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The atmosphere is thick enough to chew.
Part of this is the clinging, cloying fog that had descended on Paris like a cat with the setting sun—hur hur, Marinette thinks gloomily to herself, of course that’d be the first thing that comes to mind—probably something along the lines of a big floofy cat rubbing itself up against the couch, her talents were in fashion after all, not metaphor-ing. Streetlamps and the lights around them turn patches of it into a glimmering, shifting pyrite haze; everywhere else it’s just damp and clammy.
The rest comes from the tension between her and her companion, sitting some distance apart on the ironwork of the Eiffel Tower. Just close enough for her to reach out and lay a hand gently on his shoulder if she wanted to. Just far enough that she’d need to lean.
Ladybug sits beside her, his fingers laced in his lap as he idly kicks his legs back and forth, his messy blond mop seeming to glow faintly in the Tower’s warm lights that make shadows of his features and his hunched shoulders. Her tail moves automatically towards him for the fourth time since they’d gotten there, but she arrests the movement and wraps it around her leg once or twice. You couldn’t trust the blasted thing.
“So,” she says. Ladybug coughs, his lips thinning for a moment, his thumbs tapping together twice.
“Look, if this is about Valentine’s Day,” he says.
“It’s no problem,” she says quickly. “Really, it wasn’t.”
“I had to do it,” he says. His cheeks flush. “Y’know, to, ah, stop you. I’m sorry about that.”
Her brows knit together in honest confusion. “For what?” she says.
“Well, I, uh. You know. Didn't exactly, uh. Ask.”
Bless him. "I was sort of not really there at the time," she notes wryly. “I saw the footage, I probably would’ve clawed out your eyes or something.”
“Yeah.”
And the silence again, slamming into the meter or so between them like a portcullis. No, she reflects, the thought plopping into her mind. More like a landslide. First the little pebbles bouncing down innocently enough and then the rest of the hillside smacking into you at highway speeds, wiping away everything that you’d tried to put in its way.
Her mouth moves on automatic while her mind considers that imagery. “Would you do it again?” she says.
“Huh?” He looks up at her.
“You know. Would you kiss me if we weren’t in mortal danger,” her mouth says for her before the signal to shut up shut up shut up reaches her jaw muscles and clamps them shut.
Ladybug goes redder, the flush spreading from his cheeks to his ears. He stares for a moment before he forces his gaze back down to his lap, thumbs tapping out a rapid staccato beat.
“I, I uh, I, uh, um,” he says.
Great, Marinette thinks. Great move, Dupain-Cheng. Brilliant.
Ladybug inhales deeply and presses the pads of his thumbs tightly together, so that the skin goes white.
“I don’t think I could,” he says.
Fuck.
“There’s, ah, someone else,” he continues as Marinette feels her heart being fed through a food processor millimeter by millimeter. “A girl. At school. You, ah, wouldn’t know her. Well, you might.”
Fuck fuck fuck.
“But anyways,” he says, his hand going up to scratch at the back of his neck, “I like her. A lot. Haven’t really been able to tell her with one thing and another.”
Why the fuck had she asked. She’d known, somewhere in the back of his mind that he’d answer like that, she’d known, but so long as he didn’t say it it wasn’t so bad.
"I see,” Marinette says. She stands as quickly as she dares on legs that seem as stable as quicksand.
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be,” Marinette says. She chances a glance back at him but turns and takes a few steps away from him. “I asked.”
“I could've put it gentler,” Ladybug says. She hears him stand as well and steps a little further away.
“See you tomorrow then?” he says weakly.
In response, she stares out at Paris below, looking for a good spot to leap towards. Her mouth takes over again.
“You said I might know her,” Marinette says as she stands there, one hand on the nearest upright piece of steel for balance. She doesn’t look back at him. “Could I at least have her name?”
“Not so that I could go after her,” she adds quickly.
“I wasn’t thinking that,” Ladybug says. “And sure.”
She waits, her claws gouging shallow trenches into the iron.
“Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” he says.
Marinette goes stiff.
“You know her then?” Ladybug says.
She turns to face him, and his eyes go a little wide as they take in the expression on her face.
“Plagg,” she says. “Claws in.”
His mouth starts to frame the word “no” just as she leaps, green lightning crackling around her from toes to head as the transformation drops. Which is fine as far as she’s concerned.
The kiss is lip-bruising and she feels her teeth clack painfully against his as she hits him in a tackle hard enough to knock him back. Ladybug stumbles, trips, and goes over, Marinette clinging to him with arms and thighs and legs, but manages to cast out his yoyo and sling it around a beam before they plummet to their deaths. Well, hers. She was reasonably sure that he’d be fine, even from this height.
Unfortunately, her tackle wasn’t dead-center. Their momentum spins them around even as they fall, and Ladybug’s leg tangles in the string as he unspools it just enough to keep anyone from going the way of Gwen Stacy. They end up bouncing, upside down, chest to chest as Marinette kisses him for all that she’s worth, her head spinning as blood rushes down.
But even for all of that, the fog around them goes golden for a perfect, endless moment.
“What the,” Ladybug splutters as she breaks contact for a breath. “What? Marinette?”
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Yes, it’s me. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, but it’s me.”
“Marinette?” he repeats. “Holy shit.”
He stares at her as they swing gently from side-to-side. “Holy shit. I just kissed Marinette Du-freaking-pain-Cheng. Holy shit.”
“I kissed you, technically,” she says. A damned stupid thing to say but hey. The kiss was a damn stupid decision in the first place. Well, not the kiss, but the execution thereof. Also probably the detransformation thing, she was going to get an ear bashing from Plagg once they stopped making retching noises off to the side.
“You, uh,” he says. “Did.” He blinks a few times. “Uh. Can we do it again?”
“Can we not do it upside down?” Marinette suggests.
“Uh,” Ladybug says. “Yes. Yes we can.”
As it turns out, kissing is much more fun when her head isn’t pounding as blood rushes to it.
When she gets back home, Marinette spends the rest of the night alternately hyperventilating in panic, ignoring Plagg in favor of replaying the kissing in her head, and screaming in excitement into her pillow.