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It's weird – it's so weird that Marinette rarely has study partners – but she's found that studying in a coffee shop or at the Trocadéro lets her focus. Something about the white noise of people living their lives blends together and distracts the part of her that gets distracted. It's like a magic trick.
Marinette switches places regularly: sometimes she goes to public parks or monuments, sometimes cafés, sometimes she sits on the edge of a fountain and watches people at one of the pop-up markets. Anything that has foot traffic is fair game, and since Marinette lives in Paris, she's spoiled for choice.
Today's perfect study location is a classic café near her apartment; she's monopolizing a two-person table near the back of the room as she plows through a pile of reading for her textiles class along with the fabric swatches that go with it. It's mid-afternoon, and the shop is busy. Marinette feels a little bad about taking up a whole table for herself, but the fabric swatches are a little unwieldy, and she really does need to have most of them spread out in front of her at any given time for her reading, so there's not much she can do to be more considerate.
Except order more coffee. Unfortunately, that way lies jittery and unfocused Marinette, which is sort of the opposite of the point. Maybe tea? They should have something herbal. Marinette lifts her head to check out the length of the line at the register and grimaces to find it six or seven people long. She doesn't want to leave her books for that long, and if she takes it all with her, she'll lose the table.
Marinette makes another face and tries to let it go; maybe the line will be shorter later, or Alya will be able to join her.
Her eyes catch on one of the people in line, the one dressed in very nice, fitted Hermes slacks and a t-shirt; he's the most colorful person in the room, with dreads in colorful pastels going all the way down to mid-back. The length, the colors, it all reminds Marinette of Mylène. How long has it been since they talked? She needs to check in with Mylène and Ivan and see how they are... Marinette grabs her phone and sends the message then and there, and afterward, she lays her phone next to her textbooks and tries to find her place again.
Something about the prickling on the back of her neck makes her look up again. The guy is watching her through thick, square-rimmed glasses, his head tilted slightly, like he's confused. Marinette frowns at him. He grimaces, mouthing something that Marinette can't make out, and then he rubs the back of his neck and turns away –
Why does that strike her as so familiar?
Now it's Marinette who's staring, staring, at the man moving up to the register. He's something like her age, tall enough that he has to lean over a little to talk to the cashier, but narrow at the hips like an athlete. His dreads slip forward over his shoulder when he does, and Marinette spots something climbing up his neck that might be a tattoo or might be his soulmark. It's impossible to say from here.
Hers wraps around her wrist, hidden beneath the long-sleeved shirts Marinette wears everywhere, like keeping it tucked away will keep her from thinking about it – or thinking about who it belongs to.
(Who she hopes it belongs to.)
She looks down at her wrist, her thoughts drifting as nostalgia takes hold and reminds her of her own mark. She's wearing her favorite shirt today, white with loops at the end of her sleeves to hook over her middle fingers to keep the sleeves where they ought to be. After she passed the bac, Marinette embroidered a garden at the end of the sleeves: wildflowers and weeds, all sorts of green and growing things, with one ladybug on each sleeve peeking around a flower or veiled in the tall grass. A secret, hidden in plain sight – if someone knows where to look.
It was to honor Tikki, of course, and she loved it, but Marinette had more than one reason to put the embroidery there; her soulmark is so brightly colored that sometimes it shows through her shirts if she doesn't cover it somehow. She touches the little ladybug on her right wrist and smiles down at her bag, where Tikki is sleeping, before she sighs and looks up again, shoving her hair behind her ears as she prepares to get back to studying.
But she's not alone anymore.
The man who'd been looking at her earlier is looming over the table now, holding a takeaway cup in one hand; Marinette can see his eyes behind the thick glasses now, the bright and beautiful green of leaves newly turned. She has more than a few threads of that color in the embroidery on her sleeves right now. It's one of her favorite colors.
He's looking down at her like she's an unexpected delight, a thing he hadn't even thought to hope for, with a gleeful gleam in his eyes that makes Marinette's tongue go thick in her mouth, because the simple fact is that he's gorgeous and built –
And she feels like she knows him.
"Everywhere else is full," he says carefully. His voice is familiar, too, though Marinette doesn't know why; it's deeper than she expects. Why does she expect anything out of him? "Can I sit here?"
But he's already sliding in across from Marinette before she can answer.
Marinette gives him her best annoyed eyes, squinting and all, but she can't hold it for long. He just feels so familiar, like he's something Marinette lost a long time ago and and now he's come back to her, come back changed and different, but still hers.
"Do I know you?" Marinette asks, her eyes hard on his face.
He laughs, ducking his head a little as though that could hide the wide grin spreading over his face. "I suppose I look a little different than I used to," he says, and takes off his glasses. The first thing that Marinette notices is the silver eyebrow ring above his left eye. The eyebrow that it pierces is blond, thin and well shaped –
Marinette gasps, her eyes snapping back to his.
Green eyes – blond hair – hot –
It can't be.
(Her first thought is Chat, of course, but Chat hasn't been sighted in more than two years, and there's no way she'd run into him in a café like this. Not even Marinette is that lucky.)
(But there is another green-eyed boy with blond hair that she'd lost track of – )
"Adrien?!" she hisses, her eyes wide.
"Not so loud," Adrien says, casting an uneasy look over his shoulder at the rest of the café. "People still recognize me, you know. I was just here to get a cup of coffee, but then I saw you, and – " He smiles at her so fondly that her heart does a funny little leap, as though Adrien makes it want to dance. "I couldn't not come say hi. I've missed you a lot."
That would have been enough to send her tripping and flailing when she was younger – no matter that she's sitting down right now. Marinette lays her hands flat on the table anyway, just in case she somehow flings the fabric scraps right into Adrien's face. "Alya and Nino have missed you, too," she says, choosing to take that you as a general you, not the specific. "You should text them, you know. They'd love to hear from you."
"Oh, yeah," Adrien says, somehow lighting up even more as he pulls out his phone. "Can I have their numbers? Gabriel took my phone when he pulled me out of school, and by the time I got a new one, I couldn't remember even Nino's number." He watches Marinette unlock her phone and pull up Nino's contact card before he goes on.
"But I wasn't talking about them," Adrien says, a little quiet, a little shy. Marinette's eyes snap up to meet his. "I meant you."
"Me?" she whispers – or maybe she doesn't even do that; maybe she can't get the word out at all, and Adrien reads her lips, or her mind, and figures out what she's saying that way.
He reaches out and lays his hand over hers, his left, her right. His fingers are so long that if he stretched them out another millimeter, he would be touching her soulmark through a single layer of fabric. As it is, Adrien's so close to it that her skin is vibrating with suppressed tension.
"You and Nino meant everything to me," he says with a soft, lopsided smile. His eyes are warm. "And Alya, of course, but she decided that she was going to be friends with me, and that was that. Nino reached out to me that first day, which was the first time anyone had ever done that for me, and I loved him for it, I did, but... then, there was you. You didn't like me at first. That hurt, and I couldn't figure out why. But it did. And I felt this incredible urge to apologize, to make it right, and when you let me... I really felt like that was the start of something beautiful. The first friend I ever made on my own."
Adrien sighs then, the smile falling away. "And then my father did what my father did, and ruined everything, as he was so good at doing." He leans back in the booth, his hand slipping away from hers; Marinette feels colder, as though he's leaving her, as though he's leaving again, and there's nothing she can do to stop him –
"He didn't ruin everything," she protests, willing Adrien to look at her again. When he does, she smiles at him – hesitant, shaky, but meaning it more than she's ever meant it in her life. "I'm serious. None of us blamed you for your father pulling you out of school. And I'm right here, aren't I?"
She reaches out this time, stretching her hand across the table, palm-up, and leaving it there in tempting appeal.
But Marinette's luck – or lack of it – strikes again, and her sleeve skims across the wire spiral on her notebook – skims again, and then catches, as Marinette's hand continues forward, and the loop around her finger snaps at the seam. Her sleeve hooks on the notebook, and stays behind, while her arm keeps going.
Baring her soulmark.
Adrien's eyes fly to it instantly, like he already knew it was there – though Marinette has never shown it to anyone except Tikki and Alya, so that can't be true.
She inhales sharply, pulling her arm back to her out of instinct and fear, feeling vulnerable, feeling exposed, even though –
Even though if she's right about what it means, Adrien has every right to know. And Marinette has no right to keep it from him.
Adrien's hand shoots out and snags her fingers, keeping her from pulling back entirely. Marinette dares to glance up at him and finds that his eyes are locked on her soulmark.
He knows, then. He remembers.
Marinette looks down at her wrist, swallowing past all of the terror and the feeling of imminent rejection to try to see it the way he does: new, fresh, for the very first time. It's her old lucky charm bracelet, of course. The one that she gave to Adrien to cheer him up when she couldn't help beating him at UMS every round. Something about the soulmark magic makes it look almost real, rendered in loving detail, from the soft fabric the four leaf clover is embroidered on right down to a fine satin sheen on the wooden beads she bought at a street market when she was eight years old and her mother gave her a little pocket money to pick out something for herself...
Adrien's eyes are wide and growing larger, pinned tight, locked on her wrist to the exclusion of everything else. In a sudden burst of motion, his free hand dives into his satchel bag and roots around for a minute before he pulls it out and thwacks something on the table between them. Marinette looks down, already knowing what she'll find.
It's the bracelet she gave Adrien all those years ago. Of course it is. The cord is fraying slightly, there's a chip on one of the beads and some of the others are beginning to show wear and tear on the edges, but Marinette would know it anywhere.
He still carries it around with him?
"Why?" she whispers, reaching out to touch one of the beads with a tentative finger.
Adrien gives her an incredulous look that slowly melts into exasperated affection. "Marinette. Do you really have to ask? Because you gave it to me, of course. I mean, at first I carried it around everywhere because it works, so thank you for that, but..." He looks down at her wrist, his thumb gently stroking the back of her hand. "After a while, it just reminded me of you all the time," he says quietly, his smile growing warmer and warmer. "It's always on me somewhere."
"I knew it meant you," Marinette admits shyly. "Who else could it be?"
He looks up, the smile dimming slightly. "Then why didn't you call me?"
"How was I supposed to get in touch with you?" she asks, exasperated. "The number I had was turned off the day he pulled you out of school. I follow your Instagram account, but somehow I don't think you actually have anything to do with that."
Adrien winces. "No, I think someone at the company still runs it," he admits. "I'm not exactly model material anymore."
Marinette looks him over, head to waist: the dreads, which are luxurious and well taken care of, the colors bright, the glasses, the eyebrow ring, the tattoo on his neck and one on his forearm that doesn't seem to be finished yet. She turns his arm over so she can get a closer look. It's a stylized version of her circle-and-spots and Chat Noir's pawprint, with shades of red and green painted behind it in watercolor. "Nice ink," she says casually.
He laughs, a little sheepish. "Thanks," he says. "It's kind of fun, to be honest. I feel like I'm making me more me, if that makes sense?"
Taking ownership of the body he's never been allowed to make his own? Yeah, Marinette can understand that. "And the hair and everything?"
"It's harder for people to recognize me this way," Adrien admits with a shrug. "It's been a while since someone did, though. I think in a couple of years, people will have forgotten me enough that I can probably wear whatever I want." He laughs again. "Whatever that is. Why, is it a dealbreaker?" Adrien tilts his head, looking at her with an appealing kind of hesitance in his green eyes, almost like Chat used to when he really, really wanted her to agree to something.
A dealbreaker – like –
This can't really be happening. There's no way that Adrien Agreste sat down at her café table to ask her out. This is a fantasy, or she fell asleep over her books and she's drooling all over her fabric samples.
(And why is she still thinking about Chat?)
"Are you actually asking me out?" Marinette asks, her voice shaking.
Adrien smiles at her, slipping his hands under hers so he can hold them in a loose grip. It's more comforting than Marinette would have expected. "I've been trying to since I sat down, yeah."
Somewhere inside of her, Marinette's fourteen-year-old self is screaming.
(Her twenty-year-old self isn't far behind, honestly.)
Her heart so full of joy and disbelief and affection that she can't stand it, Marinette smiles back. "I'd like that," she admits. Adrien beams at her, happiness drenching his eyes, and his smile, clutching her hands like he can't stand the thought of her getting away now.
Marinette can't deny that she's enjoying it.
She looks down at their entwined hands, smiling to herself when she looks at her soulmark. It used to mean missed connections to her, a thread of her life that might never be fulfilled, but suddenly it means something different. Something amazing.
"Do you have yours yet?" Marinette asks, looking up at Adrien eagerly.
She's just in time to catch the arrested look on his face. There's panic in his eyes, and his mouth pulls into a wince for just a moment before Adrien pastes a smile over it all, like he can pretend it never happened. "No!" he says, too cheerfully, too loud. "I don't have it yet, I – "
"You're lying," Marinette says slowly.
A little of that panic seeps back into Adrien's eyes. "No, Marinette, I'm – "
"I can see it," she says in exasperation. "Don't gaslight me on top of lying. Which... Why would you lie about that? Unless – "
There's only one reason Adrien would be lying about not having his soulmark if he's being serious about wanting to date her, which is the part of this that Marinette does believe; that look of joy is not easy to fake, and he'd had her lucky charm on him, which is a tangible proof that she can't ignore. "You have one, and it points to someone else, doesn't it?" she says, a chill worming its way deep into her heart. "And you don't want to tell me so I'll date you? Adrien, that's despicable."
Marinette tries to pull her hands away from him, but Adrien tightens his grip, shaking his head; his eyes are frantic. "No, Marinette," he says, his voice desperate for her to listen. "No. That's not it. I swear to you that's not it."
She wants to believe him so badly. She wants to remember the boy with the umbrella as good, and kind, and honest, not as someone who would pull a nasty trick like that. "Then why?" Marinette asks in a whisper.
Adrien sighs and looks down at his bag, for some reason, raising an eyebrow as though he's asking it a question. There's no answer, thank god, or Marinette would start to wonder about her own sanity, but after a moment, Adrien shrugs and frees one of his hands to pull down the collar of his t-shirt, exposing his collarbone.
Directly beneath it, there's a tiara in silver and rose gold, the kind with a series of small, sparkling arches supporting several larger stones in shades of pink. It's his soulmark. There's no doubt in her mind. The shading is too real for it to be a tattoo. He's tried to disguise it with other tattoos surrounding it, including the one that reaches up to his neck, but it just makes the tiara stands out, makes it look more than the tattoos.
It's a tiara fit for a princess.
Marinette gasps and looks up at Adrien's eyes – his green, green eyes. How many times has he reminded her of Chat in this conversation alone? And when did Chat disappear for the last time? Was it two years ago, when Adrien reached his age of majority?
"Yeah," Adrien says, smiling ruefully. "I knew you'd figure it out the instant you saw it. You're too smart for your own good, Princess."
"It helps that you're the only one who's ever called me that," Marinette says in a faint voice. "Really? You're... him?"
"You can't tell anyone. Please?" Adrien begs. "Our identities must remain secret, even now."
Marinette looks down at her purse – oh god, Plagg must be in Adrien's bag, that makes perfect sense now – and raises a questioning eyebrow at Tikki, who is watching her with a smile on her face. She nods immediately. "It's time," she says in a tiny voice.
Adrien cocks his head sharply. "What was that?"
Marinette grins at him and takes his hand, pulling her sleeve back down. She guides him to the embroidery she's still so proud of, letting his finger rest on the tiny ladybug peeking out from behind the wildflowers.
"A clue in plain sight," she tells him. "Not that anyone's ever gotten close enough to see it, but even I like to show off sometimes."
Adrien frowns at the embroidery in confusion, gently tracing the flower, the stem – and then he spots the ladybug. His eyes go so wide that there's white all around the rim, his pupils dilate and then shrink into tiny spots, and he freezes.
"Hi, kitty," Marinette says softly. "I've missed you."
He looks up at her with tears forming in his eyes. "Is it really you?"
"It's me," she says, smiling so wide that it hurts. "It's us. Together again – the way it always should have been."
"The way it will be, from now on," Adrien says roughly, the joy rising in his eyes again until they're brimming over with happiness.
It looks good on him.
"Yeah," Marinette agrees, not without a certain pressure behind her own eyes that speaks of tears of her own coming. "Yeah, it will."