Chapter Text
oOo
Marinette woke with a start, her eyes shooting open and her mind still fully wrapped in the memory of her dream. Her face and her whole body were covered in sweat; she passed a hand through her damp hair, taking some of the locks out of her eyes. Her dream was still so vivid in her head that she couldn’t think of anything else.
“Are you okay, Marinette?” came a voice from her left, causing her to gasp. She darted her gaze around the room, trying to find out who had spoken, and only when her eyes met the concerned big blue ones of her little kwami friend did her heart stop racing in her chest. She sighed a breath of relief.
“Oh Tikki, yes I’m okay.” She passed a hand through her sweat-damp hair again and sighed. “I think.”
Her little friend flew in front of her nose and gave it a little pat. “The usual nightmare again? The one about Chat Blanc?”
Memories of icy-cold blue eyes made her shiver from tip to toe. “No, Tikki. This was different. Still a dream… but not a bad one.” She gulped dryly. “And not about him… or I mean, not about Chat Blanc.” She felt blood rushing to her cheeks as her voice started cracking. She kicked herself. Why would her voice need to crack at all?
“Who then? Was it still Chat Noir?”
Marinette nodded. “Yes. And no… I mean, it was Mister Bug, can you believe it? I still see the mental picture of my dream, those piercing green eyes, Tikki…” She felt her blush deepening. Probably her cheeks were rivalling the colour of her spotted friend by now. Her heart was pounding madly in her chest as she sat up and hid her face behind her hands.
“Mister Bug?” Marinette peeked through her fingers and noticed immediately the look of utter puzzlement that Tikki was giving her. “Was he trying to kill you as well?”
“No, Tikki. He was telling me that he loved me… that he wanted to marry me and have a house, three kids and a hamster.” She moved into a crouched position and hid her face in her legs.
Tikki stroked her wet hair softly. “I wouldn’t really think a dream like that could possibly cause such a reaction, Marinette. You know that Chat Noir loves you, and that’s the same whichever form he takes.”
Marinette sniffed loudly, her face still buried behind her legs. “No, not that, Tikki. But as he was saying that, his face faded into--”
“Chat Blanc?” interrupted Tikki.
Marinette shook her head and started sobbing. “No. Adrien !” She heard Tikki gasp and her sobs became louder. “His face, his eyes… I was looking at him as he said that he loved me and his face faded so perfectly into that of Adrien that it scared me! His eyes didn’t even change. They were Adrien’s eyes, Tikki.”
Marinette jumped out of bed and fanned her sweaty neck as she hastily climbed the steps that separated her mezzanine from her bedroom downstairs. She sat at her computer, turned on her screen and opened her browser, typing on the address line the url of the Ladyblog. She scrolled the blog down until she reached a section labelled ‘special feature’ and then clicked on the pictures from the day Chat and Ladybug were forced to swap kwamis. She clicked on a picture of Mr Bug and blew it up, until his face was as big as her whole screen.
“I think Alya may have been the cause of this,” said Tikki. “Weren't you with her the whole afternoon, in her room, getting this ‘special issue’ of the Ladyblog up and running? How many times did I hear her telling you how handsome Mr Bug was and how gorgeous his eyes were?”
“‘Only Sunshine child has eyes this green’ she said, if I recall correctly. And she rubbed his pictures on your face for hours. No wonder you dreamed about it…” the kwami continued.
“No, Tikki!” Marinette interrupted her. “I mean, yes, she did rub the pictures in front of my eyes all afternoon, true, but she’s done the same so many times with pictures of Chat Noir. She’s also photoshopped a black cat suit on some pictures of Adrien a few times and showed them to me, but they never left such a lasting effect. No…”
She sighed and moved the windows of her screen in a way that the picture of Mr Bug was put right next to one of the pictures of Adrien she had on her desktop collage. Her gaze kept darting from left to right, as she busied her hands combing her hair into pigtails. She felt so hot that she couldn’t keep her hair loose on her shoulders. She looked in disgust at her sweaty hands and cleaned them by wiping them on her pyjamas trousers before holding the mouse again, and drifting her attention back to the picture of Mr Bug on the screen. The more her gaze moved from Mr Bug to Adrien, the more the uneasy feeling she felt in her stomach was deteriorating into a painful knot.
"How can I unsee this, Tikki? How could I not have seen it before?" She cupped her hands at the sides of her face and growled in utter frustration. "You know I'm right, don't you? You do know who Chat is…"
Tikki sighed. "Marinette, you're the Guardian. You do know that if you want to find out who Chat Noir is, you have the right to ask him to drop his transformation in front of you. While Fu was the Guardian, it was okay for you two to not know each other’s identity. But now, you have all rights to know. You may have a duty to know, actually. To protect the Miraculous itself, and Chat Noir too.”
The last thing she said did it for Marinette. Yes, maybe the kwami was right, after all. If anything happened to Chat Noir, she, as the Guardian, had to be able to know where to find him. If Plagg was feeling sick, Chat Noir had the right to know that he could take his kwami to her to be healed -- after all, Fu hadn’t taught her the incantation to cure the kwamis without a reason. Tikki had become sick once, Plagg may be next. And where would Chat Noir go, if Ladybug kept being so adamant to keep her identity a secret? Marinette weighed the idea in her mind, and strangely enough, it started to make sense.
"But… what's the fun in that?" mused Marinette, tapping her index finger on her chin. "If you think that it's time for our reveal, I may as well have a little fun in the process."
"What do you have in mind, Marinette?" Tikki frowned at her, and raised an eyebrow.
"Let's make it into a game," Marinette said with a cheeky smile on her lips, as she gave a last look at Mr Bug’s picture. "A game of cat and mouse… or rather," she giggled, "a game of Bug... and Chat !" She winked at Tikki. "Let me explain my plan, but first, I’ll take a shower!"
oOo
Adrien didn’t know what woke him up. He opened his eyes and felt a sense of panic spreading all over him. His heart raced in his chest all of sudden, as he caught a glimpse of something red flying out of his window and disappearing in the darkness.
Something felt wrong… but for a brief moment he couldn’t quite make out exactly what it was. He moved his hand to reach out for Plagg, seeking comfort from the presence of his furry friend on the pillow next to him, but his hand was met with emptiness. He hastily scanned the pillow with his hand, as a knot formed in his stomach and his heart started racing in a newly found home in his throat.
"Plagg?" he whispered, but nobody answered back. He sat up in pure horror. The flash of red he'd seen when he woke up. Could that be… he touched the finger he usually wore his Miraculous on and instead of the usual comforting feel of the metal wrapping his skin, he found nothing. He picked up his phone and turned on the screen to create some light and looked at his hand.
His ring was gone.
"Plagg? PLAGG?" He screamed the name of his friend; he jumped out of bed and started rushing around his room, looking everywhere on the ground for his missing ring. Maybe… maybe in his sleep he had moved too much and the ring had fallen off his finger. But he couldn’t find anything. What was going on? Had his Lady decided to get rid of him? Without telling him anything? Why? He didn't think he'd done anything wrong the previous night on patrol…
He passed a hand on his wild bed hair and then rested it on his desk, and that's when he felt something that he hadn’t left there the night before, when he went to bed. He moved the screen of his phone towards the desk and his heart stopped when he saw what he'd touched with his hand. It was a letter, and a box. The box of a Miraculous.
"What the…" he started to say.
"Hi Chaton," the message on the letter said. "Please don't worry. I don’t know who you are and I'm not replacing you. I only need your Miraculous for an experiment; I'll give it back to you, I promise! Until then, I’ve sent Tikki to your place with a replacement, she will leave her there when she takes Plagg. Please treat her well."
He looked at the neatly written words on the page in utter amazement. Why? Why did his Lady take Plagg away from him without notice? An experiment? Couldn't have she spoken to him about it before? His hand felt naked without his ring. He looked at the ring finger of his right hand and physically felt the absence of the metallic band like a void that pierced his soul. What was this replacement thing?
He picked the box up with a pout on his face, and opened it. Inside was a little jewel that looked like a bracelet. Or maybe a necklace? No, it was more like… a collar? In a flash of light, a kwami he had never seen appeared in front of him. She was brown with a white, pointy spot on her face and longish drop ears.
“Oh, hi there,” she said. “Nice to meet you, handsome boy.” She wiggled her eyebrows. “I’m Barkk, the kwami of premonition. And at this current moment in time, I’m starving.”
You must be kidding me, Adrien thought. The Dog Miraculous? Seriously? What was M’lady thinking? First off, I’m much more a cat person than a dog person and besides that… brown isn’t even my colour. Black is much cooler. Is this some sort of joke?
His hand reached the nape of his neck as he thought that and he sat on the side of his bed, clenching his fists in frustration. He was thinking of how he would have told his Lady off for taking Plagg away from him, when he felt a sharp pain in the side of his hand, as if someone had… nipped him?
“OUCH!” he growled and jerked his hand away from the brown kwami, trying to soothe the sharp pain by holding it tight with his other hand. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Barkk gave him a sly look as she said, mockingly, “That’s what you get for being rude.”
“Oh,” Adrien said, eyes-wide, his cheeks dusting a slight shade of pink. “Did I say all of that aloud?” Barkk nodded. “Oh, I’m sorry, Barkk… I didn’t mean it. I’m just… tired. And upset. I want Plagg back!”
“What has that moany cat got that I haven’t?” Barkk’s frown turned into an annoyed glare. She pouted and folded her paws on her chest.
Adrien paled. “Oh no, it’s not that!” He put his hands protectively in front of him, but Barkk didn’t lose her pout. “I’m sure that you have as many qualities as Plagg, and that you’re a very pleasant companion. But…” He sighed. “Plagg is my friend. We’ve gone through so much together. I… don’t want to lose him. That’s all.”
“Aw, aren’t you sweet…” she purred. Okay, maybe purred wasn’t the right way to describe it, since she was a dog, but he was lacking better descriptive words. “I’m still not very happy, but I’m willing to temporarily forget about it, if you give me some food. I’m starving!”
Oh yes. She had mentioned that earlier. “Plagg is going to kill me, but you can snack off his stash of Camembert, if you like,” Adrien said.
The kwami grimaced in disgust. “Ew. Just ew. Camembert? No, thank you. The mere smell of it makes me sick. It’s already hard for me to stop gagging by smelling its foul reek coming from inside that press (she pointed at where Plagg hid his cheese). Don’t rub it in my nose, please!”
“Uh… sorry about that.” Adrien’s hand reached the nape of his neck. “I don’t really have any more food now… Do you fancy some fruit? I may be able to get some downstairs!”
“Fruit? No. Do you have any meat?”
They discussed possible snacks and Adrien even ventured downstairs with her, tiptoeing his way out of his room to dodge Gorilla, who was thankfully dozing off, perched on a chair near the door of his bedroom. He showed her around the kitchen of the mansion for some time, to let her choose her own snack, but it came out that Barkk was a very picky eater and she wouldn’t settle for anything else than what she had in mind. Only… she had no idea what she had in mind, since she hadn’t been out of the Miracle Box for nearly 180 years.
“Barkk… I don’t have time for this. It’s three o’clock in the morning, and I have to go to school tomorrow!” Adrien had a huge headache and his eyes were closing over. He was so tired he couldn’t think straight. “Why don’t we transform so we can go to a convenience store and you can choose whatever you want?”
“I’m not going to tell you my words if you don’t stop being rude.” Barkk snorted and folded her paws on her chest.
Adrien face-palmed. “I’m sorry . I really don’t want to be rude to you. But how can I help you if you don’t let me? You don’t like the food we have. I’m not allowed out of the mansion. The only way out we have is through the window, and to do that, I need to transform. Please. Can you forgive me?” He put his palms together in prayer and closed his eyes shut. When he dared opening an eye to take a peek, he saw that Barkk was staring at him with an eyebrow raised. She looked amused.
“Okay, I will forgive you. I’m too hungry to hold a grudge on you.” She gave Adrien a small nod when she saw the bright smile that Adrien shot to her. “Ah, Sass told me that you were quite handsome. Stop smiling at me like that, I can’t concentrate.”
Adrien winked. “And what else did Sass tell you about me?"
"That you're very stubborn." She giggled at his surprised look. "But that you love greatly, and that your love is pure. I will tell you my words. To transform you say, 'Run forward'. To detransform you say, 'Cool off'."
Adrien had blushed profusely when Barkk mentioned what Sass had said about him. Stubborn… well, he didn't blame Sass for thinking so. After all, 25,913 times were a lot of times to reuse Second Chance . His thoughts went back briefly to that battle against Desperada and he felt a ghastly shiver run down his spine. But as he heard the transformation phrase, his lips curled into a smirk. "Thank you, Barkk. Let's try them out, shall we?" He waited for the kwami to nod and donned the Miraculous. It felt so strange wearing a collar on his neck. Did Ladybug want to put him on a leash? Ugh… he quickly scrapped that thought off his head, before he said that aloud again, and ended up offending Barkk once more.
"Barkk, run forward!" he said, as a wave of golden energy wrapped around him. It was familiar, but unfamiliar at the same time. It was slightly foreign to him, but he did recognise the euphoria, and the sheer happiness of finally being able to stretch your legs. He thought that may be what Barkk was feeling. 180 years was a long time.
He looked at himself in the reflection of his window and he kind of liked what he saw. The Miraculous on his neck had become a full sized dog collar, with a little diamond shaped tag at the centre engraved with the letters L and B. His body was covered with a suit that reminded him a little of Rena's, in the sense that the colours were similar, brown at the back, arms and legs and white at the front, from his chest down to his crotch, white gloves and white paw decorated boots. A quick glance behind him showed him that he had a fluffy, brown and white tail. The drooping ears that decorated his head were also long, and brown. The mask he wore covered the top part of his face like his cat mask, but also curled at both sides of his nose like dog lips and was white, with brown borders. A white slit ran across the centre of his forehead.
It looked very different from his cat look, except for one thing. His hair was the exact same shape. His eyes were still his own, like it had been when he'd become Mr Bug. At his side he saw a whip. Barkk had forgotten to tell him what her power entailed, but he supposed that he didn't need to know that until an akuma showed up.
"Let's see what this new suit can do!" He picked up the whip and gave it a crack, noticing how its end easily wrapped around the legs of his bed, but released it when he thought that it should. Cool. He liked his baton better, but this whip would help him get around. He jumped onto the edge of his window and out in the darkness, missing his night vision terribly.
To Be Continued...