Work Text:
Ladybug wasn’t surprised when Chat Noir joined her on the Eiffel Tower later that night.
It wasn’t the first time they’d sought one another out after a hard battle, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. In their line of work, these occasions were pretty commonplace—knowing there was someone else who understood was more than enough to overcome the pain and suffering they had seen (and survived). If she had to be honest, that was the best part about having a partner. At the end of the day, there would always be someone there for her, and vice versa, because having a partner meant never having to be alone again. It made things safer, easier, and better.
Above all, having a partner made things easier to bear. So that’s what they did after a cruel and terrible fight, especially after Chat Noir fell victim to an akuma’s influence, they tried to find comfort in one another.
She could hear Chat Noir land on the beam beside her, settling back on his haunches as they stared out at the city lights of the Paris nighttime. His breathing hitched before he spoke. “I still can’t get used to this view.”
Ladybug managed a wry smile, wanting nothing more than to lean back against her partner, but the tension between them was thick and heavy. “It’s only been five months. I’m sure you’ll get sick of it after a while.”
“No,” he said with an airy chuckle. “I think this is one of my favorite parts about being a superhero. Not every day you get to see something like this.” His voice had taken on a dreamlike quality, and Ladybug had to agree because there was something ethereal about Paris during the late hours. Sitting atop the Eiffel Tower, wind blowing her hair back, and her heart catching in her throat at the long way down was an impossible dream she’d never taken the time to piece together.
“So I guess putting on spandex to go save the world is just another perk, then?”
Chat Noir snorted beside her, and Ladybug gathered her courage to finally look at him. He had thrown his legs on either side of the beam, swinging his feet in the chilly air, and was facing her with a small smile. Liar, she thought. He wasn’t talking about the city lights.
Eyes trained on his face, she couldn’t find any traces of hatred or cruelty marring his beautiful features, so she took it as a green light to scoot closer to her partner. She reached out and threaded her fingers through one of his hands, while the other rested against the edge of the beam to keep her upright, as he leaned his forehead on her shoulder, hot breaths puffing out through her suit and against the cool skin of her arm, They sat together, finding solace in the silence of the quiet bustle of the sleepy city below them and in the spaces between each other’s heartbeats.
There was nothing else to be said for some time. Each knew where the other’s thoughts led, and neither were ready to follow them quite yet. At least they were together, sharing a moment they couldn’t have with anyone else. How could anyone in their civilian lives even begin to understand what they went through? Together, while alone, was more than enough, and Ladybug knew that. While she spent more time with her friends and family, there was something special about the little time she had with Chat Noir. There was something special between them. They had never labelled it because there was really no need for it. They knew it was there. That was all that mattered.
“Do you want to talk about it?” Ladybug finally asked, knowing all too well that he wasn’t but they had to get it in the open sooner or later.
“Not really,” he murmured against her suit, lifting his head with a soft sigh. “What’s there to talk about? I tried to kill you.”
As true as that might have been, Chat Noir didn’t need pity right now, and she refused to give him that. He wanted forgiveness or accusations because her partner was as much of a masochist as he was a superhero, despite her best efforts to break him of that particular habit, and he wouldn’t do well if she pressed the matter any further. But she knew all too well that it was something he desperately needed.
“It wasn’t your fault, so I don’t want to hear any apologies, chaton.”
He had the audacity to scoff at her words, so she nudged him with a sharp elbow to his chest.
“Hey! What was that for?”
“You need to trust me more, you silly cat,” she said and offered him a soft smile, nothing like the smirks she flashed him between battles or the exasperated, humor-laced ones when his charisma shined too bright. She leaned forward, resting her hands on her knees, and stared at him with affection brimming in her eyes, “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Plagg told me what happened. I know I tried to use Cataclysm on you.” Chat Noir shrugged half-heartedly and stared at the night sky, eyes trained on the moon if only to avoid hers. “For it’s worth, I am sorry. I didn’t mean to get hit by Dark Cupid’s arrow—”
Ladybug rolled her eyes. “If you hadn’t it, the arrow would’ve hit me. You were protecting me, like always.” Her partner still refused to look at her, so she lightly tapped the bridge of his nose with her finger until his gaze flickered back to hers in bewilderment. For someone who touched her affectionately on and off the battlefield, it still surprised her what reactions she could draw from her partner when she reciprocated those touches. “You didn’t do anything wrong, so stop acting like you did. I don’t want to hear any more of it, you got that?”
Silence settled between them again, but this time Ladybug found herself squirming to fill it. There was a sense of something else itching beneath her skin that was eager to get out, and she knew exactly what it was, because it was the part that Chat Noir had yet to address, and a part of her wondered if he ever would. She had to admit that it threw her that her partner hadn’t mentioned the kiss yet, and she was sure that his kwami would have told him about it, considering that Chat Noir always insisted he was a tricky, smug little creature.
“So…” she began, “How’s it feel to finally get that kiss you wanted?”
Her light and teasing tone gave him an out if he wanted to shrug it off without bearing the repercussions, and she half-expected him to tell her to just forget it ever happened. She wondered if she should have even said anything, because she couldn’t remember ever seeing her partner this vulnerable, but she also knew that sheltering even more secrets than what was already between them might hurt things in the long run.
She swallowed, not breaking their eye contact, and smiled wryly. “You know, that was my first kiss.”
“Really?” Chat Noir’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“Yeah.”
When he didn’t respond, she turned just enough to face him, but what greeted her wasn’t the canary grin she’d been expecting but a wide-eyed boy who blushing furiously under her questioning gaze.
He pressed his lips together and pulled his hands into tight fists in his lap. “That was my first kiss too.”
…She hadn’t expected that answer. Because he was Chat Noir, and she had always imagined her partner as the charismatic boy in class who had the girls fawning over his every move, with a laugh on his lips and his heart on his sleeve (which wasn’t always true because there were instances where she couldn’t see through his smile, no matter how hard she tried).
“Really?” she asked because she had to be sure she heard him right.
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“So how was it?” She rested her head in her hands, eager to know.
Chat Noir’s back stiffened at her words, and he raised his eyebrows in quiet bemusement. “I wouldn’t know, remember? I don’t remember anything after that arrow hit me until you broke the spell.”
The air left her lungs in a long whoosh because that fact had slipped her mind, and how horrible was it that her partner had missed out on such an important milestone and how horrible was it that she had ruined his first kiss for him? Even as a superhero, Marinette tried to maintain some sense of normalcy among her extraordinary antics—including all the things that were meant to be extraordinary in her civilian life, whether it was having the occasional night out with her friends, the first date, and even the first kiss. The fact that both of them had missed the momentous occasion bothered her more than she cared to admit. She stared at her partner with something akin to muted horror and tried not to think about what he was feeling because she knew it might break her for sure if she did.
Chat Noir paid her no heed, choosing to look out over the city as if he had finally found the comfort he was looking for, and it wasn’t like she knew what to say anyway. The moon was a bright ball in the night sky, looming over the world while the stars stood at its side like they were the guard, the whole sky illuminating them as they sat on the Eiffel Tower. It was an idyllic moment that settled over them, the kind where lovers would share the transcendent first kiss under the faint starlight, and Ladybug wondered if this was theirs.
They could try again.
Before she knew it, she was reaching out to her partner with shaky hands, grasping fistfuls of his collar and tugging him towards her. With her nose pressed against his, hot breaths puffing against his lips, she asked, “Want to find out?” Adding after a short beat, “How it feels to kiss me?”
Chat Noir stared down at her with wide eyes, glowing emeralds in the dim light from the shining sky above and the city below. He exhaled slowly and sagged against her. “Are you asking me to kiss you, bugaboo?”
She cocked her head and laughed into his jaw. “You’re always asking,” she pointed out. “Maybe I’m just finally calling your bluff.”
“I was never joking.”
“I know.”
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her closer, which she hadn’t thought possible, until there was just a sliver of space between them. Some part of her ached because Chat Noir was staring at her like he was expecting her to bolt, but she stood rigid in his arms and tightened her grip on his collar, unable to pull away or dive in, and she figured that she’d let him answer for her. She had made up her mind already, and perhaps this whole thing would backfire spectacularly later on, but right now, she wanted to make it up to her partner.
Her fingers trailed the cool skin on the back of his neck, teasing the soft hair at the nape and dipped into the warmth of his suit. There was a short beat of silence, the span of a single heartbeat, and then Chat Noir pressed his lips to hers in a soft kiss. It stole away her right to breathe and halted her thundering thoughts, but she overcame the shock and curled her fingers into the material of his suit to pull him closer. She could taste faint traces of hairspray against his mouth and strawberry spread from scones much like the ones she could find in her parents’ bakery. They breathed together, merged their bodies together, and became lost in one another.
Chat Noir’s hands slipped further down her body and cupped her hips to pull her off the beam and into his lap. Falling to instinct, she pressed her knees into his torso and cocked her head to kiss him deeper, harder, longer. His chest vibrated beneath her hands, a soft sound lost between their wet, trembling lips, and she smiled to herself. She had made her kitty cat purr. Her hands trailed down the sides of his ribs as she tried coax more purrs to fall from his lips.
Their lips moved in sync with one another, as if fused together. Where his hands touched her skin, a wild fire erupted, like the flow of molten rock under the Earth, and a spark of heat flared in her chest. Her heart throbbed at the heat because she knew it was something she had craved for some time now, something she had always imagined that Adrien would create, and never had she thought that Chat Noir would soothe the ache she carried around.
And that’s what made her pull away.
Chat Noir followed her, chasing her lips as she settled back on her haunches, only to be met with resistance as she shook her head. “Sorry, chaton,” she teased softly, pressing a single finger against his mouth. “That’s all you get.”
He swallowed thickly. “You’re being furry mean right now. Please be mice.”
Laughter bubbled in her chest and spilled out in the space between them, bodies shaking against one another as they struggled to keep their balance on the beam. It would be just her luck to fall to her death after experiencing her first kiss with her partner. She swung her legs back around to the front of the beam and planted them in the edges of the metal studs, still holding onto Chat Noir’s hand to keep her upright.
Finally, she let go and tried to adjust her position, casting her partner a sideways glance as he did the same. Both tried to regain their bearings that had scattered about after the kiss, hearts pounding in their ribcages and thoughts frozen as if they had dove headfirst into the cold waters of the Seine.
“I do trust you, you know.” Chat Noir wasn’t looking at her, instead choosing to close his eyes as a cool wind whipped by, leaning against her, warm skin against warm skin, and sighed. “I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“Chat—”
It was his turn to put a finger on her lips. “And I am sorry for almost killing you today. I know you don’t want to hear it, but I really do need to say it. If you hadn’t figured out how to save me, I could have seriously hurt you this time.”
Ladybug took a deep breath and put a hand on his, squeezing it to offer some form of comfort to her partner. “You know I don’t blame you. It wasn’t you. It was Hawkmoth.”
“Still,” Chat Noir said, shaking his head.
Realizing that arguing was hopeless, Ladybug sighed and rested her head against his shoulder. She moved their intertwined hands to her lap and traced the edges of his claws for several moments, losing time in the steady cadence of his heartbeat and the quiet bustle of Paris below. For several moments, they sat together in silence until Chat Noir laid his head atop her own.
“Why did you kiss me?” he asked her. “Just now?”
She shrugged helplessly, refusing to move. “I don’t know. I guess since our first kiss was so bad the first time around, I wanted the second one to be better.”
In a raspy voice, cracking as he struggled to speak, he whispered, “The first kiss wasn’t that bad.”
She snorted more to herself than anyone. “Yeah, it was. You don’t even remember it.”
“But it was with you,” he told her. “And that’s more than enough for me.”
Her heart leapt into her throat, and she found herself at a loss with words, because what could she say to that? She had always suspected that her partner might have feelings for her, but she had chalked that up to part of his package—full of flirting, bad puns, and a charisma the size of the Eiffel Tower. Knowing what she did now pushed the world off its orbit. It hurt a bit too because she couldn’t do anything about it—she had Adrien.
But if she didn’t have Adrien, and she had Chat Noir…?
Inhaling shakily, she forced a smile and let go of his hand, sitting up straight and reaching for her yo-yo. “As much fun as tonight as been, it’s almost two, and I have an exam tomorrow.”
“Good luck,” he intoned, shaking his head as if to clear the cobwebs away.
“As if I need it,” she told him, pushing herself to her feet.
He did the same beside her, and for a moment, she debated whether to throw caution to the wind and wrap herself up in her partner’s arms again. Perhaps they’d kiss. Perhaps they’d talk. Perhaps things would change—irrevocably and beyond saving. If she stayed on the beam, stayed with Chat Noir, she didn’t know where the night would take them. Under the moonlight, they stood still and locked eyes, each with burning thoughts at the forefront of their minds, though neither voiced nor acted upon them.
“I guess I’ll see you around,” she said.
“Maybe sooner than you think,” he told her with a wink.
Her brows furrowed in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“You just gave me another clue to finding out who you really are. I know how you kiss now.” He stretched his arms overheard, swinging one around her neck, and locked her gaze with a cat-got-the-canary grin. “Finding you should be easy.”
With a light laugh, she flung her yo-yo out to the nearest building, winding it around the chimney, and flashed her partner a sharp smirk. “What’re you gonna do, chaton? Kiss every girl in Paris?”
“If that’s what it takes,” he said and bent into a low crouch. “You’re always worth the work, my Lady.”
With a flick of his wrist as a form of goodbye, Chat Noir leapt off the Eiffel Tower with his baton poised to catch his landing, and with a soft smile, she watched her partner whisk away onto the streets of a quiet Paris below. Once he was out of sight, she raised a trembling hand to her lips, tracing them with her fingers, as if she could still feel her partner’s lips on hers. The realization made her smile because, as first kisses went, hers and Chat Noir’s wasn’t too bad.
“Goodnight, silly kitty,” she said and pulled back her yo-yo before launching off into the Paris skyline.
(But if she didn’t have Adrien, then she’d always have Chat Noir.)