check yes juliet - Chapter 3

[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 Three

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

Rating has been upped to T for Marinette's implied 'teenage thoughts.'

Marinette prepared herself for bed with mechanical detachment.

If she didn’t think about it, she’d be... not fine, but...

Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it...

She made it all the way into her bed without thinking much at all, and then, suddenly, there was nothing left to keep her thoughts away.

Her mind went to Chat’s face as he’d left as though magnetized. There had been pink lining his eyes, where his mask ended, she remembered suddenly, and she rolled onto her stomach to hide the hitching sob that clutched at her throat.

She knew she’d said what she had to to protect herself, but now she was wondering if the consequences of taking it back could possibly hurt as badly as this did. She was finding that hard to believe at the moment. She couldn’t breathe for how much this hurt.

‘I’m sorry,’ she mouthed into her pillow, tasting cotton and fabric softener. Futile, silent apologies to the absent and uncaring, potent as trees falling in forests and drops of water in a desert. ‘I’m so, so, so sorry.’

She felt Tikki settle at her neck and start to stroke her nape.

“Would it really be so bad, letting Chat Noir know who you are?” the kwami asked gently, softly.

Marinette caught a single breath and whispered, “Yes.”

It wasn’t the whole answer, not even close, but the whole answer was long and complicated and filled with truths Marinette didn’t want to face. It was easier to lie, to decomplicate, to say that she didn’t want Chat Noir anywhere in her life that didn’t involve akuma.

Tikki accepted her answer with a little hum, and continued to stroke Marinette’s nape until she cried herself to sleep.

---

(The next morning, Alya took one look at Marinette’s splotchy, makeup-free face and uncoordinated clothing and wrapped her in a soft hug that lasted until the teacher began her lecture.

Pulling back at last, Marinette noticed that Adrien hadn’t come today. Sick, maybe. He’s looked pretty dazed these past few days.

Marinette tried not to be relieved.)

---

Marinette accepted her cup from the barista and slipped through the light crowd to the counter at the back for her single packet of sugar.

She normally didn’t need the sugar, but she normally didn’t get coffee, either. She hadn’t been sleeping well these past few days, so she needed it if she wanted to be of any use during these weekly study sessions Alya had arranged.

In the midst of pouring the packet into her cup, her eye caught on one of the open refrigerated boxes that held dairy creamers and she paused. ‘Organic All-Natural Dairy Creamer,’ the dark green lettering read. Chat liked that one, she remembered.

(Creamer cup hanging loosely from his lips as he intently watched the window where the akuma had been last seen, looking for all the world like he was watching a mouse-hole, and he’d jumped about a foot in the air when she’d greeted him, shoving the cup into his pocket with a speed that suggested embarrassment and giving her an open, welcoming grin.)

She shook off the memory, a sharp pang of longing in her chest, and went back to guard their chosen table, as her duties as the first person to arrive dictated.

---

It didn’t take Alya long to show up, and, about five minutes after her, Adrien and Nino arrived together.

They went to get their drinks and trickled back to where she’d spread their study materials over the table, drinks in hands.

Alya, the caffeine addict, got a double shot of espresso, tempered into a drinkable state by a great deal of sugar and no cream. Nino, who’d hated both tea and coffee for as long as Marinette could remember, came back with peppermint hot chocolate. Adrien sat down last, with a sixteen-ounce monstrosity of a drink that looked to contain caramel, copious amounts of whipped cream, and what may, possibly, have been coffee.

The study session began uneventfully.

A few questions in, Adrien took a small sip of his drink, which he seemed to have been attempting to stir the whipped cream into, and frowned elegantly. He quietly excused himself, and returned a minute later with a handful of sugar packets and cups of Chat’s favorite creamer. He emptied them all into his drink and stirred.

About ten minutes later, he repeated the performance, frowning, excusing himself, getting sugar and creamer, and dumping all of them into his drink.

The third time it happened, right as Adrien was preparing to pour yet another cup of creamer into his drink, Nino snatched it out from under Adrien’s nose and took a sip. (Marinette may or may not have felt a little bit jealous. Indirect kiss!)

And promptly spit it back out again.

“Dude,” Nino groaned through a coughing fit. “I know you like coffee with your cream and sugar, but that’s not even a drink! That’s a sugar coma!”

Alya leaned over and thumped him on the back, snickering quietly.

Adrien, get this, Adrien pouted. Marinette bit down on her instinctual squee as Adrien tipped the cup of creamer into his mouth for lack of over-sugared drink to put it into.

“I asked for an extra shot of espresso, and now it tastes bad,“ he grumbled, letting the plastic cup dangle from his lips.

He caught her eye and quickly removed the empty cup from his mouth, giving her a tired smile.

Marinette’s glee faded, even as her face burned with a blush, swallowed by the sinking feeling of recognition in her stomach.

But no. Adrien being Chat Noir would be ridiculous, right?

Right?

---

(Their teamwork is stilted after that horrible evening, stiff where it should jell and silent where there should be banter, and that’s her fault, she knows.

She knows, she knows, she knows that she did the right thing in keeping their identities secret. She just wishes that doing ‘the right thing’ didn’t feel so much like losing her best friend.)

---

“No, no! Get this!” Alya was literally vibrating in excitement, and Marinette wondered if it was the third or fourth cup of coffee that did her in. “I’ve figured out who Chat Noir is!”

Marinette smothered a groan and slumped in her floral-iron seat. She’s heard this theory from too many people lately, and by the first time she heard it, she’d heard it one too many times.

“Aha?” said Nino, pulling his head out of his textbook. “Do tell!”

“The secret identity of our one and only Chat Noir is...” Alya trailed off, circling her pointer finger by her head and clearly enjoying the theater of the whole thing.

Marinette just wanted her to get it over with so they could go back to studying English, like they were supposed to be doing.

“Is...?” Nino prompted, grinning.

“Is Adrien Agreste!” Alya proclaimed, swiveling her stray pointer finger to point directly at the poor, unsuspecting boy directly across the iron-floral table from her.

Adrien stiffened, which Marinette just had time to note was a strange reaction to such a wild accusation before he said, “That’s a little far-fetched, don’t you think? I mean, I’m about as likely to be Chat Noir as Marinette is to be Ladybug.”

He’d timed it exactly so Marinette was in the midst of swallowing a gulp of her drink (her regular this time--Lemon Chai, no milk, no sugar), and when her stomach tightened in shock, so did some of her other organs.

She choked violently, her airways pushing tea into places tea should definitely not go, including, embarrassingly, out of her nose.

She slapped her sleeve over her mouth, scrabbling blindly for a napkin, trying to breathe through the hacking coughs.

She felt someone thump her back, and press the sought-after napkins to her face. She accepted the help, figuring Alya had taken pity on her--no, wait. That was Alya leaving the table to get more napkins, and Nino was across from her, looking amused but for the worried crease between his brows, which left...

Adrien smiled sheepishly down at her. “Sorry, I could have timed that better.”

She just stared, because the sun caught his hair like a halo and limned his features in gold and shadow, and she desperately wanted to capture the moment, to store the look he was giving her in the recesses of her soul, because she’s never seen anything so beautiful in her life.

(That was a lie; the most beautiful sight she’d ever seen was her friends and family, alive and well after twenty-four awful hours of believing they were dead, but that wasn’t the kind of beautiful she longed to capture in pencil and paper, and this... this was.)

“Y-yeah,” she said, because she’s long forgotten the entire conversation, if there ever even was one, and agreeing seemed like a good plan. Tea was stinging her nose and her entire face felt warm and she’d just completely humiliated herself in front of her crush, but it was worth it, to see that.

Adrien pulled back and grinned bashfully, rubbing the back of his head in awkward apology.

A pose, an expression she had seen hundreds of times before on another beautiful boy, and Marinette looked away immediately, refusing to see any more similarities.

As likely to be Chat Noir as she was to be Ladybug, huh...

---

(She feels like she needs an apology from him. For pushing so hard, for not letting it go, for letting her refusal affect their teamwork, she feels like she needs acknowledgement for those things.

But she can see that she has apologies to give too, for pushing him away, for not letting him in, for speaking carelessly and speaking harshly; these are things she needs to atone for as well.)

---

“I’m going to get another drink,” said Adrien, getting up and stretching. “Does anyone want anything?”

Marinette refused on principal to watch him stretch, because he did it so much like Chat (one arm behind his head and one eye shut tighter than the other) it was making her go just a little bit crazy.

Instead, she watched the seat of his skinny jeans, because that was a sight worth going crazy over.

“I’m good,” said Nino, snickering. “But Marinette looks kind of thirsty.”

Adrien started to look down at her and Marinette yanked her eyes away from his backside in a hurry. “Do you want water, or something else?”

“W-water’s good!” Marinette squeaked, guilty heart thumping. Thirsty...?

He smiled at her in a way that made her glad she was already sitting down and walked into the coffee shop, denim clinging deliciously to his rear.

“Nino,” Alya hissed, slapping the boy’s arm as soon as Adrien was out of easy hearing range. Her reproach probably would have worked better if she didn’t look like she was trying not to laugh while she gave it.

“...I cannot believe he didn’t get that!” Nino lamented in an undertone, ignoring the slap. “He was home-schooled for fourteen years with nothing to do but surf the web! How did he not get that?”

“Get what?” Marinette questioned, focus restored now that Adrien and his skinny jeans were safely out of her line of sight.

Nino and Alya traded wide-eyed looks.

“Nothing,” said Alya, a little too quickly. “Let’s move on. Have we done page 193 yet?”

Adrien walked back to their table about five minutes later, carrying another caramel latte and a little cup of water. Before he sat down, he glanced passingly at Alya and Nino (both bent over Nino’s textbook), then he leaned over her and set the water in front of her.

Helooked at her, smirked a sly little knowing smirk, and (she could swear the shadows looked like Chat’s mask) he winked.

She sank in her seat, flustered and mortified.

He’d caught her.

And still Marinette wanted to crawl into his lap about as much as she wanted to sink through the prettily-paved flagstones. She stared at the water he’d helpfully delivered to her seat and contemplated pouring it over her head. A nice cold shower to counter the heat of shame (among other things).

Thirsty, she thought faintly. Right.

---

(Being at odds with him feels like having her wings clipped, like walking a tightrope without a safety net, like swimming in quicksand, and she watches his back, because he hasn’t turned to her with a joke or a line in three weeks and she’s drowning. The line of his shoulders is taut, tense, hurting in his leather and she did that and living like this is making her see just how empty her life is without him, just how much she relies on him to get her through her day.

“I’m sorry,” she whisperers into the chasm between them, finally unable to take the silence any longer.

For the first time in what feels like a lifetime. he looks at her, really looks at her, and, for the first time in what feels like a lifetime, she’s inhaling, breathing, almost alive once again.

“I think I hurt you, and I’m so, so, so sorry,” she says quietly, words that should have been said weeks ago tumbling out her mouth like a landslide. “I never meant to say what I said, and I’d take it all back if I could. Please... I love you so much, and there’s no one I’d rather do this with. Please, please forgive me.“ Her voice catches on the last words, eyes prickling because she doesn’t know what she’ll do if he doesn’t.

He turns to face her fully, surprised, and her heart balances on a knife’s edge.

He tries to speak once, twice, then comes out with, “Yeah. Yes. I mean...”He drops his eyes and laughs at himself, and she fights back tears of relief.

He sighs and speaks again. “I’m sorry too.”

She blinks.

“You didn’t want... for us to... you didn’t want to for us to reveal our identities to each other, and I should’ve respected that. So, I’m sorry.”

That’s much more than she ever expected from him, though perhaps she should’ve. He’s always pretty careful and responsible when it comes to their relationship. She smiles, sob caught behind her teeth, and stumbles forward.

She crashes into him for a hug, and he catches her, holds her like she’s stumbled and needs righting. She nudges past that defense and slides her arms around his torso, resting her cheek on his shoulder.

She can feel him hesitate, breath caught, but, after a few seconds, he reciprocates, and she remembers why she’s only ever hugged him three times before.

His skin is almost fever-warm where she can feel it; hard planes of muscle under the leather solid against her own; his gentle hands smooth over her back; his scent (leather and sweat and faint cologne and Chat) pools in her belly and melts down her spine and makes her knees weak with the taste of it on the back of her tongue.

It’s safe, here in his arms, safe in a way that feels all too much like home, feels dangerously like someplace she never wants to leave, ever. It’s a siren song of every smile he’s ever given her, every fight he’s had her back, every rushed conversation shared weaving through back-alleys and over rooftops, a hundred little things she suddenly realizes she doesn’t know how to live without anymore.

She buries herself in that comfort, then pulls back and smiles up at him, so that she can go back to pretending her traitorous, tell-tale heart doesn’t beat love you, love you, love you, love you over and over and over again for him.

He smiles back, red under the mask.

They aren’t perfectly synced after that (she won’t tell him why she won’t reveal her identity and he won’t tell her why it matters so much; an impasse), but they’re so much better that she could cry.

She hasn’t lost him yet.)

---

“Ah,” said Adrien, leaning over. “You’ve got something...”

Marinette made a questioning noise, turning her head to look at her crush.

He reached out and wiped something off of her cheek with long, cool fingers.

Marinette froze, face hot and stomach tying itself in hundreds of thrilled little knots.

Then he hesitated, met her eye. She had just enough time to wonder at the spark in his glance, and then he and then licked his finger, pink tongue pressed against the digit with mischief lurking around the corners of his mouth in a very dangerously familiar sort of way-

-and, suddenly, all Marinette could see was Chat.

And, humiliatingly, it only made the heat that had blossomed under her skin burn hotter.

He hummed, running his tongue over his bottom lip in a highly suggestive way and giving her a self-satisfied little smirk, apparently oblivious to both Alya and Nino choking on air behind him.

It was at that point that Marinette had to break eye contact, or risk doing something awful, like moan or whimper, or, worse, actually say Chat’s name.

Which was ridiculous, she thought, rubbing her thighs together futilely, face burning brighter than the sun, because Adrien. couldn’t. be. Chat. Noir.

---

(He couldn’t be Chat Noir because she knew Chat Noir. She knew him, and she was confident she could pick him out of a lineup, Miraculous activated or not.

In her weaker moments, she imagined what Chat might be doing elsewhere in the city, imagined what he might do with his days off.

Imagined a beautiful boy walking in on one of her groups’ study sessions, swaggering up to the counter and flirting hopelessly with the pretty barista, who’d give him the time of day more for his dangerously beautiful smile than his lame lines.

Imagined her lovable dork of a partner playing video games until the sun came up and going to school half-asleep, exhaustion-mussed and satisfied, getting teased by his friends for his state of alertness.

Imagined her diamond in the rough, her street cat with a heart of gold, her champion incognito roaming the streets after dark, or maybe just roaming the library, looking for a fight or simply looking, sating his curiosity however it pleased him.

Adrien couldn’t be Chat Noir because he wasn’t any of those boys, and it put road-tacks under Marinette’s heart to think she might not know her partner even that well.)

---

It was just her and Adrien the day the secret came out, and Marinette thanked her lucky stars for that.

It was a stupid, fumbling gaff on her part. Adrien asked her to get a textbook and, in reaching for the nearest bag, she’d picked up and opened his instead of hers.

“Did you bring me cheese?” a tiny, sleepy voice asked her from inside the bag when she opened it. A pair of bright, neon-green eyes blinked open, so luminescent they had to be glowing.

“Plagg!” Adrien yelped.

“Oops,” said the voice. “You’re not Adrien.”

The voice belonged to a little creature about the size and rough shape of Tikki, but colored solid black and had conical ears, like a cat.

A black cat.

Le Chat Noir.

No way she could really deny it now.

“Er,” Adrien said, drawing her attention back to him. His eyes were wide, a comically panicked look on his face. “That-That is... um.”

“A kwami, right?” Marinette interrupted, taking pity on him. How could one even try to explain away the existence of a kwami?

One couldn’t, that’s how.

“Uh,” said Adrien, more baffled than panicked now. “Ye-es. Er. How did you know that?”

Well. The cat was out of the bag now, she guessed.

She zipped Adrien’s bag shut over the face of the little kwami (”Hey!”), and pulled the purse containing Tikki into her lap and opened it.

“Hi,” said her kwami, shyly.

“...Hi- Ladybug?!”

Marinette snapped the purse shut before any of the coffee shop patrons who’d looked over at Adrien’s outburst could see the bright red fairy. Then she waved to Adrien, a painful kind of smile on her mouth. She couldn’t look him in the eye. “Hi, kitty.”

He opened his mouth and shut it again without saying anything once or twice, before coming out with, “Wow.”

She tried to laugh, but her chest was panicking-fight-or-flight-response constricted, and she couldn’t put any breath behind it.

“Wow,” he said again, going slowly from baffled to thoughtful. Then, he brought his fist to his forehead with a gentle thump. “I can’t believe I didn’t see it.”

“I can,” Marinette admitted softly. Because, really, who would look at clumsy, shy, emotional Marinette and see the city’s savior?

He looked at her from beneath his fist. “Your eyes,” he said, seemingly out of the blue.

“What?”

“Your eyes,” he repeated. “They don’t change.”

She blinked the eyes in question. “Lots of people have blue eyes, Ch- Adrien.”

“No, I mean... your...” He waved a vague gesture at her, then appeared to give up with a little huff. “They don’t change.”

They sat in silence for a minute, absorbing the revelation.

“Listen,” Adrien (Chat) started hesitantly. “I know... I know you didn’t want us to meet out of saving the city...” He took a breath, looking like he was struggling with something. “We don’t... We don’t have to have anything to do with each other in our civilian lives, if you don’t want us to.”

Marinette’s eyes snapped to his face in surprise, shocked by his selfless consideration.

Her heart whispered, take it, and stay safe, and screamed, no, don’t let him go in the same moment, and Marinette was caught between for as long as it took her to meet her partner’s eye.

It had hurt him to say that, it was obvious, but he wasn’t taking it back and he’d stand by her word, she knew, and that made her decision faster than anything else could. She didn’t think she was mentally or physically capable of pushing him away more than she already had.

“No,” she said, heart aching and quailing and trying to beat its way out of her mouth. “Stay. It was the finding out part that I was worried about.”

A little white lie, but she didn’t think he could accept her answer without it.

He slumped in his seat, laughing raggedly in relief, smile tremulous around the edges. (You did that, read the knife that slid between her ribs.) He offered his hand across the floral-iron table and said, “Friends?”

It was the end of an era and the beginning of another and it felt like the beginning of the end to Marinette, but she smiled anyway and took his hand and whispered, “Yes.”

Chapter End Notes

(okay but this chapter is basically Adrien discovering he can make Sweet Ingenue Marinette blush and Chat taking it and running with it)

One last part to go!

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