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Nathanaël sets aside his pencil on the park bench and holds down the pages of his sketchbook as they flutter in the autumn breeze. The movement makes the leaves he’s doodled look almost real.
He rubs at his eyes, blinking. Sometimes when he sets to drawing his focus gets intense, trance-like. It almost feels like waking up when he stops. He has to will the world to come back into focus.
As it does, he hears a new sound, tinkling and clear as the day he first heard it — Marinette’s laughter. Nathanaël peers around the large tree that provides shade to his bench and for a blissful moment sees just her, radiant and beautiful in the way of flowers touched by morning dew. He sighs, belly squirming as he briefly considers tossing his belongings in his bag and running out of the park gate to her. He could offer to walk her home. It’s close by, so they wouldn’t talk for long, but it’s a start.
Then the moment passes, and emerging from behind the tree comes the lithe figure of Chat Noir walking beside her, fingers interlocked over the back of his neck in a gesture that he manages to make simultaneously cocky and comical.
“What are you doing?” Marinette says, tone exasperated but fond. Like a turtle retreating back into its shell, Nathanaël sits back on the bench, effectively hiding behind the tree.
“You told me to keep my hands to myself,” Chat Noir explains with a shrug. Nathanaël catches the beginnings of a mischievous grin on the superhero’s face before the two progress far enough down the sidewalk that their backs face him.
“So of course you would do that in the most ostentatious way possible,” Marinette deadpans.
They’re getting further away from him now, and as another breeze starts up, his repartee is lost in the rustling of the leaves. The moment he catches himself straining to hear the rest of their conversation, Nathanaël forcibly restrains himself, returning his gaze to his sketches...
…but not before he sees Marinette go suddenly still and blush ever so slightly, nodding at something Chat Noir says to her. With her permission, he lowers his arms and reaches out one hand to brush a leaf out of her hair. He has to thread his fingers through her fringe to disentangle it, and does so easily, tenderly. The way Nathanaël would, if he meant as much to Marinette as she does to him.
He looks away, stuffs his sketchbook into his bag. Wishes he could have been her hero.
~
“Forty minutes to get to Charles de Gaulle Airport,” her mother says, flicking her wrist so that her sleeve slips back down over her watch. In the driver’s seat her father hums in acknowledgement, matching the low thrum of the engine and the heating system.
“We’ve got enough time,” he replies after a moment. He pulls up at the traffic junction, engaging the handbrake as a precaution against the slushy roads. Lila squints out her window. The nighttime and the soft, flurrying snowflakes make the traffic lights glow in vague splotches of colour.
“Not if this snow gets much heavier,” her mother counters. It’s not a confrontation, exactly; just one of the many micro-conflicts that erupt between her parents when they are actually on the same continent. Professional diplomats they may be, but in the domestic sphere it’s all stiffness and crabbiness, clipped conversations that concern almost exclusively the logistics of being continually on the move. Soon, her mother will be confirming arrival times with the private valet they hired to drive the car back and run its engine occasionally while they are overseas.
Exhaling soundlessly, Lila leans her forehead against the cool window. The car interior is stiflingly warm and she longs for the cold of Italy in December. Winter in her hometown will always feel just a little more welcoming than in other countries.
She doesn’t realise her eyes have drifted shut until the sharp voice of her father rouses her a while later. “Lila, you’ll dirty the window. Sit up, please.”
Pursing her lips in the dim backseat, she does as instructed, settling for staring outside. They pass by apartment blocks decked out for Christmas, with tinseled pine trees visible through the living room window and flashing lights wrapped carefully around the balustrades. In one window facing the street sits a lit Hanukkah menorah. She eyes it all with tentative envy. Going back just in time to celebrate Christmas with the extended family means that Lila has never gotten to put up wreaths or sort through paper chains from previous years or even be roped into helping with the holiday feast.
They stop at the next intersection. There’s a public rink some ways off, and standing at its edge is the Parisian superhero herself, Ladybug. She’s huddled up in a baby blue scarf that Lila can’t remember where she’s seen before — until she notices Adrien Agreste out on the ice, twirling on his skates for her amusement. He’s taken to wearing that scarf to school on a regular basis, as the days turned chilly and windier.
Lila presses up closer to the window. As she watches, Adrien stops spinning and, giving her a dopey grin, wobbles over to Ladybug. She laughs and steps a little closer, enough so that she can wrap the scarf around his neck, too. The grin falls off his face, replaced by an expression Lila can only identify as one of awe as Ladybug leans in, maybe to whisper something into his ear.
The lights turn green and her father promptly starts off again. Lila eases herself back into her previous posture, sitting up straight and facing forward. She doesn’t see Adrien reach up to touch Ladybug’s mask, nor how Ladybug covers his hand with hers, and nods.
~
Drumming her fingers lightly on the library table, Chloé stares past the piles of geography reference books and atlases that Sabrina has gathered for some project about bird migration in the springtime. She can live with not being in the same group as her Adrikins. After all, she and Sabrina make a great team by themselves — especially with Alix helping to do the research. What makes her purse her pink-glossed lips is that Marinette is sitting next to him, and something is different between them.
Or perhaps something is different about him. She’s known Adrien practically all their lives, and in that time she has seen countless girls fall over themselves to fawn over him while, gentlemanly and polite, he smiles just enough to be kind without encouraging them. What they have, though, that’s special. Who else could he possibly choose, in the end, but her? Who else knows him better, who else is his equal?
When she arrives at school each morning and exits the luxurious interior of her chauffered car, she carries her world with her, one of ornately panelled walls and carpeted floors. It’s there in her manicured nails, her professionally styled hair. And it’s something to be proud of, where she comes from. Where they come from. Only, she’s still trying to get him to see that.
They don’t fit in entirely at this public school because they shouldn’t, and Adrien shouldn’t feel embarrassed about being asked to sign autographs in the hallways, because Chloé knows he’s special, just like she is.
What’s so special about Marinette, that he looks at her like that?
As she watches, Marinette nudges Adrien’s sneakered foot under the table, so that he glances up from the library book he’s been nose-deep in. Literally, since he’s been falling asleep into it. She gives him a look that Chloé supposes is sympathetic, but that if pressed she might describe as simpering. Adrien responds with the slightest shrug of his shoulders, wincing slightly — who knows from what.
On the table, his cellphone buzzes, giving him a minute’s warning that he’s expected at fencing practice for the afternoon. Chloé looks away for a moment, pestered by Alix to at least glance over the material they’ve collected and confirm that she understands enough to explain it all properly. She waves her off. Of course she can present the project. She’s practically been groomed to appear before an audience, a pristine ideal.
When she looks back it’s to the sight of Adrien lightly touching Marinette’s shoulder in a tacit goodbye. She smiles up at him, and Chloé knows only too well why she looks at him like that.
~
When Fu next sees them, it is raining again, and that seems right somehow. The drizzle patters on the taut plastic of his umbrella, screening off their exchange. They are intimate and alone in the street, huddled together for shelter from the summer rain. She’s holding the umbrella for the both of them — probably at her insistence and his acquiescence, considering that their height difference forces him to hunch slightly or keep bumping his head.
As the rain intensifies to a downpour, they link arms and he tugs her still closer.
Fu smiles, subtly looking askance as he draws parallel to them on the opposite side of the street. Once upon more than a hundred years ago, he, too, stood in the rain and held the hand of someone he would come to love. Someone he would come to lose. He has had a long life, augmented by Wayzz’s power. In that time, he has seen regimes and eras rise and fall. He has traversed numerous climes, from the untouched beauty of mountainous Tibet to the gilded polish of urban Paris. And still this is what’s important, this is what he honours: that this was once a boy handing a girl his umbrella in the rain, and now they are together under that very umbrella. Nothing could be more simple or moving.
In all the modern films, rain makes for dramatic scenes, where the couple kisses hungrily, clothes clinging to their bodies, eyes shut from the stinging salt water and hands going exploring. Their time together is limited, more so than anyone else’s, and they feel its attenuation keenly.
Fu has seen a Ladybug and Chat Noir parted for the last time in the rain.
But equally, he has seen a Ladybug and Chat Noir united in matrimony in the rain — auspicious, in traditional Chinese belief. When the storm clouds are spread all across the sky, they say that the sun is hiding in the bride’s eyes, in the groom’s laugh. Or so someone once told him. He can no longer remember who that person was, or what they meant to him. Perhaps he could not bear to.
Fu walks on, drawing ever further from them. This is how he lives, watching from the sidelines. Rarely, only under the most desperate of circumstances, does he intervene. In worldly matters he stays just involved enough to ensure public wellbeing wherever the force of good is most needed, but just distant enough to hold at bay the memory of his one fateful error.
He has lived for many years, and he knows that wherever the sun is, the weather always changes.
But he’s rooting for them, this time and every time.