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Biology was not Mariette’s favorite subject. Of course, it would be dramatic to say that she hated it, but she often found herself struggling in class—something she rarely experienced in school.
She could learn to like it, though, especially with one Adrien Agreste sitting in her bedroom at the same desk where they once battled each other in Ultimate Mecha Strike for the better half of a day. This time, though, they were messing around with the concepts from their most recent biology unit—genetics.
Marinette’s distaste for this whole Punnett square nonsense must’ve been evident; it was the only way Adrien would have even considered approaching her in the way he did. It must’ve been the quiver of her lips, the furrow in her brow, or maybe the narrowing of her eyes as she stared blankly at Miss Mendeleiev's lab lecture that prompted him to walk up to her after school let out for the day.
Yeah. Adrien, who sat with Nino at the lab table in front of her, could most definitely see the distressed look on her face and asked to come over and get some of their homework done together because of said distressed look.
Though his proximity to her made her a little nervous, he did help her become a lot more confident in her Punnett square abilities—just in time for next week’s unit exam.
After finishing their required homework, Marinette continued to chip away at the difficult concept with Adrien. When she awkwardly asked him to stay just a little longer, he enthusiastically agreed. It seemed as though he must’ve had some revising to do as well.
“So, when we do the square for two characteristics… like, color in those pea plants, for example. You line up the dominant and recessive alleles like this?” Marinette scribbled a heterozygous pea plant, the Gg she wrote in pen in the small spaces she left signifying a pea plant that was a carrier of the recessive color, but presented the dominant color. She decided to copy the same script, electing to cross two heterozygous pea plants.
When she completed her work and looked up from her paper, she was surprised to see Adrien grinning down at it, head nodding slightly in affirmation. “Yeah, good! Obviously, when we get to dihybrid pairs, it gets a little more complicated…” he gently bit his bottom lip, looking like he was contemplating if he should delve into those concepts with her. “That’s just what Gregor Mendel studied, though.”
“The beans?”
“Yeah. The beans.”
Marinette couldn’t help but let out a mangled laugh. “Those darn beans, right?” She took a sharp inhale, attempting to calm herself down. “Always making different colored versions and all that jazz!”
Adrien let out a weak laugh; Marinette cringed.
After a moment of heavy silence, Adrien spoke up. “I mean, as crazy as those darn beans may be,” he laughed, making Marinette blush a deep pink. “Mendel’s experiments aren’t the only way to see dominant and recessive alleles at work.”
Marinette perked up, aching for some sort of application of Punnett squares beside beans. She was beginning to think that Mrs. Mendeliev was a bean farmer in her free time with how she went on and on about those darn beans.
“What other ways are there?” Marinette asked, genuinely interested. “Tomatoes?”
That earned an honest chuckle from Adrien. “No, genetic applications outside of food. Like, children, for example.”
“Hm,” she huffed with a nod, doing an outstanding job at looking like she understood a single word of that outside of food and children.
“You know what…?” Adrien trailed off, flipping through his spiral notebook for a clean page. “We could make our kids, if you want.”
“Hm?” Marinette questioned, far more alarmed this time. Her eyes went wide as she stayed put, trying her best not to shoot up from her desk chair. Standing wouldn’t do her any good anyway—she couldn’t figure out if she wanted to get closer to him, or further away.
“You know,” he said, smiling as he found a clean page. “We can look at some dominant and recessive alleles passed down to children from their parents. Think of it like genetic testing!” Adrien picked up his pencil, sketching out a large Punnet square outline.
Pressing her lips together, Marinette nodded in affirmation, silently saying: fantastic idea, Adrien! Could we make a square for their interests, too? With my passion for design and your piano skills, maybe our kids will—no, those are acquired traits… Ugh. What if our kid doesn’t inherit the family fashion sense and is—Lord forbid—tacky?
Adrien smiled, scribbling gg on the top of the outline. “My mom had blonde hair. Before he went gray, my dad had brown hair, but my grandmother—his mother—was a natural blonde. Looking at it simplistically, we could say that I am homozygous recessive for blond hair, as I took the blond gene from both my mother and father.” He picked his pencil up from the lined paper, using the eraser-end to point at the alleles. “Brown is dominant to blonde, and that’s how I know I may not carry the brown hair gene from my father. The little g represents the recessive alleles I carry in the homozygous pair I drew.”
Marinette grit her teeth in a forced smile, a small squeak of affirmation coming out from her throat as she vigorously nodded her head. “Continue,” she blabbed out, hand flying over her mouth to stop herself from saying something like, wow, you’re so smart! Or even worse, wow, you’re so dreamy!
“Well, you’re a bit different. Both of your parents have dark hair, but your mom’s hair is much darker than your father’s.” Adrien pursed his lips, pressing the tip of his pencil to his mouth.
“Yeah,” Marinette said, looking out the small window across the room to distract herself. “My hair color is a lot closer to my mom’s than my dad’s.”
Adrien smiled and nodded, causing Marinette to turn her head and re-focus on him after seeing the beautiful sight in her peripheral vision. “So you’d be BB in this case, ‘cause you’re a carrier for dark hair from both parents.”
Marinette’s eyes narrowed as she filled out the square in her head. “So, our children would have dark hair no matter what?”
As he completed the combinations, every square reading Bg, Adrien rubbed the nape of his neck with his left hand. “It’s hard to say without bringing the grandparents into it, nevermind the fact that hair color is a wide spectrum. Regardless, hair color is a lot more random than a Punnett square can account for.” He set his pencil down, directing his gaze to Marinette as he looked up from his notebook. “Hopefully, we’d have at least one kid with dirty blonde hair.”
She squeaked again. “Oh?” She peeped out.
“And,” Adrien started, quickly scribbling another square on his scratch paper. He wrote a faint XY on the top of the square and XX on the side. Once he completed the square, two of the four quadrants read XY, while the other two read XX. “We have a fifty-fifty chance of having a boy or girl, ignoring that I’m a carrier of the ‘twin gene’ from my mom.”
Marinette blinked, slowly nodding her head in awe—her face felt like it was on fire from how hard she was blushing.
Adrien smiled and nodded, utterly unaware of her frazzled state. “How about we give a name to every combination? That way, it’s more personal.”
“Oh, I already have a few picked out.”
Did she mean to say that?
No, she didn’t.
Crap.
“Like, baby names?” Adrien asked, raising a brow. “I wouldn’t expect anything less from you, just ‘cause you’re always so prepared for everything. Why not baby naming, right?”
Marinette shook her head. It was as good of a time as ever to come clean, right? “No, I mean… I just…” she stuttered, struggling to get the words out. “I may or may not have picked out names for our children. Three names. Maybe.” She sucked her teeth, eyes trained on the paper in front of her. “That was forever ago, though. Back when I had this huge crush on you,” she mumbled, wondering why she even brought up the past.
Sure, she still liked Adrien. Her crush never really went away; it just became a little quieter. The drumming in her heart settled into a dull thud, the faint murmurs of love only stirring in her heart when he got too close or they spent too much time together.
“Oh, wow,” Adrien said, sounding quite bashful. Marinette peered up at him through her lashes, surprised to see his tanned skin so flushed. “Do you still feel that way?”
Marinette pursed her lips, attempting to shut herself up by pushing them together. She grabbed at straws in her mind, desperately trying to come up with a decent answer. “Well,” she breathed out, taking a long pause to buy some more time. “That’s a complicated question.”
“Why?”
“Because.”
“Because what?”
Marinette sighed, becoming a little irritated. “Because it’s been nearly three years since we first met, and I’m still not completely over my silly collège crush on you!”
She may have said too much. Was it possible to turn even redder?
Though Marinette thought he would push her away and tease her, she felt more surprised than anything when he said, “You liked me even when you thought I put gum on your seat?”
Marinette couldn’t help but giggle, the nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach bubbling away a bit. “No, my wrath was not an act. It all started the day after—when you let me borrow your umbrella.”
A very eventful day in her life, considering that it was also the day she secured her very first victory against Hawkmoth with Chat Noir.
“That was all it took to sweep you off your feet?” Adrien looked at her as if she was crazy. “Me helping you out so you wouldn’t get soaked?”
Marinette scoffed, leaning slightly closer to Adrien. “It wasn’t just the action. It was how you did it.” She looked up at him with passion in her eyes, a fire ignited behind those bluebell orbs. “You showed me that you cared, you wanted to make things up to me, you…” Marinette trailed off, suddenly noticing just how close she was to Adrien.
He looked down at her with a certain glint in his eye, the exact intention of his stare difficult for her to place. His chest was no more than a half foot away from hers, their gazes boring into each other.
“You’re still that caring boy you were, and I’ll never get over him,” Marinette whispered, searching for something, anything in his deep green eyes.
“What’d you name them?” Adrien asked, seemingly off-topic.
Marinette furrowed her brow, cocking her head to the side. “What?”
He let out a chuckle, as if her confusion was one of the funniest things he’d been confronted with all day. “The kids. What’d you name them?”
“Well,” Marinette sighed, taking a shaky inhale. “Ideally, we’d have two boys and a girl.” She folded her hands over each other, messing with her fingers. “Emma, Hugo, and Louis. Silly, right?” She laughed weakly, eyes glancing down to her lap.
Adrien smiled and nodded absentmindedly. “I like the name Emma. It reminds me of my mother.”
Marinette felt her heart race, the usual ache of yearning in her chest overshadowed by the erratic beating of love. “I always envisioned her as a blonde,” Marinette said, letting out a weak laugh. “Learning that the genetics of hair color aren’t on my side has been devastating.”
Shaking his head, Adrien sat up a little straighter in his chair. “Screw the Punnett square. We’ll have a blonde kid–as long as they all have your eyes.”
Was he flirting with her? Over the years, Marinette often struggled to identify the line between Adrien being friendly and Adrien being more than friendly. Had he finally crossed over from genial to romantic?
“Then, uh, how can any of them,” she struggled to say, quickly finishing with, “be as beautiful as you? Without your features, I mean. Duh.”
Adrien blinked slowly in response, looking about as shocked as a model could be when someone calls them beautiful. “Marinette,” he began, his voice becoming raspy. “They’d be much more beautiful if they looked like you.”
In moments like this, Marinette wished she could dash out of the room and consult Tikki for advice. Though she was itching to summon her kwami, she knew that Tikki would probably tell her, be brave! Go for it!
She just needed to inject a little bit of her Ladybug confidence into Marinette! She took a deep breath, using that extra boost of charisma to help her say, “How do you feel about me, Adrien? Am I just a friend to you?” She bit her lower lip, the confident, Ladybug-esque side of her becoming annoyed when he didn’t respond immediately. To combat his silence, she added, “you can be honest, you know.”
“Honestly?” Adrien said, setting down the pencil in his right hand. “I wish you’d told me earlier.”
“Why?” Marinette asked, assuming the worst.
He definitely wanted to cut her out of his life, seeing her as just another crazy fangirl. He probably thought he was so stupid, asking a girl who was so obsessed with him to go study biology and—
Adrien cleared his throat, the deep sound pulling her out of her mental spiral. “I just would’ve… made the way I feel about you a bit clearer.”
“And that is….” Marinette said, wanting him to break her heart as quickly as possible.
Furrowing his brow, Adrien ran a nervous hand through his hair. “I’d say my feelings for you lie somewhere between like and love?” He bit his lower lip, quickly adding, “and not in the friend way.”
Trying her hardest not to scream in delight, Marinette nodded emphatically. “I’d say I feel the same way.”
He let out a chuckle, which put Marinette at ease. “Well, maybe we should take a break from Punnett squares and talk about it. Talk about us.”
“I like that idea,” Marinette said with a nod, briefly pressing her lips together. There was an issue, though. She wanted more than talking, and that telltale Ladybug confidence was still coursing through her veins. “I can think of something else we should do first, though,” she added, a small smile on her face as she rolled her chair an inch closer to Adrien’s, making what she wanted clear as day.
For the first time in years, Adrien could read Marinette like the daily news. “Kiss first, talk later?” He asked, a smug, beautiful smirk playing on his lips.
Marinette gave a curt nod, and Adrien didn’t waste a second. Taking her face in his hands, he leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to her lips, followed by another, then another, then another…
She didn’t stop him—there was time to talk later. After all, they had a lot more studying to do.