check yes juliet - Chapter 2

[clairelutra]

Preface

Rating:

Teen And Up Audiences

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Category:

F/M

Fandom:

Miraculous Ladybug

Relationship:

Ladybug/Chat Noir, ladybug & chat noir, Adrien/Marinette Cheng

Character:

Marinette Cheng | Ladybug, Adrien | Chat Noir, Nino (Miraculous Ladybug), Alya (Miraculous Ladybug)

Additional Tags:

Angst, marinette loves her crime-fighting partner and no one will ever convince me otherwise, Angst and Humor, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Irony, Identity Reveal, Fluff and Humor, Friendship

Language:

English

Stats:

Published: 2015-10-14 Updated: 2017-04-16 Words: 22,928 Chapters: 5/6

check yes juliet

by clairelutra

Chapter Two

Summary

He was never meant to hear it.

It was just a wry observation during a particularly smooth battle with an akuma, one she hadn’t even realized she’d voiced until her partner in crime stiffened beside her.

“If only asking out my crush was this easy.”

Chapter Notes

I am so, so, so flattered by the response to this fic. Thank you all, so, so much. <3

About ten people requested more, and more I have delivered.

Enjoy!

“Adrien. Adrien Agreste.”

The words refused to compute.

Chat Noir stood on the abandoned rooftop, seconds until he depowered ticking away, trying to process three little words.

Ladybug liked Adrien Agreste.

He was Adrien Agreste.

Which would imply-...

...

(That was where his brain-hamsters went on strike. This is too much, their little picket boards read, we demand a reasonable thought workload and better pensions.)

Chat restarted the thought.

Ladybug’s crush was named Adrien Agreste.

He was named Adrien Agreste.

Sometimes.

Usually.

Uh.

Plagg interrupted his mental blundering to suggest, quite reasonably, that he get off the roof, preferably not by falling over the edge in his shock. As difficult as Plagg could be sometimes, he generally did try to make sure Chat didn’t kill himself.

Chat got off the roof.

He staggered home in a daze, thoughts stumbling in circles like puppies chasing their tails. It wasn’t until he’d collapsed in his bed fully dressed (how had he gotten home, even?) that it finally sank in.

Ladybug liked him.

Ladybug liked him.

Oh god.

He wrapped his arms around his pillow and buried his face in it, blushing for the championship and wondering if he was having a heart attack.

Three hours later, to his mild surprise, he hadn’t died of... emotion (ecstasy, shock, embarrassment, shock, excitement, or shock, take your pick) but he had accepted that he wasn’t going to be getting any sleep tonight. He kept replaying Ladybug’s parting words in his mind, over and over and over and over, oscillating through joy and disbelief and bafflement and the horrible fear that he was wrong somehow.

(He had a cat’s sense of hearing as Chat Noir, and Ladybug had been speaking to be heard, but he still wondered. Anything that could make him feel like this he had to have misheard, right? Misunderstood? Was it really him that she liked, or someone else with his name? He’d wanted this so much for so long that it just didn’t seem possible that he was the one she liked.)

He had to tell her who he was. He had to.

---

(The next day, Nino demanded to know what happened after the third time he had to stop Adrien from walking into solid architectural structures in his distraction.

Adrien had no civilian-friend-safe answers to give, and proceeded to (attempt to) dodge Nino all day.

He was so out of it that he barely noticed bumping into Marinette. Marinette with the big blue eyes and soft pink lips and who looked (was) cute in a 'I would probably have had a hard time pronouncing words around you if I hadn’t already met the love of my life’ kind of way.

She noticed his vague apology and studied him, concerned. “Are you quite, um, o-okay, Adrien?”

He congratulated her on her nearly stutter-free sentence internally (because he wasn’t all that great with people, but even he knew that congratulating her on that aloud would be pretty rude).

“Head in the clouds,” he said. More specifically, his head was flying the fine line between cloud nine and hellish anxiety, but who needed to know that? “Sorry about that.”

He smiled at his classmate and she turned pink, blinking those big blue eyes up at him.

She abruptly stammered something completely incomprehensible (You can do it, Marinette! Don’t give in to the babble gods yet!) and bolted.

So cute, he thought, watching her go,)

---

“What if I was Adrien Agreste?”

Chat immediately kicked himself for asking, but it’s been two days since the revelation and he has, perhaps, gone just a little bit stir-crazy.

“What if you were what?” Ladybug shouted over the din of a nearby building collapsing under the assault of hundreds of telekinetically-controlled tools.

He leaped down next to her from his perch on a store awning. “Adrien Agreste.”

She stared at him for a good five seconds, blinking big blue eyes up at him (...deja vu) while the villain-of-the-week cackled maniacally and zoomed off to the next site of destruction. Then, suddenly, she burst out laughing.

Chat gave her an extremely unimpressed look.

She immediately clapped her hand over her mouth and gave him a sheepish, hidden smile. “Sorry.”

Chat let himself be warmed by the faintly worried glint in her eyes, and pressed on, “What if I was?”

A shadow fell over her expression, and she turned to look in the direction the akuma had gone. “...Come on, he’s getting away,” she evaded.

...Huh?

---

“Duck!”

He wasn’t really given a choice in the matter. His lady grabbed him by the scruff and forced him down next to her behind an air-conditioning unit. A good thing she did, too, because a volley of vicious-looking nails followed him close enough to clip one of his leather ears.

“You still haven’t answered my question,” he pointed out when the noise eased. He should drop it. He was trying to drop it, but his tongue wasn’t listening to him. It was listening to the burning curiosity she sparked when she straight-up refused to answer him.

She sighed, exasperated with an edge of something else he just can’t put his finger on. “What does it matter, Chat? I mean, obviously you’re not Adrien-”

He spluttered. “What do you mean, obviously?”

He was Adrien, the last time he checked.

“I-I mean- Adrien is- You are-” she hissed, floundering.

He narrowed his eyes in annoyance.

“He-he’s nice and sane and-” She gestured with her hands, rather obviously torn between trying not to give offense (too late) and defending her point. “And-...”

She made tiny starts of noises, opening and closing her mouth like a landed fish for several seconds, obviously searching for another suitable descriptor before taking a deep breath and spitting “Sane!” at him.

He gaped for a good three seconds, during which his lady carefully checked their battle situation.

“I’m-!” he started, loud in his pique.

She shut him up with a finger to his lips and a scowl.

“I’m sane!” he protested in a whisper-shout.

That got her to stop. She gave him a very flat look and raised her hands to her head, made ‘V’ shapes with her index and middle fingers, then pressed the tips to her scalp, almost in mockery of horns or-

Ears.

“Mostly sane,” he amended, because that actually was a good point. Then he reached out and pulled her wrists down, because said wrists were covered in bright red material and were probably visible from the other side of the air-conditioning unit.

“Kitty,” she said so seriously he almost expected the next words out of her mouth to be, ‘I’m sorry to say that your son has declared missing in action.’ (Too many war dramas, Adrien.) “We are hiding behind an air conditioner wearing red spandex and leather while we fight a man going on a super-powered rampage because he didn’t get a free ball-peen hammer with his twenty-seventh purchase at a hardware store. Nothing about this is sane.”

He has to concede the point.

He went back to his original one. “But if I was him...?”

The teasing faded from her eyes and she didn’t sigh so much as huff. “Look, you’re not, you never will be, and I don’t understand why you want to know so much. It won’t change anything. Please just drop it.”

She punctuated the request (order) with a sharp tug of her wrists, and he let go, frustration and hurt bubbling up in his chest, his throat.

“Now cover me so we can purify this akuma and go home,” she snapped, leaving their shelter.

He nearly, nearly let her go alone, but then he remembered the nails and followed her in anyway.

Like hell he would risk losing her for real because of a stupid fight.

---

Ladybug tossed the lucky cushion into the air, shouting, “Miraculous Cure!”

He had to try one last time. He had to. Hope and fear rose to a fever pitch in his chest.

Into the ensuing silence, he asked, “If I’m not Adrien, then who am I?”

She took a moment before answering, softly, “...You’re Chat.”

He closed the distance between them, knees shaking.

“And who else?” he said, stopping five feet from where she stood.

She turned from the dusky Paris skyline to face him, expression horribly blank.

“And who else?” he repeated, quieter, offering her the hand that wore his Miraculous and offered his trembling heart.

He saw her eyes focus on the ring and it’s two last remaining pads, and then she looked away, pain lining her eyes.

His heart plunged.

She turned back to the skyline, mouth tightening. “Look, Chat... Stop. Just... just drop it. Please.”

And there it was.

He’d been so, so happy to think that maybe, maybe, maybe Ladybug liked him. That maybe they knew each other out of the masks, that maybe they would be able to spend time together outside of battles and stakeouts for once, that maybe they could even be real friends--could date, if his luck had done a complete one-eighty overnight, maybe, maybe, maybe...

Now, he knew he’d never know.

He dropped his hand and looked away, feeling like there was something trying to eat him from the inside out. He could barely hear over the blood rushing in his ears, all of his hopes coming crashing down around his head.

He just didn’t understand why. It would make sense to know each other’s identities by now, wouldn’t it? It’d made sense, before, when she’d turned him down; they hadn’t known each other long, telling each other would have been a huge risk, but it’s been more than two years since then. Two years of one akuma a week, at the very least, and multiple akuma a day, sometimes, almost all of them fought together. Wasn’t that long enough to figure each other out?

Why don’t you trust me? he wanted to demand. Haven’t I proven myself to you over and over again? I thought we were friends!

Aren’t we friends?

...Was I reading us all wrong?

(There was a shock of fear lancing his heart--maybe she’d never tell him. Maybe when they come to the end of whatever this Paris-saving business was, she’ll cheer ‘mission accomplished’ with him for the last time, then turn on her heel and walk out of his life forever.

He wasn’t sure he could take that. He wasn’t sure if he could survive that.)

He looked back at her. Her face was twisted in shame and guilt and a tiny bit of anger.

The hurt, defensive, vindictive part of him said, good. The rest of him just screamed for him to fix it.

“Right,” he said, forcing a (hopefully) normal expression. “Well. Until next time, Ladybug.”

That wouldn’t fix it, but he didn’t know how to fix it. Running was the only option he could think of.

She only held his eye for a split second before she looked away again, folding her arms over her chest. “Yeah. Next time.”

He turned his body and made his leaden legs make the jump to the far roof, firmly telling himself that this wasn’t something to cry over as he leaped his way home.

A few tears slipped past his guard anyway.

Chapter End Notes

If the villain seemed a bit strange, please consider listening to this song.

Chapter three is written and awaiting editing while I work on homework, never fear!

(Also, watch Adrien and Marinette's canon interactions and tell me he doesn't think she's even a little bit cute. Go on. I dare you. :3c)

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