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She wants to trust him, she really does, but he’s been disappearing in the nights too frequently since her pregnancy began to show. He is always there to soothe her to sleep, but when she inevitably wakes in the ungodly hours of the morning, it is to empty sheets.
She’s too tired, at first, to stay awake and wait for him: but when she wakes once more, he is returned, smelling of open Parisian air, fresh and familiar and unnerving all at once.
So, one night, when his soft murmurs haven’t quite lured her to sleep as they usually do, Marinette follows Adrien out of their home.
When she makes it to the street, he is gone, but then again she left enough time between the front door clicking shut and her feet sliding into her flip-flops that she kind of expected this. “Which way do you think he went, Tikki?”
The kwami huddled into Marinette’s pajama collar is distinctly nervous. “Left. Be careful, Marinette— it’s late, and you’re pregnant.”
Marinette grumbles, wraps her fluffy shawl more snugly around her swollen belly. “And Adrien is gone.”
“He doesn’t smell like anyone else when he comes back,” Tikki points out. “Maybe he just goes out to clear his head?”
Marinette shakes her head. “He’s so tired these days. If he’s going out, it has to be for something important,” she insists, and starts walking.
“Cheating isn’t that important, surely. Left, I said,” Tikki sighs.
“Oh. Sorry.” Marinette turns around. “We were so active before,” she continues. “I think… perhaps he doesn’t want a pregnant woman.” Why else would Adrien’s once-passionate kisses have dwindled to now-chaste pecks?
Tikki doesn’t have an answer. Marinette drags herself home half an hour later to an empty flat, but is too tired to return to Paris, which looms traitorously in her mind.
“I’m sure there’s a better explanation,” Tikki murmurs as Marinette drifts off.
Adrien is back when she wakes again, his scent familiar and unnerving and wholly his own as he tangles one hand in her hair and rests the other on her belly. He murmurs quietly, possibly into a phone, probably just to himself or to Marinette. She listens drowsily, syllables dripping in one ear and out the other, his voice gentle and loving.
There’s no way he could cheat on her, is there?
A month of following Adrien intermittently reveals nothing but an unnerving regularity to his absences.
When Marinette asks, Tikki squirms and admits that he’d left right after lulling her to sleep. Marinette bundles up to look for him, and then they wander aimlessly until Marinette finds herself staring at the Boulangerie-Patisserie, wondering dully if she should wake her parents.
Adrien calls, then. He sounds frantic, and she lies and tells him that she was craving something from the bakery. “I am so sorry,” he cries, and he doesn’t sound like he is lying. “Wait for me, please, Marinette, I am so sorry I wasn’t there when you woke up—”
“I’ll meet you on the way, I just said goodbye to Mama,” Marinette lies, so that she doesn’t have to explain why the bakery lights are off when Adrien crashes into her five minutes later. He catches her before they fall and pulls her into his arms with a gasp of relief.
“I’m sorry,” he pants into her hair. “I— I couldn’t sleep, so I went out for a walk, and then— I forgot my phone, too, like a fool— can you ever forgive me, Marinette?” His eyes are wide, and his brows are tilted with terror.
“Of course I forgive you,” Marinette sighs, but her smile is weary and sad as she closes her eyes and leans into him.
Their baby kicks merrily in her belly between them. Adrien wipes at his eyes and sweeps her into a bridal carry, and Marinette is too tired to protest as his scent, familiar and tinged with only the night air, washes over her.
She ignores, for now, that he must have been roaming Paris for several hours— far longer than a mere walk in the hours after midnight.
Marinette keeps looking for Adrien in spite of the decreasing temperature and her increasing girth. Tikki frets, but Marinette is on a mission.
“Why don’t you just ask him?” Tikki hisses one night, as Marinette is cocooning herself in layers of warmth against the chilly autumn night.
“I’m scared,” Marinette whispers. “I don’t want him to lie to me again.”
Tikki helps her with her shoes and socks— the kwami knows that if she didn’t, Marinette would either hurt herself trying or wander around barefoot. “He loves you, Marinette. He wouldn’t do that.”
“Then why won’t he tell me? He disappears for hours,” Marinette reminds Tikki. “Whatever he says, he’s not just taking a walk.” She opens the front door and flinches at the icy wind that greets her. Her abdomen clenches uncomfortably, but she ignores it.
Tikki has no answer for her. Instead, she guides Marinette. (The unspoken compromise is thus: if Marinette must look for Adrien, then she will at least follow Tikki’s directions.)
Something is different tonight. It’s colder, perhaps, the air crisper; Marinette feels her baby settling lower, and recalls idly that she is nearly due.
She needs to find Adrien.
The pain that ripples through her then isn’t just emotional. It feels almost like a bad period cramp, complete with liquid soaking into her underwear— except that she is pregnant.
“Tikki,” she says, calmly. “I think I’m going into labor.”
Tikki whimpers softly under Marinette’s jaw. “I know,” she murmurs, and then Chat Noir lands with a snow-muffled crunch in front of them.
“What are you doing here, Marinette?” he demands, sounding alarmed.
“Good evening, Chat Noir,” Marinette greets distantly, leaning against the shop window beside her. The cold of the glass seeps through all her layers, but her senses are drifting inward. “I didn’t realize we’re on a first-name basis.”
(She hasn’t seen her partner in a long time, actually, not since Ladybug started showing and Chat Noir insisted that she not transform until she has delivered. “I can handle myself these days,” he had bragged, and then deflated. “I won’t get used to it, though. I promise to wait for you.”)
Now he paces around her, arms behind his back as though restraining himself. “You shouldn’t be here,” he tells her, his voice strained. “You’re nearly due, and it’s so cold— Marinette, are you okay?” His eyes are wide, and his brows are tilted with terror.
“Fine, I’m—” A wave of pain robs her of her voice.
Chat Noir sweeps her into his arms. Marinette wants to protest— it should be Adrien holding her, not Chat Noir, for they are her partners in such different ways— but her head falls against Chat Noir’s shoulder, and he smells crisp and clean and unnervingly familiar.
“What are you doing out here, Marinette?” Chat Noir whispers as he leaps, and he sounds so familiar and despairing that Marinette tells him.
“I was looking for my husband,” she mutters into his collarbone, waiting for the next contraction to strike.
He holds her closer, his arms tightening like steel around her. “Oh, Marinette,” Chat Noir murmurs, and he sounds so guilty that Marinette almost believes the awful suspicion that she’s been harboring for so many months. “I am so sorry.”
Her vision distorts, turning Chat Noir’s bell into a golden blur. “I just wanted to find him,” she sniffles, tears rolling down her cheeks. “I just wanted to know why—” she tenses in the face of tearing pain before she continues— “why he keeps leaving.”
Chat Noir presses his lips to her forehead, and the gesture is so like Adrien that Marinette begins to cry in earnest.
“It wasn’t supposed to be this way,” she sobs. “He isn’t supposed to be like that.”
“Do you really think that?” Chat Noir asks, and his voice trembles.
“I don’t know what to think,” Marinette howls, and Chat Noir lands in an alley behind a hospital.
“Do you trust him so little?” Chat Noir asks, and his voice breaks.
“I don’t kn-know,” Marinette keens. “I want to, but what else am I supposed to think?”
Chat Noir chuckles reluctantly. “I suppose the truth is a little far-fetched,” he admits, and releases his transformation.
Marinette thinks that perhaps the stress of pregnancy has given her a fever dream, or that perhaps she briefly passed out when Chat Noir handed her to Adrien, but the tiny black cat that perches in Adrien’s hair can only be a hallucination of Chat Noir’s kwami. “Adrien?” she says dumbly anyway.
“I’m so sorry it had to be like this, Marinette,” he whispers, striding from the cold, dark night into the blinding whiteness of the hospital. Marinette can’t make sense of the words, but she burrows her head into Adrien’s collar, her frigid nose pressing against his thin hoodie and inhaling the same cold, crisp scent that had been Chat Noir’s.
“Marinette,” his voice tells her softly as the world dissolves into chaos and pain. “You have to let go. I promise, I will stay with you, but Emma is coming.”
“Louis,” she corrects automatically, and focuses on Adrien’s too-distant face, clutching a hand that she hopes is his. “Adrien… where have you been?” She doesn’t mean to sound so accusing or so pleading, but she does.
He blinks down at her, and his hand squeezes hers. “I can't tell you here,” he says, longingly. “I won’t hide from you anymore, though. It’s not fair for you.”
There are no more words between them, then, not for a long time, only screams and sobs and crooning, but whenever Marinette tilts her head in distant moments of clarity, he is there, holding her hand in both of his as the doctors and nurses direct her to push.
Marinette wakes in a hospital bed, alone.
Her room shadowed, but a shy pre-dawn sky glows through the window. With a tilt of her head, Marinette spies the empty chair next to her bed. It takes her a moment to remember that they'd picked a hospital that didn't permit the spouse to stay overnight, and a moment longer to remember the parting words Adrien had kissed into her forehead: "I'm not leaving you alone, love."
The chair is still empty. Marinette still hurts.
"Marinette."
Her heart leaps into her throat as a pair of green eyes emerge from the shadows at the foot of her bed. "Adrien—!"
But there are cat ears pinned to the figure's hair and a golden bell at his throat, and the shadow around his eyes is made of black leather.
"Chat Noir."
He lifts a finger to his lips, laughing quietly to himself. He seems different somehow— quieter, subdued. "If the staff catches me, they'll probably throw me out," he whispers wryly. "They're pretty strict."
"Why are you here?"
His brows furrow. "I wasn't going to leave you," he said. "I couldn't."
"But Paris—"
"Paris will get along without me for a night." There's an odd fierceness in his voice. "How long have you been looking for me?"
Marinette stares. "I wasn't..." she says slowly. "I wasn't looking for you."
Chat Noir's lips twist. "Plagg, claws in."
The waning shadows in the room twist around Chat Noir. Marinette can't take her eyes from his face. "A-Adrien?"
He's still wearing that thin hoodie from last night— from yesterday. There are deep shadows under his eyes. "How long have you been looking for me?" he repeats.
Marinette wonders if she's dreaming. Her belly is still bloated. Will she wake up to Louis's kicking now? To Adrien, smelling crisp and clean and like Chat Noir?
"Marinette," Adrien croaks, sounding so terribly broken that Marinette lifts a hand to reach for him.
He catches her hand, presses cracked lips to her fingers. She can feel him trembling. "Three months," she says.
Adrien groans, tilts forward like he can't help himself. His cheek is cold against hers, but his hug is desperately fierce. "How can you ever forgive me?" he whispers.
Marinette wraps her arms around him carefully. "You had no choice," she whispers back, closing her eyes and letting his warmth soak into her bones. "I was afraid," she tells the darkness. "I thought I knew you better— I did know you better. I just didn't trust myself. I'm sorry, too."
"What else could you have thought?" Adrien asks. "You couldn't have known."
Marinette turns her head enough to press a kiss into his jaw. Stubble scrapes painfully against her lips. She doesn't care. "I love you, Adrien."
He turns into the kiss. Marinette is surprised by the heat of his lips against hers. "I love you, Marinette," he says fiercely. "More than Ladybug."
Marinette startles. "M-more than Ladybug?"
He's nuzzling at her neck now, placing hungry kisses above her collarbones. "There's no comparison."
She bursts into giggles, half-hysterical, half because he's tickling her. "That's not— That's who I was up against? —stop, stop, I can't—"
Adrien pushes himself back, clinging to her shoulders. "Too soon?" he gasps, and he's laughing, too. "I mean, of course— I'm sorry. It's been a long time. And I was so afraid— I'm sorry."
Marinette pecks his forehead. "I forgive you, Adrien," she tells him, still giggling. "This time."
“I’m heading out,” Chat Noir announces, and presses his lips to Marinette’s cheek when she finds him standing at their largest window. “Ladybug isn’t back yet,” he explains, cracking the window open.
Marinette shivers as the cold winter air whispers into their home and fusses with Louis’s layers. “You’ve been picking up Ladybug’s patrol shifts also? No wonder you were out so much. Weren’t you tired?”
“I do what I must for Paris,” he shrugs, “and my Lady would be disappointed if I didn’t. Take care of Louis, love.”
“Be safe, Chat Noir,” Marinette calls after him. “Tikki,” she says to the bundle of blankets in her arms once he has gone, “I think it’s time Ladybug introduced her son to Chat Noir, don’t you think?”
Tikki wriggles happily out of Louis’s tiny grasp. “Of course, Marinette!”
“Alright!” Marinette sets Louis down on the nearest table. “Tikki, spots on!”
Winter has settled fully over Paris, and Ladybug makes sure her son is secure and warm in the baby carrier around her torso before she leaps into the night after her partner.
“Ladybug!” Chat Noir exclaims happily when she calls him. “You’re back!”
“I am,” Ladybug beams back at the screen, feeling giddy. “I wanted to introduce you to my son.”
They rendezvous at their statue in the park. Chat Noir immediately opens his arms when he spots her, but reconsiders when he notices the bundle strapped to her chest.
“Miss me?” Ladybug chuckles, giving him a careful one-armed hug.
Chat Noir is too busy staring down at Louis. He looks confused. “You have the same baby carrier my wife does,” he says slowly.
Marinette’s smirk grows. “Want to see him?” Ladybug offers offhandedly, unwrapping her child enough for Chat Noir to see the tiny baby beanie Marinette had knitted for their son.
There’s a long pause during which Marinette imagines Chat Noir’s ears smoking while gears grind frantically in his head. “Louis?” Chat Noir finally asks, disbelieving, and then, “Marinette?”
“Right in two, mon chaton,” Marinette purrs, and laughs at his expression. “You know, this means we’ll have to find a really good babysitter.”
Chat Noir is still gaping at her. Marinette decides the perhaps the best way to snap him out of it is to kiss him, so she tugs at his bell until their lips connect.
He smells fresh and familiar, like Parisian rooftops and Chat Noir and Adrien and home.