Chapter Text
Adrien, more out of stubbornness than anything at this point, was trying to look on the bright side.
It wasn’t like he had actually been akumatized. Ladybug made sure of that. It had been a fluke! A potential branch of the future that hadn’t come to pass. It was fine, and would continue to be fine, and he had Ladybug to thank for it. Now all he had to do was… make sure that he would never feel anything bad enough that it could happen again at some different point in time, but if anything that was a positive if he really thought about it. Knowing it could happen helped to prepare him–!
He felt the words turning into a script and obliterated the line of thought, disgusted. A heavy sigh escaped him as he dropped his head to rest against the stage light he was adjusting for Kitty Section rehearsal. Why was it so much easier to be an optimist when he was Chat Noir?
“--drien? Adrien.”
Adrien found himself startling a little, straightening up in a jerk and an abashed smile taking position as he turned. “Hm? Sorry, I was distracted.”
“...I asked if you were okay. You seem… out of it,” Luka repeated, a worried slant to his mouth as he looked at Adrien from across the stage.
Hm. That was a first. Adrien thought he had been doing a good job of masking how much what Ladybug said had gotten to him, especially when he was in civilian mode. Then again, Luka had always been perceptive. Most of the time Adrien found it strangely grounding; Luka had a way of opening the doors in his lies to see through them rather than breaking the walls down. Right now all it did was send an itch of unease through him. “Oh, really?” he said, forcing a laugh. “Well, I have been pretty busy lately. You know how my father is.” He turned back to the stagelight, letting his hands pat uselessly against it as he realized it was properly set up. “Is there anything else you need help with? I’m all set up over here.”
There was a beat of silence. “...I thought your dad was giving you a break for finals?”
There it was again. There wasn’t any confrontation in Luka’s voice as he said it, just concern. And… something else too, now that Adrien listened. A kind of weariness? No, that wasn’t it. Weariness was what he heard in Ladybug after a particularly grueling akuma, or Nathalie after one of her attacks. This was lighter, a touch of humor to it. Closer to someone who had been enlisted into a child’s tea party and had no choice but to play along.
That irked him.
“Yes, that’s what I meant,” he replied crisply, bright formality rising in tandem with his annoyance. He turned from the stage light to face Luka, because only people with something to hide hid their faces when they were speaking. “I’ve been really busy studying. You know how it is with Mlle Mendeleiev’s grading.” He looked up, meeting Luka’s eyes, because honest people made eye contact when they were talking.
Which might have been a mistake, because Luka’s face went through a series of expressions too subtle for Adrien to catch, ending with a raised eyebrow that suggested he wasn’t buying it at all. Adrien felt his plastic smile waver. How the hell did he know he was lying? Who would have a reason to lie about something like this? He found himself, ridiculously, sparing a glance around the boat just to make sure Plagg wasn’t out in the open. His attention snapped back to Luka when he heard him draw a short sigh. “Look, Adrien,” he said, walking towards and then past him to sit down on one of the chairs they had set up for the audience. “I’ll be frank. I know you don’t like to bother the others with your problems. You’re pretty good at hiding it too, which. I’m not going to say is a healthy talent, but it’s a talent.” A small smile formed on his face, gone as quick as it came. “Marinette was the same, when we were dating.” There. That was weariness. Did Marinette really hide her feelings? …He hadn’t expected that from her. She seemed so earnest, every exaggerated gesture and handmade craft a shout of her character. “But recently,” Luka continued, “she’s seemed… lighter? Less stressed. I’ve seen her talking with Alya more.” He crossed his legs, ankle resting on his knee, and looked out over the water. If it had been anyone else Adrien would have thought it looked pretentious as hell, but somehow Luka made it work. “And I’m not trying to corner you into spilling your guts or whatever, but I know that your life can be… hectic. So if you need someone to talk to, well. You know I can tell when you’re lying anyway.” He said it like the whole situation had just fallen into lap and he was but the messenger. From anyone else it would have been pretentious as hell.
What felt like eons ago but was in actuality closer to a week, Adrien remembered saying something similar to Ladybug; you can’t survive without support from your friends. One of these days he would actually learn to take his own advice; at the very least it could cushion the impact of his emotional guts being pulled out into the open single handedly. He knew his eyes were too wide. He knew that every second he stayed silent proved Luka’s point further and further. But when he sat down hard on the stage, back still a little too straight, all that came out of his mouth was “Wow.”
Luka snorted, blue eyes flashing in Adrien’s direction. “Wow what?”
“Do you do this to people often?” he replied in a slightly breathless voice. He felt a bit like he’d just run a sprint. He rested his arms on his knees, one hand buried in his hair. “Just completely read through all of their pretenses to their face? You’re doing, like, a personal growth speedrun on me right now.”
Luka laughed at that, a low even sound. “No, actually. This is new.” His smile twitched, the eternally mellow composure slipping slightly like a poorly hung curtain. “I figured after I got akumatized into Truth from putting up with Marinette’s lies, I should… I don’t know. Nip it in the bud, or however that saying goes.” His expression was a shade darker as he finished speaking, and he leaned back in his folding chair, tapping out a rhythm with his foot.
“...Oh.” It surprised Adrien that he had admitted to it so easily. Most victims didn’t like to talk about being akumatized, much less the reason why. He pulled his hand out his hair, resting it on his knees. “I didn’t know you were Truth.”
Luka stopped leaning back at that, an incredulous squint on his face. “What? ‘Course you did.”
Adrien felt his stomach drop. Luka’s lie-detection was edging into dangerous territory. “I didn’t, I swear. How would I have known, anyway? This is your first time telling me.”
“Well yeah, but you saved m–” He cut the sentence off so sharply Adrien swore he heard his teeth clack, eyes snapped wide open like he’d been doused in ice water.
“...I what?” The switch from interrogated to interrogator was so fast he was almost lightheaded, the question coming out light and mild. The atmosphere had suddenly and viciously shifted, the world turning to single point perspective with all the lines converging on the vanishing point of Luka’s deer-in-headlights expression. Adrien blinked, wondering if he could dispel it, but the focus remained, singular and unyielding.
There were two options, as he saw it. The first was that he was freaking out over nothing. Was he freaking out? He thought it would be a more hectic feeling. Everything had gone strangely silent in his brain, sounds filtering in only to be instantly disregarded as unimportant. Maybe he just hadn’t been freaked out enough times to know what it felt like, in which case this feeling was proving to be both useless and uninformative–
Oh. He was spiraling.
Harshly, he pulled his train of thought back on track, time around him seeming to drip by at the pace of molasses. The first option: he was freaking out over nothing. Luka had shut up for any number of reasons, ranging from something completely unrelated to not wanting to make Adrien uncomfortable with what he had been about to say. If this was true then Luka would resolve the tension on his own any second now with a mild smile, maybe a small joke at his social faux pas, and the planet could resume spinning.
The second option; Luka had been about to say ‘But you saved me’, which meant he knew he was Chat Noir, in which case he was fucked. His saving grace was that there wasn’t any possible way that Luka could know that, although thinking it felt more like a prayer than a solid belief.
Think, Adrien, a voice that sounded suspiciously like Ladybug’s cut in through the still fog over his thoughts. Think it through. What do you know?
He knew that Luka was perceptive. He knew that he valued honesty but didn’t force it, and that that was a kind of pressure in of itself. He knew that Ladybug trusted him to do the right thing, to the point where she had given him an uncommonly powerful Miraculous.
And what could that Miraculous do?
The Snake let him perform any action with what seemed like perfection, but in actuality was grueling trial and error; an endless spinning of the slots until it hit jackpot. What took a second for everyone else for him took an unknowable amount of hypothetical time.
Adrien thought about Chat Blanc, in a future that no longer existed, and how a lot could be learned in hypothetical time.
He hadn’t realized he had retreated into his mind so completely until his senses came rushing back to him and suddenly he was on the boat again, staring Luka square in the eye. His mind felt brutally lucid but also slightly singed, like he had almost overloaded it. The deer-in-headlights look on Luka’s face finally wavered and collapsed, falling with a slump of his shoulders into what Adrien could only describe as surrender. “...You figured it out, then.” He said it with a small smile, like Adrien had spoiled his own surprise party.
And for some reason, that made everything in him snap brittle and boiling.
“You know,” he said in his polished voice, his plastic voice, the voice for interviewers and faceless greedy strangers. “For someone who is so perceptive you really don’t know when to shut up.” He rose to his feet and slowly started walking across the stage towards Luka.
“Adrien,” rippled the voice of Plagg through his shirt pocket, through his mind, a note of warning apparent. Adrien ignored it.
The deer-in-headlights look flashed across Luka’s face again, though probably for a different reason; telling someone to shut up wasn’t exactly in character for Adrien Agreste. “Adrien–”
“When did you learn.”
Luka had the gall to lean back in his chair and sigh , like this conversation was a scheduled event he’d rather not go to. “Adrien–”
“Luka, I am so beyond over this whole lackadaisical carefree thing you’ve got going on that I might throw you off this boat myself if you don’t take this seriously.” It came out practically cheerful. “Now answer the question.”
That seemed to strike a nerve, Luka’s posture solidifying into stone. He raised his head, leveling a look at Adrien that was so suddenly cold he almost flinched, and with another sigh rose from his chair. “...After Wishmaker,” he answered after a pause, looking out onto the river again. He pulled out his phone after that, typing out a message before pocketing it and turning chilly blue eyes to Adrien again. “I canceled rehearsal. Said something urgent suddenly came up.” Oh, right. Rehearsal. Adrien had almost forgotten that’s why the two of them had been there in the first place. “You know,” Luka continued after another stretch of silence, “It reassures me that you can actually be mean if you want to be. You had me convinced that you were a walking doormat.”
If Adrien wasn’t talking to someone who had kept a massive secret from him that probably would have made him feel guilty. “Only you could turn someone insulting you into a compliment to them.”
“Let’s call it part of the ‘lackadaisical carefree thing I’ve got going on’,” he replied gamely, one hand casually rising for air quotes. Maybe it was the panic-anger snapping through him itching for a fight, but Adrien almost liked seeing Luka with a bit of bite to him. “I don’t get it, Adrien. All I’ve ever been is helpful to you, both with and without that bracelet. Why the attitude?”
Because if being helpful meant acting above it all and keeping secrets, then Adrien got all the help he needed from his father, thank you very much. But that was a topic he didn’t want Luka anywhere near, so Adrien just said “Does Ladybug know.”
Luka’s lip curled in incredulous disgust, an expression Adrien had never seen on him before. “What kind of person do you think I am? Why would I tell Ladybug and not you?”
It was a stupid enough question that it stopped Adrien short. “What– because Ladybug’s smart? And would know how to handle this? What kind of a question is that?”
Luka blinked, incredulity mounting. “A normal one? Because it’s your identity?”
Oh, right. Luka cared about that kind of thing. Adrien clapped his hands together and pressed them under his chin, closing his eyes and inhaling a deep breath as he tried to calm down a little. “Okay, so first of all you don’t know Ladybug like I do.” Luka rolled his eyes at that, for some reason. “She would have told me anyway. Second of all, I don’t know if you know, but she’s– she’s kind of a big deal. She’s in charge of this whole thing, which means she needs to know when problems arise. If my identity’s been compromised then she… she–”
“Do you really see yourself as just another one of Ladybug’s problems?” The iciness had melted off of Luka’s face, leaving behind only an aching clarity. His voice had softened too, genuine worry lining its edges. It shot perfectly between all of the emotions roiling through Adrien’s chest to hit somewhere that, horrifyingly, made a lump form in his throat.
He cleared it viciously and finally broke eye contact. He wished it didn’t feel like conceding. “Oh my god , would you stop that! Stop– saying things! My point is that I cannot handle this on my own, I’m going to screw it up like I inevitably end up doing and Ladybug’s going to have to bail me out anyway, so–”
“Okay, hold on, stop.” Luka cut in, raising a hand. He’d turned to look up at the sidewalk that ran along the Seine, and when Adrien followed his eyes he saw a woman in pink leggings had paused while walking her dog. When she saw them looking at her she quickly hurried along. “We can’t keep shouting out here, we’re attracting attention.”
Which wouldn’t be an issue if you had actually handled this accordingly–
“Adrien,” Plagg’s voice rippled through his mind, stronger this time. “Please just listen to him. You have to agree that he’s right about this, at least.”
So now you decide to start talking, Adrien thought at him. Even in his brain it sounded sulky. Ugh.
“He hasn’t been saying anything wrong, so I thought I’d let you listen.”
“Fine,” Adrien spat, both to Luka and to Plagg, and began walking across the deck after Luka. He could feel himself slipping into childishness, fists clenched as Luka led him below decks into his bedroom, and yet he couldn’t do anything to stop it. First him, and now Plagg acting so insufferably reasonable with their advice had him feeling cornered, neck and shoulders tensing. He was normally so much better at shelving his emotions.
His thoughts were interrupted as Luka stopped in front of the doorway to his bedroom, turning to look back at Adrien. “We should be able to talk in here,” he said, expression unreadable. “Juleka’s out with Mom on an errand, so no one should be eavesdropping. Feel free to sit wherever.” Adrien walked two steps into the room before finding himself stopping. He didn’t want to sit anywhere, he already felt on edge. Luka walked over to his bed, flopping down on it with a sharp sigh and rubbing his temple. Adrien was struck again by this new angle of Luka; he had rarely seen him this frustrated.
“Okay, so I’m not even trying to be your therapist or whatever when I say that you need to take Ladybug off that pedestal you have her on.” He finally said, turning his gaze to bore into Adrien.
Adrien’s lip curled, fists at his sides tightening as he took a step towards him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Look. Clearly you’re not in the mood for niceties, so I’m just going to be blunt with you: Ladybug is not nearly as in control of everything as you think she is, she does not have a solution for every problem, and she’s not responsible for everything that goes wrong. The problem, though–” he cut in, seeing Adrien open his mouth. “--Is that she thinks she is. And judging by how you’re talking about yourself, you do too even if you don’t realize it. That mindset is extremely dangerous to both of you. I’ve seen how it’s broken her down.” The worry that flashed across his face seemed old, brows drawing together like they were used to the expression. “So you have to start trusting yourself, not just for your sake but for hers too.”
As he spoke Adrien found himself transported back to the rooftop when Ladybug told him about Chat Blanc, and that strange shivering strain that had entered her voice as she talked about him. He felt his lip curl. “Trust myself. Sure.”
Luka must have caught on to the weight behind his words, because one corner of his mouth ticked up in a faint smile. “Do you want to tell me what’s actually wrong, now?”
“How do you know so much about Ladybug, anyway? You haven’t interacted with her nearly enough to justify the things you said, as yourself or Viperion.”
The smile dropped. “I notice things? I thought that we’d already established that. And…” Now it was his turn to glance away. “...I know her identity too.”
Whenever he’d imagined this kind of worst case scenario, Adrien had always imagined that he would explode into action, into fiery attack. If he was completely honest with himself he was even a little afraid of just how bad the consequences of this moment would be, given the powers of the Cat Miraculous. But in his mind the person who learned was always Hawkmoth, and it felt like he was freezing over, face going slack. He felt his shoulders drop, body oddly relaxing. He heard himself say calmly, almost politely, “Plagg, transform me.”
“ADRIE–” The rest of Plagg’s shout was cut off as he was absorbed into the ring, a crackling wave of green energy cascading over him as his clothes transformed into Chat Noir’s suit. He felt his feet move into a fighting stance on muscle memory.
Luka was staring at him with a wide eyed disbelief, mouth slightly open. He blinked twice. “Okay, what now?” he said. It almost sounded like he was on the verge of laughing. Or shouting. Chat couldn’t tell. “I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting this, and I have zero clue what your next move could possibly be. What are you gonna do, Adrien?” There was a white hot edge to his voice that Adrien had never heard there before, and very suddenly he felt like he’d missed a step going down the stairs.
“I–” He hadn’t thought this through. He’d hardly thought at all. He was one of Paris’s greatest superheroes, menacing his best friend’s ex in their own bedroom. “I don’t know.”
“Adrien!” Luka yelled, snapping up from the bed, and now Chat could understand the emotion coursing through his voice, across his face; it wasn’t anger, but a horrified worry sharpened to a knife’s razor edge. “You can’t–! This isn’t–!” His voice cracked on the words, hand fisting in his hair. The curious void of feeling was slowly draining from Chat as he watched him, making way for a rising nausea. “At least have a plan! You understand that this is exactly why I took so long to tell you, right? I was trying to figure out a way to tell you that wouldn’t have you freaking out.”
“I’m not freaking out,” Chat heard himself say. His eyes had fixated on a whorl in the floorboards.
“Yes, you are.” Luka’s voice was a low shout, emotion pulling the words ragged. A shadow moved across the whorl, footsteps coming closer to him even as he refused to look up. “I– I had no idea it had gotten this bad. You and Ladybug…” There was a beat of silence. “You have to handle so much, all the time. You can’t even ask for help.”
It hurt for some reason, to hear it in the air. Chat squeezed his eyes shut. “Shut up.”
“...Adrien.” Luka’s voice was closer now. Chat felt a warm pressure on his shoulders, Luka’s hands gripping him. “You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s going to be fine.”
The words seared through him like ice on a burn. “You don’t know that.” As he spoke he felt the tickle of water running down his nose, a few hot tears leaking from his shut eyes.
Luka was quiet for a long moment, hands still gripping Chat’s shoulders. “I don’t have to know it,” he finally murmured, seemingly as much to himself as to Chat. “I just have to want it.”
It was a staggering thing to say; Chat found his face contorting at the sheer naivety of it. Luka had no idea what he was talking about, had no idea just how little of the way “want” actually got you. Adrien wanted plenty of things, desperately, and all he had to show for it was an icebox of a home life and countless superhero battles that he could watch wear his crush to the bone in real time.
And yet, he thought as he collapsed into Luka, composure finally disintegrating. He always had found it easier to be an optimist as Chat Noir.
⬧⬧⬧
“Guh,” Adrien mumbled, slumping back on Luka’s bed. He was a mess, eyes puffy and nose still stuffed, and he’d left an embarrassing wet spot on the shoulder of Luka’s jacket. Despite it all though, he felt… better. Better than he had in a while, which was an interesting development.
“Who would have thought, Mr. Can’t-Survive-Without-Support-From-Your-Friends,” Plagg responded from directly above Adrien’s face, voice pitched high and mocking. He had become visible after Adrien had calmed down enough to detransform, and he was still fuming.
You’re never going to let me live that down, are you, Adrien thought at him sourly.
Plagg flipped over midair, turning his back to Adrien. “Nope.”
“What?” Luka said from across the room, pulling his jacket off and examining the wet spot before dropping it into his laundry hamper. It must be odd, hearing only half of the conversation from Plagg’s side.
“Kwami thing. Don’t worry about it,” Adrien responded, voice still a little rough from crying. The telepathy was annoying enough when he wasn’t recovering from a breakdown.
Luka’s eyes brightened at that for some reason. “Oh.” He moved to sit at his desk, pushing it across the room until he could reach his guitar where it sat in its stand. “Man,” he murmured, strumming a chord. “Never thought I’d actually hear you say you had a kwami, much less share about it.”
“You didn’t really give me much of a choice on that front,” Adrien retorted, but there wasn’t any bite to it. Whatever spark of panic that had driven his anger before had gone out, and instead he just felt… not settled, but not drained either. Some sort of frayed middle ground.
“For the record, I think it’s just what he needed,” Plagg said, zipping over from the bed to land on the end of Luka’s guitar. Luka demurred with a small shrug, glancing down at the guitar fret. So now he was modest about it. Adrien breathed another deep breath, relaxing into the moment as the sound of Luka’s idle strumming suffused the room. As he did he thought about Ladybug, eyes closed against his shoulder as they sat on that rooftop. Maybe this is what she had needed then, too.
“...I’ve been really stupid today,” he finally said after a few minutes had passed.
The guitar didn’t stop, but he heard Luka laugh under Plagg’s “Really? I never would have guessed.”
“Ugh, just– listen, okay? Ladybug and I… we had a– I don’t think it was a fight, but things got… kind of intense. Something really bad happened to her a week ago. And– and I talked such a big game about relying on your friends to help you when you’re down and stuff like that, because you know–” He waved a hand in the air to emphasize his whole life. “I think I of all people would know that’s true. But when I said it… I don’t know. It’s like Adrien and Chat Noir are two different people, and I can’t let anything overlap between them. Not even my own advice.”
The guitar paused as Luka digested that. “Seeing how you compartmentalize your whole personality between them, that doesn’t really surprise me,” he said after a moment.
“I do what?” Adrien had to tilt his head at an awkward angle to check if Luka wasn’t cracking a joke.
He just looked back at him, baffled. “You didn’t realize? You as Chat Noir is, like, the polar opposite of normal you. I mean, it makes sense, given your dad. I’d probably need an outlet too.”
Huh. He dropped his head back on the bed again, staring at the ceiling. “I mean, I knew I put it on a little bit in-costume, but…”
Now Luka laughed like he’d just made a joke. “Yeah, ‘a little bit’. Honestly, I’m not surprised no one’s connected the dots about who Chat Noir is.” His lips pursed. “Well. besides the same voice and hair and everything.”
“Kwami thing.” He raised an index finger to emphasize the point. “The rest, I don’t know. I just thought I was a good liar.”
Somehow, it was the wrong thing to say. Luka’s face twitched, expression settling into unreadable stillness. He went back to playing, but Adrien felt the error settle like a stone in his stomach. He hadn’t realized how nice it was to just be able to talk to someone who knew the whole truth until it stopped. He pressed his lips together.
“...Sorry,” Luka murmured, as if reading his mind. “That wasn’t– you didn’t do anything wrong.” A beat of silence. “You’re right. You are a good liar. I just wish you realized the price you pay for that.”
Adrien couldn’t tell if he meant for himself or for the people he lied to. Which was probably the point. “Yeah, I should think on that. …Sorry, for blowing up like I did. And almost, I don’t know. Cataclysm-ing you, or something.”
It was almost ridiculous how relieved he felt when Luka huffed a laugh. “Yeah, I’m not going to let you live that one down.”
“God, you and Plagg both.” They lapsed back into comfortable silence again, the room gently swaying for a moment as the Liberty rocked on Seine. It was almost enough to put Adrien to sleep, but a last unresolved worry was nagging at him. “...You said you knew Ladybug’s identity, right?”
A pained expression flashed over Luka’s face. “Adrien, I… I can’t–”
“No, that’s not what I mean.” He laughed, trying to lighten the moment, but it came out sounding worn. “Trust me. I know how she feels about that. But, if– if you know her, then… how’s she doing? Is she okay?”
For just a second Luka’s expression twisted further, like it was the saddest question he’d ever heard. But then he shut his eyes and it was gone. “Yeah,” he said softly. “She’s okay.”
“Oh,” Adrien breathed, closing his eyes with a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Thank god.”
He didn’t realize how exhausted he was until he felt himself being pulled into sleep, the sound of Luka’s guitar following him into the dark.