Till the End of the Line ~ A Miraculous Short Story

Adrien

I jumped back through my window and transformed. I was so lucky to have a friend like Marinette. Not only was she funny and sweet, but she was also super smart!

"I'm exhausted! How late is it Adrien?" Plagg groaned as he hunted around my room for cheese.

"So late that it's now early. I'm going to bed." I said just a second before collapsing on my bed and falling asleep. I'd try to unmask Shadowmoth tomorrow. Or really later today.

Unfortunately, I was only able to sleep for an hour before Nathalie burst into my room to wake me up. I wondered if she ever even went home. She was always still here when I went to bed and woke me up every morning. Did she even have a home? Did she even sleep?

"It's time to get ready Adrien. You have school on top of a photo shoot and Chinese today," she told me in her usual monotone voice. Maybe she was secretly a robot. That was my current theory.

"Yeah, I know," I groaned in response and grabbed some clothes before heading to my bathroom to shower.

As the hot water ran over me, I thought about past akumatizations, like Marinette had suggested. There wasn't much to go on. Shadowmoth barely showed up, and when he did, he didn't really do much. Eventually, I just started going through past akumatizations and crossing people out in my head. It was incredibly effective, but it was something. He wasn't Mr. Pigeon, my dear friend Copycat, Pharaoh, Rogercop, Darkblade, the Mime, Animan, Simon Says, and well, you get the idea. I kept running through names until I got to The Collector. My dad. That had been a hard day. When Ladybug thought he was Shadowmoth. It almost shattered my world. Thank goodness he had been akumatized, proving he wasn't ShadowMoth.

That had actually been pretty perfect. Us suspecting he's Shadowmoth, and he gets akumatized just a few minutes later. A tiny voice in the back of my mind tried to tell me it was suspicious, but I couldn't afford to listen to it. My dad wasn't Shadowmoth.
The akumatization and the butterfly logo and everything else was just a coincidence.

Unfortunately, for the next few days, the tiny voice would not shut up.

He never leaves the house.

He's always disappearing with no notice.

He got akumatized right after we suspected him.

He has a literal butterfly as his logo, not to mention all over our house.

He had that book about miraculouses.

It was all too much. I couldn't just overlook him as a possible suspect, but how was I supposed to live here thinking that he's Shadowmoth? It was just too much. It fit too well. Why did it have to be him? Out of everyone in Paris, why did it have to be him?

Why did my dad have to be Shadowmoth?