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Marinette wakes up the same way any girl would after spending a copious portion of the night agonizing over kissing two equally attractive boys who are both equally un-attracted to her: with her stomach in her feet.
Breakfast and all, it sits at her toes and leaves her footsteps at least five kilos heavier. Maman even chastises her for stomping down the stairs—like Marinette can help it—because she clearly doesn’t understand the difficulty of dragging around a physical manifestation of your own stress, especially when that manifestation has decided to take on the form of two bowling balls strapped to the ankle.
(It’s not like Marinette can explain herself, though, so she bites her tongue and sighs her apology. And suffers.)
The heavy, stomach-in-feet footsteps take her to class (where she broods quietly over her desk) and to work (where she broods quietly over the cash register) and finally, now: to the rented trailer parked a little ways off the set erected beneath the Eiffel Tower (where she broods quietly over the vanity).
“Just give it a shot, they said. It’ll be fun, they said,” Marinette mutters at a pile of makeup supplies, “Wow, having an existential crisis sure is my idea of fun!”
In the mirror, she catches Juleka fixing her with a look like a cross between concerned and... exceptionally unsettled. The moment their eyes meet, she rushes back to braiding Marinette’s hair.
Fine. Whatever. She’s knee-deep in teenage predicament, who cares if anyone thinks she’s weird! There are bigger problems here.
Marinette pulls further into the styling chair she’s currently sitting in, an old thing covered in cracked leather that she only makes worse by digging her fingernails into it, and pouts.
In T-minus 30 minutes, she will kiss one of the two attractive boys who are firmly not attracted to her. The one she’s actually come to terms with her ineffable feelings for. The one she practiced kissing for with attractive boy number two.
One may wrongly assume that Marinette’s current distress is displaced. One might say, Oh, Marinette! Why so glum? You’re kissing the boy of your dreams!
Which, true, she is kissing the boy of her dreams and has fantasized about doing such since she was fourteen. At face value, this is a happy moment!
Except it’s not.
At first, the worry had been being a bad kisser and the consequential embarrassment of Adrien (aforementioned boy of her dreams) discovering this when she kissed him. Then she learned how to kiss someone properly, so those worries have been reasonably settled.
However, the remedy of this problem is the direct cause of another, in the same way Papa volunteered to fix the leaky faucet in her bathroom once and the next morning her entire room had flooded.
“My, God. Get a hold of yourself, Dupain-Cheng,” says Chloé Bourgeois from the seat beside her, generously applying lip gloss in her mirror, “Adrien is going to be even less inclined to kiss you if your face is all pinched up like that.”
“You don’t know what Adrien is and is not inclined to kiss,” Marinette shoots back stubbornly, eyebrows creasing, “What are you even doing in here? All the scenes you’re in have already been filmed.”
“Of course I know, I’m his best friend. And what do you think I’m doing here?”
Marinette rolls her eyes. “Disrupting my peace?”
“While that is a lovely plus, I’m clearly doing my makeup.”
She’s not sure how Chloé manages to be the bane of her existence so effortlessly—maybe it’s the Horrendous Yellow Cardigan she refuses to part with—but she does, and it isn’t any less infuriating now than it was when she was in collège.
Marinette doesn’t have the patience to entertain her today, though, not with her ongoing boy-related complications. Ugh. Perhaps she should consider joining a nunnery. A vow of chastity would solve her problems with unparalleled quickness.
Across from her in the mirror, Marinette’s reflection stares back at her—well, Lady Noire’s does. Cat-eared and covered in leather, just like Chat Noir. She even has a paw-print staff.
The irony is downright evil.
If Papa fixing the leaky faucet left her with a flooded bedroom, then practicing kissing with Chat Noir has left her with a heart murmur. Or some other tragic variation of cardiovascular abnormality.
At this point, she is willing to accept any potential health problem so long as it explains the sudden onslaught of fluttering heartbeats she gets at the thought of him. Anything—and she means anything—is better than whatever Tikki’s smug, fake-innocent smile suggests.
“Done,” Juleka mumbles, laying her handiwork across Marinette’s shoulder. The braid is much cleaner and more meticulously done than Tikki has ever managed, and the thought makes her lips quirk.
“Thank you,” she says, and Juleka nods and disappears out of the trailer.
Now, Marinette is officially a Chat Noir doppelganger. He would definitely get a kick out of seeing her like this right now, probably say something stupid and entirely un-funny that makes her laugh anyway.
In Juleka’s place, Alya parades into the trailer with an air of confidence. Marinette twists around in her seat and points an accusatory finger at her.
“You!”
“Hey, girl!” Alya greets, like she doesn’t know the grave sin she’s since committed, “Love the ears.”
Her finger, faux-claw and all, remains dutifully pinned on the very director of her demise as she approaches.
“I thought we were friends!”
Alya’s hand comes down on Marinette’s shoulder and squeezes. “Best friends.”
“Then why,” Marinette says through gritted teeth, “didn’t you warn me?”
“Warn you? But whatever for?”
“Oh, I don’t know! Maybe that the”—cue a pair of aggressive finger quotes—“‘grand finale’ you were hyping up just so happened to be a kiss?”
A kiss with Adrien. A kiss with Adrien. Who other than her would orchestrate something like this!
Alya leans over the cluttered worktop, casually fluffing her hair in the mirror with an innocence so fake it would fail a polygraph test within seconds.
“Oh, that little ol’ thing? What about it?”
“Alya,” Marinette whines, exasperated.
Finally, Alya’s front dissolves into an offensively amused chuckle. “Sorry, girl! I knew if I said something about it too early, you’d act like this. I figured ignorance is bliss, right?”
“That is a terrible solution.”
“Terrible or not, it’ll work out. Look! You won’t even have to panic over it for weeks like you would have if you found out in the beginning. It’ll be over with before the day ends.”
“No! All that means is I have to condense weeks worth of panic into not even a complete twenty-four-hour interval!”
Chloé snorts beside them. “Pretty sure the only one with reason to panic here is Adrien.”
“Would you shut up?” Marinette retorts, flopping backward into her chair.
“I’m just saying.” The sound of her lip gloss tube snapping shut ignites Marinette with unjustifiable rage. “Like, come on—Have you even had your first kiss yet? This is going to be a trainwreck.”
The trailer falls silent—it’s a short moment, really, not more than four or five seconds, but it’s long enough to singe the air. Even the whir of the air conditioner seems to get drowned out by it.
Marinette would be offended by Alya’s genuine shock and Chloé’s lack thereof, but it’s not an unreasonable assumption to make given her track record. As far as either of them knows, she has never been in a relationship or a situation that would warrant a first kiss. Between juggling class representative responsibilities, her budding fashion designer career, her work at the bakery, and now, university applications—Well, where do first kisses fit between all of that?
(Somewhere in the late evening beneath the awning on her balcony with Parisian superhero and teen-heartthrob Chat Noir, apparently. Somewhere beneath the brush of gold and pine and black leather. Somewhere warm.
Marinette thins her lips before she gives herself away.)
“See? What’d I say,” Chloé says, because it actually would kill her to stop talking for extended periods of time.
“Wait, really? Is that why you’re nervous?” Alya asks.
Marinette could laugh. Their conclusion is about one nighttime visit from Chat Noir late.
“I’ve had my first kiss, thank you very much,” she assures, looking away from her reflection as it pinkens.
First kiss to… an extent, but neither of them needs to know the details.
Details. God, the details—the fiery pressure of Chat’s hands, the splay of his fingers on her waist, the drag of his mouth—
“Uh huh,” an incredulous and bored-sounding Chloé saves her from another deep-dive into the events of the previous night, and if her disbelief wasn’t so annoying, Marinette might have felt thankful.
Alya stares thoughtfully into space. “Honestly, wouldn’t Adrien be more likely to be the one without having kissed someone before? I mean, he’s kinda—you know—”
“Of course he has!” Chloé cuts in, entirely too confident for Marinette’s liking.
“You sound awfully sure of that,” Alya observes.
“I am his best friend, so of course I would know,” she reiterates, and then she’s grinning like her father just promised to bulldoze Marinette’s house down and replace it with a new boutique in her honor, “And obviously I would be sure he’s had his first kiss since it was mine, too.”
Marinette chokes on the laugh that spouts out of her.
Chloé and Adrien? Kissing? It’s like trying to imagine Chloé out of that Horrendous Yellow Cardigan—virtually impossible.
Beside her, Alya snickers into her hands, just as unconvinced. “Yeah, and Marinette’s first kiss was Chat Noir.”
Marinette stops laughing immediately.
“What? You can ask him yourself. I have no reason to lie,” says Chloé, who Marinette (in a moment of distress the figurative equivalent of getting sucker-punched in the small intestine) can suddenly see in something that is not the Horrendous Yellow Cardigan.
She might be spoiled and annoying and rude and have a bad attitude twenty out of the twenty-four hours in a day, but Chloé… isn’t, by some grace of God, a liar. Lila took that particular antagonist route.
Besides, if Adrien and Chloé’s first kiss being each other is about as believable as Marinette’s first kiss being Chat Noir, well—well. Marinette sinks into her seat.
Alya narrows her eyes at Chloé skeptically. “...Uh huh.”
“Ugh, whatever. I don’t need to prove myself to either of you.” She rolls her eyes so hard Marinette thinks they might get stuck somewhere on the other side of her bright blue eyeshadow before sashaying out the trailer.
Marinette exchanges a look with Alya as the door slams shut—and then they’re erupting into laughter.
“Some things never change,” says Alya.
Marinette jabs a thumb over her shoulder at the door Chloé just stomped out of. “Exhibit A.”
“Exhibit A through Z, you mean.”
“Very true.”
Alya reaches over and squeezes her shoulders once they settle from another round of laughter.
“You’re gonna do great out there, okay?” She smiles reassuringly. “Adrien won’t know what hit him.”
Marinette returns the smile crookedly. Chat told her that, too—that Adrien wouldn’t know what hit him—right after he kissed her within an inch of her life. Or maybe that was after she kissed him.
Honestly, with the way things tend to work out for Marinette, Alya and Chat are probably more right than they think.
“You can say that again.”
“I’m gonna go check up on the set prep, okay? Come out when you’re done brooding,” says Alya as she moves toward the exit.
“I do not brood!”
“Whatever you say!”
The door clicks shut behind her as she leaves Marinette alone with her thoughts.
“How did she do that?”
And Tikki, who floats out of her purse to admire the braid Juleka did earlier with affronted admiration.
“Witchcraft or opposable thumbs, pick your poison,” Marinette replies laughingly, watching as the kwami gapes.
She pouts at her hands and their lack of useful appendages. “Hmph.”
Marinette sighs heartily at her reflection. It really is a nicely done costume—she would never have thought to do the green accents, but the contrast is nice. If she had been the one to design it, she’d probably focus more on the detailing of the leather and the stretch around the shoulders. It’s a bit restricting mobility-wise, but she guesses that’s less of a concern considering this is all for a scripted film.
Either way, nothing beats Chat Noir’s real design. Marinette would choose to stay faithful to the classic black any day if given the choice.
“What are you thinking about, Marinette?” Tikki asks, and Marinette jolts in her seat.
“I’m not thinking about him!”
Tikki blinks at her. “I didn’t say you were thinking about anyone… but I guess I didn’t have to. Which ‘him’ is it?”
Marinette purses her lips. Damn. She’s not that obvious, is she?
“Adrien,” she lies—and wow, since when does she have to lie about thinking of Adrien?
“You were thinking about Chat Noir?”
“Chat N—I clearly said Adrien!” Yes, she is that obvious after all.
“You never deny thinking about Adrien, though, so you must’ve been thinking about someone else. And the only other person you could be thinking about is…”
Tikki trails off and gives her a knowing look. Marinette feels like she’s lost, somehow.
“Fine,” she huffs, “I was thinking about Chat Noir, so what? Gonna give me that weird look again?”
She does. Marinette’s expression only sours.
“Could it be that the reason you’re nervous isn’t because you have to kiss Adrien, but because you have kissed Chat Noir?” Tikki asks in that curious, matter-of-fact way of hers, like she isn’t asking the question Marinette’s been juggling in her head for the past 12 hours (not counting when she was asleep and juggling it in her dreams).
“I… don’t know. I mean, of course I’m nervous about kissing Adrien—it’s Adrien—and I’m also really, really excited, but… ever since last night—”
“Ever since you kissed Chat Noir?”
“Ever since I kissed Chat Noir,” Marinette repeats, “my feelings have been all… bleh, you know? It feels wrong! I’m gonna go out there and finally kiss Adrien when this entire time I’ve been thinking about—”
Chat and his hands and his eyes and his mouth and his smile. Marinette dissolves into a groan.
Tikki hums consideringly. “So you’re nervous because your new crush on Chat Noir conflicts with your current crush on Adrien, and having to kiss Adrien after already having kissed Chat Noir is bound to confuse you even more?”
Whatever the human equivalent of a BSoD is, Marinette is experiencing it. Right now.
She tries, in her moment of pure bewilderedness, to comprehend what the hell Tikki just said—and imagines that a two hour lecture on advanced thermodynamics would be significantly easier to grasp.
Eventually, she weeds out the craziest thing that came out of Tikki’s mouth: crush on Chat Noir.
Crush. Chat Noir. Hers.
“I—What?”
Before she can get a well-needed explanation, a rapping of knuckles against the trailer door has Tikki phasing into her purse, consequently leaving Marinette to gape stupidly at the vanity.
“Dupain-Cheng!” a voice that is unmistakably Chloé’s shouts, “Hurry up and come out, we’re waiting on you!”
Marinette peeks into her purse to find Tikki in all her inauthentic innocent glory.
“This is not over.”
The moment Marinette is outside the trailer, she’s ushered toward the set beneath the Eiffel Tower by one of the set managers—a classmate from Alya’s Film and Production class whose name she can never remember—and ends up standing there while several different people flit around her handling this and that.
It’s a little awkward waiting around while everyone else seems to be so busy. It makes her feel like she should be doing something, like rehearsing her lines or warming up her vocal cords, or whatever actors might do pre-filming.
Marinette doesn’t know. Even at all the previous filming sessions, she didn’t know what to do at such a… meticulous? delicate? period of the whole movie process. That is, of course, until—
“Adrien, go ahead and get on set!”
Marinette spins on her heel to spot Nino pointing toward her. A head of golden hair bobs in its path.
Yeah. Until she sees him, and there he is.
Seeing Adrien Agreste has done the same thing to her heart since she was fourteen years old.
Absurdity of clichés aside, it’s like riding a roller coaster. No matter how many times you ride it, no matter how well you’ve memorized each twist and turn of the track’s path, your stomach always sinks when it hits the drop. The wind still makes your eyes tear up. Your body is always weightless during the freefall.
That’s what seeing Adrien is like—a constant freefall, her heart soaring as it meets the evercoming descent.
(With a love like this, she can’t imagine having a crush on anyone else.)
Adrien catches her eye as he approaches.
“Marinette!” he calls, and oh. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph—Marinette forgives Alya for everything if it means seeing Adrien in a Ladybug suit, in her very own red and black.
Her mouth opens and closes soundlessly. Wow. Wow. He really ought to consider modeling more latex.
“Hey, what’s up?” he greets, suddenly right in front of her, and Marinette drags her eyes away from the rise and fall of his chest and tries to look like she’s not weirdly attracted to him in spots.
“Hi,” she croaks.
He smiles at her and says something else, but she doesn’t hear him. It’s probably something like “I didn’t notice you while I was solving this multivariable calculus equation for the litter of orphaned kittens I just saved from a burning building”, or “Did you know I enjoy washing my hands after using the bathroom and long walks on the beach?”—anything along those lines, because he’s that kind of guy, perfect and smart and has manners and perfect and—
“Marinette?”
Marinette jumps. “Huh? W—Sorry. What’d you say?”
“I said the Chat Noir suit looks really good on you,” he laughs, and the sound has her pulse playing hopscotch against her ribcage.
“You think—me? Thanks,” she says, holding out one hand and its faux-claws, “The claws seal the deal, don’t they?”
Adrien hums appraisingly while he gives her the up-down and it very well kills her. Sends her straight to the grave.
“Yeah, but I think the ears are my favorite part on you.” He pinches the fake ears pinned into her hair and officially kills her two times over.
“W-Well,” she says, “you don’t look half bad yourself. Red suits you.”
Red really suits him, Marinette thinks, especially right now, all on his cheeks and the tip of his nose.
“Oh—I… Thank you,” he says bashfully.
“Alright, lovebirds. Enough flirting.” Alya’s voice has Marinette nearly jumping out of her skin.
“We—We weren’t—”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever you say,” she teases, and Marinette takes it all back—she’ll never forgive her, “We’re on in five, okay? Nino’s adjusting the lens on his camera and we'll be good to go.”
“Roger that,” says Adrien, and Alya disappears back to where she came from (although not before shooting a painfully obvious wink at Marinette).
Five minutes. Marinette blows out a breath. Five minutes and she has to…
She sneaks a glance at Adrien and he’s already looking at her. Five minutes, and she has to kiss him. Enthusiastically. On camera.
Marinette doesn’t know whether she wants those five minutes to turn into five years or five seconds. Perhaps it would be best for time to stop entirely.
“Nervous?” Adrien says, and there’s that magazine smile, the breadwinner itself.
Nervous? Nervous is a foul understatement.
“Me? Nervous?” she says with the grace of a teetering see-saw, “I’ve never been nervous in my life. Ha.”
“Good. There’s no need to be nervous, it’s just me.” He grins, and there is something particularly catty about it. It makes her stomach (the one in her feet) do a funny little dance, some crude attempt at the tango with her lunch in the spotlight.
It’s just me. Just you. Just Adrien. Just the boy that she printed out and taped new pictures of by her bed on a biweekly basis during her unsightly preteen era. Totally not a big deal or anything.
(Oh, sweet Jesus—Who let her do that?)
Marinette doesn’t know whether she should laugh or cry. She goes for a strangled sound in between.
“Yeah—What about you? You’re probably not worried at all, right?” She gestures vaguely. “Just another Tuesday for you.”
“Well,” he murmurs, swiping his tongue over his lips, “I’m a little nervous.”
It shocks her more than it probably should because—Adrien, nervous?
Coming from his field of work, Adrien is well acquainted with being on set in front of massive fluorescent lights and equally massive cameras. While to her knowledge it is his first time starring in any film of this length, he’s still been in his fair share of commercials and recorded interviews—she’s watched all of them at least twice—and then, obviously, he is his mother’s son.
Marinette can’t imagine him feeling any kind of nervous right now. They’re in his element, after all.
Her face must show its shock, because then Adrien is blushing and backtracking and adorable, “Or—Maybe nervous isn’t the right word. I’m just… excited, you know? I’ve been looking forward to this scene.”
“You’ve been looking forward to it?” To this scene? The scene where she kisses him? Enthusiastically? On camera?
His hand finds the back of his neck and he ducks his head.
“Yeah. I have.”
“Oh,” she says with the cadence of a deflating balloon, sounding just as anticlimactic as it is dumb.
Surely, she’s looking too far into this. He probably means that he’s excited for the final battle, for his heroic one-liners, the satisfying end of something they’ve both put so much time and effort towards—but all Marinette’s clearly delusional ears hear is Adrien has been looking forward to kissing her.
She’s on that roller coaster again, falling and falling and falling, struck with the urge to reach over and touch him; make him pick his head up so she can see how his lips curve, brush her fingers through the sweep of hair across his forehead—messy and effortless and strangely reminiscent of—
Marinette shakes her head much like a perturbed dog might.
No. Strangely reminiscent of no one. Especially not Chat Noir.
Today was about Adrien, kind-eyed and made-of-sunshine boy of her dreams—not the literal Harbinger of Destruction.
So for the love of God, could she stop getting reminded of him? Or at least not by Adrien, of all people.
Seriously—they’re nothing alike!
...Well. They do have similar eyes, and they’re both blondes. And sure, sometimes Adrien makes a joke that sounds like it could’ve come out of Chat Noir’s mouth—something ridiculous, a pun that takes at least eight layers of context to understand—and it catches Marinette off guard. Or other times, Chat will giggle, soft and to himself, and it’s strikingly similar to the way Adrien does when Nino mumbles in his sleep when they’re in class. Those make Marinette pause, too. She’ll stop and stare like he might turn his head and the boy staring back at her will be someone else.
Aside from that, though—they’re nothing alike. Really.
The silence during her contemplation must come off as judgement, because suddenly, Adrien looks actually nervous.
“Sorry—Is that weird? I just—I don’t know—”
“No!” Marinette blurts out, throwing her arms in front of her, “It’s not weird. Um. I feel the same way.”
“You do?”
“Yes.” Usually her excitement doesn’t make her want to discard herself in the nearest trash can, but this is Adrien; what would she be if not excited to kiss him?
The excitement is there. Somewhere. Probably beneath all the anxiety and confusion and unrelenting thoughts of Chat Noir’s mouth.
Adrien smiles like the break of dawn, though, sunlight splitting through shrouded corners, and all her feelings for him rush up like a firepit in her chest.
“Then…” He pauses, pretends to think. “What part would you say you’re most excited for?”
Marinette blinks. Did he just—
“I… uh…” Is she supposed to be honest right now? No, right? Wait—Wait—does he know?
Just as Marinette begins to break out in a nervous sweat, Adrien bursts into laughter. Suspiciously, she narrows her eyes.
“You’re... Oh, my God. You’re teasing me!”
“What?” he says, still laughing, “I would never!”
Against her better judgement, Marinette laughs, too. “You’re a jerk.”
He gasps. “How cruel!”
“It’s warranted!”
“I have to respectfully disagree.” Adrien crosses his arms and lifts his chin defiantly, a strikingly familiar pose that Marinette chooses not to dwell on.
Before she can quip out a reply, she sees Alya waving around staff from the corner of her eye.
“Places, everyone!” she shouts.
“Oh, already?” Adrien says, glancing to the side and oh, my jawline— “Guess that’s our cue. Let’s work hard, yeah?”
“Yup. Let’s—uh—do that!” Marinette says with a jerky nod, fighting the urge to do something weird like shoot finger guns or pop a classic double thumbs up. She ends up turning robotically on her heel, which isn’t much better.
As she starts mechanically toward her spot, though, Adrien catches her by the wrist. Confused, she allows him to pull her back around and is greeted by a grin that looks too smug to be on his face.
“By the way,” he starts, hushed and playful, “I’m most excited for that part, too.”
A part of her brain shuts down instantaneously as Adrien bounds away in the opposite direction.
What, and she means this in the most courteous way possible, the fuck.
“Marinette,” Alya calls from the director's chair, shooing her to where she should be, “you start on the other side—and can someone point the fans at her? She’s looking a little flushed!”
Marinette is working on autopilot.
Which is… not normal. But then again, nothing about her right now—the cat ears, the acting, the kissing Adrien Agreste outside of her dreamscape momentarily—is normal.
Initially, Marinette considered it a damn miracle (whether it’s because she’s Lady Luck personified or not) that she could say her lines without stuttering after whatever the hell it is Adrien subjected her to earlier. Mercy from God herself, even.
In the dialogue approaching the kiss, though, Marinette went from lucky, smooth delivery to—well—flatlining. Her success is now entirely reliant on muscle memory developed by the hours upon hours she spent memorizing each page of the script and the pure comfort she has playing Lady Noire’s character.
In other words: she’s working on autopilot.
You can’t exactly blame her for it, though, because this is essentially a fight or flight (flight specifically) response. She has to put her conscious thought to the side—for now—for the sake of the entire scene. So, when she flicks her baton into her belt as she stands beside Adrien—
(We did it, Mister Bug! We… We did it.)
—and he slings his arm around her, pulling her against his side—
(Couldn’t have done it without you, chatte.)
—and she laughs as she rests her head on his shoulder—
(I’d certainly hope not. It’s you and me against the world, isn’t it?)
So when all of that happens, she doesn’t crumble.
Just keep it together for a little while longer, she tells herself. You can do it.
Adrien’s hand slips into hers and her mental autopilot function explodes. The figurative plane in her head crashes into some non-recorded island on the other side of the world.
(Nevermind. You can’t do it.)
(She hopes she doesn’t look too startled.)
Marinette holds her breath and rattles off every single expletive she knows at the plane crash in her head. This is it. Here it comes.
She imagines the night before—the crumpled script curling into her fists, the highlighter smears on her fingertips, florentine crumbs on her desk—until the only thing she sees is that short, simple line.
LADY NOIRE enthusiastically kisses MISTER BUG.
Twelve-point Courier New. Italicized for emphasis.
Shit. This is really happening.
Adrien’s eyes find hers—waiting.
Is it too late to chicken out? Is movie magic out of the question yet? Nino is good with the camera, right? He could probably figure out a convincing angle—and Alya would succumb if Marinette begged, and trust, she is not above begging—
Shit. Marinette can only make her stalling look like a natural, in-universe pause for so long before Alya starts making those judge-y director eyes at her.
She can’t do this. She can’t.
But then Adrien squeezes her hand—it’s just enough pressure to show that he’s here. It's reassurance. You can do this, he says.
And no, she really can’t, but fuck. She guesses she will anyway, because she said she would and this is the final stretch and she hasn’t pined for this many years to pass up the chance to finally kiss Adrien and she will do this.
Marinette takes a shuddering breath and makes the scripted mistake of turning toward Adrien.
Haloed by the gold-violet shine of the dipping sun, he smiles—it’s slow, it’s hopeful, it’s exactly the kind of blissful in-love gaze Alya wanted him to master for this scene, and Marinette’s heart aches for it. For him.
Just like that, he’s no longer Mister Bug and she’s far from Lady Noire—No, she’s just Marinette, pathetically enraptured, love-stricken, idiot Marinette, and he is the boy that her heart will always run back to.
Therefore, when Marinette kisses him, it doesn’t matter that it’s not in the script to pour desperate adoration from her fingertips, or that there’s no line that tells her to angle her chin toward his mouth and trace her lips against his the way a wildfire embraces trees: burning and hot and consuming, because it pours and she does and she kisses him.
She kisses him, and she prays he hears her. I love you, I love you, I love you, I love you.
Adrien might not know the question she’s asking but he answers her anyway, meets her surge like the collision of two waves.
His hands are in the curve of her spine, his breath a sigh against her mouth, his scent all the air she can breathe—and Marinette should be melting right now, her limbs all lax and gum, because Adrien is kissing her back, but—
But with her eyes closed, it’s too easy to mistake the tenderness of his touch for someone else’s.
Suddenly, there is no sunset and there is no Eiffel Tower, only the awning over her balcony and a string of flickering fairy lights that really, she ought to take down, or at least change, because they’ve been up there since Christmas. Chat Noir helped her put them up.
He kissed her beneath them, too.
A delirious thought comes to her, then, when she inches away from Adrien’s face and feels the whisper of his eyelashes on her skin. She opens her eyes and meets the green of his, and it’s bright and familiar like the aloe plants leaning off her railings.
She pictures Adrien masked in black leather, her in red. If they traded suits, how much would he look like him?
Wait. What?
Adrien smiles again—it’s for her this time, not the camera, and it’s sugary and sweet and Marinette’s chest squeezes with guilt at the sight of it because it reminds her so much of Chat’s.
Her hands begin to tremble, and she clenches them into fists at the back of Adrien’s neck.
When did this happen? Since when does she search for Chat Noir in other boy’s eyes, in their lips? Since when does she kiss Adrien Agreste and pretend it is Chat’s smile against her mouth?
“And cut! That’s a wrap!” Alya’s voice rips her back to reality. Marinette wastes no time springing out of Adrien’s arms, cold all over.
What is happening?
“Marinette,” and there’s him in her ear, and even that sounds like Chat Noir. Her heart staggers in her chest like a reflex, his voice a step she always manages to trip over.
She turns to him, stretches her lips into a smile that’s all teeth.
“A-Adrien. Um. Well! We, uh, did it!” she stammers, and it frustrates her even more—Clearly, her feelings for him haven’t lessened in the slightest, but she still—but Chat still—
“We did,” he agrees, “You were wonderful. I couldn’t imagine a better co-star.”
He looks at her with so much fondness it makes her head swim. She could very well be concussed.
“You’re wonderful,” she sighs dreamily, shoulders slumping forward, before she straightens back up at record speed— “I, uh—I mean, you did fonderwul—wonderful—too. Um. Really, uh, wonderful.”
“I’m really glad you think so…” He trails off, words quieting into silence, and for a second, Marinette thinks he might be blushing—pink and soft and over his ears, but Alya’s at her side before she can get a good look.
“Mari!” Alya cheers, throwing an arm over her shoulder that nearly sends her collapsing into the ground, “Awesome job! And you, too, Sunshine. This is gonna come together perfectly.”
“Thank you,” Adrien replies, and then he’s looking at Marinette again and leaving fire in her chest, “Marinette, I—“
“Bro!” Nino crashes into Adrien’s side and his words falter into an unprepared Oof!
“Nino,” he coughs in response.
Nino offers his congratulations and praise as well to both Adrien and Marinette, but in record time, Marinette has zoned out of the conversation and in on Adrien—the Ladybug suit seriously did him wonders. Maybe he’ll let her design a red outfit for him one day, something that cinches his waist and stretches over his shoulders.
Yes. Red is good, she decides, very good. Black would suit him well, too, though. Something accented with gold to bring out his hair would look nice, something like—
Marinette bites her tongue and winces, hard.
Something like Chat Noir’s suit. God. She needs to stop thinking like this.
“You good, Mari?” Alya asks, and Marinette’s smile feels more like a grimace.
“Yeah.” Absolutely not. “I’m just kinda thirsty, I think.” Ha. Thirsty is one way to put it.
“Why didn’t you say so? Let’s go, they just restocked the refreshments table,” she says, leading her away from Adrien and Nino.
She doesn’t look over her shoulder as they leave.
The sun has disappeared beneath the horizon and leaves the sky a whisper of gold and faded pink. The streetlights begin to flutter to life around them, basking the baked goods and water bottles on the table in a paperish glow that reminds Marinette of the bakery.
She bores a hole into a plate of chouquettes. The pearl sugar they’re topped with is store-bought; she can tell by how uniform each chunky grain is. Chat Noir likes his best when it’s homemade.
“Okay, spit it out. What’s up?”
“Huh?” Marinette snatches her gaze back at Alya. “What? Nothing’s up.”
“Sure, and that’s why you’re having a telepathic conversation with the table. Come on. What happened?”
The breath Marinette lets out comes from her chest and her shoulders and her jaw. She focuses on the pattern of the tablecloth, of each overlapping line, and counts the squares they make until Alya’s eyes start feeling like dumbbells where her stomach should be.
Marinette gnaws on her bottom lip.
What is she supposed to say? That Adrien kissed her but she was kissing Chat Noir? That her heart’s beating double time?
“Have you ever liked more than one person at once?” she asks instead, and there’s a stilted pause where all she hears is her own breathing.
When Alya doesn’t immediately respond, Marinette hesitantly looks up at her—and comes face to face with an expression that is significantly less helpful than she was hoping for. Slack-jawed and wide-eyed, eyebrows bowed in two identical arches—yeah. They aren’t going to get anywhere.
“Holy shit.”
Marinette groans.
“Holy shit. Marinette? Are you being for real right now?”
Another groan, this time smothered into her gloves and faux-claws.
“Oh, nuh uh. When did this happen? What about the last four years of indestructible pining?” Alya whisper-yells, huddling into Marinette’s shoulder while looking around, careful not to let anyone overhear.
Marinette looks at her from behind the hands on her face and shrugs half-heartedly.
“Recently…” Like, last night recently.
A series of expressions shutter across Alya’s face, all different degrees of consideration and shock that she usually saves for things like Mendeleiev’s pop quizzes or an unforeseen Ladybug update—until she parts her lips into a gasp.
“Wait, who? Is it—oh, my God. Is it Luka?”
“W—No! It’s—” Marinette clamps her mouth shut. There’s no way she’s telling Alya she has anything like a crush on Chat Noir. “I don’t want to say who it is right now. Just… have you? Like—is this a thing that happens, liking two people at the same time?”
Alya, unhelpfully, snorts. “For you? Not a chance.”
“Alya,” she pouts, “I’m serious! I’m kinda freaking out here.”
With another glance cast over her shoulder, hazel eyes peering at their surroundings suspiciously, Alya takes Marinette by the elbow and—
“Hey—!”
—and pulls her onto her ass behind the refreshments table.
“What the hell—” Marinette yelps, only to be shushed fervently.
“You said you’re serious, didn’t you? Then this is a necessary precaution.”
“I can hardly see how this is necessary in any way, shape or form.”
“Anyway,” Alya says, unfazed by her apprehension, “Having feelings for more than one person at once… I guess that’s not unheard of. I mean, think of all those love triangle movies we watched.”
Somehow, having her situation compared to a poorly written yet ever-occurring plot point in all the shitty rom-coms she and Alya ironically enjoy is not settling. But damn, does the shoe fit.
Average teenage girl is torn between her humorous, dorky superhero partner and the famous model who doubles as the class sweetheart—Come on. That’s literally a pitch for the next Disney original.
“Well, what do I do?” Marinette asks, grabbing blindly from the table.
Alya purses her lips. “Make a choice, I guess.”
“I have to choose?”
“What else would you do?”
“I don’t know!” Marinette huffs, cradling a handful of palets de dames, “Suffer? Flee the country? Let my emotions fester precariously until they put me into a stress-induced coma?”
Across from her, Alya pinches the bridge of her nose and lets out a slow sigh. “Mari, you will not be doing any of that.”
“My options are appearing quite limited right now.”
“Let’s think this through, okay?” Marinette gets robbed of a cookie as Alya begins her interrogation. “Do you like this… other boy just as much as Adrien? Or more, even?”
She has yet to consider the complexities of her feelings for Chat—Hell, she’s still processing the fact she even has feelings for him, let alone the extent of them!
“Um,” Marinette supplies, meaningfully.
“Um?” Alya presses.
“I. Um. I… don’t know?”
“You don’t know.”
“...No?”
“Okay. We’ll try something different: Do you like Adrien less after discovering your feelings for this mystery boy?”
Marinette peeks over the refreshments table. In her line of sight, Adrien laughs at something Nino shows him on his camera—a blooper from a previously filmed scene, she guesses, or maybe a poorly paused frame—and it bubbles out of him and into his palm, genuine and breathless. Across the stretch of distance separating them, the warmth of the sound still finds her and eases the tension in her shoulders.
She exhales, defeated. “No. Not at all.”
“This might complicate the whole ‘make a choice’ thing, then,” Alya points out, and Marinette sinks back into the frankly subpar hiding spot they’ve made out of the table.
“Ugh. You think?”
Alya smiles sympathetically, “No, I know.”
While sulking behind the refreshments table longer than she will ever admit, Marinette comes to a few conclusions:
- She has feelings for Adrien.
- She has feelings for Chat Noir.
- She can finish an oreo in 25 seconds.
Some of these conclusions are… less notable than others.
In retrospect, she had already come to these conclusions. She just accepts them as things that all exist at once now, which is an entirely different journey.
That’s what she’s been telling herself, at least.
Alya left her to her devices soon after it occurred to her that Marinette is, for the time being, a lost cause. She can’t blame her. Conclusion #1 and #2 are entirely contradictory and Conclusion #3 is just a little sad.
By the time Marinette figures she ought to relieve herself of her Lady Noire costume for her peace of mind and get up, she still hasn’t gotten past the whole ‘choose between Adrien and Chat Noir’ thing.
Accepting the fact she has the capacity to like someone as sweet and kind as Adrien and also like Chat Noir at the same time took a lot of energy.
(And yes, she did briefly entertain the null option of choosing both of them, but the thought of Adrien and Chat Noir in the same room is what inadvertently lead to the discovery of Conclusion #3. She scrapped that fantasy very quickly.)
Marinette shuffles from behind the table as inconspicuously as one can manage in such a position, but if the weird stares she gets on her way to the trailer are anything to go by, she isn’t as inconspicuous as she intended to be. Typical.
Anyway. There’s also the fact that choosing either one of them at all probably isn’t even an option.
Let’s be real. It wouldn’t matter who she ‘chose’, she’s getting rejected in every scenario.
For one, there’s just no way Adrien likes her. She’s had a gigantic crush on him the size of the moon for four years now, and he can’t not have caught on after the monster of a kiss she laid on him earlier.
Meaning: he’s just saving her from her own embarrassment by not acknowledging her dumb, school-girl crush, otherwise he would have to outright reject her in an act of public humiliation.
As for Chat? He offered to help her win Adrien over! He couldn’t have made it any more clear that Marinette is just a friend with that move.
Plus, she isn’t even sure he likes Ladybug anymore after all the times she’s rejected him, so even that route’s hardly an option.
God. Are crushes supposed to be this hard? Alya and Nino made it look so easy. They were already—
Marinette narrowly dodges getting concussed by the door that flies open in front of her.
“Woah!” Of course. Suddenly she wishes the door knocked her out. “You alright?”
“Um! Adrien,” she says, stepping out the way of a fresh-faced Adrien Agreste unfortunately dressed in his normal clothes, “Sorry. I’m just. Um.”
She waves her hands at her costume, and Adrien nods understandingly. She tries not to linger on the motion.
“Got you, I’ll just get out of your way, then,” he says, stepping to the side to let Marinette through.
She gulps at the space he made for her—it’s definitely adequate enough for her to fit past, but it’ll be a squeeze. With her current internal turmoil, she’s not sure if she can handle being so close to him.
She… doesn’t have much of a choice, though, ‘cause he’s not making any more of an effort to move.
“Thanks,” Marinette squeaks, holding her breath as she rushes past him inside.
Scrambling toward the vanity, she begins aggressively ripping makeup wipes out of the bag. She busies herself with taking off Lady Noire’s face so as not to think too hard about the way Adrien is still leaning against the doorframe, his eyes a tangible weight on her back.
“Oh, and Marinette?” he calls, and she’ll never get over the way he says her name.
“Yes?” she says to the false eyelashes she just peeled off her face.
She hears him shuffle around until there’s an undeniable warmth at her shoulder, and when she looks up, there are two faces in the mirror.
“I meant what I said earlier. You were wonderful today—I mean, you’ve been wonderful these past weeks, but—well, especially today,” he says with the sugar-sweet smile he gave her before, and it takes all of her not to melt on the spot.
“I couldn’t have done it without you. Call it a team effort,” she says, rolling the lash glue between her fingers so she doesn’t do something stupid like grab his hand.
“Of course,” he says, “but, other than that, I wanted to ask you something before you left…”
Marinette can basically taste her heartbeat as the words leave his mouth.
“What’s up?” she asks slowly, suspicious and expectant and anxious all at once.
“Well, um…” And there it is again—Nervous Adrien, wetting his lips and pushing a hand through the hair at the back of his neck, eyes flitting between her and the floor like he’s deciding on how brave he’s going to be with his next words.
It’s cute but damn if it isn’t just a little bit unsettling, because what about Marinette could possibly make him nervous? Like—she’s Marinette, and he’s the guy she’s made a fool of herself in front of for four consecutive years in a row.
But for that same reason—because she knows what it’s like to feel that way—Marinette smiles up at him patiently, quietly allowing him to collect his thoughts.
Adrien takes a breath and decides to keep his eyes on hers. It only makes her face feel kinda hot.
“I was wondering if… you’d want to go out sometime?”
Marinette blinks.
Blinks again.
Blinks ag—
“Marinette?”
Marinette is out of order.
“You—You wanna—With me, you want to—” she stammers when she finds her voice, trying not to look too far into Adrien’s worried (and painfully sweet) gaze just in case she’s severely misreading the situation, “...go out?”
“Yeah.” Stop looking at him biting his lip. Stop looking right n— “Like… on a date?”
Adrien Agreste just asked her on a date. There’s a good chance Marinette just died her third death today.
Adrien wants to go on a date. With her! Marinette!
There’s an absolute yes on her lips before she thinks it herself, waiting to be shouted or uttered or wheezed, but when she opens her mouth—nothing comes out.
Nothing comes out because she thinks of last night, of Chat Noir, of her pulse in her fingertips when he kissed her, and she can’t.
“I… Adrien, I…” she trails off, at loss for words and feeling like she just got dunked in ice.
Thankfully, Adrien is Adrien, and he doesn’t rush her, he doesn’t even look discouraged.
“You don’t have to answer me now. Just… think about it and let me know if it’s something you’re interested in. Okay?”
Marinette nods dumbly. “Okay.”
With that, Adrien waves and heads out of the trailer. Marinette watches his back as he goes.
Alya is going to beat her ass when she finds out about this.
Marinette decides not to tell Alya yet. She can barely take the weird, unreadable look Tikki unapologetically gives her the moment she gets home, so the best friend spiel will have to wait until tomorrow.
At least, that’s what she told herself earlier while piping the chouquette dough mechanically on a pan.
When she arrived back home, Marinette showered and immediately went to the kitchen to prepare the chouquettes she promised Chat. They had some leftovers from today’s sales, but she wanted them to be fresh for him.
That and the fact she has an easier time unscrambling her thoughts when she’s cooking something familiar—something about the muscle memory and the ease in which she flutters around ovens and counters—and she needed to get some self-contemplation done without cat ears pinned into her hair.
By the time the chouquettes are out of the oven and cooling, almost ready to be plated, Marinette has come to a decision about… well, everything.
So, fine—she loves Adrien and Chat Noir both. Alya was right, she needed to make a choice. She needed to make her mind up for her own sake and everyone else’s around her.
So, she did.
She chooses neither.
“Neither?” Tikki repeats from her shoulder, flabbergasted.
“Neither,” Marinette confirms, carefully balancing the plate of chouquettes in her hands as she makes her way up to her room. She didn’t know when Chat would come, but hopefully it would be soon—while the treats were still hot.
“But—Why? You don’t want to be with either of them?”
“That’s not the case,” she sighs, “I have feelings for both of them, Tikki, and that’s the problem—It wouldn’t feel right choosing one because I’ll still have feelings for the other, too. It’s not fair to either of them. You know?”
Marinette kicks the trapdoor closed. Tikki sputters at her side and it’s almost comical.
“But… I mean… I suppose that makes sense,” she finally sighs, sounding oddly defeated.
“Maybe I’ll be able to sort my feelings out in time and pursue one of them, but for now, that can’t happen.”
Truth be told, as resolute as she tried to sound out loud, it still stung inside to make such a… miserable, decision. It had to be this way, though, as much as it sucked—she knew that.
She’d live.
“I’m heading up, okay?” Marinette says, shaking off the forlorn tension creeping up on her. “I’ve got a delivery to make.”
When she pokes her head out of the skylight hatch, Chat Noir is already there.
He’s stretched out on her deck chair with his arms folded behind his head, one leg propped up across the other, and his eyes closed—like he lives here or something.
Marinette rolls her eyes.
“Nice of you to join me,” he greets when she stands above him, only opening his eyes after becoming shrouded by her shadow.
“Hello to you, too,” she says, offering him the plate of chouquettes.
He lights up like a Christmas tree and springs to his feet.
“Princess! You shouldn’t have.” He plucks a chouquette from the plate and pops it into his mouth, humming in satisfaction. “So good.”
“I said I would, didn’t I?” Marinette says, sitting on the end of the deck chair.
She puts the plate down on the table (right on top of a magazine which may or may not have Adrien’s face on the cover) and Chat is quick to follow it, already piling more chouquettes into his hand.
“Did you just make these?” he asks around a mouthful of the pastries, and Marinette wishes she grabbed napkins on the way up so she could shove them in his face.
“Yes. Do you know basic table manners?”
“‘Course I do! We’re not at a table, though.”
Marinette makes a show of looking at the table she just set the plate down on.
“...This one doesn’t count.”
“Oh?” She crosses her arms over her chest. “How come?”
“Clearly, it’s too small.”
She eyes the table—it’s for tea, so it is small, but—
“Chaton,” she says seriously, “You of all people should know size doesn't matter.”
Chat Noir stares at her, a handful of chouquette stopped in its path to his mouth. There’s a pause.
“Marinette!” he cries, “What is that supposed to mean!”
Marinette snickers and grabs a chouquette from the plate, shrugging her shoulders exaggeratedly.
Chat maintains his scandalized demeanor for as long as he can (not very long) until crumbling into laughter of his own, knocking his shoulder into hers as he does. Like he always does.
In record time, Chat inhales just about every chouquette Marinette prepared—save the handful she managed to salvage for herself—and drapes himself against her side with a happy sigh.
“If you burp in my face, I’m considering it permission to eject you,” she says matter-of-factly to the head of blonde hair on her shoulder, watching him brush crumbs off of his hands.
“I’m offended,” Chat replies, turning to look at her, “After all this time, have I not proven myself worthy of higher expectations?”
Marinette flicks a pearl of sugar at him. “Have you met yourself?”
“I have. I’m quite the gentleman, don’t you think?”
“I—”
“You know what?” Chat cuts in, “Don’t answer that. I don’t need you to wound my pride any further this evening.”
“Suit yourself!”
Chat Noir chuckles, but soon after, he becomes suspiciously quiet, which is dangerous because that means he’s thinking and that can go left very quickly.
Before she can question his unsettling silence, however, he breaks it himself.
“Actually, I have a question you can answer,” he proposes, and it is the most foreboding thing Marinette has heard all day. She already knows.
“How was filming today?”
Okay. She wasn’t exactly dreading this question, but she wasn’t necessarily bouncing on her feet with excitement to answer it, either.
It wasn’t even that filming had been bad, because it hadn’t been! It was great, even, but at the same time… Marinette tips her head up toward the lights.
“It was… successful,” she starts slowly, “We’re officially done. It was pretty quick and easy, and I didn’t forget any of my lines.”
“I knew you would do great,” Chat says with a resolute nod. “What else happened?”
Marinette rattles off more about what they filmed. She details her Lady Noire costume, which Chat is expectedly too happy about (“Tell me you took pictures. Please.”), and then about the scene itself—her lines, the way she nearly fumbled part of her monologue, the stunts—everything except the—
“And the kiss?” he mentions casually, blissfully oblivious to the way she was avoiding that part, “Did all our practice come in handy?”
She drops her face into her hands. The kiss—the practice one and the real one.
“Oh, come on,” he snorts, “It couldn’t have been that bad… um… Right?”
Save the poorly timed epiphany? It was—just—
“I can't believe I kissed Adrien Agreste,” she whispers, giddy at the memory.
Chat eagerly leans into her space, eyes alight with anticipation. “So it was good? Everything you hoped it would be?”
If you looked past the equally horrifying and mind-numbing realization she had in the middle of it, the kiss was absolutely incredible—Adrien’s hands, his mouth, his everything—Marinette felt like she won the damn lottery.
Technically, it was amazing. In context, on the other hand...
“I don’t know if I’d say it was everything I hoped it would be, but it was still pretty damn good,” she admits after giving it some thought.
Chat, because he has no semblance of personal space, crowds even closer to her with a grin that is all teeth and pride. “Not better than me, then?”
Marinette shoves him off the deck chair.
“Hey!”
“Hey yourself,” she says, pushing herself to her feet to approach the railings.
Chat Noir follows her once he recovers from being knocked to the floor, sliding back up to her side.
“So… Why wasn’t it everything you hoped it would be?” he asks hesitantly, looking like he’s bracing for another hit, “Is Adrien, like… a bad kisser?”
“No!” she shouts—too quickly—before clearing her throat. “I mean—He’s—Adrien is… amazing. At everything. Kissing is no exception, really, I just…”
Adrien wasn’t the problem. He never could be—he was perfect—but Marinette, on the other hand? Oh, boy.
Chat Noir patiently waits for her to elaborate, but something tells her it wouldn’t be a great idea to recount what exactly was going through her head in that particular moment.
“Filmed,” she blurts out, “Since it was filmed—It was good, but, you know, it was also scripted—so the whole authenticity aspect wasn’t there and that’s why it wasn’t really everything I hoped for.”
She smiles nervously, hoping that her blatantly made-up reason is enough to convince him. Eventually, after letting her soak in her own apprehension, he nods and dissolves into more of that unsettling silence that only brings about questions Marinette doesn’t have the face to answer.
“I see. What do you think Adrien thought of it?” Case in point.
“Well,” Marinette says, barking out a humorless laugh, “it was good enough to ask me out on a date before I left, apparently.”
Oooh, geez. She cringes as soon as the words leave her mouth. Why did she even mention that?
Chat Noir doesn’t look surprised, which is at the very least flattering—she thinks—because that must mean he had some type of hope in her, but at the same time, his expectancy looks misplaced.
“O-Oh? And what’d you say?” he asks.
Marinette shrugs. “I didn’t give him an answer yet.”
“Do you… have an idea of what it’ll be?” says Chat, “Or are you—um—still thinking about it?”
She watches him wring his fingers out over the railings, and he looks at her in bursts: his hands to her eyes, never lingering too long on either spot.
“I…” She exhales. “I’m going to say no.”
Chat’s eyes go wider than she’s ever seen them.
“You’re what?”
She chews on her bottom lip. “I’m not going to go out with him. I’ve already decided. I just need to figure out how to—how to tell him, and…”
Her voice tapers off into nothing. Chat Noir looks strangely upset—No, it’s not strange, not really. After all he did to help her, after the countless hours she spent gushing about Adrien, hearing her flat out reject him now must be—frustrating. Annoying. All of that.
A bitter, guilty feeling settles in the pit of her stomach, like her body’s trying and failing to digest a bad lie.
“I’m sorry,” she starts, inching toward him, “I know it sounds stupid and—Especially after everything you’ve done to help me, I know you must be irritated, so I’m s—”
“What? I’m not irritated, Princess, don’t apologize,” Chat is quick to reassure, but the look on his face doesn’t go anywhere.
She shrugs again, helplessly.
“I'm just… confused,” he continues, “Why are you rejecting him now, after everything?”
Tension shoots up her spine and renders her still, save the twitch in her fingers.
(Why else would she reject Adrien? It’s almost laughable.)
“Just. You know…” Come on, Chat. Read between the lines or come to your own bizarre conclusion—anything so that she doesn’t have to say it out loud.
Marinette silently wills him to use that pretty little hyper-imaginative brain of his like he usually does, and he… stares. Nothing in her favor is going on up there.
“You know,” she tries again, vaguely gesturing over the balcony, but Chat Noir just follows the motion of her hands with growing perplexity.
A sigh rushes out of her. Shit. Shit.
“…Marinette?” he says, sounding soft and concerned and inexplicably hurt.
She drops her head into her arms, ducked over the balcony’s handrails with only her shoes in her line of sight.
“I have feelings for someone else.”
Even though she can’t see him, Marinette is sure that Chat looks even more dumbfounded. She can hear the confusion in his breaths.
“Who?”
She wonders if he can read the answer out of her silence. If he can read it in her eyes when she finally looks up at him, in the squeeze of her fists, if he could read it last night in her voice when she asked him to stay.
“Nobody you’d know,” she tries, but it’s not convincing even to her own ears.
His eyes narrow.
With more conviction: “Princess, who do you have feelings for?”
He has to know by now. He has to. There’s no way he doesn’t, not with the way he looks at her right now—not with the—he must know.
Chat Noir takes a shuddering breath that Marinette only hears because she’s so hyperfocused on his every movement right now she’d notice even an off-speed blink. Then, his hand is reaching toward her and she knows if he touches her, she will fall apart, so she might as well just get it over with and say it now, just swallow her pride and tell him that it’s—it’s—
“You,” she whispers, “It’s you.”
The air is in contradiction with itself. It feels cramped, like they’re standing chest to chest in a stunted elevator, like they are the farthest thing from outside on her balcony with all of Paris fanned out in front of them as far as the eye can see. Marinette forces herself to breathe—in and out, in and out—because it’s the only thing she can manage for herself.
Chat Noir inhales, and she is not ready for whatever is about to come out of his mouth.
“Marinette,” he breathes, and the sound catches in her throat and makes her hands shake and why, why, why does he have to say her name like that? Like—like it’s a prayer, like a hymn, like he—
She squeezes her eyes shut. “Listen to me, Chat—You don’t have to—You can just forget—”
“Forget?” He sounds—offended, or hurt that she would even suggest it. “Why would I want to forget?”
“Because… you don’t feel the same way?”
“Oh, but Marinette,” he murmurs, dangerously smooth, and her head spins. “You really don’t know?”
“What?” she whispers, because she’s only ever known to accept affection quietly.
Chat Noir bites his bottom lip. Color spreads across his face from beneath his mask and the way he looks at her right now—the way he must have always looked at her—How could she not have noticed?
“I like you—No, ‘like’ doesn’t cut it.” He ducks his head bashfully, something familiar, and speaks to the floor. “I’m beyond that point.”
He looks up again, all flushed and shy, and dear God, her head is really spinning.
“What?” she repeats, gripping the handrails so hard her knuckles turn white, “I—I don’t understand?”
“I love you. I’m in love with you,” Chat Noir says, and he says it like he doesn’t know any other words better, “Say you love me back, please?”
And God, she does—she loves him, longer than she’s known she could and more than her memory imparts, so much that it makes her heart shake.
“I do—”
His eyes light up. Her chest caves.
“—but—but I can’t—it’s not only you, Chat.”
A sinkhole swallows her pulse. She focuses on her hands, because whatever face he may pull—whether it be sadness or anger or anything—she won’t pretend like she’ll be able to stomach it.
“...It’s Adrien, still, isn’t it?” Marinette feels even guiltier when she hears the familiar inflection of Adrien’s voice in his. How, even in a moment like this, her own feelings mock her dilemma.
“Yes. It’s—I’m sorry, I just—As much as I do love you, I can’t stop loving him, either,” she stammers, ineloquent and ugly and in a halting pattern of stops-and-goes, “And I don’t—I can’t string you along like that, Chat, so even if I do love you, I have to… I can’t… I...”
I love you but I can’t love you, she could say. I love you but that’s all I can give you: a hollow declaration, a house with no foundation, a pair of hands that are constantly reaching and never touching.
Another apology presses at the back of her tongue, but then Chat Noir’s gentle hands are on her jaw and her head is rising.
“Princess, would you look at me?” he asks, and hesitantly, she meets his eyes.
Who knew how treacherous and familiar green could be?
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Don’t be.”
“But I am, Chat!” Marinette snaps, “When I’m with Adrien, I look for pieces of you in him, in his gestures and his smile and—”
“Marinette—“
“—and when I’m with you, all I can do is compare the sound of your laugh with his because everything one of you does reminds me of the other—”
“Marinette—“
“—and I—“
“Claws in.”
“W—Chat!” Marinette shrieks, hands scrambling to cover her eyes as the tips of Chat Noir’s ears dematerialize in a flash of green light, “What the hell do you think you’re doing!”
“Open your eyes.”
Like the added pressure will make her see less, her palms press against her eyes even harder. She will not—cannot—open her eyes. After all this time, how could she?
Chat’s fingers close around her wrists. Ungloved.
(No callouses. Her guess was wrong, then—even after handling his baton every day, his hands are as smooth as they are strong.)
He doesn’t try to pull her hands away. He lingers, though, like a question. A plea. Maybe it would’ve been easier if she had a reason to fight against him, but she doesn’t, so she stands there and lets his touch sear her skin.
“Please, Marinette. Look at me.”
And what if she does?
What will she do when she sees the face behind Chat Noir’s mask and it’s not who she wants him to be? She won’t be able to swallow that disappointment—she doesn’t want to feel it in the first place, and she doesn’t want him to see her feel it, either. So why is he doing this? Why is he doing this now, of all times?
“I can’t,” she says.
“You can.”
“I can’t, Chat, you know this!” she fumes, “What are you even doing, huh? You can’t just expose yourself like this!”
“Marinette,” says Chat Noir—or, not Chat Noir, but whoever he is behind the mask, but the way he says her name makes her falter all the same.
His thumb runs across the back of her hand in circles and squares against her skin. His touch runs through her limbs like ice.
“Trust me,” he says, and Marinette?
Marinette wants to cry or scream or push him or literally anything other than do what she is about to do—because in the end, what she does is succumb.
As much as she knows she will regret it, she succumbs, because she has nothing if not trust for him—mask or no mask.
Hesitantly, she inches her fingers apart and peeks out from the gaps between them. At first, all she sees is the span of Chat Noir’s chest, the stretch of his shoulders—not in leather, but in cotton and buttons.
Then she’s looking at the collar of his shirt where it meets his throat, she watches his Adam’s apple bob, follows it up the sharp lines of his jaw to his mouth and his perfect upturned nose and—
“...You’re kidding.”
Treacherous, treacherous green.
“That would be mean of me,” says Chat Noir’s voice with Adrien Agreste’s face, “wouldn’t it?”
She could pass out. No, she is going to pass out, because why the hell is Adrien standing where Chat Noir just was?
“Adrien?”
Yes. It’s Adrien goddamn Agreste, and he’s wearing Chat Noir’s smile and Marinette thinks—No, she doesn’t think anything, actually. Her brain and everything it’s worth feels like it’s been dunked into hot oil and fried to a delicious crisp. She’s positively unresponsive—Hell, the likelihood of her being able to spell her own name right now has dwindled to a startling ‘probably not’.
Marinette sucks in a breath and holds it.
Chat Noir is Adrien. Adrien is Chat Noir. Good God.
“Hi,” says the love of her life, “It’s me.”
For a second, all Marinette does is stare. She scrutinizes his every feature, the nose, the mouth, the eyes she had been so convinced she knew best—the face she thought she could pick out in every and any crowd and just—just know—and feels her stomach churn uncomfortably. Undoubtedly, she knows this face.
The finishing blow comes as the wind. It sweeps over them like the caress of a hand and leaves his hair tousled over his eyebrows, and just like that, the clarity is strictly undeniable.
It’s really him.
“Holy shit,” Marinette wheezes, startled by the sound of her own breathless voice—her own acknowledgment—
(She really could pass out. Seriously, there’s no way she’s getting enough oxygen to her brain right now. The only thing stopping her from conveniently falling over the railings and hitting her head just hard enough to develop amnesia is her shock-induced catatonia.)
“Marinette? Are you okay?”
“It’s you,” she whispers, rooted to the ground.
Adrien who is Chat Noir who is the boy she is in love with (times two) looks at her with a gaze that is so earnest it almost hurts to meet it head on—like staring at the sun—and he slowly takes his hands off of her.
“Is… is that okay?”
What a loaded question.
“Is it okay that it’s you?”
“Yeah…”
This time, it’s Marinette that reaches out to him. She crosses the arms-length worth of hesitation she kept between them wondering how he could even ask that question after everything that’s happened.
“Adrien—chaton—” Her hands find his face and he leans into her touch, eyes lit with such blatant hope it has her heart aching. “I don’t know what I would do if it wasn’t you.”
Well, not really. She had a few predictions ranging from meltdowns to identity theft, but the point is she is happy—so, so happy—that it’s him.
“Good thing you don’t have to know, right?” he asks, hushed.
It isn’t exactly weird—it makes sense, even—but it is jarring to look at Adrien and process that this is Chat Noir, this is her partner, this is the boy she trusts her and all of Paris’ lives with.
“You’re such an idiot,” she whispers, exasperated but elated despite herself.
Adrien shrugs like he saw the insult coming. He’s got a dopey smile on his face and it doesn't go anywhere. “I know.”
“Seriously, chaton—I know who you are now. This—What will Ladybug think? Was it worth telling me?”
(Yes, she knows exactly what Ladybug will think (she’s Ladybug), but the point still stands.)
“I’ll figure it out, I promise,” he says, and he looks so sure of himself Marinette can’t help but feel relieved, “No matter what might happen though, it was worth it. You’re worth it.”
She’s so happy she could burst. “Idiot.”
“You love it,” Adrien says, and she rolls her eyes.
“I suppose I do.”
She ought to have pieced everything together sooner. There isn’t anyone else Chat Noir could be, and the only boy she could fall for twice over is Adrien. So of course, of course they are one and the same.
Realization slaps her in the face.
“Oh, my God.”
“What?” Adrien asks, concern flooding his features.
“You—” Her brows furrow. “Chat Noir is in love with me.”
“Yes.”
“You’re Chat Noir.”
“I am.”
“Oh, my God,” she repeats, hands covering her rapidly heating face, “Holy—Oh, my God—Adrien Agreste is in love with me. What the—How the—?”
What fucking timeline are they in?
“Is it really all that surprising?” he giggles, honest to God giggles, and Marinette might have a stroke at this point.
“I—Well, I mean—I just need a second to process this, okay?”
Because somehow, her brain hasn’t caught up to the reality of the situation beyond Adrien = Chat Noir.
“Take your time,” he, Adrien, purrs into her goddamn ear.
She gargles something incoherent and buries her face into his shoulder.
“By the way,” says Adrien, and she can hear the grin in his voice, “does this mean you’ll reconsider rejecting me?”
Marinette huffs out a sheepish laugh, shaking her head as she looks up at him. “I don’t know, I think I’ll need some more convincing.”
“Is that so?” Adrien leans down until his forehead is against hers, amusement twinkling in his eyes.
“Uh huh.”
“Fortunately,” he says, confident and brilliant and hers, “I can be quite persuasive.”
And when Adrien’s mouth slants across hers tasting like poetry and pearl sugar and love, Marinette is inclined to agree.
“Wait a minute, that means… that girl you kissed on the swingset—that was Chloé?”
“Oh… yeah, you know about that?”
“Oh my god. Your first kiss was Chloé.”
“You were my first kiss, Marinette.”
“W—Huh? What do you mean, what about Chloé? The crackers? Swingset?”
“Changed my mind. Every kiss until yours was just a practice round.”
“I—That’s not how it works!”
“Sure it is. Besides, who else would know other than you and me?”
“You—You’re… insufferable.”
“Fine, fine. I don’t care about the technicalities as long as you’re my last first kiss.”
“That was awful.”
“Awfully romantic!”