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“On a scale of one to ten, how approachable are you?” Carapace asks.
“I would say a solid seven.” Chat noir responds. It’s another day, another patrol schedule. Ladybug happens to be busy, and so, he finds himself next to Carapace, lounging on a rooftop without a care in the world.
If Ladybug were to be here, they would have been- without a doubt in the world- actually patrolling, but you know what they say. When the cat’s away, the mice-er- when the bug's away, the cat (and turtle?) will play.
Jokes aside, he finds it crucial to mention that it was Carapace who asked if they could skip patrol- the reason being a rather grueling chemistry lecture, allegedly- Chat agreed. It is to be noted that there was a rather grueling chemistry lecture this afternoon. For him, at least. Chat found himself tired after that, an impromptu photoshoot, piano and his daily fencing lessons.
He and Carapace had jumped between varying topics from school, classes to music and eventually girlfriends. Or rather, a girlfriend because Ladybug is still mooning over the other boy, and Adrien has said goodbye to any other romantic prospects, dedicating himself to obtaining the love of his lady and failing.
Back to the topic of Carapace’s girlfriend, which had led Chat to confide in Carapace about his longtime dilemma: friendship. To be specific, friendship with Marinette.
It greatly bothers Adrien that, despite three years of friendship, she still isn’t comfortable around him. She jumbles her words, trips over her own feet, and holds tight-lipped smiles around him. Point to be noted: She isn’t like this with anyone else. He wants to see the confident side of her for himself. Not be a spectator in the situation but a contributor. He wants her to address him with that confidence.
But how? This leads us to the current conversation.
“She acts normally with everyone else?” Carapace inquires.
“Yes.” He sighs defeatedly.
“She’s nervous around you, stutters, trips, and shies away from alone time with you?” Carapace wonders out loud. “Dude, I don’t know. Wait, this sounds similar. Dudeee!”
Chat’s leather ears perk up on top of his head.
“What?”
“Dudee!” Carapace drawls out, a smug grin on his face. “I think I know what this is about. She likes you!”
He frowns. That cannot possibly be right. “That’s not the case.”
“Is so,” Carapace replies.
“Is not,” Chat defends.
“Is so!”
“Is not.”
“Is so!”
“Is not!”
“Is so!”
“Is no-“
Carapace holds a finger before his lips, interrupting him, “I can prove it.” He doubts it.
The so-called proof turns out to be a blog post on the internet. That, and countless YouTube videos listing the signs that someone likes you. Adrien could cross off a couple, but that was the extent. Body language, leaning in? If anything, Marinette was leaping as far away as she could.
He pauses mid-thought. She doesn’t do that…anymore. She doesn’t run away anymore. She doesn’t run away anymore! Now there was one less hurdle to cross out of the 300 something in total.
Baby steps? He is going to be twice as old as Master Fu is when she is (eventually) at ease around him. He can wait, he decides. What’s an odd three hundred and fifty years to the joy their friendship will elicit?
He lets out a long sigh, ponderously.
He looks at Carapace, who is still scouring the internet for ways to confirm his suspicions. The value of hope remaining in him per scroll is currently negative. Just as Chat thinks he has given up all hope, Carapace lightens up.
“I know! What if we verify it?” he asks.
Verify it? Whatever is that supposed to mean?
“I’ve heard that if someone likes you, they’ll laugh at even the most unfunniest of jokes.” Carapace states. “You’re the punster of the team. This will be easy, bro!”
“Hey!” Chat protests, “my jokes are funny.” Carapace waves him off with one hand.
“That’s not the point. Try it. Come on!” Carapace urges him. “It’s perfect! Think about it. If she does laugh, I get a feeling she likes you. If she doesn’t, she’ll talk to you about it and clarify. Win-win.”
This sounds like a terrible plan is all that Chat noir can muster up in reply. Though he doesn’t say it. Carapace seems enthusiastic about the plan. And what if it works? What if she does end up clarifying the situation? He assumes she’d try to make a point and be more confident(?) around him to avoid any further misunderstandings (one that he’s purposely creating so he can talk to her?)
This sounds terrible, and he’s not even considered the downsides yet. What if he cracks terribly bad jokes and she starts running away from him again? That would mean all the progress they’ve made along the way was for nothing. Red alert: the baby has fallen flat on its face and refuses to take any more steps. It’s a real catastrophe!
Chat noir shakes his head, trying to comprehend the web of thoughts inside his head. The spider- Carapace’s idea that has made itself a cozy home in his mind- refuses to stop.
“Try it only for one day. I swear I will never utter a word of this again if you do.” Carapace offers. “In fact, I will approach her if this doesn’t work, and sort the whole thing out!”
Chat snorts. Yeah, right. As if Ladybug would allow this outrageous display and risk letting Carapace and himself potentially expose their identities.
“Fine.” Chat yields. Carapace lets out an excited ‘yes!’
Hours later, at around two in the morning, Adrien lies awake on his bed, regretting the upcoming day. His phone lies on the bedside table, lit up. Most recent searches include an array of ‘terrible jokes’ list.
It’s a great morning! The birds are chirping, Parisians bustle about, the sun is shining, and Adrien is having a horrible morning before it has even begun. This is even worse than the time he had to wake up extra early for a photoshoot.
Alya, Nino and Marinette are waiting for him, as usual. All he can think of is how embarrassed he’s going to be after this. No one is going to find it funny, and he’ll stand there like an idiot.
That’ll show Carapace. (And that teensy little spider thought he planted in Adrien’s head yesterday!)
He walks up to them, greeting them with the usual good morning. Nino bumps his fist against Adrien’s. Alya greets him back. Marinette smiles.
“Let’s head inside, shall we?” Alya asks.
Marinette nods. Nino throws a thumbs-up. They head inside, Nino and Adrien bringing up the rear.
This is it, Adrien. He mentally cheers himself, perhaps motivating himself to get through this tedious (and potentially life-threatening) task. You can do this.
Here goes Nothing.
“Hey guys, want to hear a joke about paper?”
Nino turns to him, puzzled. “Paper?”
“Never mind, actually, it’s tearable.”
He’s staring at the back of Marinette’s head. Wondering if she-
She giggles. She giggles. Giggles!
Nino looks confused, if not, concerned. Alya doesn’t acknowledge the joke at all. Adrien could not worry about the two of them any less. He’s focused on the giggles that he’s sure he heard only moments ago.
She found it funny! She found it funny? Oh no, she found it funny. In hindsight, maybe he should try another joke. It was a little funny. Not that tearable, actually. This proves nothing, he thinks to himself, convinced.
He’ll come up with something different next time.
Adrien finds himself sitting with Alya, Nino and Marinette during lunch, as usual. What is unusual has not befallen upon them yet. For clarification, by unusual, he means the next pun. Marinette is busy munching on a sandwich. He finds his chance. He leans on the table for support, not taking his eyes off of her.
“Do you know what happened when two slices of bread went out for a first date?” he starts.
Marinette pauses mid-bite. She looks at him, wide-eyed, surprised at his remark.
He delivers the punchline, “It was loaf at first sight.”
He can no longer hear Alya typing. Out of the corner of his eye, he notices she’s smiling hesitantly at him. He turns his gaze to her and grins. Nino’s eyebrows are arched upward like he has questions to ask. Adrien does too. If someone would only come forward and direct Adrien to the person willing to provide an answer to the questions. That would be greatly appreciated.
Adrien’s thought process is interrupted by a giggle. He turns towards the source of the sound, astonished. Marinette sends him a sweet smile before turning back to her sandwich.
He’s unable to move. His grin falls, and his brain has gone blank. Even the spider idea in his brain has paused, not knowing what to do next. He can’t decide if his day got worse or better.
Whatever, he concludes, it’s not like this means Carapace is right. The joke wasn’t even bad. In fact, it was pretty good, he tries to reason with himself. Yeah, it was. I would’ve laughed at it. He reassures himself, recovering from the minute system failure he seemingly had seconds ago.
As the four of them leave the cafeteria, another one of the jokes he searched up resurfaces in his mind. He pats Marinette lightly on the shoulder.
She jumps, startled. Confused, she turns around.
He smiles, “What do you call a fake noodle, Marinette?”
Alya and Nino, in earshot, hear him. They’re both making faces, exchanging glances with each other and him. He ignores them.
“I don’t k-know, what call do you it? Er-uh, I mean, what do you call it?” she stutters out.
“An impasta!”
She stares at him for a couple of seconds. Then a tight-lipped smile takes over her face. “That’s a good one, Adrien.”
She walks away without another word. The grin on his face has completely vanished. It’s not coming back any time soon.
They don’t speak again for the rest of the day. When he tries to approach her before his fencing class, she runs away.
Told you so, says a voice at the back of his head. He ignores the whole incident and marks it off as a ‘minor setback’.
(If he’s to be honest with himself, the whole day needs to be marked as a ‘minor setback’, but then it wouldn’t be so minor. He refrains from thinking any more about it.)
Three days and numerous terrible punchlines later, Adrien is still trying to figure out the situation.
He’s cracked every possible corny joke he can find. Heck, he can write a book titled Dad Jokes 101 at this point. He’d promised Carapace he’d do it for only a day. This debacle has dragged on for a longer period than he had anticipated. Much more. And he can’t find it in himself to stop. Why? You might ask. Marinette keeps finding them funny. Or trying to acknowledge that she finds them funny.
He can tell she doesn’t. Just the other day, they were paired up for chemistry together. And he had said, “You know, Marinette, you can never trust atoms.”
Marinette had instinctively narrowed her eyes at him. She looked back at her test tubes quickly, pretending she had heard nothing. To an outsider, it would look like she was observing the test tube with rapt attention. However, Adrien knew that was not the case. The test tube didn’t even need to be watched at all. She was finding an excuse to look anywhere else.
She had lifted the two test tubes, tilting the one in her left hand to pour its contents into the one in her right hand.
“It’s ‘cause they make up everything.”
Her left hand had shaken just a little, spilling some of the test tube content-luckily just good old H2O- onto the table below.
The perceived annoyance was gone as soon as it had appeared. A large smile had engulfed her face. But even though she was smiling at him, he could tell she was irritated.
Before he could ask her if she was alright, the teacher had walked up to their table. The moment was lost.
He remembers another such incident from only a few hours ago. They were sitting in the library, completing their assignments after Alya and Nino had decided to ditch them.
Marinette was frowning hard at the problem. A stray strand of her hair from behind her ear had fallen, framing her face. She’d looked pretty. She had paid no mind to it, with the enthusiasm equivalent of finding the answer to the question after a millennium, she’d started scribbling on the paper, her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
He’d noticed her do it many times. It’s sort of an unprecedented thing she does when she’s busy concentrating. He doesn’t think she even realizes she’s doing it. In fact, he’s sure she doesn’t. It’s cute. Seeing her focus wholeheartedly.
He had turned his attention towards his own assignment. There was a problem about outer space. He’d almost winced as he recalled a pun he’d read.
“Hey, Marinette?”
She’d looked up in acknowledgment.
“Do you know how astronauts propose?”
Her eye had twitched. He could swear on it. Adrien knew at that moment that she knew what he was playing at here. In that moment, he knew she was annoyed out of her mind and wanted to run away screaming ‘bloody murder’. Murder of her peace of mind, if anything.
“They planet.”
Despite all things considered, she had sent him a smile after the punchline.
As of current, Adrien is losing his mind. Adrien is not well. He skipped patrol with Carapace yesterday, bargaining one more day to himself, to prove the turtle hero wrong. WHY IS SHE PRETENDING TO FIND THEM FUNNY?? His mind screams. There’s panic everywhere, and his two brain cells are working overtime on no sleep. Did he mention he’s been losing his mind yet? Yes, he has? Thrice already? Ok, once more. He is losing his mind!
It’s been more than 5 hours since that incident. He finds himself standing at the front of the school, waiting for Gorilla to pick him up after his fencing class. His eyes subconsciously trail towards the other side of the road, where the bakery is. Where Marinette’s house is. And then upwards, where her room is. Where she currently might be.
It couldn’t be. Could it? Maybe she likes cheesy jokes? No, that doesn’t add up. Maybe she doesn’t want to make him feel bad about his jokes? That doesn’t add up either. Maybe she-
Adrien is startled out of his reverie by a loud noise. He’s faced with the familiar sight of Mr Pigeon- probably trying to invade Paris and claim it as the city of pigeons (again). Well, he knows what he has to do.
Chat Noir’s lost sense of how many times he’s sneezed into the crook of his elbow. Rena Rouge took pity on him, stopped by a pharmacy mid-battle and bought a box of tissues for him. Carapace and Ladybug are doing their best to follow Mr Pigeon as he flocks around with his pigeons.
Mr Pigeon planned, to no avail, to launch civilians into space. He then decided that he would fly to space with his pigeons. What a brilliant plan, ain't it? Chat noir wonders to himself, sarcastically.
Mr Pigeon swings by right in front of him, landing on the rooftop in front. Rena and Carapace are a few rooftops away.
“Come, my dears! We shall live on the moon! It will be all ours. Ro-ro!”
“You do realise pigeons can’t breathe on the moon since it has no atmosphere, right? That and all the other essential needs.” Chat noir says as Ladybug lands beside him. Mr Pigeon's face contorts into an angry glare directed at him, as if he’d stolen an ice cream from him as a child. He really hadn’t thought this through, had he?
Rena Rouge lands on the other side of Ladybug. “What a stupid plan.”
Ladybug adds, “I guess he didn’t planet well.”
Chat noir misses the look Rena Rouge throws at Ladybug. He also nearly misses Ladybug’s prior remark that prompted such a reaction. Nearly.
And that makes all the difference.
“Well then, I guess we will have to capture this city instead and throw you pests out! Go, my Pigeons. Ro-ro!”
“Can he stop changing his plans?” Rena Rouge says.
Carapace groans, “Can he stop trying to imitate the sound of the pigeons? It’s annoying.” He uses his shelter to prevent the pigeons from attacking them. The pigeons gather around the shelter, trying to peck their way in with their tiny beaks.
Chat noir, meanwhile, is stuck in processing mode. Ladybug made a pun! His mind rejoices. Ladybug made a pun. His mind is processing. Ladybug made a pun…about space. Loading, hold on dear reader…Ladybug made a pun about space using planet to replace plan it. His feet seem as if they are stuck to the ground, unresponsive.
Planet. Plan it.
Around him, Carapace’s timer beeps. Ladybug has long summoned her lucky charm. Rena Rouge is getting ready to bring her illusion into action. I guess he didn’t planet well, her voice echoes in his mind. The tissue box in his hand is long forgotten. The surroundings have faded away.
“Rena, create an illusion of me and-“Ladybug’s instructions barely register in his mind. His brain allocates them as background noise. Do you know how astronauts propose? He had asked. Her eyebrow had twitched. Her? Her?? Marinette? Or would that be Ladybug? This is a clear misuse of pronouns.
He does not notice Mr Pigeon redirecting pigeons towards the opposite direction. He does not register the others groaning in protest of the indecisive akuma. He does not note that Carapace drops the shelter.
They planet. His own voice echoes in his mind. She had smiled. A fake smile. A smile, indeed. She had smiled. Marinette had smiled. Ladybug had smiled. Ladybug had smiled... in response to a pun. To a cheesy pun he’d searched off the internet at three A.M. at night because Carapace had convinced him-
He feels a series of taps on his shoulder. The world comes back into focus. Ladybug is standing in front of him. Carapace and Rena both look at him with concern flickering on their faces. There’s a frown on his Lady’s face, and it is all too familiar. Neither the pigeons nor Mr Pigeon is anywhere to be seen.
His eyes scan her face. Those eyes, he’s seen them so many times. More times than he had thought. He’s seen them up close and from far away. He’s admired them every single time. Those bluebell eyes.
Her pigtails. Kwamis, he’s been absolutely blind, hasn’t he? She’s worn them everywhere. He’s seen them numerous times. How could he not recognise them?
The tiny freckles on her face, barely noticeable from afar, were even more obstructed by the mask. The mask is obstructing his view of Marinette’s face. Chat noir has never hated the mask more than he does now. Adrien has never hated the mask more than he does now.
His eyes, still scanning her face, move towards her lips. They’re moving, he realises. She’s talking…to him?
He snaps out of it. Letting a soft ‘huh’ out in the process of returning to the world of the conscious.
“We lost you for a minute there, dude,” Carapace says. His miraculous lets out a beep.
Ladybug’s attention is diverted to Carapace. “Let’s go look for Monsieur Pigeon, we’re running out of time.” She turns his attention back towards him.
“Are you ok?” she asks softly.
Chat noir nods. She flashes him a small smile.
“We’ll talk at patrol later, ok?”
He nods once more and she directs all her attention towards the west. He can see a blurry flock of pigeons at a distance.
All of this is familiar to him. She’s familiar to him. He has known Ladybug personally. He knows what she has for breakfast and lunch. He knows her class schedule, her usual seat, the topics she’s interested in, the flavor of macaroon she likes, what she wants to pursue in the future, where she lives, her friends, and her parents. He’s known more than he could have ever imagined.
For a good amount of time, that’s all he wanted to know. That’s all he wanted. To know about her. To know her. Now, he realises, he has. This entire time, he’s known all of it.
More than anything, he knows her name. Marinette Dupain-Cheng. She dots all her I’s with hearts on top and swirls the M in her name in a way that no one can ever replicate.
Moreso, he’s known Marinette. Not in the way she’s stumbling over her words and her feet, but in a way that he can confide all his feelings to her. In a way, he knows her insecurities, strengths, and weaknesses. The small details about her day, like how she fussed over the embroidery for her new fashion piece. He knows Marinette can kick the akumas ass without thinking twice. He knows she has her doubts from time to time. He also knows that she is unbelievably strong, determined, and incredibly stubborn.
He knew Marinette showed up twenty minutes late to class. He now knows she slept in due to the late-night akuma on the other side of the city. He knew Ladybug had to hurry and leave quickly three weeks ago after facing a particularly difficult akuma. He now knows she had to organise the party for her mother’s birthday.
It’s a whole new perspective on two different people. On the same person. On Marinette and Ladybug. On his Lady and his everyday Ladybug. On his friend and his partner. On the person who gets him like no other. On the person he’s grown fond of. On the love of his life.
It’s barely been a second since he concluded when he realises that he doesn’t have to read into any of this. It was only a joke.
Ladybug instructs them to split up into two groups. He’s with Rena Rouge. They’re to use two different paths. She asks Rena to create illusions of her and Carapace. The illusions are to accompany Rena and him.
Pandora’s box. All his doubts, questions, and feelings are gone with the wind. The only thing that remains is hope. The thought of Patrol is the only thing that sustains him. His eyes find Ladybug’s. Patrol, he thinks, see you at patrol. She shoots him another smile before running off.
His feet move without a second thought, following the Rena rouge and the conjured Illusions as they head towards the akuma. His eyes trail on the illusion of Ladybug leading the group towards the akuma.
Chat noir’s mind wavers for a moment. He involuntarily glances at the real Ladybug. She is nowhere to be found now. He finds his eyes drifting back towards the illusion of Ladybug. He wonders if he’ll finally be able to see through the magic.