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It’s funny because she had always known that there was a real human underneath that mask. After all, she knew how freeing a different persona could be. Ladybug was capable and confident, and completely unlike awkward Marinette. It was so easy being her, a girl that existed solely to defeat akuma and to save the city once more. An identity crafted from the freedom to be superhuman, to personify a saviour, a hero you could depend on. Why wouldn’t you love Ladybug?
It was the reason why she was so understanding and so uncomfortable about Chat Noir’s admiration for her.
So she had always known there was a real human underneath that cat mask. But what she didn’t even consider was that the real human was the mask. And she had made the same mistake that Chat Noir had, of falling in love with a figurehead that didn’t quite exist. Adrien Agreste was there to accommodate the whims of everyone wanting to direct his life. Pliant, gentle, easygoing. A perfectly suffocating fiction.
The thing is, the thing is that it should have been a love story. Adrien and Marinette, Chat Noir and Ladybug, identities revealed and they fall into an easy love. But the reality is a lingering shame of being mutually off-sync and in love with a fantasy. The guilt of not being who the other wants. The bitterness of never being who they want. How can you compete with yourself, but better?
And so the true truth of the matter was that once they knew, things couldn’t stay the same. It had the same feeling of shaking off a dream. The playful, joyous potentials that had inhabited their old selves were gone forever. But replacing that was something more delicate, more gentle. Because in the whole wide world, they knew, there would never be a single soul that understood better than the other. A partner that accepts the whole of who you are. Something precious lost, but something just as precious gained.
The story of Ladybug and Chat Noir, of Marinette and Adrien — it will never be that love story. Not anymore. But there is a story. And there is love. And there are two superheroes who aren’t quite the same, but somehow, that isn't so bad.