Paris in the evening was the kind of beautiful that felt almost deliberate — the Seine catching the last of the sunset and breaking it into shifting fragments of gold, the stone facades along the river warm and amber in the fading light, the whole city arranged as though someone had decided, for this one hour, to make it look exactly like the paintings.
Beneath it, moving through it with the unhurried confidence of someone who owns the afternoon, a car carried a princess and her prince through the Champs-Élysées.
Inside, the city was irrelevant.
The Puppet Master had curled herself into the curve of Jaden's arm with the complete, boneless satisfaction of a cat that has located the warmest available surface and has no intention of moving. In her hands, a tablet displayed the afternoon's documentation — a sequence of photographs so perfectly composed they looked like illustrations from a picture book that had been made specifically for her.
The Bridge of Arts: Jaden's arms around her from behind, a padlock clasped onto the railing, a controlled cameraman having found the precise angle to capture their leaning profiles against the water.
The Luxembourg Gardens: Jaden bent over her hand, pressing a formal, unhurried kiss to her knuckles while she looked up at him with eyes that had gone entirely soft.
Montmartre: the two of them against the Sacré-Cœur's pale stone, looking out over a Paris that had obligingly turned golden for them, his arm settled naturally around her shoulders as though this were simply where it belonged.
Every image was immaculate. Every image was real — in the sense that it had happened, that Jaden had been present and cooperative and gentle, that the afternoon had unfolded exactly as she had imagined it.
"Look, Prince." She enlarged the Carousel photograph — the two of them laughing, genuinely laughing, caught mid-movement — and held it up with the reverence of someone presenting evidence. "Just like a storybook. We really are perfect together."
"We are," Jaden said.
His voice was as warm as it had been all afternoon. His hand moved through her hair in a slow, easy stroke.
And somewhere behind his eyes, very quietly, a question was becoming harder to ignore.
*Where are they.*
From the moment the Puppet Master had taken his hand and pulled him into her open-top car, he had been waiting for the intervention that should have come within the hour. Ladybug and Cat Noir were not people who sat at home while a civilian was being paraded through Paris by an Akumatized Person. They should have found them at the Bridge of Arts. At the gardens, at the very latest.
Instead: nothing. An entire romantic itinerary completed without a single interruption.
Which meant they were being held somewhere. Which meant whatever was keeping them occupied was substantial.
He filed the thought away and kept his expression exactly where it was.
---
Forty feet below the streets of Paris, in a tunnel that smelled improbably of aged cheese and strawberry macarons, the situation was significantly less romantic.
Adrien had his back against the cold stone wall and was making no effort to conceal his misery. "There are *so many of them.*" He addressed this observation to the ceiling, since the ceiling at least couldn't disagree with him. "Every time we clear a section, there are just — more. Where is she getting more birds? Does she have an unlimited bird budget?"
Plagg was three-quarters through a piece of camembert and had opinions about the interruption. "If you used your Cataclysm with any degree of precision," he said, through a full mouth, "we would have been through an hour ago."
"I *am* being precise! There are just too many of them to be precise *at!*"
Ten meters away, around a bend in the tunnel, Marinette was watching Tikki work through a macaron with the focused, guilty urgency of someone monitoring a fuel gauge. "Tikki. Please. We have to go."
"I know, I know." Tikki's cheeks were at capacity. She chewed with visible concentration. "The attack frequency is very high, Marinette. I need the energy."
"Miraculous Ladybug."
Adrien's voice came around the corner — still Cat Noir's register, courtesy of the voice-changing effect the Miraculous maintained even through detransformation. "Are we thinking? Because I'd really like to be doing something other than hiding in a tunnel."
"I'm thinking." Marinette had her phone out, the screen casting blue light across her face as she moved across the map with her thumb, tracing the afternoon's trajectory. The Bridge of Arts. The Luxembourg Gardens. Montmartre.
The pattern was there. It had been there from the beginning; she'd just needed enough data points to see it clearly.
"Notre Dame," she said.
"That's— how are you sure?"
"Because look at where they've been." She held up the phone, the route traced between landmarks like a connect-the-dots. "Every stop is a romantic Paris destination, in sequence, moving steadily toward the center of the island. This isn't wandering. This is a *progression.*"
Adrien was quiet for a moment, visibly working through this. "She's taking him sightseeing, though. She just — she seems like she wants to—"
"She wants to get *married.*" Marinette said it flatly, with the certainty of someone who has followed the logic all the way to its end and doesn't love what she found there. "Cat Noir, think about what this actually is. She found her prince. She took him on a romantic tour of Paris. The next step in every fairy tale she's ever read is a wedding. And the location for the grandest, most official, most unambiguously *legitimate* wedding in Paris is—"
"Notre Dame." His voice had changed. "Okay. Okay, I see it."
"That's not even the worst part." Marinette's voice dropped slightly, taking on a quality that was almost reluctant. "She's a child. But she's a child who has controlled government workers all afternoon. Think about what else she might have had them do."
A pause.
"The legal procedures," Adrien said slowly.
"The legal procedures." Marinette exhaled. "If she's had puppets in the administrative offices — which she has, because she has puppets *everywhere* — she could have forged documents. Age verification. Application materials. She's been doing this methodically, Cat Noir. She doesn't want a pretend wedding. She wants one that holds up."
The silence that followed was different from the previous ones.
"I know who she is," Marinette said, and something in her voice had gone quiet and careful. "I've seen her before. The girl who follows Jaden around the park — the one who's always trying to get his attention. Her name is Manon. She's Nadja's daughter."
"Nadja—" Adrien stopped. "The news reporter?"
"Yes."
Another silence.
"That," Adrien said, with the tone of someone completing an unpleasant calculation, "is not good."
"No."
He knew Manon, peripherally — had seen her in the park, had registered the quality of attention she directed at Jaden, had filed it away as *child with a crush* and moved on. But knowing who her mother was recontextualized the whole picture. Nadja pursued stories with a dedication that most people reserved for personal vendettas. If Manon had inherited even a fraction of that tenacity and applied it to the obsession behind this transformation—
This was not a child playing house.
This was a child playing house with the absolute conviction that the house was real and permanent and entirely hers.
"We go now," Marinette said.
The two Kwamis looked at each other, then back at their holders.
Plagg burped with considerable satisfaction and patted his midsection. "Ready."
Tikki touched the corner of her mouth delicately. "Recovered."
"*Tikki, spots on.*"
"*Plagg, claws out.*"
Two lights cut through the dark of the tunnel.
---
Notre Dame Cathedral at night was not meant to be beautiful in a comfortable way. It was meant to be *significant* — its towers rising into the dark sky with the authority of something that has been standing here for eight centuries and has no particular interest in being impressed by the present.
Tonight it was lit from within.
Candles behind the stained glass sent colors bleeding outward into the dark — deep red, cathedral blue, the amber of old gold — and the effect was something between sacred and unsettling. In the space around the building, puppet workers moved with the quiet efficiency of the completely controlled, completing the final arrangements of a wedding that had been planned and executed in a single afternoon through the combined labor of hundreds of people who had not been asked whether they wanted to participate.
White roses flanked the red carpet in great clustered arrangements. The organ had been tuned. The priest had been positioned. Every pew held a guest with perfect posture and empty eyes and a smile that was precisely the right shape.
---
In the wing off the main hall, Manon sat before a dressing-room mirror and looked at herself.
The wedding dress was extraordinary — layers of lace built outward from the bodice like the petals of something unfurling, every surface embedded with pearls and crystals that caught the candlelight and scattered it. The diamond crown sat on carefully arranged hair. The girl in the mirror was composed and radiant and looked, somehow, both like herself and like someone she had always been working toward becoming.
On the corner of the dressing table, neat as schoolwork, sat the afternoon's other achievement: a stack of documents, still carrying the faint chemical smell of fresh ink. An identity card. Marriage application materials, stamped and processed and nearly complete. A legal architecture built from silk threads and hollow-eyed civil servants, designed to make the next hour permanent.
Manon picked up the identity card and turned it in her hands with the satisfaction of a craftsman examining finished work.
She was going to be married.
Legitimately. Officially. In the most beautiful building in Paris, with the right papers, by a real priest.
*"Hehehe..."*
The sound that came from behind her mask was small and bright and entirely genuine.
Then the mental link opened.
"...Is everything prepared?"
Hawk Moth's voice arrived with the particular quality of someone who has been waiting longer than they wanted to and is choosing not to say so directly.
Manon didn't look away from the mirror. "No," she said, pleasantly. "I'm still getting ready. The Prince hasn't seen me yet. Nobody is allowed to peek." She paused to adjust her crown a fraction of a degree. "Especially not you."
In his lair in another timeline, Hawk Moth pressed his fingertips together and did not speak for a moment.
"Have your puppets located Miraculous Ladybug and Cat Noir?"
"Nope." She sounded entirely untroubled by this. "But if they show up, my servants will handle it. You'll get what you want. Just be patient." A beat. "I'm hanging up now."
The link closed from her end with the casual authority of someone who has decided the conversation is finished.
Hawk Moth was left with the silence of his lair and the particular frustration of someone who has deployed a variable they cannot control and is now discovering what that means in practice.
After a moment, he opened a different channel.
[She's completely ungovernable.]
The response from his counterpart was measured, and carried something that was almost — beneath its composure — amusement. [She's six years old and she's getting married in Notre Dame Cathedral. What did you expect?]
[I expected a pawn, not a director.]
[Then perhaps next time, choose your pawns from people who aren't six years old.] A pause. [For now, we wait. There's nothing else to do, my colleague.]
Hawk Moth received this observation in silence.
He did not find it particularly comforting.
---
Across the hall, in the men's dressing room, Jaden stood in front of a full-length mirror and considered his reflection with the objective curiosity of someone encountering a version of themselves they hadn't previously met.
The suit was exceptional, if absurd — a white tailcoat with gold detailing, a sash that caught the light, a sapphire-studded silver crown positioned on his dark hair with rather more care than he'd expected a six-year-old to exercise. The peacock feather brooch was at his chest, which he found, in the circumstances, privately amusing.
He looked, he had to admit, exactly like a prince.
*Fits rather well,* he thought, and heard the humor in it.
He was still examining this thought when small hands wrapped around his waist from behind with the full conviction of someone who considers this entirely normal and permanently warranted.
He turned, and looked down.
The Puppet Master looked up at him from inside the circle of his arms, and the expression on her face — visible around the edges of the mask, in the brightness of her eyes, in the curve of her mouth — was the kind of happiness that doesn't know how to be anything other than total.
"I could hug you forever," she announced, with complete seriousness.
"You've been fairly consistent about that all afternoon," he agreed, warmly.
She rose onto her toes, reaching upward. He bent slightly to meet the movement — and then redirected it, gently, pressing his nose to hers instead. A quiet, affectionate deflection that somehow managed to satisfy rather than disappoint.
She made a small sound of contentment.
A controlled waiter appeared at the door, bowing. "Princess. Prince. Everything is ready."
The Puppet Master pulled back with visible reluctance, but her hand found his and held it with the grip of someone taking possession rather than simply connecting — fingers laced, firm, entirely certain.
"Come, my Prince," she said, pulling him forward. "It's time."
---
The great doors of Notre Dame opened inward.
Beyond them, the nave stretched away in candlelit grandeur — the stained glass throwing pools of color across the stone floors, the white roses banked along the red carpet releasing their scent into air that already smelled of age and incense and the particular solemnity of a space that has witnessed centuries of human significance. The pipe organ filled the vault of the ceiling with wedding march, and in the pews, hundreds of controlled guests rose and applauded with the synchronized enthusiasm of people who have been told to be delighted.
Jaden and the Puppet Master walked the red carpet together.
It was, objectively, one of the most surreal things that had ever happened in this building, which had witnessed a great many surreal things across its eight hundred years.
At the altar, the priest waited with the practiced composure of a man whose will was not currently his own but whose professional reflexes remained intact. He opened the ceremony with the standard architecture of a French civil marriage blessing, his voice flat and correct.
The Puppet Master stood at the altar with the expression of someone who has waited for this specific moment her entire life and is giving it her absolute full attention.
"Do you take—"
"*I do,*" she said, before the sentence had finished. Loud and certain and already impatient for the next part.
The priest turned to Jaden.
Jaden looked at the girl beside him — the borrowed grandeur of her dress, the crown slightly askew now from the walk, the joy in her eyes that was so complete it was almost painful to look at directly.
He smiled. "I do."
"Then—" The priest closed his book. His voice took on the cadence of a conclusion. "If anyone present has cause to object to this union—"
"*We object.*"
The voice came from the back of the nave. Both voices, actually — arriving together, landing with the clean authority of people who have been working up to this entrance for some time and have chosen their moment carefully.
At the great archway of Notre Dame, backlit by the night sky behind them, stood Miraculous Ladybug and Cat Noir.
Ladybug's yo-yo was in her hand, already moving in a slow, prepared rotation. Her eyes went immediately to Manon — not to the Puppet Master, not to the Akumatized Person, but to the child underneath the costume — and what was in them was not hostility. It was something firmer and more specific than that.
"Manon." Her voice carried through the nave clearly. "This ends now. You're not old enough to get married. You know that."
Cat Noir was leaning against the doorframe with the posture of someone who has decided that a cathedral is a perfectly reasonable place to be comfortable. He surveyed the altar, the dress, the priest, Jaden's silver crown, and assembled his contribution to the intervention.
"Also," he added, in the tone of someone raising a genuinely helpful practical concern, "if this goes through, our handsome Prince here gets to spend the foreseeable future explaining this to a judge. Very romantic. Very complicated. Just something to consider."
In the front of the nave, at the altar, something moved across Jaden's face — a brief, involuntary flicker, there and gone. His legal analysis of Cat Noir's reasoning was swift and merciless and entirely internal.
*He wouldn't, actually. Coerced party. France has fairly clear statutes on the matter. Your grasp of the relevant code could use some work, Adrien.*
He kept this observation to himself.
The Puppet Master had gone very still.
The happiness that had been filling her face — bright and total and genuine — was still there, but something had moved into it. Something hot and possessive, rising fast, the way anger rises in people who have been interrupted at the exact moment they were most certain of what they had.
Her eyes moved from Ladybug to Cat Noir and back, and they were burning.
"You," she said. Her voice had dropped an octave from its fairy-tale register. It was the voice of a child who is furious in the way that children are furious — completely, without any of the modulation that adults learn to apply to strong feelings. "You two *pests.*"
The word came out like a verdict.
"*Destroy them.*"
In the pews, every puppet guest turned its head.
In the controlled, synchronized movement of things that have been waiting for a command, hundreds of hollow-eyed Parisians rose from their seats, and the sacred hall of Notre Dame de Paris prepared to become something considerably less sacred.