Chapter Text
He knows he’s in love with her.
He is, frankly, a little obsessed with her—he has to purposefully restrain himself, especially as civilians where people think their relationship is only a few weeks old rather than Chat Noir having been in love with Ladybug for more than a year and the heroes dating for months.
He didn’t think it was possible for him to be happier than he was while dating Ladybug in secret until they did the reveal.
So it’s not that he doesn’t want to be with her that has him holding back a flinch at the teasing comments about him being such a good boyfriend that Alya and Alix and Kim keep tossing his way.
He feels like he should be preening under the compliments—because that’s what they are, even if Kim phrases it as, “You’re making other boyfriends look bad, Agreste!”—but he kind of feels like he does when he’s being chased by fans. He just wants to hide.
Still, he thinks he’s a good actor. The first few times he gets a weird—worried—look from Marinette but after that she doesn’t seem to detect that anything is wrong.
And something is wrong.
Clearly, he’s broken.
He’d wanted nothing more in the world than to be hers and then nothing more than to tell the world that he’s hers and now…
Now he—
“Okay, I’ve been patient, like Tikki and Alya suggested. I’m done with that. What’s wrong, kitty?”
He blinks. “Um… what?”
They’re alone in her room.
He came in through the bakery and he’s in Ladybug’s room, and Marinette is his girlfriend, and he should be so excited about that for the rest of time, and he is when he thinks about it, but his mind is elsewhere.
Broken, obviously.
How can he think about anything else when her thigh is pressed to his and they’re alone?
She taps his forehead with a fuzzy pen. “Where do you keep going to in that pretty head of yours?”
He all but swoons towards her. He loves it when she calls him pretty.
A book nearly falls off his lap and he straightens up, cat like reflexes kicking in to catch it.
Oh, right, he was actually supposed to be studying.
Not thinking about how much he wants her or how much he doesn’t want to be her boyfriend.
“I am so in love with you,” he picks as the better of the two distracting thoughts to admit to.
She chuckles. “I’m in love with you, too, mon soleil. Is that what’s so much more interesting than your favorite subject?”
He closes the textbook and sets it to the side, moves in closer to her, leaning down until they’re nose to nose. “Well, it could be.”
And when his acting fails, he can be a great distraction of his own.
In the past they’ve worked up to what’s called dry humping despite it being a rather damp event in Adrien’s experience, but Adrien is hoping to do something that doesn’t involve sticky boxers since he doesn’t have a magical transformation to whisk the mess away.
Adrien is really astonished at how much her parents trust her—the door is closed and locked and he knows they bought her condoms even if they’re far from needing them.
Adrien is, technically, allowed to lock the door to his room at the mansion when he’s alone, but that has been proven to matter little to both his father and Nathalie.
He’s not allowed to close the door when Marinette visits.
It’s embarrassing, how his father doesn’t trust him.
Ladybug usually sneaks in through his window instead of coming in through the front door, but really, they usually come here, instead.
After they’ve learned a few new things about each other’s bodies and subsequently washed their hands, they lay with Adrien’s head on her chest as their heart rates settle.
“Are you going to fall asleep, kitty?”
Adrien hums, “I could.”
Adrien has never fit the stereotype of falling asleep right after he orgasms—partially because it usually happens in the shower, thanks to the aforementioned lack of privacy in his bedroom—but he could currently go for a cat nap.
She pets his hair and kisses his forehead, “You should get more sleep, darling.”
And he means to respond, he really does, but she trails her hand down his spine and he’s relaxing further against her with a sigh, words lost entirely.
It’s a lot easier to talk when there’s the adrenaline of battle—or just social anxiety—pushing the words out than it is when he’s relaxed in her arms.
You will speak when spoken to, son, he remembers his father commanding when he was younger—both to make Adrien talk and to shut him up—but Marinette hasn’t seemed to notice, or mind if she has, that Adrien struggles with words sometimes.
Of course, she’s Marinette— if she does notice, she won’t be mean to him about it, least of all because she has her own verbal issues.
And now, at least, he has the excuse of falling asleep.
He’s not sure what startles him awake—the first thing he registers is his Lady’s voice, “You’re okay, Chatton, we’re safe,” and her hand on his cheek, urging him to tilt his head up.
When he blinks against the early evening light, her bright blue eyes are right there.
He jerks back.
“Kids?” he hears her mother’s voice, muffled though her door.
Marinette’s hand slides from his cheek to his ear and she pulls his head back down to her chest so it’s muffled from the outside and he can hear through her body as she shouts, “Just a minute, mom!”
Turns out that what startled him awake was Madam Cheng knocking on the door and asking if he was going to stay for dinner.
And he has to try to remember if he’d stayed the previous evening or is he thinking of the night before?
How often is too often to stay for dinner when you’ve only been dating their daughter for three weeks and definitely haven’t planned how you’re going to propose to her?
Marinette must decide he’s taking too long to answer, because she tells her mother that he has to ask permission first and he realizes that she’s right.
Thankfully Nathalie and his father do seem to like Marinette, even if they don’t trust them alone—and Adrien is sure that Gabriel assumes her parents don’t trust them alone, either—so he’s allowed to stay for dinner.
And it’s great. Dinner is great. Dinner here is always great.
Her parents are exceptionally good cooks in addition to being top notch bakers and possibly the most friendly people in all of creation.
It’s so nice that he kind wants to cry about it, about how the mansion never felt this much like home even when his mother was alive, about how he never imagined he’d have something this wonderful even once he was old enough to start his own family.
He doesn’t flinch when Monsieur Dupain throws an arm over his shoulder, their combined laughter bouncing off the walls.
He doesn’t even flinch when Monsieur Dupain calls him son.
Adrien slides right into the next joke, even as a cold stone settles in his gut, adding a confusing, bitter taste to the warmth of the evening.
Later, alone in his own bed, in a mansion that has never really felt like a home should anyway, he wonders and frets.
And so it goes.