A/N: For PFTones3482, who is really the only reason this story exists in the first place because she's the one who introduced me to this fandom and has put up with me asking random questions about it ever since. Also, be warned that I've only seen the first ten episodes, all of which were subbed, so…. There'll definitely be differences once the English version comes out, and this fic will certainly be canon divergent after those first ten episodes. Please point out any little spelling/grammar mistakes you may notice so I can fix them. As always, standard disclaimers apply.

"Halt!" Madame Neumann called. "Philippe, mind your footing. Adrien, you may advance."

Instead of moving forward the allotted metre, Adrien lowered his foil and took off his fencing mask. Philippe had already thrown his mask on the floor. "I need some water," Philippe growled as he stomped off the piste.

"Etiquette, Philippe!"

"Etiquette?" Philippe snarled, rounding on their instructor. "You favour him." Philippe's foil jabbed blindly in Adrien's direction, but the others had also halted their matches and stood well away from him. "Everyone always favours him because they think he's perfect and can do no wrong!"

Madame Neumann's eyes narrowed behind her glasses, and her lips pressed into a thin line. She was as severe as she looked, sharp as a tack and with just enough grey hair to make it clear that she had the experience to back up her word and wouldn't abide nonsense. "Apologize and withdraw your accusations, Monsieur Dupond." She would not like handing out a suspension to one of their best fencers, even a short one, but Adrien knew as well as everyone else that that was what was coming if Philippe didn't yield. All of their instructors were strict, but Madame Neumann was one of the harshest. She always said her place in the sport allowed her to be nothing less.

Philippe glared, but Madame Neumann did not back down. Adrien shifted uncomfortably and was about to suggest a rematch when Philippe spat, "No. I will not participate in a fixed bout." He stalked toward the locker room.

"I'll, ah, perhaps get a bit of water myself," Adrien murmured. He knew Philippe's accusations were unfounded—Madame Neumann was strict but fair and an excellent instructor—but he never liked being reminded of the fact that some people thought of him as a spoiled brat who had had things handed to him on a silver platter.

He would trade anything he had in return for recognition from his father.

Well.

Almost anything.

He wasn't so sure he'd be able to part with Plagg, since the cheese-loving kwami was as much a friend to him as Nino, and he wasn't about to give up being Chat Noir when the city needed him. When Ladybug needed him. He wasn't so sure he'd be able to give up the chance to be close to her, either.

Philippe wasn't in the locker room when Adrien arrived, but that was perhaps just as well. Philippe's skill was still outstripped by his ego, and unreasonable anger had no place in fencing.

Philippe, who had stormed off past the locker room and the nearest water fountains in search of sanctuary despite his fencing gear, never saw the black akuma land on his foil.

"Blademaster." Philippe's head rose, his eyes staring straight ahead but not seeing as he listened to the voice in his head. "I am Hawk Moth, and I know you are being treated unfairly. I will help you cut down your opposition if retrieve something that was unfairly taken from me in return."

"Tell me what you want," Philippe said, but he had already agreed to the terms and the dark magic was already spreading over him.

"Maybe I shouldn't do this," Marinette said into her cell phone as she paced back and forth on the sidewalk. Even just the knowledge that Adrien was inside was making her lose her nerve. "This is a bad idea. I shouldn't be here."

"Marinette." Alya's voice was as reproachful as ever. "You memorized his schedule, and you know exactly when you need to round the corner to coincidentally run into him. Just remember what I told you and you'll be fine."

"But that's my problem! I'm already forgetting what you told me and I'm never fine because I just have to look at him and I forget how to talk, let alone what to say!"

"Just breathe, okay? All you're doing is asking him to the movies. Just slip it into casual conversation."

"But that requires being able to hold a conversation." Marinette pulled at her hair. "You've seen me. You know I choke up every time I try to talk to him."

"That's why you just need to— Manon! Put that back! Remember magical unicorns don't grant wishes to— Hey! Are you listening to me? Look, Marinette, I need to go. You'll be fine."

Marinette sighed and hung up. She could do this. She could do this. Just because it was Adrien and he was so sweet and perfect and—

"Why not pretend it isn't him you're talking to?" Tikki wondered, looking up at Marinette from her place in Marinette's purse. Had they been alone, the kwami wouldn't have still been hiding, but there was too much potential that someone might see her for her to come out now.

"I can't. If it were as easy as mind over matter, I would've been able to leave a message on his phone." Marinette finally stopped pacing and slumped against the side of the building, sliding down until she was sitting on the sidewalk with her knees up in front of her. Cradling the purse as she was, she could talk to Tikki in relative peace. "And it would be different if I hadn't been the one to ditch the movie date Alya got us." Not that she'd had much of a choice; she and Chat Noir had had to save the city from Wildflower. The only saving grace to all of that had been that Nino had gotten a hurried message from Adrien that he'd gotten caught in the traffic jam Wildflower's vines had caused and wouldn't be able to make it, either.

Which was why Alya had had the brilliant idea that Marinette ask Adrien to go catch the film they'd missed, now that they weren't in danger from overactive flora.

It had just taken her a few weeks to work up the nerve to come.

"You were busy being brilliant. And you had no trouble talking to Chat Noir when it came to defeating Wildflower or anyone since. Maybe—"

"Tikki," Marinette said, "Adrien isn't Chat Noir. He's much better than Chat Noir, in every single way. You can't compare them! Talking to Adrien is…is…." Marinette studied the picture of Adrien that was set as her phone's background and searched for the right words for a few seconds before giving up. "Impossible."

"But you can do it," Tikki said, sparing the phone a glance even though she knew quite well what Marinette's crush looked like. "He is only a boy, and your confidence as Ladybug does not come from me."

"This is different," Marinette insisted. "And Adrien is so much more than just a boy; he's…he's…." She shrugged helplessly, still unable to find the right words. "He's perfect."

Screams erupted from somewhere inside the building, and Marinette bolted to her feet. Adrien's in there! She was inside in an instant, ducking into the first alcove she spotted so she wouldn't be seen. "Tikki," she called, "transform me!"

Marinette might not be able to summon the courage to ask Adrien out on a date, but Ladybug could at least protect him—and everyone else—until she could.

Adrien stared as Philippe advanced on him; it must be Philippe, although he was now clad in a black facsimile of his former fencing gear complete with mask and he carried not one but two swords, both of which looked stronger and sharper than sabres. Some of the other students shrieked and fled, dropping their foils in the process. A few huddled by the far wall, near a door just in case but keeping a rather firm grip on their weapons, and Madame Neumann moved so that she could easily reach one of the forgotten blades, though she did not yet pick it up.

Adrien himself was rooted to the spot, back on the piste in preparation for another bout and desperately wished he'd spent five more minutes nursing his water bottle in the locker room. Even if Plagg hadn't been in Adrien's bag with everything else, Adrien couldn't transform in front of the others.

"Monsieur Dupond! You cannot—"

"I am Blademaster!" Blademaster's right hand shot out, quick as lightning, and sliced through Madame Neumann's jacket and scored her chest protector. She stumbled back, her composure lost. "I will prove it to you!"

Madame Neumann kept backing away, likely to inform the police even if they couldn't do much of anything. Adrien began to creep toward the nearest door—the other remaining students had abandoned their bravado and already dashed away—but Blademaster's other sword blocked his path before he'd taken three steps. "En guarde," he sneered.

Adrien swallowed but stepped back and raised his blade, adjusting his stance to the ready position. He wished he could believe a loss would restore Philippe, but he knew better.

Blademaster lunged, moving so quickly Adrien hardly had time to parry the attack. It was all Adrien could do to defend himself, and Blademaster was still only fighting with one blade, his right, keeping the left one behind his back. Adrien took an opening when he finally saw it, making an attack of his own, but suddenly Blademaster had twisted Adrien's foil from his hand and his other sword quivered at Adrien's throat.

Blademaster's left sword hand was suddenly jerked away, and Adrien realized Ladybug's yo-yo was wrapped around it. The heroine smiled when he looked over and she retracted the cord as he scrambled back. As she began spinning the yo-yo again, she said, "Two swords against none isn't a fair fight. Why not give me one?"

She shot Adrien a look he could easily interpret: get out. While she distracted Blademaster, he ran, and by some stroke of luck, the locker room was empty when he reached it. "Plagg!" In the brief time he'd been gone, the kwami had devoured another hunk of cheese, this time gruyère. "We don't have time for this!"

"What's your rush?" the kwami asked, but he'd hardly opened his eyes again before Adrien initiated the transformation process and he was pulled into Adrien's ring.

In the interest of keeping his identity a secret—although he wouldn't mind Ladybug knowing the truth, especially if he could know who she was in return—he entered the practice area from the far side, which was an easy enough thing to do when he knew the area like the back of his paw and had no trouble scaling walls.

He landed lightly and quickly realized that while Ladybug might have been successful in keeping Blademaster occupied, she had not been successful in disarming him—and he had probably been inches away from trimming more than her hair quite frequently, judging by the scars on both the floor and the walls. Adrien had known Blademaster would not be holding normal swords, but for them to still be so sharp….

"The akuma's in his sword," Ladybug said as she landed by his side. "I'm just not sure which one."

"The right one." It must be; Philippe was right-handed, and although he'd been teaching himself to use his left, he was still stronger with his dominant hand. And he'd only left carrying one sword.

Ladybug gave him a sideways glance. "How do you—?"

Adrien waved at her with his right hand. "More people are right—awk!" He pushed Ladybug out of the way of a flying foil and narrowly avoided being skewered himself. Blademaster still held both his swords, but he was now throwing forgotten ones their way, probably to split them up so he could fight them more easily. Trouble was, he didn't even need to touch the other swords to control them; they seemed to obey his gestures, at least until they got wedged somewhere or snapped in two.

Blademaster.

It figured he could control the swords like that, too, when he wished it.

Adrien rolled to his feet and spun his staff, elongating it before dashing in to give Ladybug more room to work. If she ended up needing to use her Lucky Charm to get them out of this, she'd need time to think, and he was better at close combat fighting than she—especially when it came to fending off a fencer. And if he proved to be a suitable distraction, Blademaster would spend more time trying to skin a cat than pin a bug to the wall.

To be fair, though, Adrien was more used to fighting a fencer wielding only one sword and with a sword of his own, but this wasn't fencing. Having to constantly watch his back didn't make matters any easier. Ladybug couldn't just pull the sword from Blademaster's grasp when he held it so tightly, and she must have run into difficulty trying to bind him or she'd have him trussed like a pig for slaughter by now. No, if he wasn't the one to disarm Blademaster, he had to at least loosen Blademaster's grip on those swords. Knowing that, Adrien fought like a wildcat, spinning his staff this way and that, splitting it in two in the blink of an eye and trying to land blows on Blademaster's arms and wrists.

Though Adrien was quick as a cat, Blademaster had the flexibility and skill of a seasoned fencer, and his task was harder than it would have been if Philippe were merely half as good as he believed himself to be. The apparent telekinetic control over the swords didn't help matters, but the fact that fewer and fewer blades remained whole and free did.

Blademaster's attacks became more aggressive and then abruptly ceased as he turned to attack Ladybug. Adrien could only assume that he'd gotten a stiff reminder from Hawk Moth to retrieve their Miraculous. He used his staff to vault over Blademaster and land in front of Ladybug, carefully avoiding her spinning yo-yo. She had been more than ready to defend herself, but he shot her a cocky grin anyway. "Do be careful, my lady," he said. "His swords are sharper than a cat's claws."

Ladybug rolled her eyes. "Use your Cataclysm. We need to trap him or we'll never be able to disarm him."

"Me-ouch! Don't you have any confidence in my abilities?"

"Focus, kitty cat," she stepped away from him and loosed her yo-yo, but Blademaster danced out of the way and the yo-yo caught on an upended foil instead. Ladybug scowled and yanked it back. "We need to deal with this now or he'll go after Ad—the fencers."

Adrien spared a second to look at Ladybug—had she really been about to say his name? He'd never met her as himself—before deciding he'd dwell on that later. Drawing on Plagg's power through his Miraculous, he invoked Chat Noir's infamous destructive power. "Cataclysm!"

Aiming for Blademaster's sword was more likely to nearly get his hand chopped off than anything else, so Adrien dragged his hand along the floor, hoping to trap Blademaster the way he and Ladybug had Sabrina's father when he'd decided to use introduce his own brand of justice to Paris.

He did not need Ladybug's frustrated yell to realize he'd chosen poorly, just this once.

Perhaps he shouldn't have rushed in without waiting to hear if Ladybug had anything else to say.

His power worked perfectly well on things he touched directly, but its power diminished as it spread. It ate through the floor and the subfloor, but it did less well against the layers of concrete and rebar beneath that; although chewed up, nothing was completely gone. He'd created an obstacle course—for all of them—rather than succeeded in trapping Blademaster.

One look at Ladybug told him he wasn't liable to live this one down any time soon.

"I'll, er…." Adrien glanced down at his ring; he was rapidly losing power, and of the two toes remaining on the paw print, one flashed and vanished as he watched. The other would not last much longer. "Back in five minutes," he promised, dashing out. Plagg had not eaten all the cheese in Adrien's bag, although the glutton had gotten close to it.

Adrien barely made it to the locker room before the transformation wore off and an exhausted Plagg spun out of his ring. Adrien wrenched open his locker door, letting Plagg rest on his shoulder as he dug through his bag in search of a container the kwami hadn't gotten into already. He breathed a sigh of relief when he found the untouched chèvre. "Eat up," he said, holding it out.

Plagg perked up instantly and made a dive for it. Adrien left him to his feasting, knowing he couldn't be any help to Ladybug until Plagg had regained his energy. It would make matters even worse if he showed his face as Adrien—Blademaster was sure to go after him and Ladybug would be forced to abandon her plans to protect him—but that didn't make waiting any easier.

"Lucky Charm!" Marinette shouted as she spun her yo-yo up into the air.

A fork dropped into her hands.

A large, ladybug-patterned fork that looked sharper than usual, but still a fork.

"What am I supposed to do with this?" she wondered.

She glanced around, looking for anything that would help her make sense of her newfound weapon. Chat Noir's Cataclysm catastrophe—oh, she hoped Chat Noir was not rubbing off on her, thinking like that—might not have trapped Blademaster, but it had slowed him down. Without being able to fly or make superhuman leaps, he needed to pick his way across the rubble to her, a feat that required more precarious balancing than she was sure was typical in fencing. If she waited until he reached that point, then ran to cut him off there, and used that foil as a rebound, then the fork….

Marinette smiled. "That's it," she whispered.

Without Chat Noir to distract Blademaster, all his attention was on Marinette. This time, she was counting on that. The most direct path to her—and to her Miraculous—required Blademaster to balance on a sharp edge of concrete, and a misstep would cause him to catch his foot in the remains of the crisscrossing support bars. She ran to meet him, easily drawing his attention, so he didn't see her throw her fork at one of the swords that was wedged point down in the remains of the floor. The fork ricocheted off the guard and sped prong first toward Blademaster's hand (the right one; if Chat Noir was wrong about that….).

The fork slipped into a gap between Blademaster's jacket and glove—a loosening resulting from their earlier attacks—and he howled and dropped his blade just as one foot slipped off the concrete and wedged itself between the framework of steel supports. It played out just as she'd envisioned. Marinette dove for the sword, knowing she needed to destroy it to release Hawk Moth's akuma—

—and screamed as Blademaster's other sword sliced into her ear. Her momentum carried her forward, and she'd pitched into him in such a daze that she barely felt his free hand tear out her other earring, but she knew the moment he had. She instantly lost her transformation, and it was ordinary Marinette who scrambled to her feet with one hand clamped over her right ear. She couldn't see Tikki, couldn't see either of her earrings, and Chat Noir had yet to return—although the last was just as well.

Marinette grabbed the cursed sword and dragged it from Blademaster's reach, driving it into the floor so he couldn't just call it back to him, but without Tikki and the Miraculous, she could do little else. "Tikki?" It came out as a whimper, and if Tikki heard, Marinette caught no response. She'd have to search for them later; Blademaster was caught as surely as a mouse in a trap now and had no way of getting the Miraculous to Hawk Moth before Chat Noir came back.

Marinette bit back a sob and raced for cover, blindly picking a door and rushing through. This was why she and Chat Noir were a team; if they didn't work together, things could go terribly wrong. She knew it could be worse, much worse—he hadn't sliced off her ear or her head, for that matter, and he wouldn't remember her true identity when this was over—but she'd lost Tikki. She'd lost her Miraculous.

Ladybug was gone.