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Basking in the glow of victory, Ladybug felt her grin stretch so wide that her cheeks twinged at the edges. Eagerly, she turned towards her partner with her fist outstretched. “Po—”
Chat was already a few steps away, lips pressed together firmly as he looked at something in the distance. “Good work as always, Ladybug,” he said quietly, glancing her way.
A moment later, he was gone.
Her fisted fingers stretched out towards his retreating form as if they were tethered to his tail by marionette strings. Ladybug yanked them back, capturing her traitorous fingers against her chest with her other hand.
Chat Noir had been clear: he didn’t want her reaching out.
She had to accept that, even if it hurt.
(Especially if it hurt. The way she’d hurt him.)
Trying to collect herself, Ladybug reached to wipe the sudden dampness on her face. The sky had been ominously overcast throughout the battle; it must’ve started to rain.
Still, she couldn’t bring herself to head home. She wasn’t ready to be Marinette yet, wasn’t ready to hear Tikki’s baseless reassurances, wasn’t ready to be alone with her thoughts again.
Even after everything, the battle felt incomplete without a fist bump from her partner.
(He was still her partner. He was. They’d both said it, so it had to be true, right?)
Thankfully, there was one more mission for Ladybug today. Chat Noir hadn’t explained why he didn’t want to check on the akuma’s target, but Ladybug was grateful he did. She could use the distraction and had assured him she’d catch up with the civilian in question as soon as she could
Besides, even now, the sight of Adrien’s smile never failed to brighten her day.
Adrien, however, wasn’t where she’d last seen him. She couldn't find him anywhere in the vicinity she’d left him either. Which left her with the last resort: she’d have to go check on him at home.
By the time she’d fed Tikki (carefully avoiding any opening for conversation all the while), transformed, and made her way to Adrien’s window, the skies had fully opened up.
Ladybug didn’t mind the downpour; good things happened in the rain.
Adrien, however, seemed to feel differently.
(He hadn’t fallen in love in the rain.)
Adrien had scrambled to the window at her knock, his lips forming her name as he fumbled at the latch.
“What are you thinking?” he scolded as he ushered her in. “It’s pouring!”
“I—” Her voice cracked. She tried again. “I was coming to check up on you. If you were okay — after the akuma? ”
Adrien’s worried frown melted into something softer. “You came all this way? In the rain?”
“I couldn’t find you right after.”
“I was right where you left me.” Adrien looked puzzled. “Wasn’t I? I thought I went right ba—”
Ladybug shook her head, only to freeze with horror when water droplets escaped from her soaked ponytails, interrupting Adrien’s sentence. Her stomach twisted as she realized she’d been dripping water all over his floor.
“Oh no,” he muttered, following her eyes to the puddle on the floor. “I’m so sorry.”
He was sorry? She was the one who showed up uninvited just to damage his expensive-looking floors.
“I should’ve gotten you a towel right away—I’ll be right back.” His voice sounded far more strained than made sense to Ladybug. Was Adrien really that attached to his flooring? Would his father punish him for water damage?
Ladybug felt the blood drain out of her face and her fingertips grow cold. Of course he would. Her stomach twisted. Gabriel Agreste will pull Adrien out of school, and she’ll never see Adrien again, and then he will publicly state that Ladybug is a menace to interior design, and everyone will know Ladybug ruined Adrien’s life! And Alya will know that Marinette is actually the one that ruined Adrien’s life, and Chat Noir will realize he doesn’t want to forgive her after all because who could forgive the stupid girl who ruined everything, even if hurting him is the last thing she ever wanted—
“Ladybug?” Adrien’s voice interrupted her thoughts. Distantly, she registered the large stack of fluffy, clean towels in his hands. “Are you alright?”
“I’m fine.” She winced internally at her voice—she was barely convincing herself, let alone Adrien.
The worried frown he’d greeted her with earlier returned, but he didn’t challenge her.
“Let’s dry you off,” was all he said, and then she was enveloped in softness and the scent of laundry detergent.
She didn’t resist as Adrien led her over to the couch and set her down on a second towel he’d laid out while she hadn’t been paying attention, or when he wrapped a third towel around her neck and gently lifted the corner to wipe the tears off her cheeks.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Adrien’s voice was softer than the Turkish cotton towel tucked around her shoulders.
“I—I’m supposed to be checking on you.” And she couldn’t even do that right. Now he was worried about her.
“Consider me checked on, then,” he reassured with a smile. “And available to listen, if you want. Since you’re already here.”
A worried grimace passed across his features as he reached up to scratch the back of his neck. “But no pressure! I know you’re very busy, and—”
“No!” Ladybug’s voice was too loud; Adrien jumped. “Ah, I mean, no, I’m not busy, I’d love to stay, I just… don’t want to bother you.”
“You’re not a bother.” The warmth of his voice seeped into the cold damp of her bones and loosened something inside her. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Ladybug shouldn’t burden Adrien with her problems. She knew that.
But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt this warm and safe and cared for. Was it when she’d told Alya? Or even earlier?
And she was trying to be better about trusting people more. About sharing her burdens and accepting help. Didn’t this count? She needed to be more open.
Why not start with the person she’d been keeping something from the longest?
“I love you,” she blurted.
Adrien’s eyes bugged out.
Abort! Abort mission! Too open! Close it back up!
“I mean!” She could save this. “You’re very kind! And selfless! I love that about you! You’re super great, ha ha ha!”
“Not always,” he muttered under his breath, something dark flickering in his eyes for a second as he glanced away. But before Ladybug could puzzle out what that meant, Adrien was looking at her again with the same gentle expression he saved for the most bizarre of Marinette’s verbal blunders. “But it’s nice to hear you think so.”
Ladybug opened her mouth to say something — maybe to reassure him, or to ask what he meant, or apologize again — but Adrien spoke before she could.
“I know what it’s like to feel like you don’t have anyone to talk to,” he admitted. “I don’t want you to feel that way.”
Oh, Adrien. She’d let him feel that way too?
“I bottled everything up because I didn’t want to burden anyone.” He was looking away again. Ladybug wanted to cup his cheek and turn him towards her, to tell him that she’d always be there if he needed her, that she never wanted him to feel alone again, but that wasn’t something he needed to hear from Ladybug.
(Adrien needed to hear that from Marinette.)
“But holding things in just made things worse,” Adrien continued, his eyes meeting hers as he reached out to rest a reassuring hand on her knee. “Please don’t do that. You don’t have to talk to me. I know we aren’t close. But please, talk to someone. Can you talk to Chat Noir?”
“N-no,” she choked out, the words hot in her throat.
“Oh.” Something went flat and wrong in his face, and she felt it in her chest. “Of course.”
“He h-hates me!” Her whole face was hot and wet and her voice was shaking and then suddenly Adrien’s arms were around her and her tears were seeping into the cotton of his shirt against her cheek.
“No, no, no, Bug, don’t say that.” His voice was soft and low as he rubbed her back. “He doesn’t hate you. He could never hate you.”
“Maybe not… hate,” she admitted with a sniff. “But he doesn’t like me very much right now either. I don’t know if he’ll ever like me again.”
“You think he… is that what you need to talk about?”
She nodded into Adrien’s shoulder and felt his arms tighten around her.
“I screwed up,” she confessed. “I was given some… extra responsibilities and I didn’t know how to manage them. And I ended up hurting him. I almost destroyed our partnership—”
“But you’re still partners. You fought together today as well as you always have.”
“We are, and I thought we were starting to heal and things were getting better, but…” Adrien’s arms tensed around her. Should she really be telling him this? What if he didn’t feel safe, knowing that the relationship between the heroes of Paris was still rocky?
“If you’re still partners, what’s the problem? Did he do something to upset you?”
“Of course not!” Her defense came automatically before she realized it was a lie. With a deep breath, she corrected herself, “He didn’t do anything wrong. I shouldn’t be upset by it.”
Concern was etched across Adrien’s face, almost as if he thought he might have unintentionally upset her too. “But you are.”
“And that’s not fair to him!” Adrien looked like he wanted to argue the point, but she wasn’t finished. “His feelings are important and if he needs space, I should respect that, not pout and cry every time he doesn’t fist bump me.”
“He forgot to fist bump you?” The color had drained out of Adrien’s face.
“He didn’t forget.” Some distant part of Ladybug was shouting that she should be reassuring Adrien, who looked totally horrified, but now that she’d started talking about it, she couldn’t stop. “He… I thought things were getting better, but then today... he didn't want to touch me, or look me in the eye, and that’s fine, I shouldn’t be upset by it, I’m the one that ruined things and I need to live with that. I have to accept that there are things I can’t fix.”
“Of course you can fix it,” Adrien insisted. Something in the back of her brain pinged at the way he moved his hand to her shoulders and met her eyes. “You’re Ladybug. You can fix anything you put your mind to.”
The raw earnesty in his eyes was tempting; Ladybug wanted so badly to believe him, but... “Not if he doesn’t want it fixed.”
Adrien’s eyebrows shot up. “You think he doesn’t want that?”
“He was pretty clear that the renewal of our partnership didn’t include anything beyond a professional relationship.” Ladybug bit her lip and shied away from Adrien’s still puzzled gaze. “He doesn’t love me anymore.”
“That’s what—” He sounded almost harsh for a second, before closing his eyes and inhaling slowly. Calmer, he continued, “Did he say that he didn’t think you could fix it? That he didn’t want you to try?”
“No, but—”
“Then you still can.”
Ladybug envied Adrien’s faith in them. “Chat doesn’t even want to see me outside of akuma attacks. He said he needed space.”
“I didn’t mean— I thought that’s what people said when they were still upset, you know, when they can’t just go back and pretend nothing ever happened.” Adrien’s hands dropped into his lap. He sounded so lost. “Isn’t—isn’t that what you’re supposed to say then?”
And just like that, she was standing in the rain again as a doe-eyed boy offered her an old umbrella.
Most of the time, Adrien seemed so at ease with social situations that Marinette forgot that the sum total of his friendship experience before they’d met was Chloe. He probably really had no idea how resolving a fight between friends was supposed to go. Marinette had seen how Chloe and Sabrina made up when they fought, after all — thankfully, Adrien hadn’t bought into that model of friendship.
“Sometimes,” Ladybug admitted. “Sometimes it means, ‘Let’s take things slowly, I still want to be friends, but it’ll take time to get back to how it was before’ and sometimes it means, ‘Don’t call me, I’ll call you.’ I hoped it was the former at first, but…”
“But then he didn’t fist bump you,” Adrien finished for her.
“It wasn’t just that,” she admitted, twisting the edge of his towel in her hands. “He hasn’t exactly reached out, you know? And that’s the thing about asking for space — only the person that asked for it gets to decide when they’ve had enough space. You’re supposed to wait for them to tell you they’re ready.”
“Maybe… maybe Chat Noir doesn’t know that?” Adrien hedged. “Maybe he didn’t realize you were waiting for him to say something?”
Ladybug bit her lip and considered the possibility. “Don’t take this the wrong way, please, but Chat’s a pretty social guy. I’m sure he has plenty of friends that he’s fought with before.”
To her surprise, Adrien laughed. “Unlike me, you mean?”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t worry about it, really,” he quipped before turning serious once more. “But what if you’re wrong? What if this is all new to him, and he doesn’t know what to say or when to say it? What if he’s scared, too?”
“What if I push him, and ruin whatever relationship we’ve managed to salvage?” Her tongue was thick in her throat and her words squeezed out thin as reeds. “He asked for space and I need to respect his boundaries.”
“Well, maybe he was stupid to ask for that. Maybe he regrets it.”
“He’s not stupid!”
Adrien ignored her outburst. “Maybe he doesn’t need any more space, but he doesn’t know how to tell you. Maybe he was worried that if he told you he wanted to be more than your partner, that he wanted to be your best friend, that he’d wanted any place in your life you were willing to make for him, that you’d say you were happier the way things are, that keeping each other at arm’s length was exactly what you’d wanted all along—”
“Adrien!”
“Sorry,” he apologized immediately, shrinking down into the couch. “It was just a thought.”
Just a thought. There was no way that Chat Noir actually thought that, right? Hadn’t she reassured him? Wasn’t it obvious how desperately she missed him? That’d she do anything to get back to the way things had been six months ago?
That she’d do whatever it takes to make it up to him? That she’d put the pieces of his heart back together piece by piece, no matter how long it took, if only he’d let her close enough to do it? If only she knew how?
“You should tell him that.” Adrien’s voice interrupted her train of thoughts... which apparently weren’t thoughts at all, since Adrien had clearly heard her. “I think… I think he’d really… really like to hear that.”
He sounded a little bit like he was about to cry. Ladybug couldn’t understand why he’d been so affected by this, but she clung to his words anyway.
“Remind him how it used to be,” Adrien continued. “You and him against the world, a duo.”
Wait—
“Tell him again how much you were struggling, that you were falling apart, that you never meant to leave him alone and in the dark, that you’re sorry it took so long to tell him why.” He wasn’t looking at her anymore; his gaze fixed on a framed picture across the room.
She recognized the picture — it was one she had on her own corkboard from the day she and Alya had tagged along with Nino to keep Adrien company at the Grévin wax museum. Marinette herself stood on one side and Adrien on the other, with Alya and Nino between them.
(She should’ve stood next to Adrien when Alya suggested it. Should’ve done a lot of things differently.)
There was no way Adrien knew just how fitting his visual target was, not unless — well, not unless it was even more fitting than Ladybug knew. Was he…?
“If you told him that, he’d understand,” Adrien continued, oblivious to the slow realization struggling to emerge in her mind as he spoke. “You wouldn’t be pushing him. He wouldn’t—he wouldn’t think so. I think he’d be relieved to know he hadn’t made you wait too long, that he—”
Overcome with a sudden burst of determination, Ladybug reached forward to grab his hands. “I’d wait forever.”
Adrien blushed.
In retrospect, that was probably an extremely bizarre response on Ladybug’s part if her hunch was wrong. She released his hands.
“Oh, um,” he murmured and scratched the back of his neck. “I’m sure forever isn’t really necessary.”
“I hope not.” Ladybug hoped her smile was more reassuring than it felt. “But he should know that I would. That I want him as my partner and more, that I’d make space for him in any part of my life he wanted, that I hate the way things are now and all I want is to be closer.”
“What if…” Adrien’s eyes searched hers, green and glimmering, and she called on every bit of strength she had to not look away or backtrack, to look back at him and let him find whatever he was looking for. “What if he said he wanted all of it?”
He leaned in closer, reaching to envelope one of her hands between his own. Her breath caught in her throat, and her heart was pounding against her rib cage so hard that she’d be surprised if Adrien couldn’t hear it.
“What if he wanted to be in every part of your life?” Adrien sounded a bit breathless too.
“Then I’d let him in.” This time, the words slid out like butter. For once, she knew exactly what she wanted to say. “And I’d tell him I wanted to be in every part of his life too, as soon as he was ready.”
“I’m ready whenever you are, milady,” he whispered back.
Much later, Adrien would tell her that he’d said that expecting an identity reveal, but apparently they hadn’t worked out all the kinks in their communication just yet.
Still, he didn’t complain when she decided to kiss him instead.
And she didn’t complain when he kissed her the next morning at school, either.