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Marinette has wanted romance since she first could recognize it, in how much her parents love each other every single day, every single time.
And she tries for herself, she really does, but most of the guys are not into dating, and she doesn’t think of girls at first.
Her first date is with Kim, and it…really just feels like one of their usual hangouts, but without Nino. They don’t go for a second one. Both of them agree that it isn’t going to work out, not like this. Maybe they’re too young. They’re ten, after all, and their dates involve sitting across from each other at lunch and maybe kind of shying away from holding hands at the table.
The next time she tries to date someone, that someone is poor Nino, who she claims a crush on two years after the disaster with Kim. At twelve, they have a little more autonomy, so their date involves going to the local McDonald’s and sitting at one of the tables and sharing fries and goofing off.
But it still doesn’t feel romantic, like there’s something missing.
It takes them three dates to kiss, but most of the school knows they’re dating, and that’s enough, right?
She doesn’t feel anything when she kisses him, but she tries to get into it. She tries her hardest, but there’s still no spark.
Maybe she hasn’t met the right guy yet. She hasn’t met the right person.
She’s only twelve, after all. She has time to find that spark.
They break up amicably, but their trio with Kim ends up falling apart when he starts developing the seed of a crush on Chloe. Marinette cuts him off; it hurts, but Chloe hurts her so much. She can’t take it. She can’t do it.
Nino supports her decision — and so do the other girls.
Oh. That’s an option.
Juleka agrees to go out with her, once. But all Juleka talks about is Rose, and Marinette can tell that neither of them are really into it.
Maybe she’s straight, and that’s why it isn’t working out. She doesn’t know. It’s confusing. Girls are very, very pretty. But does she want to date them?
She’s just barely thirteen — how is she meant to know? Why is she contemplating these questions? Why is she thinking about this? What’s with the obsession with love?
And then she looks at her parents, at some of her friends’ parents, and she knows why.
Maybe she’s like Alix, but Alix is always happy to give a massive ‘screw you’ to romance, and Marinette just can’t do that. She’s not like that.
So she knows that she can have romance. But it isn’t finding her.
She knows that it takes a while for some people to fall in love. It takes them a while to find the right person.
And then their last year of college falls upon them, and so does Adrien Agreste.
She thinks that Adrien Agreste is just like the company he keeps at first — if you lie down with dogs you get fleas, after all.
But he isn’t. He shows kindness, he apologizes — and people don’t apologize to her. Not as often as they probably should, but her sense of fairness is probably skewed. And she thinks, as she takes his umbrella, that it might be that kind of lightning-strike love that she’s been searching for. That Adrien has broken the bubble around her.
Chat Noir does not have the same effect. He clearly possesses some kind of attraction for her right off the bat, but she’s not interested in that. Chat Noir is nice, but he just sees some kind of perfection that she isn’t.
So she falls right into Adrien, she thinks of it as love, she tells everyone (except Adrien) about it, and it grows into a feedback loop of anxiety surrounding him until she can’t even interact with him when she’s trying to ask him out.
(Something whispers deep in her, maybe it’s because that isn’t really what she wants with him.)
She can and does talk to him sometimes, and she manages to function when she’s not trying to make it anything more than friendship.
But she can’t tell. She can’t tell what’s wrong with her, why she can’t just say her feelings out loud. And there are some confusing incidents with Chat Noir, too. They’re not the same feelings. They’re not.
If she says it enough, maybe she can convince herself.
And Luka, there’s something else. It isn’t love. It isn’t the same kind of feeling. But maybe, maybe, maybe. After all, whatever she has with Adrien isn’t going anywhere. So she can take a chance, try and find it with someone else.
It takes a few months, but she finds one day there’s no longer a spark when it comes to Adrien. She thinks maybe there never was one, but she’s been trying to delude herself into thinking there was.
And when she searches herself…well, it’s true. Somehow, she managed to convince herself that there was something where nothing was.
A mirage.
Dissolving around her in smoke like one of Rena Rouge’s illusions.
Marinette can see clearly, but at what cost?
And what is she seeing? What’s the answer?
What will she find if she looks?
She looks. She looks. And she finds the truth, at long last.
There is no kindling for a spark to take to. There is nothing to burn. There will never be a spark that sets her on fire.
The realization feels like fear. The realization feels like she’s being struck by lightning — and she remembers what that feels like from an akuma attack, even with the Miraculous shielding her.
It feels like relief, most of all, and she wants to cry with some strange combination of happiness and fear rising in her like a wave.
Marinette can see clearly.
But there are…some things that muddy the waters. Why did she kiss Chat? Even without memories, was she still longing for the spark?
She supposes that there are some things that don’t change. That can’t change.
And maybe…maybe her lack of kindling means that she is like Alix after all. There’s no need for a fire without fuel, after all.
She stops the chase. She doesn’t need to, after all, when it’s hopeless.
And that isn’t a bad thing. She once feared that a spark would never catch, when she thought that there was something to catch.
Chat Noir tells Ladybug that he’s aromantic, and that clicks, even as she punches him in the face as a reflex and apologizes for it.
In the subsequent conversation, she apologizes over and over again, and they’re so different. She hasn’t always known like he has, and it hurts, feels a little like a betrayal, but…they’re both, maybe, even if she isn’t quite sure yet. (It’s really just fear of accepting the label — that’ll make it real, and it’s been real but putting a name to it means that she has to accept it, and…)
(Chat Noir, the biggest flirt she knows, is aromantic. That means that Marinette, someone who has treasured romance all her life, can be too, right? But if it was all just a joke, then what does that mean?)
(What does it all mean?)
She doesn’t say “me too” then. Not to him.
Alya asks her how it’s going with Adrien, in a way that’s meant to be subtle but absolutely isn’t. Not that she minds — Alya’s bluntness is a part of her, and Marinette wouldn’t have her best friend any other way.
She tells Alya that she’s realized some things, and that she’s going to stop. Because she was chasing something that Adrien represented, not Adrien himself. Alya looks at her strangely.
She’s aromantic. And she might still try for some kind of relationship — once she starts to unlearn that sort of chasing. She needs to learn to accept herself before she tries for anything else, whatever that may be.
Marinette is on her way to finding herself. This is just the first step towards it.