It had never really occurred to him to tell Ladybug that he was in love with her.

Like, obviously it had - because obviously he was - but the thought had always been one of those idle things, one of those ideas which cropped up when he thought about in another life, in the same way some people thought about what they'd do if they won the lottery. He sort of had won the lottery, in a way. Just in the nick of time, too. And now, since, you know, he had never told her - now it had been four years of knowing her and Adrien hadn't once thought to drop it in, there, as something she might like to know - well, it seemed weird, now. They were partners. First and foremost, they were a team, and it wasn't like being in love with her would threaten that (Adrien wholly believed, with all of his being, that there wasn't anything that could break the 'them' they were up: they were a team, before anything else), but then, you know, what was he meant to do? Just shove it on her?

He hadn't even had time to think about romance. He'd spent almost all of his teenage years - he was 17 now - thinking that even looking in that direction would be selfish. It still felt sort of selfish. Adrien didn't know if his body would accept these new lungs. The scar from the surgery wasn't even finished healing, yet. He hadn't been discharged. There was still a wheelchair rule, even, he had to stay sitting just-in-case, just to be sure his body had a chance to heal - Francine came to push him into the hospital's little front garden, occasionally.

Sometime after lunch today he'd be transferred back to the bigger hospital. This one was a private one. Quite small, but very well-regarded. This was effectively a hospice. He didn't need to be here, anymore, and Francine joked she far preferred this parting than most of her patients'.

Adrien didn't know what to tell Ladybug. He hadn't even texted his father, yet, because he hadn't known what to say there, either - I forgive you for not wanting to go through that again? Why weren't you here? Just a heads up, I'm not dead, not that you care? He thought about texting anybody, and everybody, and he put his phone away.

The garden smelt like primrose; his mother had used to call these sundrop flowers. When he was young, just after she had died, Adrien had kept a vigil eye out for the sundrop flowers. They'd used to sit here, on this bench (he'd parked and struggled out of his wheelchair, to get onto it), in this garden - wasn't it funny how things had come almost full-circle, except he survived it and she had not - they sat here, with these flowers around them, and played the naming game, but sundrops had always been Mum's favourite because they could grow anywhere, really. Anywhere there was sun. She'd said, "Isn't it beautiful, what hope can grow into?"

So Adrien had kept a vigil eye out, because if the sun was hope then these flowers were a promise it was still there.

The flowers were everywhere, today. They bloomed by the dozens. The sun was warm. There wasn't a cloud in the sky.

He breathed in. All the way in. There was a novelty to doing it which made him laugh, every time, and it was stupid, and giddy, and he loved it, because he loved what his laughter sounded like, too, and the fact there was no death rattle, and the fact that he could laugh forever, if he wanted to. If he wanted he could laugh until his stomach hurt, because his lungs did not choke him, and there was more air, and more breath, and more life, and none of it came on a time limit, it was just there.

He must have looked mad, laughing like that. But that was what he did. The idea that someone might see him - the idea that someone might look at him here, on this bench, and wonder what that completely normal 17-year-old was doing, rather than what that very ill 17-year-old was doing, was so wildly outrageous to him that he sat there, heady with laughter, until his stomach did hurt, and his lungs burned (but did not ache), and Francine came out to fetch him because he was going to that other hospital, now, so the doctors could look at him, and make sure he was recovering well, and give him is post-transplant treatment plan, and everything.

And then he was going home.

Adrien hadn't been home in months and months. He was going home.

What Chat Noir did send to Ladybug's yoyo, eventually, was just a simple text: I got the transplant.

He stared at the message for a little while before he sent it. She wasn't transformed, at the moment. He would have to wait until she did transform, probably tonight - probably she was going to be on patrol. She must be worried. He hadn't told her he was leaving. It had been several weeks.

Adrien wasn't … Terribly surprised that he didn't fit in very well at his new school. He'd never been to a public school before. It had been simply unimaginable - after all, catching Ladybug's cold last month really had almost killed him, how was he meant to go to a public school? His father had been right. It was full of germs. It was dangerous. As much as Adrien had longed for friends, he had been better off being the poster child of the Agreste corporation (look at my son - isn't he pretty - such an inspirational person - buy Agreste to support his recovery!), and trying to get an education from the hospital's schoolroom around the fact that half the time, he could not breathe. So first of all he stressed out about getting the homework right, and second of all he had, like, no idea how to socialise, except for all the time he'd spent socialising with Ladybug, and Ladybug wasn't exactly HERE AT THIS SCHOOL RIGHT NOW IMMEDIATELY, was she? So he doubted those skills would be particularly useful.

Besides. He had been the poster boy. The sick child all of Paris knew about.

Some of his classmates wouldn't touch him with a ten foot pole. Too afraid of 'catching' something, or breaking him somehow, or maybe they were just afraid to be dragged into the flurry of media attention his enrolment had drawn - was still drawing. Cameras followed him to school, each and every single day. (Adrien insisted on walking. He had a bodyguard his father had assigned him - those stitches still weren't out yet, and who knows what would happen if he tore them - but he insisted on walking. He could walk, now. All the way. He loved it.)

Ladybug hadn't answered his text, yet, but it had only been two days since he sent it, and he wouldn't have known what to say, either. Sometimes Ladybug freaked out and didn't know what to say, especially about this sort of thing. Sometimes she panicked and just … forgot that she hadn't answered. He wasn't that worried. She'd figure out what to say, eventually, and it would be perfect, because she was the one who said it. Adrien asked Plagg if anything had come in, though, and he dropped into his seat at his very-empty lunch table, hospital-approved meal in hand. He had to eat healthy if he wanted to give these lungs the best shot at settling in. Fortunately, he already did enough exercise. Not-so-fortunately, the steroids he was on to prevent rejection made him constantly hungry, and his nutritious, wonderful meal did very little to fill his grumbling stomach. He'd have to talk to his nurse the next time he even had a nurse - his previous one, hired by his father, had quit when things had looked grim, so at the moment he was flying nurse-free.

Lung-good, nurse-free, laughter-capable, for the first time in years. He was maybe a touch nervous.

Adrien gave up trying to eat his lunch at this lunch table. He'd spent enough of his life indoors - there were people staring - he packed it up, and he hitched his bag onto his shoulder, and he went out into the school grounds so that he might find a place which felt like sunshine, with maybe some patch of grass to lie in. Instead, he found a girl. She was sitting by herself. Her hands were idly playing with the same grass Adrien had wanted to lay about in, making little chains; she took one strand, and split it in two, just at the middle, so she could weave the next piece in.

It had seemed so overwhelming, to go and speak to any one of the dozens of other kids in the cafeteria, but here they were outside, and the day was warm, and he loved this air, and Adrien wasn't very scared of her at all. He thought she was very pretty.

"Hey," he said, "do you mind if I join you?"

The girl didn't look up at him, but she nodded her permission, as absently as her hands were moving, so Adrien settled in the grass and started in on the meal his nutritionist had recommended for him. Early weeks after the transplant, he had to follow this schedule to the hour - which was good, because he had been trained to follow schedules almost his entire life, so this one wasn't very hard to follow. In between mouthfuls, and speared salad, Adrien said, "My name's Adrien. What's yours?"

The girl said, "Marinette."

She wasn't eating anything. Adrien was caught out, watching her, because she peeked up at him, now, and he was still looking at her, wondering what she could possibly be thinking. Why wasn't she inside, with her friends?

Adrien said, "Why don't you tell me about it? I'm pretty new to school, but I've been told I'm a pretty good listener." All the seniors had loved him, at the hospital. For a while. Adrien plucked out one blade of grass, and he started his own little chain.

Marinette found out that he was a good listener, because they sat in silence for a little while, while she made her thoughts make sense in her head, and he didn't seem to mind the wait. Was that what people who needed lung transplants were like? Did they just not mind the wait, because they were - up until recently - always waiting? No, that sounded too morbid. But maybe? Ugh.

Ugh.

She didn't know what to say to Chat Noir, or how to help him, now. She didn't like that he'd had the surgery without telling her - that was a big thing, and she knew he would have told her, if he'd had a chance, so how close had it gotten? How close, and she hadn't known? - and now she didn't know what to say, or do. What if she said the wrong thing? The last thing he needed was someone saying the wrong thing, NOW.

She looked up, again, to peek at Adrien Agreste, who this time had the good manners to pretend he didn't see her peeking. She couldn't ask anybody else what to do. They all knew she had 'my friend, the Guy, who means I can't date anybody else, but also I'm not dating him', and that was as much as they DID know, and if she started mentioning things about Chat Noir's life willy-nilly - like the fact he had needed a lung transplant, in the first place - then what was the point of their secret identities, to begin with?! But she could ask Adrien Agreste. They weren't friends, yet. And he was a good listener, he said.

And she trusted him. With no real reason to, except the way he sat there, patiently, and waited, and made his chain of grass, in the sun, she trusted him.

So Marinette asked, "What do you say to someone who just had a transplant?"

Adrien didn't look up. He asked, "What do you mean?" because it sounded like she had something else she was asking, but she hadn't gotten around to it yet. He kept his voice neutral. He had expected a lot of questions, like this.

"I have… well, he isn't … someone I know had one, recently. I think in the past couple of months. And I don't want -" she only stumbled for a second, "to hurt him. I don't want to hurt him. Are you meant to say congratulations? Or is that insensitive, because of the donor? Or do you not talk about them? Or -?"

Adrien smiled, and it was affectionate, in a way that didn't quite belong to this girl, sitting across from him. Marinette. She just made him think of Ladybug, a little; when she got going she just sort of … kept going. He loved that about her. (He loved a lot of things about Ladybug.) The fondness of his smile stopped her in her tracks, though, and Marinette blushed (also very pretty, like Ladybug), so Adrien dropped the grass chain and lay down in the grass, as had long been his plan. He loved to soak up the sun. "I don't know," he said.

Marinette thought, well, that wasn't very helpful.

Adrien continued, "I guess you don't say congratulations to the donors, but… I mean, I really want to talk about that stuff. This family doesn't want to hear from me at all, it's like … passing trains. The hospital says I can write a letter, and they'll deliver it, but they've made it pretty clear they won't be opening it. I don't even know what I would say."

"Thank you?"

"For their dead daughter?" it seemed a little cruel. He had thought to thank them, too, and he would have liked to, but he couldn't think of a way to do it that didn't make an already hard time worse for them. Adrien lifted an arm up, to cover his eyes.

Marinette asked, next, in a bare whisper, "Does it hurt?" because his shirt had lifted up, a little bit, and she could have followed that trail of hair in either direction, but she followed it up to the marrish scar which was developing down the very centre of his chest. She could see just the tail end of it, from where she sat. Adrien lifted it up just a little bit further, so she could see how it crept all the way across his ribcage. It wasn't the only scar, there. He'd had more surgeries on his lungs than he could count.

"It's not too bad. It's better than not having them, that's for sure." Only his voice wavered, a bit, toward the end there, and Adrien had to strain to breathe past something which leapt into his throat, because he had as yet not gone back to the hospital bed, or what he had thought, or the belief that he was dying, and he really didn't want to. He could live the rest of his life without thinking about how that had felt, ever again.

She watched him hang onto his composure, just. Marinette swallowed something of her own.

Had Chat been that close?

Had Chat been so close that he could be afraid, like that, just talking about it?

Chat Noir wasn't afraid of anything.

"I think you're really brave, Adrien. Coming out here and doing this."

"Doing what?"

"Talking about it." She smiled, for him. This was one of her favourite parts of her job, as Ladybug; Paris' superheroes weren't just about stopping akumatised victims, they were about stopping people being akumatised. Being Ladybug had, factually, made Marinette a better, kinder person, and she was constantly learning. Usually she learnt from Chat, never mind that he learnt just as much from her. Marinette lay down beside Adrien in the grass, and the action might have been strange, for two people who did not yet count as friends, but it didn't feel that way.

"So what now?" Adrien asked her. Because nobody had been there to ask, before, and he didn't know. He had never had a whole-rest-of-his-life to plan for, before.

"Do you want to be friends?" Marinette offered.

"Yeah." His eyes slid sideways, to peer at her, "If you haven't filled your lung-transplant-recipient quota."

Marinette thought, privately, that this was an awful thing to say, but she gave him the benefit of the doubt. Sometimes Chat Noir had been like that, early on - she'd figured out it was just because he'd never really socialised. Maybe Adrien had never really socialised. She said, "My friends and I do game night tonight. It's every Wednesday. Are you going to be free? I did some research, I know there's a LOT of stuff to do for recovery…"

"I can make it." If he couldn't, he would bring his things with him. Adrien was excited. There was a spark in him that made Marinette smile. "I haven't been to a game night since I was nine. That would be really cool, Marinette, thanks for inviting me! Should I bring anything?"

"Just yourself is fine, Adrien." She was warm.

Adrien settled, because of the warmth of her voice, and the way it tasted like honey, on the air.

He confessed, very quietly, "I really like my laughter," which made Marinette burst INTO laughter, and Adrien found out that he really liked hers, too.

"What?"

He grinned, sheepish - "I haven't really laughed since my voice broke, I was - I mean, I don't know about your friend. But my lungs weren't really good enough to. I sat in the courtyard and laughed for like an hour, I must have looked insane." But anyway, the only reason he brought it up - "There aren't a lot of people who knew me before the surgery," he said, "for you it's just my laugh, now. But if you knew him, you should listen for it. I bet he loves it, too."

The lunch bell rang.

Neither one of them really made to move.

A/N: And heeeeere I am with some extra bit of the fic on the same night because it was still stuck in my head and no work in the morning! Wooooo! I am going to bed lol I am too old for this. Also, did people migrate to Ao3? Is that something that happened in the fic community and I didn't notice? I have not written fanfics in a looooong time.