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She tiptoes into the apartment quietly, careful to make sure her keys don't rattle in the lock as she opens the door. Pushing her bangs out of her eyes, Marinette glances around the living room and the kitchen before she turns to shut the door with exaggerated care.
Their apartment opens directly into the main living area, which on its own is larger than the apartment she grew up in. Marinette turns and heads for the kitchen, but halfway there, she stops.
Adrien is lying on their couch, stretched out in that careless way of his, dead to the world. A lesser man would be snoring into his pillow. Naturally, he looks perfect, like someone posed him there. He's even smiling a little. Must be having a nice dream.
Marinette looks down at him and shakes her head, laughing to herself. He does this every day when he comes back from teaching class, and he pays for it every night when he can't get to sleep before midnight, but does that stop him? Of course not. Why would it?
She leans over and shakes his shoulder. He murmurs at first, turning over like he can get away from her hand and sink back into sleep. Marinette laughs again and shakes him harder. "Come on, Adrien, you know you shouldn't nap like this," she says. "I'll make dinner if you wake up now."
He makes a soft sound, pressing his face more firmly into the couch pillow, while Marinette leaves her hand on his shoulder and waits; eventually he sighs and opens his eyes to look at her. The first glimpse of his eyes is always startling; they're such a bright, rich green that they're actually distracting. She's never met anyone with eyes that vivid before. It feels like they shouldn't be allowed.
"Hi," she says, smiling fondly at him. "Nice nap?"
Adrien sort of hums at her, a low sound that comes from deep in his chest, and then he smiles back, the sleepy, dopey smile he always gives her when she wakes him up like this. "Yeah," he sighs. He stretches out, his arms reaching far over his head and pointing his toes, too; his t-shirt pulls up at the waist to show Marinette a thin sliver of tanned skin.
"Come on, model boy," she says, patting him on the shoulder again before she straightens up and heads into the kitchen. She calls back over her shoulder, "I need food, and if I'm guessing right, you haven't eaten since class let out."
"I ate," Adrien grumbles.
"Cheese doesn't count!"
Adrien sighs loudly enough that Marinette could hear him halfway across the apartment. But he doesn't say anything else. Clearly, he doesn't have an answer to that. Marinette smirks to herself and pulls the spinach out of the fridge with a spring in her step.
She's got the salmon searing on the stove and she's at the island in the center of the kitchen, in the middle of chopping shallots for a salad, when Adrien's long arm reaches over her to take the bread knife out of the block in front of her.
She glances over her shoulder. He's got the baguette she was going to cut up in his other hand. "I've got it," Marinette says, raising her eyebrows. "Maybe you shouldn't be using sharp objects after you just woke up." She goes back to chopping the shallots, but maybe not fast enough to hide the smile she's trying to bite back.
"I can help," Adrien says mildly, going around the island to use the other side. "I'm not totally useless in the kitchen, you know."
"I do know that," Marinette admits. "But we made a deal, didn't we?"
"You can't hold me to agreements I made while half-asleep, Marinette. That's not fair." Marinette glances up at Adrien and finds him watching her with a gleam in his eyes. He enjoys teasing her.
Marinette makes a truly grotesque face at Adrien, so that he knows he's being threatened. "God forbid I cook dinner for my husband." She scrapes the cutting board in front of her into the bowl to the sound of his laughter. "But if you insist, then you might as well get to it. Why aren't you finished with that yet, hmm?"
"If you wanted me to lose a few fingers, you could have just said so." Adrien pretends to saw at the baguette in a way that actually makes Marinette twitchy – not because she's worried about his fingers, since he is actually being careful to keep them out of the way, which is the most important thing. But as far as she's concerned, no one should ever treat bread like that.
"I'm going to tell my father you mangled a baguette," Marinette sings over her shoulder as she takes the shallots over to the spinach still draining in the sink. "He'll stomp you flat and serve you on Brie."
"You lie," Adrien says. From the slightly distracted way he says it, he's finally attending to the baguette the way he should. "Your father adores me. You're just saying that so I don't suspect it when your mother comes up behind me to smack me with a bread peel."
"Maman would never hit you with a bread peel," Marinette protests. She flashes him a smirk over her shoulder and adds, "Don't you know how much those things cost?"
"Ha, ha," Adrien says, very dry, but trying to hide a smile. One of her favorite things about Adrien is that he can take it as well as dish it out. "But that reminds me – "
He sounds far more serious now than he did before. Marinette turns around with the bowl of salad in her hands and comes back to the island, leaning against it to give him her full attention.
"Father texted me to ask you to ask your mother to ask her aunt Mei-ling to schedule the meeting she's been dodging." He gives her a wry smile at the long chain of people he's summoned up.
"Was there anything else?" Marinette asks, giving him the same kind of smile. "Hi? How's your day gone? Want to catch up this weekend?"
"Of course not." Adrien stacks the last of the baguette into an untidy pile and puts the whole thing aside, reaching for the olive oil. "Red wine vinaigrette?"
"Yeah, sounds good," she says, pushing the salad bowl over to him. "Adrien..."
"No, I know," he says, glancing up at her with raised eyebrows and a smile he's only faking a little bit. "But it is what it is, right? At least I expect him to be like this now, which is better than when I thought he might change." He sighs, shakes his head. "I'm just sorry I dragged you into this. I should have said no."
"But you wanted his approval," Marinette says gently.
"But I wanted his approval." Adrien gives Marinette another tiny, slightly pathetic smile. "And look how that worked out."
She goes around the island this time and leans against this side, facing Adrien so he has no excuse not to look at her. "Being married to one of my very favorite people in the world isn't a hardship, Adrien," she says gently. She's told him this before – more than once – but she's willing to tell him again and again if it gets that look off his face. "I agreed, didn't I? I had my reasons. Now that they've got a reason they can use to get over the fact she married a white man, my mom is welcomed back into the fold of her family. That means more to me than you'll ever know. It's not like we could have gotten married in the first place if I hadn't agreed, anyway," Marinette says with a grin. "The officiants are kind of sticky that way – they wait for everyone to say yes before they go on."
Adrien snickers. "I'm imagining the look on my father's face if you'd said no, I've changed my mind, I don't actually want to get married today, thank you. I think he might actually have had an aneurysm."
"Of course he would have," Marinette points out, folding her arms across her chest to get comfortable. If Adrien feels like retreading ancient ground like this, she wants to be near him for the next little while to make sure he's okay. "He couldn't very well have made the deal with the Chengs if I hadn't, and that would have been, like, eight months of negotiating down the drain. We could probably have held out for a king's ransom, you know."
Adrien cocks a teasing eyebrow at Marinette. "I didn't realize you were so mercenary. You could have gotten a lot more out of Gabriel if you'd tried."
"Nah," Marinette says, leaning over to bump her shoulder against Adrien's arm. "I already got what I wanted." She gives him a quick grin and stands, going back to the other side of the kitchen to check on the cooking salmon, which also allows Adrien a moment to let the blushing fade. Win-win.
He's her husband – on paper, anyway. In practice, he's more like her roommate and her very best friend. And Marinette enjoys little more than teasing the life out of him.
They usually catch up on their days over dinner – Adrien's classes, which kids have turned in the silliest papers or somehow confused the instructions on an experiment in the most baffling ways, and the newest developments in the long cold war between Marinette's co-workers, which started when a new hire wouldn't stop clicking his pen very loudly and someone else asked him to stop. Then he started clicking the pen in her direction. Pointedly. It went downhill from there. Marinette refuses to get involved, but Adrien eats up even the most minor of stories with a fascination Marinette can't even begin to understand.
"Don't you get enough petty warfare at school?" she asks, laughing. "I thought academia breeds this sort of thing."
His eyes light up. "Hey, did I tell you about Professor Laurent? No? Someone served her white wine instead of red at the café on campus, and she's convinced that Professor Martiné put him up to it."
Marinette makes a face and drains the last of the wine in her own glass, now that she's been reminded it's there. "How can you stand them?"
Adrien shrugs. "It's pretty funny, most of the time. I really thought that people who lived through the akuma wars would have a sense of proportion, but I guess not."
"Isn't it weird how everything just... went back to normal?" Marinette says, her eyes drifting toward the tall plate-glass windows that line their living room, where Paris lives out its night life without fear or thought of caution.
Paris has lived without Hawkmoth for nearly eight years now. No one knows who he was except Master Fu. He was the only one who saw Hawkmoth's face; the instant he saw it, he'd banished Ladybug and Chat Noir from the battlefield with such harsh words that they had no choice but to do as he told them. The akumas ended that night, after Miracle Queen made her move, and ever since then, Master Fu has steadfastly refused to tell them anything about who Hawkmoth was, or what he wanted. It's not their business, he tells them every single time. It's no longer important. Hawkmoth is contained, and without the Butterfly miraculous, he's no danger to anyone.
Marinette disagrees. So does Chat Noir. But so far, they haven't had any luck getting Master Fu to change his mind. About that... or anything else.
"Yeah," Adrien says thoughtfully, leaning back in his chair with his wineglass. "Sometimes I wonder if we're the only ones who remember."
"I imagine the akuma victims remember," she replies, raising a pointed eyebrow.
Adrien shrugs. "That it happened, at least. I wonder if it's a blessing or a curse that they don't remember anything they did while they were possessed. I'd want to know, I think, even if it fucked me up forever. Wouldn't you? Wondering what happened and what I said, what I did... that would be worse. That would mess me up for good."
"That's because you have an overactive imagination," Marinette says solemnly.
"Please," Adrien says, raising an eyebrow at her. "Like you don't."
She wrinkles her nose at him. He laughs.
Adrien does the washing up while Marinette takes a few cookies out of their freezer stash to bake for dessert. At the end of it, when they're both stuffed, she takes her last cookie and gives Adrien a wave before she heads into her bedroom and closes the door. Tikki swirls out of her pocket, nearly drooling as she stares at the cookie in Marinette's hand.
"Here," Marinette says, laughing, as she holds the cookie out. Tikki snatches it so quickly that Marinette is tempted to count her fingers afterward, but instead, she picks up her phone and flops down onto her bed, checking the time. She and Chat always meet at an hour after sunset. This late in spring, that means Marinette has another half an hour to waste before she has to leave.
She uses the time to putter around in her room, straightening up her vanity and laying out clothes for the next morning, when she's probably going to be grouchy from lack of sleep. She has every intention of running around with Chat as long as he's willing to stay out – and he never sends her to bed before midnight.
The closer it gets to time to leave, the more Marinette checks the time on her phone, until Tikki sighs and floats toward her. "Let's just go," she suggests. "If you're early, you can wait for him there."
Marinette brightens. "You're the best, Tikki!"
She transforms and hurls herself out of the window, moving as fast as she can, so that it's less likely someone will look up and spot her; she's run five blocks on the rooftops before she can blink, her whole body seething with frantic energy. When she's gone far enough away from their apartment that she's all right with being seen, Ladybug grabs her yo-yo and starts flying.
Their meeting places aren't random. Long ago, when Hawkmoth was still active, Ladybug sat down and made a list of every monument and building in Paris with a good bit of flat roof to land on, and they still use that list to determine where that week's meet-up will be. Right now, the list is alphabetized by the second letter of the first word. Marinette changes the order every January. It's kept them ahead of the reporters, so far, though Alya's come damn close to predicting their moves once or twice.
Still. Alya's trustworthy. If she's the one who eventually figures it out, it wouldn't be so bad.
Tonight they're meeting on the roof of the Carnavalet Museum; it's one of the old Renaissance mansions, and so has an ornate roof with a comfortable railing to perch on. Ladybug normally finds Chat sitting – or leaning or lying – on the roof waiting for her, but she's the first one here tonight. She drops down onto the railing, letting her legs dangle over the side, and looks out over Paris, hoping to see a small black dot bounding from roof to roof toward her.
No such luck. Ladybug sighs.
She's tapping her fingers and her toes by the time Chat lands on the rooftop next to her. "Someone's early," he says, a lilt in his voice that means he's pleased. "Miss me?"
"Duh," Ladybug says, rolling her eyes, and throws herself at him. "Hi!"
Chat catches her neatly and swings her around. "Hi, yourself," he says, grinning. "God, it's good to see you. How have you been? Tell me everything."
He leaps up onto the railing and crouches there, settling her on his thigh in a move that seems to be automatic, unthinking, except for the way he settles his arm around her waist like it belongs there and nudges her into leaning against his chest. He does this every time. Chat swears perching like a bird is comfortable, and she does believe him, but somehow, she thinks he has more than one reason to sit this way.
(Not that she's complaining.)
"Mostly working," Ladybug says with a shrug. "I'm boring these days: work, home, work, home. I might get a drink with my friend on the weekend. The most excitement I see is when we come up on the rooftops and pretend we're patrolling."
"Hey," Chat says, playfully offended. "There is nothing pretend about this patrolling, thank you very much. See?" He points down at something on the street a few blocks away. Ladybug can smell the joke coming a mile away, but for the sake of the bit, she follows his finger to see a tall, thin man leaning against a lightpost. "Potential pickpocket, right there. We'd better keep an eye on him. You never know what he might do."
Ladybug laughs, shaking her head a little – Chat is ridiculous sometimes – but then she realizes there's something familiar about the man he'd pointed out. She squints. "Chat," she says flatly. "That's Fred Haprèle."
"Yep," he says easily.
"He's a mime, kitty," Ladybug continues, trying to swallow her amusement. It's doing funny things to her voice. "Not a pickpocket."
"Far be it from me to contradict you, my lady, but have you ever considered that's exactly what he wants you to think?" Chat blinks innocently at her. "What if all of that miming is just a cover? Isn't that how magicians do their sleight-of-hand tricks? Over here, look at this hand," he says, wiggling the long, graceful fingers on the hand not holding Ladybug. "And all the while..."
Suddenly, she feels a pinch on the soft skin of her waist. It startles her so badly that Ladybug squeals embarrassingly loud and backflips to land on the railing, crouched and panting, glaring at Chat with a murderous kind of fury.
Chat grins at her. "Gotcha."
"You're dead meat," Ladybug says levelly. "You know that, right? I'm going to hang you from the Eiffel Tower by your toes."
"You'd have to catch me, first," Chat says, his sharp canines gleaming in the soft night-time lights.
There's wicked humor in his eyes. That's her only warning. Chat yanks the baton from behind his back and shoves off in the same movement, halfway to the next rooftop before Ladybug can even blink. In the next second, she's in the air, too. She chases him all over Paris, to the Eiffel Tower and past it, over the river to the Left Bank and through the Luxembourg Gardens, where they briefly play hide-and-seek until Ladybug realizes what an advantage Chat's black suit gives him. She's the one being chased now.
Ladybug throws a glance over her shoulder. Chat isn't very close, but she can tell that all of his attention is locked on her to the exclusion of everything else, which causes a shivery sensation in the pit of her stomach. She gives him a smirk and yanks herself away. As always, Chat follows.
She crosses the river again and swings past Beauborg and through the Marais district before turning north to follow the Saint-Martin canal. It's mostly locals here, who are used to Ladybug and Chat Noir, unlike the tourists who were taking pictures as they swung through the more public areas of the city. This is where she's going to get the drop on him. Ladybug seems to remember that there's –
Ah. There it is.
Right in front of her, on the left side of the canal, there's an arrangement of restaurant facade and walk symbol pole that leaves only a narrow gap between them. Ladybug flings herself through the gap, continuing on as straight as she can – but just after she goes through the poles, she flips around mid-air to look behind her.
Chat is too focused on her, not on their surroundings. He gets this way sometimes: way too fixated on the target of his attention, with a single-minded focus that Ladybug rather enjoys.
Especially when she gets to use it against him.
She pitches her yo-yo behind her and winds it around the facade and the pole, making an impenetrable net just before Chat gets there. He doesn't have a chance to stop before he bounces off the net she made at a speed that sends him flying. He tumbles backward, landing on one knee, his baton bracing him upright, and shakes his head hard, his hair fluffing and resettling.
Yes.
Ladybug does a delighted little flip in mid-air to land lightly on her toes.
Chat narrows his eyes at her. If she didn't know him so well, she might have felt intimidated. Instead, she bows to him as flamboyantly as she can.
This time there's no warning. Chat pushes off with his baton to spring over her blockade, and Ladybug is caught off her guard; she shakes her yo-yo free and spins to take off again, but it's too late. Chat is already on her. He grabs her around the waist and sends them flying, higher than the buildings around them in a second, but he doesn't stop there; his staff can stretch as long as he wants it to, after all, and Chat keeps going until they're so far up that the people below are nothing more than tiny dots, nearly invisible in the evening light.
He lifts himself up on the tip of his staff and crouches there, setting her back on his leg like nothing just happened. But this time, he leans in to look at her so closely Ladybug's eyes cross.
"That was a dirty trick, bugaboo," Chat says to her.
She can tell he's not mad. He's trying not to laugh, and he doesn't want her to know it.
"And you fell for it anyway," Ladybug says cheerfully. She pushes his bangs out of his eyes, taking the opportunity to mess up the rest of his hair while she's there. "So what does that say about you, hmm?"
Chat sighs, softening, surrendering, all of the fight going out of him at once, even though they're just playing. He tips his forehead to rest against hers.
Danger signals begin to blare. He's too close: too real, too honest, leaving him vulnerable in the way he only allows her. She can't look away from his eyes. They seem to fill her vision until everything else recedes; not even the night's chill, or the wind that blows around their bodies can touch her. There's nothing else. Just him.
Ladybug could kiss him, right now, and it would be so, so good. And he would kiss her back. In a heartbeat. In an instant. She knows that best of all.
"Chat," she whispers uncertainly.
"I know," he whispers back. He sounds miserable. "I didn't think it would be this hard. Or... I guess I thought it would get better, easier to bear over the years. But it's not. It's worse. I think about you all the time. At work, when something happens, you're the person I want to tell. When I get home, half the time I pass out in the hopes of dreaming about you instead of dealing with my real life."
Her heart goes out to him. She runs her hand through his hair again, this time not even trying to pretend she's doing it for any reason other than to touch him. She might cry, if she thinks about it too hard, if she allows herself to feel it the way she feels it every day and every night. Because Chat isn't alone in this. He never was. He's the one she wants, and he's the one person she can't have.
"How is she?" Ladybug asks with a tremulous smile.
Chat laughs, tear-drenched, wistful. "She's good. She was telling me about her job earlier. She's doing well there. She has that passion, you know? You can hear it in everything she says. So I think... I think she's happy."
Ladybug doesn't want to be this person – she doesn't want to feel this way about someone she's never met – but sometimes she hates Chat's wife. How could she possibly appreciate him the way that he deserves? Does she even know what she has? Does she take care of his tender heart with gentle hands? Or is she careless with Paris's greatest treasure?
Ladybug swallows. "That's good, right? That she's happy. That's the point."
He laughs a little, nuzzling closer. "Yeah," he agrees softly. "She's great, you'd love her. She's my best friend. After you, there's no one I trust more. But I still feel like I'm using her."
She's not allowed to know why, or what happened. Ten years later, and Master Fu still won't let them share identities, so Ladybug can't know the specifics of why Chat had to get married in the first place. It's always felt like he needed protection from something or someone in his personal life. That hurts so much – because she can't know what kind of trouble her kitty's in, and she can't be the one to save him.
Ladybug wants that with every fiber of her being. If she could have married him without giving up her name, she would have done it in a heartbeat. And not just because she's in love with him. He's her best friend. He's her partner. Chat Noir is everything to her, and there's nothing she wouldn't do to help him.
"You wouldn't," she says, moving her fingers so gently that it's not scratching, not anymore. It's more like a massage. Chat's purr has deepened and roughened as he aged, and the sound of it and the way it rumbles through her own chest makes her feel light-headed. "Chat, you couldn't. You're not that kind of guy. If she's anything like as great as you say she is, then she understands that."
Chat sighs. "Yeah, you're right," he agrees in a low voice. "And she always says that she did it to reconnect to her family – don't ask, I can't explain – "
Ladybug shakes her head.
"But I know she's lying. There were other ways she could have done what she needed to do. This, she did for me," he says, closing his eyes.
Maybe his friend does know how to take care of him. Ladybug resents that even more.
"Then it's a gift," she murmurs, stroking her hand down Chat's face. "And you should take it, kitty cat, and say thank you."
Chat's laughter is a bark – short, sharp, and unhappy. He opens his eyes again. "I'll work on it," he says, his mouth twisting. He takes a breath that she can feel, cooler air against her mouth, and then tries on a smile. "How's your guy?"
Ladybug winces. He must really be in the mood to punish himself tonight. Chat knows damn well that he's the only one she wants, so there's no way he would have believed that she had a boyfriend. Ladybug had to invent an ever-rotating cast of situationships to cover any slips she might make regarding Adrien's presence in her life.
She thinks she hates the implication most of all: that she's out getting laid while Chat and his wife aren't like that. She knows they aren't. Not that he's told her... but he didn't have to. Ladybug knows her kitty. He loves with his whole being, with every piece of his heart and his body and all the parts in between. He wouldn't.
If only she could tell him that she loves him exactly as much.
But she can't.
Fucking identities.
"He's good, too," she says with a sad smile. "There's some crazy thing going on at work and I think he's trying to become nocturnal, for some reason. Maybe the two are related. It's hard to say, with him."
In some ways, she and Adrien have never been closer. They spend almost all of their time together, he's her best friend, and she tells him nearly everything; despite all of that, though, there's a core of something very distant and full of regret inside of him that she's never been allowed anywhere near. His mother, maybe. Or his father, or both. There's no way of knowing.
"Hey, being nocturnal is pretty great," Chat says with a beautiful smile. "I should know. Midnight is a cat's natural purrowling time. Maybe he should look into working from home."
"Absolutely out of the question," she says, laughing at the idea of Adrien teaching classes in their apartment. It's big, but it's not that big, and some of his classroom demonstrations sound exciting in a way that isn't meant for residential buildings. "But I'll tell him you said so. I'm sure he'll be happy someone agrees with him."
His sigh is softer this time, quieter, and he turns his face away a little so that he's not quite looking at her, but at the open sky around them, the darkness that seems like it could go on forever; maybe it's an open universe of possibilities, Ladybug thinks, her own eyes drifting toward world's edge, the distant line of the horizon. Maybe out there, they could be...
"Whose turn is it to have another try at Fu?" Chat asks.
Ladybug worries her bottom lip with her teeth as she tries to remember. They've been trying to get Master Fu to let them exchange identities for a very long time. "Yours, I think."
Chat snorts. "Of course it is. All right, I'll go ask him tomorrow."
"Good," Ladybug says softly. "You know I can't wait, right?"
That earns her another big, beautiful smile, showing off the tips of his fangs. Chat looks at her affectionately out of the corner of his eye. "Same here, bug."
———
She never wants to be the one to leave first, and as usual, Chat seems just as reluctant to leave her, so it's really, really late when Ladybug begrudgingly swings the long way home, exhaustion seeping into every pore and pooling in her bones. She really doesn't know how much longer she can keep this up. They only do patrol-and-hangouts twice a week, so it feels like they have to stuff as much quality time together as they can possibly get, which leads to these late nights.
Marinette has never been the kind of person who wakes up early, but the days after patrol it's even worse. And she has a real, grown-up job she needs to get to now. How is she supposed to do this? The obvious answer is to go down to one patrol a week, or even less, but that's out of the question. That would mean less time with Chat, and there's no way Ladybug is ever going to agree to that.
Their apartment is on the corner, top floor, for ease of window exit, and Ladybug always comes home past the side that holds the living room; that window is always closed, though, so she usually uses the one in her bedroom.
But tonight, the living room window is open. Adrien must have opened it for some fresh air and forgotten to close it before he went to bed. She can close it on her way through, and tease him about it tomorrow morning.
Ladybug slings herself through the open window, toes first, and lands so quietly in their dark apartment that she's impressed with herself. Maybe she can sneak up on Chat next time... She straightens up, her yo-yo in her hand, and begins to turn toward the open window –
The path of her turn means that the hallway leading to their bedrooms is right in front of her. There's a low mutter, something that might be words, and then bright green light floods the entire room. Ladybug instinctively closes her eyes. She knows that light; shutting her eyes at the sight of it is something she's beaten into her reflexes by force.
She's not fast enough.
Her heart kicks into overdrive, sweat rising to her forehead and the bridge of her nose, and her neck and chest are already hot and getting hotter.
It's impossible. It's not possible. She can't have seen what she thought she saw. Is she tired enough that she's falling asleep on her feet? Ladybug licks her lips and tries to say something, but her throat is such a knot of tension that all that emerges is a croak.
His voice in the darkness sounds wary. "Who's there?"
Her hands are so tight around her yo-yo that she'd wouldn't be surprised if it cracks into pieces. Ladybug swallows, and tries again. "Chat?"
Her voice is very high-pitched and tight as a drum. To her own ears, she sounds very, very young. Lost.
"Ladybug?!"
She can hear him moving, and then the living room light flicks on, flooding the apartment. Adrien stares at her, his green eyes huge and astonished and so, so familiar. He's wearing striped pyjamas and a faded t-shirt, something she's seen him in so many evenings and mornings that she could have drawn them from memory. Her eyes continue, inevitably, to look at the kwami hovering over Adrien's shoulder. Plagg is smiling his evil little smile aimed directly at her, his tail curled around himself. He looks like he's enjoying this thoroughly.
"You're Chat?" Ladybug says to Adrien, tears boiling up behind her eyes, thick in her throat, prickling inside her nose and threatening to pour out of her mouth. "You?"
Adrien looks down at himself, like her appearance startled him so much that he forgot who he was and what face he was wearing. Just like that, in an instant, his face changes. He comes to her quickly, striding across the room with his impossibly long legs at a speed that Ladybug rarely sees from him, and grabs her upper arms in both hands like he'd like to shake her. "It's an accident," he says to her, his eyes imploring. "He can't take our miraculous away for an accident. Don't you see? This is our chance."
Her shock is so all-consuming, so pervasive, that it takes her a long time to understand what he's saying. "An accident?" she asks, searching Adrien's eyes. "I – "
"Wait," he says, retreating slightly into confusion. "Wait a minute, what are you doing here, in my apartment?" He looks at her more closely, searching her eyes, before amusement begins to dawn on his face, followed immediately by a new, teasing light in his eyes that she hates. "LB, were you following me?"
"No!" she protests, crossing her arms. "No, I wasn't. I – "
Oh. Oh. Oh, Adrien is right; this is their chance, isn't it? She's not convinced that Master Fu won't hold an accident against them, because she's come to realize that he's not the most reasonable person when the miraculous are concerned, but at this point, she doesn't care. If it comes down to it, she thinks they can take him. Probably.
Ladybug laughs sheepishly, letting her arms drop. "I think fate might have a sense of humor," she says, smiling up at Adrien. "Spots off."
The pink-red light washes over him, making Adrien squint, but he doesn't close his eyes – and when he sees her, when he really and truly finally sees her, Marinette, his friend, his best friend, he'd called her –
His eyes widen so much they're nearly round, and very rapidly they turn glassy and wet. His mouth drops open. All trace of teasing has left his face. Instead, he's in shock. "Marinette?"
"Hi," she manages in a thick voice. Then she has to swallow.
"It's you?" Adrien asks, his voice growing rougher, his eyebrows screwing up. "It's really you? This whole time?"
His hands are clutching at her with so much desperation that he should be hurting her, but Adrien would never hurt her, not even on accident.
"Yeah," Marinette says, giving him a huge, shaky smile. Her eyes aren't exactly dry, either. "This whole time."
He stares at her a while longer, looking between her eyes like he might find something to explain this insanity in them, and then he laughs – or maybe it's a sob, who knows – and hauls her into his arms, hugging her so tight that she squeaks.
That doesn't stop her from hugging him back, of course.
"I love you," Adrien says hoarsely into her ear. "God, I love you so much. Ladybug – Marinette – How did I get so lucky that you're both of them?"
Marinette turns her face into his hair, closing her eyes. "I'm the lucky one," she whispers, sniffling. Her face is aching with the force of her smile. "I didn't think Chat could get any better, but I was wrong."
With laughter so shocked and bright and joyous that Marinette feels fresh tears brimming at the corners of her eyes – she hasn't heard Adrien laugh like this in years – Adrien pulls back to take her face in his big hands and grin at her. His eyes are lined with red. She's not the only one having a mental breakdown right now.
"This is the best day of my life," he says to her.
"Not the day we got married?" Marinette teases. She dares a little, sliding her hands up his hips and further, to grip his t-shirt tightly in her clutched fingers.
"Oh my god, we're married." Adrien stares down at her like he'd actually somehow forgotten the last six years of their lives together.
Marinette giggles. "Yes, we are."
He shakes his head, hard, his hair flying. "I'm going to go over every second of the last ten years tomorrow and scream about a lot of it," Adrien tells her, his thumbs stroking slow and smooth over her cheekbones. "You're more than welcome to come. I'll send a calendar invite. But right now, there's something else I'd like to do..."
Adrien leans over, touching his mouth to hers, soft, gentle and awed, like he still can't really believe that it's her. Marinette is the one who ruins it. She can't stop smiling.
That's okay. They spend quite a lot of time practicing.
———
The next morning, Marinette and Adrien walk over to Master Fu's shop hand-in-hand. It's time to face the music, and they might as well get it over with. Whatever Master Fu says, they're together, and nothing can change that.
Adrien holds the door open for her, and they go in, a tiny bell chiming deeper in the shop to let Master Fu know they're here.
He comes out of the back, wiping his hands on a clean cloth, and looks up to find them waiting for him. "Oh," Fu says, his eyes narrowing instantly. "I see. And how did this happen?"
"It was an accident," Marinette says firmly.
"It really was," Tikki adds apologetically. She sticks her head out of Marinette's purse to aim her large, beseeching eyes at Fu, which Plagg says might help. It's hard for anyone to ignore Tikki when she's trying her best to be earnest and lovable. "They didn't mean for it to happen."
"You should have known they'd blow it eventually," Plagg puts in. He sounds bored, but Marinette knows better. Half of this was his idea. "You let them get too close."
Fu sighs. "That was not part of my plan. These two were made for each other. The universe knows that just like the rest of us."
Adrien squeezes Marinette's hand, held securely in his larger one. She squeezes back.
"We've held the miraculous for ten years," she says to Fu. "There's no Hawkmoth anymore. There's no threat. There's no reason Adrien and I shouldn't know who each other are except for your rules." Out of the corner of her eye, she catches Adrien turning to look at her, his eyes wide. This wasn't part of the plan. "And I am tired of your rules. We're good holders. We take care of our kwamis, and no one else could protect Paris the way we do. It's time for you to realize we've grown up."
Fu looks at her for a long time, his eyes hard, and heavy, a physical weight – one that Marinette can bear, as long as Adrien is beside her and Tikki at her hip. She lifts her chin and waits for him to say something.
Then, unexpectedly... Fu smiles.
"I have been waiting for one of you to tell me that for the last six years," he says. "Come with me. You two are going to need a lot of training if you are to be the new keepers of the Miracle Box."
"Wait," Adrien says, looking from Marinette to Fu to Plagg, who's chewing on his own tail. "Wait, that was it? This whole thing was some kind of test?!"
"Do you want me to take your miraculous away?" Fu asks Adrien, raising his eyebrow.
Adrien shakes his head, a somewhat mulish set to his eyes.
Fu shrugs. "Then what's the problem?"
He turns and heads into the back again, murmuring something to Wayzz that's too faint for Marinette to make out. She looks up at Adrien, raising both of her eyebrows. "I wasn't expecting that," she says quietly.
"Am I wrong to be annoyed?" Adrien asks, looking after Fu, his mouth twisting. "Years of our lives – "
Marinette shakes her head. "No. I am, too," she says. Understatement. "But I think that might be a conversation for later, over a very large bottle of wine."
Adrien's eyes light up. "I love this plan," he sighs. "Especially the part where I get to go home with you."
She grins at him and goes up on her toes to press a kiss to his mouth. "Me, too," she says to her husband. "It's my favorite part. Just like you."