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“How do you fight like this?!”
“I’m a teenage boy. It’s either learn to do everything like that or perish.”
“I wasn’t even talking about the erection!”
“It’s… so weird that you call it that.”
“Okay, Chat, why don’t you tell me what you call it with all the people you talk about your penis with?”
“Touché, My Lady, touché. If that’s not what you’re referring to, then…”
“Everything is even louder now that I’ve transformed!”
He snorts. Maybe she should stop shouting. “Yeah… you’re a cat.”
Her lower lip wobbles. “I thought the super-hearing before was a side effect from the miraculous.”
“What? I mean, sure, Plagg makes my hearing better, but only when I’m transformed.”
“So things have always been that loud for you?”
He grimaces, certain she’ll hate the answer, but, “…Unless I’m dissociating.”
“Oh my gods. …I cannot deal with that right now. I already need a nap. Let’s go.”
And then, as soon as they shimmy out the window high in the wall of the closet, “How are things also brighter?!”
“Again, cat! Didn’t you notice anything change when you were Lady Noire?”
“Yeah, all the things I noticed being in your body before I transformed.”
He looks his body up and down. “…All the things?”
“Chat!”
🐈⬛ 🐞
She wasn’t kidding about the headache.
He casts the cure and slams back into his own body before the Ladybugs heal the stress headache she developed while they were swapped.
It only lasts a couple of seconds before the loveliness wipes that away too, but he’s still rubbing his temples when his Lady slams her body into his and crushes him in a hug.
Oof.
He melts a little, wraps his arms around her significantly less firmly, rests his cheek on her hair.
“Meet me at the bakery,” she whispers against the magic leather on his chest, quieter than she’s ever spoken to him before, and then she’s letting go and bounding away before he can respond that they still definitely have school.
He sighs.
She’d said bakery, so he finds somewhere near there to detransform and walks in the front door.
“AdrienandIaregoingtotalkupstairs,” and Marinette is grabbing his arm and pulling him past the baked goods (and her parents) before he can even look at a display case, “seeyoulaterbye!”
“Ah, hello, Mada—“ Adrien still tries to be polite, waving to Madam Chang on the way by, but the door to the stairs closes too fast for his greeting and then his lady is dragging him even faster, loosing all pretense of moving like she’s a mere mortal or even slightly worried about yanking his shoulder out of socket.
Several flights of stairs later he finds himself in one of her desk chairs.
He rubs his shoulder.
He’s had many many fantasies that start with being dragged to Ladybug’s or Marinette’s room (even a few with them both, which might be the only disappointing thing about this reveal) but none of them involved having pink stationary shoved into his hands.
“We’re making a list,” she says, slamming a hand down on her desk, but then she flinches, “Sorry!” She flinches again, and says, quieter, “Sorry.” She sighs. “Start with loud sounds and some perfumes.”
He begins to write, but, “What is this list for?”
“It’s everything that makes you uncomfortable.”
Oh, well then the loud sounds and perfume make perfect sense, except… “…Why?”
“So we can fix it, of course.”
Of course.
He fiddles with the fuzzy pink pen.
“Kid, she didn’t mean it like that.”
He flinches at Plagg’s voice, suddenly close to his ear—he’d completely forgotten that Plagg and Tikki could come out now.
Is it weird that that’ll take more of an adjustment than thinking of Ladybug and Marinette as one person?
“What does Plagg mean? How did you think I meant it?”
“It’s just—you can’t fix the way that things bother me, My Lady.”
“I—that’s not—of course not, Chatton.” She touches his cheek, urges him to tilt his head up. “I mean we were going to fix the things, not you.”
And he’d thought he’d been in love with her before.
He doesn’t quite trust his voice, so he shifts the pen and notebook into one hand and uses the other to slide up her arm.
Her face reddens but she just keeps blinking down at him, even as he tugs her closer, trails his hand to her shoulder to her back down to her hip, pulls her all the way into his lap.
She has, several times in the past, sat in Chat Noir’s lap for various Akuma related reasons—usually while they’re balanced on the tip of his baton, high above the city.
He thinks that it’s much more pleasant now that he knows there was never another boy, and it had been distractinglypleasant before, but the tint of her cheeks and her suddenly avoiding eye contact helps him find his voice, “Is this alright, Marinette?”
She looks back into his eyes and her lip wobbles. “Nothing is alright, Adrien!”
And he takes his hands off of her immediately, resisting the reflexive urge to push her off his lap, but then she’s flinging her arms around his shoulders and burying her face in his neck, almost knocking them off balance, and he thinks they might have been talking about different things.
He wraps his arms around her and plants his feet more firmly so that her next sudden movement won’t throw them to the floor.
“I’m supposed to be able to tell when you’re upset. How did I miss so much?”
“…Which of me are you refurring to?”
She sniffles instead of chuckling, but there’s a puff of air that he chooses to interpret as amusement. “Both of you, actually.”
He hums, considering. “Well, I don’t think I have a sensory processing disorder as Chat, for one. The suit helps filter things. And, um, you are very good at noticing when new things or changes make Adrien uncomfortable. But this isn’t new or a change for me. You just weren’t prepared to handle it.”
She leans back enough to frown at him. “The perfume is new.”
He shakes his head. “Alya’s perfume is new. Some scents bothering me is not.”
She makes a sound of frustration and bounces in his lap which is very new and he’s not sure what his face does but then her eyes go wide and she flushes crimson about it before flinging herself into her other desk chair, snatching back the stationary and beginning to write.
“…Okay, so, um, what spents, scentifically? I mean, what scents specifically?”