Chapter Text
Marinette’s parents thought it was funny that she moved to the opposite side of Paris only to work at another patisserie (to which she would always counter with a. she moved out to study at one of the finest fashion and design institutes in all of France and b. it was a café not a patisserie and their pastries were nothing compared to her parents’). But she needed the extra cash and lulls throughout the day like this one always gave her some time to sketch out a new design.
The environment helped a lot. The constant aroma of coffee mingled with the scent of fresh bread danced in the sunlight during warm days and teased those that passed by during cold days. The café had quickly become one of Marinette’s favorite spots to design just because she always got her best ideas while working.
Of course, the presence of a certain ex-model certainly didn’t hurt.
She hadn’t believed him when he first told her that he was Adrien Agreste simply because he didn’t look a thing like him. Marinette had read all about the estranged relationship between Adrien and his father Gabriel Agreste, the owner of France’s largest fashion company Gabriel, how as soon as Adrien had turned eighteen he severed all ties with his father, took his inheritance, swore off modeling for good and disappeared from the public eye. It was rumored that he’d started university somewhere in Paris, but other than that, no one had seen hide or hair of him until Marinette submitted a job application to Le Café Miraculous.
Adrien was the one who interviewed Marinette for the job. The owners of the café, Tikki and Plagg, were a cute elderly couple that Marinette had met once three months after she started working there. They spent most of their time exploring the French countryside and occasionally checked up on how things were going in the café. As long as things went smoothly, which it did, Plagg and Tikki never bothered them much about business in the café.
The interview went fine. Marinette had plenty of experience in customer service from her time working at her parent’s patisserie. Overqualified, in fact, was what Adrien said when he offered her a job right on the spot.
“I can’t work full time,” Marinette stated firmly. “I have class most mornings, but I should be free on most evenings.”
“Understandable, I also have class to deal with. All employees have to take a weekend shift though. Would you prefer Friday night, Saturday afternoon, Saturday evening, Sunday afternoon, or Sunday evening?”
“I’ll take Friday night. I don’t go out much anyways.”
He smiled, “Nino will be happy to hear that. He might make you cover some of his night shifts. He DJ’s for clubs on the weekends.”
“Oh, cool,” Marinette replied. “So where do you go to school?”
“I’m studying physics at L’universitie de Paris. What about you?”
“I’m a fashion and design student at the École de la Chambre Syndicale.”
Adrien froze.
“You okay?” Marinette frowned.
“Why are you here?” he asked coldly.
Taken aback, Marinette replied a bit forcefully, “Like I said, my parents own a patisserie so money isn’t easy to come by and I decided to earn—”
“No, why are you really here?”
“I, I don’t understand.”
“Don’t think you’re not the first fashion student to come in here and pretend to apply for a job to get an internship with my father or to see where Adrien Agreste disappeared off to.”
“Look, I just want a j—wait did you say Agreste?”
He nodded curtly.
“As in Adrien Agreste, Gabriel Agreste’s son?” Marinette asked skeptically.
He nodded again.
“Psh, yeah right” she scoffed. “If you’re Adrien Agreste then I’m Vera Wang.”
He looked at her pointedly.
“Wait you’re being serious?”
He nodded.
Marinette looked him over. At first glance, he looked nothing like the Adrien Agreste she remembered from the magazines. Gone were the carefully coiffed wavy blond locks. His golden hair, which was usually tied back, fell to his shoulders. Sharp cheekbones and lean but toned figure replaced the once round cheeks and thin wiry frame. He had a few cartilage piercings and a tattoo of a black cat on his left forearm. Even his vivid green eyes were different, though at the time, Marinette thought that was his only feature that was recognizably the same. He certainly wasn’t the Adrien Agreste the world had known five years ago.
She took a breath, “Look, it doesn’t matter who you are or who your dad is. I just need this job.”
He raised his eyebrows, “You really don’t care?”
“Not in the slightest.”
Adrien relaxed, “Okay, awesome. Because it would really suck if I had to turn you away. We’ve been looking for someone to do the icing on our pastries after Nathanael left last month.”
Marinette laughed, “Good, because I really don’t care about you or your dad, wait, it’s not that I don’t care about you as a person. I’m sure you’re a great guy and all I just, I’m going to stop talking before I say more stupid things.”
“No worries,” he chuckled. “Can you start next Monday?”
And that’s how she got here on another Friday night lull, hair tied back in a small bun, black apron over her white jeans and pink shirt, blue eyes staring absentmindedly at another design that was starting to look too similar to the blond manager who was handing the only customer in the café his signature drink, Le Chat Noir (which is black coffee with a double espresso shot, the coffee counterpart to their other hugely popular caffeinated tea Ladybug Spots, which was actually Marinette’s mother’s recipe that she used whenever she needed to pull all nighters. Both drinks were always super popular during exam week).
Marinette had been grappling with her feelings for a few months now, deciding whether or not she should actually tell Adrien that she sort of really like him and that it would be cool to hang out with him outside of work and that it was getting real frustrating to see him pop up in all of the sketches she drew because she’d start daydreaming and stop paying attention to what she was doing (Okay maybe not that last part).
She was just scared. She didn’t want Adrien to think that she was just baiting him all along, like how he thought she was when they first met. She’d seen firsthand how that affected him when a few weeks after she was hired, another girl came in with an application and began giggling uncontrollably when she saw him. He was always polite, but she noticed how the smile never reached his eyes during those moments. That was how Marinette discovered the existence of the ‘model mask’ as she liked to call it. His eyes were like that in all of the magazine shoots she’d seen.
The Adrien now (dare she say the Adrien that she was maybe falling in love with) had no inhibitions. When he laughed, he laughed fully, shoulders shaking as the sound of his laughter bounced through the room. His smile was not small and polite but dorky and lopsided. And his shit-eating grin whenever he delivered those horrible puns made his jokes all the more bearable. And his eyes would light up in a way that the camera could never capture. Marinette never wanted him to be forced back into the façade he worked so hard to shed.
But Marinette didn’t want this to be another 'what if' moment in her life. She was going to tell him and she was going to do it today.
The moment was perfect. The café was quiet save for the absentminded scratch of Marinette’s pencil. The setting sun filtered through the windowpane, illuminating the dust that swirled through the air.
“Whatchya working on?”
Marinette jumped in surprise, quickly closing her sketchpad and knocking over the cup of stirrers in the process.
“Oh merde, sorry.”
Adrien chuckled, “No, it was my fault for scaring you like that. Just wanted to say good job on the cookies. The decorations turned out great!”
Marinette blushed slightly at the compliment, “Thanks, I’m glad you liked them.”
“I did,” he looked around, “it’s pretty quiet here.”
“It’ll probably pick up a bit after everyone gets off work,” Marinette replied.
Adrien nodded in agreement.
“Hey Adrien?”
“Mmm?”
Marinette took a breath, “Can I talk to you?”
“Well, I mean you already are,” he responded with a cheeky grin.
Marinette stared at him, eyebrows raised in a ‘did you really just’ manner.
“Okay, okay sorry,” he laughed, “You were saying?”
“I erm, well I don’t really know how else to say this but,” she pulled at her apron nervously, staring down at her pink flats. “I have feeling for you. I like you, a lot actually and I, I wanted you to know that.”
She looked up to find his expression unreadable, his green eyes refusing to give her any sort of clue as to what was going on in his head.
“I,” he began, “How long?”
“What?”
“How long have you had feelings for me?”
Marinette looked down again, “A few months.”
She could feel her heart pounding in her chest in the silence and wondered if it was loud enough for him to hear.
“I, I need a moment,” Adrien replied softly, “to figure out what to say.”
He didn’t wait for her to reply, quickly disappearing into the back room.