Marinette doodled in her notepad, trying to catch the curve of Adrien's lip as best she could. She had been sketching him instead of taking notes since someone started talking about molar mass. Tikki sat on her pen holder, watching the pencil flick back and forth.

"Ayla could be right y'know. If Adrien had completely green eyes and cat ears, he could be Cat Noir," She said, casually.

"What?! Of course, he isn't. We've had to work together to save Adrien before, several times! He can't be Adrien," Marinette laughed.

"Have you ever actually seen him in danger? Or being rescued? And when we had to defeat the Horrificator, the only person we didn't see kidnapped was Adrien!"

"That's not true. We didn't see anyone get kidnapped we just followed the trail! Trust me Tikki, it's not Adrien!"

"I'm sure you're right," Tikki said.

She sighed softly. As much as she loved Marinette, Tikki was beginning to get fed up with her faults. First it was idolising Adrien and decorating her room with a mildly creepy wallpaper of his face, then it was stealing phones, and now she was ignoring obvious signs that Adrien was the other half of her superhero duo! She and Adrien were two halves of one whole, just as she and Plagg were. Yet somehow, they couldn't see it.

"We've gotta go! The library opens soon and we have to get there!" Tikki declared.

Marinette gasped at the time. "Good call Tikki. Spots on!"

As Ladybug came swinging down to land in front of the library, the gathered crowd whooped and cheered. Adrien couldn't help smiling when he saw the flash of red and black swooping through the air.

"Nice of you to drop by," he purred.

She flashed him a smile, "I was making myself look pretty for you."

"You're always pretty to me, milady," he took her hand and kissed the back of it.

She laughed and pushed him away, but her smile made his heart melt.

"Now Ladybug has finally arrived we can get on with the ceremony!" The mayor declared.

Ladybug stepped forwards to stand beside the mayor. There was a purple ribbon in front of the library doors, ready for her to cut and declare open. Down in the front row was Chloe, yelling and waving and claiming to be Ladybugs best friend, and Ayla rolling her eyes at her. Marinette tied hard not to laugh at her best friend. The mayor beamed at her, and held out the giant scissors for her to cut the ribbon with.

Marinette held her hand up in refusal, and took a step back. "With all due respect mayor bourgeois, it's the kitty here with the best claws to cut with."

Adrien beamed as he walked forward. "Why thank you ladybug!"

She noted, with a dull sense of pride, that less people cheered for him than they had for her. Once the library was open, the pair of them stepped to the side to allow everyone to push past, into the library. Ayla tried to get another interview with Ladybug, but Ladybug kept pushing Chat between them, to try and get more attention on him. She didn't really need to feed his ego, he could do that himself, but it was beginning tricky to find somewhere to hide when she had to transform since everyone was trying to get her attention.
Ayla had a million questions, and Ladybug tried to answer as many as possible, but eventually Chat stepped in the way.

"Enough. Even we have to rest," he chuckled.

Ayla smiled back and apologised for being overly enthusiastic.

"No problem, keep investigating, you're excellent!" Marinette grinned.

Before Ayla could keep talking, Chat put his arm around Ladybugs shoulders and walked her away from this conversation. Ladybug peeled his arm off her, and pushed him away. He chuckled as she did.

"Alright, it was good seeing you, let's do it again soon," she said.

Ladybug began to swing her yo-yo to try and pick up speed when Chat gave her a hopeful look and laid a hand on her shoulder.

"Wait - do you, maybe, like, wanna hang?" He asked awkwardly.

Ladybug tilted his head at him. He gave her a nervous smile.

"Do I wanna hang?" She repeated.

"As friends! C'mon bug, we never hang out unless we're fighting an akuma. Let's just go get ice cream. My treat!" He insisted.

Marinette thought about this for a while. All she had planned for today was to finish sketching Adrien, and her new outfit design on him. She glanced back at Chat. He still looked hopeful. Something in those puppy-dog - err, kitty cat - eyes, made her feel a surge of affection.

"Well I don't want to be the one to stand between a cat and his cream," she smiled.

Chat beamed in delight. "Yeah! Right! So you'll come?"

Marinette looped up her yo-yo and hooked it back into place on her hip. "Sure. Lead the way."

Ladybug and Chat Noir sat on the rooftop of a tall building together. He leaned his back against the taller part of the building, sat on the ledge, with his knee up, and his leg dangling over the edge. Ladybug sat on the floor, leaning against the wall of the ledge, by his feet. They had given her chocolate buttons on her strawberry ice cream to look like ladybug. Chats chocolate ice cream had chocolate triangles in to look like a cat. They were cute.

"Ice cream selfie?" He grinned, cheekily.

Ladybug laughed and shrugged. He raised his phone high over the edge of the building with made her stomach feel queasy. She remembered, all too vividly, almost dropping Ayla's phone from her balcony. If he dropped his phone...

"Smile!" He beamed.

She threw up a peace sign and grinned with her ice cream. He winked, but held up his ice cream too. Then he brought his phone to his chest to look at the picture. Marinette giggled. It was strange to her that he could hold a phone in his claws with ease this high up, and she couldn't hold one without almost dropping it from her hand to the pavement.

"Care to share the laughter, my lady?" He asked, between licking the ice cream.

"Nothing really. I was thinking of a friend of mine. She's a klutz. Cute though. Sweet too. But she trips over the air sometimes,"

This girl reminded Adrien of Marinette. "I know a girl like that too."

"Maybe it's the same girl," she chuckled.

"Maybe. I had to defend her from the Evillustrator when they went on a date," he explained.

Her stomach twisted. He was talking about her. She gave a nervous chuckle, hoping desperately that he wouldn't put two and two together. Instead, she licked her ice cream quietly.
Adrien watched her intensely. Since Ayla found the text book and suggested Ladybug might be a girl in their school, he couldn't help but try to figure out who. He'd already ruled out all the girls who had been akumatized before, since he'd fought all of them with her. Marinette had never been akumatized.

"So... ladybug... are you anyone's little love bug?" he teased.

She dropped her ice cream onto her chest in surprise. Chat felt a little guilty, but it was squashed by a tidal wave of relief when she said "Me? A love bug? No!"

Chat Noir felt a purr in his chest and his ears flicked happily. She was single. She would be his lady. He just had to find the words to say it.

"I mean, it's not like there's no one," she continued.

His tail flicked urgently. Was she talking about him? Or was she talking about someone else? Either way he was beginning to feel hot under the collar.

"Anyone I might know?" He asked, flexing his muscles pointedly.

Marinette laughed, which caused her to move her head back, into his leg. That made his legs tingle. Whenever they touched she sent tingles through him.

"Unfortunately, I have never kissed the boy, which rules you out," she chuckled.

Adrien tilted his head in confusion. "What?"

Marinette gave him a look that said ha-ha-very-funny. Then she realised that he was genuinely shocked and confused by what she was saying, and she frowned.

"You seriously don't remember our kiss?"

Adrien felt like screaming. Kiss?! What kiss?! When had they kissed?! She could clearly see the shock and confusion still filling his eyes, so she tried to remember what had happened as vividly as possible, in case there was a minor detail that he remembered.

"Remember valentine's day when dark cupid started destroying how people saw their loved ones?"

"Sort of."

He remembered that clear as a bell. Well parts of it. He remembered hunching over a poem he was trying to write and getting frustrated. He remembered walking up to Ladybug, ready to tell her everything. Then there was a blur. Then he got a valentine's day card replying to his poem, which he was convinced was from her. Ladybug. His ladybug. But then she hadn't said anything, so he could help doubting it was from her, and had made himself too nervous to bring it up.

But they hadn't kissed... had they?

"You were going to use your cataclysm on me and the only way I could break the spell was to kiss you. It worked," ladybug shrugged, as if it were nothing.

As if. It was. NOTHING!

"But - but - but - you kissed me?! And you never thought to mention this before?!"

"Sorry, I thought you remembered and then you never mentioned it, so I thought I wouldn't bother to," Marinette shrugged again.

Adrien sat back on his hunches, face still, taking in everything as carefully as possible. They had kissed - no, she had kissed him, and no one had told him, but the boy she liked, she had never kissed.
Ladybug had kissed him, and still not fallen in love.
His tail beat and curled in annoyance.
She could shrug and laugh about it and he was filled with a bubble of screams because he couldn't remember kissing the woman he loved. He would never remember their FIRST KISS! And here she was acting like that didn't matter!

That had to be fixed.

"but, like I said, I've never kissed the boy I do like, so it can't be you," she added, almost cheerfully.

The world came crushing down onto him, ready to destroy every bone in his body.

"You never kissed… the boy you like?" he muttered.

Well she had technically. But he forgot about it, and she didn't know it was him. A tragedy. Marinette shrugged innocently.

"He's just too... whenever I try to talk to him I just... it's not like talking to you. I know you. I like you. I can tell you anything and I know you won't tell anyone because you couldn't. No one would believe you if you tried. But him... I get so nervous I get tongue tied and end up making a fool of myself!"

She tucked her knees up to her chin, and sighed sorrowfully. Chats tail flicked in jealousy. How comes he could make her flustered? How could he take someone as cool and collected as Ladybug and make her so nervous she could hardly talk to him? Why couldn't he do that?
Adrien didn't want to know anymore, because he knew it would just annoy him, but something made him desperate for details. To know who had stolen his lady from him, and didn't even know!

"What's he like? He's got to be someone pretty miraculous to win your heart bugaboo," he leaned forward, so his belly was across the ledge and his head was beside hers.

She couldn't bring herself to look into those huge acid-green eyes of his. If she had, she was sure she'd tell him everything.

Marinette gave a breezy laugh, because her lungs were drowning in anxiety. "Oh, you wouldn't know him!"

"Maybe I would. And anyway how can I help you get him-" the words stuck in his throat. Helping someone else win her heart could actually kill him. "If I don't know who he is?"

Marinette realised she'd messed up. She couldn't admit that she was in love with Adrien. Adrien the super model. The rich, handsome, sweet boy that every girl had a crush on! How cliché!
Besides now Tikki had pointed it out, she was beginning to notice how much Cat Noir looked like him. But the only other boy she could think of was poor Nathaniel.

Marinette hoped this wouldn't come back to bite her.

"Well… he's cute," she began, slowly.

Chat curled his paw around his ear, like a real cat, to make his point. She didn't notice.

"he's got these eyes…"

Chat blinked a few times, and still she ignored him.

"they're like… they're the same colour as the sea in travel guides around the Bahamas. His hair falls over them all the time though. He had to keep brushing it out of his face, and I think it's funny, because his eyes are like the sea, but his hair is so orange it could be fire!"

Marinette gave a small laugh at the idea of elements playing on someone's face. She didn't really think much of Nathaniel before, but now she had to, she was thinking about how he would be a good model for the new jacket she was making. I mean, he wouldn't be as good at it as Adrien, but let's be real, she would never be able to ask Adrien to model for her, let alone watch him do it!

Meanwhile chat had dug his nails into his ice cream cone so deeply that it had broken apart and was dropping down to the street twelve floors below.

"and he's an artist. Creative, and emotional, y'know? I love watching him draw. When he gets the picture in his head nothing can stop him. he starts sketching and it's like there's nothing else in the room. Even the teach- um, even the people in charge of him, can't stop him. he could draw the perfect date on a canal boat, with the moon on the top of the Eiffel tower and music for the two of you to dance to alone, if it would make you happy…"

Marinette had often thought of that date with the Evillustrator. Sure, he was akumatized, and he definitely didn't remember it anymore, but… well it that was what Nathaniel felt, she felt bad to just pretend she didn't know. But he reacted to her, how she reacted to Adrien. Only better and more controlled. Marinette hung her head. He deserved better.

Chat growled under his breath. Here was his lady, HIS Ladybug, going goo-goo-eyed over some ginger artist! Although that description, it was niggling at him. he was sure he'd seen something like that before somewhere. He couldn't think about it now. Adrien's' mind was to full of angry cotton balls hiding everything he was supposed to think logically about. He felt how he did at Christmas again. Like using his cataclysm on anything and everything that would dare to be happy. Not ladybug. Never ladybug. But this artist?! This lady-stealing, fire-haired, sea-eyed, creep?!

Adrien stood up. His claws had been digging into his palm so deep he had almost sliced through his glove. He couldn't be here right now.

"I gotta go… I promised someone I'd meet them in an hour," he lied.

"oh. Ok. this was fun, we should do it again sometime!" ladybug smiled.

Usually that smile could fill him with a warmth that turned his insides to a puddle, but now he was wondering how she smiled at him. was it this smile? His smile?! Or did he get his own special one?

That's the one he wanted.

"sure. Anytime milady," he bowed, and back flipped off the ledge.

Once he was gone, Marinette let go of the breath she'd been holding for ages.

"Tikki, spots off."

Tikki sat on Marinette's knee, and gave her a concerned look.

"You can't play with Nathaniel's emotions like that Marinette! What if this somehow gets back to him?!" she insisted.

Marinette shook her head. "I know but how could it? chat doesn't know Nathaniel! He'd never find out."

Tikki groaned with worry. For some reason, she was certain that Nathaniel was going to find out. Then he was going to be hurt again. Then maybe they would have to face The Evillustrator yet again. Things were not looking good in Tikki's eyes.
although, she forced herself to consider the positives, maybe Nathaniel had gotten over his crush on Marinette. Maybe he'd moved on. Maybe there was no reason to worry.

Maybe.