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Akumas really did have the worst timing. This particular one struck when Marinette was minutes from a double date with Alya and Nino and Adrien Agreste.
Adrien Agreste.
Hawkmoth truly had no humanity left in his soul.
So—it may not have been a date in the strictest sense of the word. The group of them were going ice skating together and Adrien had, by some miracle (or blatant lie to his father) gotten permission to go along for once. Either way, there were going to be four people in evenly matched sets wearing adorable winter outfits, and there would be carefully orchestrated hand-holding situations galore.
She and Alya had made sure of it.
Marinette and Alya had just arrived at the skating rink when the alert sounded. Marinette excused herself to the bathroom (she should have said “to hide” but she didn’t and now, if she didn’t beat this akuma in record time, Adrien would really think she needed that constipation medicine).
Needless to say, by the time Ladybug made it all the way across the city, she was in a pretty foul mood.
Chat Noir had beaten her there and crouched low on a rooftop to analyze the situation. He shot her a quick smile when she landed beside him and then turned back to watch the Christmas-themed carnage unfold.
“What’s got her jingle in a jam?” Ladybug asked, ducking down beside her partner.
“Sounds like someone got left standing alone under the mistletoe.”
Ladybug frowned down at the street, where someone dressed like a Christmas elf with big red lips was shooting sprigs of mistletoe from a candy-cane gun. When a civilian got trapped under a sprig they were instantly frozen solid, and the heroes watched as the berries on the mistletoe began to blink and disappear one by one.
“What happens when the berries run out?” Ladybug asked apprehensively.
“I don’t—”
blink. blink. poof. The civilian exploded into a cloud of glitter and snow.
Chat winced. “Festive.”
“This one’s definitely going on my naughty list.”
Chat laughed despite the situation. Ladybug reached for her yo-yo and stood. “Let’s get this over with. I have somewhere important to be."
Her partner gave an affirmative nod and leapt after her into the fray. They landed side by side in the street and the akuma whirled to face them.
“I am Missile-toe!” The villain roared, and then embarked on a predictable “give me your Miraculous or else” tirade.
Ladybug was not in the mood. “We know, we know. Or else you’ll glitter-bomb us out of existence.”
“All this because of some mistletoe?” Chat quipped. “That’s not berry nice.”
The akuma snarled at Chat, who made a mocking kissy face in response. Missile-toe shot a sprig towards him, but he flipped easily out of the way.
“Chat, don’t taunt the akuma.”
“Why?” he asked, doing a double-barrel-roll back towards her just to show off. “Do you think she can hurt me?”
“No. It’s just tacky.”
Chat snorted, but then his eyes went wide, and he tackled Ladybug to the ground, narrowly missing a direct hit that had been aimed right for her. He landed on top of her, the pair of them nose to nose, and Chat gave her a wink.
“You’d never leave me alone under the mistletoe, would you M’lady?” His breath fanned across her cheeks in a quiet chuckle.
Ladybug’s response was to affectionately boop his nose, and then dump him roughly off her onto the street. “Not the time, Kitten.” She hopped to her feet and brushed the dust off her suit.
“So you’re saying there is a time?”
Ladybug laughed as she swung away towards the akuma.
Chat watched her go with a lopsided smile of adoration. “That’s what I heard.”
He pounced back into action, drawing the akuma’s attention with repeated feint attacks with his staff while Ladybug tried to identify the akumatized object. It seemed likely to be in the mistletoe decoration adorning the candy-cane gun, but they wanted to be sure before Chat called up his Cataclysm. After a few minutes of analysis they drew back together, weapons whirling in a defensive shield.
“It’s probably on the gun,” Ladybug said. “Slight chance it’s the hat though.”
“Maybe we could solve it with a little luck?”
“Probably. Lucky Charm!” She called as she sent her yo-yo shooting into the air. There was a burst of pink magic, and a small cylinder fell from the sky into her waiting hands. She regarded it with a contemplative frown.
“What is it?” Chat asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know what it is, or you don’t know how to use it?”
“I—it’s just a tube of lip balm, but—”
Ladybug’s eyes darted around until they fell on her partner, whose eyebrows had disappeared into his hairline. Whose lips were curved in a smile of mischievous delight.
Whose figure was flashing a vivid pattern of scarlet and black spots.
Ladybug glanced away and hummed evasively. “I’ll figure it out as we go.”
Chat’s smirk grew even wider. “Well M’lady, your ever-loyal partner is here if you need… help with that.”
Meanwhile, the akuma seemed to be growing impatient and stalked towards them with a menacing glare. “Enough of your pathetic conspiring! Are you ready to give me your Miraculous, or are we going to have to do this the hard way?”
Chat lunged and brandished his weapon. “Hawkmoth won’t be getting his Christmas wish this year!”
Missile-toe snarled and took aim with her candy-cane gun. She fired off a series of mistletoe sprigs towards the duo, who flipped away from each other in opposite directions to double back behind her. Ladybug threw her yo-yo like a lasso at the gun, but Missile-toe ducked so the string went high, instead knocking the lurid elf hat off the villain’s head.
Not one to waste an opportunity, Ladybug reeled the hat back toward herself and tore it in half. She wasn’t really surprised when no butterfly emerged, and she threw the pieces aside and refocused on her foe.
Missile-toe was also not one to waste an opportunity. She had used Ladybug’s temporary distraction to take careful aim at the hero, and the next shot came whistling in with exceptional accuracy before Ladybug was completely prepared for it. Ladybug made to dive out of the way but her foot landed on a bit of something slippery—a scrap of the discarded hat—and stumbled backwards, off-balance.
She knew it was over in that split second—she could see that the magical mistletoe would find its mark, she couldn’t stop it—and her eyes scrunched closed.
The soft thwump she felt against her body was not as anticipated—the focused impact of a projectile. It was the warmth of an embrace—a long, solid figure meeting her front-to-front. She felt a wave of affection and exasperation for her partner and opened her eyes to give him a piece of her mind for taking another hit for her.
She’d forgotten, for a moment, what this hit would do. He’d frozen completely solid—his eyes wide and desperate, his mouth opened in a silent warning. Ladybug tried to pull back, to find her Lucky Charm and see how it could help, but his hands had frozen in a firm grip around her upper arms and she couldn’t get them to budge.
Missile-toe seemed content to watch her struggle and cackled in delight as Ladybug tried frantically to free herself. She began to wonder what Hawkmoth was waiting for, but then a flash of green caught her eye—the mistletoe sprig that hit Chat had ricocheted up from his shoulder and now hung above him in the sky, its berries blinking threateningly.
By the villain’s design, she was about to witness her partner be blown to glittery smithereens.
She fought with renewed desperation, tugging until she gasped at the painful prick of Chat’s claws through her suit. It was no use—his grip was unmoved no matter how she pried at his fingers. He may as well have been turned to stone.
She slumped against him in despair, her forehead and hands falling to rest on his unyielding chest.
Several paces behind Chat, the akuma’s eyes shone with satisfaction. “Tick-tock, Ladybug. In a minute, you’ll be left all alone under the mistletoe, and you’ll finally understand my pain!”
Ladybug lifted her head, a thought half-formed in her mind.
Because Missile-toe wasn’t akumatized over getting stuck under the mistletoe. She was akumatized over getting stuck under the mistletoe alone.
And Ladybug wasn’t alone. She glanced up at her partner, at the frozen fear in his eyes that she would be hurt, at the stillborn shout on his lips to save her.
Lips that were in reach.
It had worked before. He… he had offered. He wouldn’t mind.
Above him, the mistletoe’s last berry flashed. No time left to deliberate.
Ladybug pitched forward and pressed her mouth to his.
She squinted her eyes closed, half expecting him to dissolve like ash against her lips, but he didn’t. She waited, heart pounding, until she felt the tension in him change from a magically induced freeze to a stillness born of shock. His grip on her shoulders slackened and he pulled back slightly to look at her.
He was alive. Whole. Wholly stunned, if the glazed look in his eyes was any indication, and Ladybug nearly laughed as her body went boneless in relief, but there was still the matter of the akuma.
She stepped around Chat, reaching for her yo-yo to parry the inevitable incoming attack, but…
The akuma was gone. In its place stood a normal girl in a ladybug-red coat who was watching them with a giant grin on her face. “Sorry,” she said, taking sheepish step back under Ladybug’s attention. “Just… pretend I’m not here.”
“We… can’t really do that,” Ladybug said. She exchanged a baffled look with Chat, who had finally recovered and joined her. “How did you break free of Hawkmoth’s control?”
“Oh, I didn’t.” The girl giggled. “He was all take their Miraculous now or I will strip you of your powers! And I’m like can you shut up? I mean my ship is sailing before my very eyes and you want me to interrupt?!”
“Your… your ship?”
“LadyNoir forever!” She opened her coat to reveal a t-shirt emblazoned with the slogan. “Got this at a street vendor last week. Here, just take this— you need it more than I do.” Ladybug flinched as the girl rushed towards them, but she only thrust her formerly akumatized mistletoe into Chat’s hands and then began backing away. “And pretend I was never here.”
“But—”
“I was never here!” The girl began running, occasionally peeking back over her shoulder at the stunned superheroes until she had disappeared around the corner.
They stared after her in silence for a minute, and then Chat cleared his throat to speak. “Should... we follow her and see if she’s okay?”
“I think she’ll be fine,” Ladybug answered, shaking her head. “That was bizarre. I can’t believe that t-shirt.”
“I kinda want one.”
She gave him a half hearted shove.
“What I can’t believe,” he said, his tone turning impish, “is that you kissed me again—”
Ladybug opened her mouth to protest, but he continued before she could.
“—and I still don’t remember it!”
“Well stop getting hit by akumas, you overprotective moronic meow-meow, and maybe that won’t happen!”
“I saved your life!”
“I saved your life!”
“We save each other,” Chat reminded her with a grin. “That’s how we work.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She smiled back, and then her smile faded. “I’m late. I’m supposed to be on a date.”
Chat’s face fell, though he tried to cover it up. “Who’s the lucky guy?” he asked, his tone light despite the tension in his face.
“You know I can’t say.” Ladybug’s stomach gave a guilty churn. She hadn’t meant to rub it in. She nearly forgot sometimes, especially when she had Adrien on the brain, that beyond their easy friendship and seamless partnership there would always be a part of Chat that wanted… more.
Chat seemed to be in fairly high Christmas spirits anyway and managed to give her an encouraging smile. “Here,” he said, taking her hand and pressing something into it. “Maybe this will come in handy on your date.”
She opened her hand to find the sprig of mistletoe the akuma had given him. She felt her cheeks warm, the knowledge that it wasn’t a real date and probably never would be hanging heavy about her heart. “I doubt it, but thanks anyway.”
“He really is a lucky guy, LB.”
Ladybug looked at her partner, taking in the genuine affection in his expression, the motion of his chest as he swallowed a wistful sigh, the line he balanced, always balanced, between wanting the best for her and wanting her. His lopsided smile caught her particular attention because she knew what it tasted like now (not bad, actually, kind of pepperminty).
She considered the leafy bunch in her hand for a moment, and then, with a coy motion (she couldn’t explain it, except to say she was quite possibly possessed by the ghost of Christmas future) she raised it above her head.
Chat lifted an eyebrow. “What are you doing?”
She shrugged. “What do you think?”
He gave a nervous laugh and took a cautious step towards her. “The same thing I always think, except for once I feel like you’re thinking it too.”
“Come on then,” she said, wiggling the mistletoe. “It’s tradition.”
He took another slow step toward her and, despite the platonic peck she was planning, she felt her heart begin to race. Everything she knew about him suggested that he’d jump at the chance she was giving him, but he seemed to be testing each step, measuring her reaction to the hand he set low on her waist, the finger he crooked under her chin to lift her face to his. When she could feel his breath on her lips, he paused.
“Are you sure L—”
He was about to breathe her name, she knew, when Ladybug ran out of patience, or possibly self-control. She captured the first syllable as a brush of his tongue against the seam of her mouth, and the second syllable was no more than a soft sound in the back of his throat. She didn’t expect the kiss to last long enough to get to the third, but—
She had underestimated how it would feel. She couldn’t have predicted the thrill she would feel when his fingers flexed against her hip, tugging her into him, while his other hand moved up to cradle the back of her head. She didn’t know how much she’d enjoy the way he held himself back from her, and the way she found she could break that unexpected reserve by tangling her fingers in his hair and giving it a gentle tug. He dissolved against her, not into glittering ash as she’d feared earlier, but into something molten that covered her whole body in warmth.
He kissed her, his mouth moving in presses and soft sighs, and she kissed him back in playful tugs and delighted hums. At one point she absently walked her fingers down the length of his spine and found that she could make him shiver, and she liked the experience well enough that she set about finding ways to replicate it. A slow tug of her teeth against his bottom lip earned her a growl, a brush of her fingertips against the shell of his ear won her a gasp.
She felt his restraint crumbling under her fingertips.
Her earrings beeped.
“Ladybug,” he murmured against her lips.
“Shhh,” she answered, wrapping her arms behind his neck and pulling him down.
They beeped again.
“Ladybug.” His voice was hoarse as he pulled away to look at her.
Ladybug made a mental note that wrecked was a good look on him.
He laughed breathlessly. “That was awesome.”
She chuckled. “You weren’t too bad yourself, Kitty.”
“You need to—” he started, but his voice broke and he had to swallow before trying again. “You still have to do your Miraculous Ladybug before you transform back.”
“Right.”
“Because all those glitter people disappeared,” he said, staring at her lips.
Her earrings beeped again.
He took a step back from her. “So you do that, and I’ll—see you after Christmas?”
“You bet,” she grinned, walking backwards until she couldn’t feel the draw of his gravity anymore. She stopped a safe distance away. “Merry Christmas, Kitty.”
His answering grin was euphoric. “Merry Christmas, Bugaboo.”
Marinette was very late for her date but didn’t mind as much as she thought she would.
After all, it wasn’t really a date. And her definitely-not-date was also very late and spent the entire time staring off into space with an unexplained dreamy smile.
When Alya asked her what could possibly be interesting enough to distract her from Adrien Agreste, Marinette just laughed.
“Adrien’s great,” she said, watching as he nearly skated into a wall. “But Chat Noir is… a fantastic kisser.”
Alya shrieked and spilled cocoa all over herself, and when she removed her coat to clean it up, Marinette rolled her eyes.
“Seriously?” she said.
“What?” Alya said, dabbing at her "#LadyNoir Forever" t-shirt. “It’s canon now.”