it would be rude to push her away. “I’m sorry, but I can’t remember where we’ve met,” she says at last.
The girl pulls back and runs a gloved hand under her nose. “Yeah, you wouldn’t,” she says thinly. “You got mixed up in something here, it’s messing with your head a bit.”
There is another drag of silence that no-one tries to fill, and when fox girl speaks again, it’s not the elaboration Marinette is waiting for. “I’ll take her home,” she announces instead as she climbs to her feet, “and I’ll explain what I can.”
“Okay,” cat boy croaks. He lifts a hand and lets it hover by Marinette’s chin, mouth twisted in the effort of keeping some unknown pain away. “Marinette, can you close your eyes for a moment?”
For some irrational reason, she expects to be kissed when she obeys. But embarrassing thoughts about boys she can’t remember meeting are chased away as she feels him fumble with her right ear, and then with her left.
She’d think he was checking out her earrings if she didn’t know that she wasn’t wearing any.
“Okay,” he says very softly, and has leaned back again when she opens her eyes.
“Come on,” says fox girl, and pulls her to her feet.
The room they’re in is like some bizarre greenhouse with no sunlight, but artificial lamps hanging from the walls.
“Is this a film set?” Marinette can’t pull her eyes from the glass coffin and knows somewhere in the back of her head that paper mâché walls would not send every word and every step echoing around them. The artifice of the mise en scène is far preferable to the prickling horror of the possibility of what this place is if it isn’t.
“Don’t look,” says fox girl and takes her hand, pulling her in the other direction.
“Hey, are those people – “
“It’s fine,” says fox girl, but her voice is strained, “Marinette, please, let’s just get you home.”
“I live by Pont au Double,” Marinette relents as she casts a final look over her shoulder. Nobody in the group has moved to do anything about the two figures sprawled like corpses behind them.
“Don’t look back there,” fox girl repeats, and pulls her to a narrow lift, pushes the only button in it, take them into the daylight of an expensive office with marble floors and tall ceilings. She leads them to a foyer with a wide staircase guarded by a massive portrait painting of a father and son, and Marinette stops walking to stare at it.
“Who are they?” she asks when fox girl pulls on her hand.
“Adrien and his dad,” she replies simply, as if Marinette would know who Adrien is.
“I think I know the dad from somewhere.”
“Gabriel Agreste,” fox girl spits, “the fashion designer.”
“That’s right! Hey, is this his house?”
“Yes,” says fox girl, and pulls her out the front door to a balmy summer evening and down the street. She hasn’t let go of Marinette’s hand, and she looks so sad and so tired that Marinette lets her hold it.
“Can I ask what happened back there?”
“I’m not sure how much you’ll understand right now. If it’s okay, I’d rather wait until your parents can hear it, too.”
“Was it something dangerous?”
“Yeah,” says fox girl quietly, “but it’s okay now.”
They’re moving in the direction of the Seine. Marinette could find her way home from here if she wanted to, but the world is foreign around her; there’s something wrong, something more than cosplayers in the basement of a famous fashion designer whose gate they left wide open behind them. Marinette’s head is still processing the absurd display she woke up in, and when she tries to think back to what she was doing earlier, she’s seized by a nagging anxiety that the last she remembers, it was lunchtime, and she doesn’t know what she’s been doing since.
Fox girl dodges a family from Marseille who want to take her photo, and Marinette is suddenly aware of the world around her on a completely different level of horror.
“What date is it,” she says, too shaken to make her voice carry the question properly.
“August 5th,” says fox girl, and Marinette stops walking and tries to swallow the panic rising.
“It was the first day of school.”
“Oh, Marinette,” and fox girl is hugging her again, pulling her tight to her leaning against the wall of the building beside them. It was the first week of September, but Marinette can feel the residual heat from the sun through the fabric of her t-shirt. The street is thick with tourists, the evening is lovely, it’s summer around them and Marinette is wearing sandals.
“What happened?” she asks, and fox girl strokes her back.
“You were very brave. And because of it, you forgot.”
In that moment, Marinette knows that waking up to cosplayers in what can’t have been a film set cannot have been the weirdest thing that’s happened today. Something more has passed, something from which her life will never be the same. Almost a year of her life is gone, and in the place of all those forgotten days is a gaping and bleeding gash that she hadn’t noticed until now. Whatever happened since the last thing she remembers, it was something she’s missing with a violence she’s never missed anything in her life.
She doesn’t know why she cries, but she supposes it is over something lost.
*
Whatever Marinette has been up to today, it hasn’t been for long enough for her parents to have worried. Still, she’s hugged and petted and sat down with a glass of juice when she’s lead home by the hand of a very impressive cosplayer. Fox girl declines anything, remains standing, and looks full of regret as she starts talking.
“I expect it’ll be public soon enough, but you should hear this from me – we’ve fought Hawkmoth, and we’ve defeated him. He was Gabriel Agreste. Marinette was over to visit his son, and she got caught up in the battle. She wasn’t harmed, and – she helped us out. But because of what she did, she’s forgotten everything about – about this. Everything that’s somehow about Ladybug and Hawkmoth, and all of us.”
Fox girl waves a hand in an uncertain gesture as Marinette feels her father’s arm tighten around her shoulders.
“Oh, honey,” her mother whispers, and strokes her hair.
“As you might understand, she’s pretty confused right now. I’m - we all are so very, very sorry that this happened.”
“What about Ladybug’s miracle cure?” her father asks, and fox girl shakes her head.
“There was nothing Ladybug could do.”
“Who is Ladybug?” Marinette asks, and fox girl’s eyes run full with tears.
“Ladybug is the hero of Paris,” she declares, “she’s brave, and strong, and she is fully committed to see justice be upheld. She fought Hawkmoth, and thanks to you, Marinette, she defeated him. Remember that. If not for you, he would have won.”
“Oh,” says Marinette, struggling to feel pride in something she can’t remember doing. Fox girl lingers for a minute before she turns to the door.
“Again, I’m so sorry this happened to you. You should all know that she’s perfectly healthy. The only thing affected are memories of this last year.”
Her parents nod, and when fox girl opens the door, her mother speaks up. “Please tell Ladybug that we’re grateful for everything she has done. We’re grateful to all of you. And we’ll take care of Marinette.”
Fox girl nods, and strides out of the room as she lifts a hand as if to wipe away tears.
*
Marinette falls asleep to her mother stroking her hair, and wakes up to her mother still next to her in bed. Except for that, it feels like any other morning.
The day passes in empty peace. Her parents check in on her every chance they have; Marinette sits in front of the TV news with her phone in her hand, piecing together some kind of sense to what she’s forgotten.
Fox girl is a superhero whose name is Rena Rouge. Cat boy is Cat Noir. There are several others, but the most prominent of them is by far Ladybug. Ladybug is a girl who like Marinette wears her hair in pigtails, but that is as far as the similarities go. Ladybug is in archive clips on the news and amateur footage on youtube. She battles monster ten times her own size, talks to TV cameras, swings through Paris like Spiderman with a magical yo-yo, and Marinette has met her, Marinette has helped her defeat an evil supervillain. Gabriel Agreste had magic powers that let him turn people into monsters, and Ladybug and Cat Noir have been fighting him for nearly a year. His son is on a magazine clipping pinned to Marinette’s wall, and his contact is saved on her phone. She got caught up in this because she was visiting him.
It feels like a dream, and she tells her father so when he drops in to have lunch with her.
“Yeah, that’s how it was the first few weeks,” he says, and smiles fondly at her, “but we got used to it. You’ll find it all over the internet these days – hey, you should check out the Ladyblog! It’s run by your friend Alya.”
Marinette has read the messages exchanged with Alya. The girl whose photo is on the Ladyblog, is the girl whose face is in a number of selfies on Marinette’s phone. It looks like she’s Nino’s girlfriend.
“Have you met Ladybug?”
“I have! She saved our bakery more than once, and she’s dropped by a few times for help. And she was at your birthday party this year – there was some trouble with Nonna.”
“So I guess I’ve met her before, too.”
“You sure have,” her father says, smile dimming, “she saved you on your birthday. And back when I was – well.”
“You were a monster?!”
He nods, staring forlornly at the food. “I heard you confessing your love to Cat Noir, so I invited him over for brunch. When he came, he told you he was in love with Ladybug, and you took it pretty badly. It’s horrible to see your daughter hurt like that. But Ladybug and Cat Noir saved us both.”
“So that’s how he knew me.”
“He’s a very kind young man. Hey, he said Ladybug didn’t love him, so you might still have your chance!”
“Papa!”
Afternoon sees Nino come by, which in itself is more surprising than the fact that he’s brought along the girl with the Ladyblog and Gabriel Agreste’s son. Marinette has never been particularly close with Nino, but from the warmth when he smiles at her and how long he hugs her, that seems to have changed this last year. It’s a bit awkward, but knowing that she’s someone who Nino cares about is not a bad feeling.
Neither Alya nor Adrien try to follow his example.
“I’m guessing I should introduce myself, huh,” says Alya when Nino steps back, and she holds out a hand. “Alya Cesaire. And FYI, I’ve officially claimed the title of your BFF since last October.”
“Adrien Agreste,” says Adrien, whose hand is warm and whose smile is brittle, “I sit in front of you in class. We’ve had some adventure together this year.”
“Nice to meet you,” says Marinette, and lifts her phone. “I’ve been reading our messages. I’m not sure I’ll be much help with planning Kagami’s party any longer.”
“Silly bird!” Alya laughs and shoves her shoulder at the joke, “just be there with yourself and a cake and Kagami will be plenty happy.”
“She’s right, Marinette,” Adrien earnestly contributes, “Kagami loves you. She worried when she heard what happened to you.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” says Marinette, and she really is. “I’m sorry about all this. It’s weird to have friends you don’t know.”
Alya smiles in sympathy and sits down beside her on the sofa. “Lucky that we know you, then.”
Her lockscreen is a shot of Ladybug, but she flips open her image gallery and opens a photo dated two days before. It’s a candid shot of Marinette whaling on Nino with an inflatable dolphin, with a fretting Adrien trying to get between them.
Bright joy spreads in Marinette at the sight, even if she can’t remember it.
They sit on her rooftop balcony and drink iced tea and spend the afternoon talking about everything Marinette doesn’t remember happening. She hears about how their class somehow was a weird epicentre of akumatisations (“Everyone, and people’s parents, too! Except you and golden boy here, somehow.”), about her surprise party that was ruined by her own grandmother turned into a supervillain, about a class trip when Nino and Alya wiped people’s memories, another one where they ended up in space. About how she won a design competition and was offered an internship by Audrey Bourgeoios, about Chloé of all people being the superhero Queen Bee, about that time miss Mendeleiev was on game show claiming to have filmed interdimensional cheese-eating creatures. Nathaniel had a crush on her and turned into a villain who took her out on a date.
“You said it was super romantic,” Alya smirks, “except for the part where he kept trying to beat up Cat Noir.”
“Did we even have time for normal school this year?” she asks at some point, and the others laugh.
“Don’t think they let up on the homework, if that’s it!” Nino says.
“I can’t believe I’ve been to space.”
Alya has the footage to prove it.
Much as Marinette tries to think back, the last she remembers hanging out with friends was Rose’s birthday party that must be close to a year ago now, and they’d done little else than eat snacks and paint each other’s nails while watching “Titanic”. This little group is different, on all accounts. Alya’s ease around her speaks of an intimacy Marinette hasn’t ever had with anyone her own age. Adrien’s warm assurances leave no question about their friendship. Nino’s nudges and in-jokes she doesn’t get but still laughs at are a testament to how she’s somehow become someone he sees, and someone she sees, in turn.
“I’m so glad you guys came by,” she says, smiling at each of them. “It’s kind of hard to be upset about something you don’t know that you’re supposed to miss. But even if I feel fine, it’s still really good to know that I’ve been around people who care so much about me.”
Their smiles fade at that. For a moment it seems like none of them knows how to reply, but then Alya leans over and hugs her tight.
“Marinette, we care about you because you care about everyone. You’ve done so much to help others this year. You’re always so busy doing things for your friends, and as class president, and as – as just being you.” She pulls back, but keeps her hands set on Marinette’s shoulders. “Adrien here even called you ‘our everyday Ladybug’.”
Alya is clearly trying to smile, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. When Marinette looks at Adrien, he’s looking at his hands.
“Yeah, and then you stepped into a quiche with both feet!” it bursts from Nino as the silence has dwelled three seconds too long, and Marinette groans as Alya laughs and leans back. Even Adrien lifts his head to smile, but it melts away the moment his phone beeps. He glances at the screen and sighs.
“I gotta go.”
Nino and Alya’s faces fall again, and Marinette, no longer high-strung with nerves about how to act around strangers who clearly are important to her, suddenly remembers that crucial part from Rena Rouge’s words to her parents.
“Adrien, I’m so sorry! I totally forgot – that was your, um…“
And Adrien smiles, even with heartbreak shining through it. “Marinette, it’s fine. I was so worried about you after everything that happened. I really needed to see for myself that you’re okay.”
“How are you?”
He looks out at the Notre Dame across from them. “I’m – I’m not okay. I mean, my mum and now this, but – but I have people to look after me. At least I don’t have to be afraid of Hawkmoth any longer. And I know that it wasn’t – it wasn’t because of me that he was such a jerk.”
She’s only known him for a little less than three hours, but some forgotten part of her heart whispers how uncharacteristic the bitterness of the final sentence is. Adrien squeezes his eyes shut for a moment, and then he gives them a smile that is subdued by sadness, but still spilling over with affection and gratitude. “You’re right, Marinette, that it’s good to know that people care about you. Hanging out with you guys reminded me of that. I really needed that, too.”
Meeting his eyes is like a punch to her gut, and she can’t even begin to untangle the current of emotions running along her nerves.
After she’s walked the three of them to the door, her room feels empty and strange. There are decoration she can’t remember putting up, sewing project she can’t remember starting, games doesn’t know if she’s played. There are photos of friends she’s made and now lost. There’s a polaroid with the four of them together, but the girl who has her arms thrown around Alya and Nino is a stranger. That Marinette is someone who might as well be dead - the Marinette who Alya and Adrien know and who Nino cares so much about is the girl on that photo, but Marinette can’t recognise herself at all.
*
On the third morning, the doorbell rings and Chloé Bourgeois stands on the other side.
Marinette has absolutely no idea how she’s supposed to respond to that.
Her helpless silence lasts until Chloé uncrosses her arms and stares at something to the side of Marinette’s head. “Are you gonna let me in or what?”
“Sorry,” Marinette says and steps to the side, bracing herself for comments about her plebeian home or her labourer parents. Chloé’s never been known to drop by someone just to be nice, but surely not even Chloé is so mean that she’d make the visit just to mock her? She closes the door, but knows better than suggesting Chloé would condescend to sit down or consume anything from her home.
Chloé’s hands are restless, and she won’t look at Marinette. She isn’t speaking either, and the entire show is so unusual of her that Marinette eventually has no choice but to be the one to break the silence.
“So…”
“I just came by to give you these,” Chloé declares with a slightly hysteric note, thrusting a small box at Marinette. It isn’t gift-wrapped, but the build is expensive enough to speak for something out of Chloé’s price range, alright. Marinette almost doesn’t want to know what’s inside. There’s a logo she should recognise, but before she has the time to consider it, Chloé is in her face.
“What are you waiting for?!”
“Sorry!” Marinette yelps as she ungracefully stumbles backwards. She glances up to measure Chloé’s anger, and meets a pair of pale eyes wide in shock and something uncomfortably human. She’s never seen that in Chloé before, and it feels almost like an intrusion to watch it in someone who she never thought could have those emotions. She quickly turns her eyes away, and Chloé takes a measured step back.
“I’m sorry for yelling.”
Marinette has never before seen Chloé wear shame and regret. The girl who has mocked her every day in school for the last three years, now fiddles with the strap of her Hermès handbag as she stares at the wall.
“It’s just, I’m so used to you – not taking that. Please open it.”
The box holds a pair of earrings with charms shaped like ladybugs, the red and black pattern set with miniscule gemstones. The clips are solid gold, thick and sturdy when Marinette carefully wrestles one of them out.
“They’re very cute,” she says, wondering for a moment about the gift before remembering that Chloé was a superhero too and must have known Ladybug better than even Alya did.
“Try them on,” Chloé says, quiet and soft and with a current of something that almost sounds like anxiety.
Marinette does.
“Well?” she asks as she looks up at Chloé, and Chloé breaks into a smile that almost makes Marinette wonder if someone has cloned her or something.
“You should wear them,” she says, confidence returning.
“I feel kind of bad for getting this praise for something I can’t remember doing,” Marinette says, fiddling with one of the earrings.
“You deserve it,” Chloé promptly declares. “I was there, you know. You were amazing and you should owe it, even if you don’t remember it. Hawkmoth would have won if it weren’t for you. So those earrings – you should wear them and remember that every time you see yourself in a mirror.”
“Thank you, Chloé,” Marinette says, still uncertain about how to deal with this girl who is clearly trying very hard not to be who Marinette remembers her being.
“Sure,” says Chloé, glances at the door, then back at Marinette, before she turns. “I gotta go now. Bye.”
In less than five minutes, a fundament in Marinette’s life has been yanked away. Superheroes in Paris was weird, but Chloé giving her gifts, Chloé apologising? She’s still half mindless from the shock as she walks to the closest mirror. The earrings are small and discreet, but the jewels catch the light whenever she turns, calling attention to their presence. Ladybugs have clearly stopped being incidental in Paris by now. Anyone would think that wearing these earrings is a tribute, but Chloé’s words said something else.
I saved the city, Marinette thinks, touching one charm. They aren’t really her style, but she leaves them in for the rest of the day.
And then she leaves them in the next day, and then it’s been a week, and then months, and gold doesn’t tarnish, the stones never lose their sparkle as Marinette wears them in rain and sunshine and springs and autumns as a memento of something she can’t remember.
One day, she will softly realise that she’s been choosing clothing and accessories to fit her earrings for years already.
(and years and years from now, she’ll wonder about them out loud to Adrien, and Adrien, with a youth spent professionally wearing designer merchandise, will name a designer and name the stones and theorise about private commission rates in timeframes like the one Chloé must’ve given them, and throw out a sum that sends Marinette into a panic about owing the Bourgeois family both her soul and her firstborn -
and Adrien will laugh, and tell her, “She owed, you, Marinette. She so owed you.”)
But right now, Marinette is seeing herself in the mirror with a dizzying suspicion that Chloé isn’t the only one who has changed immeasurably this last year.
*
It’s been a week since Paris was freed from the terror of a supervillain and Marinette forgot most of the last year of her life. It’s a bigger deal to just about everyone else. Marinette, after all, has no memories about her bedroom being smashed by a king kong baby or her school being haunted by a classmate turned into a slime monster. Her friends are still her friends. Some new people are also her friends. There’s a class chat with a lot of activity, and to which she tentatively posts and is enthusiastically greeted.
Alya and Nino have come by every day. Adrien, surrounded by law enforcement and childcare services and lawyers and an aunt about whom his is politely unenthusiastic, texts her every evening. Myléne and Alix visited with a potted rose for her balcony.
She pulls it out of its shaded spot as evening lets up the heat of the day, and she gazes out over the city. It looks as peaceful as ever, as she supposes it must. She’s seen the video footage of the monsters Gabriel Agreste set loose upon it, and of Ladybug’s miracle that would always restore things to the way they had been before the attack. There’s a lot of discussion about Ladybug and her allies, and whether they’re going to stay around now that Hawkmoth is gone. The heroes themselves have kept a low profile ever since.
Alya might have seen Ladybug up close more often than anyone else, so it stands to reason that Marinette has met her more than once, too. She gave up a year of her life for Ladybug, and Marinette can’t imagine ever being that brave just because. Maybe she can understand it a bit, though, because she’s been getting a good idea of the timeline by now. Myléne had been the first ever victim of the first ever person turned into a monster – Ivan. Quiet, unobtrusive Ivan turned into a raging monster for having done nothing wrong, and oh, how Marinette had felt the rage burn at knowing that it had happened, and how satisfying to watch the footage of Ladybug telling Hawkmoth everything about how bad he was, before she trounced him.
If she could have superpowers like Ladybug, Marinette would’ve liked to do exactly that.
The setting sun casts her side of the cathedral in shadows, and it takes her a moment to notice the motion against the wall. Only as the figure scales the tower and the sunlight reflects in a metallic body does she realise who it is.
Ladybug lands on her feet and turns to stare directly at Marinette’s balcony.
Marinette is frozen, wondering if she’s somehow interrupting, and even how to greet a celebrity you might or might not know. She lifts a hand in a weak wave. Ladybug is still, but then raises her arm to throw. Wire sings above Marinette’s head and she steps back to let the Hero of Paris land on her balcony.
“Hello,” says Ladybug.
“Hi,” says Marinette.
A still second passes between them before Ladybug speaks again.
“Are you okay?”
That, at least, is something Marinette has gotten practice at answering. “I’m fine. People ask that a lot, but I really am. I mean – whatever scary things happened, I don’t know about it, right?”
Ladybug’s smile is very small.
“I’m glad to hear that.”
She says nothing more, but turns to gaze across the city. She seems more reserved than she’s ever looked in all the youtube clips, and the more Marinette looks at her, the more she notices that something about Ladybug is off.
And there was that one time it was Juleka, and Ladybug was a blond boy and Cat Noir a girl with a long, dark braid.
“Are you a different Ladybug?”
The girl turns to her, tense in momentary shock, shoulders raised for a second before she closes her eyes, and lets them fall.
“I guess it isn’t just the new haircut.”
“Your eyes are different. Ladybug – I mean, the other Ladybug I guess – hers are really, really blue.”
“Of course,” says Ladybug, “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“I’m not sure others would notice,” Marinette contributes as the silences grows.
Ladybug leans against the railing and returns to watching over the city. “There would be a lot of talk if she were to retire the moment Hawkmoth was defeated. I’m only supposed to let people see that Ladybug is still around until it won’t cause mass panic for her to pass the torch.”
“I can keep a secret,” Marinette says.
Ladybug turns to her, and her face lights up in a fond smile. “I know you can, Marinette.”
Marinette wonders if superheroes have the time to have tea and cake. Surely even they must have normal lives, too? And there are so many things she wants to ask her. The empty gap in Marinette’s life is slowly filling with answers which are ordinary, everyday, but never about the important part of it – the what, the why. So Marinette is friends with a boy whose father was a magical supervillain, but why was it Marinette that was so important to defeating him, what was it a wallflower with two left feet could do against a magician who had terrorised the city for a year? How could someone like Marinette do something that made Chloé Bourgeois be nice? That made a superhero who has saved the city for a year look at her with the kind of grief that Cat Noir had poured at her when she woke up that day? What could she have done that was so dangerous that she’d forget it, and forget everything even remotely about it?
“Since you know what happened to me, does that mean you know what it was that I did to help Ladybug and the other heroes?”
She somehow isn’t surprised to see Ladybug’s face close in a conflicted frown.
“If you’re asking if I can tell you, then I can’t. I would if I could, but you’d just forget it again.”
“Can you at least tell me why I’d forget?”
Ladybug shakes her head.
“Would the other Ladybug be able to tell me?”
The answer is another headshake, as Ladybug looks very miserable indeed. The refusal is unmistakable, and Marinette doesn’t try begging from any other angles. It seems clear that this Ladybug is telling the truth as she knows it.
“Can you at least tell me if it’s something that would make me happy, or make me sad?”
Ladybug looks thoughtfully at the cathedral across from Marinette’s home.
“I can’t know your feelings, Marinette,” she says, eventually, “but I think it was both. I think you were sad to know the things you’d forget, and I think you were happy that Hawkmoth would be stopped and the city could be at peace. You know that you’d forget everything, and you thought it was worth that price. And none of us – nobody else could have done it. Only you, and we’ll never forget it.”
Marinette sighs. “Something so important that not even Ladybug could do it, and I can’t ever know what it was. What a way to spend a year.”
Ladybug smiles once again. “You did a whole lot more than help Ladybug out, from what I hear. It seems you’ve got a lot of friends.”
“Was Ladybug my friend, too?”
“After a fashion, I guess you could say so.”
After a fashion, like Ladybug must have been everyone’s friend in a city full of people whose negative emotions were preyed upon by Adrien’s dad. But there are holes in the weave, there are too many threads dangling about with Alya and the Ladyblog, about Adrien and his dad, and the Ladybug visiting now, and Cat Noir’s eyes running full with tears, and the fact that Marinette once was someone important enough to save the girl who saved the city.
Those loose threads will dangle still, because the new Ladybug clearly won’t be the one to lift the veil on any mysteries. Forgetting is such an odd side effect to experience that maybe it wasn’t a side effect at all, that maybe there are things so bad that a year lost is better than knowing them.
A part of Marinette feels sticky with the cowardice of not prodding. If things ended well, then whatever happened cannot have been that bad, right? And yet, the ambiguity of not asking feels preferable to knowing whatever terror she was made to forget. Marinette isn’t brave like Ladybug, and no-one expects her to be. Picking at scabs is never a good idea, and even as she startles at her earrings whenever she brushes her bangs back, the sensible part of her says to forget it and to move on, to not dwell on things that cannot be changed.
The conversation with Ladybug has stalled, and the heroine is fiddling with her yo-yo and looking uncomfortable.
“It’s good to see that you’re well,” she says after a silence that is growing awkward between them. When she raises her arm to throw, Marinette interrupts.
“Is she alright? I mean, it does sound kind of dramatic for her to quit just like that.”
“I guess it kind of was,” says Ladybug, smiling over her shoulder “but she’s fine. I have it from her own mouth.”
*
“It’s weird that I’ve forgotten being here,” says Marinette with a frown. “I remember bits of school. I definitely know science stuff I didn’t know before.“
“There was an akuma, that’s why. Take my arm.”
Marinette does, quickly realising Kagami won’t slow her stride and that it’s up to Marinette to match hers. Kagami’s prim uniform might do an admirable job of camouflaging the athlete beneath it, but Marinette notices it when pressed close to her. This is a girl with a confidence in her body and a precise control of every movement she makes. There's no hesitation as she loosens Marinette’s arm around hers to hold it out in a distance. When she makes a quick turn to face Marinette as she floats backwards, there’s not a hitch in her movements. Kagami isn’t a klutz who trips over her own feet.
It’s been ten days, and it’s an hour ago that Kagami knocked on her door, with a gift of fine strawberries and a no-nonsense attitude.
“It’s troubling to go through the process of befriending you again,” she announced when Marinette sat them down to share the strawberries. It was the start of an awkward and frequently stilted conversation during which Marinette learned that Kagami is on the same fencing team as Adrien and that Marinette had participated in a total of one practice session.
“We met when I tried out for a place on the team by challenging Adrien, and you made a wrong call as the referee. Then I was akumatised.”
Marinette’s insta says that she’s been hanging out with Kagami, and Adrien said that Kagami loves her. Marinette isn’t so sure she’s seeing it, though, but Kagami’s insistence on small talk is proof better than most, she supposes. The skating rink might be as good a place as any to break the metaphorical ice.
Ice skating with Kagami is a very different exercise than ice skating with Rose and Alix. For one, neither Rose nor Alix ever tied her laces without being asked, and then admonished her that it’s about time to learn it. Kagami carries herself in a different form on the ice, too. Marinette and Rose have messed around pretending to be figure skating ballerinas, but Kagami sweeps into speed and lifts a leg behind her as if it’s nothing, and floats over the ice in an elegant curve. She raises an eyebrow as she turns to stop around Marinette.
“You’re so good at this, Kagami!” Marinette enthuses, but Kagami doesn’t respond to the compliment.
“Yes. But you’re not so bad yourself. Come on.” She pulls Marinette along, and Marinette follows with strokes more uncertain than usual as fourteen years of being the clumsy girl bear down to remind her that she’ll never be as cool and as graceful as this friend she doesn’t know how she won. Marinette is the one who’ll trip and fall and limp home in bruises.
“I’m nowhere as good as you,” she apologises with a smile.
“I’ve seen you skate before. You’re better than this.”
They’re slowing, and Kagami turns back around to bring them back to speed. Marinette follows, clumsily.
“Stop holding back,” says Kagami beside her, “you need speed to keep your balance.”
Marinette isn’t entirely convinced about that physical reasoning, but she does believe in muscle memory and she does believe Kagami, and Kagami’s grip on her arm is mercilessly pulling her along faster and faster, until they’re going faster than Marinette has ever gone before. And Marinette –
Marinette doesn’t remember, exactly. But her body knows these motions. Her gut is itching to fly over a field like ice-covered streets, to run up ramps and run down roofs, to go faster and faster, to dodge things that would have no business being on the rink, to jump and to spin in ways Marinette would never even dream of doing before.
Was it Kagami who held her hand while they did it?
She bends her knees and angles her right leg to push the left forward, and her skates are sharp and the rink is empty, and when the walls are flying past her, she turns to find Kagami smiling proudly at her. She shifts her grip to tangle their fingers, and Marinette understands – understands again, maybe – that nice words isn’t what brings her together with this amazing girl.
Ice skating is physics, is the mass of her body focused into the blades of the skates, transferred into the friction of metal against ice by the force she applies to it, directed by the angles into which she shapes it. The words are meaningless; what Marinette knows, is that she is changing this tiny bit of reality with every stroke bringing her into speed, with every atom of air flying past her, with Kagami’s delight as they stop skating to let the remaining motion carry them to a slow stop.
Somewhere out there, there’s a superhero who might well be able to walk on water, but Marinette can’t perform miracles. For her, keeping her balance on ice is more than enough.
*
Juleka shows up with her brother, an entity that Marinette vaguely knew existed before and now turns out to be the Luka who was more frequent on Marinette’s Insta than Juleka herself was for a few weeks back in spring. They’re in a band with Rose and Ivan, and Marinette has been designing their merchandise. Luka brought along his guitar, which doesn’t fall exactly within Marinette’s idea of normal etiquette but then she’s also friends with a girl who without hesitation told her to her face that it was Marinette’s fault she was turned into a monster.
She understands when he plucks out a strand of melody that is hauntingly familiar.
“Did you write that?” she asks as he lets the notes quiver away with the last repetition.
Luka smiles, the first of her friends not radiating a low, nervous energy around her. “I wrote it for you, Marinette.”
She feels herself going red at the words. “For me? Why?”
Luka strikes a wistful chord, lets the harmony flow. “Because you’re you, Marinette. You’ve done a lot for a lot of people – for Kitty Section and your friends. Why shouldn’t I write a song for someone like that?”
“Yeah,” Juleka contributes, “you stood up against Chloé – and you stood up for her, too. You should’ve seen yourself. I wish I could be like that.”
Marinette covers her hot cheeks with her hands. “I feel like people are just trying to make me feel better by saying that,” she mutters, staring at her knees.
A large hand lands on her knee, and she jerks up to be met by Luka’s steady gaze.
“That’s not true, Marinette. I might not have known you from before, but I know that the girl I met was one who never thought twice about helping someone who needed it, and who always stood up for her friends. She’s a person who would give up on anything if it was the right thing to do. The Marinette I know is a girl who would carry the world on her shoulders without even being asked.”
Those are not things Marinette would ever think about herself, but it is impossible to not believe the words coming along the steadfast, calm smile. And Marinette might not know that she knows this boy, but she feels it, deep in her core. She knows that she trusts him, and she knows that he would never lie, and his words shift the hue of her life like an Instagram filter. Of course she’s yelled at a pop star and his producer in full public, of course she’s someone Jagged Stone would ask to design his album cover. She doesn’t know that she’s done it, but it doesn’t feel unreal.
For the first time, Marinette knows that she isn’t the girl she remembers being. And she really likes the sound of the Marinette her friends tell her she is.
She isn’t blushing any longer.
“I’ll take your word for it,” she replies with a smile, “even if I can’t remember it.”
Later, Luka sends her a recording of her song. She listens to it as she stares into the ceiling over her bed, and she feels herself smile. So her life is a bit weird right now. It’s apparently been a lot weirder than that, but even if she can’t remember the weirdness, she’s clearly gotten a lot done by it.
Outside her window, the Notre Dame sounds the call to Vespers. When song ends, she stretches her feet towards the ceiling and plays it again.
*
If Paris had still followed the revolutionary calendar, the twenty-third of September would be New Year’s Day. As it stands, the September equinox is little more than a milestone on the Gregorian calendar. It’s the date when day and night are the exact same length, all over the globe. It’s the first day of autumn, as the sun sets for six months on the North Pole. It’s been fourty-nine days since Hawkmoth was defeated.
Ten days ago, Ladybug announced her retirement, leaving the city in Cat Noir’s care until she’s needed again.
With no more supervillains and supermonsters around, it’s not like the superheroes have been very busy. A couple have been seen about the city and helped out with a couple of non-magical accidents. It’s all rather pedestrian, compared to the flash and show of the akuma attacks. Marinette’s life, too, has retreated into a familiar routine.
Adrien is under the care of an old grandaunt who he’d met only four times before his father was arrested. She lives in the 17th arrondissement, but he was adamant that he’d continue at Francois Dupont. By the time the rush of students has left the stairs leading down from the school’s courtyard, he has transformed with a garish hoodie, a striped beret, and a pair of glasses just ill-fitting enough to be unflattering without making you look twice.
“Maybe I should start making anime art,” he muses as they stroll down the street, and Marinette snorts a giggle into her hands. Adrien grins. “Everyone knows that the Agreste family is the quintessence of class and good breeding. Wherever Adrien Agreste is hiding, he’s surely not wearing counterfeit Naruto merchandise.”
Everyone who knows Adrien in person even a little bit knows that he delights in the hideous knockoff. After seven weeks, Marinette has a fairly good map of the difference between Adrien-her-friend and Adrien-the-tragic-celebrity.
As they leave the school, they turn towards the quay without discussion, and walk along the Seine in a comradeship that doesn’t need words. She doesn’t know if Adrien thinks she likes walking around, but she knows that Adrien loves it. His father hardly ever let him out of the house, according to Alya, and Adrien is clearly delighting in going wherever he wants whenever he wants to. There is very little Marinette can do about all the things gone to pieces in his life, but she can keep him company as he tramps around the city. She does it with enthusiasm.
“Do you wanna come over for dinner tomorrow?”
“Sure,” she agrees easily. “What’s the occasion?”
“Aunt Élisabeth worries about me having friends, after everything. I’ve told her it’s fine, but she’s fretting about how I’ve never brought anyone home.” He waits for a beat. “My father never let me have friends over. I remember that time I went to your place to practice for the Ultimate Mecha Strike III tournament - did anyone tell you about that?”
“It showed up when I googled myself,” Marinette says dryly, and Adrien chuckles.
“Your parents were so nice. I’d never seen my father be happy about visitors. I think I still feel that way - like it’ll be a bother to Aunt Élizabeth if I bring someone home. But that was my father who was the weird one, and I hate when she’s upset for my sake.”
“Is she getting easier around you?”
Adrien shrugs. “I’m not sure what ‘easy’ is, for her. I think some of it might be because she’s happy that I’m there. She told me she always wanted children, but it never happened. And then suddenly I was there, and even if she’s sad about mum and upset about my father, she’s happy to have me there. ‘The Lord has done this for me’, she said.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
He sports a little blush as he stares straight ahead, hands dug into the pocket of the hoodie. “It makes me feel a bit bad, too. I really, really appreciate that I can stay with her, and she’s so nice about everything, but I still feel awkward about it. It’s weird to be family in the home of someone who used to be a stranger just a few weeks ago.”
“I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”
“Yeah, and I can’t even imagine what it’s like to just forget a year of my life.”
There is a fellowship in being the only two civilians in the entire catastrophe. Marinette’s involvement has been kept strictly quiet, with the only people in the know being her family, her friends, and the school. There was a brief police interview to establish that she knew nothing, and a medical examination to establish that her condition wasn’t medical at all. But magical though it might be, it’s still there, and for all the aggressive care, there is also a tangible walking on eggshells around the two of them. But Adrien doesn’t, and she returns it in kind. There is a freedom in talking about it to the one other person you won’t be afraid of coming across as whining to.
“Do you miss your father?”
Adrien dwells on the question for a good while. They’ve passed Pont l'archeveche before he answers.
“Not as much as I thought I would. At first I thought I’d be crushed once it sunk in, but I never did get any more upset. I mean, I’m so angry at him. I hate what he did. But by then - I think maybe I had given up on him already. He’d moved away from me ever since my mum - you know. He’d already spent two years showing me that I only mattered as far as I could be the perfect offspring to parade in public. That hurt a lot, but by the end, I was used to it. I guess it was kind of considerate of him, in a twisted sort of way.”
Adrien’s father had laid the city in ruins for Ladybug to clean up in order to bring his wife back from the dead. Marinette has never lost anyone like that - she doesn’t know what despair like that feels like. But she thinks that it is a rare gift to be like Adrien Agreste - to have lost first your mother, for then to learn that your father was a criminal beyond reason, and to still face the day world with that gentle cheer.
None of Marinette’s friends are exactly as she remember them, but like Alya, Adrien is someone she’s had to learn all anew. Marinette’s neurons remember him in ways her mind does not.
They’re friends, of that there can be no doubt, but the collection of images buried in a hidden sub-folder on her desktop and the hearts doodled all over his name in her notebooks from school speak of some truly mortifying infatuation. She must’ve gotten over him to be equally embarrassingly in love with Cat Noir – though that one seems to have been purged with far more success. She wonders if Adrien ever knew - and she wonders how easy it would be to kindle those feelings anew. There are times when they walk around the city streets in silence, and she can glance at him and feel her heart ache from a tenderness that has nothing to do with pity.
As supper time slowly approaches, they loop back towards the bakery. On Place des Vosges, there are flowers on the statue of Ladybug and Cat Noir. They stop to admire them.
“Someone must’ve cut them from their own garden,” Adrien says.
“Chrysanthemums,” Marinette feels her frown forming. “Even if they’re the only things flowering this late, it’s pretty morbid.”
“I don’t know,” says Adrien, and stands on the tip of his toes to straighten the crown of flowers on Ladybug’s head, “you know, they aren’t about death. They’re used in funerals because they’re a symbol of eternal life. Maybe whoever left these flowers meant for them to mean that Ladybug will be back one day.”
He walks her back to the bakery, and then continues down the street towards the metro station. Even with his life in ruins, he’s determined to carry on into whatever future waits for him.
Marinette has no choice, in that regard. Her room is littered with artifacts of a lost year. She has studied them like an archaeologist, trying to piece together some kind of story from the evidence she has found. Sketchbooks on her shelves, messages on her phone, projects left half-finished that fateful day she went to visit a friend and gave up a year of her life for the sake of saving the city.
It’s been seven weeks since Hawkmoth was defeated, a week and half since Ladybug announced that she won’t be around any longer, and there is a melancholy in knowing that summer has ended. It lies like a cloak on Marinette all evening, not helped by the decision to give up on finishing the last project she’d started before forgetting.
It’s a sweatshirt of some kind, but she can’t tell her plans from her tacking, has no idea about what measurements she was working by, can only tell that it wasn’t for herself, was probably for a boy going by the cut of the torso. A Cat Noir and Ladybug fan, going by the decoration. She’s been trying to figure it out for two weeks, but none of her friends recognise it and she finds no note of a commission. She’s finally capitulated.
She climbs her balcony to watch the sunset and sets to work with her seam ripper. Aborting the project feels vaguely like a betrayal of the girl who had left it behind, but the fabric is expensive, the embroideries speak of days of work, and Marinette is at least practical about her money. By the time dusk has fallen, it’s long since been reduced to neatly folded fabric and a pile of thread. Marinette stares out at the cathedral and beyond without seeing, turning the seam ripper over and over in her fingers.
She hasn’t felt sad, exactly, about what happened. Annoyed, frequently, and awkward a whole lot – and curious, about all the tiny little things that her friends and her parents can’t fill in. The curiosity has bordered on fear, sometimes. She’s found trinkets and tokens in the back of drawers that she’s dropped as if they burned her, puzzled at their mysteries and afraid of knowing their answers. There are images and messages on her phone that rouse a discomfort so fierce that she swipes past them instantly, too much of a coward to take them in. It is as if a deeply buried part of her soul warns her away from them; as if some hinterland of her body knows.
But the one who would answer has left, and she didn’t leave her contact info. Paris has returned to normalcy. The new school year has started. Ladybug is gone. Life is normal, and Marinette needs to forget the agony that ripped through her that moment back in August when she realised what had happened. It had come over her like a swell of thunder and lasted for the while it took her to wet the tips of Rena Rouge’s hair, and what remains is just a tender memory that aches if she pokes it.
She only pokes it in still moments like these, when there’s no-one around and nothing to do, when there is stillness enough for her to acknowledge the crawling knowledge that she’s forgotten something unspeakably painful. She had bawled from an endless loss in Rena Rouge’s arms, and now the only thing remaining is the knowledge of the feelings wracking her for those short minutes.
A part of her perversely wants to dig back into it. To be brave, and to brave the discomfort in the photos and screenshots and the pigeon feather, the ballpoint pen, the pressed rose. There’s something there that she doesn’t want to know, and she hates this cowardice.
The sky has grown dark as she’s been wrestling with these thoughts, and the temperature has sunk towards a night that will be the same all over the world. She scoops up the pieces of fabric to climb back down into her room, and but startles at a thump of something unfamiliar much too close behind her.
Cat Noir is squatting on her balcony railing, and he gives her a bashful grin and a little wave.
“’Evening,” he greets her.
“Hi,” Marinette replies dumbly, mindlessly putting the fabric down on the table. Superheroes on her balcony has not grown less weird. Cat Noir is the boy from hours and hours of video footage, of TV interviews, in other people’s selfies online, of news reports and analysis. Is the boy she once was in love with, and who broke her heart, and who her heart must have still remembered when she woke up beneath Adrien’s old home that day seven weeks ago. How else could it have ached like it did?
“Are you busy?”
She shakes her head, and his smile grows as he shifts to sit properly on the railing. Every nerve in Marinette’s body is aware of every movement he makes; the stretch of his smile, the curl of his tail, the way his fingers tighten around the railing as his feet dump down.
“Great! I was hoping to catch you out here – it’d be awkward to go knock on the door, what with – “ a light blush spreads across his cheeks, “eh, whatever. I came by to bring you something,” he says, and pulls something out of a pocket. “It’s a gift from Ladybug.”
On his palm is a small, black magatama.
“You have one already, right?”
Marinette pulls out the matching red one she keeps on a necklace under her clothing. “Is this from Ladybug?”
Cat Noir nods enthusiastically. “It was a birthday present! I mean – we happened to come by and Hawkmoth kind of ruined your surprise party and all.”
“I got a birthday present from Ladybug,” Marinette mutters to herself.
Cat Noir chuckles. “She’s got good instincts. This new one is to let you know how much she appreciates what you did for us.”
“So you’re still talking with her? The old Ladybug, I mean – I mean, the second one too! But I got a bit worried about the first one, when the other one said she’d quit.”
Her words dim Cat Noir’s excitement. A hand raises to clutch the back of his neck in a gesture that shouldn’t be so familiar to her.
“Not really.”
“You’re not keeping in touch?”
He shakes his head.
“But how’d you get this?”
“She gave it to me.”
“Does that mean you know who she is?”
He nods, once again looking at his feet. “Yeah, I do. But it was her choice to quit, and she was so tired of it all. She wouldn’t want me running down her door to remind her of it.”
“I thought you guys were friends.”
“We are!” his head snaps up, and he looks vaguely desperate, “it’s not that! But Ladybug – she wants to move on from this. But she also really wanted you to know how much she cherishes you, Marinette,” he grips her shoulders and stares into her eyes, “please, whatever else you wonder, don’t ever doubt that.”
Marinette looks down at the small stone in her hand, and she smiles at him. “You know, I’ve had a lot of people tell me that lately.”
Cat Noir smiles back. “That’s just as it should be. You deserve it, Marinette.”
And she knows it. She doesn’t know if she forgot something awful or sacrificed something wonderful, but whatever it was, she knows it was worth it, she knows it was good, and she knows that in the year she lost, there was another Marinette – a Marinette who had made so many dear friends, even a superhero. And she knows, from what they tell her, that it wasn’t over nothing.
“Yeah.”
He lets go of her shoulders and takes a step back to lean against the railing, smiling. “Hey Marinette, can you close your eyes for a moment?”
She does so. Now that she can’t see Cat Noir, her other sense burst to life, taking in the cool air, the sounds from the street below, the smell of autumn, the whisper of wind brushing between the rooftops. Distracted from her heavy thoughts and nerves still naked from Cat Noir’s presence, the world is suddenly vibrant around her.
“Don’t open them.” He’s still that metre away from her, she can tell by his voice.
And she feels something brush her cheek, quick like a bug in the air before it takes off again, and then it’s in her hair, bearing down like a little mouse.
“Keep them closed!” Cat Noir admonishes. Marinette giggles.
“What is that?”
The thing in her hair presses close one last time, and then it disappears. When she opens her eyes, Cat Noir is still leaning against the railing with his arms crossed.
“That was a goodnight kiss from Ladybug,” he says with a cheeky grin.
It wasn’t, of course, but whatever little magic he just bestowed upon her hummed with an energy of the same frequency as the jet black jewel in her hand, with the same frequency as Cat Noir himself. That subsonic current that set her nerves tingling now radiates from her hand, paradoxically easing her mind into the peace she’s been missing for at least seven weeks.
“Thank you, Cat Noir,” she says instead of answering his joke with one of her own.
The boy in the superhero suit turns slightly to gaze up the Seine. “Ladybug – the first one – you wouldn’t remember, of course. But the thing that made her special wasn’t that she had superpowers. We all did. But because she was the only one who could truly defeat our enemy, Ladybug had to always fight, and always find a way, and to never falter. And that…. That is a heavy burden to carry. All the rest of us had been akumatised, at some point or the other. But never Ladybug. She never gave into to despair, no matter how hopeless it was. She doubted herself, sometimes, but even then she always got back up and continued. She never asked to fight that battle, but she still did it. Even when it was scary, and exhausting, and dangerous, and caused her all sorts of problems. And in the end - “
He breaks off the sentence, and smiles in melancholy as he turns back to meet Marinette’s eyes.
“Even if she’s gone now, I think we could all do worse than try to be a bit more like her. And Marinette - I’m not sure you understand how awesome you are, and how much you’ve done for everyone around you. But what you did that day - what you gave up on so that Hawkmoth wouldn’t win - that was something like Ladybug. It was exactly what she would do.”
He reaches out to take Marinette’s hand, and then he presses a linger kiss to her fingers.
“Have a good evening, Super-Marinette.”
He says the words with a soft smile and a brimful sincerity that for a moment makes her forget time and place. And when she finds herself alone and breathing again, her body tingles in the understanding of how the girl she once was fell in love with him.
Time moves on a different pace, and her body feels brand new and unfamiliar. Cat Noir’s words and Ladybug’s present have shifted something, and Marinette feels alien in her own skin when she finally turns around and picks up the fabric pieces. Maybe Adrien will feel like retiring the Naruto hoodie. The girl who drew hearts all around magazine clippings of him would surely approve, and the only thing Marinette can do is stand where she is, and walk forward.
Somewhere in the city is a girl, just a girl like Marinette, who used to be a superhero. She spent a year saving the city Marinette loves, and then she gave up on it all. But she lived on, Marinette knows that – she moved on, like they all have to. Adrien will be so happy over a garment made for him by someone else than his father.
Maybe it isn’t entirely a happily-ever-after for her and Adrien, but it’s a happily-enough, at least. She hopes it is a happily-enough for the girl who used to be Ladybug, wherever she is, and she hopes that Cat Noir’s cheer is sincere. Even Marinette, who has experienced Ladybug only in retrospect, feels that it is weird to see him solo. She wonders if he’s lonely, without Ladybug. And when she remembers her heart blooming at his lips against her skin, she wonders if the girl who used to be Ladybug misses him.