When you spend the first ten years of your life watching your mother die of the very same disease you spend the next seven years of your life battling, it tends to put you out a little. Adrien didn't have any delusions about it, really. His lungs were giving up, and sure he'd been on the transplant list for the past three years of his life - when he'd started to go really downhill - but he knew he was dying. He'd watched his father drag out Emilie's death with all of his greatest fortune behind him, but Adrien's mother had been ill, and suffering, and she had needed a machine to breathe for her, and another to suck out what she could not find the energy to cough up. That was not a life for Adrien. His father had about disowned him when it came out ("Father, no. I don't want it," Adrien had said, and Gabriel had tried to force him to, anyway, except the nurses had refused), but Adrien did not want the entire Agreste fortune struggling to keep him alive. Don't get him wrong - he loved living. He loved the wind in his hair and the view of Paris and all of the world that he would never get to see, he loved that this universe stretched and went on forever and he could spend every second of his life - whether it was seventeen years or seventy - trying to see all of it, and he wouldn't manage even a fraction.

But since he was going to die, he wanted to do it on his terms. Not in the middle of running away. You know? He'd face it standing, and like the man he'd never get to be, and with the same stubborn lift of the jaw that he saw in Ladybug, sometimes.

Ladybug.

Adrien lay very still in his hospital bed, but Plagg knew he was thinking about Ladybug, because his thumb twisted the ring on his right-hand ring finger, idly. Ladybug was out there, somewhere. He'd initially tried to return the ring to Master Fu, when he'd caught this cold and realised that it was bad; Master Fu had refused it. "There is only one Chat Noir, Adrien. Until Plagg is ready to select a different Chosen," and Plagg would never be ready, not until Adrien was still, and white, and cold, "I am afraid you have no other choice."

"Ladybug needs a partner who can protect her."

"I think you will find," Master Fu had reassured him, and closed his fingers around the ring, there, in his palm, "Ladybug is very capable of protecting herself."

And Adrien believed that. Really, he did. So he'd taken the ring with him.

"You want me to call her?" Plagg offered.

Adrien had thought about asking for her. Ladybug knew he was ill. Maybe not exactly what it was, but she knew. She'd been around the year before it got Really bad, before he got on the transplant list, so she had something to contrast it with - Chat Noir had just had the disease, he was just going to die of it, but it hadn't even felt real to him before three years ago. He hadn't been up to the top of the Eiffel Tower for years. Couldn't waste his breath on the climb.

Ladybug had promised to take him up there, you know, when it was 'time', because he loved that view. He loved this city almost more than life itself. He loved Paris, and the people here, and how much everybody tried. Protecting her - the city - and her people had been (was) one of the best things in his entire life, so far. Ladybug took his breath away (ha), but Paris… Paris constantly surprised him. If he had to choose one city to live in, if he had to choose this one place he would see in all of his life, if he had to pick this one spot - he would choose Paris. So it was a good thing it was Paris, he supposed.

Anyway. She'd promised to take him, and he had liked the idea of that, he'd liked thinking he would not die here, in a place like this, looking at this hospital ceiling, alone, with machines beeping beside him and nobody to look after Plagg. But he didn't know if he would last the trip, anymore. And Ladybug was probably at home somewhere, with her family, drinking warm drinks and laughing over some game of scrabble, being happy, with that little scrunch of her nose while she laughed, and he didn't want to interrupt that. Little old him.

No. His answer was no.

Adrien's eyes closed. He was so tired. It was hard to breathe. "Will you press the button?"

Plagg moved quietly to the head of Adrien's bed, to press on the nurse call button. There was something terrible in his throat. It was making it hard to not cry. Footsteps, and then the door to his very fancy, hotel-style, very empty hospital room opened, and the nurse must have popped her head in because he could smell the antiseptic of the hallway, which was full of air he wasn't meant to be breathing. The nurse stepped into the room. She shut the door behind her. He heard the seal.

"Sweetheart?" with his eyes closed like that, this nurse - he didn't know her name - wasn't sure he could hear her.

Adrien asked, with some strange waver in his voice (was he afraid? He wasn't sure - was he meant to be? He wanted Ladybug. He wanted to not be -), he asked, "Will you sit with me?"

His father was not coming in. Nathalie had come earlier in the week to drop off his outfit for his next modeling shoot - she either didn't sense the same thing Adrien did, that this was it, that this was all the time he had left, or she didn't care. He chose to believe the first one. It was nicer. When everything you could see and reach and feel was so awful, it was good, to choose the things that made the world a little nicer. He really believed that.

"My name is Francine," the nurse told him, so that he knew. She thought it mattered. He thought it mattered, too. There was a scrape of the ever-empty guest chair beside him, and then someone - Francine - caught up his hand, and Adrien cried his tears out until they were dry, and he complained to poor Francine, the nurse, who probably didn't care, and probably had other patients to get to, and probably had a whole life at home and kids and a family vacation coming up in June (he would never see June; he would never see his father or Ladybug or anyone ever again; the last thing he had seen was the ceiling, and he could not open his eyes again) -

He complained, "I'm scared."

Francine patted his hair back. If he tried very hard, he could almost pretend it was Ladybug. "I know, sweetheart. I know. Does it hurt anywhere? Do you want me to increase your morphine?"

It was hard to breathe.

Was this what dying felt like? He was getting light-headed. What if he died by mistake. What if he didn't see it coming, what if he wasn't done thinking yet, what if it just came and claimed him in the middle of a sen-

A great, vast black.

It felt empty.

Not like falling, really. Just black, and cold. Like nothing was the space, there, starting at his chest - the space he filled was nothing, and everything was the space around him, and he did not know how to reach it. How do you reach when you are nothing?

What do you reach for when the space around you is everything?

Adrien woke up.

Understandably enough, this came as something of a shock to him. It felt like he'd been hit by a truck - but a very healthy truck. If someone was ever hit by an ambulance, this was what he imagined it would feel like. Like it would have been better not to have been hit in the first place, but thank goodness there was an ambulance there!

His chest felt light, somehow. He drew a breath inward. It came easily. There was no death rattle. He opened his eyes. The room was filled with sunlight. The curtains were open. At the foot of his bed, hanging like a banner, someone had strung up the word CONGRATULATIONS in gaudy, glittery red letters. The bed was soft beneath him. Adrien could breathe so easily it almost made him want to cry.

"A pair of lungs came in," Plagg said, and Adrien could tell the kwami was being deliberately off-hand about it - "What did I tell you? These things always work out, and I never get my sympathy camembert!"

That was not what Plagg had told him at all. Chat Noir did not have a great track record with good luck. Usually he got the opposite. Always, he got the opposite. They had been facing this together.

Adrien laughed. It wheezed out of him. It was free, and light, and he wondered if this was what his laughter really sounded like, when he wasn't choking on the same breath. Like windchimes. Adrien loved it. He loved it.

"You need to keep your body from rejecting them. There are meds you need to take. But you beat it, kid."

Adrien filled these lungs all the way up with air, a huge gulp of it, this air, this Paris, this world. It came, shaking, out of him.

Plagg asked, "So what are you going to do with the rest of your life?"

A/N: I have a problem. I just like to angst this child. So much. Please leave a review!