Chapter Text
Context is a hard thing to have fourteen years too early.
On her wrist, she wore her soulmate’s name. Adrien Agreste .
Marinette got used to hearing that name far more than she wanted. Everyone would ask about it since it was so obvious. “Agreste? Like the famous designer, Gabriel Agreste?”
And growing up, she remembered the name Agreste in line at the grocery stores when looking at the magazines there and asked her mother to buy them. The clothing was beautiful, and it became a habit to pick up a new magazine every week to see what else was out there.
After a while, she forgot that she was picking it up because of a name.
Until that name showed up in one of the magazines with the face of a star and a smile worth a million words, and Marinette knew. Marinette knew she was destined to be in love with him.
Adrien Agreste .
Once he was public knowledge, once he wasn’t just a name on her wrist, there were dozens of girls her age in public who had clearly taken a Sharpie marker to their skin and written his name there. Even Chloe did it in some foolish ploy to convince her Adrikins that they were meant to be.
When Chloe had come back to school the day after that plot, her rage was immeasurable. Unsurprisingly, it hadn’t gone well.
But Marinette knew that the name around her wrist was real. It’d been real for fourteen years, and she’d come to terms with the idea that she may never meet him, let alone fall in love with him. She could pine. She could plan for three children and a hamster. And she could understand that it may never be real.
And then she heard Adrien Agreste was coming to her school.
Context is somehow harder to have fourteen years too late.
Growing up, Adrien had no idea what the word “Ladybug” had to do with a soulmate. His mother would sometimes gently tease that maybe whoever Ladybug was would have a sister named Rainbow or Starshine. A soft joke, a kind one, but it didn’t reassure Adrien. And the idea of a soulmate angered his father, let alone the idea of one who may belong to a commune of some sort.
So it was forgotten and never spoken of.
His parents weren’t soulmates. It wasn’t obvious to most people, but Adrien knew the name that was printed into his mother’s skin. When she wore her hair up in just the right way, he could see it on her neck. He never really read it, but he knew one thing. It wasn’t Gabriel Agreste.
That wasn’t terribly uncommon, either. Sometimes people never fell in love with their soulmate, and sometimes people fell in love with someone else first. And sometimes names just didn’t match up.
And Adrien understood all of that very young.
He never expected to find “Ladybug”, especially when she didn’t have a last name. Who would he try to look for? How would he find her when he was cooped up in his father’s mansion?
Adrien had resigned to never knowing. It was easier that way, better than to fall in love with someone in his own imagination for a love story that would never happen. And he was lucky that her name was easy enough to hide, printed just along his hip. It was easier for him to forget, too.
But then… there was Ladybug . Creative. Courageous. Bold. Free .
There was no going back once he met her. Oh, he was in love.
And she was most definitely his soulmate.