Chapter Text
Opia (n. the ambiguous intensity of looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable)
There are no secrets between them.
It’s a promise they make when they’re eight and Alya spends the night for the first time, solidified by clasped pinkies and hushed whispers since it’s long after Sabine had turned out the lights. Alya was the one to propose the pact, eyes catching the moonlight and flashing golden-brown as she rolled over in her sleeping bag to face Marinette. “So I guess this means we’re best friends now, huh?”
Warmth blooms in Marinette’s chest, bubbly, exhilarating and giddy . “I guess it does,” she whispers, matching Alya’s grin. Then she pauses. “What makes a best friend different from a friend?”
“I-” Alya’s mouth opens and closes once. “...don’t know.” She props her hand on her elbow as she considers. “I suppose that,” her gaze falls back on Marinette, “Best friends don’t keep secrets.”
She sits up on her knees and extends out a pinkie solemnly. “Do you, Marinette, promise never to keep a secret from me?”
Marinette holds back her giggle as she sits up on her knees as well. “I promise,” she says, reaching out to lock pinkies.
Alya, however, pulls her hand back. “You have to ask me too, silly.”
She smiles sheepishly. “Oh, right.” Clearing her throat, she tries to imitate the gravity in Alya’s voice. “Do you, Alya, promise never to keep a secret from me?”
“I promise.” Her pinkie hooks around hers and squeezes. For a moment, her face is more serious than Marinette has ever seen. Then a wide smile breaks out. “ Now we’re best friends.”
And that was that.
The promise becomes the foundation of their friendship and from it forms a mountain of memories, six years of spending afternoons doing their homework in Marinette’s bakery, communicating with knowing looks only the other understood and having late-night conversations that ended when someone started snoring.
But like the snowflake that touches off an avalanche, Tikki’s arrival in Marinette’s life changes everything.
Marinette pants slightly as she lands on her balcony and the transformation releases in flash of dazzling light; the little kwami hovers in front of her face, wearing an eager smile. “So what did you think?”
Her lips purse together as she runs through the afternoon in her mind, watching night creep across Paris. Meeting Fu hadn’t been illuminating as much as it was perplexing; the only thing that had really been explained was her role in defending the city.
Well, her and Chat Noir’s. She still wasn’t sure what to think of her companion (partner? she didn’t think the hideous mix-up with her yo-yo and his baton qualified them as a workable team yet.) But the glowing feeling of using Miraculous Ladybug, of watching the world right itself and of knowing she had a hand in it was one she wanted to experience again.
“I think,” she says finally, “That I am going to like this a lot.”
Tikki chirps happily as she flies to rest on Marinette’s shoulder. “I knew as soon as I saw you that you were the perfect girl to be Ladybug.”
“Really?” She turns her head to glance at the kwami. “I’m not su-”
Her phone buzzing in her pocket interrupts her; she unlocks it to find nine text messages from Alya, five missed phone calls and one email from her labeled “URGENT!!!”
Marinette reads the email first, sense of dread increasing as she looks down at a link for a website named Ladyblog. She opens it and is immediately greeted by a picture of her and Chat Noir fist bumping after they captured the akuma.
“Oh no.” She scrolls down to find more pictures of her and Chat fighting the Gravitator aka their physics teacher, Ms. Mendeleiev, and a long article introducing the blog and its goal of “unmasking the mystery of Paris’ new crusaders.” She reads the article once and then again and again as she walks into her room, deflating more and more before flopping face-first on her bed. “Oh no .”
From their days of playing detective and finding who had taken the last macaron, she’d known Alya never backed down from a good mystery and true to form, she had bolted up to Ladybug right after gravity had returned to normal, raining down a deluge of questions on her. She’d managed to dodge them but had taken a selfie with her, unable to say no to her best friend even as Ladybug.
Briefly, she wonders why Alya hasn’t posted it before it occurs to her that she may have printed it out and hung it next to the boy band posters on her wall.
She pulls a pillow over her head and groans. The thought of her best friend idolizing her slightly nauseates her.
“It’s not that bad, you know.” Tikki’s voice floats from somewhere above her head. “Lots of people have tried to find out Ladybug’s identity over the years.”
Marinette rolls over and pushes the pillow from her face. “Yes, but have any of those people ever been Ladybug’s best friend?”
Tikki doesn’t answer her but flits down to nuzzle her cheek.
Marinette rubs the kwami’s head gently as she stares up at the ceiling, the question of whether she can tell Alya the truth dying on her lips. Fu had been very clear on that point too.
For the first time since they began the tradition, she doesn’t answer Alya when she calls to say good night.