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“So,” Marinette says with a couple of volumes of manga in her lap. “It’s been a while since you came to see me, hasn’t it, Whiskers? Did you finally decide you missed me?”
From his place on one of her balcony pillars, Chat Noir turns away from the moon, teeth gleaming with a knowing grin and eyes flashing in the almost-dark. “’Whiskers,’ huh… That’s a new one. Finally warming up to me?”
Marinette rolls her eyes. “Regrettably.”
It’s been… a while, since Chat Noir swung by for a nighttime visit. He hasn’t been around since the night he told her Ladybug already had someone else, the night her heart cracked for him. The time they talked about good people and loving everyone and lending comic books. She’s thought about that night more times than she has fingers, stayed up too late feeling too guilty and torn on who to text about it. And so far, she’s only managed to turn to two things: Tikki, and her diary.
“Sometimes things just happen this way,” Tikki said once, quiet and sweet and abnormally sad while Marinette wrote and wrote and wrote. “They make us sad and confused. But that doesn’t mean we don’t have good things in front of us.”
Marinette turned to her bulletin board and her lock screen that night—both featuring pictures of herself and Luka—and decided that Tikki wasn’t wrong. And that a phone call wouldn’t be so bad after she finished journaling.
Maybe she won’t admit it out loud, but the balcony has felt… emptier, for Chat Noir’s absence. And it’s felt a little more like home tonight, now that he’s here.
“You know,” he says. “Cats warm up to you the longer you spend time in their space. They’re pretty affectionate once you really get to know them.”
“First of all,” Marinette shoots back, sitting up straight, still cradling those volumes of manga like she’d protect them with her life. Honestly, she probably would. “First of all, you’re in my space. You’re the one who came to me first!”
“I had my reasons.”
“You had one reason.” Marinette raises a brow to correct him. “And that’s because Ladybug asked you to.”
“But I kept coming back.”
“Yeah, and I ask myself about it all the time.”
“No, you don’t.” Bathed in streetlight, Chat Noir softens with a smile. It’s rare, and gentle, and for all their complicated feelings about literally everything, sometimes Marinette likes to think that he has that smile reserved just for her. “You already know why.”
Against her will, her stomach flips, and she finds herself getting up and joining him at the balcony, leaving the books behind. Without looking his way, she rests her chin in her hand, stares up at the moon right along with him. “Yeah,” she murmurs. “I know why.”
They talk in little touches sometimes. An elbow bump, a ruffle of the hair when she lets it loose, a scrape of her nails under his chin. Sometimes, if Marinette listens closely, she can hear him purring deep in his chest, feel his tail swishing up a breeze and curling at her knee for the simple reassurance that she’s really still here. Sometimes these things say more than words ever could. Sometimes they say I love you when they haven’t quite learned how to say it to each other yet.
It really is a cat’s love, the more she thinks about it.
“Don’t leave me hanging that long anymore.” Marinette says it to the street lamps below, but Chat Noir’s ears perk up out of the corner of her eye so she knows he’s paying attention. “Thought maybe you didn’t want to see me.”
He hums, speaks softly. She can hear the smile in his voice. “So you did miss me after all.”
Before she can shove him, even playfully, he shoots straight into the air with the help of his baton, lands on the next pillar over with a spy’s stealth and all the grace his name deserves. His eyes flash in the dark again, and he’s grinning as wide as he was the day they met.
“Too slow,” he says, “aren’t cha?”
Marinette wrinkles her nose. “Only ‘cause you have the suit. If I had one of those things, I—I’d…”
Chat Noir’s tail flicks behind him, as if to emphasize his point. “Give Ladybug a run for her money? Kinda ambitious, don’t you think?”
“Oh? Betraying your lady in your best friend’s house?”
Within seconds, his smile starts to fade, and Marinette almost immediately regrets her words. “C’mon, Princess,” he says in that sad, sad voice that hardly fits him. “You know she’s not my lady anymore.”
It isn’t that she forgot, exactly. Those ten winding minutes. Those apologies he thought she never really owed him. In fact, they still sort of haunt her. And the realization of how he must have been feeling, all this time, pushes that old stone feeling deep into the pit of her stomach. And she still hasn’t figured out why—why they can be so done with things, or think they are, and still have it hurt so much. “She’s still your partner, though,” she says. “She still values you. She wouldn’t keep fighting with you if she didn’t feel that way, right?”
For a while, Chat Noir doesn’t answer. He stays staring at the moon, like if he looks at it long enough he might find the traces of his love there. Or like he’s hoping that somewhere, on the other side of the city, she’s staring back. Eventually he tucks away his baton, sits atop the pillar with an unsettling amount of balance. That tone that sounds so unlike him has mostly disappeared, but from what Marinette can see, it’s found its way into his smile. “Y’know something? If I didn’t know any better… If I didn’t know her as well as I do, I’d almost say you were her.”
Marinette’s stomach drops, but she recovers surprisingly fact. She impresses even herself with it. “Even if I were her, you think I’d admit it to you in front of God and Hawkmoth and everyone?”
“Point taken.” Teasingly, he tries to flick her temple, and smiles even wider—with pride, even—when she dodges it. And then he droops, contended, and his eyes dart just past her, presumably toward the stack of manga beside her deck chair. “So you went to talk to him after all,” he observes. It’s hard to tell now,whether he’s proud or wistful or maybe even protective.
She’d like to think, on some plane of existing, that it’s a combination of all three. “Far be it from me to turn down a recommendation from the illustrious, incomparable Chat Noir, right?”
This is the part where he’s supposed to puff up his chest in pride, or flex for her to make her laugh. Instead, he slinks down from the pillar onto sturdier ground, takes slow, purposeful steps over to the stack of books, and leafs through a each one, his claws catching on the pages. Marinette’s not sure whether it’s the content or the moonlight that brightens his face. “You ever think people will tell stories about us?” he asks.
Marinette’s mouth goes dry. “Us?”
“Yeah, us. Saving the day just in time, or going to school and making new friends, or following our dreams, or falling in love. Finding yourself. That kind of stuff.”
She’s been leaning on the balcony this whole time, watching him from a relative distance. He’s no shadow in the streets or on rooftops. He’s not this charming enigma waiting for girls and boys and people of indeterminate genders to fall all over him. He’s just the thing he’s talking about. The story to be told. “I think,” she starts slowly. “I think we tell stories like that all the time. I think it’s just the human thing to do. And… I don’t think stories would be believable without it. I think that’s how they last.”
Chat Noir must think he’s being slick by holding the book to his face, but his smile reaches all the way up to his eyes.
This is supposed to be a cinch. She’s just returning some books and asking for some more books. And finally making good on her promise to Luka. It’s literally no less cordial than a visit to the library.
So why is she stopping? Why can’t she move?
Honestly, Marinette has to give herself some credit. Since the rooftop, and the balcony, and the stairs, and the akuma, she’s gotten better at holding steady conversations with Adrien. First in a bucket, and then in her hands, and then all the things left unsaid without the regret of not having said them.
But there are still the residual things, of course: the way she has to try too hard to suppress a smile when he turns back to wink at her, the way she scrunches up her nose when he gets closer than usual and grins in her face, even the dumb giggle she lets out when he bumps his shoulder against hers, when she bumps him right back. They’re these silly little things, things that give her this distinct we-could-be-dating feeling. And maybe they don’t set off explosions or fireworks in her heart and under her skin, but they still snap like bubble wrap, let those leftover fantasies wisp away like the smoke from cheap party poppers.
(Huh. Maybe she really should try writing more poetry herself. Luka’s been doing it more these days, ever since the trip to the museum. Quiet boy on the steps with a little black book in his hands, in the library with a fine-tipped pen between his teeth, putting colors to sound until he gives her that electric-blue smile. That’s the stuff of fireworks.)
It’s a weird balance to strike, though—being close enough with Adrien that it’s not weird to have these little moments, or to ask to borrow his comics, but still getting the jitters when they’re alone together, still getting the flutters when she sees the stars in his eyes as they talk about this or that character, still…
Still feeling that sinkhole in her stomach when she sees him alone with someone else.
He’s just sitting in the locker room with Kagami, their fencing helmets beside them, presumably from a recent class or practice. They’re not laughing, but there’s still that calm, reassuring halo around them. They’re not crying, but there’s still something solemn in their shoulders, in the quirks of their lips and the flutters of their lashes. Marinette doesn’t make herself known, only clutches the books tighter. She can’t hear what they’re saying, partly because it’s so soft and partly because her blood is thundering in her ears, drowning out nearly every other sound. She holds her breath, trembles in place, feels that tunnel vision creeping in. Feels her eyes lock into place when Kagami’s hand flits across his shoulder and down his arm, fingers lacing with his.
It’s when Adrien scoots closer and one of them leans in—she doesn’t even process who—that she turns lightning-fast, presses her back against the nearest wall, shuts her eyes tight.
Why does this sting? She moved on first, and he was never interested, so why does it hurt so badly that she has to hold onto her chest just to keep it together?
When she opens her eyes, she wishes she hadn’t. Because Lila is there, in the distance, staring down from the balcony. And she’s smiling, the way she knows best, the only way she knows how. And Lila smiling is never, ever a good thing.
She’s gone before Marinette can say anything.
And Marinette didn’t know her heart could sound any louder in her head.
And now that comment from the front steps makes painful sense.
That’s why she said it was Luka’s turn.
By the time Marinette makes it upstairs, clutching the railing and almost out of breath, Lila’s already talking to Luka in the hallway. To anyone else, it might look like chatting in the hallway, maybe even concern over a test grade, or a chance at getting some advice. To Marinette, it looks like poison.
She’s rooted to the spot until Lila pats his arm a couple of times and disappears back down the hall toward their classroom, and she’s stuck again. Stuck between Adrien and Lila and Luka with all the sick feelings in her stomach and no idea where to go. And when Luka makes eye contact with her, part of her wants to break into a run—in the opposite direction.
Luka approaches her slowly, quiet blue boy that he is, and he’s got that same solemn calm about him, the kind from downstairs, the kind that’s starting to make her dizzy. She has to cling to his sleeve just to keep from swaying on the spot. “Hey,” he says. “Can I walk you over to class?”
“What did she say?” Marinette croaks. She hates her voice then; it sounds the way it does just before she throws up.
At first, Luka’s confused. “What did who say?”
“Lila. What did she tell you?”
“Nothing.” His hand finds her shoulder, gives it a squeeze that’s probably supposed to feel reassuring. Marinette can’t tell if it’s actually hot to the touch, or if it’s so cold that it feels like it’s burning. “Nothing. She just said something about keeping an eye on you. But I do that already, so I didn’t see the point in her telling me.”
Keeping an eye on her. It puts a lump in her throat that’s hard to talk around. “You—you still feel the same way, right? About her heart?”
“Hey…” Luka’s brow furrows, just how it does when he calls her babe in that way that makes her tear up automatically sometimes. “Are you okay?”
When was the last time someone asked her that? When was the last time she actually felt like a teenager, scared and uncertain and caring so much about what other people were saying about her? “Did she say anything about Adrien? Did she?”
“She mentioned him—what’s going on? Talk to me, babe. You’re worrying me.”
“I didn’t—whatever she said, I swear it’s not true, I promise, you know her, you know—”
“Marinette,” he says again, in that gentle tone that has her crumpling on the inside, because she may lose everyone in her class—even Alya, even Adrien—but she can’t lose Luka, too. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Just as Marinette is about to answer, she stops short at the sight of Adrien and Kagami walking just past them. They’re not too close, not too far apart, but their hands bump every so often, and Kagami catches it, and Adrien doesn’t protest. “No,” she finally says, more tired than she expected to sound. “You can… you can walk me to class, sure.”
Luka looks like he wants to ask her something, but he thinks better of it. “Will you promise to tell me at the end of the day if something’s wrong? Because…” There’s the flick-flick-flick of his ring, the anxious whine of the metal. “Because I love you, and I want to listen to you, too.”
She knows he does. On both accounts she knows. She can still feel him sometimes, hugging her from behind and telling her she doesn’t have to shield him anymore.
Just before the bell rings, just before Marinette opens the door to her classroom, Luka catches her hand and asks if he can kiss her. It’s sweet, and he does it when he means the best, when he’s at his most uncertain, subtle though it is. Still, he deserves better than what she can give him right now, and she feels almost ashamed when she shakes her head in defeat, stomach churning and heart quivering so much she’s afraid it might deflate. She tries to apologize as soon as his eyes spark with an almost hurt sort of suspicion, tries to change her mind to make him happy. But he only steps back and squeezes her wrist and says, “Just come see me after school, okay?”
He’s gone down the hall before she can say anything, even another apology. She wishes she could stop him. She wishes she had stopped him.
Because when she opens the door, everyone is staring. At her. At her desk. Everyone, including Lila, whose first frowning words are, “Marinette, how could you? How could you do that to him?” And this time that smile lives in her monster-green eyes, and this time that smile is just as telling.
She almost doesn’t want to find out what’s there, but she has almost no choice. Partly because Alya’s coming up behind her, nudging her inside.
And partly—mostly—because of the photos that are scattered across her desk. Several of them, all of them of her alone with Adrien, hands touching here, shoulders bumping there, eyes sparkling in the overexposure. They’re topped with a single white place card with bold, red letters scrawled across it.
C H E A T E R .
Marinette’s stomach doesn’t drop. Instead, it sinks like a stone, worse than it felt when she stopped outside the locker room. This is the kind that makes her dizzy, sway on the spot. Even with her brain this hazy, she can hear these whispers in the back of her head, all the little things that her classmates must have said in the void of her absence, must have wondered, and the shutter clicks that she thought nothing would come of. She can see the shadows of someone flitting away whenever she turned her head. And the despondent glitter in Mylène’s eyes. And the traces of horror in Juleka’s expression. And the glare coming from Nathaniel in the corner that she hopes to everything isn’t reserved for her.
And the smile—that God. Damn. Smile—in the corner there. The one that says that no one will believe her if she makes any accusations. The one she sees all the time.
It seems like everyone in the room is holding their breath, waiting for her next move, because she’s the only one who can make it.
Little by little, and with squared shoulders, Marinette takes measured, deliberate steps to her desk; she’s almost impressed with how she manages to trip up the center stairs. She doesn’t bother to sit down as she picks up the place card—only looks Lila in the eye as she slowly tears it in half. And tears it again. And crumples the shreds in her fists to throw them away.
When she turns away from the wastepaper bin, everyone in the room immediately turns back to their own business or conversations, except for Alya, who beams in her direction from their shared table. And except for Chloe, who surprisingly raises her brows like she’s impressed. And except for Adrien, who walks in late to the whole affair, takes his seat at the front of the room and asks, “What’s wrong, Marinette?”
Within seconds, she puts on a smile because it feels like the default thing to do when someone asks that question, and because around Adrien, it’s easier to do. A glance Lila’s way, and she makes it particularly sugary. Particularly fake. She knows where to draw her influence, acter all. “Look, Adrien,” she says. “Look at all these photos Lila took. Isn’t it sweet how she went to all this trouble to remind us of what good friends we’ve become?” Her smile widens. “She’s such a good friend, too, isn’t she?”
The only reason she knows how to play this game, navigate these narrow, winding thoughts, is because Ladybug uses them on the daily, relies on her mind more than anything else. It’s also the only reason she knows how to win. She doesn’t have to look Lila’s way to know she’s been caught in her own tactics—that she could either agree and loathe herself for aligning with them both, for deigning to call Marinette Dupain-Cheng her friend, or that she could argue and admit to her true intentions.
It’s a twisted take on the whole if you can’t beat them, join them thing, but it works.
And for the first time since Marinette’s really known her, Lila doesn’t know what to say.
For the first time in a long while, this silence doesn’t sound so bad.
“You may be a lot of things I can’t stand, Dupain-Cheng,” Chloe tells her after class, arms crossed as usual. “But you’re not a cheater.”
Of all the people Marinette expected to pull her aside, Chloe certainly wasn’t one of them. But maybe she should have expected it. There was a weird sort of finality that came in the time between Lila stumbling over her words and Miss Bustier entering the classroom, but those were the moments that Nathaniel turned to her with that soft look of concern and reassurance in his eyes. Those were the moments that held the knowing quirk in Adrien’s brow and the spark in his eyes when they exchanged old volumes of manga for new, and the mellow, should-have-known apology in what she could see of Juleka’s face.
She wouldn’t say she owned the space now, because that was where she and Chloe and Lila differed. She never wanted to own anything. She only wanted to make her space in it. All it took to really do that, it seemed, were a few Polaroids she and Adrien now shared.
“I mean,” Marinette manages, some of the bitterness from before still lingering in her throat. “I didn’t think anyone would think I was one.”
“Come on,” Chloe hisses. “You know her. She’d wrap the whole world around her finger if it meant people would pay attention to her.”
Sometimes, Marinette wonders if Chloe has more reasons to hate Lila than the obvious. Or if she realizes that they’re more similar than they think. “I’m glad you believed me, at least.”
“Obviously I wasn’t the only one.” Chloe rolls her eyes. “You saw that nosey best friend of yours. And Adrien.”
“Alya’s had her moments,” Marinette admits, rubbing the back of her neck. “And Adrien’s… it’s complicated.”
“Everything with you two is complicated, isn’t it.”
If only she actually knew.
Their conversation goes on for just a bit longer—about Chloe’s expertise in making people’s lives a living hell, about how everything Lila wants is more transparent than the freshly-cleaned windows at Le Grand Paris. Even about how, in Chloe’s words, “ballsy” it was for Marinette to rip up the card and turn those pictures on their head. She was just telling the truth, Marinette insists, but Chloe isn’t exactly having it, and Marinette is too exhausted on too many fronts to argue.
Sometimes, Marinette wonders what ever led her to entrusting Chloe with the bee.
As if things couldn’t get more complicated, it isn’t Luka who asks to talk to her after, but Adrien. Adrien, the person who—well, she probably shouldn’t say he’s responsible for this whole mess, because on a small scale it’s Lila, and on a large scale it’s a society that says any and all affection is automatically romantic when it doesn’t have to be. But a lot of it does have to do with him, to some degree. He’s as mild-mannered as usual, leaning over the railing as they chat in broad daylight—because, apparently, they’re never allowed to be alone together anymore without someone making something of it.
It’s going to take a while to undo the damage. To snuff out even those smallest nuggets of doubt.
“She’s trying to ruin me,” Marinette murmurs after she tells him about the card, pocketing her phone after sending a reassuring text to Alya, “and you and I both know it.”
Adrien doesn’t say anything; it sounds, painfully, like he’s still trying to walk that line of good intentions.
“Aren’t you angry?” she says. “Aren’t you hurt?”
“Of course I am,” Adrien mumbles after a moment, tightly clutching his books and the Polaroids. “It’s not right, what she does. Spying, trying to put you on like that. I don’t even know why she does it, but of course I’m not okay with it. If anyone deserves happiness, it’s you.”
“Then why does it feel like you’re only just starting to agree with me? Because she’s starting to pull you into this mess, too? Or because this whole thing could make you look bad to Kagami?”
“I…”
Marinette can feel the chill between them, the way Adrien begins to recede, and instantly she wishes she could eat her words. “I’m sorry,” she says, a little too fast, her hands starting to shake. “I didn’t mean that, I didn’t mean it like that, I swear.”
“I know,” he says. “I know you didn’t.” He doesn’t need to add, but you still said it, for it to hang in the balance.
Before he can say anything else, Luka swings around the bottom of the stairs below, stopping there and looking up at them both. He looks concerned, and a little solemn, and Marinette can’t shake the feeling that he’s upset with her somehow. She doubts he’d ever be, but that doesn’t do much to alleviate her mind. “I’d better go,” she says in that way that means their conversation isn’t over just yet. It’s as she’s rounding the railing, as Luka comes up the steps, that she adds, “I am happy for you. It’s not just me. You deserve that happiness, too.”
Luka nods toward an empty classroom when they meet halfway, and instead of greeting her with a hug or kiss, he slides his spinner ring on her index fingers and lets her in first. He’s strangely calm as he sits across from her, more so than usual, but he does drum his nails on the desk to fill up the quiet. If there’s a rhythm to it, it feels like he’s the only one who knows it.
Silence doesn’t fit them.
She’s starting to wonder if maybe something happened in his classes, or if he’s upset that she hasn’t asked about the physics tutoring, when he says, “Jules told me what happened.”
Marinette’s insides turn to ice.
“I get it now,” he adds before she can say anything more. “Why you were so scared of Lila talking to me earlier. I’m sorry that she made you feel that way. That… isn’t even on the list of things you deserve to feel.”
“Maybe I did.” She grits her teeth. “I should’ve known she’d try to pull something like that. She was always talking about how she’d try to ruin me, leave me with no friends and all that. Maybe that’s just what I get for trying to be the bigger person. It’s just… like that, huh.”
“No, Marinette, no.” He even shakes his head for emphasis. “You don’t deserve something like that for being a good person. You don’t deserve that for keeping your friends close. ‘Sides.” He tilts his head knowingly, sticks out his thumb and pinky in a back-and-forth, same-same gesture. “Logically speaking, she can’t succeed at the whole ‘no friends’ thing.”
“I’m sorry,” she blurts out, unable to smile, because it feels like that’s the only thing she knows how to say anymore. And maybe because he knows as well as she does what it’s like to be the bigger person against nasty people. What it’s like to fight back in those little ways, to get what you deserve and be done with it, and have it all blow up in your face. “I don’t want you to feel like… we can’t trust each other.” She clenches her fists, loosens them again, gives the ring a flick. “I have no reason not to trust you. I know you’d trust me, too.”
Luka doesn’t say anything.
“You…” Marinette pauses. “You do trust me, right?”
“Of course I do,” Luka says; it’s hard to tell whether the reply comes too fast or not. With a faint smile, he reaches forward to brush her bangs from her eyes. His fingers are cold, and the touch is so intimate that she starts to think, among the scatter of photos in her mind, that maybe this isn’t on the list of things she deserves to feel, either.
“Luka?” She frowns. “Talk to me.”
Admittedly, she braces herself for almost anything. Especially the maybe-inevitable quip of, everyone knows you loved Adrien, and if you kept spending that much time with him… The one thing she doesn’t expect him to say is, “I’m not upset with you.”
Even though it’s probably the first thing she should have expected him to say, considering she’s only ever seen him angry a total of one time. It’s just that it was a very… defining one time.
“I’m not,” he says again. “You need to know that. And I don’t think you should spend less time with him, if that’s what you’re thinking. He’s your friend, and I told you before, I’m never going to ask you to limit your time with your friends just because we’re dating.”
“But…?”
(There’s always a “but.”)
Luka looks down at their hands, taps his fingers against his knuckles because the desk is too loud for them now. “I just wanna make sure we’re all in on this. You know what I mean? Because yeah, I get that getting over something like this is really… really hard.” He chews his lip, keeps his gaze low as he digs a guitar pick out of his pocket and starts passing it from finger to finger. “And I think I know how you feel. But I want to know for sure about us. I need to. And I’m sorry for… maybe needing that reassurance more than most.”
“No,” Marinette tells him, and this time the quickness doesn’t feel so bad, even if his words make her feel a guilty kind of sick. Even if she feels guilty for needing the ring as much as he does. “Don’t be sorry, please. You deserve that. And I haven’t—I haven’t given it to you the way you need. You’ve given me a lot. Something like that is the least I can do for you… isn’t it?”
Luka doesn’t answer her; she gets the feeling that, somewhere inside of him, he doesn’t know how to feel like he does deserve it. Doesn’t know how to admit it out loud.
“Hey?” she says, too afraid to ask if this counts as a fight or not. “Can I hold your hand?”
“You don’t have to ask.” He manages a smile then, and everything in the curve of his lips says, God, no, it doesn’t.
For a moment, she wonders if it would have been this easy with Adrien, if they’d been in the same situation. If they would have talked it out. If she would have let her tensions get the best of her, and isolated herself until he apologized their relationship back into complacence. Or if…
If…
“I want to hold your hand,” she tells him—clears her mind as best she can—and slides her fingers between his. The shaking in their hands starts to still, and in that touch she can feel all the days he stayed home from school and under his covers, all the times he pinched his pick between his fingers and closed his eyes and thought of her song to calm him, all the jitters of that coffee shop stage. And then, not long after, the steady touch it takes to paint a set of fingernails. To clip back locks of hair. To caress her skin just before a kiss that’s slow and full of purpose.
With a glance to Adrien’s and Lila’s pausing, then passing figures in the hallway outside, Marinette cinches up the pit in her stomach, the scraps of that ugly place card contained within it. She bows her head to meet Luka’s eyes, presses her mouth warmly to the back of his hand, and hopes all her apologies rest with him the way her cheek rests in his palm.
It’s been…
Marinette so badly wants to fill that thought in with, one week since you looked at me—honestly, that’s what she gets for being in the same class as Kim—but her heart isn’t in it.
It’s just that it’s been weird, ever since The Incident. She doesn’t even know what else to call it; it almost feels so indescribable that it doesn’t even deserve the dignity of an adjective. There’s something a little too stiff in the atmosphere when they’re all seated in class. Even though she’s gotten the overall sense that her classmates believe she wouldn’t… do what Lila claimed she was doing—she doesn’t even want to name that, either—there’s still this looming worry in the air. The doubt, that nagging feeling in the back of her head that everyone is thinking, Well, she was head over heels for Adrien all that time…
It comes even in spite of Alya tousling the thoughts away at lunch, wringing them out of her whenever she squeezes her shoulder, and praising her for actually being able to carry fluent, coherent conversations with Adrien.
It comes even when Chloe tosses her a glance from across the room, and doesn’t bother to look behind her, as if the whole thing isn’t worth her time and shouldn’t be worth Marinette’s either.
Even when Nathaniel approaches her in the art room after school, his eyes already rolled and his arms laden with warmup sketches of Viperion’s hooded expressions, and says, “I can’t believe she actually thought that would work. You’re like. Really obviously gooey for Luka.”
(Even when Luka, strumming his guitar in the corner, smiles warmly to himself before gracing her with a wink and proving Nathaniel absolutely right.)
It’s not even that she can blame them for it, because it is a logical conclusion to make. It’s just that it feels uncomfortable, even if the people who matter the most—or, most of the people who matter the most—know the facts, and even if she doesn’t need to go out proving her relationship to anyone. It’s not their business. Even when Lila tried to make it everybody’s business.
Marinette knows her way around being dealt an unconventional hand. She just has to get all her cards right.
Okay, she’ll admit it. None of this would be happening if it weren’t for a panicked late-night video chat with Alya, which involved a lot of crying, twisting, frustrated groans, and constant reassurance from Alya that all she needed to do was Be Herself.
(It’s just that Being Herself has landed her in bits of trouble here and there. Especially lately.)
But this is what Luka deserve—especially when his exams are coming up so soon—so the panic is well worth reversing dumb traditions.
Juleka’s the one to let her onto the Liberty when she arrives on a cool, breezy Sunday morning. Admittedly, the two of them have been kind of skittish around each other in the days since the incident with the card—it’s still sometimes hard to figure out where they stand with each other beyond we’ve been in the same class for years and I helped you with our class photo and you make really good music and I make cool promotional stuff for your band and I’ve been dating your older brother for a while now and it’s weird to talk about what we do when we’re alone. But today feels more off than usual. Juleka barely even looks at her while they’re waiting for Luka to come up.
“Did you believe her?” is all Marinette asks, scuffing her heel against the deck and grounding herself with the sound of the waves.
Juleka folds her arms tight, less defense and more self-preservation. “I didn’t want to.”
“Well… do you believe me?”
Juleka only shrugs. Maybe, it sounds like, or I don’t know. Marinette’s starting to think that maybe she deserves it, but the little glance she gets looks like it also says, I want to.
She’ll make sure of it. If there’s anyone who deserves to believe her, in all this awkward quiet that ensues—if there’s anyone Lila’s hurt more than her, with all this manipulation—it’s Juleka.
Before she can say anything else—it’s a misunderstanding or we’re only friends, I swear or even I don’t know how I feel but it’s not like how I used to—Luka hops up from below deck, taking the steps two at a time. “Hey,” he says, assuming his usual calm smile, his hands finding their lazy way to the pockets of his jeans. The way his eyes flutter to his old guitar pick, now a pendant that sits comfortable in the hollow of her throat, isn’t lost on her. “This is new, you picking me up. Color me spoiled.”
Her expression feels nothing short of nervous, her gaze flitting between the two of them, and she hopes the look she tosses Juleka on her way to land promises self-improvement.
“So where are you taking me?” Luka says once the Liberty is out of sight and they’ve made their way to the metro station. Somehow, it feels less tense now, knowing it’s just the two of them. It’s hard to tell whether that’s ironic or not. “You’ve kept this whole date thing a mystery. How do I know you’re not gonna kidnap me or something?”
Marinette only smiles, swiping her pass, and waits for him on the platform. “Do you trust me?” she asks.
Luka looks surprised for a moment, but he smiles right back, and swipes his card, too, and reaches to cradle her hand in both of his. “What kind of question is that?”
They don’t say much on the ride over; they simply share his earbuds while he taps out the rhythm of each song against the back of her hand and tells her what colors they are. Robin’s egg blue, burnt orange, black curling in from the edges. She’s missed hearing him talk about music like this, so idle and vital like the blood in his veins. She almost doesn’t want to get off the train, either; it’d be nice to hear him talk like this for hours on end, and maybe if they have time afterwards, she can. But their stop is called, and she takes him by the hand and leads him back up to the street, and it’s worth pulling him away from his earbuds to see the way his eyes glitter. The way he grins at her so knowingly.
“Ice skating, huh?” he says. “This feels familiar.”
She smiles right back. “I figured I owed you a better first date.”
“I mean…” Playfully, Luka starts ticking his fingers. “I think it’s a little too late for firsts.”
Marinette rolls her eyes, and laughs, and pulls him right inside.
The ice rink is that happy medium of crowded—enough people that Marinette won’t be in any spotlight or feel self-conscious about her skating, but not so many people that either of them would feel stifled or crushed against the wall. Luka insists on tying her laces for her, even though she swears she knows how, but maybe it’s just because he wants to bend down for her and give her his hand like the last time. And maybe, like the last time, she kind of enjoys the attention, the fact that he’s so close to kissing her hand and is practically a punk prince in his own right. The affectionate, amused smile he only ever seems to show her, the shall we? in his eyes, the giddy first-date feeling that turns her stomach when she lays her hand in his.
“Don’t worry,” he murmurs just as he leads her onto the ice, out of the way of other skaters passing by. They’re both a little wobbly on their feet, like newborn horses or deer; it’s actually kind of relieving to see. “You’re a natural.”
“No,” Marinette shoots back with a pout. “You’re a natural. I just followed your lead the last time. And…” She can feel the heat crawling all the way up to her ears in spite of the chill, and definitely not because of it.
Luka tilts his head, his bangs shading his eyes. “And…?”
She swallows hard, pigeon-toed in her skates. “And I want you to follow mine for once. So you don’t worry this time.”
Luka positively beams.
Marinette’s no good at skating backwards the way he is, and she definitely can’t risk lifting him over her head the way he did (even if, all things considered, she actually has a fighting chance of pulling it off). Honestly, she has to spend the first few minutes keeping her legs steady and staying close to the wall and willing away the thought of Chat Noir teasing her about it. But it feels like riding a bicycle, or maybe even driving, whenever she gets around to learning how to do that. You start off scared and uncertain and hoping to everything that you don’t look stupid. And then you glide forward, just a little bit, and then just a little more, and suddenly you’re doing it, as easy as breathing, as easy as holding a loved one’s hand.
“See?” Luka says, keeping his laughter between the two of them. “You are a natural.”
“Oh, stop,” Marinette says with a roll of her eyes, and goes back to tugging him along beside her.
They stick to idle skating most of the time, only racing each other when there are fewer people to bump into. The real challenges lie in trying to skate and record Luka’s elegant spins on her phone at the same time, and wobbling across the carpet to the bleachers when their legs start to protest and beg for a break. Luka ends up buying a single cup of hot chocolate for the two of them to share, even when she nearly chucked her wallet at him as he retreated to the concession stand. They pass the cup back and forth, blowing on it as they take cautious sips and caring little about sharing the same mouthpiece.
“This is nice,” Luka says—not excellent, not terrible, but nice. It’s a pretty safe word, but Marinette decides to give him the benefit of the doubt anyway. “It was really cool of you to do this.”
“What do you mean?” she asks. “You do this all the time. It’s only fair that I get to do it for you, too.”
“Maybe.” He says it dreamily, like he’s barely conceding the point. “But you made it special.”
Marinette’s almost glad she’s not holding the cup, no matter how empty it may be by now, because with the way she’s playing with her hands, she almost certainly would’ve spilled the contents. “I just figured you deserved it, with… all the stuff that’s been happening lately. You deserve to know how I feel about you, even if I don’t get the words right, either.”
Luka puts the cup aside. Maybe he’s afraid of spilling, too. “Well,” he says. “How do you feel?”
It’s hard for her to gather her thoughts when there’s upbeat pop punk echoing off the ice—even harder when she knows she really won’t get it right on the first try. But it’s still worth it. She thinks. “Like… If someone wanted to hurt you, then I’d do for you what you did for me. Not—not get akumatized or anything”—she’s already starting to lose the words, and no amount of bouncing her leg seems to get her back on track—“but, you know. Defend your honor, or something. Like, make sure Lila doesn’t get to you the way Bob Roth tried to… or maybe it’s the other way around, and…” She shakes her head quickly. “Can I try that again? I don’t want to think about her right now.”
Or ever again, she wants to add, but she can’t be afforded that luxury just yet.
The way Luka looks at her is nothing short of amused. “That’s the beauty of firsts,” he says. “It always implies there’s something that comes after.”
Marinette decides, with a faint smile, that Luka will always be too good at words, no matter how much he tries to argue that he’ll never get them perfect. And then she decides it’s all the poetry and wax figures and studying getting to him. “Do you remember the first time we came here together?”
“Like it was yesterday.”
“And…” She rubs her hands together; they don’t feel cold, because of the gloves and wrist guards, but it’s more a force of habit. “And do you remember the day before that? When you told me someone like me deserved to feel like… like…”
Marinette trails off, and in the quiet between them she swears they can both hear those notes he played, all those weeks ago. He never told her what color they were; maybe, some other time, she’ll ask.
“What about it?” Luka asks when the music in her head dies down. He even reaches over to smooth out her hands before she realizes she’s been wringing them too hard.
They go limp in her lap, and the words get so lodged in her throat that she almost has to force them out. “You’re that guy,” she says. “You’re the guy who makes me feel like that. And sometimes I think… not in like a fantasy, ‘for all eternity’ type of way, but… sometimes I think you’re the only guy who’s ever going to make me feel that way. The way you do.”
“You don’t know that. Some other guy could, someday. Or some other girl.” He flicks her nose, and as light and playful as it is, the strain in his voice—the way it sounds like the words pain him to say out loud—isn’t lost on her.
“Well,” she announces, clutching her knees more tightly than she means to. “I want you to be that guy for a long time. As long as possible. And it doesn’t make you any less special. And I can prove it.”
“Oh, yeah?” He’s still got that grin on his face, that quirk in his brow. “How’re you gonna do that?”
Marinette can’t help beaming and rummaging through her purse. With a swelling pride in her chest, she carefully lays a bracelet of braided cord in his hand. “Like that.”
Luka stares in awe at first, turning the bracelet this way and that. Seeing his expression makes all those night-owl hours of twisting and knotting and tearing up all the more worth it. “You made this,” he says. Doesn’t even need to ask. And then he’s sliding the bracelet on, the rope taut against his skin and flexing with his muscles, and it fits him. It fits him so well it almost hurts.
“It’s not supposed to come off,” she mumbles. And then, “What’re you laughing at?”
“It fits,” he says, and flexes again. “It endures.”
Somewhere after Luka lets her drain the cup and before they unlace for the day, Luka tells her there’s one last thing he wants to do. Marinette thinks that maybe he wants to try that move again, the one where he lifts her over his head like some cheesy 80’s movie. But he makes no move to get up, instead staring at the skating rink as a few guests are starting to clear out for a late lunch.
“Go ahead,” he says, jerking his chin toward the ice, bouncing a leg and drumming out a beat against his knees to the new song starting to play. “Go skate to my color.”
“Your color?”
Luka smiles, doesn’t lose his rhythm, and points up. “It’s teal.”
Marinette’s eyes go wide; teal songs, the real deal, are almost as rare as pink ones for him. And there comes wave after wave of butterflies, reassurances instead of warning signs, as she wobbles to her feet. And there she goes, back onto the ice, and she doesn’t need to cling to the wall this time. She only has to go. To glide, until it feels as easy as breathing all over again, with the breeze cutting across her cheeks and through her hair. She can’t skate backwards, or do any flips or intricate moves. But she can go, and go, and go, every step so natural, to some place that’s so much farther away from place cards and polaroids, physics and borrowed books, where it takes her forever to realize just how fast she’s going. Everything endures, but not quite so much as when she lifts her head to the sight of Luka grinning at her, his cheeks a bright and healthy red from the indoor chill, and riffing on an imaginary guitar with that braided bracelet clinging to his wrist.
She’s skating to his color, and she’s all in.
Talking to Kagami is easy when she’s alone. It’s just funny, Marinette finds, how all these things come together in front of the lockers.
Kagami isn’t startled when she approaches, still trying to find a place to put her hands besides her pockets. Instead, she’s hunched over some kind of journal, snapping it shut when Marinette gets close enough. She thinks she noticed a rose dried and pressed to the pages, but she can’t be too sure, and she can’t hazard a guess.
“Normally,” Kagami says, bristling, “people try to make their entrances a little more obvious.”
It’d be funny, how Marinette is the more flustered of the two, if it weren’t so predictable. Hastily, she apologizes, swings around the bench, and takes a seat next to Kagami. For a while, neither of them says anything, each of them soaking in the background buzz of conversations in the courtyard and the hallway. Marinette’s acutely aware of how much her legs are bouncing, of how Juleka appraised her upon entering the school as if to compliment her on a job well done. Of how Luka’s new bracelet rubbed against the inside of her wrist before he let go of her hand to take his exams, and how he slid that spinner ring on her finger for her to borrow, his eyes fixed on the pendant she’s started to wear every day now.
I’m all in, he said, and refused to take the ring back; it sounded like there was something in his voice pleading with her to take care of it, or reassuring her that she’d need it more than he did. And then he tugged those knotted cords like a good luck charm before he slipped away behind the frosted glass doors, and she’s been thinking of him ever since. Every poem and every formula and every important date. Somehow, that’s been more than enough to dispel whatever chaos and sinkholes Lila’s tried to leave in her wake. Especially when the people around her have started to ask her questions. Did you really have tinnitus? Did you really know Jagged Stone?
“I owe you an apology,” she finally says to break the quiet between them, and wishes there were a less violent word for it. “For the things I’ve been thinking, and the feelings I’ve been having.”
Unamused as mostly usual, Kagami doesn’t move except to incline her head and let her gaze dart to the side, as if to say, Go on.
“I…” Admittedly, Marinette’s been thinking about this more than she expected to, but it still takes those few moments to get the words out right. To think about the café, the music, the stairwells, braids and beads, video games and comics and playing at statues and poetry. “I’m not flipping anymore,” she finally says. “I’ve landed.”
Kagami tosses her yet another glance, this one a little more flippant even by her standards. “You landed a long time ago,” she says, getting to her feet and cradling her books close, and her journal even closer.
“Hey,” Marinette calls after her, when she’s standing in the doorway. Her voice is far too stiff for a sleepy school morning—but then, Kagami looks far too stiff, so perhaps it all works out. Almost instinctively, her hand goes to the band on her index finger—one of the only ones big enough to wear the spinner ring without it falling off—and she starts flicking, and the sound strangely calms her right down. She waits for Kagami to turn, even a quarter of the way, pinches the band until a grooves dig into her skin. “Go for him.”
Kagami’s expression barely changes, except for the faint widening of her eyes. “Why?” she asks, half-scoffing, potentially at the idea that she should need anyone’s permission. Except, maybe, her mother’s. “Because you didn’t? Or so no one else can?”
“Because you should,” Marinette says simply, as much as the questions feel like a dulled knife to the gut. She’s taken worse. She’ll take worse.
From a distance, Kagami regards her, up and down and up again. She doesn’t go soft the way the boys have—honestly, Marinette’s not even sure the Tsurugis are capable of going soft—but something in her expression changes. Becomes a little more understanding. “He suits you.”
Marinette’s stomach jolts—she doesn’t have to ask who—but she manages a wry smile. “Because I go gooey for punk boys?”
Kagami’s answer at first is a dumbfounded stare, the kind that says, are you kidding me? Frankly, Marinette thinks she’s about to say something about how they’re both creators, or how he’s a Type O, before her gaze drops to the ring. It isn’t until then that Marinette notices how tightly she’s been pinching it, how erratically she’s been spinning the center band, anticipating the shadows of her classmates, ready to make her spaces all over again with the words all stuck in her throat.
“Because he knows you,” Kagami finally says before she leaves. “Because he stopped you.”
In the quiet that ensues, Marinette listens—with her locker door open to the photos Lila took, the ones she’s starting to add of all her other people. She’s drawn noses and whiskers or mustaches and monocles on some, added shiny gold stars to others. The only ones she’s left blank are Luka’s, because she’ll never be able to explain away the ink on her lips.
In the quiet, if Marinette listens close enough, she can hear the painstakingly slow rip of that card. The leftover scrapes of blades on the ice. The catchy beat she leaned into, the scratch of her pen in her diary, the crease of cotton twine at two in the morning. The echo of Kagami’s words and balconies on Paris nights. Her thumb on the edges of those borrowed pages. The tick, tick, tick of the nearby clock, filling mostly-empty hallways, counting down all the time Luka has to prove himself in that classroom upstairs.
Tick, tick, tick.
It sounds like teal. Little splashes, almost microscopic. Her brain doesn’t fire it off the same, but it doesn’t have to.
It endures.