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Each night, she returns.
The rooftop hasn't changed.
Same cracked ledge, same rusted pipe, same hush of nighttime Paris wrapping her in silver. A place that feels suspended from time, untouched by the world below. No honking. No demands. Just this, their place.
He’s already there when she arrives.
“My Lady,” he says, tipping two fingers against his forehead with a theatrical flourish. “What are you doing here on this fine evening?”
She smiles at him tenderly. “I missed your green eyes,” she says simply.
His grin falters for just a second, caught off-guard by her honesty, then melts into something softer. Something unbearably fond.
“Well,” he says, “they missed you too.”
She sits beside him. It feels like home.
“You look good tonight,” he murmurs.
“I just appear to be,” she replies.
He pretends to ignore the weight of her voice, but his next words are gentler than usual. “Had a long day?”
She nods. “Patrol. Then press. Then civilians. Everyone pulling at me, needing me. Sometimes I just want to…” She trails off.
“Disappear?”
“Disappear here,” she corrects. “With you.”
His smile is wistful. “This place really is something, huh?”
“It’s not the place,” she says again, more quietly. “It’s you”
A silence settles. Not empty. Full of all the things they never got to say. All the things they pretend to say now.
“Have you ever thought about what it’d be like if none of this had happened?” he asks. “If we were just two kids in Paris?”
She doesn’t answer right away. The idea hurts more than it should. “Would we have met?”
“I’d like to think I would’ve found you anyway. Maybe in a bakery. Or crossing the street. Or… maybe on a rooftop, still. Some things are meant to be.”
He looks up at the sky like he’s searching for that other life. The one they didn’t get.
“I think about it all the time,” she admits. “What we could’ve had. Without the suits. Without the danger. Just... you. Me. A Saturday morning with croissants and terrible rom-coms.”
“You’re assuming my taste in movies is terrible.”
“I know your taste in puns is.”
He lets out a laugh, real, rich, familiar. The kind that fills her like sunlight in winter.
She turns toward him.
“I love you, you know,” she says, voice almost steady.
His eyes shine. “I know.”
And in that moment, everything feels whole again.
They sit like that for a while. Talking about nothing. Everything. The color of sunrise. Whether Plagg is secretly a philosopher. If pigeons are secretly akumatized. How many ways he would’ve proposed to her if he’d had the time.
He reaches for her hand.
She reaches back.
But her fingers close on nothing.
The warmth vanishes. The night breathes in, colder now, sharper.
She looks beside her.
There’s no one there.
Just silence. Just shadows where a boy once sat.
The truth swells like a tide inside her chest, unstoppable now.
He’s not here.
He hasn’t been.
Not for a long time.
It’s been seven months.
Seven months since her hands shook against his chest, trying to keep his heartbeat going with sheer will. Since she screamed for help and got only echoes. Since the final battle took him and left her standing in the rubble with a promise dying in her throat.
Since she had to take the ring off his cold body.
But here, on this rooftop, she can still pretend.
She can still feel him beside her in the silence. Still see his smile in the curve of the moon. Still hear his laugh tucked inside the wind.
She tilts her head to the clouds, eyes burning.
“Goodnight, Chaton,” she whispers.
And if the night replies with a hush that sounds like a purr…
She lets herself believe.
Just a beautiful lady
on a roof
all alone
without her kitty.