Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Marinette stared at the inside of a kitchen cupboard, barefooted, her nightdress slouching off her shoulder. She could take another peek at one of her diaries, just to check that thing she had underlined about Adrien's favourite pastries, but she was determined to remember by herself.

Her toes curled against the linoleum. She chewed on her lip.

Baking was her domain, and this cupboard was hers, but it belonged to a different version of her, and Marinette felt like she was filing through a stranger's cabinets. 

It wasn't just the cabinets, though.

Marinette was drifting through a stranger's house. There was a book on her nightstand, the pink ribbon of a stranger's bookmark sticking out halfway, the pages worn by a stranger's thumb and embellished with a stranger's marginalia. Her side of the bed was soaked in a stranger's perfume — sweet, flowery, something that Old Her would've liked. 

And now, Marinette stared at the inside of a kitchen cupboard, filled with a stranger's folded over flour packets, half-empty jars of sugar, and a box of six different types of icing with one stuffed in upside down.

She would never tell him that, but sometimes she felt guilty for letting Adrien love her.

Loving Adrien was one of the few things she retained, along with sewing and baking and breathing. She loved him so much, oh God, the way she loved him. But he fell in love with Old Her — he slipped an engagement band onto Old Her's finger — was New Her the same? Would New Her ever be the same?

And it was that crisis of Old and New, Marinette in Adrien's phone gallery and Marinette in the mirror, that kept her from checking her diaries.

She was the same person, goddammit. She would prove that to herself. 

Before she picked out the flour, there was a jangle of keys behind the front door, and the lock clicked open.

Marinette poked her head out of the kitchen in time to see Adrien enter, hair windswept and his eyes already meeting hers.

"Hey," she said. She hadn't noticed when she started smiling.

"Hey, darling." He shut the door behind him, and opened his arms for her. She hugged his coldness, trying to warm him up through her thin nightdress and the heat of her cheek on his windbreaker. He kissed the top of her head, but she didn't miss the glance at her lips. "Your hair's wet."

"I just took a shower."

"Mmm. You smell sweet."

And they stayed like that for a while, after Adrien squeezed her tighter. 

Her heart .

She was beginning to feel a lot like fourteen-year-old Marinette from her first diary. Adrien sent her stomach into an explosion of butterflies, and she'd backstepped into her silly teenage stutters and flaming cheeks whenever she spent more than a moment thinking about her fiancé. She always wondered if those ripped out pages were filled with more embarrassing maunders about that cute boy who sat in front of her and whom she insisted was the love of her life.

Which he was , Marinette thought with a smile, and placed her chin on his chest to look up at him shyly.

“Are the windows open?” he asked, unwrapping his hands from around her to push her damp hair out of her face. “Won’t you catch a cold?”

“It was warm when I left the shower.”

“But it’s cold now.” He kissed her forehead, gave her bare arms a rub, and began unzipping his windbreaker. Once it was off, he paused, then pulled his shamrock green jumper off, too. Before Marinette could ask, he stuck it over her head. “Now you’ll be warm.”

She pushed her arms through the sleeves, and for the fraction of a second her face was still covered, she closed her eyes, and took a lungful of his scent.

Nostalgia. Nostalgia for a memory her brain may have forgotten, but her heart had kept safe.

By the time she got herself comfy (which took a little longer than it should have — a loose thread of wool caught itself on her earring), Adrien had already wandered into the kitchen. He glanced at the opened cabinet, the big mixing bowl underneath it, and the carton of milk she had taken out of the fridge.

"What're you baking?" he asked.

Marinette hesitated at the doorway.

Maybe she should've just checked her diary.

She wrung her fingers into the loose woollen sleeves around her fingers. "I wanted to bake you something."

"Aw, Marinette. Is it a surprise?"

Marinette could have said yes. She could have shooed him out of the kitchen, and, while he was gone, crept upstairs, opened that strange, unfamiliar nightstand drawer, and flicked through her diary for the recipe.

Instead, she looked away from him. "No, I just… can't remember… what I usually baked for you."

A silence settled between them. Marinette shut her eyes against it.

But then he chuckled, and his socked feet walked across the linoleum until he was in front of her.

Adrien put his hands on her shoulders. "Let me teach you?"

She opened one eye. "You know the recipe?"

His expression flickered. But Adrien kept himself composed — was this what Old Her meant when she wrote about how good he was with his model smiles?

"Yeah. You taught me so I could…" He bit his lip. "...could make some if you weren't home one day. Yeah!"

Marinette sighed, and rubbed the back of her neck. "I'm sorry. It was meant to be a treat for you but now you'll have to do all the work."

"You think baking with my fiancée wouldn't be a treat?" He let go of her to open the fridge and brought out the ripe passion fruit Marinette had pushed aside when searching for the butter. "Let's make some macarons."

All Adrien really had to do was tell her the recipe. She knew how to bake, but he still came up behind her and put a hand over hers and helped her stir the mixture with a whisk.

She didn't have the heart to tell him he was using the wrong technique. Plus, she liked having him close to her.

An hour later, they had a tray of macarons cooling by the windowsill, all the bowls and whisks and spoons washed, dried, and tidied, and the takeout Adrien brought home on the dining table.

"Could I ask you something?" Marinette said.

He was standing up, slicing the pizza and filling her plate with a large slice. "Go ahead."

"What were we like before… you know, the memory loss?"

Adrien's hand froze around the pizza cutter. She noticed before he could cover it up.

Then he looked over his shoulder, and smiled. "Not much different from now."

"Adrien…" She placed a hand on his forearm, and met his gaze. "Please don't keep more from me than you already have to."

He gave the pizza cutter a conflicted furrowed brow, sighed, then sat beside her. "I'm sorry."

"I'm not mad at you." She brushed an eyelash off his cheek, but kept her hand there. "This is hard for both of us.”

Nodding, he took her hand from his cheek, kissed it, then gave it a squeeze. “I know. I know. I wish I could tell you everything, it’s just…”

“I get it. I trust you.”

Waking up one morning in a bed she didn’t know, with walls she didn’t remember painting, and picture frames of a couple she didn’t recognise was terrifying, and it didn’t help that she couldn’t know what happened before. Adrien introduced himself as her fiancé, then told her about the amnesia, and when she asked what happened, he asked her to trust him when he said he couldn’t tell her.

Something about his warm green eyes and soft hands and the rhythm her heart felt like it had been playing for years had made Marinette nod.

“What about the stuff you can tell me?” she said. “Can you talk to me about that?”

He softened into a smile. “What do you want to know?”

“What sort of stuff did we used to do together?” she asked, barely disguising her enthusiasm. Marinette had instincts, and had to know if following them would lead her to a pattern that used to be their normal.

Adrien rubbed his thumb over the back of her hand, looking at the pizza box with a haze over his eyes. “Well, we kissed. A lot.”

She flushed hotly. Guilt settled itself into her stomach. Since she woke up that morning a month ago, they still hadn’t gotten around to doing any of that.

He continued — talking, and rubbing her hand. “I guess we were always making up for lost time. You know, we spent four years dancing around our feelings before we got together?”

“What?”

Adrien nodded. “We fell in love with each other when we were fourteen. But things were complicated, and we were both a little confused, but in the end…”

Her chest warmed. “We found our way back to each other.”

“Always.” And this time he looked at her, just to kiss her forehead. “So we used to kiss a lot. Whenever you woke up earlier than me you’d want me to kiss you right here” —he was speaking with his mouth still between her eyebrows— “before you got up, but you like sleeping in, so I usually just kissed you before making breakfast. You never woke up from it, though. You’re such a heavy sleeper. I once tried getting you out of bed by kissing you all over your face and you were still out like a light.”

Marinette bit the inside of her cheek. It wouldn’t matter now, but she was almost mad at Old Her for not being awake every time he kissed her.

He pulled back to stroke her cheekbone. “And we loved Friday nights because we both got home early. We’d cuddle on the couch and put on a movie, or we’d cuddle on the couch and talk, or…”

Bashfully, Adrien smiled to himself, then averted his gaze.

“Or…?” she repeated, a little warm in the face, too.

“Well, you know, other stuff.” He cleared his throat. “You liked the other stuff a lot.”

“And did you?”

“ Marinette .” 

His face was red, and he laughed a little breathlessly. It was endearing — Adrien still blushed when he thought about his fiancée like that.

"What else?" she asked. The pizza was getting cold on her plate, but Marinette was enthralled. 

He pondered, but she wanted to squeeze his shoulders and tell him to stop thinking and to just talk . She wanted to know everything — every tiny little detail in the life they built together. She wanted to know how long they usually hugged for, and their favourite way to sleep at night, and exactly how many times they usually looked up from their breakfast bowls to talk to each other. 

"Oh!" he exclaimed. "This one's my favourite, which is a little silly. You liked it when I tied your hair up for you before bed. And I loved it. I did it once when we were nineteen and it just stuck."

"That isn't silly. It's adorable." I wish I remembered it went unsaid. "Can you tell me about us when we were teenagers?"

He leaned back in his chair, grinning, now drawing excited patterns in the back of her hand.

She may not have remembered her life with him, but Marinette loved this man.

"You once tried giving me a love letter and instead gave me a prescription for constipation pills."

"I did what?" she screeched.

"And the thing is," he said through laughter, "it wasn't even your prescription."

"Whose was it?"

"Mas—" His laughter stopped. Adrien snapped out of what happened to be his reverie, and shook his head  "Uh, a relative of yours. I think your grandfather."

"That's awful."

"I also tried pranking you by pretending to be a statue. But you ended up feeling me up."

" No!"

"Alright, alright, it wasn't that bad. You just sorta… kissed me. And confessed your undying love for me."

" Please tell me we were dating."

He bit back a grin.

"I think I regret asking you for this," Marinette said. "I just gave you an excuse to make fun of me."

They talked until eleven o'clock, by then which they had to reheat their pizza, but Marinette was so worn out from laughter she barely had an appetite. The macarons were taken off the cooling rack and placed on a glass stand by the stove (it was Adrien's last birthday gift to Marinette, he explained) and they decided they'd just have to wait until tomorrow to try any of them.

She had been stealing glances at him since they got up from the dining table. Now, while he dried his hands after washing their dishes, soft and just a little bleary as it shied into 1AM, Marinette leaned back against the counter and appreciated the view.

Then, she approached him. Wiggled into his arms. He blinked sleepily, but smiled nonetheless, like she was a surprise he wasn't expecting to find cuddled into his chest.

"So," she said, hands covered by the sleeves of his jumper while she rested them on his shirt, "we used to kiss a lot?"

He stopped wiping his hands. He must have known where she was going with this.

Adrien slung the towel over one of the chairs, and, almost tentatively, cupped her hips. She shivered, especially when he gazed down at her.

"A lot," he confirmed.

Her fingers trailed up his collar, and found themselves on his cheek. This was a familiar touch, unlike the one on her hips. But what his hands on her hips lacked in familiarity made up for in excitement.

"This'll be like my first kiss, you know," she said, rising to her toes. 

He adjusted his hands so his palm pressed into her lower back. "I'm sure you'll be a natural."

"Muscle memory, right?" She smiled up at him, squinting the kitchen light out of her tired eyes. 

"Right."

Marinette and Adrien stood there for a moment, she leaning into his arms, him with his forehead touching hers.

She shut her eyes, and kissed his lips. She kissed him long but sweetly, giving him just a little more than a peck, her face in flames and her hand clutching his cheek to stop it trembling. Marinette suddenly felt like she was fourteen again, not that she remembered how it was herself, but their dizzy kisses and her fluttering heartbeat and the want for more at odds with her tremors seemed rather reminiscent of something she read in her first diary.

Everytime I see him, I get all clammy and feel like fainting .

At least if she fainted, he'd just hold her together.

He wanted to deepen the kiss, she knew. Marinette could feel him pressing against her a little firmer, a hand coming up to bury itself into her hair while the other tightened into the shamrock green jumper sagging between her hips. 

He wanted to, but he wouldn't. 

Because that hand in her hair and the grasp on her back weren't to carve his need into her, but to steady himself. It had been a month, after all. Marinette could sympathise.

(She almost opened her lips for him, to see where'd that take them, but decided that should wait until it wasn’t 1AM).

She drew back and pursed her lips. His hands loosened, both in her hair and in the jumper.

"How was that for a first kiss?" he asked.

"Perfect," she said. Marinette almost gave him another, but her nerves were still singing. Instead, she (with great reluctance) pulled herself away from him, and headed out of the kitchen. "Let's get to bed?"

He smiled. "Yeah."

.•° ✿ °•.

Marinette should have let Adrien brush his teeth first, but what if by the time she came back he was already trying to sleep? She turned the hair brush under the lamplight, and twisted her band around a bristle. Who knew sitting at the edge of their bed could feel so awkward.

She heard the bathroom light turn off, and scrambled to her feet. Marinette managed to twist the hair band around her fingers, too; she hurried to untangle herself before Adrien crossed the corridor.

He opened the door, and paused. "Is everything okay?"

Finally, she freed the hair band, then looked down at the ensemble in her hands. She came up to him, and, wordlessly, held them up.

"Do my hair?" she asked softly, peering up through her fringe.

He smiled, and took the hair brush from her.

Marinette spent a moment glancing from the desk chair to the bed to the floor, until Adrien guided her to the mattress and asked her to sit down. He settled on his knees behind her, and kissed her roots before taking the brush to her hair. She was glad he couldn't see the silly way she smiled.

Nonetheless, she cast her eyes down bashfully, only to have them caught by an oblong contour in the duvet. Curious, she palpated it, before pulling back the sheets to find a chestnut, spiral-bound photo album with a cream Our Story So Far label.

She picked it up without much hesitation. Adrien's hand stuttered in her hair.

"Were you looking through our pictures?" she said, flicking it open. The cover page was printed empty, but right in the middle was Marinette + Adrien written in what might've been Old Her's handwriting.

He brushed her hair a few times, before tugging back the strands by her ears, fingers grazing the backs of her earrings. "Yeah. I just wanted to see how much we changed."

She turned to the first page, and gasped. "Is this our first class photo together?"

Marinette felt his breath on the shell of her ear as he looked over her shoulder. Then, he chuckled. "Yeah. I was right…" And he reached around her to point to the middle of the photograph, in the second row. "...here."

Fourteen-year-old Adrien wasn't too different from twenty-four-year-old. Same blond hair, same dazzling eyes, same soft smile. So that's why Marinette fell in love, she thought fondly, rubbing Adrien's little face with the pad of her finger. She was just below him, sitting on the bench in the first row. In fact, neither of them had changed much. Marinette looked up from the album to the mirror hung across her. They lost some baby fat, and their bones sharpened, but everything else was the same.

She flipped to the next page, but it wasn't a picture of them.

Marinette knew of Ladybug and Chat Noir, but only through Alya's blog. She skimmed through it after their first lunch out together since the memory loss, but it hadn't been updated in almost a month and a half. Adrien explained the logistics behind Hawk Moth and the superheroes, and how he'd fallen off the radar for a while. Something about Ladybug renouncing guardianship and throwing him off track, whatever that meant.

"Why's this in our album?" she asked, pointing to the picture. Ladybug and Chat Noir looked much younger than in the latest pictures Alya had on her blog. Did Paris really trust two kids in superhero costumes? 

"Oh, that." Adrien was quiet as he bunched up her hair. "Uh, it was Ladybug and Chat Noir after their first battle. You took the picture and you were really proud of it."

"Isn't it a little weird to keep it in our album?"

Adrien tickled her neck. "You were a bit of a mega-fan. Gimme the hair band."

Marinette held it up for him with one hand, and turned the page with another.

Yet again was a picture of Ladybug and Chat Noir, but it was attached to a magazine article headed with Paris' Superheroes or Super-lovebirds? He was on top of her, lips painted black, and they were kissing.

"Was this my idea to keep here, too?" Marinette asked.

Adrien swallowed. "We both liked collecting superhero stuff?"

She shrugged, and kept turning the pages.

He tied off her hair, but instead of moving, Marinette reclined back into his chest.  Shuffling up to the headboard, Adrien took her weight happily, and kept his arms around her waist while she went through the album.

"Ohh…" Marinette ran her fingers across the plastic sheath, under where a scrunched up letter was stuck down. "What's this?"

"Hmm?" Adrien leaned over her shoulder to get a better look. "Oh. That was the first love letter I wrote to you."

" Your hair as dark as night / Your pretty bluebell eyes—"

"Yeah, yeah, let's skip that one." He reached over and turned the page.

Marinette snickered. "Why was it scrunched up?"

"I was too embarrassed to give it to you. I threw it away."

"Aw, but it's so cute!"

"You're laughing at it."

"No I'm not!"

"You are."

She was. Marinette rested her head back so she could smile up at his flushed face. "You like my bluebell eyes?"

His flush cooled off, and Adrien smiled back. "I do." He kissed the dip of her nose. "But before you get too smug, just know you were the one who pulled the poem out of the trash."

Marinette's face dropped. "I what ?"

"Yep. You watched me write it in class and waited for me to leave after I threw it away so you could be nosy."

Bringing her head back over to face the album, she groaned. "I was so embarrassing ."

"We both were." He adjusted his arms around her so he could lie back a bit more. "But we were fourteen."

"Were Alya and Nino like this?"

Adrien paused. "No."

Marinette sighed.

Each page was admired deeply. Marinette was tactile, pressing her fingers against all the plastic sheaths and feeling the corners of every photograph. She drank in the memories that she no longer had, tried to fabricate the taste of that mint ice-cream when she was out with her friends, the sweat under her blazer as they walked in the sun, the smell of cinema tickets and popcorn the first time she held hands with Adrien.

"I look so red," Marinette said. "Didn't you think it was weird that I was blushing so hard?"

Behind her, Adrien was silent.

She turned in his arms and found his head lolled back, eyes closed, lips parted. He was asleep.

Marinette smiled. Careful not to jostle him, she placed the album on the nightstand, and switched off the lamp. Coming back into his arms, she pushed gently at his chin to close his mouth, and kissed him.

He woke up when she pulled away. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to fall asleep."

"It's late, anyway. You should've just pushed me away."

He laughed, closing his eyes again. "You know I could never do that, My Lady."

My Lady? That was new. 

Adrien held her close, kissed her cheek, and went back to sleep.

Chapter Text

Dreams, for Marinette, were fragments of old memories.

Her first few nights with amnesia were uneventful, but left her with the warmth of nostalgia deep in her sleepy chest. A high-five with Alya. A class presentation. Bending to kiss her mother's cheek. Group hugs. They were never detailed enough to make much sense, but after talking to Adrien about them, they made the connection between her dreams and Old Her's life.

Sometimes they confused her.

And hurt her.

Like the dream she had then, about a boy who wasn't Adrien but might've been Adrien, giving her a wink with a comment about 'giving her some extra time', stepping off a platform — or a building, a rooftop, something like that — while she cried out his name.

She jolted awake.

Adrien. It was Adrien. It didn't look like him, nothing like him in fact, but it was him. She knew. Where her brain left blanks, her heart filled in.

Her heart hammered and she was sweating through her nightdress. She flung the duvet off her middle and, automatically, wedged her arm between herself and the hot body beside her to touch his face.

A thumb to his cheekbone. The whoosh of his breath on her wrist. Hand a little higher, and it was passing his brow, his sideburn, the shell of his ear.

Marinette exhaled, and buried herself deep into his warmth. Face pushed into his chest. Arms folded inside while she let him envelop her, hide her, alive and okay.

She closed her eyes. Almost fell asleep. Then she heard herself — was it herself? Old Her? Did this really happen? — cry out a name made of jumbled letters but was definitely, definitely Adrien's, and she jerked awake again, shot with charged blood.

"You okay?" Adrien asked. His hand slid to the back of her head to hold her steady, an action so perfect he could've been awake all along, but his voice was gravelly with unuse. "You keep jumping awake."

"Nightmare," she mumbled on his shirt.

He was quiet then, tracing the part where her neck crested and simmered into her hair. "What was it?"

"You — I think, well, no, I know — you… you sort of… you let yourself fall from somewhere really, really high." Marinette took a lungful of breath and curled tighter. "Is that a memory?" she whispered.

Again, he didn't reply. Not immediately, at least, and Marinette knew what that meant.

"When?" she whimpered. "When? How? How could you do that to me?"

That time, he hushed her, and pressed his lips to her head, cocooning her. 

"I'm sorry," he said softly. "I can't tell you."

Marinette swallowed hard, knowing if she tried wiping her eyes, he'd know she was crying.

"But I'm here now. I'm alright. You're alright. We're together. And that won't ever change." He tilted her head up, (and she squeezed her wet eyes shut), kissed the tears on her cheeks, then kissed her lips. "I love you," he told her.

She opened her eyes to see the silhouette of his face. Marinette raised her hand to touch it again. "I love you, too."

.•° ✿ °•.

She had another dream before morning.

It wasn't a nightmare.

Marinette woke on her back, Adrien's arms around her, his breaths still heavy. 

She leaned in, and kissed him.

His lashes fluttered, and she kissed him again. Then his chin. His jaw. He was mumbling by the time she got to his throat, and she felt him waking up once she took his hand and moved it under her nightdress.

"You're always so eager," he chuckled sleepily.

She was a little embarrassed at her own enthusiasm, but a better, more comfortable thought overtook it.

Always . A constant. Perhaps Old Her and New Her weren't that different after all.

.•° ✿ °•.

After over-exerting herself that morning, (it had been a month), it was in the best interest of Marinette's soreness to turn down Adrien's suggestion of going on a walk. It sounded nice before it started raining at noon, but she much preferred staying in her nightgown and drifting around the house.

"What're you thinking?" he asked, running his hand through her hair. 

"That this couch is too small and we should've gone back upstairs."

Adrien snorted. He reached down and fixed her nightdress back down her naked legs, after having hitched it around her hips only so long ago. "Alright, other than that."

She lifted her forehead off his chest to face him. "I wanna sew."

His eyebrows shot up, and he smiled. "Really?"

Marinette nodded, running her finger along the rounded juts at the middle of his clavicle, like an infinity sign. "I saw some fabric and stuff in my sewing machine. Maybe I could finish it off."

He brushed back her fringe. "Yeah. Do that."

She nodded, then broke into a grin. Marinette rose onto her knees, and dragged a languorous kiss across his lips. "But before that..."

He snickered, and undid the work he just finished on her nightdress. "Some things never change."

.•° ✿ °•.

They lay down together until three o’clock, when Marinette decided enough was enough of that tiny couch, and although she loved Adrien to bits, she refused to stay there any longer.

“Let’s just buy a bigger couch,” he suggested.

“Or let’s go upstairs next time!”

Adrien laughed, and dropped his head back onto the armrest as Marinette untangled herself. 

“You always have a solution for everything,” he said when she stood up, and rubbed her knuckles fondly.

Marinette was loving his always . She wanted him to say it again. She almost asked for it.

“It doesn’t take a mastermind to know a bed is better than a couch for lying…” Her eyes fell to his hand, his right hand, the one on her knuckles. Specifically, the curiously shaped ring on his finger. “...down.”

Adrien’s attention moved to it as well, and he retracted his hand.

“What’s that?” Marinette asked, reaching back for it.

“Just a ring.”

“But I’ve never seen you take it off.” She took his left hand from his chest, and held both up for inspection. “This,” she said, tapping his left ring, “is an engagement ring, but this…” Marinette pulled her lips up into a thoughtful purse as she examined the right.

"It was—it was a gift. From you."

She flicked her eyes to his, beseeching the impending recount of one of her memories. Marinette wondered if it was possible to become addicted to this.

"When we were fifteen, you went on a trip with your parents and brought back gifts. This was mine." The explanation sufficed, but he was in a rush to push it all out.

"That's so sweet." Marinette lifted his hand and kissed the ring. "I guess you returned the favour." She flashed him her engagement band.

He mimicked her, kissing it. "Now, are you gonna cuddle with me here or go do some sewing?"

"Ugh." She dropped his hands. "Sewing . You can stay on this awful couch on your own.”

"You used to like this couch!"

She was already walking out of the living room. "I lost my memories and even I know that's a lie."

His laughter rang out through the corridor as she left. Marinette smiled to herself as she went upstairs.

The sewing room was small, adjacent to their bedroom. It looked like one of the three bedrooms their house came with — when Adrien first went to work after she lost her memories, she found the other bedroom filled with noncommittal drying racks and nothing else. Adrien later explained they kept that bedroom free so they could build a nursery when the time came.

(Marinette's heart had soared).

She stood in the doorway and surveyed the fabric inside her sewing machine.

There was an issue.

Marinette had no clue where Old Her had been going with that design. 

She took a seat at the desk and lifted the unstitched part of the fabric into her lap. It was white and floral and there was a lot of it — this wasn't just a button-up or a skirt she could get done in about an hour. This was the product of sketching, planning, measuring, sitting hunched over the sewing machine for days.

There was no way Marinette would be able to make sense of it all without finding her original outlines. The sticky note with DO NOT TOUCH!! scrawled across and stuck on the machine arm wasn't exactly reassuring, either.

Outlines . She had to find them.

A flick through the sketchbook beside her left her no closer to figuring out the design, but she did catch a great glimpse into Old Her's works. Any pages marked with yellow marker tape were pieces she hadn't made yet, and she made a mental note to find something in there for Adrien when she was done.

She tackled the drawers next. Nothing in the first. Nothing in the second. Nothing in the third.

Marinette groaned. They must have been somewhere . Only a machine could sit down for such a complex endeavour with no outlines.

A machine… 

She saw a laptop, closed, on the table next to her.

Marinette almost toppled the chair over when she stood up.

Bunching up the skirt of her nightdress, she wiped off the fine layer of dust collected on the lid before prying it open. It was cold, none of that mechanical warmth her phone and TV had. 

She crossed her fingers, and pressed the power button.

It hummed to life.

The black screen was backlit for some time, then a loading screen appeared, which then gave way to a lockscreen with the time and a picture of Old Her and Adrien.

Her fingers hovered over the spacebar.

Black cat ears and whiskers were drawn onto Adrien's face, and two red antennae from Old Her's head. 

The cat ears were common enough, but antennae? 

She hit the spacebar, and to her relief, wasn't prompted with a password before her laptop unlocked. Marinette would have to ask Adrien about the antennae later. Perhaps it was an inside joke she had no memory of.

Her desktop loaded immediately, with the few files she had saved there. It was a picture of her mother and her father in front of the bakery — she only remembered one visit, and with her mother and father engulfing her in teary hugs and questions about what she remembered, who she remembered, to what extent she remembered, Marinette hadn’t had much time to appreciate it.

She opened her documents and, with great precision, sifted through each file. There were some that she wanted to stop at, to absorb, to take in something from her old life, but she was on a mission, and couldn’t get distracted by pictures of her and Adrien that hadn’t made it into their album, nor videos of her and Alya she had backed up from her phone. Forty-five minutes in, and there were still fifteen files to go. None were images.

So she looked at it from another angle — the desperate, Trying Every Angle She Could angle. Moving her mouse to the toolbar, she tapped View , then checked Hidden Items .

Immediately, ten new text documents popped up.

Marinette blinked. There must have been a system to her hiding them. Each of the documents were dated, and, according to the quick calculation she did, were from when she was eighteen. The months started off meandering, February and March and April blurred together by far-away dates, but then the dates got tighter, choppier, intervals no longer than three days as the documents moved into June.

Diary entries, maybe? Perhaps one of them had the outlines she was looking for.

She tapped the first document. It was dated for Valentine’s Day.

It didn’t take long for her to realise that it wasn’t a diary entry.

Chat Noir,

I’m sorry this is typed. I wanted to handwrite this but… what if we know each other — you know, in normal life? You’d know my handwriting, right? And then you’d connect the dots, and you’d know my identity and— you get it. It’d be a disaster.

(Yes, it would, I can hear where your brain is going and no, it wouldn’t be ‘destiny’, it would be a disaster ).

I wanted this to be poetic when I first wrote it but then I got embarrassed, so I'll be casual. Casual is good, right? It's all casual! I can be casual with you. You're my best friend.*

*This might change by the time you've read this whole letter.

So, it's Valentine's Day, right? And I go downstairs and I see my parents kissing. They make me heart-shaped pancakes and send me off with heart-shaped macarons to share with my friends and I nearly drop them because — well, because I'm clumsy, but also because I was thinking about something else.

(Can you guess what? Probably not yet).

I get into school, and see my best friend kissing her boyfriend. So much kissing in one day! I offered them macarons, I walked into class, and I felt this awful, awful loneliness I usually don't feel on Valentine's Day.

I wanted to kiss someone today, too. 

You!!!!

This is a love letter, kitty-cat. Happy Valentine's Day. I hope you can give me a February-the-15th kiss instead. 

Love,

Your Lady

Marinette stared at the flashing insertion point beside Lady .

Chat Noir? Was Old Her in love with… Chat Noir?

Heat barrelled into her face, because, oh God, did she give that letter to him? That fluttery, teenagery, love-struck letter to a superhero? 

No, no, she couldn't have done. She had always been in love with Adrien. 

Then what was this? Fanfiction?

She closed the document, and opened the next. It was dated for the last day of February.

Chat Noir,

I don't take kindly to you calling me silly. No kissing after akumas for a week!

(Yeah, I don't believe me either).

But I agree, I have been acting a little… frivolous lately. I've noticed it too. Everytime I come home from patrol I scream into my pillow because oh my God did I really beg you to kiss me in exchange for giving back your baton?

(AHHHHH I'M STILL EMBARRASSED I'M SO SORRY!)

I just can't think around you! Yes, this is your fault. All your fault! You used your charming kitty act to get straight into my heart and ruin me. This was your plan all along. Betrayal!

(See, I'm doing it again. Look what you've done to me!)

You just make me so happy. My chest always feels so… light, you know? And the butterflies… I have a butterfly nest in my tummy and those pesky bugs are staying right there!

I'm being silly. But I can't help it. I'm riding this high you put me on and it's a cross between an adrenaline rush and a drug overdose.

So, yes, I'm being silly! But it was you before it was me!

Love,

Your Lady

There had clearly been some correspondence between the first and second letter, but weirdly, there was nothing addressed from Chat Noir himself. 

Perhaps they were the later documents? Like the second to last one: 12.06.20XX

Chat Noir,

It's 3AM and I need you. I don't know why I'm writing this because it's not like you'll read it until we next see each other, but I just need to feel like you're here. That you're palpable.

I want to put my head in that space between your chin and your collarbone and close my eyes and feel you breathe under me. I want to worry about you feeling how fast my heart is beating because we're so close and there are no superhero suits between us and I'm so flustered. I want to wait until you're asleep before I put my cold feet on your warm legs and curl up around you, protecting you while you protect me.

My bed feels empty empty empty and I could cry at how bad it feels.

I do love our little escapades, but part of me wants more. 

(All of me. Every single fibre of my being wants you, all of you, all to myself. I'm the most selfish Ladybug to exist).

I want you to scoop me up and take me home. To run your bare fingers over my freckles, the ones you can't usually see. I want to kiss you and put my forehead on yours and look into your eyes — your real eyes — then wrap my arms around your torso and bury my face against your neck.

I want to worry about my parents coming up from the bakery (we run a bakery and I shouldn't tell you that but I want to) and seeing me tangled up with you under my blanket.

I am aching. But I'll be patient.

Love,

Your Lady

Marinette fanned herself once she realised she was blushing.

It was… raw, to say the least. If that was really a fanfiction, Old Her really went deep.

But did she not write anything from his perspective?

She sent her mission for the outlines to the sidelines for the moment. There was something else tugging her piece of mind, and it was these fragments of an untold story.

Marinette went through each folder in her laptop again, making sure Hidden Items was checked the whole time. There was nothing new to see — other than a picture of Adrien from when they must've just started dating, posing for a swimsuit shoot (finding it saved and hidden gave her a good laugh). 

Until she ventured into a sub- sub folder, entitled Delete .

Clearly, it hadn't been deleted. The folder, and the one document inside it, remained intact. 

A text document. some thoughts before i go .

It was created the day she lost her memories, at 2AM.

I couldn’t sleep. I kept reaching up to play with my Miraculous but they aren’t there and it’s jarring me. Tikki’s still here, of course, she will be until morning, but it feels empty. Too empty, too soon.

I shouldn't even be out of bed. I shouldn't be wasting the last few hours I have with my Adrien before I give up every memory of him I have ever had.

Marinette froze.

I should be cuddling him, kissing his shoulder blades while he sleeps and putting my face in the back of his hair and smelling that smell that always reminds me of being fourteen and taking Chemistry notes while daydreaming about the perfect scenario where I can ask him to the movies without jumbling up my words.

I should be on my side and watching Tikki sleep on that pillow I made after we defeated Stoneheart the second time, and scoop her onto my chest so I can feel her little circle of warmth, like a thumbprint, running into my heart. I should have a finger stroking her head and a hand linked with Adrien's, because when I wake up, neither will mean anything to me.

Tikki won't even be there.

Oh God, Oh God, I'm crying and I can't wake them up. But it hurts so much and I don't know if I can do this anymore.

I don't want to forget. And I'm starting to think I'd rather Hawk Moth come after me with my mind ripe and full of memories than have him retreat back into his shadows while I stumble around a house that won't be mine and look into the eyes of the love of my life and feel nothing.

I'm only a little angry at Master Fu, and I know that anger isn't rational.

He didn't have a choice. We'd already passed the point where he could delay the guardianship. 

(Funny how we could do that, right? That I could renounce my guardianship at midnight and have eight hours left with my memories before they vanish in the morning, just like that). 

I just wish there was another way, so Hawk Moth — God, the whole of Paris — wouldn't know who the new — old, I am the old guardian — is. So he wouldn't have years and years and years of planning and scheming and coming so close to winning I have to do the unimaginable.

I’m trying to be careful. I have tried as much as I could. I went through all of my diaries and notebooks and tore out anything to do with the Miraculous. Even those entries from when I started falling in love with Adrien — with Chat Noir. 

(I didn’t have the heart to throw them away, so maybe I wasn’t that careful. I gave them to him, instead. I told him to read them if he ever needed to remind himself of how much I used to love him).

Adrien says he’s ready to take this on. He says he’s ready, he reassures me that I have done the absolute most to make it easy for him. Hawk Moth won’t know he’s the guardian, and Adrien will have decades upon decades before he has to renounce his guardianship.

He will be incredible. I trust him more than anything.

But I just wish the universe could have done me a solid and let us both keep our memories.

Because I will never look at Adrien with aged, long-sighted eyes and remember how my heart raced when he grabbed my hand in the métro station and dragged me away from his fans and his bodyguard all while I was in my pyjamas. I will never hold his wrinkled hand in mine and remember the first time we touched, under that umbrella, and how hard I fell in love with him. I will never rest my weary head on his shoulder and look at our grown-up children and think, this is where I’ve always wanted to be.

I will never have the always I have now. And I can’t bear to part from my always.

The letter stopped there, but Marinette had been going to write more. Now, she wiped the tears from her cheeks, rolled back the desk chair, and braced herself against the edge of the table.

She dropped her head.

The letter was incomplete—

—because two hands had come up to land on her shoulders from the darkness behind her. Marinette gasped, soggy with tears, and whirled around. 

And Adrien was there, like he always was. Shirtless, bed-mussed, and teary-eyed himself.

“I’m sorry,” Marinette croaked, and looked away. “I’m sorry, I just— I…”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” He opened his arms. “Come here.”

And Marinette leapt out of her chair and threw herself into him.

She cried hard, each sob so violent she thought she thought she'd choke. 

“I don’t want to forget,” she wept into his chest, “I’m—I’m only twenty-four. I can’t forget now .”

Adrien didn’t hush her, but held her tight. He was shaking, too, and Marinette willed her feeble arms to tighten around him, to let him know he didn’t have to be brave just for her. That this was awful, and he shouldn’t pretend it’s okay.

No pretending. Not in the last few hours before daybreak.

“I don’t want you to forget either,” he said against her hair. Quietly, so Marinette wouldn’t hear the tremor in his voice unless she paid attention.

She did.

Pulling back in his arms, she grabbed his face, and kissed him. It was a bruising, salty kiss, his tears and her tears leaking through the corners of their lips and both of them parting to gasp through sobs before diving back in.

“I love you,” she panted, and kissed him again. “I love you. I love you. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Always.”

And the tears came faster. Because Marinette couldn’t promise him that, too.

They didn’t sleep for the rest of the night. They sat side by side, the room softened by the table lamp on Adrien’s side of the bed, and talked. They went over each of their memories, like gemstones, trading them and turning them over and watching the different prisms they casted if they angled them just like so. They held them carefully, lovingly, and kissed each other honestly.

“I don’t want to cry again,” Marinette said, tears already leaking from her eyes.

“It’s okay. It’s okay to cry.” And Adrien raised his hands to wipe her cheeks.

She fell asleep on his shoulder. Marinette faced the void with her head nestled into the crook of Adrien’s neck, his arms around her, pulling her into his lap.

Safe, warm, and loved.

And two hours before that—

—Marinette was lying on her back, looking through the dim lights at the paint streaks on their ceiling, trying to memorise Adrien’s hand on her bare stomach. 

One of her secret little delights used to be closing her eyes and thinking about that hand on her stomach meaning something a little more. The protective hand of a father-to-be. The swollen belly of a new mother, carrying a baby the size of a plum — their little plum, their little plum that could be Emma or Hugo or Louis — safe from the outside world, its very existence a product of love Marinette thought couldn’t be purer.

As that fantasy reappeared in her head, her chest tightened. 

Because she won’t remember that secret little delight by the time it — if it ever even — happens.

Adrien asked the familiar words, “what’re you thinking?” and would Marinette’s pain ebb at all tonight? When that intimate little tradition they had since they were teenagers with shaky hands on new, goosebumped flesh will soon mean nothing to her?

“I want to have a baby,” she blurted out.

Adrien’s hand twitched, but didn’t move. “Wh— Now?”

“Not now.” Now is a bad time, now is the worst time, a baby can’t have a mother who doesn’t even remember wanting it. Marinette didn’t say this, and opted to drop her head to the side and muster one of her usual smiles. “But one day. Can I tell you something silly?”

“You could never be silly, My Lady.”

She almost called him a liar, because eighteen-year-old Chat Noir insisted his lady was silly when she was in love, and Marinette still felt that hadn’t worn off.

But she didn’t want to divert the conversation. “Sometimes, when I’m in town, I drop by Autour de bébé and look around. I like looking at all the baby clothes, and the pushchairs, and the car seats, and imagining which ones I’d choose for our kids.”

His eyes turned glassy, glistening under the lamplight. “Really?” he whispered.

She nodded. “Really.”

"Well, we'd have to get married first." He traced her navel. "You know, so your dad doesn't kill me."

Marinette laughed. "I bet you want one of those flashy, lavish weddings."

He wrinkled his nose, thought better of it, then shrugged. "I mean, maybe the second."

Marinette gasped. "The second? You're planning on there being a second?"

"No, no, not like that!" His eyes turned frantic. "I mean, I'd like to have a quiet wedding with you before we have a bigger one after. Just us, near the swingset on top of the hill. Everyone else can wait."

Marinette smiled.

And then she turned her head away from him, because she was about to cry.

And the day before that—

—Marinette watched Adrien push a plate of macarons-to-be into the oven, the kitchen sweetened by their passion fruit pulp, a fine layer of flour powdering her hands.

He turned, and grinned at her. “I didn’t burn myself!”

“Good job, kitty!”

And she hoped, when she forgot everything, that he would at least know the recipe his fiancée used to make his favourite pastries.

Marinette, the Marinette of now, took deep, harried breaths, eyes welling and overflowing, teardrops splattering onto her nightdress.

She remembered.

She remembered. She remembered everything.

The memories hadn’t gone anywhere. She hadn’t even lost them. The lights were just switched off in her mind for a while, and now they were on again. Every single light, the brightest lights her brain could ever shine.

Alya Césaire . Nino Lahiffe . Juleka and Luka Couffaine .

A smile appeared on her face.

Miss Bustier. Mrs Mendeleiv. Mr Damocles — they were all there!

Ingredients: ¼ cup of passion fruit pulp, 2 large egg yolks, 3 tablespoons of granulated sugar…

Yes, yes, yes.

“Marinette Dupain-Cheng, will you marry me?” 

Yes. Yes. Yes.

The USB stick hidden between the folds of her fabric. 

Marinette spun around on her chair, and dug her hands into the miles of white floral fabric hanging from the sewing machine. Finding the USB stick, she jammed it into her laptop, waited for it to read, and opened its contents.

There — a png file, titled Adrien don’t look!

She double-tapped it.

A wedding dress, with a layered, floor-length skirt, made out of white floral fabric.

Chapter Text

The first time Adrien had carried Marinette to bed, she woke up disoriented, blinking the sunlight from her eyes, having a moment of who what where when how when feeling a quilt tucked around her carefully when she clearly remembered falling asleep with her face squashed into the top of her sewing machine.

She felt a little like that the next morning.

Maybe because it hadn't happened in so long, because she used to just accept that unconditional love's magical qualities granted her the power of teleporting from her sewing room to their bedroom.

She rolled onto her side, and reached out for her fiancé.

There was only sunlight, and bed sheets thoroughly slept in.

And then there was clattering from the kitchen. Plates being taken out of the cabinets. A pan being set on the stove. Adrien's voice humming beneath it all, like a baritone harmony in the symphony of homemaking, conversing while he cooked.

To Plagg!

Marinette's eyes opened, and she smiled wide. She missed Plagg.

She missed Tikki, too, but she wasn't ready to address that particular heartache yet. Not when she was already so fragile. That was a pain she wasn't sure she could bear at the moment. 

Pulling herself out of bed, she began to freshen up, and, as always, caught toothpaste in her hair.

She palpated her wrist for a hairband, and groaned around her brush when she found none. It really wasn't so hard to remember hair ties, she chided herself, and pushed her hair behind her ears so her black earrings caught the bathroom lights.

Marinette stopped.

She swore, swore that she had taken them off.

Yes, she had, she definitely had, because Marinette still remembered the burn of tears behind her eyes as she unclipped them and how Tikki nuzzled her damp cheek and promised she'd be there until her guardianship had officially been renounced.

Then why was she wearing them now?

Were they the same ones? Were they… her Miraculous?

Marinette stared at her reflection. Toothpaste dribbled out of the corner of her mouth.

She spat and rinsed, and held her toothbrush under the cold running water.

Still staring at her earrings. 

"T-Tikki?" she tried. Quiet. Hiding behind the rushing tap.

She cleared her throat, and wiped the toothpaste off her chin.

Marinette tried again, bolder this time. She swallowed hard, and kept her gaze firmly on the mirror. "Tikki."

Her earrings shimmered. Her heart was about to burst.

And Tikki appeared in a flash of pink, floating in between the mirror and Marinette, unfurling her tiny body like a rose bud and opening her eyes.

"Marinette!" she cried, elated, concerned, questioning — all at once.

"Tikki!" And the tears that sprung to her eyes were enough for Tikki to understand, to get across the whole story, and so when Marinette cupped her kwami tight to her cheek, Tikki reciprocated. "I'm so happy to see you."

"I thought I'd never see you again," she said. "I missed you so much. But… your memories…"

"I know, I know." Marinette let go, and pushed a hand back through the hair that was around her ears. "I know. I gotta figure out what to do. I'm still thinking."

Tikki watched as Marinette finished rinsing her toothbrush, opened the cabinet, and placed it back into the hand-painted ceramic pot it came from. "Are you gonna tell Adrien?"

Marinette pursed her lips. "Not yet."

"Marinette…"

"I need to work out how to solve this. I can't just spring this up on him out of nowhere. He already has to deal with being the new guardian."

Tikki landed on her shoulder, and, jumping midair, planted a kiss onto Marinette's cheek. "You chose well, you know."

She smiled. "I know. He's amazing."

Together they left the bathroom. Tikki hovered by Marinette when she flung open the wardrobe. Her Miraculous winked at her from the mirror in the door.

"But how did these…?" Marinette fiddled with her right earring. "I took them off."

"Adrien put them back on you while you were sleeping."

Marinette turned to Tikki, agape.

"He couldn't think of anywhere safer to keep them." She paused, considering. "And maybe it was a little irresponsible. I think it hurt him too much to take them from you forever."

Smiling, Marinette gave herself one more glance in the mirror. "Good thing he did, huh?"

She let go of her earring, and her hair fell back around her ear. Tikki zipped away, and, as Marinette bent down to leaf through her clothes, returned with two scarlet hair ties dangling off her hands.

"I have an idea," she said.

Marinette looked from the hair ties, back to Tikki, then smiled.

.•° ✿ °•.

Adrien was still at the stove when she came downstairs, back to her, fist around what might've been the handle of a frying pan, if the growing stack of pancakes on the counter told her anything. 

She crept behind him, then hugged his waist.

He didn't jump. Marinette felt his laughter roll out of his body between her arms. "Look who's finally here. I thought I'd have to start putting missing posters up."

"Ha-ha. Don't act like you didn't put me to bed last night." Marinette pressed her lips to the back of his neck. "Thanks for that, by the way."

"No problem." He dug the spatula under the browning pancake, and flipped it to its golden side. "Look at that. I'm a professional."

"My lovely house husband. Such a homemaker."

"You bet. Gimme a kiss." He jutted out his right cheek.

Marinette rose to her tiptoes, pecked it, then broke away to share some pancakes between two other plates.

A blush — hot across the bridge of her nose, just below her eyes — made her smile to herself. Just using the word husband , though it wasn't wholly true yet, reduced her to a red Marinette, a shy Marinette: his silly lady.

She gripped the Nutella jar hard so she wouldn't do something embarrassing, like bury her face in her hands.

"You want some on yours?" she asked, finding her voice and holding up the jar.

For the first time that morning, Adrien looked at her.

He almost dropped the frying pan.

Marinette knew why.

Because she had her hair separated into pigtails, fringe grazing her eyebrows, a dark blazer rolled up at the forearms and a pink pair of jeans she never grew out of.

"New hair?" Adrien said, still gazing at her.

"Well, it's not exactly new." She dunked the butter knife into the Nutella jar and spread some on her pancake.

"You haven't worn it like that in a while." Then, one hand firmly on the frying pan, Adrien brought Marinette close and kissed her head. "I love it like this. I love it all the time, but I missed this."

"I had a feeling you would." 

She held the butter knife up to him automatically, done with both their pancakes, so he could lick off the Nutella like he always did.

Adrien looked at her, puzzled.

She wasn't meant to remember that.

"Uh." Her hand faltered. "Do you want the leftover chocolate?"

"Sure, I guess." He licked it off, still looking at her strangely.

"I, uh. Had a dream about you asking to eat the leftover chocolate. Guess that was a memory, huh?" She laughed at herself, then dropped the knife in the sink so he couldn't see her eyes darting.

Breakfast was quiet, at least on Marinette's side. Adrien hadn't seen her in a whole day, and, with pancakes stuffed in his mouth and a smear of chocolate spread on his lip, he chatted about going on a walk, then the rain starting back up, then bringing back dinner just to find her 'knocked out' on her sewing machine.

Lovingly, chin resting on her hand, Marinette used the corner of her tissue to wipe the chocolate from his lips. He leaned in obediently, still talking.

She wondered if he was thinking what she was thinking: rooftops on Saturday nights with cans of fizzy drinks and sushi boxes and talking . It had been a Ladybug and Chat Noir tradition since they were fifteen, and continued through the early days of their relationship, all the way until Marinette lost her memories. She remembered the first few times they did it, hearing him go on and on and on with soy sauce browning his lips, and thinking whether he talked that much as a civilian.

He didn't. But then they learned each other's identities, and then he did.

Marinette felt a burning need to transform later in the evening, and to resuscitate that tradition. But she wasn't supposed to have her memories back, let alone be Ladybug anymore.

"What're your plans today?" he asked, taking a sip of water.

She shrugged. "Well, you know me. Sewing."

"What're you working on?"

She smirked. Perhaps, if Adrien had been facing his amnesiac fiancée, she would've told him, but the Marinette sitting before him had been at the butt end of all his curiosities since the dress first appeared in her sketchbook.

"Sorry. I'm under strict instructions to keep it under wraps." Marinette giggled, pushed back her chair, and turned the kitchen tap on. The water fell in rivulets over her plate.

"From who?" He was up too, and putting his hand under the stream to rinse off the chocolate.

She rolled her eyes. "Ladybug," Marinette joked.

"Ah, she's the worst. Such a bore." He put his wet hands on her hips and turned her, pressing the small of her back into the edge of the counter. "Can't you tell me? Your lovely house husband?"

She reached behind her, wet her fingers, and flicked the water into his face. "Curiosity killed the cat."

"But satisfaction brought it back." He grinned at her. "Hey, what if I can convince you…" 

"Nuh-uh. Absolutely not." She caught his hands before they snuck up her blazer. 

"Seriously? I thought that'd work."

"I have stuff to do today! I can't just spend a whole afternoon on that terrible couch again." She shook her head at him, and broke out of his arms. "I'll pay attention to you when I'm done. Promise!" And, as if to seal the deal, gave him a kiss. 

Upstairs, her sewing room was just as she had left it. The bodice was almost done, left lying on the desk, and Marinette had fallen asleep in the middle of working on one of the skirt layers. 

Tikki flew up to face Marinette. "You're a bad liar, you know."

She groaned, and threw herself onto her chair. "I know."

"You must tell him, Marinette."

Marinette unfolded her roll of fabric, and smiled. "I think I know what I'm gonna do. Help me measure this, and I'll tell you."

Tikki grabbed the tape with a giggle.

.•° ✿ °•.

The only way Marinette knew he was up was because of the hand rubbing her back.

Their room was black, lamps and lights off, curtains drawn tight. Adrien had slipped his fingers up the back of her shirt after she complained about being achy, and caressed all her stiffness from the back of her neck to the dimples in her spine. 

It had been silent for ten minutes. She forced some sighs, shifted her arm even when she didn't need to, and turned her head every so often. Marinette wanted him to know she was awake, too. She was warm and pliant, his hand on her bare skin with no other motive than love, and wanted to hear his voice.

"You should've taken a break," he admonished softly.

"I wanted to get my dress done," she mumbled.

"Dress?" His hand stopped in the middle of her shoulder blades. Adrien lifted himself to loom his grin above her. "The secret project is a dress?"

Marinette's eyes burst open. "No," she lied. "The dress was a warmup."

"Sure."

"It was!"

"I didn't say it wasn't."

Marinette grumbled, and closed her eyes again.

The mattress dipped as Adrien lay back down. He pulled his hand out from under her shirt, and slid his fingers into her hair, thumb rubbing her cheekbone.

She shuffled closer. He pressed their foreheads together.

"I love you, Marinette."

Her lashes stroked his cheeks when she opened her eyes. "I love you, too."

Blindly, she felt around for his mouth until she kissed it.

Wrapping his arms around her middle, Adrien broke away to yawn.

"Rude," she teased.

"You're such a night owl."

"That's what happens when you're out—" Saving Paris every night . 

Marinette swallowed.

"...out of time in the day to get stuff done. I was reading my diaries," she said instead.

"What parts did you read?"

"I, uh…" She racked her brain, not through the fragments of her diary entries, but rather her memories, her real memories: palpable, suffused with sweet cologney scents and palpitating teenage heartbeats. "Something about our first slow dance. It wasn't a very coherent entry, though."

Adrien quietened. After a moment, Marinette felt the whisper of his soft snicker against her upper lip. "You know, I thought it was totally normal to slow dance with your friends."

A slow smile spread on her face. "You dummy."

“ Hey . We were fourteen. I wasn’t the best at picking up social cues, you know.”

Marinette laughed. “I know. I love you all the same.”

.•° ✿ °•.

“The skirt is really coming along, Marinette!”

Blotting the sweat away from her brow, Marinette smiled at Tikki. “I hope this all works out.”

.•° ✿ °•.

Though she was facing away, back up to his chest, Marinette knew Adrien had fallen asleep already.

She picked up their joined hands and held them up to her eyes, where a sliver of moonlight struggled through the gap between their curtains and shone onto his engagement ring.

Marinette smiled, and kissed it.

.•° ✿ °•.

“Wow,” Tikki breathed. “You look beautiful.”

Marinette couldn’t even bring herself to turn in front of the mirror. “Oh, God, I’m… I’m really about to go through with this.”

“You’ll be perfect.” Tikki came to rest on her shoulder. “Promise.”

.•° ✿ °•.

Checking the time on his laptop, Adrien pushed back from his bureau, stretched, and headed over to Marinette’s sewing room. The steady hum of her machine had been silent for a while, so unless she was sketching, she must have fallen asleep again.

He felt his heart swell as he knocked on the door. Even if she had amnesia, even if she didn’t remember the dress she wore on their first date, or their breathless kisses after patrols, or clinging to him as he took them to the top of the Eiffel Tower, she was still so, so Marinette. His Marinette.

There was no response. Adrien pushed the door open.

The sewing room was empty.

Marinette was gone, her chair tucked into the desk. The endless white fabric that she had pinned into her sewing machine was nowhere to be found — a quick glance at the rack on the other side of the room showed no new additions. The shelf with all her thread spools had been organised (which they never were mid-project) and the bobbin was on its last few stitches.

That was when he saw the yellow sticky note on the desk.

Meet me at the swingset on top of the hill @ 10PM. Don't be late and wear something nice!

Marinette ♡

Sticky note in hand, Adrien walked up to the window and opened the blinds. If it were light outside, he would've been able to see the swingset from the sewing room — the hill overlooked almost their whole neighbourhood, but with no street lights around it was hidden behind the cluster of trees around it. He had no idea whether Marinette was there already, but knew he had to be quick.

He was downstairs in ten minutes, in the shamrock green jumper he made her wear the evening he did her hair (it still smelled of her) and a dark pair of jeans. Grabbing his coat, he picked hers off the hook, too (he would admonish her for not wrapping up later) and left the house.

It was at the base of the hill where Adrien looked up, and saw her.

Marinette stood by the swingset, facing away, moonlight caught in her pigtails and her shoulders and the bracelets on her wrists. It fell in rivulets down her skirt.

The skirt of her wedding dress.

Adrien took the first step up.

She turned, then, smiling already. They'd climbed this hill time and time again, suited up, unsuited, in the blast of summer with a heavy picnic basket, in the dead of winter with hot chocolate, but it was the first time Adrien's legs trembled as he hauled himself towards her.

He stopped at the top, two metres of trimmed grass and daisies he couldn't make out in the darkness between them. Now closer, he could see the pinpricks of her goosebumps covering her bare arms, and how her clasped hands shook in front of her, and the tears glistening on her waterline as she smiled — didn't stop smiling. 

Adrien wanted to ask her to marry him all over again.

A breeze picked up. Marinette shivered, and Adrien ached to wrap her up with her coat, but she had dazzled him, rendered him as useless as the daisies he couldn't make out.

"Do you remember," she said, thumbing away her tears, "what you told me on our last night together? About wanting a quiet wedding out here by the swingset?"

Adrien's heart stopped.

He did.

But how did she?

Marinette sniffed, and approached him, taking one of his hands in both of hers. "And do you remember how we spent that whole night just talking? Or how you— you held me… so I wouldn't be alone when I lost all my memories?"

The backs of his eyes burned. "Marinette…"

"Do you remember our first kiss?" she continued, and broke into a teary laugh. "Actually, that's the one thing you wouldn't remember. But it was nice — though I would rather have kissed you when you weren't trying to steal my Miraculous."

He started to cry — he didn't even realise until her left hand let go to brush his cheek.

"Do you remember Glaciator? And— and all the candles and rose petals you put out on that rooftop for me?" She shook her head with a smile. "If only I knew who was under that mask. I would've jumped right into your arms, kitty."

"My Lady," he whispered. "You're back."

She nodded, not bothering to wipe her tears this time. "I'll always come back to you, Adrien."

Adrien dropped the coat, and embraced her.

His Marinette.

She hugged him tighter just as he pulled back, cupping her face and kissing her eyes, her cheeks, and finally, her lips. Salty kisses, tearful kisses, filled with love.

"I'm so happy," he whispered. Adrien leaned his forehead against hers and closed his eyes. "It's… a miracle… you…"

Marinette reached up and put her hands over his on her cheeks. "I found that journal entry I wrote on my laptop on our last night. Everything just… clicked."

"I'm so happy," he repeated, like a mantra, unable to say much else. "You came back to me."

Marinette was silent.

She removed his hands from her face to clasp between them, and tilted his head so he could meet her eyes. "Adrien, you need to make a decision." Some of the softness in her voice receded. "A really important decision only you can make."

He stared at her, mouth parted.

Taking a deep breath, Marinette squeezed his knuckles. "I remember everything."

He nodded.

"I'm not supposed to remember everything." She opened her mouth, like she was about to suggest something, thought better of it, and shook her head. "You're the Guardian. What should we do?"

And Adrien laughed — what else could he do? — and held Marinette close.

"A civilian shouldn't know what you do." He kissed her hands. "But shouldn't Ladybug?"

"A-Adrien, I know this is— this is huge , but I don't want you to make a spur-of-the-moment decision—"

"Spur-of-the-moment? You underestimate me too much." He smiled, slowly, watching her eyebrows lift. "Why do you think I put the earrings back on you? It was always going to be you, My Lady."

They kissed. Tikki rose from the daisies below them, bringing with her two wedding rings.

.•° ✿ °•

She was speaking to Tikki when Adrien came back to their room.

He approached them, kissing Marinette's head. "You're not gonna change?" 

Turning, she proffered him her hairbrush. He smiled, and took it.

"It's just… well, you know, our wedding night…" Her face coloured.

"Oh, My Lady, how scandalous."

"Shut up."

Adrien laughed, and followed her as she went to sit on their bed.

Closing her eyes, she leaned into his touch while he undid her pigtails. Adrien took his time, running his fingers through her loose hair, but then they began to wander — the nape of her neck, the top of her back, creeping over to the strap of her dress.

"What're you doing?" she giggled.

He lowered the strap just a bit, kissed her shoulder, then pressed his cheek against her skin. "I love you."

She sighed, reaching behind her to brush her fingers against his sideburn. "I love you, too."

"Ugh, gross!"

Marinette and Adrien looked up; Plagg was floating above them, arms crossed, clearly displeased with their spectacle.

"Plagg!" Tikki hissed, and flew out from Adrien's bureau, where she had been staying to give them privacy. "That's not nice! They're having a moment!"

"So what? They have the rest of their lives to have a moment. " But he didn't leave. He stayed there, looking at them, with something like fondness.

"Hey." Marinette made a cup with her hand. "Come here."

He hesitated, before dropping himself into her palm.

She kissed his head. "I missed you, Plagg."

Adrien's arms tightened around Marinette's waist. "No way, Plagg, you're not stealing my wife from me."

" Please , you can have her." And with that, Plagg leapt away, following Tikki back to the bureau. He glanced behind him one more time. "I'm really glad you're back, Pigtails."

Marinette smiled, leaning into Adrien's chest. "Don't worry. I'm not going anywhere."