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Marinette pushes heavy doors open, then nearly slams them on her boyfriend’s face as she stops to spin to the beat of the already-pulsing music that crashes over her body as soon as she steps inside.
“Oops!” Hurrying to catch the door before it knocks Nino and thousands of dollars of his equipment to the floor, Marinette offers him a sheepish grin. “Got caught up in the…” She gestures all around her.
Nino knows exactly what she means: he probably would spin too, if he weren’t weighed down by amps and cords. He doesn’t mind much, though: Marinette looks much cuter with her skirt flair than he would tripping over his feet. Even now, she’s wiggling her hips and shoulders as she makes her way through the crowd; Nino can’t hear it but he’s sure she’s humming under her breath too. He and Marinette live for music, live in music — he’s never met anyone else who was as taken by rhythm and song as he is.
“I’ll get these set up,” he calls out over the buzz and bustle of the room.
Marinette doesn’t bother with a reply, simply bounces in place and signs, “I love you!” back to him. LSF is a godsend between the ear shattering shrieks of akuma and constant thrum of concerts; Marinette and Nino have both made an effort to learn at least the basic signs and this one has always been her favorite.
“Good luck,” she signs his way, and Nino fumbles with his cords before flubbing a “thank you” in return. Well, it’s not always the most useful.
Still, the quiet interaction gets Nino’s heart calmer than reasonable, given the frenzy around him — and more confident than he has been in days. Playing for Battle Of The Bands was his dream, and he finally qualified this year only to be thrown into a tailspin by the announcement last week: they would be paired with a partner and expected to perform (and win!) with only a month’s worth of practice with this stranger?!
If it weren’t for Marinette, Nino would’ve quit on the spot. Instead, he’s setting up his DJ equipment at the pseudo-auditions and waiting — nearly looking forward to, even — finding out his brand new music partner.
All around him, musicians stretch and show off their skills. One artist flicks bands of colored lights to mix electric sounds; another dances with her cello as her partner. Anyone here would be an amazing partner; he doesn’t know what he was so afraid of.
Nino wants to lose himself in it, learn from everyone around him, soaking in every unique harmony and nontraditional chord. It should be a cacophony, but the undercurrent of delight and excitement brings every note into alignment across the room, and Nino’s fingers are itching to grab a disc and start spinning.
He’s just grabbed his favorite of this set when the doors slam open and the music screeches to a halt.
In the silence, the newcomer lifts a violin to his chin and plays a complicated run, fingers flying. When every ear is tuned to him, he bows with a flourish, and the room bursts into applause and raucous cheers. The man only smirks.
Nino revises his assessment: he would be happy to partner with anyone here… except him.
That’s when Marinette sprints across the room to throw herself in that guy’s arms.
Luka closed the doors behind him, already feeling at home. He’d never been part of a Battle Of The Bands like this before, but the room was full of friendly faces — people who not only knew of but waited for and encouraged his classic theatrics. When Marinette slams into him, Luka hardly stumbles, steady on his feet for once.
Pretty girl on one arm and a violin in the other, Luka makes his way to the back, laughing and greeting the musicians passing by. Any one of them would be an amazing partner for this challenge — anyways, classical music goes with just about anything, so he was guaranteed to mesh well with whoever he got paired with.
He always had been good at making friends.
Step two? Learning to keep them. Luka was lucky Marinette had stuck around, lingering like a fermata, her note playing on long after the melody of other keys had ended.
“What are you doing here?” Luka offered, trying desperately to start up a conversation before it became her job (again) to break the silence they found backstage.
Marinette stuck her tongue out. “What, I can’t just come to support my favorite Luka?”
He tries not to notice the way she doesn’t say musician and levels her a look that he can only hope matches her playfulness instead of broadcasting pained desperation.
“Alright, alright. I’m here with my partner! I think you’ll really like him, he’s great at mixing up styles to really bring out something special in them.” She pauses, looking up at Luka fondly. “You’ve always brought out something special in me.”
Luka blushes. Turning to fiddle with his case, he considers the way Marinette looks up to him, as if he was a guiding force in her life instead of the other way around. He’s always seen Marinette as a hero, someone who stood up to wrongdoing and empowered her friends — someone who saw the best in them and found ways to make those strengths matter.
Yet here she is, telling him that he had done that for her just by sticking around. Luka didn’t know what to make of it.
Instead, he just moved on. “Well, I’ll be auditioning soon, so I’ll have to see you out in the audience! You know I’ll be looking for my number one fan,” he winks.
“You’ll see me," she promises.
Luka sighs, still tingling with the interaction as she slips out into the crowd, and prepares to play. He knows from experience that the best way to get this electricity out is to push it out in song, and he does: playing his heart out on the stage, coaxing crisp notes and comfortingly familiar chords out of his violin. He nearly collapses once he steps down, all his energy leached out from under him.
Surprisingly, the guy after him keeps him buoyed. The music he’s playing is unlike anything Luka’s ever heard, a strange bubbly medley of sweet stringed instruments and the heavy bass of rap, alongside some shaky percussion. Curious, Luka edges closer to the man as he pulls his equipment down — then startles terribly as Marinette pops up behind him.
“Luka! This is the person I was telling you about: Nino, my partner! Isn’t he great?”
Marinette sends him the sweetest look she can muster, all-too-reminiscent of the fond look she offered Luka earlier, and something sour curdles in his stomach.
Luka hates the man instantly.
The two of them end up paired together.
Everything is worse on the ship of Luka’s boat, the seething detestation stark and inescapable in the clarity of daylight. The floor rocks back and forth beneath Nino’s feet, as if he needed any more reason to feel unstable, but somewhere between hating Luka on sight and rocking his heart out on stage, Nino had ended up with luck worse than Chat Noir’s.
As much as Nino would prefer to be on home turf when dealing with his nemesis, his brother would be there, and his family was entertaining a new set of cousins — Nino had long since lost track of which set of relatives were cycling through his house at any given time. Besides, Marinette had promised to stop by and drop off macarons, maybe stick around and listen to them play — which is how Nino found himself here.
Quite honestly, what little good will Nino had left for Luka burned and shriveled up at the sight of his houseboat: an airy, comfortable home, with a wall of picks mounted in his private room and a deck crammed lovingly with instruments that served as a private music studio. Meanwhile, Nino had been shoving his equipment to a dusty basement corner to fill space between boxes of guest bedding and turned his volume down low when he was brave enough to sneak down to practice at all — minutes, maybe, at a time — until Marinette offered to house his stuff at her place.
Exhausted already by the sheer force of his resentment, Nino pulls his favorite records and starts to mix, layering in minor chords under bass-heavy pop funk to pull out that ironic melancholy.
It had been her grades that convinced them, and her resume. Good Moroccan boy does not date Chinese girl , his grandfather had admonished, but no one could deny that Marinette was skilled, hardworking, polite — a total lucky charm. On top of that, all the time he spent at her place had brought his grades up, so at least he was free to spend as long as he wanted with her, playing music and studying late into every evening.
None of that compared to this, though. A whole house made to cater to Luka’s music, supportive parents, privacy? Combined with Marinette’s absolute delight around Luka, Nino was sure he didn’t stand a chance. They were just too different.
Almost immediately, Luka draws out a dribbling staccato of notes on his guitar, the kind of soft comfortable homeliness that Nino associates with piano music on a rainy day, a good book and tea under the covers.
Between the two of them, three pedestrians on the nearby street wince. One of them deigns to heckle them, launching into a litany of vengeful threats detailing the specific and graphic places they could put Luka’s bow instead of on the violin.
“We are so going to lose!”
Luka scoffs. “We wouldn’t if you were any good at your job.”
Nino nearly throttles him right there. Where was Marinette when you needed her?
Late, she’s late . Luka kicks himself for expecting Marinette to show up on time, and now look what’s happened — he’s managed to startle himself backwards with the force of venom in his retort; he’s never lost his cool like that before and feels unsteady for the first time on the waves of the Seine despite how familiar this rocking has always been.
Still, it’s too late to take back now, and Luka can’t honestly say he regrets it, or that he’s lied. Whatever Nino was doing earlier was some Frankenstienic amalgamation of sounds and feelings, as if music were some finger painting to mess around with instead of a canvas spread across stained glass: fragile, poignant, with each note a perfect companion to the ones around it to build a single, everlasting image.
Still, Nino looks as discomposed as Luka feels, and a sliver of regret worms its way into his heart.
Nino stomps that worm dead with his response: “Why do you even play? You have no idea what music is even supposed to be.”
Luka’s smirk drops. Every time he’s heard Nino speak, it’s been the same layered expressive tone that his music carries — Luka had quite resigned himself to the onslaught of complex emotion — yet here Nino is, flat as if he doesn’t even care about Luka’s answer.
Sure enough, Nino’s already packing up. “Some son of Jagged Stone you are.”
Luka’s stomach drops. Silence rushes in his ears, unbroken even as Nino clashes and bangs around. He’s not supposed to know about that — he’s not supposed to care .
“The hell would you know about… about any of that! Like you’ve met Jagged, or,” and Luka pauses to pull his shattered smirk back together, layer a sneer in his voice in a way he’s sure Nino-the-layer-enthusiast-Lahiffe will notice enough to hate, “ever bothered to create music worth listening to.”
Nino snaps. In a few words, Luka has destroyed every artifice of chill Nino could manage to wrap himself in, and now he stands bared and vulnerable in the glaring light of mid-day, sunshine and seething resentment glinting and glimmering across the reflection in the Seine. Luka almost feels bad, except even with betrayal slapped across his face, Nino still looks shockingly put-together. In fact, he looks put-together enough to… retort.
“You certainly don’t care, with your entitlement and elitism, but for your information, I write experimental music because I have a multitude of cultures and styles to represent — not everyone has the privilege of being born to an aristocracy of whiteness, y’know.”
Well, shit.
That’s how Marinette finds them: Luka gaping speechless, Nino snappish and sheepish all at once.
“Uhhh… how much of that did you… hear?” Nino rubs his neck awkwardly, blushing bashfully at his girlfriend — a sudden change in demeanor, given his intractable disgust directed at Luka only moments ago.
Marinette tilts her head, newly cut bangs slipping sharply over her eyes, disappointed sympathy cutting even more sharply. “Enough to know you’re being unfair, Nino.”
“Wh–glarhb?!” The noise Nino makes, half-outrage and half-befuddled, hums satisfyingly in Luka’s ears. “Oh, come on , Marinette, that’s not fair to me—”
“Oh yes it is,” and Luka has never heard Marinette like this before, all sharp edges and pushier than she’d ever had the confidence to be when they’d first met. She fills up space, he notices, takes it for herself instead of shying away from the edges of who she could be.
He misses her so deeply it stings.
She’s still talking: “Nino, I don’t know what Luka’s ever done to get you so worked up like this but you owe him a question at least, before jumping down his throat with accusations of racism.”
Luka grins, smug again.
Marinette whirls on him, and he wilts immediately. “And you! What has gotten into you — Nino doesn’t lose his cool for no reason, don’t think I don’t know you provoked him.” Her voice softens to a plea. “You love experimental music; you played it all the time as a kid, and I know — well. I know it’s not the same anymore, but you can’t deny Nino is good.”
Both boys wince; her displeasure is a discordant melancholy note and shame doesn’t discriminate when it settles in their hearts. “Talk to each other,” she urges quietly.
Luka started this. He takes a breath, and speaks. “I play classical music because it’s… well, classic — it sticks around, it never leaves. It’s guaranteed to last through time, when my relationships patently… haven’t.” He pauses to grin lopsidedly at Marinette, acknowledging her as the exception. “I shouldn’t have insulted you, though. If Jagged had stuck around, or if I’d never known our relationship, I would still be playing pop and rock, experimenting with my music like you. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” Nino has softened measurably as Luka spoke, and he turns to look at Luka properly for the first time all day. The full force of his warm brown eyes is too much for Luka to bear, and he turns away as Nino explains himself. “I grew up with a family too large to count, and all the expectations of it — I can understand the pressure you might be under, with your own dad and all — but to be honest, I’m unsuited for every place I go, whether it’s the mosque or school or anywhere else. I’ve always had to set aside a part of myself to fit in. I started writing music to make a space that’s just me, all of me.”
Luka winces. How had they misjudged each other so much?
“Probably because Marinette threw herself at you and I got jealous,” Nino snorts.
What.
“You said that out loud, if you weren’t sure,” Marinette offers helpfully. Luka sinks to the floor and buries his face in his hands. Nino pats his back sympathetically.
Luka’s voice comes out muffled but strong. “I was jealous of you too, if it helps. Marinette’s been my north star for so long, I hated seeing her with another guy… I never really got over that crush, but I’ll work on it. For real this time.”
When he peeks up, Marinette is smirking and Nino is glancing between them, a look of growing awe and interest dawning on his face.
“What?! I promise, I said —”
Marinette shrugs coyly, pulling Luka up to standing. “I didn’t know you were still interested but… I’ve got two hands, y’know.” For a moment, she quirks a grin at him, laughter clearly dancing in her eyes, before her expression drops to something softer. “You stuck around while I stumbled around getting myself together. I didn’t mind waiting for you, Luka.”
“I’ve got two hands, too!” Nino interjects — and he’s blushing, eyes bright and happy, and everything that’s irritated Luka so acutely about this man shatters into affection and hope. He’s beautiful , Luka thinks. He tells a story with his music just like I do. He holds the heart of the woman I love, who loves me back, and I’m terrified but I want a love that lasts.
Years later, when they tell the story, Marinette starts at the Battle of the Bands.
“They didn’t know it, but there’s no way they could’ve lost, not the way they played: like they had a story to tell, like they were building a home all their own made to fit their bodies and hearts, like they set down a foundation meant to weather the worst of life and still stand strong.”
Nino laughs, and Luka shoves into her shoulder. She pushes back, and ends up half sprawled in both their laps.
“And what were you, then,” one of them teases. It never matters who.
The other will answer for her: “Our courage.”