Work Text:
Paris had seen a lot of akumas. Paris had *not* seen an akuma who could turn every umbrella in a six-block radius into a functioning, aggressive tornado, which was — Ladybug reflected, sprinting for cover with Chat Noir half a step behind her — a genuinely inconvenient power for a city that owned exactly one and a half million umbrellas.
"IN HERE," she yelled, shoving open the first door she found — a supply closet behind a café, mercifully empty, mercifully soundproof against the shrieking wind outside.
They tumbled in together, slammed the door, and pressed themselves into the dark, chests heaving, waiting out the worst of the akuma's rampage while Ladybug's earrings blinked their final warning beep and Chat Noir's ring did the same, nearly in sync.
"We can't transform back in here together," Chat Noir hissed. "My lady, this is a two-person crisis waiting to happen—"
"There's no time, just — turn around! Face the shelf! Don't look!"
"I'm looking at paper towels; this is fine, this is a completely normal Tuesday—"
Both of them turned to face opposite walls, squeezed their eyes shut for good measure, and let the transformations fall.
There was a very small, very charged silence.
"...Marinette?" said a voice she recognized down to her bones, because she'd spent two years half in love with the boy that voice belonged to, and it was very much *not* coming from behind her.
She turned around despite every instinct screaming not to. Adrien Agreste stood in a supply closet in his socks — because apparently detransforming had also cost him a shoe somewhere in the chase — staring at her with the exact same slack-jawed, thunderstruck expression she was almost certainly wearing back at him.
"...Adrien?" She looked down at her own hands, blinked at Tikki floating dazed by her shoulder, and then back up. "You're Chat Noir?"
"You're Ladybug?!"
"I— you— I have had a crush on Chat Noir's *dorky alter ego* for two years and it turns out they're the same person—"
"You had a crush on me?! Which me? Both me? I need you to be specific, this is very important—"
"Both, apparently, which is deeply unfair, I've been in love with one guy this entire time and didn't even know it!"
They stared at each other in the cramped dark, surrounded by bulk napkins and an alarming quantity of ketchup packets, and slowly — helplessly — started laughing, because there was nothing else to do with a moment this ridiculous.
"Okay," Adrien said, once he'd caught his breath, "so. This changes things."
"Does it, though?" Marinette leaned back against the shelf, considering. "I mean — I know you now. Not the mask. *You.* And honestly? I think I like knowing-you better than crushing-on-you. Crushing was exhausting. This is just — nice."
Adrien blinked, and something in his face relaxed into an easy, real smile that had none of Chat Noir's performative smoothness in it. "Yeah. Yeah, actually — same. I think I built you up into this untouchable rooftop goddess for so long I forgot you were also the girl who trips over air and forgets to remove price tags from her clothes."
"I removed the tag one time—"
"It's still on your bag right now."
Marinette looked down. It was, in fact, still on her bag.
"We're better as friends," she said, mostly to herself, testing the shape of it. "Best friends. Who happen to save Paris together and now also know each other's most dangerous secret."
"Bro," Adrien said solemnly, holding out a fist.
"Bro," Marinette agreed, and bumped it, and just like that, two years of overwrought unrequited longing dissolved into the easiest, warmest friendship either of them had ever had — sealed, appropriately, in a napkin closet, smelling faintly of ketchup, while outside the akuma finally got purified by absolutely nobody, because they'd both forgotten to actually finish the fight.
"...We should probably go deal with the tornado."
"Yeah. Probably."
Neither of them moved for another whole minute, just grinning at each other like idiots, before Tikki cleared her throat pointedly and reminded them Paris was, in fact, still on fire. Sort of. Metaphorically. There was definitely an umbrella lodged in a church bell tower.
---
Being Guardian was supposed to come with a manual. Master Fu had *implied* there was a manual. Master Fu, Marinette had come to learn, implied a lot of things that turned out to be "you'll figure it out, I'm ninety, goodnight."
What being Guardian *actually* came with:
- A magic box that occasionally hummed showtunes at 3 a.m.
- Seven increasingly judgmental kwamis living in her purse
- The ability to access, bond with, and wield *any* Miraculous, which sounds cool until you accidentally turn your bakery's croissant display into a swarm of very aggressive butterflies because you sneezed while holding the Butterfly Miraculous
- A slowly dawning, low-grade magical *aura* that made her uncomfortably good at things like lock-picking, luck-based dice games, and sensing when Chloé was about to do something insufferable
- Zero, and Marinette cannot stress this enough, *zero* institutional support
"You're basically a walking magical nuclear arsenal now," Adrien said cheerfully, watching her practice with the Peacock Miraculous in her parents' kitchen. "Very chill. Very normal. Very not-going-to-attract-attention."
"Don't jinx it," Marinette said.
He jinxed it.
---
The abduction happened on a Tuesday, which Marinette found personally offensive, because Tuesdays were supposed to be for math homework and mediocrity, not ninjas.
She'd been closing up the bakery when the lights went out — all of them, streetlight to streetlight, in a wave down the block, like something was *eating* the electricity. Then there were six people on the ceiling. Actually on the ceiling. Like spiders who'd taken a personal-development course.
"Marinette Dupain-Cheng," said the one who was clearly in charge, dropping down with the theatrical grace of someone who practiced dropping down in mirrors. "Guardian of the Miraculous. You will come with us."
"I have a croissant in the oven," Marinette said, stalling, reaching very slowly for her purse.
"It will burn."
"That's dark."
She fought — got three Miraculous transformed in under a minute, which she was later reliably informed was some kind of record — but there were a lot of them, and they had a truly rude amount of sedative-tipped darts, and the last thing she saw before the world went sideways was her own reflection in a masked assassin's goggles, looking extremely unimpressed with her life choices.
She woke up in a stone room lit by torches, which was such a wildly overdone aesthetic choice that some small, petty part of her brain thought, oh, we're doing this, are we, even through the sedative fog.
There was a boy in the room with her.
He was maybe her age, dressed in something that looked expensive and slept-in in equal measure, with green eyes doing a complicated dance between *murderous* and *deeply, deeply done with everything.* He was chained to the opposite wall with the specific slack of someone who had already tested every link for weakness and found none.
"You're awake," he said. Not a question. Just an assessment, filed and closed.
"Where—"
"Nanda Parbat. You've been kidnapped by the League of Assassins. So have I, though in my case it's more of a repossession." His mouth did something bitter. "Damian."
"Just Damian?"
"For now."
"Okay, well, I'm Marinette, and I'd say nice to meet you but the *circumstances* are really working against that particular sentiment."
Something that was almost — almost — a smile crossed his face. "No. They rather are."
She had no idea, sitting there in the torchlight with her wrists raw from rope, that the boy across from her had a last name that would mean something to half the planet, or that he spent his nights in a different city in a different mask doing the exact same job she did. He didn't offer it. She didn't ask. There were, at the time, more pressing concerns — namely the several dozen trained killers who apparently had plans for both of them.
---
The thing about Ra's al Ghul, Marinette learned very quickly, was that he did not do anything small. He did not simply want the Guardian's power. He wanted the Guardian's power *bound irrevocably to his bloodline*, because subtlety was for people without a Lazarus Pit and unlimited free time.
"You will wed my grandson," Ra's announced, in the tone of a man ordering catering. "The union of the Guardian and the al Ghul line will secure the Miraculous within my family in perpetuity."
"I'm seventeen," Marinette said.
"So is he."
"That's not the part I have a problem with, but thank you for confirming you also think that's weird."
Damian, chained beside her, had gone very still. "Grandfather. I refuse."
"You do not have that luxury, Damian."
"Then I'll fight you for it."
"You will lose, as you always do, and then the wedding will proceed regardless."
They tried to fight — Marinette got two more Miraculous on before six assassins pinned her, Damian broke a man's wrist with his bare, still-chained hands before three more got him face-down on the stone — and in the end it didn't matter, because the League had spent centuries perfecting the art of making resistance a formality rather than a strategy.
What actually mattered came hours later, kneeling side by side in a borrowed ceremonial robe that weighed more than her sense of consent, surrounded by armed witnesses who considered this a Tuesday. Marinette looked at Damian — at the tight, furious set of his jaw, the careful way he'd angled himself half in front of her without seeming to notice he'd done it — and felt something in her chest insist on asking the question nobody else in that room seemed to think mattered.
"Hey," she said, quiet enough that only he could hear. "Are *you* okay with this?"
Damian blinked. Whatever he'd braced himself for, it wasn't that.
"I don't — " He stopped. Started over, quieter. "No one's asked me that. Ever. About anything."
"I'm asking now."
He looked at her for a long moment, something shifting behind the murder-trained composure — surprise, and under the surprise, something that looked almost like gratitude, raw and unpracticed. "No," he admitted. "I'm not okay with any of this. But if I have to be handed to someone against my will—" a breath, steadying "—I'd rather it be someone who thought to ask."
"That's the saddest 'yes' I've ever heard."
"Welcome to my life."
"Okay." Marinette exhaled, squared her shoulders, and reached over to take his still-bound hand in hers. "Then we survive this together, and we figure the rest out once we're not, you know. Hostages."
"Agreed."
The ceremony that followed was, by any objective wedding-industry standard, a disaster: no cake, no dancing, one extremely reluctant officiant, several dozen heavily armed witnesses, and vows that were less "till death do us part" and more "here are the terms of your indenture, sign here." When Ra's commanded them to seal it with a kiss for the assembled League, Damian leaned in and murmured, "Only if you want to," and Marinette found, a little to her own surprise, that she did — not out of romance, not yet, but out of something that felt like solidarity forged in a very short, very strange amount of time.
Ra's declared the union bound. The League cheered in the specific flat way assassins cheer, which is to say, not very much at all.
Marinette had a headache, a marriage certificate written in what she was fairly sure was blood-ink, and a husband whose last name she still did not know, who had just quietly slipped his bound hand into hers and squeezed once, like a promise.
---
Freedom, when it came, came from the inside out.
Marinette spent her captivity doing the one thing seventeen years of superheroics had trained into her bones: *cataloguing exits.* Guard rotations. Sedative stores. And, critically, the location of the Black Cat Miraculous the League had confiscated during the fight, locked in Ra's personal vault like a trophy.
"Okay," she whispered to Damian, three nights after the wedding, finally alone in the guest quarters Ra's had provided for his new granddaughter-in-law. "I have a plan. It is unhinged. I need you to trust me."
"I married you four days ago at swordpoint," Damian said. "I think we're past 'trust me' and into 'I'm already in this.'"
"Fair. Okay. Cataclysm."
"What?"
"It's a power. Total destruction, anything I touch. If I get the ring back, transform, and get to the Pit—"
Damian's expression went very still. "You want to destroy the Lazarus Pit."
"I want to destroy this entire operation's *reason for existing*, yes."
He was quiet a moment. "Do it. He's used that thing on people I love. It doesn't fix what it breaks — just delays it, makes it worse underneath. I'd rather he never have it again."
The heist was, frankly, iconic. Marinette got them out using a borrowed Miraculous to reset a guard's memory, conjured an illusion of an empty vault, and Damian — soft-footed, silent, entirely in his element for the first time all week — picked the vault's three locks in under ninety seconds with a running, deadpan commentary on his grandfather's security taste.
She got the ring. Transformed. Full Cat Noir black, claws out, tail lashing.
"CATACLYSM!"
She plunged her clawed hand into the glowing green water, and it didn't just break — it unmade decades of borrowed time curdling and collapsing into ash-grey rot, the magic screaming once, thin and awful, before going permanently silent. Alarms that had never once needed to sound started sounding.
Between the two of them — Cat Noir's claws and Damian's brutal, economical fighting, working together with an unnerving, immediate synchronicity — they carved a path to the outer courtyard. Marinette tore open a portal with the last of her borrowed power.
"Where does that go?" Damian shouted over the wind.
"Anywhere I want! I'm the Guardian, perks of the job!"
They dove through together, hand in hand, and the chamber collapsed behind them in a final thunderous exhale.
---
The portal spat them out on a rooftop Marinette recognized with a full-body wave of relief as Paris, four in the morning, both of them shaking with adrenaline crash.
"So," Marinette said eventually, still catching her breath. "I just realized I destroyed your family's evil water feature and I don't even know your last name."
Damian huffed something that was almost a laugh. "Wayne," he said. "Damian Wayne."
Marinette blinked. Blinked again. "...Wayne. As in—"
"Gotham. Yes."
"As in Bruce Wayne?"
"My father, also known as Batman, yes."
"So you're—"
"Robin. Currently. Before that, a variety of other titles I'd rather not list at four in the morning."
Marinette stared at him, doing the specific rapid mental math of someone recontextualizing an entire kidnapping. "You're a superhero. You're a superhero's kid. You're a trained assassin *and* a superhero's kid and you let me carry the entire 'I also fight crime' conversation like it was a fun fact—"
"You never asked."
"I ASKED YOUR NAME AND YOU SAID JUST DAMIAN—"
"In my defense, we were chained to a wall."
"That is not a defense, that is a very thin legal shield—"
He was laughing now, properly, the sound rough with disuse, like it surprised him as much as it did her. "I know you as Ladybug — I recognized the Miraculous work the moment you cataclysmed the Pit, half of Gotham's rogues gallery has files on the Paris heroes — but I didn't want to say anything until you told me yourself. Seemed only fair. You'd earned the choice."
Something in Marinette's chest went soft and warm at that — the quiet, deliberate respect of it, handed to her without ceremony, the same way he'd handed her the question of consent back in that torch-lit room. "Okay," she said. "Then I guess we're even. Mutual secret identities, mutual accidental marriage, mutual really terrible first date."
"Second date. The vault counted."
"The vault does *not* count as a date, Damian—"
"It had ambiance."
She pulled out her phone. "Here. Put your number in. If we're doing this — actually doing this, figuring out what we are to each other — I'd like it to be a choice too. Not just a certificate written in blood-ink."
Damian took the phone like it was something breakable, typed his number in with the same precision he probably used to disarm bombs, and handed it back.
"Text me when you land," Marinette said. "However you're getting home."
"I look forward to it," he said, with the stiff formality of someone who had never once looked forward to anything and was startled to discover he meant it.
---
"Maman. Papa. So. Funny story."
Sabine Cheng and Tom Dupain had the specific braced expression of parents who'd learned that "funny story" from their daughter meant *sit down, possibly get the fire extinguisher.*
"We know you're Ladybug," Sabine said pre-emptively. "What else is there?"
"I got kidnapped by an international league of assassins, and while I was there, I got married."
Silence. The specific silence of two parents recalibrating their entire understanding of the word "grounded."
"Married," Sabine repeated.
"To a boy named Damian. He's really wonderful, actually, once you get past the murder-training — he asked, well, actually *I* asked *him* if he was okay with it, which felt important, considering the circumstances, and he said yes, and it just — it mattered, that we both got to choose that much at least."
"Marinette." Tom's voice had gone very careful. "Sweetheart. Is this — are you safe?"
"I'm safe, Papa, I promise. I destroyed the bad guy's evil immortality pond and portaled us both home. It's handled." She paused. "His last name is Wayne."
Sabine blinked. "...Wayne. As in—"
"As in Gotham. As in Bruce Wayne's son, As in I am now, apparently, married into a family of rich people who don't even know I exist yet."
Tom Dupain visibly aged and then, just as visibly, decided that his daughter fighting off international assassins while wielding cataclysmic destruction magic was, on the list of things he'd had to accept about his superhero child, not even in the top five most alarming.
"Well," he said finally, "does he treat you well?"
"He does. He asked if I was okay before anything happened, and when I asked him the same thing back, he said no one had ever asked him that before. Ever. About anything."
Tom's face crumpled, just slightly, in the way it did whenever something genuinely moved him. "Then he's already better off than he was," he said. "Welcome to the family, I suppose — does he like croissant or pain au chocolat, this is very important, I need to know what to bake."
"Papa—"
"I'm framing this," Sabine said, already reaching for her phone. "Our daughter, secret superhero, Guardian of Magic, and now apparently a Wayne."
Marinette put her face in her hands, and laughed, and loved her ridiculous, wonderful parents so much it ached.
---
The invitation had not, strictly speaking, come from Damian.
It had come from the Wayne Foundation's own event office, three weeks after Gotham's fashion press finally, breathlessly confirmed the rumor that had been circulating since a certain viral Paris runway show: that the mysterious, publicity-shy young designer known only as MDC — whose pieces had been quietly worn by three separate European royals and one extremely influential fashion editor — was taking general meetings with a short list of American labels, Wayne Enterprises' textile division among them.
MDC never attended galas. MDC never attended anything. MDC communicated exclusively through a single, ruthlessly efficient assistant, sent sketches instead of headshots, and had, in eighteen months of operation, been photographed exactly zero times. It had become something of a running joke in fashion circles that MDC might not physically exist.
So when Wayne Enterprises' event coordinator, three days before the annual gala, received a personally signed RSVP confirming that **M. Dupain-Cheng, of Atelier MDC,** would be attending — no plus-one requested, own name on the list — she nearly fell out of her chair.
Damian did not know. Nobody in the Wayne family knew. Marinette had, with the specific chaotic energy of a girl who had learned to keep secrets from an early age, decided that meeting her husband's family for the first time in front of six hundred witnesses was, weirdly, the safest option available to her — public enough that nobody could disappear her into a basement, official enough that she got a place on the guest list under her own merit, and dramatic enough that it was, frankly, extremely funny.
She had also, quietly, texted Damian exactly one thing that morning: *don't ask questions, just be surprised, I promise it's good.* He had not been able to get a straight answer out of her since, and had, after four days of trying, simply decided to trust her, which — three weeks into an actual relationship built on choice instead of coercion — had become disturbingly easy to do.
---
The gala, at the start, was a fairly ordinary affair: string quartet, unreasonably expensive canapés, at least one board member quietly laundering money in the coat check.
Then the whispering started.
It began at the door, where a security guard, scanning names off a list with practiced boredom, looked up at the sharp, poised young woman in a deep-red gown and asked, out of pure procedural habit, for her name for the press list.
"Marinette Dupain-Cheng," she said, pleasant and unhurried. "Of Atelier MDC."
The guard's pen stopped moving.
"...The MDC?"
"The one and only."
Word did not so much spread as detonate. By the time Marinette had crossed the ballroom's threshold, at least four separate fashion journalists had abandoned their canapés entirely, a Wayne Enterprises PR associate had visibly begun sweating, and Bruce Wayne — deep in conversation with a city councilman — had been interrupted no fewer than three times by staff whispering, 'MDC is here, MDC is actually here, sir, in the building, right now' with the reverent urgency usually reserved for national emergencies.
Damian, arriving from the coat check, walked directly into the wall of whispers and had absolutely no idea what was happening until he turned, scanning the ballroom out of habit, and saw her.
Marinette. His Marinette. Standing in the center of a small orbiting crowd of astonished designers and journalists, in a gown that was — he realized with a slow, dawning, delighted horror — clearly her own work, deep red, impeccably tailored, and looking for all the world like she'd been born knowing how to hold a room.
"You're MDC," he said, arriving at her side, mostly to himself, mostly stunned.
"Surprise," Marinette said, grinning up at him. "I told you it was good."
"You own a fashion label. An internationally acclaimed one. My father's company has been trying to get a meeting with you for eight months."
"I know! It's very funny, actually, I've been sending your dad's assistant polite rejection emails for two-thirds of a year, I had no idea you were *involved* with any of this until three weeks ago—"
"This is the single most chaotic thing that has ever happened at one of these events, and I once watched Jason set a centerpiece on fire out of spite."
"I have several more surprises. Pace yourself."
Bruce Wayne, extracting himself from a suddenly very interested cluster of board members, arrived just in time to hear his son laugh — genuinely, warmly, without a trace of his usual careful restraint — at something the mysterious MDC had said, and filed that away with the particular alarm of a father who recognized, immediately and completely, that something significant had happened without his knowledge.
"Damian," he said carefully. "You know Ms. Dupain-Cheng?"
"...We're acquainted," Damian said, which was, generously, an understatement of truly historic proportions.
"*Acquainted,*" Marinette repeated, delighted. "Sure. That's a word for it."
Bruce's welcome speech went ahead as scheduled, warm and practiced, thanking the room for their generosity, the string quartet swelling gently underneath — and the entire time, Marinette stood near the back with Damian's hand loosely in hers, watching his family with open, curious interest, already half in love with the chaos of them without a single one of them knowing what she was about to say.
The applause for Bruce's speech was still settling when Marinette caught Damian's eye, raised an eyebrow — now? — and got a small, steady nod back.
She didn't take the podium. She didn't need to. She simply stepped forward, into the space the crowd had already carved out around Gotham's most mysterious new arrival, and let her voice carry the way she'd learned it could, on rooftops, in ballrooms, anywhere that needed her to be heard.
"Since everyone's clearly dying to know who I am," she said, warm and a little wicked, drawing eyes from every corner of the ballroom, "let me save you the suspense. I'm MDC aka Marinette Dupain-Cheng Al Ghul Wayne, yes, Wayne, as of about three weeks ago, as I'm also Damian's wife."
The silence that followed had a *texture.*
Somewhere in the crowd, a champagne glass hit the floor. Jason Todd, mid-sip, choked so violently Dick had to thump him on the back. Tim Drake pulled out his phone with the reflexive speed of a man documenting a crime scene. Bruce Wayne's expression did something complicated and multi-staged, moving through shock, recalculation, and finally settling, with visible effort, on I will deal with this like a reasonable adult in front of the press.
"Also," Marinette added, lower, just for the family cluster now gathering close, eyes bright with a secret she wasn't quite ready to hand the whole ballroom, "there's more to the story than *fashion designer*, but that part's mine to tell in my own time, if that's alright. Tonight's already a lot."
Alfred, God bless him, recovered first — striding forward with a fresh tray of champagne and the unshakable calm of a man who had survived worse family announcements at worse parties. "Congratulations are, I believe, in order," he said, offering her a glass with a small, genuine bow. "Welcome to the family, Mrs. Wayne."
"Thank you, Alfred! I brought macarons, they're with the coat check, I'll bring you some before I leave."
"ALFRED", Bruce said, in the strangled voice of a man whose evening had just detonated twice in ten minutes, "did you *know* about any of this—"
"I did not, sir. I find I am remarkably unsurprised regardless."
Damian, chin lifted, entirely unrepentant, slid his hand back into Marinette's. "Father. I can explain."
"I would," Bruce said, very evenly, "*love* that. After the gala. In the study."
"Fair," Marinette said. "Fair enough."
---
They danced, later, once the worst of the shock had thinned into buzzing gossip and Bruce had reluctantly returned to hosting with the grim determination of a man who would absolutely be interrogating his son at nine sharp the next morning. The string quartet slid into something slow, and Damian — a little stiffly, like a boy who'd been drilled in ballroom technique but never once used it for joy — held out a hand.
"I don't actually know if I'm any good at this."
"I design ballgowns, Damian, I promise I've thought about this exact moment more than is strictly healthy." She took his hand. "Just don't step on the hem. I'll never forgive you."
They danced under the ballroom lights, badly at first and then not badly at all, and somewhere near the edges Dick Grayson elbowed Jason so hard he nearly went into the ice sculpture, whispering, *look at his FACE, I have never seen that face,* and Tim Drake got a photo for posterity that would later be printed, framed, and hung in the manor's east hallway without anyone's permission, and Alfred watched from the doorway with the quiet, private satisfaction of a man who had waited a very long time to see that particular boy look that particular happy.
Marinette did not tell the ballroom she was also Ladybug. That one, she decided, could stay hers a little longer — a secret kept not out of fear, this time, but simply because some things deserved to be handed out slowly, on her own terms, to people who'd earned them.
---
Epilogue: The Wedding Her Parents Refused to Let Go
The Wayne family got their explanation the next morning, delivered over coffee in the study with considerably more composure than the gala had allowed, and — after a great deal of paperwork, several extremely tense international phone calls, and one (1) legal team quietly confirming that League of Assassins marriage contracts held approximately zero standing in any court that mattered — the "marriage" was formally, legally dissolved within the month.
Which suited Marinette and Damian just fine, because neither of them had ever wanted *that* wedding. The blood-ink and the swords and the six-hundred-year-old warlord officiant had never been theirs to keep.
What they wanted came eight months later, and it came almost entirely against their will, because Sabine Cheng and Tom Dupain had, from the moment they'd heard the words *arranged marriage* and *forced* in the same sentence as their daughter's name, quietly and immovably decided that their little girl was *not* going to have her only wedding be one she hadn't chosen.
"We're baking a cake," Sabine announced one Sunday video call, with the tone of a woman who had already bought the flour. "A real one. With real icing. And you are wearing something you actually picked, and there will be *dancing* that isn't interrupted by ninjas, and Damian's family is invited, and that is *final.*"
"Maman, we're not even properly—"
"Marinette." Tom's voice, gentle but absolutely unmovable. "You asked him if he was okay. He asked you back. That's more of a wedding than most people manage in a lifetime. We just want to give you the *party* part. Let your papa bake."
So, on a warm evening in late spring, in the small walled garden behind the Dupain-Cheng bakery strung with fairy lights and entirely too many paper lanterns Marinette had insisted on making herself, a very small, very chosen wedding happened — no swords, no torches, no six-hundred-year-old warlords, just the people they actually loved.
Tikki and Plagg hovered somewhere near the dessert table, thoroughly unbothered by protocol. Alfred stood beside Sabine at the cake table, the two of them having bonded with terrifying speed over lamination technique, occasionally exchanging notes in low, professional murmurs. Bruce, in a suit considerably less stiff than his gala tuxedo, gave a toast that started dry and businesslike and ended, to everyone's shock including his own, slightly choked up. Dick cried through the entire ceremony and blamed pollen. Jason smuggled in fireworks that Tom banned from the premises approximately four seconds before they went off anyway. Tim took nine hundred photographs and later insisted, correctly, that at least twelve were print-worthy.
Adrien stood up as Marinette's best man, because — as she'd told him, laughing, three months prior — "you're literally the only other person who understood the whole thing from the start, it has to be you," and he'd cried a little too, and told the assembled guests a story about a supply closet, a lost shoe, and a truly unfortunate umbrella tornado, which got the biggest laugh of the night.
Marinette wore red — her own design, of course, simpler than the gala gown but hers in every stitch, no blood-ink signatures required. Damian wore his father's old cufflinks, self-conscious and glowing in a way none of his siblings had ever once seen and would spend the next several years mercilessly, lovingly teasing him about.
When it came time for vows, Marinette didn't recite anything formal. She just looked at him, and asked, the same way she had once in a torch-lit room half a world away, "Are you okay with this?"
Damian, steady, certain, home in a way he'd never quite let himself be before, said, "Yes. Actually, properly, completely yes."
"Good," Marinette said, smiling so hard it hurt. "Because I asked first, so it counts more."
"That is not how vows work."
"It's how *my* vows work."
Tom Dupain, watching his daughter marry a boy who'd once told her no one had ever asked if he was okay, cut the first slice of cake with the enormous, world-absorbing satisfaction of a man who had, in the end, gotten exactly the wedding he'd promised her — the real one, chosen, unforced, and entirely, gloriously theirs.
*[End.]*