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In front of you, cherished more than anyone
is someone who cherishes you so that you won't get hurt, that's right, it's me
Even if your words somehow become "goodbye" instead
Everything will be as it is
-Kimi ni Todoke, Tanizawa Tomofumi
Adrien Agreste has never felt the sting of his bad luck curse so badly.
Sure, he can never get hot water when he really wants a hot shower, and most of his electronic (or electric) devices usually fail him when he needs them to complete even the simplest of tasks like, you know, toast. But it’s only the small things, and he takes it in stride with the serene resignation that other people usually mistake for the aloofness of a cool guy. If only they knew, Plagg says sometimes between bites of smelly cheese, that you’re the biggest, most socially awkward dork in all Paris.
But anyway, there’s a line between lowkey bad luck and accidentally finding out Ladybug’s identity without her consent. He’s thrilled despite himself, but also deeply worried about her reaction.
See, it happens kind of like this.
On a night like any other, Adrien transforms into Chat Noir and races across Paris’ rooftops to meet his Lady for the night’s patrol. He’s still a few buildings away from their meet up point yet he can already make out her silhouette, the red of her costume shining under the bright parisian moon. When he finally makes it to her side, she’s smirking at him.
“Late, are we kitty?” she tells him, holding a giggle. Adrien, now Chat, holds back the need to explain to her that his father issued a photoshoot without warning him and that it threw off the rest of his schedule for the day –not to mention the fact that he might have distracted himself between takes with that pretty black-haired classmate of his who roamed the park with that little kid she babysits sometimes. He wants so badly to justify himself to Ladybug, but he doesn’t want her to think that he’s trying to tell her who he is. He respects her too much for that.
So instead he says: “I’m sorry, my Lady. Shall I make it up to you?” as he approaches her, eyebrows raised in a suggestive way that only earns him a flick to the forehead.
“Come on,” she tells him turning around. Chat’s not even ashamed to admit that he stares at skin at the base of her neck for a few seconds. “We’re gonna finish late if we don’t go now.” Then she swings her yo-yo around a lamppost and takes off, leaving him to gaze at her in poorly veiled amazement. Soon enough, Chat follows her and they’re running through Paris in amicable silence.
It’s an oddly quiet night, there doesn’t seem to be any akumas causing trouble, which is to be expected, given that the last one, an angry clerk who called himself The CEO, was defeated only yesterday. Chat lets his thoughts wander, reminiscing his afternoon and those few minutes he spent watching Marinette trying and adorably failing to make idle conversation with him. Adrien thinks she’s cute, with the big blue eyes that remind him so much of Ladybug’s own and that rosy hue her cheeks take whenever she speaks to him. Or tries to, anyway. He’s intrigued by the girl, how she’s so witty and cool whenever it’s not him she’s talking to; Adrien wonders why she can’t seem to talk to him, if maybe she’s afraid of him. I could like her, he thinks, if it weren’t for…
And right as this thought crosses his mind, he hears Ladybug yelp. Bringing himself back from his thoughts, Chat Noir looks around to see that his lady laying down on a lower roof, her yo-yo still tied to the post she meant to swing herself from.
“My Lady,” he exclaims, rapidly jumping down to her side. “Should I call the purramedics? ” Ladybug snorts despite herself, offering him a small smile before wincing and reaching a hand to her ankle.
“It’s nothing. The edge of that roof was slippery.” She mutters, trying to stand up. Chat admires her will to do it even though she’s obviously injured, and then catches her when she stumbles down. “I fell and twisted my ankle. Glad to see you still have your awful sense of humor, though.”
Chat looks offended, mostly to get a smile out of her, then proceeds to gently prod her ankle to test the damage. It’s not a serious injury, but she’s going to have trouble walking for a couple of days.
“Seems like I’m going to be your knight in shining armor for tonight, my Lady.” He tells her, scooping her up in his arms without giving her a chance to reply. Ladybug protests, saying their patrol has barely started and besides she’s not telling him where she lives.
“That’s okay, I don’t think there’s going to be an akuma attack tonight.” Chat argues, trying to appease her. She’s pouting, which makes it a bit hard to concenrate for him, so he looks at the distant Eiffel Tower instead. “And I can just drop you off somewhere secluded you can transform at and call a friend to help you get home, how does that sound?”
Ladybug ponders for a moment. “Fine.” She says an eternity later. “But no funny business! And I’m walking.” Ladybug pushes him away in an attempt to get him to drop him, but Chat is miraculously (ha!) stronger than her, and overpowers her with some struggle. Adjusting his hold on her, he directs her a chesire smile before taking a jump towards an adjacent roof. Ladybug screams, holding onto him tighter than even Chloé. Chat will probably get home to write about this in his diary.
Resigned, Ladybug gives him a direction, and he drops her off at a mostly deserted but well-known street. It’s not so late that she might inconvenience her friend, he thinks, but he still worries and tells her to be safe.
As he’s leaving, Ladybug stops him with a hand on his arm.
“Chat!” she exclaims, smiling softly at him when he looks back. “Thank you.”
“It was meow pleasure, my Lady.” He says, and with that he takes a jump, propelling himself with his staff. He’s a building away when he remembers he might not make it to patrol tomorrow, so he turns around to inform his partner of the fact. He doesn’t think she’s transformed already, it’s barely been fifteen seconds, but when he reaches the alley where he left her, Chat sees a bright rosy glow and a second later there’s Marinette, right where he left Ladybug.
Adrien lands on his balcony at the exact same time his transformation wears off, and by the time he’s crossed the window doors towards his bed, Plagg is already stuffing himself full of cheese. Any other time, he’d be commenting on it, but not now.
Because Marinette is Ladybug.
Oh my god, Adrien thinks, covering half of his face with one hand as he drops himself on his bed, Marinette is Ladybug!
He doesn’t know what to do, how to feel. On the one hand, he’s glad beyond belief that a girl such as Marinette, brave, kind Marinete is behind the mask. On the other, how is he supposed to reconcile his shy, flushed to the roots of her hair classmate with the outgoing superhero that’s always captivated him.
He must say some of this out loud, because next thing he knows, Plagg’s floating beside him, his focus mostly on a piece of cheese as he offhandedly says:
“That girl’s not shy. You’re just thick as a brick.” And then promptly goes back to eating. Adrien is ready to fight him about it, but just as sudden as his discovery of the night, the realization that his kwami is right hits him square in the face.
Plagg’s right. Marinette isn’t shy. She’s outspoken, a graceful kind of clumsy, willing to stand up for her friends and loved ones even when there’s not much she can do –and Adrien’s been drawn to her for a while, been watching her out of the corner of his eye, afraid that if she talks to her directly she’ll get spooked and tongue-tied as it’s been her custom for the past year.
How could he be so blind? She had no problem talking to Nino, or Alya, not even Chloé, and yet she’s hardly able of saying hi to him. She’s not shy! His mind screams, stuck on that fact for some reason. She doesn’t even have a problem talking to Chat Noir.
“Why would she,” he mumbles in the general direction of his ceiling, “if Chat Noir’s her friend?” he feels a little ridiculous, annoyed that she can talk to him just as long as she doesn’t know it’s him she’s talking to, wondering how on earth he can have missed what was right behind him all this time.
“And how am I supposed to face her tomorrow!?” he asks the room, horrified. Plagg has fallen asleep on a cushion, being his usual unhelpful self, but Adrien didn’t expect help from him. In the dark of his bedroom, his mind slowly gives in to exhaustion, and he falls asleep without an answer to his problem.
Adrien is avoiding her.
It’s not that noticeable, because Marinette and Adrien don’t talk that much to begin with, what with her inability to string words together to form a coherent sentence in his presence and all. But where there always was a kind smile in his face whenever they would talk now there’s a nervous one. He keeps tripping over his words, not unlike her, whenever he talks to her, and Marinette wants to think it’s because he deals with attraction the same way she does (or doesn’t, for that matter). But she’s not naïve, despite whatever Alya might say, and she knows Adrien no longer feels comfortable in her presence for some reason.
On the nights when Marinette gets a moment to just lay in her bed and think about nothing in particular, she figures it all started when she hurt her ankle.
That particular day she was late because her swollen ankle had impeded her from wearing her usual outfit, opting instead for a simple chinese style black dress with a pink flowery pattern around the edge of the skirt, as well as her usual pink-and-black flats. And when she crossed the door of her classroom not only did she receive a myriad of compliments from her classmate and a very realistic drawing from a blushing Nathanaël, but she was also met with Adrien’s pointed, blushing stare.
What made it worse? He was staring at her ankle.
Later that day, he’d asked about her ankle a number of times, both to her and Alya, and every time he looked like he wanted to say something else but eventually opted not to. Marinette feared for a second that he might have found her out.
But that was impossible, right?
So Marinette’s best conclusion is that she did something to him. she can’t for the life of her figure out what exactly, but she must have offended him somehow, and he’s just too nice to confront her about it.
She keeps trying to work up the courage to talk to him about it, but then something else happens: Chat Noir starts showing up at her house. It should tick her off that he knows where she lives, should have ticked her off since that first time they ever met with her out of costume, that he knew, but she’s too dumbstruck to fixate upon that fact the first time it happens.
“Hello there, Princess.” He greets that night, being his usual flirty self, a trait of his that seems to have receded when they interact in costume, and she doesn’t know whether to be thankful or worried about it. She likes Chat, trusts him with everything but her identity, and some nights she even wishes she could reciprocate her feelings, if only to let go of her crush on Adrien that now seems so hopeless.
But Adrien is kind, kind enough to refuse her offer to change the pigeon feathers on her hat so they wouldn’t trigger his allergies; talks (talked) to her even though she’s a clumsy awkward mess who can’t talk in front of him and doesn’t even have the courage to tell him about the only birthday present he received that year, and he’s so beautiful. He’s not even handsome like she likes to call him sometimes, he’s downright beautiful, so much you feel prettier just looking at him. How can she not love him?
Chat makes it easy to forget about all her dilemmas when he visits her. He asks her about her life without offering too much in return, mindful of his identity, and she’s glad to be able to tell him things and not worry that he’s going to find her out, that he’s going to see the girl behind the mask and his cheeky smile will turn into a disappointed grimace, that he’s going to say “gotta go!” and hurry away from her like she’s got the plague.
These days Chat hangs out for so long he's nearly falling asleep on her roof. Marinette chastises him, but ultimately lets it go, because it’s nice to have someone seek her out for who she is –not that Alya and her friends from the collegè don’t, but there is so much she can’t tell them, and they’re all so busy with their own stuff, Marinette feels bad just thinking about burdening them with her own problems.
Besides, talking to Chat has helped her put many things into perspective. Talking to Chat out of costume reminds her that there’s a person behind that mask, and it ultimately leads her to think that there’s someone she’s not actually treated as a person until then: Adrien. He’s been this dream of her, this perfect boy that she likes, and she’s failed to see the boy behind the model. Adrien is lonely and a little bit shy, Marinette realizes, and it only makes her sadder that he’s drawn away from her. He likes phyisics, and sometimes he makes really awful jokes, only comparable to Chat’s, and only when he thinks that no one but Nino is paying attention.
In lieu of those discoveries, it dawns on Marinette how much of a fangirl she’s been and, slowly, almost painfully, she starts stripping her room of most of the stuff related to him. The photos go first, safely kept into the box she made for her diary. The pull down is next, erased to make way for her own schedule of the week. It’s both hard and easy, because she knows everything about him yet doesn’t really know him at all.
A few days after she’s done that, roughly three months since Chat started showing up and Adrien started avoiding her, she finally builds up the confidence she needs to confront the second.
With a slightly stronger voice than necessary, and thankfully not stuttering as much as she uses to, Marinete Asks Adrien if maybe she could talk to him. Avoiding her eyes, her classmate agrees.
“A-Adrien,” she addresses him once they find an empty classroom to talk in. One of his hands is scratching the back of his neck, where his hair ends, and Marinette fights the urge to reach out and touch his hair. “I- I need to ask you something…” she stammers, drawing the boy’s eyes from the floor to her face.
“What… What is it Marinette?”
“I-I just…” she sucks in a breath, mentally cheering herself. I can do this. “You… You’ve been –I think you’ve been avoiding me.. And, well, y-you don’t have to tell me o-or anything… but i.. I didn’t want to embarrass you so I asked you to come here and… well, I wanted… to know why, if I did anything t-to you or said something… I just.. wanted to apologize if I had to and… I-I’m sorry Adrien!” she finishes lamely. She’s already chastising herself for all her stuttering and trailing off, looking down to her shoes to try and hide her embarassment.
Suddenly, there’s a warm, big hand on her shoulder, and Marinette looks up to find Adrien giving her a shy smile, his other hand still behind his neck. There’s a blush crossing his cheeks, mirroring her own, and Marinette thinks he’s never quite looked so beautiful.
“Marinette, I…”he starts, but is interrupted by a scream. They both jump, running towards the window to see what the commotion is all about. She plasters her face to the window, feeling Adrien hovering behind her. She squeals a little inside, but the threat of an akuma attack pushes the thought away. Indeed, floating on the hallway is a woman in a pantsuit, holding an oversized ruler.
“You wanted to get out of class early? Well now you’ve got detention!” The lady screams, swinging her ruler. A second after, the doors in the hallway open and close with a bang, and when Adrien runs to test the one in their classroom, it won’t budge.
“We need to get out of here!” he exclaims, quickly scanning the room for exits. They’re on a third floor without a second entrance or a closet to transform at. The halls are deserted enough that Marinette could transform without a worry, but there’s Adrien, looking at her expectantly.
“A-are you okay?” she asks him, walking close to him. Adrien is staring intently at her, a troubled look crossing his face. He nods, taking his bag from where it lays discarded upon a desk. He runs to the window to check it out one more time.
“Marinette, we don’t have time, I…” he hesitates, gripping the cord of his bag more tightly. “ I know. I didn’t want you to find out like that but… we need Ladybug.”
Marinette is positively shocked. If a fly tried to enter her mouth right then, it would probably get away with it. And then the impossible happens:
“Oh, and by the way…” he adds, directing her an apologetic smile: “Plagg! Transform me!”