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In the post-bell rush of students towards the locker room, Adrien delivers the news, all perfect white teeth and crinkled eyes: “Father agreed to let me come with you guys to Deauville!” Her brain stumbles, unable to reconcile Gabriel Agreste and agreement, and then—oh my god oh my god!
“He said yes?” Marinette asks, eyes wide. The words feel foreign on her tongue, something out of a daydream. “For real?”
“For real!” he confirms, grin stretching even wider.
“There’s no way!” Marinette exclaims, overtaken by both elation and disbelief. “How did you even convince him? You’re incredible—uh, I mean that’s incredible, not that you’re not incredible—I, um… I’m, uh, I’m just surprised that he said yes,” she trails off awkwardly, trying to school her face into something other than a grimace.
All of a sudden, she feels like she’s back in collège, back before her crush on Adrien had fizzled into a childhood wish. It’s the familiar burn of her cheeks, the awful spluttering, the way her palms had turned clammy when he so much as glanced over at her. Adrien Agreste in glittery pink gel pen, loops and exclamation marks and hearts; passionfruit macarons; girlhood in all its glory.
“Trust me, I know,” Adrien agrees, seemingly unfazed by Marinette’s bumble. “To be honest, I don’t even really know how because Nathalie was the one who ended up convincing him, but yeah, I was just glad that he said yes at all.”
“Well, I’m so glad you can come,” Marinette tells him, hoping that her sincerity shines over her state of fluster. She presses her cool palm to her cheek. “It really wouldn’t have been the same without you.”
Adrien’s smile turns impish. “You mean, you’re glad that you won’t have to third wheel Alya and Nino alone.”
“Um, that too,” Marinette laughs, caught off guard. “I guess this time I won’t have to bring you around on FaceTime, then.”
For all her self-proclaimed expertise on everything Adrien at fourteen, she hadn’t known him back then, not really. If he asked, she would explain it like this: I knew about you, but I didn’t know you. What she has with Adrien now is something her collège self could have never imagined; not when to her he had been more myth than person, when being around him had felt like holding water in her hands.
“Yeah,” he says, voice softening. He pushes a hand back through his fringe to keep it from falling into his eyes. “I’m excited, actually. It’ll be my first time actually seeing the beach in person, I guess. In the flesh.”
“You’ve never seen the ocean?” Marinette asks, perplexed. “But didn’t you have that shoot by the sea? The swimwear thing?”
“Green screen,” Adrien explains, but he sounds surprised. “I can’t believe you even remember that ad—I think I did it back when were still in collège?”
I literally used to think we were going to get married and have three kids and a hamster, she doesn’t say. “Well, uh, you know me,” she laughs nervously, gesticulating vaguely. “I, you know, uh… fashion! Fashion. I do love fashion!”
Adrien leans forwards, and the side of his mouth curls upwards with something mischievous. “You sure you’re not just a fan?”
“Um—I don’t—I don’t know if I would call myself a fan,” Marinette protests, cheeks hot. “Okay, maybe of your fashion. But just the fashion. Nothing else, okay?”
“I’m just teasing,” he laughs, and Marinette wrinkles her nose. “I’ve got to go to fencing,” he says, gesturing up the stairway with his thumb. “But I’ll see you on Sunday?”
“See you Sunday,” she repeats. “And tell Kagami I said hi!”
It all comes back to this—the wind running through her hair, adrenaline dancing in her veins, her heart jumping rope within her ribcage. Marinette laughs with exhilaration, head tipped to the sky, and she can hear Chat whooping by her side. Her chest feels overfull with wonder, like she’s swallowed a shooting star: I am alive I am alive I am alive.
Of course, there are days where Marinette wishes that she could be anyone but herself, where the weight of it all feels like a time bomb in her throat and phantom blood that stains the streets. Again and again, the violet smog of akumatisation pit against the people she loves most; Paris, up in flames; a lonely boy in a white wasteland.
But Chat is grinning up at her now, all swagger and smirk in the afterglow of their win. Bright-eyed, he nudges her in the shoulder. “Race you to the Eiffel Tower?”
She says only what they already know: “You know we only have a few minutes left before we detransform, chaton.” But she doesn’t want the night to end like this either—not when her limbs feel lighter than air, her body electric.
“Come on, bug, you know we have time,” he cajoles, pouting a little. “It’s only to the Eiffel Tower. You know we’ll make it back in time.”
“Chat,” Marinette says. She means to be stern, but her voice gives shape to something unquestionably affectionate.
Chat had once described being Chat Noir as a kind of liberation. I actually get to do the things I want to do for once, he'd said, things civilian me could never. For Marinette, though, being Ladybug has always been more a tug of war. Unyielding pressure against the optimism rooted at the very heart of her being, tension that sits in the sweep of plum beneath her eyes, the ache between her shoulder blades. To be a tidal wave or a drop in the ocean; to be both at once.
When Marinette dwells on it for too long, she can’t help but wonder about Chat’s civilian life, about how stifling it must be for the answer to spell out superhero. Who are you, Chat Noir? If I saw you, would I know you?
“Buginette,” he sing-songs. “Pretty please. It’s a Caturday, m’lady.”
“Caturday,” she repeats in something between a laugh and a scoff.
He wiggles his eyebrows. "Well, I'm not hearing a no."
Marinette smiles a little, crosses her arms over her chest. "Only to the Eiffel Tower," she relents. "And then we’re going home."
Greenlit, Chat cheers, breaking into a run. Against the rooftops, his footfalls are audible, and he extends his baton to propel himself forwards. “Last one to the Eiffel Tower’s a rotten egg!” he crows, jumping across to the next building.
Marinette rolls her eyes, albeit fondly. “Catch me if you can!” she calls back, throwing out her yoyo. Catch, pull, swing. Together, they skip across the skyline like pebbles on a lake.
When Marinette breathes in, all she can taste is salt. Beneath her soles, the sand is damp and warm, and she sinks her feet into it, curls her toes, feels the way it pushes past her skin grainily. The briny lap of tide against shore has turned her soles prune-like. From where she sits at the shoreline, she can hear Alya and Nino play fighting further into the surf: laughter; splashing; Alya, come on!
At low tide, the coast is littered with shells of all different kinds—whorls of colour, patterns, ridges—and Marinette finds her fingers combing through the sand in search of a keepsake. A blue streaked clamshell catches her eye, and she brings it up to her face to look more closely, watches the way light bounces off its surface when she twists it between her fingers. Puts it down. There’s something missing.
“Hey,” she hears Adrien greet from behind her. She has to squint when she turns to look up at him; the sun is round and bright where it sits in the sky like a radiant pearl, and his golden hair is haloed in the afternoon light. “What are you up to?”
“Um, just looking for shells,” she explains, raising a hand to shield her eyes. “I’m thinking of bringing one back for a friend.”
“That’s cool,” he replies, and Marinette watches him roll his pants to his knees, peel away a frond of seaweed stuck to his heel. Somehow, even with slime-like residue stuck to his skin, he looks straight from the kind of spread that Marinette would’ve ripped right out of a fashion magazine. “Like a souvenir?”
“Something like that,” Marinette agrees, gaze dropping to the beach. Absentmindedly, her hands push into it, fingers slipping beneath sandhills. “I just keep thinking…” I just keep thinking about Chat, about how he’ll never get to see me like this—as I am. Just me, Marinette. How strange it is to love half a person; how badly I want for him to know this part of me. And the sheer impossibility of it all. “I was just wishing that he—uh, my friend, I mean, could be here. But he can’t, so… I guess I thought I’d bring some of the beach to him.”
Yesterday, after their race, Chat had asked her if someday, one day, eventually, they would come to learn each other’s civilian identities. “I know I shouldn’t ask, but…after Monarch,” he’d said, breathless, hopeful. “At the end of it all. After everything. Would you want to…?”
To know Chat in his entirety, to be known entirely; her heart ached. She had tried to push the feeling back into her ribcage, ignore the awful, gnawing want. As kindly as she could manage: “It could be a long time, Chat. It might be—it might be never.”
“I know, I know.” He’d cleared his throat then, shifted from heel to heel. Met her eyes earnestly. “Let’s say it’s a hypothetical. If it was an if. If…then?”
“If,” she started, and then it’d been the beep-beep-beep of her earrings before they were both leaping in opposite directions, blips of movement through the night. If we could, I would always choose to know you. I will always want you to know me.
In the sand pile, her fingers close around something small and thin, no larger than a pebble. When she pulls her hand away and unfurls her fingers, revealed is a dark grey seashell, spiral-like and almost black in colour. It sits snug in the cradle of her palm, smooth against her sea wrinkled skin.
“That’s really thoughtful,” Adrien tells her, voice soft. He sits down beside her, hugs his knees to his chest. “I bet he’s really gonna appreciate it.”
“It’s just a shell,” she laughs, fingers folding around the shell again. Like this, she can keep it safe. “It’s no big deal.”
“It’s not that,” he says, shaking his head. “You’re always looking out for people, always thinking of all your friends, all the time—I don’t know how you do it.”
She feels her face flush. “Uh, I mean, um, what are friends for?” Marinette offers with an awkward laugh. With more sincerity: “I guess it’s easy when it comes to the people that matter.”
“Tell me more about the guy who you’re getting the shell for,” Adrien requests, nudging her calf with his knee. “I wanna know.” He looks curious, almost antsy. It’s not at all what you think, Marinette almost says.
Instead, she lets the reservoir of affection in her chest spill over. “Well, to be honest, he can be a bit of a handful,” she starts. “And he’s a little cocky, kind of a flirt. So, so annoying.” A little smile starts to press at her mouth—she imagines Chat squawking with protest, pouting like a child. It softens her like a pat of butter in the sun. “But he’s brave, and he has a good heart, and I mean, nobody makes me laugh like him. Nobody gets me like him.”
“Sounds like he’s really important to you,” Adrien offers quietly.
“Yeah,” she exhales, overcome with feeling. Her chest feels tight. “He is. I don’t know what I’d do without him.”
“I have a friend like that too,” Adrien offers. “Not that their personalities are alike, in fact, they’re totally different,” he amends, laughing a little. “Opposites even. It’s just that the way you talked about your friend…it reminded me of how I feel about mine.”
It’s Marinette’s turn to be curious. “What are they like?”
“I don’t even know how to explain her,” Adrien begins, looking a little bashful. He looks down at the sand, starts to swirl patterns into the beach with his fingertips. “She’s so smart, and so incredible—I mean, she’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. She’s—she’s amazing. I really like her,” he rushes out, cheeks colouring pink. Quieter: “I’ve liked her for a long time.”
Kagami, she thinks. It must be Kagami. It’s not a stabbing pain—no blood, no open wound—but the realisation does give way to a strange emptiness in her chest. A ghost of a girl begs to be heard: that could’ve been me. But it doesn’t matter; Adrien is her friend. Kagami is her friend.
“She sounds wonderful, Adrien,” Marinette tells him, and she finds that she means it. Kagami is beautiful and determined, capable and kind—it only makes sense. “What if you brought back a seashell for her?” she suggests. More than anything, she wants for the two of them to be happy.
He looks up at her, cheeks still rosy. “Do you think—do you think she would like that?”
“Well, it’d be sort of a hey, I was thinking about you kind of thing, right?” Marinette says slowly. “But not in a weird way!” she adds, wincing. “Because it’d be something small! Something casual. But still personal, and thoughtful, and, uh—do you get me?”
“Okay,” Adrien says, amusement pulling at his lips. “You’ve convinced me. So how do I know if a shell is a good shell, then? If I’m picking the right one?”
“I feel like it’s the kind of thing you just know,” she shrugs. “If you see it and it reminds you of them. If it feels right in your hand.”
Adrien unfolds his legs and stretches before getting into a kneeling position. “I guess if I know, I’ll know,” he says, reaching to the side to pick up a shell by his calf.
On the train ride home, Marinette shows Adrien the dark grey whorl tucked inside her fist tentatively, like the whisper of a secret. Adrien shows her the shell he’d picked out for Kagami: a bright red abalone shell with alternating ridges and grooves. When Marinette turns the shell over, this is how she knows he loves her—its pearlescent inside gleams technicolour, the sun catching its surface from the window by her head.
“If it isn’t my favourite sewer rat—I mean, cat,” Marinette calls when she sees Chat approaching her balcony.
“Meowch,” he exclaims, jumping over the railing enclosing the rooftop. “Nice to see you too, princess. What are you up to, studying?”
“History test coming up,” she tells him, pretending to flip through the textbook in her lap.
“Boring,” he says, pretending to yawn. “Hang out with me instead.”
Though she still spends more time with him as Ladybug, he’s been visiting her more and more often. It doesn’t faze her anymore, but running into Chat for the first time as Marinette had felt like bumping into Madame Bustier in the soup aisle, this overwhelming disorientation of situating a familiar face in an unfamiliar context. He had still been Chat Noir, except in her family’s boulangerie, and she couldn’t have been further from Ladybug as her sticky fingered civilian self behind the counter.
“You’re boring,” she shoots back. “And stinky.”
Chat feigns hurt, pressing his hand to his chest dramatically. “I’ll have you know I smell like Adrien the Fragrance, actually.”
“What?” Marinette laughs in disbelief. “You’re lying.”
“Smell me,” Chat insists, sidling over to where she’s sitting.
“You’re trying to distract me,” she accuses.
He shakes his head with a grin, inching closer. “Smell me!”
Helpless to her curiosity, Marinette leans in. Instantly, she knows. It’s something citrusy, something like sandalwood, and exactly like the bottle she’d hidden beneath her bed back at the peak of her crush. “I can’t believe you actually do,” she says, cringing viscerally.
“Marinette…” Chat starts, a little perplexed. “How do you know what it’s supposed to smells like?” His eyes widen, and then he smirks a little. “Are you a secret Adrien Agreste fan?”
Her face instantly turns red. Deny, deny, deny. “I’m not—I don’t—why does everyone think I’m an Adrien Agreste fan?” she huffs out.
“You can be honest,” Chat sing-songs. “Be who you are.”
“I’m going to tell Alya that you smell like Adrien Agreste so she can put it on the Ladyblog,” Marinette grumbles. “Your fans would love that.”
“Wouldn’t want to give him that endorsement,” he replies, wrinkling his nose. “Don’t you think he’s a little annoying?”
“Annoying?” she repeats incredulously. “He’s not annoying!”
“So you are a fan!” Chat crows.
“It’s not that,” she protests. “He’s a friend, Chat.”
Chat pulls a face. “Don’t you ever get annoyed of seeing his face plastered everywhere, though? All the billboards, bus stops, ads…”
“I mean, he’s not exactly hard to look at,” Marinette offers. Chat looks at her with his eyebrows halfway to the moon. “What?” she says defensively. “He’s a model!”
“So you’re into Adrien Agreste?” he asks, somewhere between mystified and scandalised.
“I told you, he’s just a friend,” Marinette doubles down. She lets out a sigh, pretends to pick at her cuticles before finally admitting, “I did use to have a crush on him back in collège, though.”
“Used to?” Chat exclaims, voice shooting up in pitch. “What happened?”
“I grew up,” she says, laughing a little at his reaction.
“What does that even mean?”
Marinette shrugs. “It’s just… I just don’t think he could ever see me like that, I guess. I mean, I’m me—I’m too clumsy, I’m always a mess… I just don’t really think that I’m his type. And we’re friends now, anyway, so—”
“You’re amazing, Marinette,” Chat cuts in, unusually sincere. He’s frowning now, eyebrows furrowed slightly. “Don’t put yourself down like that. I’m—Adrien is lucky to even have you as a friend at all.”
“Thanks, Chat,” she says with a smile, trying to diffuse the unexpected seriousness of the situation. “It’s okay, though. Really. It’s not like I’m hung up on him, or anything.”
“I know, I know,” he replies, raking a hand through his hair. “But I just wanted—I want to make sure you know how incredible you are. I mean, you’re Marinette.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls,” Marinette ribs, but she feels her chest flood with fondness, and more saliently, relief. He doesn’t know it, but these are the words that she has wanted to hear for so long: This other part of you matters to me. You don’t need to be a superhero to be worthy of love.
Later, after Chat leaves, she knows she’ll keep herself up through the night imagining what it would be like for him to know the truth, to join two unlikely halves into a whole. In the dark, her mouth stretching around the syllables silently: Chat, it’s me.
But in the now: “You wound me,” Chat groans. “Come on, cut me some slack.”
“You’re a heartbreaker, Chat Noir,” she teases, nudging his ankle with her foot. “How am I supposed to know if you mean it?”
“Easy,” he answers, smile sunny. “I only say it when I mean it.”
“Really,” Marinette says, though she already believes him.
“Really really,” Chat insists, though he knows it too. “You know what Adrien can’t do?” he asks, extending her his hand out to her exaggeratedly. “Take you on a ride across the whole of Paris—what do you say, princess?”
“Chat,” she says, laughing a little at his theatrics, but she puts down her textbook and takes his hand anyway.
Adrien has been staring at her all day.
At first, she’d thought it was something on her face, but a quick look in the mirror had told her otherwise. And Adrien had just kept looking and looking and looking. Like something had changed, like he was seeing her for the first time.
It’s not until after school in the locker room that she manages to catch him alone. Why have you been looking at me like that? What did I do? she wants to say. And yet: “Um, I—Adrien! Hi,” is all she gets out. “Hi.” Her stomach has been roiling over with this horrible sense of unease: did Chat Noir say something? He wouldn’t do that to me. Would he? He wouldn’t.
The tension that she expects from him is nowhere to be seen. “Hey Marinette,” he greets with smile. He’s sliding his bag into his locker, pulling out his gear for fencing. “How was class?”
“Um, it was okay,” she replies, taken aback by how normal he’s being. No tells, no weirdness, no confrontation—it almost feels she’d been making everything all up in her head. Except he had been looking. Hadn’t he? The shame of doubting Chat wells up in her throat, and she tries to swallow down her insecurity, tries to smile. “Nothing too exciting. Off to fencing soon?” She gestures to the fencing mask in his hand.
“Yeah, I should probably go soon,” he tells her, sounding almost apologetic. Kagami will be there, she realises. “After I put my books away, I mean.”
“Oh, no, that’s all good,” she says quickly. “I guess that means you can give Kagami the shell today, then.”
There’s a pause, and then, “Kagami?” he asks, clearly confused.
“The shell?” she tries. “The one you showed me in Deauville?”
Realisation washes over his face. “No, uh, it’s not for Kagami,” he rushes out, words tripping over each other in their haste to be heard. “Kagami is great, but…to be honest, I just—I don’t really see her like that.”
“Oh!” Marinette squeaks. “Um, sorry, my mistake, I just thought…the way you were describing your friend, it reminded me so much of Kagami and…” If not Kagami, then who?
“No, it’s okay,” he says, laughing a little, and she finds herself smiling sheepishly. “I mean, Kagami is awesome. But you know. We’re not…we’re not like that.” He shuts his locker and leans against it, turning his body towards her. “So what about Luka?”
“What about Luka?” Marinette repeats, perplexed.
Adrien clears his throat. “I mean, that was who you were talking about on Sunday, right?”
“Oh—uh, no, no,” she backpedals, wide-eyed. “No, me and Luka, um, no. It’s for another friend. Not that there’s anything wrong with Luka! I mean, Luka is really great, it’s just that…”
“It was for someone else,” he finishes.
“Yeah,” she laughs awkwardly. “I guess we’re not very good at this guessing thing.”
Adrien makes a considering noise. “Do I know them?”
“Maybe,” she says vaguely. Who doesn’t?
“Is it…” He trails off for a moment, forehead creased with thought. “Nathaniel?”
“What? No!” she giggles. “I hardly even talk to him.”
“It’s not Nino, is it?”
That makes her sputter with laughter. “What kind of a question is that?”
“I just can’t think of who,” Adrien admits, looking at her as though she’s a bug under a microscope.
Marinette just shakes her head, smiling at his efforts. “I guess some things are meant to stay secret.”
At the end of a rather uneventful patrol, Marinette turns to Chat with a smile. “I have something for you,” she tells him, reaching into her yoyo for the shell. Pulling it out of the pink glow as discretely as she can, she hides it in her fist.
She’s about to ask him to guess what it could possibly be, when he exclaims, “Oh, before I forget,” and presses something into her empty palm: “For you, m’lady.”
When she lifts her hand up to inspect it, her world tapers to this moment.
A red shell.
Her fingers tremble. No, no, no. She turns it over.
Iridescent.
For a moment, all she knows is fear—it’s the snow-covered city and a boy with a wish. Her Chat Noir lost to time, pleading for Monarch’s mercy, the beginning of the end. She thinks her chest might burst from how fast her heart is palpitating, and she can hear every beat all up in her ears. Like a kick drum in her head gone out of control—thump thump thump thump thump.
A shell off the coastline of Deauville, and it’s everything.
Life starts to recontexualise itself in order to make sense of this moment; this unthinkable, inconceivable moment. It’s the universe rewriting itself in Marinette’s mind, expanding and contracting and shattering in jagged fragments that retessellate in ways that should by all means be implausible. Adrien, my best friend. Adrien, who purrs when I hold him close. Adrien, with the too wide grin, all teeth, feline. She’s the strongest person I’ve ever met. Adrien’s face turning pink. I’ve liked her for a long time. Adrien, Adrien, Adrien.
“Bug?” Chat, Adrien, asks worriedly. “Is it—do you not like it?”
She looks up at him through the saltwater in her eyes—when had she started crying?—and tries to reconcile the irreconcilable, picture the impossible boy behind the mask. Green eyes. Blonde hair, windswept. It’s him, and it isn’t. It can’t be. It is.
Marinette doesn’t know whether to laugh or sob. She feels so, so horribly stupid. “Chat,” is all she manages to choke out because she can barely bring herself to speak, hardly even knows what to say. It’s the opposite: there are so many things she wishes she could unsay. I did use to have a crush on him back in collège. Even worse: What if you brought back a seashell for her? How could she have let this happen?
“Hey, what’s wrong?” he asks softly, pulling her to his chest. “Ladybug.” One arm rests on her shoulder while the other wraps itself around her upper back. She just shakes her head, presses her nose into the curve between his shoulder and neck. Tries to breathe.
It’s him. It’s him.
She feels herself split down the middle by dread and relief, the two emotions separating into distinct entities like oil and water.
Out of everyone in the whole of Paris, her us-against-the-world crime fighting other half happens to be one of the people she cares most about in the entire world. Deep in her bones, Marinette wouldn’t want it any other way; she couldn’t ask for a better partner, a better friend.
And still, the fact of the matter is, no matter what choice she makes, her handprints are pressed into the course of history. Whatever decision she comes to will irrefutably change the trajectory of their lives, how their timeline unfolds, how other timelines unfold, if it all falls apart. They had been so careful, and for what? For Marinette to find out like this? This was never supposed to happen, was never even a remote possibility.
Yet here they are.
There is no handbook for what happens next; it’s all up to her.
There’s the after where she lets him go: the one where she starts all over again, the one where Adrien will never know. She feels sick to her stomach. Another holder, another beginning. She doesn’t know if she can do it. It’s been her and him since the start of it all; years and years of growing together; Ladybug and Chat Noir unravelling from discrete selves into something inextricable, something greater, something them.
She can’t do it. She won’t.
So what then?
After everything, this is what she comes back to: the after where she tells the truth. It’s the future they swore against—their lives, their loved ones, the safety of Paris at stake. One akuma, and it could all be over.
It’s the worst choice in the world.
It’s the only choice she’ll even consider making.
The seashells are still pressed into her hands; one exposed, the other hidden. She feels the weight of the one that is closed, the terrible heaviness that it holds.
“Adrien,” she breathes, more air than sound, and slides the black shell into his hand. “I’m so glad it’s you.”