Visage

It's four akumas in, a full month since he's received his miraculous, that Adrien realizes that Ladybug does not have a face.

Not. Literally, obviously (and boy isn't that a terrifying image.) She has two eyes, certainly, a nose, a mouth, can see them plain as day when he turns his head to face her. But the second he looks away, the second he so much as blinks- the features blur in his mind. She has two eyes, but he does not know their shape. She has a nose, yet he can't for the life of him remember its size. Even that simple fact, she has blue eyes, is not something he knows so much as he remembers thinking that she had blue eyes.

He wonders if he's the same, as Chat Noir, just as featureless and fae-like as Ladybug. He wonders anytime he passes a reflective window during patrol, anytime he looks up and sees Chat Noir's picture on a billboard.

But then again, even as Adrien, he has never been able to see the face in his mirror as anything but a stranger.

Adrien doesn't hate his face, let's be clear. He doesn't really care, truly. But more often than not, it feels more like a tool than something he actually owns. Something made for public consumption, not to actually live with.

(He's read, once, in an advanced physic book, that some particles in the universe behave differently if they are observed. Maybe it's the same for him. He's spent so long alone in this empty house, with no friend to play with and no father to see him, maybe his very nature has been altered.)

"Do you ever," he asks, once, during their night patrol, (day patrol is for the city, to make the people feel safe and build trust between Paris and its superheroes. Night patrol is for themselves.) "feel, disconnected? From your body?"

"Oh, absolutely." Ladybug replies without hesitation. "The suit helps, but God, when I'm out of it? It's like I have giant twizzers instead of hands. Zero accuracy, zero agility. It's the most frustrating thing on earth."

Huh, really? Not the answer he'd expected. "Aw, my Lady is the clumsy kind?"

She elbows him in the ribs, and he laughs. "Like you aren't."

"I'm actually quite dexterious, thank you." He winks at her for good measure. "... Though, I cannot say the same about my face. I see pictures of me all the time, but it doesn't... feel like it's me."

Ladybug nods knowingly. "Ah, yes, I feel you. The mask is weird, right?"

He did not mean only inside the suit.

"I like it, though. The anonymity of being a superhero. No face, no name, no identity."

"You don't say?" He teases her again, and she sticks her tongue out at him.

"It's not about that, Chat. I would give you my name in a heartbeat if it weren't so dangerous." (Would she? Would she trust him that much? Would she?) "It's more that... Like this, I'm Ladybug. I'm not the girl with the french first name and the very unfrench last name. I'm not the girl with features all over the place, ethnicity-wise. There's no one to tell me I'm too french, or not french enough, or anything along these lines. I'm just... Ladybug. A concept. A set of actions."

Oh.

This. Got heavier than Chat was prepared to.

He almost apologizes- for bringing up an obviously sore topic, for opening up old wounds- but then she turns to him, and she smiles, and Chat has always been weak to that smile.

"It's freeing. I like it."

Adrien isn't, biracial, or a second-generation immigrant, or anything Ladybug might have implied she was. It would be insulting of him to pretend he understands what she might go through in her civilian life.

But freedom, this, he can get.

"I feel you." He says, and he can only hope she understands how much he means it.

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