Work Text:
“I swear,” Marc sighs over his notebook, “whoever’s coming up with these Miraculous powers needs to get more creative.”
When Marinette walks into the art room that afternoon, she’s half-expecting him and Nathaniel to bowl her over in their own excitement. To tell her all about how there’s a new hero in town. A snake hero, all teal and black with splashes of yellow. And that his name is Viperion. Viperion. It’s like they called it or something, they were supposed to say. Like they’re creative prophets in their own right.
Except in reality, the art room is abysmally quiet, and Nathaniel is bent over sheets of paper with his head in his hands, and Marc is practically sprawled out over the worktable—and still is, moments after she gets settled with her sketchbook. And when he recedes into his seat, and Nathaniel turns his head up toward her, she can see why. Comic panels are erased so thoroughly that the paper is torn in places, and some of the lines in Marc’s notebook are scratched out so bold that she wouldn’t be surprised if the ink bled onto the next page.
Creative block. Burnout. Why wouldn’t they be feeling it? As far as Marinette knows, the two of them have been working on this project nearly every day that school’s been in session, and probably on the weekends, too. She knows the signs besides—from her own staying up too late over the sewing machine, pricking her fingers when the fatigue hits hard, crying with only her dress form as her company because her brain has too many tabs opens and none of them will make the designs go—and sometimes she wishes she didn’t.
Sometimes she wishes they didn’t, either. How many pages did Marc rip out of that notebook before he decided they were even worth rereading himself? How many sheets did Nathaniel crumple up and chuck behind him, or hurl right at the wall?
Before she can say anything, Luka sidles up behind her, draping an arm over her shoulder and resting his chin on her head. He doesn’t do it out of any possessiveness, but simply because it comes natural to him. Because it grounds him. He told her so once.
“What seems to be the problem, boys?” he says by way of greeting, the calm smile near-audible in his voice.
Nathaniel’s answer is nothing more than a frustrated groan and the thud of his head against the table, his arms dangling at his sides. Among them, that’s a more-than-sufficient answer.
Even still, Marc, thankfully, is a little more articulate. “It’s Viperion,” he explains. “That new hero, you know? It’s been bothering us all weekend.”
Behind her, Luka flinches, though it’s probably not obvious. Even she only knows because she can feel it. And out of the four of them, she’s probably the only one who knows why. And it’s not because of the anxiety. “Viperion, huh,” he murmurs, coming to straddle a nearby stool as he glances over the papers. “I might be familiar with his work.”
“Uh, you kind of should be,” Nathaniel says, more to the floor than to any of them, just as Marinette’s thinking the same thing with a roll of the eyes that she keeps on the inside. “Didn’t he save your entire sister when she got akumatized? Again?”
“No,” Luka says simply. “Just the left half.” There’s the barest hint of annoyance in his tone, but anyone who didn’t know him well wouldn’t know it at all, or wouldn’t hazard the right guess. “So…” He sounds more cautious now as Marinette takes a seat beside him and studies the papers more closely. Everything on them is erased or scratched out far too much for her to make out anything, but whatever was there couldn’t have been that bad, could it? “What’s the problem with him? He doesn’t seem half-bad.”
“Problems,” Marc corrects him. “Plural. The first is that we have to change his powers entirely.”
“Time loops?” Nathaniel interjects, finally sitting up again. “Time loops? What kind of snake-themed hero makes going back in time a superpower when Bunnix was, like, right there?”
“Uh…” Marinette quirks her lips in thought. “Someone who knows about the Ouroboros? You know, that snake eating its tail thing. Like, look—” She fishes her phone out of her pocket and pulls up a quick Internet search, showing them the symbol. “This thing. Right? It’s a snake. It’s like a… like a rebirth thing.”
Nathaniel squints at her phone, studies the image there. “It makes no sense,” he finally decides, and maybe this is what people talk about when they talk about creative differences. “He even has a lyre in real life. Why would his superpower not be hypnosis? What’s he gonna do, just—just yeet it at people?”
Marinette laughs so hard she snorts. Marc nearly falls out of his chair.
“Does it really make no sense?” Luka prompts after a moment, unable to will away his own smile; he probably wouldn’t want to anyway. “Or do you just not want it to make sense because you’re attached to the idea you like, and you want that to make sense instead?”
Nathaniel gives him a look, which makes Marc smile weakly behind a hand. “You sound like our editor,” he says. It sounds fulfilling, Marinette thinks, hearing him say our even after all this time.
“Nah.” Luka’s eyes sparkle, and he pulls out his books. “I’m just an artist like you.”
Marc rests his chin in his hand, studies Luka from across the table. They haven’t spoken too much, mostly because there’s never been a need to when the art’s doing all the talking, but it’s never been hard to see all the ways that Marc quietly latches onto him. “Do you ever get that way? About your music?”
“Get what way?”
“Like—like…” Marc closes his notebook, drums chipping black nails against the cover once, twice, again. “Like the notes are all tangled up, and you don’t know how to make them sound the way they’re supposed to. And, and you just—hate it, everything about it. You don’t even want to look at what you’ve tried. Until something happens, and it finally comes out smooth, and beautiful, and you wonder why you ever thought you weren’t cut out for art.”
Luka pauses over his work—a problem set from his algebra class—and stares into some distance beyond the surface of the table. “Oh, yeah,” he murmurs. “Happens all the time.”
Marc tilts his head. “What stops it?”
The way Luka looks over to her—holds her gaze for longer than just a second or two—isn’t lost on her the way it must be on the others. “Oh, just. Something.”
Marinette doesn’t know what he means by that, exactly, but her heart flutters all the same. And if he knows her heart as well as he says he does—as she knows he does—then it probably isn’t lost on him, either.
“Anyway,” he says, only sort of changing the subject. “What’s the other problem?”
“Well…” Marc fidgets in his seat; Marinette’s eyes could be deceiving her, but it looks like there’s a tinge of red on his cheeks. She’s always found it kind of sweet, how much he admires Luka. How eager he is to be in his space. Maybe it’s because Luka is so unapologetically everything Marc has ever wanted to be. Been too scared to be, in spite of the little ways he stands out. “It’s just that… we kind of made Viperion for you, and modeled him after you. And, and who knows who Viperion really is, anyway? And is it just a coincidence that he picked that name? Or has he read the comics?”
“He could’ve read the comics,” Nathaniel mutters, “but that’s a tall order.”
“Stop,” Marinette says, flicking his nose to chide him, “with the self-deprecation. You know that’s not a requirement for being an artist anymore, right?”
“Never was,” Luka hums. “All you have to do is make art.”
“And if he has read the comic,” Marc goes on, and Marinette holds her breath, her thoughts going far too fast for her to catch them. Please, don’t let him conclude that he must go to this school, or that Marinette must know him somehow. Please don’t let him think that he must be in this room. Please, please, they’re on thin ice as it is.
But he doesn’t; instead, he says, “If he has, then can he really pull off being anything like you?”
Luka goes back to the work in front of him. Out of the corner of her eye, it looks like his shoulders sink in relief. “I don’t think anyone could do that. I hope not, anyway. But he could give it a try. I’d be flattered.”
“You could make it easier,” Nathaniel laughs, cold and frustrated. “And just be him. Could you pull that off?”
“I don’t think that’s how it works.” Marc’s brow furrows, but he looks amused even as he lays a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder and gives it a squeeze. It’s so tender that Marinette has to look away. “He’d have to keep that stuff secret, right? Nobody even knows who Ladybug is, and she’s around all the time.”
Under the table, Marinette crosses her legs tight and hopes no one notices her fidgeting.
“But it would be funny,” he adds. “If you actually were Viperion. You’d be perfect for the job. And I bet Ladybug would think so, too.” He pats his notebook faithfully, looking for the first time like there’s promise in what he does. “Our Ladybug does, anyway.”
Luka looks up from a lengthy word problem, slow but not menacing. Cautious, more like. He turns his head toward Marinette, and the way he looks at her for those few seconds feels like he’s looking through her. It feels cold, and knowing, and she has to sit stock-still the whole time. He can’t know. He can’t possibly know.
“Yeah,” he murmurs. “Funny.” His gaze slips down to her hands, and the glow fades from his face, like maybe he was wrong about something. It feels like wishful thinking, but she’ll wish all the same.
Funny, he says, but Marinette isn’t laughing. And neither is he.
“You’ll do this for your sister?”
“I’ll do it for the greater good. Isn’t that what this is all about?”
“You’re a fast learner. So, have you decided on a name?”
“Viperion… Yeah. Call me Viperion.”
Marinette’s been playing the exchange over and over in her head since the moment she detransformed. The way their hands touched twice over the bangle as they passed it between them. The unassuming way Luka seemed to fall into becoming a hero—accepted it without question the way she always wishes she had. The quiet, accepting way he followed her lead, even when he stepped in to use his powers, and the curious way he couldn’t stop looking at her. Like he wanted to know something. Like maybe he already did.
For the first time, she’s grateful that it looks like she’s daydreaming. At least if she’s daydreaming, everyone around her can guess wrong. Maybe even Luka, no matter how tuned in he is to her soul, no matter how many times he leans on her or brushes her hair back and asks what she’s thinking.
Maybe she can even bank on the fact that he’s nose-deep in his books, as they stretch out on the school steps waiting for Juleka and Rose. He has his arm slung around her, but the more she glances over to him, the more she notices how his thumb flicking his spinner ring, how his leg is bouncing like crazy. He’s not just studying; he’s antsy about studying. He’s worried about something. And from what she’s seen, he’s been worried about it for the last few weeks.
“What’re you thinking about?” she murmurs. Carefully, she lays her hand on his knee, her breath catching at the feel of the thread and the bare skin there.
Within moments, his leg stills, but he’s still spinning his ring, and he only stops to curl his fingers around the top of his book, squeezing every so often like it’s one of those foam hand strengtheners. “The brevet is coming up,” he says, and settles for tapping his foot on the steps as he reads. “And I have to pass it this time if I want to go to high school.”
“Oh…” Of course. How could she forget?
“I wasn’t even close last year.” She can barely see it from this angle, but he’s darting his eyes around the page, scrunching up his lips. “You should’ve—no, you shouldn’t have seen how my Ma looked when she found out I had to repeat. We both sort of knew, considering…” He shakes his head. “But actually seeing it on paper, and hearing it from Mr. Damocles, it was… I mean, it wasn’t terrible. Some parents are worse about stuff like that. It’s just… She looked so sad.” He swallows, hard, and the page starts to crumple under his grip. “Enough men have hurt my Ma. Made her sad, and angry. I saw it enough times. And I told myself, even if I never did what they did, that I wasn’t going to be one of them. I told myself I was going to pass this time.” He pauses, looks over to her. His eyes look glassy, but with a distant resolve instead of upset or self-pity. “You understand, right?”
Marinette tilts her head, and thinks of the bakery, about her mother waiting at the register, and she rests her hand on his cheek. “Of course I understand.”
There’s this look Luka gets sometimes, where his eyes go soft and a smile starts tugging at the corner of his mouth. She’s only ever seen it when he looks at her, when one of them says something heartfelt, and a selfish part of her wants to make sure no one else ever gets to. At least not now. And she’s started to see, lately, what Manon meant about her parents’ wedding pictures, because the more Luka looks at her like that, the more she starts to see the way her parents look at each other.
Not that they’re treading that path. Oh, God, no. It’s just the love there. Marinette sees it. And she loves it, too.
“It just seems like you’ve been studying really hard,” she says, resting her chin on his shoulder and peering down with him at a spread of problems that are only vaguely familiar to her. “And it’d be awful if you fried your brain and all that hard work just kind of, fizzled out, you know?”
“You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
“I… might be.”
Luka grins, turns the page, drops his voice. “It also sounds like an invitation.”
She was going to wrap her arms around him, just to keep him close, but switches to a playful shove at the last minute instead. “I-it’s not!”
“I’m teasing, I’m teasing,” he says with a chuckle. He isn’t totally calm now that he’s said something; there’s still the residue of his feelings in the bounce of his ankle and the rhythmic pattern his nails drum out over a diagram. But all the same, there’s something definitely snakelike—something that definitely reminds her of Viperion—in the way he closes his books, and leans over to steal a kiss from her lips, and says, “But you have been getting good at it.”
“We’re not talking about… about kissing,” she insists in a low hiss. “We’re talking about your studies.” Except now she’s certainly thinking about it, at the very least. And maybe about kissing Viperion, too. And how those fifteen minutes of fame must really be doing something for him, giving him more confidence than he already has. Or making what he does have feel a little more real.
Which is, really, only one of the many reasons she can’t go telling him he needs to be just a bit more careful with this whole identity thing.
Maybe she’s reading into it too much. Any boy could pull off a move like that.
Well.
Maybe not just any boy.
“I thought you didn’t want to talk about my studies,” Luka shoots back. “I thought you didn’t want my brain to fry.”
“Well, I don’t. But I at least want to know if I can help you study anything. I know it’s all stuff I won’t be doing until next year, but… what’re you looking at me like that for?”
He’s in the middle of putting his books away, but still makes time to say, “Because I think it’s sweet that you’re always jumping to help everyone. Even me. It’s one of my favorite things about you.”
Marinette tries, and fails, to hide a blush.
It’s as he’s complaining about physics, yet again, and as she’s about to suggest that he could find a tutor, when the double doors open out of the corner of her eye. She turns to look—maybe Rose and Juleka are finally ready to leave—and whatever curiosity lived in her expression fades instantly at the sight of Lila, who’s humming to herself as she flips her hair over a shoulder.
“Oh!” Lila says with a hand to her heart, in that sickly sweet way that Marinette still can’t believe fools anyone. “You startled me, Marinette! I didn’t think you’d still be at school.”
Marinette can practically feel her face go flatter, less and less amused with each second. “I didn’t expect you to care, but I guess we’re both full of surprises today.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.” Lila turns just so, bats her eyelashes. “Hi there, Luka. How’s the music going?”
Luka gives a single, cordial nod—“Lila”—and taps his pencil on the notebook of sheet music he’s pulled out of his bag. It takes him forever to get the notes down, he’s said before, because he’s a slow reader, but there’s a certain sense of enjoyment or accomplishment in getting it down at all. “It’s going.”
“Any word from Jagged? You know you’re still more than welcome to take me up on that offer.”
Now Marinette knows exactly how Luka must have felt when she put her hand on his knee. All the acid burning under her skin, the angry, tingling urge to find some way to move her body just to get the shaky feeling out. She clenches and unclenches her fists, over and over, enough to feel her nails digging crescents into her skin. It’s Luka who stops her, one of his hands covering hers and his thumb stroking lovingly over her knuckles.
“You know?” he says. It’s too nice for Marinette’s tastes, but she can’t exactly stop the words once they’ve come out. And he’s never exactly called Lila out the way she’s wanted to so badly, the way she’s wanted Adrien to so badly. But Luka, at least, has always had this sly way of sidestepping her conversations, long before he ever put on the bangle. And it boggles them both every time. “I think I’m good. I’ll take the hard work over the connections any day, and besides.” He hooks his pencil through the spiral ring, pulls Marinette closer to him; it makes her flutter and swell with pride all at once. “Even if I wanted to, I’ve got an in already. Did you know Marinette designed an album cover for Jagged once? She even gets early access to his tracks now. Pretty sick, right?”
Marinette could fly right now.
Lila, on the other hand, wrinkles her nose for a split second, clears her throat and composes herself. “Yeah. Sick. I guess you could say that.” She turns to Marinette then, which really should be a warning sign, but Marinette’s learned to brace herself less and less. “So I see it’s his turn today, huh?”
Marinette narrows her eyes, stomach starting to turn. But before she can speak up, Luka squeezes her shoulder, enough to make her lean into him. “What are you even talking about?” he asks, wary but not sharp.
“Oh? You mean you don’t know?” Lila’s eyes widen at first, but then her expression relaxes into something Marinette can’t bring herself to trust—if she could ever bring herself to trust Lila in the first place. It’s… unsettling. It crawls under her skin in exactly the way someone shouldn’t. “Well, don’t let me to be the one to tell you. Right, Marinette?”
Marinette goes sullenly quiet, so tense in Luka’s arms that he has to press her against him just to calm her. She wishes now more than ever that it could be more comforting, the fact that he can read her, feel her so easily.
“Well,” Lila says without bothering to wait for an answer, though in all honesty she probably never wanted one. “I should probably go. Places to go, people to see.” She waves, manages somehow to give only Marinette a nastily knowing smile, and then she’s down the steps and gone around the corner.
Marinette doesn’t hate a lot of people. Or anyone, really. But Lila Rossi isn’t exactly “anyone.”
She can only give it so much energy, though, before Luka squeezes her shoulder again and strokes her hair. It doesn’t make the feeling go away immediately, or totally, but it soothes her at least. Reminds her that she doesn’t have to be so angry for long. “What’d you tell her that for?” she mumbles, most of her weight sinking into his side. “You didn’t have to defend me.”
Luka sets his notebook aside so he can hold her a little more purposefully, so that she has all his attention. “I mean, I did,” he says. “Or, I wanted to. And something just… sets me off about her, anyway.”
“Not like Bob Roth, right?”
His grip on her tightens, and she’s all but seated in his lap when he presses his lips to her temple. “Not at all. Never again.” He kisses her cheek, too, and then her jaw, and the way he buries his face in the crook of her neck tells her he’s thinking about it all over again—the silencing—until his hold on her goes slack. “You have to deal with her all day. And I want you to not have to deal with her for a while. But it’s not just because of what you told me about her. I just… I can’t get a read on her heart, you know? I don’t know what she sounds like, because it’s always changing.”
Slowly, Marinette wraps her arms around his neck, threading her fingers through his hair. The more she thinks about it, the more they must look like one of those overly publicly affectionate couples, but they’ll be going home soon enough. They won’t have to show this off much longer. “Are there any hearts that never change?”
Luka leans into her touch, and when he sighs it feels like he’s sinking with her. Like he couldn’t do it if she weren’t around. “Yours, when you’re with me,” he murmurs. “And mine, when I’m with you.”
Luka says he sucks at poetry and physics, and Marinette can only help with one of those. She thinks. It’s not that she’s bad at physics. It’s just that she so happens to be better at other things. Like poetry. But poetry isn’t always something you can always read or analyze to understand, or so she tells him on the way to the wax museum. It isn’t something you can just get to the point to in order to really know it. Poetry is something that you read over and over again for new meaning. That you feel, in the silence of the reading, as the words sink in. It’s something that begs to live the way you live, or lives because you’re alive, and manages to be good when we try to grasp at how we understand ourselves, and miss. When we grab for the words just out of our reach, and set them down like freshly polished porcelain instead of trying to wrangle them into something that makes sense.
She doesn’t tell him how she knows this. Hasn’t told him about any of the poems she’s written, or tried to write and barely reread before tearing them up and throwing them out. She hasn’t told him about the one she wrote Adrien, either—the one she can’t believe he’s kept safe until now. Or about the ones she’s tried to write about him when she can’t sleep and all she can think about are his sea-blue eyes in the dark. All she tells him is that maybe, if he tries writing some of his own, he’ll understand just what those people are trying to get at when they write it, too.
“So…” He sounds amused on the walk over, scuffing his heels on the sidewalk; the sound of it, and the way it halts him in place for that barely-there second, reminds her of all the moments they’re stuck in, and how they push past them. “Why a wax museum, of all places?”
“Well,” Marinette says with a thoughtful tap to her chin. “I figured it’d be the easiest way to really see people. You know, kind of try to capture them the way a poem does.”
“Couldn’t we just… I don’t know. People watch? Like actual living, breathing people?”
“They are living, breathing people.”
“Babe, they’re made of wax.”
“And who,” she says, “do you think they’re modeled after?”
She’s got him there, and she knows it, because he only smiles and shakes his head.
“Besides,” she goes on, “don’t you think there’s something poetic about all these people, frozen in time, and all the things they could be doing if they were alive?”
“Well, no,” Luka says, “because we’ve already established that I’m not good at poetry.”
“Not yet,” Marinette tells him with a smile and an excited squeeze to his wrist. “Not yet.”
They pay for their own tickets, which Marinette insists on, and as they step into the threshold, Luka’s hand finds hers. It’s comforting, partly because they haven’t been on a date outside of either of their houses in a while, and partly because the statues are so unsettling that she finds relief in feeling something real. Which is probably why she’s never come to the wax museum before.
But all things considered, it’s still a pretty impressive place, with pretty impressive art. The black-and-white tiling, the ornate gold patterns in the doorways, the regal marble pillars, it all feels less like a museum and more like a great hall. Like they should expect a queen’s presence at any moment. And the sculptures—of Clara Nightingale, Aurore Beauréal, even Andre the ice cream man—are sculpted with such care and accuracy that Marinette can’t help keeping her eyes on them. Can’t help thinking they might come to life and sneak up on her like they’re in some horror movie.
Maybe it’s a good thing Nino isn’t here. He’d probably get some ideas that’d keep her up at night.
“You still haven’t explained what we’re doing here,” Luka says, just as pleasantly as always. “Or what this has to do with poetry.”
“Well…” Marinette takes a seat at a nearby bench, pats the empty space beside her so he can join her. “You said you were reading that one poem, right? ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn?’”
“Ugh.” Luka shudders. “Don’t remind me of that one. I’ve read it something like twelve times and I still don’t get what it’s talking about.”
“It’s a classic,” she protests. “But I’m not gonna read it to you. I’m going to show you. Or, at least…” Awkwardly, she rubs the back of her neck. “I’m going to try”
“How…?” He shifts beside her, almost… wiggling? In anticipation? It’s both unusual and kind of adorable. “What’re you gonna do instead?”
Marinette looks around and smiles. Leave it to Luka to bring her confidence out of hiding. “We’re gonna pretend to be one of those things.”
Luka’s eyes narrow in confusion, then go wide in surprise. Just the kind of progression she expected. “What? The statues?”
“Mmhmm.” Maybe it’s not the most creative date idea, not like ice skating or blowing a full roll of Polaroid film in the city. And maybe it’s not the most simple, either, not like that first date at the café and along the Seine. But it’s interesting, and it just might help him, and he just might get it this way. And she gets to spend time with him to boot. And that’s all she really wants to get out of this. Time, while she manages to have it. “Do you want to go first?”
He heaves a laugh. “I don’t know how to be a statue.”
“Me neither.” She shrugs, tilting her head to admire him, though he looks more than fine from every angle. “That’s what makes it fun.”
Luka considers her for a moment, probably weighing the options in his mind first. She hadn’t even considered until now that he might be uncomfortable doing it, because, well, it is an open space in public. But before she can apologize or take back what she said or even think to beat herself up for forgetting, Luka shrugs and says, “Well, why not?”
She just hopes he’s not doing this to humor her or make her feel better.
There’s his usual slow grace about him when he pushes himself to his feet and gets some distance on her. He has to move around here and there to find just the right pose, but the instant he does, it seems almost natural. Feet planted apart, guitar strapped around his shoulder, the neck secure in his hand. He’s fished his pick out of his pocket, and his stance and the calm, confident smile he wears makes him look like he’s struck just the right power chord. Like he’s on a stage. Exactly where he deserves to be.
It’s perfect for him. It’s so perfect that Marinette’s breath catches, and she can’t help staring.
The room is so quiet for those few minutes that he stays so still, which is probably why her heart is pounding so loud. Or maybe it’s so loud that it just drowns out all other sound altogether. He’s as good as one of those wax statues if not for the even rise and fall of his chest, and the more time he spends like that, the more time she hears the captain’s words echoing in her head. All that stuff about compasses and statues and going haywire.
Seeing him like this, she realizes, sends her heart in every good direction, so fast that it’s hard to catch up with and name every feeling. And the needle only spins faster as she gets up, approaches him, reaches up to touch his face. His cheek twitches in an almost-smile where her fingers brush against it, and then her knuckles, but that movement alone is more than enough to have her jumping and drawing back.
And then the curiosity of it is more than enough to have her try again.
She doesn’t speak a single word, only runs her fingers through his hair, lets her nails catch on his jaw, feels how alive he is no matter how hard he’s trying to grasp at timelessness. This time, when he breathes, she doesn’t pull away. And when he moves again, she isn’t startled, and her hand slips down to cradle his cheek. It’s too warm to be wax, too lithe and living. But it feels right now. It feels… safe.
“How’d I do?” he asks, soft and low, and all but nuzzles into her touch. It’s a good thing they’re alone in this hall.
Marinette swallows thickly, takes her time in letting go of him. “Good. Good, but… I think I like you better human.”
“Yeah?” He grins. “What’s wrong with me being a statue?”
“Nothing!” she says, a little too fast. “Nothing’s wrong, I just… It’s gonna sound dumb, but…” She trails off, rubs the back of her neck. “You make my heart steady, I guess. I mean, it still goes kind of crazy, but at the end of the day, it’s… calm. Like you make my compass point north.” She pats her heart with a shy, tender care. “The one in here, I mean.”
Luka softens, but doesn’t stand up straight just yet. Like this, they’re right at eye level, and Marinette’s senses are so overwhelmed that the compass is starting to turn all over again. Slowly. Just enough to warn her of all the ways she could lose herself. Could want to. “That sounds like something my Ma would say.”
Marinette softens, too, with a smile she feels all the way to her fingertips. She has to fight the urge to touch him again. “I… may have been a little inspired. She’s really good with sea metaphors.”
“So…” His gaze drifts down, then back up to meet hers again. “Am I your north?”
Her breath catches, so quiet that she wouldn’t be surprised if he couldn’t hear it. “Do you want to be my north?”
He gives her an earnest look—the way he lingers on her lips isn’t lost on her—and smiles in a mutual feeling sort of way. “I was kind of hoping I already was.”
Somewhere inside her, the needle goes steady again, and by the time she recognizes it, Luka is already in her seat again, gesturing for her to take her turn. He’s even framing her between his thumbs and forefingers, squinting with one eye shut, his tongue poking comically out of the corner of his mouth. Just enough for her to notice the stud.
“Okay,” he says. “Pose.”
The instant he says it, Marinette is frozen, but probably not in the way he’d want. She doesn’t feel quite like a statue; she feels more like a deer in headlights. She has to take a look around the room to get inspiration from the others—the stage presence that Clara and Jagged command, the menace of a fake Hawkmoth lurking in the corner—but none of them are quite her.
Not even the Ladybug they saw downstairs. And that actually is her.
This is exactly why Adrien is the model.
Sometimes, Marinette recalls, when Nathaniel and Marc are working together in the art room, Nathaniel will mention needing to warm up, or to practice different poses for the comic, and Marc will volunteer. Mostly because he’s happy to help, and partly because he needs to get away from the words in order for them to get better. In those moments, Marc easily assumes whatever pose Nathaniel happens to need, but that’s not what she remembers most vividly. It’s Nathaniel. Sitting at his desk, pencil in one hand and chin in the other. It’s the look he gets on his face from watching Marc from so long, because it’s the look she knows has snuck up on her for months.
It’s perfect for her.
She may not have the same grace or ease that Luka did, but she lowers herself to the floor all the same, sitting on her knees and leaning on a hand. It’s not so hard to be so expressive; all she has to do is look north and slip out of focus. Lose track of time and barely catch the wonder in his face before he’s kneeling with her and helping her back to the bench, slowly, slowly.
“Are you okay?” she asks; she can’t hear hearts the way he can, but she can guess at feelings sometimes. Especially his.
Luka nods, still staring. Now she can see the leftover awe, the dedicated way he studied her. “I get it now,” he says. “I get what he was talking about. Being frozen in time, lasting forever, all that. That’s what we see in art.” He pauses, leans forward with his hands folded between his knees. “Can I tell you something that might sound kind of stupid?”
“I bet it won’t be,” Marinette says—which isn’t wrong, but it’s more like she blurts it out embarrassingly fast. “I bet I’ve said dumber things.”
He turns his eyes toward her, and smiles, and shakes his head. Parts his lips to speak, breathes, swallows, tries again. “I think you’re what he means when he says that beauty is truth.” He shrugs. “‘That’s all I know on earth, and all I need to know.’”
Marinette’s heart jumps up into her throat. “H-hey,” she stammers, “you said you weren’t so good with words. Or poems.”
“I’m not,” he says. “I’m just good with you.”
He’s not wrong, Marinette thinks. He can’t be wrong about that.
Luka doesn’t want to know if there’s a statue of Silencer hiding somewhere, and that honestly might be for the best. What they see on the way out of the museum—all those old akumatized villains—are bad enough, and the fact that Marinette can’t tell him why she’s suddenly holding onto his hand so tight is even worse.
They sit on the steps to collect themselves for a moment, unsure of where to go next, and Marinette’s the one to speak up first. “Did that help?” she asks. “Was that helpful? Because I can imagine why it would be, and—”
“It helped,” he says to reassure her. “I kind of get it now.”
“You get poems?”
“Well… not totally. But I get that they’re human. All art is.” He looks over to her, knees tucked in toward his chest. “Like us. And I’m… weirdly glad we are. Cause I don’t think I like that whole thing of one or both of us being statues.”
Marinette manages a half-smile. “How come? If we were both statues, that might not be so bad. You know, the whole ‘together forever’ thing.”
Luka hums in thought, studies her up and down, like he’s inside her somehow. “Yeah,” he says after a while, “but that’s the kind of thing I’d want to choose to do every day. And besides.” He leans in close, bumps his nose to hers. It always makes her dizzy and cross-eyes when he does that, because she never knows whether to keep looking or close her eyes and let him do the rest.
“Besides, what?” she murmurs.
There’s his smile, right against her lips. “If we were statues,” he says, “we wouldn’t get to do this anymore.”
And he tilts his head, and she lets him do the rest.
For days on end, Luka won’t let her look inside his notebook.
It’s unusual, honestly. Most of the time, she’s the first or second person he goes to when he’s so stuck on a song that even improvising won’t help. Not that she’d call herself his muse or anything, but she doesn’t mind hearing, every so often, that her presence makes the notes untangle in his head more easily.
Lately, though, he’s gone to Rose almost exclusively, huddled with her in the corner of the art room while they murmur what Marinette can only assume are lyrics and melodies and tempos to one another. There’s a lot of tapping pencils, a lot of crumpled papers full of scratches and marks, a lot of chewing erasers and spinning rings and fidgeting, and most of the time she finds it hard to concentrate on her own projects because she’s so enthralled with the mystery of theirs. It almost reminds her of all the editing Marc and Nathaniel have been working on just across the table; it isn’t quite so frantic, but even looking over there makes her feel like whatever they’re working on has to be nothing short of perfect.
Which is also unusual for Luka. If anything, he’s the one constantly telling her that he likes imperfection. That it’s what makes most things even more beautiful. And that of course he meant her too. Especially her.
On top of all that, he’s been shutting his notebook and knocking her head with it any time she tries to sidle up and sneak a peek, even when Rose isn’t there. She’d almost feel excluded if he didn’t take out his books beside her afterwards, and kiss her temple to fight her pout, and whisper nothing but, “Patience.”
It makes her shiver—and glad that she can—because it reminds her of her balcony, and just how delightful it is to wait for him at all.
It isn’t until a particular morning, when she’s nearly lost track of whatever this mystery is, that she opens her locker to find a piece of lined paper folded neatly on to of her books. Like it must have been pushed through the slot and fluttered down, just waiting for her.
It’s strange at first. She’s never gotten a secret admirer letter before. Why would she get one now? Why, predictably, when she’d have to turn someone down and spend her day feeling bad about it?
And then she unfolds the paper.
house insurance
she said, come,
stay a while.
did she call to me, or
did i invite myself in?
she said, mind this place
and bless this house
for the cracks and the squeaks
and the mold and the leaks,
so i got on my hands and knees
with all those cleaners
and i scrubbed until my skin
was red and my nails
were chipped.
i did that for her.
i do that for some people, you know.
(i never have.
i’ve always wanted to.)
somewhere in between
wringing the mop
and sweeping the corners,
i wondered how anyone could have
left this place, and
smashed the stained glass
on their way out.
i cleaned, and i bathed,
and i took the food she gave me,
and she asked,
what can I give you for all this?
can’t you hear them?
can’t you feel them?
the raindrops
on the roof you placed
over my sorry head?
There’s a note at the bottom, too. She almost misses it.
I think your idea worked.
Marinette reads it the way she reads every poem: three times. Once for the words. Once for the meaning. Once to pick it all apart. It’s in the picking—the questions, the sacrifice, even the handwriting—that she looks up and notices the disappearing blur of a denim jacket. A smile that must have been hiding there. A loving look that must have been lingering all this time.
Her chest tenses, and her heart warms, and she holds the paper close. It worked. It definitely worked.
“Morning, Marinette. What’s got you smiling so much?”
She isn’t startled right away; the depth of the poem makes it feel more like she’s being pulled out of a pool of warm water. It’s when she opens her eyes—and finds Adrien standing there—that she comes to her senses more quickly. Her heart drops, and she scrambles to fold the paper and tuck it away. “Nothing!” she says, and then winces, because everything about this sounds totally suspicious now.
But if it really does come off that way, Adrien doesn’t say anything about it. He only passes her, collected as ever, to get to his own locker, and keeps mostly to himself. At least until he says, “It was sweet.”
“What was?” She stands up straight, with a death grip on her backpack that she wishes would just relax, and hates how sudden all her movements are. Isn’t she over this? Isn’t she done with this? Or is it exactly because she’s done with it that it won’t stop affecting her?
And why… why is he being so nonchalant about it?
Why isn’t this awkward for him?
And if he notices a look like that now, then why did he never notice it before?
Did… did she ever look like that? Did she ever really look at him like that?
Adrien looks over to her, a simple tilt of the head, with a half-dreamy smile. “The look on your face,” he says. Closes his locker door. Passes her by again. “You looked like you were in love.”
Just like that, he leaves her dumbfounded again, with the faintest flutter in her heart, but that’s all it amounts to in the end. A flutter, and a sink, and the sway of early-morning steps into the hallway again. It takes her a few seconds to steady herself, but she does. She does.
She finds Luka in his usual spot, thinking on the bench by the courtyard, drumming another pattern on his knees. His face lights up when he sees her, the way it usually does, and it looks like he’s searching her. Or maybe searching for that paper. The closer she gets to him, the louder her heart pounds in her head, and when he moves to make room, it starts to fade again.
“I saw it,” she murmurs, hugging her knees to her chest.
At that, Luka starts to wring his hands. It’s slow, but noticeable. “Oh, yeah?” he says, and she has to give him credit for how hard he tries to sound casual.
She nods. Looks over to him. Rests a shy hand on his knee. “With words like that, I think they’d be stupid not to pass you this year,” she says. “And I also think… I’d be stupid not to change myself a little.”
He raises an eyebrow, just barely but full of caution all the same. “What do you mean by that?”
Marinette takes a moment to tap her chin in thought. “I’ve been thinking about what the captain said before. Not the compass thing. Something else. And…” She brushes her hair back, her hand trembling as she touches the space just behind her earrings. “Maybe… if you pass the brevet this time, maybe the two of you could take me to get my seconds done.”
His eyes go wide, as if to say, Really? What he asks instead is, “Are you sure? You’re not just doing it for me, right?”
She nods once, then again, a bit more emphatically. “I think they’d look nice. And I promise I wouldn’t be doing it for you. More like… because of you.” Her eyes drift down, then back up again. “You do a lot of good things for people, but you also inspire people to do good things for themselves. And… I’m glad I get to be one of them.”
Luka goes quiet for a while, as though he’s thinking he could say the same about her, but eventually he murmurs, “They would look nice on you.” He studies her this way and that, a smile breaking across his face and growing by the second. It’s so wide it looks like it might hurt him soon, and all the genuineness in him is there—the same kind she saw when she left that bangle in his hands. Maybe the same kind Adrien saw in the locker room. “I guess it just depends on how much mercy physics decides to have on me, huh?”
“Well, about that…” Marinette looks up the stairs, up to her classroom, where she can already hear Nino greeting Adrien with a whoop and a high-five. “I think I might have another idea.”