![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clairelutraPreface
daydream
In the end, it was an accident, and yet still a culmination of evidence that brought Ladybug and Marinette’s shared identity to light for him.
A year and a half or so of distant acquaintanceship and then six months of friendship that got closer all the time and…
That Marinette disappeared during every akuma attack was easy enough to brush off. That Ladybug held the same fashion dreams and idols as the ones Marinette sighed over could have been pure coincidence. That Marinette rolled her eyes and grumbled, what is with that joke? when he gave her and Ladybug the same punchline was suspicious, but ultimately not particularly incriminating.
It was a combination of things: it was the ease and confidence and kindness with which Marinette delivered her speeches that put him in mind of Ladybug; it was Ladybug gushing about a video game that Marinette had been excited about for weeks; it was the lingering question of why Marinette’s seemingly boundless courage and valor only failed in the face of attempting to defeat akuma, never before or after, that made him start to wonder.
By the time he uncovered her kwami in her bag while trying to retrieve her homework for her, he’d been almost certain of it.
It was still kind of a shock, though, he wouldn’t lie.
“M-meow?” tried the red-and-black creature staring up at him from the void of Marinette’s backpack, blinking huge blue eyes up at him in a way that was bizarrely reminiscent of Ladybug at her most adorably confused. The gesture was far more alien than Ladybug’s, but the body language was all there in the tiny form, from the half-raised nubbly limbs to the hunch of its not-shoulders to the slight tilt of its (her?) head.
The meow was doubly ridiculous because the creature in front of him was very obviously modeled off of a ladybug.
Adrien knew the cat one, and he was pretty sure Plagg would never sink to the indignity of fake meowing.
“Uh, meow?” he asked, flabbergasted and not sure if he was expressing his surprise of her choice of coverup or attempting to converse on her level.
“…Meeeeeow,” replied the little red kwami, sounding rather unsure of that herself.
“Adrien?” Marinette called from the next room over. “Did you find it?”
Boy and kwami lost another few seconds gaping at one another, then the little not-cat-not-ladybug dove into the bag and retrieved Marinette’s study materials, handing them over to Adrien with a kind, if slightly awkward smile.
Ladybug.
That was Ladybug’s kwami.
So it was more than likely that what he had in his hand was Ladybug’s homework.
“Adrien?”
Holy shit.
“G-got it,” he stammered, staring at the miniature companion of one of his best friends.
Two of his best friends.
Who, together, were actually only one of his best friends.
Holy shit.
Sure, he’d suspected it, but to have those suspicions confirmed like this…
Oh.
Oh, wow.
It was really her.
He shook himself out of it, smiling down at the kwami whose name he’d only heard mentioned in passing. “Thank you… Tikki?”
Tikki’s kind smile took on a sheepish tilt. “Meow.”
“Pffffft,” Adrien said, and then gently zipped the bag shut again.
Okay, but was it really her?
He couldn’t help but wonder as he chased Ladybug over the rooftops, more focused on her lithe form than on scanning the city streets for possible dangers.
Sure, they were ridiculously similar, but that could all just be a coincidence… right?
Tikki could have just been an exam-stress-induced dream — he figured trying to check again to see if she really existed would probably just be a violation of Marinette’s privacy, no matter what he found.
(And that was another thing: Ladybug didn’t want him to know.
It was an accident that he’d found out, but she didn’t want him to know, and the guilt of his misbegotten information was making him consider and reconsider and re-reconsider the morality of trying to confirm it.
If she didn’t want him to know, then the less he knew, the better, right?
But if he knew then he could probably stop thinking about it so much, and then it would probably be a lot less likely that he’d burst out with a oh my god are you Ladybug? if startled badly enough.
(He’d almost said that to Nino that morning because Nino had patted his shoulder without warning, and Adrien was starting to worry about what would happen when Marinette inevitably sneaked up on him one day.)
It was a moral conundrum, and, for what felt like the first time in ages, he didn’t know what would make Ladybug happier. It felt like any attempt to confess where he’d gone wrong would result in Ladybug pulling away — merely uncomfortable at best, and her trust in him irrevocably broken at worst.)
“Something on your mind, kitty?”
“Are you—” burst out of him, with Chat only managing to catch the truly incriminating tail end of that question by a hair’s breadth, clapping his hands over his mouth and almost physically swallowing it back down.
Ladybug blinked, bemused amusement twitching the corners of her mouth. “What?”
She was standing at ease, a hand rested on her hip and her feet a little further than a shoulder width apart — a classic superhero pose that Marinette sometimes fell into when she was gathering her courage for something.
But then, Marinette could just be copying Ladybug, local superheroine, for the confidence boost, right? Just because the body language was similar didn’t necessarily mean…
“—excited?” he finished belatedly, sheepishly. Shoot, that was close.
Ladybug quirked a patient eyebrow, still amused. “For what?”
“Errr… Paris Fashion Week?” Chat tried, pulling his hands away from his mouth with a wince.
He’d been hearing about it pretty much daily from the fashion-minded people in his life for the past week, so it was only logical that it’d be the first thing that sprang to mind; his fellow models were feeling the strain, his father had been both more present and busier than ever, and Marinette’s excitement was so contagious it probably could’ve made flowers grow.
Ladybug, whether or not she was Marinette, was also one of those fashion-minded people, and it showed on her face. He could practically see the second his odd behavior faded from her mind, vanishing in the face of the glorious reality of the best and brightest of the world’s designers gathering for a week-long showcase.
The way her smile dawned was unfairly enchanting.
He tried not to melt too obviously in the face of it, in the face of the light in her eyes as she just glowed at him for a moment before bursting out with, “Did you know Giovanni is going to be there?”
Chat did, in fact, know that Giovanni was going to be there, because Marinette had texted him at three A.M. last Saturday in all caps about the press conference where it was announced.
(Oh, it’s her, sang his lovesick heart.)
Ladybug didn’t wait for a reply. “And Gabriel, and Shah Maxi, and Feri Tristan, and oh. My. Gosh!!”
Chat’s feline ears jerked at the sudden pitched squeal while he tried to ignore the even more sudden, overwhelming feeling of déjà vu.
He’d heard those exact words, at that exact pitch, with that exact infectious excitement no less than three times since the announcements.
None of those previous three times had been from Ladybug.
(Oh, it’s her.)
“So you are excited,” he said, leaning on his staff as his facial muscles were infected by the sheer joy bursting out of her like summer fireworks.
She bit her lip at him, bubbling noises of glee spilling into the air, and then did the dorkiest, cutest, most ridiculous little wriggle he’d ever seen — a little motion that wasn’t a dance so much as it was a shimmy of anticipatory delight.
“I can’t wait!”
Chat swallowed hard, stomach all tied up in awed little knots.
It was definitely the dorkiest, cutest, most ridiculous dance he’d ever seen, but this wasn’t the first time he’d seen it, not by a long shot.
Not when he’d been friends with Marinette Dupain-Cheng for as long as he had.
Oh, it’s her.
And the surer he was of this information, the harder it was to keep his hands (his eyes, his thoughts) off her.
Not in any particularly creepy way, but now he knew that Ladybug spent her days wearing soft cardigans, letting her hair tangle in the breeze, gushing over pictures of kittens and pwning every single ass in video game tournaments. He knew that sometimes she turned up to class with pencil graphite smudged on her cheeks from where she’d fallen asleep on her designs, and that she wrinkled her nose when she tried to drink carbonated drinks, and that she loved sewing so much that, at this point, her room was more fabric than furniture.
(And now he knew that Marinette was the bravest person he’d ever met, that she was someone he could trust with his heart and his secrets and his life, that she’d shown him that trust — and freedom and balance and teamwork and validation and friendship besides — and that was just as bad.)
It had already been hard to resist touching Marinette when she’d just been a distressingly attractive friend, but now he knew that it was Ladybug tipping pale, nearly bare shoulders in his direction when he came to stand next to her and smiling at him from across the cafe table and giggling over his stupid jokes like that, it became less of a question of resistance and more of a question of whether he’d catch himself reaching for her before or after she noticed.
It was most definitely after, this time.
Especially because he didn’t notice until the sinfully soft material of her off-the-shoulder sweater was bunching between her bicep and his hand as he leaned into her to see whatever she was planning to take home from this trip to the library.
He pretended not to notice the way she sucked a breath in through her teeth, and continued to read over her shoulder. “…Business Insider?”
“I… uh,” she stammered, just breathless enough to make his pulse falter, and then cleared her throat. “I-I mean yeah. If I’m going to run my own company someday, I gotta know this, right?”
“Ah-ha,” said Adrien, who’d honestly never thought about it before but found himself interested despite that. His life plan involved getting a PhD in physics and either going into teaching or science. What one would need to know to run a company had never really crossed his mind before. “Very smart.”
She grinned a very Ladybug grin up at him. “Right?”
Adrien swallowed his pulse back down and removed his hand from her person before he could do something really stupid, like draw her into his arms and bury his nose in her hair. “So you won’t need to marry rich after all. Whatever shall I do with my future now?”
He told himself he was imagining her blush as she scratched behind her ear and giggled, bubbly bright. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I mean, I’ll still need starting funds, right?”
Placing a hand over his heart, he rolled his shoulders a little and tried to tell himself he wasn’t preening, finding himself turning towards her and trying to get into her line of sight without conscious thought. “Ouch! Use me, you’re planning to use me! For business opportunities!”
She was watching him so warmly he couldn’t help but lean in, trying (and probably failing) to belatedly cover it up with a droll remark of, “You, mademoiselle, are cold as ice.”
“Hmm…” She let her eyes trail the whole length of him, a kind of lazy, curious heat in her gaze that left every inch of him clamoring for more, then reached out a single finger and pushed him back out of her pathway to the library’s checkout desk, purring, “I’m sure I could make it worth your while.”
The quiet murmur shimmered between his ears like the lingering notes of a brass gong as she passed him by, apparently unaware that she’d just completely blown his mind.
Holy shit.
That was his other problem: Marinette (or Ladybug, or whatever she was calling herself right now) was a flirt.
Or, at the very least, she flirted with him.
With both Chat-him and Adrien-him, which led him to believe it was more than just him, but whoever she decided to turn her attention to, she was good at it.
He didn’t even think she was quite aware of it, but as soon as she got over her freudian slippery slope of a stutter problem, she was smoother than cream. Adrien wasn’t sure he’d ever quite recovered from the moment Marinette had done that… stupidly attractive chair-spin-thing and flashed him a cocky smirk that made his blood run hot and cold and fast, her sultry You going my way, hot stuff? making his skin heat from collar to hairline.
(And that was before he’d known it was her. If she did that to him now…
He felt like the breath had been knocked out of him just thinking about it.)
And this was enough of a problem for his cardiac health all on its own, but the bigger issue was that he was much more used to dealing with that flirtatiousness as Chat.
Which meant that all his automatic responses were Chat’s automatic responses.
Which meant that it was really only a matter of time before his brain took her poking his chest as close enough to her ringing his bell, and told him to catch her hand and kiss it.
Or, at least, that was what he thought would happen.
Somehow, he didn’t manage to account for Marinette being so cute he just couldn’t help himself.
His life felt like a run of clichés sometimes (from the missing mom to the distant dad to the sudden superhero occupation that put him in the perfect position to fall unrequitedly head over heels for the most amazing person he’d ever met), but running headlong into Marinette, who was running in the opposite direction while holding a stack of papers, felt like it might be taking the cake.
It was like something out of a movie. The shower of papers was picture perfect, fluttering in the warm spring breeze sneaking in through the high window, sunlight painting golden patterns on the tile. It was him and her, alone and truant, in one of the most beautiful, deserted parts of the school.
It was like something out of a movie, except for the loud, angry yell Marinette emitted on contact.
“You—!! Do you know just how long it took me to—?!” she snarled, and then choked, eyes going wide as the papers fell far enough to give them a clear view of one another. “…Oh. Adrien. Hi.”
She was a mess — hair tangled, mascara smeared around her eyes raccoon-style, covered in the remains of what was doubtlessly hours of hard sorting work, obviously sleep-deprived and understandably enraged — and the way she looked from him to the corridor to the mess of her papers made everything in him kind of just… cave.
He got up to help her collect the papers, and she sighed.
“And the award for most romantic hallway collision goes to…”
Just like that, he was biting down laughter, stooping to collect a sheet of what was probably science class data, aching from his heart to his bones for a reason he couldn’t quite define.
“Nice butt, though.”
…What.
Marinette was still sprawled on the floor, looking tired and defeated from head to toe except for her laughing, mischievous eyes, and Adrien thought, oh.
Oh no.
It knocked the breath out of his lungs when their hands brushed as he gave the papers back — and they brushed a lot, seeing as Marinette’s fine motor control seemed to have dissipated with the rest of her composure. She laughed with him about it, free and easy and lighting up when he smiled for her and…
“Sorry you had to see me like this,” she sighed as she accepted the last of the papers, a delicate flush on her cheeks and a defeated twist to her lips. “Today was… tough.”
And, really, after all that, kissing her knuckles was better than kissing her mouth, which was what he really wanted to do.
(Kiss her mouth and push her back against the wall and protect her from the world, finger-comb the tangles from her hair and tell her silly jokes until she relaxed, hold her until she fell asleep in his arms and—)
(He wasn’t sure if it was adoration or admiration or just plain awe that he was feeling, but the sight of her laughing like that had reached a fist into his chest and squeezed his heart until it hurt.)
Her free hand was soft against his fencing callouses as he caught it, her knuckles warm against his lips as he kissed them, her blue eyes endless as he looked up and said, “You’re always beautiful, princess.”
Those blue eyes widened, glowing in reflected sunlight, the tumble of her messy hair catching glints of it, the flush on her cheeks deepening so sweetly he craved.
Unheeded, the breeze toyed with their clothing, delivering them the chatter of students in the far off courtyard and the smell of new greenery.
The moment was absolutely perfect, until they both registered the sound of Marinette’s papers falling to the ground all over again.
Adrien jerked back, startled, and then blinked bemusedly at the sprawl of documents.
“…Do you want any help?”
One very red-faced heroine hung her head and nodded.
Which wasn’t to say that his Chatisms didn’t bite him in the ass in other ways.
While not the most tactile person Adrien knew (that title went to Nino), Ladybug never exactly shied away from casual touch. She instigated it more often than not now, actually — and the longer they were partners, the more comfortable she seemed to be with him, and the more she touched him.
Finding a shoulder rested against his during a long stakeout was no longer a surprise, nor were knuckles bumping against his bicep as she passed him by, or feet coming to rest in his lap when they lounged together after long patrols. Chin scratches and nose boops were gestures of affection, shoulder bumps and gentle elbowing were offers of support, and taps and nudges to get his attention were simply unthinking.
On the flip side, she only ever swatted him away from the most overt of flirtations now — which meant he was free to drape an arm across her shoulders and rest his head in her lap and even pull her close sometimes, if he had a really good excuse.
(Granted, he’d only ever tried when he had a really good excuse, even if he craved the contact almost non-stop; he wasn’t quite sure what to do with the thought of not needing a really good excuse.
If he started, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop, so it was probably better to err on the side of caution in this, he thought. She probably wouldn’t appreciate him clinging to her like a limpet as she went about her day.)
And in battles? All bets were off. If she needed to throw him over her shoulders to toss him at an akuma, she’d do it without a second thought. If he needed to pick her up and deposit her at some better vantage point, she’d only expect it. Tackling each other out of the way of oncoming attacks, catching each other when they fell, carrying one another to safety; it was as expected as it was necessary.
But now that he knew Marinette was Ladybug…
Well, old habits were hard to break.
Scene set: A grey, drizzly mid-spring morning. Marinette in the back corner of the science lab, reaching for something just out of her reach with all her might. Adrien walking into the room, spying the lean V of her hips, and tripping over a chair.
At the clatter, Marinette stopped reaching, dropping her arm and letting her shirt cover the mouth-watering planes of her stomach back up in soft, inviting pale pink fabric.
Adrien ripped his eyes away from her midsection and swallowed, kicking himself. Rude. “Everything okay there, princess?”
She blinked at him for a moment, and then pointed to the cabinet she’d been trying to reach with a sheepish smile. “They asked me to get beakers. I think they forgot where they were.”
“I’m sure they were just distracted by the size of your personality,” he reassured her, grinning a teasing grin, despite the fact that he was only half-joking. She really was larger than life most of the time. “It must’ve added a few inches.”
Marinette gaped in mock offense. “Are you calling me short?”
By that time, Adrien had wandered close enough that she had to crane her neck to look at him, which was really an unfairly adorable angle to see her from.
“Me? Call you short?” He grinned wider. “Never.”
Shooting him an unimpressed glance, Marinette looked away and turned up her nose with a little hmph.
“Pfffft.”
And, before he quite realized what he was doing, he was stooping down to wrap his arms around her thighs, lifting her up with more effort than normal, but still fairly gratifying ease.
Marinette squawked and clung to his head, her silky shirt catching on his ruthlessly suppressed stubble. “A-A-A-A-Adrien?!”
…Oops.
Speaking of rude.
Just because Ladybug would be expecting it didn’t mean Marinette would be.
He cleared his throat awkwardly. “…This better?”
“…Better?” Marinette echoed, sounding like she’d never heard the word before.
“I mean, can you reach the beakers now,” he clarified, feeling his cheeks and ears heat a little bit more for every second he had her sweet-smelling skin this close to his face.
A moment of silence, and then: “Oh! The beakers!”
Adrien snickered. “Yeah, the beakers.” Dork, went unsaid.
Marinette put her hand on his head and balanced herself with pointed firmness, squirming in his arms for a better perch.
…Which, sadly, brought Adrien’s attention to the pliant, lovely thighs in his grasp and the supple derriere wiggling against his shoulder, both clad only in a mid-length cotton skirt.
He cleared his throat and fixed his eyes on the stack of textbooks balanced precariously on the opposing shelf, knowing full well why it suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe, and determined to ignore it.
“Got ‘em?” he asked after she stilled, having to clear his throat twice more before the words would come out as anything more than a dying wheeze.
“Two-fer, captain!” She dangled the two obtained beakers in front of his nose, a little victory sign in each hand. “Goin’ down?”
“Going down,” he agreed, dropping into a crouch to set her feet on the ground and then bouncing back up on burning thighs. Doffing an invisible hat with a bow, he grinned. “Thank you for choosing the Agreste Elevator Service. We hope you have a nice day.”
He straightened out, expecting her to floor him with a fond eye-roll and a gentle elbowing, and instead found her with a smile fit to knock anyone off their feet.
Oh, thought Adrien.
Oh no.
It was bright.
It was freckly.
It was so soft and warm and sweet and so damn near adoring that it made the burn in his legs vanish into nothing, hit him square in the heart and made his knees so weak he couldn’t feel them at all anymore, put his heart in his mouth and shot it to the floor.
Adrien needed someone to call 112 stat.
Heartless or oblivious, Marinette didn’t call an ambulance for her poor, dying partner — she just smiled softer.
Adrien didn’t try to kiss her or hit the floor in a dead faint, but there were probably many other, weaker-willed, alternate universe versions of him that did.
Marinette swayed in closer, waved a finger under his chin and said, “Thanks, Cha—”
And then stopped.
Blinked.
Wrinkled her brow, covered her mouth, and stared at his clavicle.
Adrien wondered if this was some new, special kind of hell.
“…Adrien,” she corrected herself after a painful moment of silence, looking unsettled. “Thank you, Adrien.”
He swallowed down the urge to say, you were right the first time.
“…No problem,” he said instead.
It came out kind of strained, but it wasn’t an emotionally overloaded scream, so it was still a victory.
This was definitely some new, special kind of hell.
So he needed to tone it down.
So what.
She didn’t want him to know her identity, and she didn’t want to know his, and it really was an accident that he’d figured it out in the first place.
He understood that. He knew that the best thing to do in this situation would just be to leave it alone, leave the secret be, let her live in peace and not test boundaries he’d been well-aware of for years.
He wanted her to know so badly it hurt.
He wanted her to throw herself across his lap and grumble with him about akuma after a long day fighting. He wanted her to text him to meet her at the Eiffel Tower at three A.M. so they could have an adventure looking for shops open that late. He wanted to her to talk to him about what it was like to keep her secret from Alya for all these years, and tell her in turn about how guilty he felt, keeping his own identity from Nino.
He wanted her to look at him and see him and call him her kitty when she was still half-asleep in the mornings, look at him and know him and trust him the way only three years of saving each other’s lives could make people trust each other, wanted them to stumble into each other’s rooms late at night and curl up beside one another after long solo patrols.
It chafed to be the only one who knew.
It chafed, but this was what she wanted. It had been her choice to insist they keep their identities secret, and until the day she changed her mind, their identities would stay as secret as he could keep them.
He wasn’t supposed to know what he knew, and he wasn’t going to break her trust because of an accident.
It was just… hard, sometimes.
Especially, he thought, trailing after his lady as she scampered around the abandoned observation deck on top of the Eiffel Tower, pausing to fuss with a boombox that had been set to the side. Especially when she pulled things like this.
It had been a long day. Soul-searching and priority-ordering during long and boring photoshoots would have been sobering enough, but the photoshoots themselves had cancelled plans he’d been looking forward to for months, depriving him of the pick-me-ups (of spending time in his friends’ company) that he’d come to rely on by now.
Needless to say, he turned up to evening patrol in a funk.
And Ladybug, being the person she was, had taken one look at his face and spent the entire night trying to cheer him up.
Silly puns, awful jokes, an attempt at a game of tag, an offer to stop for food, a debate on the merits of his favorite video games, all as she pointed out city sights she thought he’d like along their route… She never actually said it, but it was so transparent it was almost worse than if she had.
She was his best friend, his confidant, his partner, and she was trying so hard to make him happy and he was so far past head-over-heels for her it wasn’t even funny anymore.
Her efforts had culminated into her dragging him into one of those big chain stores he’d always been curious about but had never been allowed to visit, and searching the place top to bottom for…
“Why a boombox, though?”
Ladybug punched a few more buttons on said piece of equipment and gave a satisfied little aha before answering.
“Because you’re gonna teach me how to dance,” she said, certain as fact as she bounced up and rested her hands on her hips.
Chat blinked, bemused. “I am?”
She faltered. “I-I mean, only if you want to. I mean, I remember you saying that you were learning how to ballroom dance and you really loved it, and you like teaching people things, and…” She rubbed the back of her head with an embarrassed grimace.
Chat looked from the twenty-euro sound system to the open, empty deck around them — to the map of city lights all spread out below them and to the starry night above — and then to his partner, his lady, who was looking embarrassed and worried and hopeful, who was shifting in place and fidgeting her fingers, who had set all this up to make him smile again, and said, winded and empty and aching and so full he thought he might burst, “I’d… I’d love to teach you to dance.”
She looked up at him with stars in her eyes, and he wasn’t sure he could get a brighter smile if he’d brought down the moon for her.
(But hell if this evening hadn’t left him tempted to try.)
For all her skill in bringing his heart to its knees with a look alone, Ladybug didn’t have the first clue about ballroom dancing.
Case in point: her idea of ballroom music was, apparently, Mystery Skulls.
(She flustered adorably when he gave her a Look for it, and mumbled something about not knowing what to pick, so she just got that album he’d been gushing about that one time, and then Chat was too busy trying not to think about the fact that she remembered a conversation like that from over a year ago to give her much hell for it.)
They made do.
Ladybug was a quick learner, even with the unsuitable music, and Chat stopped narrating the steps within the hour, leaving them to glide together in near-silence, heels clicking in time on the rusty grating.
The night didn’t fold around them so much as it breathed around them, the city humming in swells and ebbs as the breeze flitted back and forth, sultry and indecisive and flighty. The crickets could be heard even at their height, even through the reedy electronica playing through the tiny speakers, and Chat took a moment to appreciate their tenacity for finding their way this high up.
Ladybug nuzzled her face into the crook of his neck with a soft sigh.
Unthinking, Chat buried his nose in her hair, immediately soothed by the smell of her shampoo. There was probably some reason why he shouldn’t have done that, he thought, but he didn’t have it in him to look for it right now.
He was almost dozing on his feet when Ladybug broke the silence.
“…Hey, is everything okay?” she asked, running a finger from his shoulder pad to his elbow. “You seem kinda… down.”
Well, thought Chat. The love of my life — that’s you, by the way — doesn’t want me to know her secret identity, but I ended up finding out anyway and she’s somehow more perfect than I ever dreamed and it’s killing me.
And today kind of sucked until you, that too.
“It’s, ah…” He took one of his hands away from her waist for just long enough to wave dismissively. The effect was probably diminished by the way he buried his face in her hair for comfort right afterwards. “It’s just some civilian life stuff. Don’t worry about it.”
She pulled back enough to look up at him, sad and concerned, and Chat’s chest was caving all over again.
“Secret identities, remember?” he offered, avoiding her eye so he could put air back in his lungs.
He wasn’t looking at her, but the (dis)advantage of being this close together was that he could feel her droop instead.
“Oh, right,” she mumbled, disappointed, like he’d thrown water in her face or something.
That urge to scream was rising again.
“I mean, it’s kind of specific,” he said, passably casual when all he really wanted to do was go home and cry over things he couldn’t have. “What if you look up and see me on TV one day and realize it’s me? What would we do about our identities then?”
She poked his chest like she poked Adrien’s chest and gave him a teasing smile with one eye closed. “You mean when you get arrested for some really dumb prank? I’d know you anyway, doofus.”
Chat had to take a very deep breath before replying.
“Excuse you,” he said archly, like someone who hadn’t just scribbled out his entire bucket list and replaced it with 'widescale pranking.’ “I’m going to be there for breakthroughs in physics, thank you very much.”
A beat.
And then there was that heartbreak-inducing smile again.
“I know,” she said, halfway to a whisper.
Chat stopped talking for fear of what other kinds of ammunition he might end up giving her. This was unbearable enough already.
Smoothing his suit over his collarbone, Ladybug wrinkled her brow and asked, “Would… would it really be so bad if we figured it out, do you think?”
Forget unbearable.
This was hell.
“…I thought you didn’t want us to know,” said Chat. It was his one and only reason for keeping his mouth shut, and if it turned out that he’d been wrong all this time…
Ladybug fell into silence, Chat’s pounding heart counting the seconds between them, and then she said, “I mean, we’re not allowed to tell each other, but…”
“But what do you want?” Chat pressed, suddenly hot and cold and vibrating and numb with how much he needed to know.
She looked contemplative, raising one scarlet-gloved hand to trace the edges of his mask. “I think… I think I want to meet whoever’s under this, one day.” Then she blinked, flushing a little and looking up at him through her eyelashes. “If… If you don’t mind, 'course.”
If he didn’t mind.
Ha.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
“'One day’?” he said, only sounding a little bit strained and deciding to leave the last part alone for now. Anything he could say in response would probably give him away. “What’s holding you back?”
Saying that was a mistake.
He shouldn’t have asked.
He shouldn’t have asked, because Ladybug’s response was to tilt her head back and grin at him, teasing. “Well, I have to figure it out first, don’t I?”
I have to figure it out first, don’t I?
She’d have to figure it out.
Chat’s ears rang.
It was like starving for weeks, months, years, and then hearing that his favorite meal rested just over the horizon. Where over the horizon? That was still up in the air. All he knew was that it was out there and that he might have it someday.
It was… quite possibly the worst thing she’d ever said to him.
It was also quite possibly the best.
He remembered, belatedly, that oxygen was one of the basic needs of the human body, and inhaled again.
How could he even respond to this?
It took him a moment, but somewhere in himself, he found words.
“I’ll be waiting,” he promised, knowing he sounded far too invested and unable to bring himself to care.
(She’d just offered him the entire world on a silver platter with that one. little. catch. Sue him for feeling like he was on the verge of crawling out of his skin.)
A funny look crossed her face, before she scrubbed the back of her neck with an embarrassed aside glance.
“R-right,” she said, awkward and mundane and flustered and oh, oh god, he really couldn’t take much more of this. “B-but anyway! I just thought… if you’ve been feeling down, you can tell me, you know?”
Chat opened his mouth to tell her that really, she’d just made his everything, and he was pretty sure nothing could touch him now, and then paused.
Well, I have to figure it out first, don’t I?
Then he exhaled, and inhaled fresh air, feeling the night filter through his body in navy and gold, feeling his blood pump with the thrill, feeling his skin tingle and vibrate from the pure possibility of tonight.
“Well…” He smiled uncertainly and rubbed the back of his neck. “My father made me cancel on my friends today, and I’d been looking forward to going out with them for… a really long time.”
Her whole face softened in sympathy, not an ounce of recognition in her, so he tacked on, “They were planning on going to this one falafel place that one of them loves, but then my father called, and, well…”
“That really sucks,” she said, still fairly radiating soothing, heartwarming, validating sympathy, and still not showing any sign of recognition at all.
Help.
Then her eyes lit up, conspiratorially mischievous as she leaned in to say, “Tell you what, a few friends and I hit up a stand like that… recently. Maybe they’re still open?”
…
Well.
Rome wasn’t built in a day.
He also leaned in, in and in and in until their noses were millimeters from touching, feeling the giddy, breathless grin on his face, and said, “That sounds like something worth checking out.”
And Ladybug?
Ladybug just beamed.
She wanted to know.
Or, well, she wouldn’t mind knowing, and she’d assured him like that and…
And, oh geez.
He thought the urge to get her attention, to impress her was bad before.
Now it felt like a compulsion.
It felt like magnetism, like someone pulling on his puppet strings, like he really just couldn’t help himself as he twisted around to walk backwards in front of her whenever they went anywhere, as he just about dived into any possible opportunity to show off in front of her, as he flexed and preened and stretched, feeling more and more desperate all the time to just get her to look at him.
He was acting like an idiot and he just couldn’t stop.
And he was pretty sure she didn’t even notice. Not that him making this much of a fool of himself was unusual, or that it was only in front of her, or even that the more he acted like Chat in front of her, the more she acted like Ladybug.
(Soft touches and confident smirks, trust in little things that was as unthinking as it was absolute, the way that, as thoughtless as she was sometimes, she still always, always, always took the time to listen to him…
Adrien had very good reasons for spending half his classes swooning into his textbook, even if his teachers didn’t seem to think so.)
It felt like he was begging notice me, notice me, notice me, each time she so much as glanced in his direction, and he just didn’t know how to stop.
(And then he’d half-accidentally suggest, jokingly, that he wanted to learn how to make her moan, and her eyes would flash surprised and dark and hot and wanting, and he’d forget why he’d wanted to stop at all.
And then spend the rest of the day distracted and overheated and trying not to fantasize too vividly about Marinette crawling over her desk, seizing him by the lapels, and shoving her tongue down his throat.
Among other things.
Being seventeen and hormonal and more in love than anyone knew how to deal with was hard. It was hard and nobody understood.)
And she didn’t notice him, but she noticed him. She never once seemed to look at him and realize the truth, but she looked at him.
She even stared, sometimes, like she just… liked to look at him.
Which was nice, because, for the first time in his life, Adrien was really enjoying being looked at.
Feeling her eyes on him felt good.
It felt really good, a very certain brand of pleasure that involved butterflies in his stomach and hyperawareness rolling over his skin and a squirming breathless feeling that just made him want to move.
It meant that she was noticing him, seeing him, just…
He really liked it when she stared at him.
It was kind of ridiculous, but he was almost posing as soon as he registered the tell-tale tingle at the back of his neck.
He looked up to find Marinette sitting at her desk with her head pillowed on her arms, her eyes drifting lazily over his shoulders, down to his chest, and then back up to his eyes.
Fffffffffff…
He met her with a grin, hopelessly delighted, his belly tight and hot and goosebumps rising on his skin.
And, instead of rolling her eyes and flustering like she normally did, she bit her lip, dropping her eyes to his mouth for a long moment before breathing a long, slow, purring sigh that went straight to his groin.
…Holy shit.
His second stretch was both much bigger and much less deliberate, the urge to show off suddenly swamped by the itchy static need that was suddenly coating his bones.
It didn’t help.
It didn’t help at all.
Her hazy, liquid eyes sharpened abruptly, snapping to where his shirt was riding up over his stomach — to the strip of skin and the edge of the waistband of his boxers where his jeans had ridden down without his noticing — a rosy flush blooming over her cheeks as she tracked the movement with mind-meltingly blatant interest.
…How many days did it take to build Rome, again? Adrien wasn’t sure he could take much more of this.
He slumped back into his seat, hoping he was slow enough that the movement looked intentional (it was not), instead of like all his joints had gone weak (they just had), feeling a sunburn of a blush skate over his skin.
Marinette’s radioactive blue eyes dimmed in disappointment as his shirt fell back into place, lower lip jutting ever so slightly, and Adrien stared at her, blood roaring in his ears.
…So.
Theoretically, could he get away with just… never wearing a shirt? At all, ever again? Just walk around, bare to the world, with her looking at him like that always?
Please?
He was a model, he was sure he could work it well enough, and if it would get her to look at him like that…
…God, what if she looked at him like that while they were on patrol?
He spent one, two, three seconds with the thought before it became very, very clear that those were ruminations for a much more… private time, and then he forcibly shoved them back in a box in the back of his mind — the one haphazardly labelled I know she’s too attractive to function around but we have a city to save, goddamnit.
Scratching the back his head and straightening himself out with a sigh, he looked up to find that Marinette had moved from disappointment to… confusion?
“…What?” he asked, cooling down a little in his answering puzzlement.
“…No, nothing,” said Marinette, the knit in her brow only deepening. “Sorry, you just… reminded me of someone.”
…
What.
“O-oh,” he said, his limbs suddenly feeling numb and shot through with electricity. He manually pushed air into his lungs and croaked, “C-can I ask who?”
A smile stole across her face, heartbreakingly sweet and enchantingly warm, and Adrien was already more than halfway to cardiac arrest when she opened her mouth.
“…Just a friend,” she murmured half to herself, cheeks blooming even darker and her fingertips tracing an idle pattern on her desk that made Adrien’s face tingle with the memory of them on his skin, tracing his mask.
“…Oh,” said Adrien again, feeling a little bit like he’d just been punched in the throat for more reasons than he could name.
(Call him delusional, but she didn’t exactly sound like she was talking about a 'friend.’)
The only question left to him was whether or not she was talking about who he (prayed, hoped, wished, craved) thought she was talking about.
Read: was she talking about Chat.
Adrien let himself tip forward until his head met the cool wood of his desk, and made a mental note to look up exactly how many days it took to build Rome.
“So, what’s on your mind?”
“…Did you know it probably took over a million days to build Rome?” was what came out of Chat’s mouth as he spun Ladybug out and reeled her back in, their heels clicking in time on the grating of the Eiffel Tower’s observation deck once again.
Reeling her back in had the interesting effect of pressing her against him from chest to knee, of twining her in his arms and bringing her so close he could feel her breath puffing hot against his throat, and Chat ignored that as furiously as he’d been ignoring the lyrics of the songs playing in the background.
(All of them were about sex. All of them.
If he heard one more singer breathlessly beg their lover to take them, he was going to say something regrettable.)
Ladybug blinked bemusedly. “I… didn’t know that.” She wrinkled her nose. “That’s a really long time.”
“Right?” said Chat over Mika candidly speaking about waking the neighbors with his love making, and set the dance off into another quick sequence of steps, thinking that if it took her that long to figure it out he might actually waste away. “How about you? What’s on your mind?”
The progression of emotions across her face only served to make him more curious — slow pensiveness followed by dawning realization, and then a funny mixture of panicked embarrassment.
“N-nothing, really!” she said with an overly loud, awkward laugh.
Chat quirked an amused eyebrow, and the laugh seemed to catch in her chest.
Puffing her cheeks and twisting her mouth, she looked away and mumbled, “It really is nothing…”
“…It doesn’t look like it’s nothing to you,” he suggested after a moment of hesitation, “but you don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to, you know.”
Pensiveness clouded her expression once again, and they danced in silence for a bit, only the rasp of their suits and the light breeze for company as Mika finished up with another verse that left Chat feeling too warm in his skin.
“Well,” she said, just as he was considering breaking the silence for the sake of his continued sanity, “love problems, I guess.”
…Of all things…
“Oh,” said Chat, once again feeling a little bit punched in the throat. He swallowed the feeling away. “Do I need to beat anyone up for you?”
The offer startled a laugh out of her, something warm flickering in her expression as she shook her head. “Nnnnot that kind of problem. Thanks, though.”
(—the blushing smile on her face as she traced patterns on her desk and said he reminded her of 'just a friend’—)
“Always,” he promised like the given it was, batting the memory of her smile away and blinking when he found her currently smiling that very same smile up at him. “…What?”
She blinked right back, smile not fading an ounce. “I have a friend that reminds me a lot of you.”
Chat tripped.
What.
He was too preoccupied to do more than register Ladybug’s amused huff as she set him back on his feet, their dance coming to a halt as he processed this information.
“D-do you?” he croaked, somewhere in the ballpark of 'normal’ despite the blood rushing in his ears.
Was this proof that 'just a friend’ was Chat Noir?
She gave him an odd look. “…I do.” Then she quirked him a grin. “Why, kitty, don’t tell me I’ve found your secret identity.”
Don’t tell me I’ve found your secret identity.
Chat was starting to feel like one of those '1000 degree knife versus’ experiments.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, feeling so far gone he’d hit critical denial and tipped right back around to normal. He flexed as pure habit. “Is he handsome enough to be this cat?”
“Oh, definitely,” she said, halfway to a growl as she let her eyes wander over him, like Chat’s brain hadn’t been melted enough already. She grinned mischievously. “He’s a model, you know.”
“He’s that pretty?” Chat gasped, clasping a trembling hand over his heart, trying to compartmentalize the fact that Ladybug had basically told him she thought he was good-looking enough to compare to a model. “Looks like I’ve got real competition now.”
Her laughter was real and bright and loud and oh…
“Competition for what, you dork?” she wanted to know, poking his nose with a delicate finger, eyes sparkling.
…Oh, hell.
He wasn’t sure what his face looked like right then, but it was enough to make her do a double-take, smile stilling and breath catching on the inhale.
She jerked her hand back, cheeks darkening in the golden observation deck lights, flustered and affected and fighting off a smile that looked unconscious. “I-I mean, i-it’s, um. I… M-my family is probably wondering where I am. A-and I have a study group tomorrow! Because the BACs are really close and I-I should… go.”
“Okay,” Chat agreed as he swallowed back the honeyed, smitten sigh that desperately wanted escape.
She glanced at him again, and then looked away fast and coughed, ears joining her cheeks in color. “R-right.”
She hesitated another moment while Chat grappled with just how breathless she sounded, and then took a stiff breath and moved away.
He caught her hand before she could go, a questioning little tug on her fingers as she passed.
She paused, letting him keep her hand, even as loosely as he held it, and turned around, face open and questioning.
Kissing her hands then wasn’t really a broad gesture — not so much anything he’d seen in a movie or read in a romance novel — so much as it was plain, helpless affection.
I love you, I love you, I love you, filled him up, laced his breath, sat on the back of his throat as her gloves touched his lips. I love you so much I just don’t know what to do anymore.
He heard the tiny catch of her breath and looked up to see her staring at him with wide, open eyes, and he swallowed.
“Thank you for the dance,” he whispered, emotion taking away his voice. He tipped her a roughened smile. “See you tomorrow?”
“Y-yeah,” she stuttered, “t-tomorrow.” Then her brow knit. “O-or later. Patrol isn’t for another three days, you know.”
“Oh, right,” he said, not sounding at all like he’d forgotten. “Later then.”
She hesitated for a second, and then gently pulled her hands out of his and left.
Standing there, cold wind making itself known now that Ladybug wasn’t there to make him forget about it and buzzing from the inside out, Chat wondered if building Rome really did take that long.
Time from there seemed to slow to a crawl.
He spent hours staring at his ceiling before finally managing to drift off, and then spent the next day alternately counting the seconds and feeling them slip through his fingers in lump sums.
That mixture of anxiety and excitement and anticipation got him to the meeting place for the study group an hour early and kept him going right up until Marinette walked in, using Alya to support most of her weight and emitting three jaw-cracking yawns in a row.
She smiled when she saw him, as soft and inviting as ever, but if she recognized him, he couldn’t tell.
It took until about ten minutes into the study session for him to realize that no, his world wasn’t going to change today, and that all his anxious pacing had been for nothing.
(Relief mingled with the disappointment; he’d wanted it for as long as he could remember, but he didn’t have a clue what would come after.
He had hopes, but could reality come close to any of them?)
It was downright normal in the library study room they’d claimed as their own, actually. Marinette’s obvious exhaustion had stretched into a distinct inability to focus, Nino was helping things derail, and Alya was rapidly losing patience.
They were about halfway through their planned materials when Marinette yawned again and interrupted her attempt at a math question with, “Did you guys know that Rome actually took more than a million days to build? That’s like… more than two hundred and fifty years. A lot more.”
Nino shot her a curious look while Alya pushed herself up and removed the straw from her drink, apparently having reached the end of her rope.
It was almost funny how fast things happened after that.
“I swear,” Alya grumbled, waving the weapon of minor destruction and mass drinkage in her friend’s face, “if you take us off course one more time…”
Marinette wrinkled her nose in defiance, and then yelped in shock as Alya smacked her clear across the cheek with the straw.
“Hey!”
Adrien found himself biting the corner of his mouth as he tipped his seat back, absurdly charmed by the sour look Marinette shot her attacker.
“Oh, whoops,” Alya snickered, scanning the table for a napkin. “You gotta dodge, girl!”
Marinette’s hand hovered by the splat of whipped cream on her cheek, sour look deepening. “I didn’t think you’d actually hit me!”
Adrien tipped his chair back and grinned at the ceiling so he wouldn’t grin at her pout.
It was valid enough, but what had she expected, really?
"Oh you hush,” she grumbled in his general direction, like she could hear his thoughts, and Adrien didn’t even bother trying to stop his heart from melting.
She was just too cute for him to survive, really.
He reached over the table and wiped the whipped cream off her cheek, her skin warm and soft under his touch, and found her blinking owlishly at him when he drew away.
Cute.
He looked down at his newly sticky fingers. There were still no napkins on the table, but even if there were, Adrien wasn’t really sure he would use them. Who was he to pass up whipped cream?
He was just about to enjoy his newfound treat when Marinette’s hand shot out from across the table and clamped around his wrist, and he looked up to find a wild look in her eye.
She paused for a second, apparently holding some internal debate, and then, instead of giving him back his hand, she took full possession of it, dragging it back over to her side of the table.
He opened his mouth to ask…
And she cut him off by sticking his fingers in her mouth.
Oh, well then, he thought faintly as his mind registered warm-wet-hot-slick and redirected every drop of his blood straight south.
She looked up at him, liquid eyes deeper than the Marianas Trench and glittering, then gave his fingers a gentle suck.
Adrien felt it like a punch to the solar plexus.
If he hadn’t known that fingers were a sensitive part of the body before, he sure as hell did now. He felt hyperaware of everything, except that 'everything’ began and ended with the dark pink lips wrapped around his digits, with the way that the suck had lit him up from head to toe in pins and needles, chills and shivers.
And then her eyes half-lidded, something that could only be her tongue dancing around the over-sensitized pads of his fingers, and he could feel his breath escape him on a wheeze that was halfway to a strangled whimper.
Holy fuck.
Marinette just gave a little sigh in response, her eyelids falling shut over radioactive eyes, and set her attention to wrecking him.
By the time she opened her eyes again, Adrien was left with absolutely no doubt that if their relationship ever progressed to the point of consummation, he’d probably be lucky if he lasted thirty seconds, if this was what it felt like to have her mouth on his fingers.
She pulled off him with a suck and a purr and a smirk, and if he hadn’t already been an overheated puddle of hormones, that probably would have done it.
He was half-panting and definitely trembling as she licked her lips, murmuring, “Thanks for the treat, mon minou.”
It was such a Ladybug tone that he didn’t register that it was Marinette that said it until after he was mouthing her name, on the verge of begging his partner for mercy.
Her deep blue eyes sharpened, something uncannily like victory in her expression, something hungry and predatory and knowing, and there was something very important about that look that Adrien almost had, when they were interrupted.
“Um. Do we need to leave the room?”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Marinette jump about as badly as he had.
“Uhh,” said Marinette, rough in a way that stroked down his spine and made cobbling his senses back together just that much harder.
“Nope!” he croaked, voice high and sounding about half as wrecked as he felt. “Nope, we’re— we’re f-fine—… We… We’re… Um.”
His hopeless stammering trailed off as it hit him, all at once, what that knowing, predatory look had meant.
She knew.
She’d figured him out, she knew who he was, she—
“I mean,” said Alya, interrupting yet again, “if you need us to leave so you can clear out that UST, it might help.”
"Nnn…” said Adrien, automatic denial springing to his lips in the absence of anything even resembling his cool.
“Well, I mean…” Marinette herself interrupted, shooting him a pointed look.
Oh.
Right, the reveal.
He… had some explaining to do, didn’t he.
Alya looked to each of them in turn, and then mercifully got up with a sigh.
“Well then,” Alya said as Nino got up with her. “I’m getting another latte. Let us know when you can focus on test prep again.”
“Um,” said Adrien, more flustered than he really should be at the clear implication that he and Marinette were going to be doing things (each other) when he knew they were really going to be talking things out.
“Right,” said Marinette, like she hadn’t heard the implication at all.
Alya raised her eyebrows at the two of them one last time before she left, and Adrien tried not to flush more at the unsaid but well-heard, be safe, kids, as Nino shut the study room door with a quiet click.
Adrien took a deep breath, wondering if Marinette would be okay with waiting for her apologies and explanations until some of the blood returned to his brain.
He didn’t get a chance to ask.
A loud, clattering scrape echoed off the walls of the tiny room, and Adrien looked up to find…
Marinette literally climbing over the table, study materials crunching and tearing under her knees as she grabbed the back of his head and crashed her mouth into his.
Oh.
Oh.
She kissed him fast and searingly hot as she tumbled into his lap, straddling his thighs and pressing their chests together, burning him wherever she touched.
Shock staggered him at first, keeping him numb and still until she melted it all away, her fingers in his hair tightening his gut and her lips and tongue liquefying his mind and his worries as one until all there was left to do was arch into her, open himself up and pull her closer.
And then it was like three years’ worth of desire and longing caught up with him at once, backed by the way his blood was still rushing from her earlier ministrations.
He nipped her lip, reveling in how close her answering laughter was, how he could feel it roll up from her belly, they were so close, and then shuddered and gasped when she returned the favor, hot chills and cold thrills turning whatever was might have been left of his defenses to dust.
There weren’t enough metaphors in the whole wide world to describe how it felt to make her moan, nor how it felt to feel her sink into him, to feel her relax and squirm closer as the pace of their kiss fell into something saner, calmer, more playful and less desperate.
When the accusation he’d been fearing finally came, it was so soft, so sweet and laughing and delighted he almost couldn’t believe he’d feared it at all.
“You found me,” she accused into his mouth, eyes glowing in the lamplight as the edge of her smile caught on his lips. “When?”
And it felt like nothing at all to grin back and confess, “It’s been a year, slowpoke.”
“Oh my god, Chat,” she sputtered, scandalized and offended and even more delighted, somehow, and he was full, full, so full that all there was left to do was laugh.
She let him until she got tired of it, and then she kissed him again.
(And again and again and again and…)
(And if he came very close to failing his BACs because he was so preoccupied, well, you live and you learn.)
