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“Yes Ladybug! That’s perfecto. Think Mozzarella, Parmigiana, Ricotta. Bite the pizza, smile! Pull the cheese with your teeth. Yes, that’s buonissimo.”
Plagg was pretty sure he had died and gone to wherever cheese is made. (Wisconsin? Fluff had told him it was called Wisconsin , but she was a bit of a trickster, so he couldn’t be fully convinced that that wasn’t just a prank to get him to say a weird word.) Regardless, he was sitting in Adrien’s dressing room enjoying the spoils of his covert mission to the craft services table while his holder and Ladybug cheesed it up, literally and figuratively, for the camera. The only thing that would make this better would be if Tikki were here instead of stuck in the suit. “Oh well,” he shrugged as he dove into a brick of Gruyere, “more for me.”
Adrien was pretty sure he had died and gone to heaven (although he wasn’t sure that was a concept he believed in, what with the magical cheese loving god that lived in his sock drawer and the general villainy he faced on a daily basis from his father and… well… his father--but he didn’t know that fact yet. He had a complicated relationship with the concept, is all. But if heaven was standing next to Ladybug for an ad campaign about milk, he wanted in.) (A weird concept for an ad campaign, he and his lactose intolerant tummy knew, I mean come on, what is this, the nineties? But he also knew that Plagg was going to be on cloud nine for at least the next week, which meant he got Ladybug time AND minimal kwami sass, what a world.) The photographer barking something about gelato brought him out of his daze. That is, until, Ladybug was kissing his cheek.
Marinette was pretty sure she had died. At least seven times. Today. Ope, and there’s number eight. “Kiss him like your favorite flavor of gelato!” She did. She kissed him. Right on that one freckle that she has always thought was cuter than all the other freckles (at least on this side of his face. Oh boy have you seen the freckle above his left cheekbone just to the right of his smile lines? It’s insane.) “Perfecto mon coccinella! Uno bacio. Like it is a sunny day and you are sharing a scoop of frangipani with Claude and Claude is smiling at you and the sun catches in his eyes and he promises to never leave you and…” The photographer was now openly weeping and Ladybug was brought back to reality when he blew his nose rather wetly on the handkerchief he’d just pulled from his pocket. “Let’s take a break.” He managed to choke out before running off set wailing.
They stood there, arms still around one another, sticky white paint still slathered on their upper lips, in shocked silence until Ladybug realized that she was Ladybug and should thus be the one to break the tension. “That was, um... nice. I mean… uh until he– I don’t mean, it’s just that..." She took a measured breath before continuing (you've got this, Marinette.) "I hope he’s okay.” Well, that had certainly broken something, whether that was the tension or her dignity, though, was really anyone’s guess. (Her dignity, it was her dignity.)
Adrien, somehow, was just looking at her like, well, like she was Claude and the sun was catching in her eyes. “This happens from time to time. It’s usually best not to bring up frozen desserts around him, but I guess it was kind of inevitable at this shoot. He usually needs a little while… do you want to, um…” suddenly Adrien’s cheeks were pink right where she had just kissed him (she had just kissed him!) “I uh, kind of want ice cream now. Is that bad?”
Ladybug, as a matter of fact, also really wanted ice cream right now (and the sunny day thing and the sparkling eyes thing and the promising to never leave thing, but she’d settle, for now, on ice cream thing.) “Not bad, sounds yum.” She blurted out before gluing her lips back together again. Out of all the words in the french language that she could have strung together as an answer, it certainly wasn’t her worst work. It wasn’t her best. It wouldn’t win her any pulitzers any time soon, but it did seem to have been successful in winning her a scoop of ice cream with Adrien, and honestly, that was better than a stuffy medal any day of the week.
It took Adrien five whole minutes of walking with his hands by his side a fraction of an inch away from Ladybug’s hands (also by her side, also swinging nervously with her walk) to realize that he still had white milk goo paint stuff on his upper lip. He kicked himself internally, there goes the kissing ladybug in the sun over a scoop of ice cream dream, nice job Agreste. He glanced over at Ladybug to see if she could tell how distressed he was. She also, as it turns out, had white milk goo paint stuff still smudged across her upper lip. He noted that in the back of his mind as something that might potentially salvage the kissing plan after all. He also, resourceful and char-meow-ing as he was, saw it as a conversation starter. “So, uh. This stuff is weird, huh?” He pointed to his lips when Ladybug turned to look at him with a puzzled expression.
“Wha–” she was staring at his lips like she was trying to understand some complex realities. (He didn’t realize that she was. She had died a tenth time now, and even Chat Noir, with his nine lives and ability to speak normal human sentences (well, depending on your definition of “normal” and “human”) couldn’t save her short circuiting brain now.)
“You know, the fake milk stuff? It doesn’t even really look like milk, up close.”
He was moving his perfect lips. He was saying something about milk. He had stopped talking. He was looking at her. He was expecting an answer. “Oh! Yeah I bet our lips would stick together if we kissed, hah!” WHAT WAS THAT!!!???? Abort! Abort! Marinette’s brain had short-circuited so much that her usually over-active brain to mouth filter was no longer working and she had just let her most honest thoughts pour out. She could tell that her face was as red as her suit. She had forgotten, for a minute, that she was, in fact, IN the suit. That she was supposed to be poised and trustworthy and powerful when she was in the suit. This was a disaster.
“I was thinking the same thing, actually.” Adrien chuckled nervously, his cheeks also doing an impressive Ladybug imitation.
Don’t be a statue, Marinette. Ladybug told herself. But then she remembered what had happened when Adrien had been a statue. What she had said about wax lips. What she had done to his (non-wax!) lips. The circuits in her brain were no longer short, they were miniscule. “Entwined for eternity,” she whispered, thoughts be damned.
Adrien’s eyes flew open wide in realization, Ladybug’s hands flew over her face in mortification, and right at that moment, an akuma flew into Andre Glacier’s ice cream scoop, where he stood and watched their interaction from the other side of the square.
“Not this again!” Adrien grumbled when the first sinister scoop landed to their left. He pulled Ladybug (Marinette!) behind a tree so he could call up his transformation in hiding. “We’ll discuss your theory about the stickiness of this stuff once this is over, sound good Marinette?” Chat Noir winked as he swung into action.
Marinette was pretty sure she had died.