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Everyone on earth has at least one soulmate. Depending on who’s older, you’re the most likely to find out who they are between the age of fourteen, to the exact minute you turn sixteen. There is no way to know who is older, but the closer your sixteenth birthday comes, the easier it is to make preparations.
Marinette is lucky. Her sixteenth birthday is approaching, and she has yet to be flung into her soulmate’s body. Unlike most people however, she isn’t as worried about whose body she visits, as much as who gets to visit hers. You see, Marinette is a superhero. She is constantly putting her life on the line, and by proxy, she is putting her soulmate’s life on the line. So, as her birthday approaches, she thanks the heavens for her luck. It probably comes with the job description.
A week before her birthday, Marinette cleans out her room. All of her Adrien posters are sitting in shoe boxes, and her desktop wallpaper is now as generic as it can be. A little spark of hope at the prospect of Adrien of being her soulmate still sings in her heart, as much as she tries to quell it. She knows he’s younger than her, but that doesn’t mean anything. Her soulmate could be halfway across the world for all she knows.
On her birthday, she confirms with her parents once more the exact time of her birth, even though she knows it off by heart, and has it in her calendar. Everything is going according to plan. “I can’t believe this is happening,” she says. It doesn’t feel real. She feels perfectly normal, but her legs are shaking.
She looks down at desk. On a piece of paper she’s written her full name, phone number, email address, and location. Unfortunately her soulmate has no way to know what’s coming, so she needs to trust them to reach her.
“Whoever it is, they’ll be extremely lucky to have you,” says Tikki.
Marinette flushes. Then she looks at the time on her desktop monitor. “It’s almost time. You should go.”
Just then, the ground shakes. Her stomach drops, and she quickly opens up the news livestream on Youtube. Sure enough, it’s an Akuma attack.
“ Merde ,” she swears, and pulls out her communicator. She sends off a quick text to Chat, and prays he can hold off the Akuma for the ten minutes he’s going to have to wait.
She bites her fingernails, and then stops, remembering someone else is about to be under her skin. A chill runs up her spine. Then she feels incredibly nauseous. It passes quickly, and she becomes light headed, her eyes dragging closed.
Sometimes Adrien wishes being Chat Noir doesn’t come with rotten luck.
When he passed out in the middle of fighting an Akumatized villain and woke up in a completely different location, it took him a few moments to figure out what was happening. He feels his neck, where the villain had him at a chokehold, and shutters. It’s jarring, being in a different person’s skin. Not as jarring as seeing himself fighting the villain on the Desktop screen, however.
Not him. That’s Marinette, his civilian classmate, whose life he’s put in danger. His civilian classmate, who is his soulmate.
Adrien runs. He stumbles, not used to the body he’s wearing, but he has to do something, anything to protect Marinette. The villain isn’t too far, and Marinette’s endurance is surprisingly good. He doesn’t stop to think, and winds up right underneath the fight, with his own body hurling towards him.
“Marinette!”
“Chat! Wh—get out of the way!” she says, in his own voice. The villain swoops down, and Adrien dives into an alleyway, Marinette following.
“Marinette!” he says, crowding her in a wall, “Are you okay?” He sweeps his eyes up and down his own body, which was very strange, but thankfully it seems to be in shape. “I’m so sorry, you managed to get the unluckiest soulmate of all time.”
Marinette blinks down at him, and swallows. Then she shakes her head. “Silly kitty…” she smiles a bit, her own expression shining through, and Adrien flushes.
“You—but I put you in danger,” Adrien says. “But don’t worry. I’ll take it from here.”
“Y’know, I live in that body you’re wearing every day, and I’ve never seen my shoulders that sunken before.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that sometimes you’re allowed to ask for help. Have some faith in me, yeah?”
Words catch in Adrien’s borrowed throat. “But—how could I possibly ask that of you?”
“You can, because you have to. Five minutes more of an Akuma running rampage will lead to the destruction of Paris.”
Adrien is starstruck. Then, he isn’t. “It won’t work,” he says, “We need Ladybug. And she isn’t here.”
Behind them, sirens wail, and cars are crashed in. Adrien watches as Marinette contorts his own face, cycling through many emotions, until she’s resolved. She takes out the baton, and opens it. “We’ll have a Ladybug, don’t you worry, my chaton.” Launching herself into the air, she leaves Adrien.
My chaton.
He opens his mouth, and closes it again. He looks at his borrowed hands, flexing them. Then, tentatively, he checks Marinette’s pockets. In one, he finds macaroons. In another, her purse. In her back pocket, her phone. There’s another pocket, with something that feels bulky. He pulls it out. It’s a red communicator, with black polka dots. Ladybug’s communicator. He stands there, stunned.
Hoarsely, he tries speaking. “Tikki?”
Despite the hard evidence, he still jumps when Tikki materializes in front of him. She looks at him, and he points at her. She squints. “…Adrien?”
“Th—there’s an Akuma,” he manages. “Is it okay if I…” he trails off, hoping Tikki understands what he’s asking.
“Of course! Marinette is waiting for you, isn’t she?”
He swallows. Right. Yes. Marinette. And Ladybug. They— she’s waiting. Fighting. He flexes his hands. “Tikki,” he says, regaining some composure, “Spots on!”
As ladybugs fly through the city, repairing any damage from the defeated villain, Marinette starts to fade. Being too weak to do anything else, she grabs Chat’s arm, and drags them into yet another alley.
The ring around her finger beeps, and she watches it lose its final tick as unconsciousness takes her.
“…Marinette, Marinette are you okay?” says Chat’s voice, not coming from her own mouth. There are hands on her shoulder, and her mind spins.
Of course Chat is her soulmate. She’s an idiot for not seeing it sooner. She cares so deeply for him, and she’s starting to understand that he feels the same way.
“Chaton…” she says, before her mind fully switches back online.
“My Lady,” he says back, and she’s swooped into a bone-crushing hug. She hugs back, winding her arms around him, and squeezing. He smells like leather and sweat, which is okay. “Plagg, claws off.”
“What are you doing?” asks Marinette, pushing out of the hug on instinct. She panics, caught with the horror of what Chat is doing. He smiles at her, and in the wake of the detransformation sits Adrien Agreste. Marinette’s brain short-circuits.
“Hi,” he says, his voice barely above a whisper.
Marinette manages to squeak, not trusting herself to say or do anything else. As if she could.
Adrien’s soft smile melts away, and he glances down at himself. “Is this… are you okay—with this? With me?” He’s being earnest.
“You’re Adrien,” is all she can manage. His hands are still on her shoulders. Their knees are bumping against each other, and the temperature feels sweltering.
He blinks. “Is that…okay?”
“I don’t—is this a dream? Am I dreaming?” She stares into his green eyes. She never had the courage to before, but she looks now. She sees the kindness, bravery, selflessness, and trust she knows from Chat. Her Chaton. She takes her hand, and brushes it across his cheek. “My Chaton…” He turns beet red, and his arms tense around her. Marinette blinks, freezing for a moment, and realizes what she just did. “Ah! I’m sorry, I have no idea where that came from—”
In her flailing, Adrien takes her hands in his own, stopping her mid-sentence. They sit there, two kids who’ve taken on the world together, and two very stupid classmates. “I—I’ve loved you for a long time.”
The statement sits heavy in the air. “Me, Marinette? Or me, Ladybug?”
Adrien looks at her for a moment, and then smiles. “Yeah.”
Marinette feels overwhelmingly soft. She takes their hands, and intertwines their fingers. Biting her lip, she contemplates a response. “I’ve had a crush on you since the day we met… and I’ve loved you for a long time too.”
“Are we…” Adrien looks up at the sky. “Are we stupid?”
“Yes,” says Plagg.
The three of them laugh, and Marinette detransforms. She and Adrien are still close, but now her knees are bare. A chill runs up her spine. Her body is aching from the awkward position, and she stands. Adrien doesn’t follow suit, so she holds out her hand for him.
He takes it, and stands. He doesn’t let go of it.
Marinette feels like she’s fourteen again. A giddy burst of energy makes her giggle, and look away from Adrien, biting her lip. She’s spent so long pining for Adrien, and then Chat, when they could have been together who knows how long ago. “Y’know, my parents went out for the day to give me the house for my birthday,” she says.
“Oh?”
“C’mon,” she says, and tugs Adrien along, never letting go of his hand.
Marinette lets Adrien use her shower, and gives him clothes she made. He sits on the edge of her couch, waiting for her to finish. For the two years he’s known Marinette, he doesn’t think he’s ever spent much time in her room. He’s been there before, but never had a chance to look around. She has a ginormous corner desk; half of it piled neatly with school supplies, and the other half strewn with half-sewn fabrics and pattern books. In front of the desktop monitor there’s a slip of paper with her contact information. Adrien had been so eager to leave earlier, he hadn’t even noticed how much thought she put into the soulmate ordeal. On the walls behind her desk, she has a string pinned to the wall, with pictures of her and their friend group from over the years hanging from it.
He smiles, holding the picture of himself, Marinette, Alya, and Nino at the zoo. And then of them at the museum, and them on their school trip last year, which was surprisingly disaster free, for once. Then, he starts seeing pictures of just himself and Marinette. The time they went to the park, and when he modelled her outfit design last fall, and from when they somehow ended up both babysitting Nino’s and Alya’s younger siblings together.
“I have more,” says Marinette. Adrien spins on his heels, caught red handed. Marinette smiles, and heads to her closet, pulling out an unassuming shoe-box, and hands it to him. Adrien opens it, and his breath catches. The box is almost filled to the rim with professionally printed pictures of Ladybug. Some of them are selfies with civilians, or with Rena Rouge, but the overwhelming majority of them are of her and himself. Some of them are even of Ladybug and himself as Adrien.
“How did you get these printed?” he asks. They’re sitting on the floor together, going through the pictures.
“Alya does it for me, in exchange for a few making their way onto her blog. You can have some if you want.” She smiles at a picture Adrien took; he’s making a silly face in the camera, and Marinette is contemplating a lucky charm, pouting cutely. When he sent it to her she scoffed, and laughed it off. Adrien never would have imagined she would have secretly printed out all the stupid selfies they took.
Adrien loves her so much his heart aches.
Blue eyes meet his own, and he realizes he’s been staring at her. He swallows roughly, and both of them turn red. He scrambles to her awkwardly, slipping over some of the pictures. “Can we kiss now?” He can hear his heart beating in his ears, and his body shakes.
“I—” starts Marinette, cutting herself off. The temperature rises. He watches Marinette’s eyes darken, and glance down at his lips, which sends a thrum of energy right downstairs. She nods.
Adrien isn’t sure who moves first, but he has lips on his own. It’s short, and a bit awkward, and they pull apart slightly. Then, Adrien leans forwards again, capturing Marinette’s lips with his own. They move their mouths together, their breaths mingling, and Adrien finally relaxes into it. Hands wind into his hair, and he hums deeply, letting his eyes close.
For a first proper make-out, it isn’t perfect; their teeth get in the way, and Adrien doesn’t know what to do with his hands. It is, however, with the perfect girl, so Adrien can’t find himself complaining.
They say that once you’ve switched bodies with your soulmate, your hearts are connected. Adrien isn’t sure if that’s true in a literal sense, but he understands what it means now. His heart feels full. His hands have a place. He has a person he can call home. Every so often, doubt will come in, but his trust of her always outshines it.
She trusts him with herself too, so, how could he deny it?