Under Oath | Ladynoir ✓

18 | bon retour

LADYBUG DID GET HIM AN office.

Well, she secured a workspace for all the Miraculous investigators collectively. It was in the Palais de Justice, the same building as Heloise Hessenpy's office, the hub of Paris' judicial power.

The gold-gilded stone buildings housed the high courts of the city. They had been prisons and war rooms and high councils for kings and queens. Every room in the judicial complex felt old but treasured. The degree of age changed because the place had grown over time—marble columns and stone arches had seen emperors, carved wooden balustrades and chandeliers had seen kings, and creaking iron cells had seen war generals.

The Agreste vs. Paris pretrial hearing would happen in the Cour d'Appel. This is where I'll come, Chat Noir realised, head tilted back at the grand ceilings as he strolled deeper into the complex. His boots struck the steps loudly as he nimbly descended, taking a left, then a right, following his Lady's directions.

In a stuffy back room, Ladybug had indeed tacked a cat calendar on the wall.

Chat Noir chuckled noiselessly, letting his claws glide along the doorframe. In the superhero office, which was far away from the part of the Palais that had become a heritage site—ahem, a tourist trap—everything was wooden.

A workbench with office stationary stretched along the back wall, underneath the Palladian windows that ushered in the afternoon sun. The eastern wall supported a standing desk with two computers, their private hard drives, and a printer. Metal frame shelving spanned the western side, half-full with cardboard archival boxes.

Chat Noir pulled one box forward—labelled 2017 Akumatizations—and rummaged through. Then another—labelled 2018 Gabriel™ Fiscal Records—and one more—Shanghai Press Coverage.

From the contents, it seemed Rena Rouge had already come through and deposited all her transcripts of the akumatization interviews, the auditor's reports and financial crime division's findings on Gabriel, the brand, and foreign media coverage of the terrorism in Shanghai.

Go Alya.

A tingle zipped down Chat Noir's spine, ears pricked up, tuning into footsteps along the stone hallway outside. He could hear people, smell them, before he saw them. The weight and pacing became suddenly, achingly familiar.

Once, with his father, he'd attended the opening night of a touring portraiture exhibition at the Louvre. The artist painted a massive canvas with a grid of distorted whorls and shapes, and a prepubescent Adrien thought it boring, until he walked halfway across the gallery and looked back to see a face in the distance.

It was the same now. The dense mental fog of the quantum masking lifted, revealing a smiling, bespectacled face. Carapace swung the door open and froze.

"Oh." He blinked. "Didn't know you were coming in today."

If I could, I'd sew his sweet-talking mouth shut with his own whiskers. Chat Noir tried for a friendly grin. "Yeah, I just got worked into the roster."

"Cool." Carapace's features scrunched into a placid, short-lived smile. He breezed right past in favour of the computer desk, seeming familiar in the office despite how recently Heloise had assigned it to Ladybug.

Chat Noir was acutely aware of his time away, like a gaping hole in the middle of the floor. While he'd been licking his wounds in a hotel room, Carapace and the others had been working for the judiciary.

The hero in question wove his fingers together and flexed his palms until the knuckles cracked. Then he wagged the computer mouse on its pad to wake the screen, logging leisurely into the heroes' private network.