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Sometimes Adrien wishes he could get out of the habit of taking whatever he's being handed before he actually looks at it. It's a reflex borne of his long years modeling, and it served him well then, but now that he's a regular person – or, as close as he can be, given that he only quit a few years ago – it gets him into trouble more often than not. There are a few autographs floating around on eBay which were scrawled out on menus or someone's electromagnetic theory coursework or action figures from the one voice-acting gig Adrien did when he was a teenager. He's lived through entire parties holding a drink that someone pressed into his hand that he didn't want, and refused to try – who knows what was in that glass? Not Adrien, and he didn't want to find out the hard way.
Still. This is probably the weirdest thing someone's just handed him.
Tarnished and battered and grimy with age, it's an ancient lamp that looks like it's made of copper, the kind people used to put oil in when oil lamps were all they had; it's about the length of his hand, with a nozzle at the front and a ring in the back that was probably used to carry it around at night. Adrien stares down at the battered thing, speechless and very confused, and then he lifts his head to stare at the guy who pushed it into his hands.
But he's gone.
The street is full of people, but it's not that crowded; Adrien should still be able to see the guy walking away. He goes up onto his tiptoes to look over peoples' heads, but there's no sign of him.
There's nothing.
Adrien rocks back onto his heels, looks down at the lamp in his hand, and sighs. It's tempting to leave it on the next corner, balanced in the shop window, free to anyone who wants their very own reproduction oil lamp. But there's just the outside possibility that it's stolen goods or something, which means that he should hand it in to the police as lost property.
And he's never been very good at ignoring what he should do, even if he doesn't want to do it.
Something for therapy, Adrien tells himself, and opens his satchel and nestles the lamp inside. His fingers slide over the side as he pulls his hand out, and Adrien rubs them together, wincing, hoping that he hasn't gotten his hand dirty.
But he can't feel anything.
Adrien shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets, turning around to head for his statistical thermodynamics class. He puts the whole encounter out of his mind, dismissing it as the weirdness that happens sometimes when one lives in a big city.
At least, he does until he gets back to his apartment that evening and finds a dark-haired woman lounging on his couch. She's wearing casual clothes, a tank top and jeans, and no shoes, showcasing toes painted scarlet red.
Sadly, this isn't the first time this has happened.
Adrien sighs, going back to his front door and opening it wide. "If you leave now, I won't call the cops," he says. For some reason, he's suddenly tired beyond belief.
"I wish I could," the girl says without moving a centimeter. "What year is this?"
Oh. She's not all there, is she? Adrien groans on the inside. That's going to make this way more difficult. He palms his phone, holding it downward and beside his thigh where she hopefully can't see it, and dials emergency services. "2024," he says cautiously. "What year do you think it is?"
She grins, her head tipping back against the armrest. "That's not it. I just didn't know when I was, you know?" She rolls her head to the side to look at Adrien, giving him a flash of laughing eyes bluer than the Mediterranean. "You have no idea what's going on, do you?"
The tiny voice of the operator lets Adrien know that he's connected, and he needs to somehow tell them what's wrong without alerting the fangirl; at the same time, he's ensnared and caught in the self-assured amusement lying deep in her eyes. "No," he says slowly. "Why don't you tell me what's going on? Why are you in my apartment?"
"You rubbed my lamp, pretty boy," she says, her mouth curling in an irrepressible grin. "And until you've made your three wishes, that means I'm all yours."
She lifts a casual hand and snaps her fingers at his phone. Adrien looks down to find the line disconnected, his phone flashing the call time at him, as though he wasn't perfectly aware that he'd been on the line for all of twenty seconds.
"What the fuck?" Adrien breathes.
She tosses her head back and laughs out loud, a long sound, one that echoes around his normally quiet apartment. "I love freaking you guys out," she says slyly, smiling at him. "I don't suppose you've got a list of wishes you've been thinking about for ever and ever, have you? Some people do. It makes this part go really fast."
"No," Adrien says warily. If this were four years ago, when he was still being homeschooled under his father's thumb, then maybe. All he'd wanted was to get out of that house, to have a friend or two who cared about him, to be able to make his own choices.
He has all of that now. All of his teenaged wishes have come true.
Huh. Adrien hadn't actually realized that until today.
He swallows, looking at the nameless woman, who's watching him with amused and expectant eyes. "No," he says, as he shifts his thumb slightly to hit the call button again to redial his last number. "I'm pretty happy with my life the way it is."
"Lucky man," she says softly. The look in her ocean eyes hasn't changed, not at all, but something about her seems so much older now, like she's ossifying right in front of him. "I'm sure you'll think of something, though. They always do. And you can stop trying to call for help," she says, snapping her fingers again. Adrien looks down to see that the call's dropped again. "No one can see me except the person who has my lamp. That's you."
Adrien doesn't know what did it – the second phone call dropped for no reason he can find, her missing shoes which are nowhere in this room that he can see, or that strangely weary look in her eyes – but something in him has shifted from utter disbelief to...
Maybe.
It's nothing more than a possibility, but even acknowledging the possibility makes wonder well up inside of him. Adrien has always wanted there to be more to the universe than what he could see, what he could touch, and this feels like a window that looks out over a place where everything he's ever read about or dreamed of could be real.
Adrien glances out into the hallway, suddenly wary that someone's heard them talking, but there's no one there. He closes the door and turns to face the woman, nervous and indecisive. He can't believe he's giving this any thought at all, but somehow Adrien can't help it.
He swallows. "Can you prove you're... That you're what you say you are?"
"Wish-based economy, pretty boy," the woman says, stretching her whole body from her arms to the tip of her toes. "I can't do anything for you without one." She turns on her side, tucking both hands under her cheek and looking at Adrien with thoughtful eyes. "You can't even bring yourself to say the word out loud, can you?"
"What word?" he asks instantly.
It's stupid. Adrien knows what she means. But if he can get her to say it first, then he won't make an idiot out of himself by naming the impossible thing.
She gives him a lazy smile, a little crooked, her cheek squashed by her hands. "I'm Marinette," she says. "That's what you wanted to know, right?"
It wasn't – but after a pair of cops knock on Adrien's door to check out his emergency call and in the process of checking on him, they completely fail to see Marinette, even after she saunters behind them and makes bunny ears behind their heads –
Adrien's a believer.
———
After breakfast the next morning – Adrien has no idea where Marinette slept, if she sleeps at all, and he has no intention of asking – Adrien's washing up the dishes by hand as she leans over the kitchen island and watches him do it with every evidence of being reluctantly fascinated.
Adrien has never found this particularly interesting, but who knows what she's used to?
"You know," Marinette says after a while, and just when Adrien is cocking his ear to listen to the rest of what she has to say, she completely fails to follow up on it.
Adrien really wants to ignore the dangling conversational gambit, but he's way too curious about what she has to say. It should be illegal to leave people hanging that way. Asking makes it completely obvious that Adrien's invested.
(Which he is. Damn it.)
Adrien gives up the silent war with a mental grumble. "What?" he asks. He manages to keep his eyes on the glass he's scrubbing clean instead of turning to look at her.
"Most people have made a wish by now," she says curiously. "Why haven't you?"
"I told you," he says, shrugging. He sets the glass in the drying rack and turns to the few plates they used. "I'm happy with my life. I don't really need anything, and if I did, I'd rather work on that myself. Where else am I going to get a sense of pride and accomplishment?" Adrien looks over his shoulder to give her a grin. She's just watching him, her eyes narrowed. "You picked the wrong person, I think."
"I'm not the one who chooses who gets the lamp," Marinette says with a sigh.
Adrien's hands slow as his attention goes very firmly to his houseguest. That's right, he remembers – there was a guy who'd shoved the lamp into his hands. And he just handed it over without even making sure that Adrien was the right person. What if he was an asshole? Adrien can think of several reasons he wouldn't want to entrust something like the lamp to people without good motives, and that's not even considering the fact that Marinette is a beautiful woman, who seems to be dependent on him for things like shelter and food.
He would like to have words with someone about their vetting process. It seems insufficient.
Adrien drops the sponge in the sink for later and turns around, wiping his hands on a dishcloth. "If not you, then who?" he asks.
"It's really not important," Marinette says with a smile that doesn't reach her eyes. "You've got to want something. It could be as simple as those dishes washing themselves."
"I have a dishwasher," Adrien tells her, laughing when her eyes go wide with surprise. "I like cleaning. It's simple, and at the end you have something to show for it. You really want me to make a wish, don't you?"
She shrugs, leaning back to stand upright. It's a retreat, Adrien realizes, his eyes narrowing slightly. "I want to get out of here," she says carefully.
Marinette is hiding something.
Adrien lets his mind range over all the stories he knows about wishes and their consequences, and it's not that difficult to spot a common thread between them: the monkey paw curls, the wish is twisted. Those who wish for things they haven't earned learn to regret it. Whether it applies here, whether this is what she's hiding? That's a question Adrien thinks he needs an answer for.
He doubts that she would tell him if he asked. But that's not the only way to find out, is it?
And Adrien can't help the reckless, exhilarating urge to put himself up against the intellectual challenge of a lifetime. Can he outwit someone who's undoubtedly heard it all before?
Adrien tosses the dishcloth aside and crosses his arms over his chest, looking Marinette directly in the eye. "All right," he says, smiling at her. "My first wish..."
He knows what he wants to happen. The only question is how to say it, how to phrase it, so that Marinette can't make it boomerang back on him. Adrien mulls over his words for a few minutes, trying to idiot-proof the concept, but in the end, he falls back on simplicity.
"I wish for someone in this building to have a good day," he says, and smiles.
Surprise flashes over Marinette's face, her eyes widening, just a little, before she gets her face under control and raises her eyebrows sarcastically. "That's it?"
"That's it." Adrien has to work hard to hide his laughter at the disgruntled look that comes into her eyes.
"Someone in this building – that could be anyone," Marinette protests. "It doesn't work as proof if you never know whether I actually did it. I could sit on my ass and do nothing and someone's probably going to have a good day. Don't you want to make a wish you can see?"
"But you won't sit on your ass and do nothing, will you?" Adrien says, leaning forward slightly to look deeper into her eyes. "That's the deal. I make the wish, and you grant it. That's what you wanted. You didn't say the wish had to do anything for me."
Adrien's enjoying himself too much. That's going to come back to haunt him, probably –
But he can't stop.
She groans and grumbles and tries to talk Adrien into making another wish, one that's more selfish; but Adrien can be incredibly stubborn when he wants to be, and he lets Marinette wear herself out against his certainty and his amusement and the way that he's enjoying arguing with her. In the end, when Marinette realizes that he's not changing his mind, she sighs and snaps her fingers. "There. The girl in 2B is going to get a job she didn't think she was qualified for."
Marinette turns away from him, like she can't bear to look at his smug face anymore – but Adrien catches the sweet edge to her smile she's trying to hide. She liked that, he realizes, a thrill of excitement settling in his stomach. Was it the argument? Or was it the chance to do something kind?
He's more convinced than ever that he's right, that Marinette wants him to make selfish wishes she can twist into the sorts of bad ends he's read in myths and comic books. There's nothing stopping her from doing that to selfless wishes, too, like the one he made – it would have been easy enough to give someone's pet a good day, for example, or to pick someone who works second shift who's going to sleep around now so that their 'day' was short and his wish was essentially wasted – but Adrien has a sneaking suspicion that Marinette doesn't have a lot of experience with people who make wishes for other people.
It's terrible of him to take advantage of her like this, but that little flicker of a smile makes Adrien feel a whole lot better about it. Maybe Marinette wants to help, but she doesn't get the opportunity very often.
He likes the possibility, anyway, and the challenge wrapped up inside of it.
"Come on," Adrien says, pushing off from where he's leaning against the sink. "I've got to get to optical physics. You might as well come with me."
Marinette turns back to him, her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open in surprise. "What?"
"I've got to get to class," Adrien repeats. He snags his bag and heaves it over his shoulder to illustrate the point. "Do you want to come?"
She bites her full lower lip and then lets it slide free of her teeth, which captures Adrien's attention so thoroughly that he's surprised when she speaks. "You're letting me go outside?"
It takes Adrien a few moments to understand the question, and once he does, anger roars so high inside of his chest that he finds he's grinding his teeth. Can one of his wishes be to find all of the previous holders of her lamp and beat some decency into them?
Adrien forces himself to take a deep, calming breath – or two – and holds his hand out to Marinette. "If you want to," he says gently. "You'll probably sleep through class, since we're hip-deep in Bell's inequalities, but that doesn't mean you can't come. As far as I'm concerned, you can do anything you want."
"I can't go anywhere without you, or the lamp," Marinette murmurs, looking at his hand with a hesitant, lingering doubt that is making Adrien think that people have told her this before, only to withdraw it or treat her in some horrible way. What else would make her mistrust an offer like this?
It's breaking his heart.
"Come on," Adrien repeats appealingly, giving Marinette his softest smile, giving her the time and space to make up her mind. He doesn't care if he's late. Adrien will wait for her forever if it means Marinette might trust him. "Come see Paris. How long has it been?"
She chews on her lip again, hesitant and thinking hard, but eventually, finally, she comes to him and takes his hand. Adrien wants to punch the air and shout in joy, but somehow he manages to act like a normal human being. "About three hundred years," Marinette says, looking up at him, traces of wariness still lying in her eyes.
"I can't say the smell has improved," Adrien tells her, grinning. "But I think there's more glass, so it's probably a lot shinier."
Marinette laughs, seeming surprised by herself, and lets Adrien tug her out of his apartment so he can show her the city. They get caught up in looking at buildings and people having coffee at tiny outdoor tables at the cafés and the bright and colorful posters on every available flat wall, until Adrien remembers that he really is going to be late to class and he likes this one. They run the rest of the way to his university, even though Marinette's still in bare feet – Adrien makes a note to buy her some shoes later – and he slams into the classroom at one minute to the lecture starting, earning him a glare from the TA.
Marinette doesn't sleep through his class, after all. She's too busy looking at everything: the scrawled equations laid out on the board, climbing the windowsill to plaster her face against the small and cloudy classroom windows and look at Paris's skyline, examining his fellow classmates's clothes with more interest than she's shown in anything else so far.
She continues to watch everything with poorly hidden fascination in her eyes, even after Adrien decides against going back to his apartment and gets them lunch at a small café nearby, even after he takes her to a nearby secondhand market and they wander around for hours and hours just looking at what's available.
He'd meant for her to pick out some clothes, and more importantly, some shoes, but Marinette shakes her head. "Thanks, but I don't need them. I'm immortal, I don't get hurt, and I can change my clothing to whatever I want," she says with a smile softer than anything else she's given him so far. "Don't worry about me, all right?"
Adrien is finding that easier said than done.
He was planning on making quiche for dinner tonight, because he's finding that leftovers are one of the greatest ways to keep from having to cook all the time and Alya was happy to teach him some of her mom's recipes; that will feed two with a side, so Adrien plumbs the depths of his fridge and finds enough for a pea salad. That works.
"You don't have to cook for me," Marinette says uncertainly from her spot at the kitchen island. She seems to have claimed that spot as her own.
Adrien shrugs. "I'd be cooking for me anyway. It's just as easy to cook for two as it is for one."
"No, I mean..." The hesitant note in Marinette's voice makes Adrien spin around to look at her. She meets his eyes, but it seems like it's a struggle. "You have to know by now that I have to do as you say. Why aren't you making me do it?"
He scowls. "Can one of my wishes be beating up whoever made these stupid rules?"
Marinette's laugh is just as beautiful as she is. "I don't think I can snap that into existence," she says when she's calmed again, though there's a huge smile on her face.
"Here," Adrien says, digging his phone out of his pocket. He pulls up a search engine and gives it to Marinette. "Do me a favor and look up slavery."
He goes back to the quiche while she's doing that. If Adrien lets out some of his pent-up anger on whisking the eggs, no one will ever know but him. He's pouring it into the pan when he hears Marinette set his phone down on the countertop. "And you agree with this?" she asks, her voice high with distress. "That it's wrong?"
Adrien is just scraping the last of the eggs into the pan, so he forces himself to finish that before he drops everything and heads around the island to Marinette's side, though he's too cowardly to take her hands the way that he wants to. Instead, he crouches so he can look up into Marinette's eyes, which look more blue than ever, shining with repressed tears.
"No one should ever be someone's property," Adrien tells her with so much force in his voice that it kind of hurts. "Just the idea of it is disgusting. Isn't there any way to break your lamp or something?"
Marinette looks like she's about to cry. Her eyebrows are pulled together, her forehead creased with emotion or deep thought. After a few moments, she lifts her hand and touches Adrien's cheek very, very gently. She's so quiet that Adrien is really starting to think that he did something wrong, that he broke her.
Her eyes are on Adrien, but she's not looking at him, not really.
Out of nowhere, she sighs, her mouth firming into a decisive line. "No," Marinette says, her voice flat. "No, there isn't. So don't try that thing where you wish me free of it, all right? Don't waste your wishes that way."
His heart clenches painfully in his chest at the thought of this fascinating, beautiful woman trapped in the lamp for the rest of time, for ever and ever, having to deal with whoever they decide to give her to, no choice in the matter, no freedom...
The oven dings to let them know it's preheated, and as though she's grasping at an excuse to get away, Marinette slides off the stool and rounds the island to put the quiche in the oven. Adrien looks after her thoughtfully.
There's something about her right now that he can't put his finger on – something about the way she's avoiding his eyes, the way her shoulders seem to be slightly higher than they were.
Would she lie to him? About this?
Adrien's train of thought is interrupted when Marinette stares hard at the empty countertop and a pile of halved, pitted cherries and a bowl of something that looks like cream appears in front of her. "Hey," Adrien says, affronted. "I said I didn't want you cooking for me."
Marinette gives him a narrow-eyed glance over her shoulder, half challenge, all laughter. "What if it's my choice? Are you going to tell me to stop?"
His father would have had ten kinds of fits at the very unattractive way that his jaw drops. "No," Adrien sputters, "But – but – "
"But nothing." Marinette interrupts him without mercy and smiles at him before she turns back to the ingredients. "I want to do this, okay?" she admits in a soft voice as she sorts through the cherries. "I haven't had this in a really long time, and I want to share it with you."
In that moment, Adrien would give her anything in his power to give.
"Okay," he says, when he's sure his voice will hold.
And when Marinette brings the cherry clafoutis out to the table with a luminous smile on her face, Adrien has to admit to himself that if he's not very, very careful, part of him is going to go with her when she leaves. Maybe the best part of him.
It's going to hurt.
But what does that matter? Adrien has been hurt before – and he also knows that if he lets that get in the way of whatever time he has left with Marinette, he'll regret it even more.
He makes sure that he's his most charming and hilarious self over their food, and Adrien is rewarded by the sight of Marinette laughing, with shining eyes and the brightest smile he's ever seen on her. And she's funny, too – god is she funny. She can keep up with him, which almost no one has ever been able to do. Adrien's never laughed like this in his life.
It's one of the best nights he's ever had, period.
After dinner, he tosses Marinette a controller and teaches her how to play UMS. She's not bad for someone who's never seen a video game before, and once she starts to remember where the buttons are, she gets a lot better, very quickly. She never quite beats him, but she comes closer than she should for someone who's been playing for all of an hour.
That night, as Adrien lies in bed staring at the dark ceiling above him, he thinks about what Marinette said to him, about her not being worth his wishes. And he thinks about the fierce and brilliant light in her eyes when she was trying to slaughter him in UMS, and the sweetness in her smile when Adrien nearly inhaled his clafoutis and licked his plate clean, and the way that she'd pressed her face to the window to look out over Paris and soak it in like the light from the sun.
She's wrong. She's so fucking wrong that Adrien is kind of offended she'd ever think she wasn't worth his wishes.
Marinette is worth everything.
(God, he really, really hopes she was lying to him.)
And for the rest of the night, Adrien sets about crafting two more foolproof wishes.
———
Adrien is nursing a cup of coffee at the kitchen island when Marinette stumbles out of the guest bedroom, her hair a dark cloud and her eyes bleary. He pushes another mug toward her and she fills it up silently, shoving herself into her chair with no grace at all as she marinates in the caffeine-infused steam from her coffee.
"How did you survive before coffee?" he asks curiously.
She groans a little and cracks an eye open to look balefully at him. "Coffee's not the only thing with caffeine in it," Marinette mutters. She takes a healthy gulp of her cup. "It is more effective, though. I'm so glad humans started trading globally."
"I bet," Adrien murmurs, watching her come back to life with amusement he's careful to keep hidden. Once she's more or less upright and the coffee is gone, he pushes his own mug away and leans his elbows on the island. "I figured out my other wishes."
He hadn't realized that there was a faint smile on her face until now, until it slides away. Adrien doesn't want to hurt her – god, that's the last thing he wants – but he doesn't want her trying to stop him, either. He feels like he has to go about this the long way; all the stories say that there's power in threes, and the third wish should therefore be the most powerful of them all. And if he's right, he's going to need that power.
"Of course," Marinette says, her voice even, perfectly pleasant. She lifts her eyes to look at him at last. Adrien winces at the flat look in them. "What would you like?"
Adrien takes a deep breath, mentally begging for his shitty luck to fuck off for the next five minutes.
"I wish that my father would find something that makes him truly content, at last," Adrien says, watching Marinette carefully. If she can twist this wish into being the opposite of what he means, well, Adrien can't say that his father doesn't deserve it after years of treating Adrien as his own personal doll.
But Marinette's giving him a look of aggrieved disbelief, and Adrien smiles at her, his spirits rising to a fever pitch. If that worked, then –
She sighs and snaps her fingers. "There. He's going to realize that assistant of his is pretty in about, I don't know, twenty minutes. After that, they're on their own. I can't manufacture real love and I refuse to try."
"Really?" Adrien asks, unexpectedly charmed. "Nathalie? I didn't think he was ever going to admit that out loud. I suppose it would have taken magic to make it happen." He grins at her, trying to cheer her up and get her to give him that smile again, but she refuses to be cheered. Instead, Marinette looks at him from under her thick bangs with eyes that have seen too much.
It's like she's already saying goodbye.
"You've got to wish for something for yourself eventually, you know," she says softly.
Adrien swallows.
"You're right," he admits, rubbing his slightly sweaty palms on his thighs. He takes a deep breath.
Please let this work, he prays.
"I wish you were free to live your happiest life," Adrien tells her in a rush, before she can stop him. Marinette's half out of her chair already, her hands outstretched to cover his mouth, and he takes her by the wrists and eases her into standing in front of him. She's got tears in her eyes as she makes a fist and hits him in the chest with it.
"Why would you do that?" Marinette cries. "I'm not worth it!"
"Yes, you are," Adrien says gently. "I don't know why you think so, but you're wrong. You're worth way more than that, actually, and you deserve what you've given everyone else over all of these years: the freedom to be anyone you want to be. And happy. You deserve that, too."
Marinette wraps her arms around him in a hug so tight that Adrien wonders for a second if she's trying to strangle him. He leans down and hugs her back, breathing in the faintly floral scent of her skin and valiantly resisting the impulse to press his mouth to her neck to find out what she tastes like. "You were supposed to wish for something selfish," she whispers to him.
Adrien laughs, a bark of a sound that has more than a little darkness in it. "I did," he whispers back. "Marinette, I did. I need to know that you're out there, that you're happy. That's all I want."
She pulls away from him to search his eyes, her eyebrows drawing together, and Adrien lets her, though he'd rather hold her forever, or as long as he can until she has to go; does it have to be right away? Or can he have her for another day? Can he take Marinette on one last date and watch the wonder grow in her beautiful eyes as she soaks in modern Paris? Can he –
Marinette takes his face in her hands, leans in, and touches her mouth to his in a kiss so soft Adrien barely feels it. It swells, surges, growing in intensity and sweetness until Adrien is lost in Marinette and her pretty mouth, until there's no thoughts in his head other than her, until he can't tell where he stops and where she begins, like they're one person, one heart, one soul.
It's the best kiss he's ever had.
Until Marinette makes a soft, hurt noise against his mouth –
And snaps her fingers behind his back.
When Adrien opens his eyes, she's gone.
He knew it was coming – he just didn't know it would hurt like this.
Adrien closes his eyes, taking a long, deep breath through his nose, and waits and breathes steadily until the tears gathering behind his eyes fade away. Then he picks up the coffee mugs and turns toward the sink. Cleaning has never felt less enjoyable, but it still has to be done, doesn't it?
———
Three days later, Adrien is sick of himself, sick of his apartment, sick of the quiche he's still eating for lunches and the empty guest bed he couldn't bring himself to make. Everything reminds him of her. Adrien is starting to wonder if he's going to have to move.
He takes his optical physics book and heads to campus, where there's a little café tucked away in one corner of the quad that has comfortable chairs. Nobody usually bothers him there, and the people who work there are generally cool, so when someone sits down next to him, Adrien doesn't bother to look up. "I'm not interested, thanks."
"Really?" says a delicately pointed voice. "Because I was hoping – "
That voice –
It's familiar.
Adrien's head comes up so fast that his neck twinges. Marinette is sitting next to him, smiling at Adrien with a brilliant, sly happiness in her eyes that makes her seem like she's glowing. She's wearing jeans and a t-shirt, similar to before, though this time she is wearing shoes; she's got a bag with her, too. Adrien wouldn't have been able to tell her apart from any of the other college students if he hadn't known her.
He's aware that his jaw has dropped. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like he can do anything about that.
"How?!" he demands.
Marinette shrugs one diffident shoulder, but her smile grows even wider. "You were too good at phrasing those wishes, you know that? My happiest life. You absolute sap." She slides over to the side of her chair and reaches out, tangling her fingers in Adrien's. "I told them I wouldn't be happy without you. That's all."
He can't believe it. It's too good to be real. "Are you sure?" Adrien asks, his hand tightening on hers, like he's afraid someone's going to take her away from him. "You get to stay?"
"I get to stay," Marinette confirms, beaming at him. "I have a whole life set up for me. Though I am missing a few things, like friends... and a boyfriend. I was hoping you might know someone for the job."
Adrien laughs, the relief and happiness floating inside of him, making him feel light and free like he's never been before. "I think I might know someone," he murmurs, leaning toward her until their faces are only centimeters apart. "But I hope you know that he's taking the job for ever and ever."
Marinette grins at him, her eyes soft and happy. "Perfect."