Marinette curled up tighter in the corner of her bed, much to the concern of her kwami.
"Marinette, I'm sure you're just taking this all out of context! You have no idea what he talking about before!"
The blue-haired heroine just groaned into her pillowcase, eyes shut tight against the world. "He said he didn't like me, Tikki. What else could that possibly mean?"
"Marinette, all you heard him say was that he didn't like the idea of hiding things from his friends!"
"Yeah, then immediately stopped talking when I walked into the room! What else could it possibly mean other than that he doesn't like me and he just doesn't want to admit it to Nino or Alya?"
"You're being ridiculous, you know." The kwami, who exactly what Adrien had been talking about thanks to her stellar hearing (not to mentioned the certain cat-like creature that he had been talking to), just shook her head. Marinette groaned and rolled over toward the wall, wrapping herself in a cocoon of blankets and hiding her face in her pillow.
Unfortunately for her, it was because of this pillow to the face that she failed to notice her kwami dart out of sight as a dark figure dropped onto the trapdoor in the ceiling. Even under a cocoon of blankets, however, it was impossible to miss the knock that came from directly above her, scaring her so badly she could almost swear her heart stopped right then and there.
"Marinette? Are you here?"
She shifted the bedding just enough to see the boy in black on her rooftop, scanning the room in search for the girl that was, literally, right in front of him. Instead of answering, Marinette flung her pillow at the trapdoor as hard as she could, snickering at the highly undignified shriek that came from above her as he fell off the pane of glass in surprise. In a slightly better mood, Marinette stood up on her bed and stuck her head out the door, looking innocently at the leather-covered figure on the ground at her eye level.
"Are you looking for someone, Chat Noir?"
"That…" He was gasping dramatically, one hand on his chest and the other draped across his face as he lay prone on his back. "…was very rude!"
"I have absolutely no idea what you mean. Care to explain?"
"That's it!" Noir lunged forward, pulling her up and onto the roof with surprising ease. Poor Marinette, not expecting the sudden movement, went tumbling sideways and ended up on the ground beside him, laughing even before she hit the rooftop. They lay there for a moment, side-by-side, laughing slightly and recovering from the double jump scares. Marinette sighed and relaxed, closing her eyes and folding her hands across her stomach.
"So, Chat Noir, what brings you here on this sunny afternoon?"
"Oh you know, I was craving some baked goods the other day and just so happened to be in your neighborhood this afternoon…"
"You are terrible!" Marinette laughed as she sat up, brushing her hair back out of her eyes. "I just fed you like, last week!"
He sat up from beside her and smiled himself, realizing that he had, in fact, used that very same excuse just the week before. "Okay okay, maybe I'm just here to see you. After all, a friend's a friend, baked goods or otherwise."
"That," she said, swatting at him (he ducked with ease of practice), "is a terrible motto."
"What's a motto?"
"I don't know, what's the 'motto' with you?!" Marinette, trying and failing to hold a straight face, burst into laughter at her own joke. "Get it…motto…like…the Lion King…" She doubled over, arms wrapped around her shaking midsection as she giggled uncontrollably.
"The lion what?" She looked over at him, sure that he was kidding, but Noir's straight face of innocence was, surprisingly enough, completely genuine.
"You've never seen the Lion King?"
"I…take it that's a movie?"
"Chat!" Marinette reached for him again, this time connecting the back of her hand with his shoulder. "How on Earth have you made it through this many years of life and you don't even know what the Lion King is?! What did you spend your childhood doing if it wasn't watching Disney movies all night?"
"Uhhh…" He shrugged and raised his eyebrows, for once at loss of a good comeback. "Word puzzles?"
"Oh my gosh, we have to fix this, this is ridiculous."
"Fix wha-whoa!" One moment, Chat had been sitting on the rooftop talking to his friend, and the next he was falling through the trapdoor, landing on her comforter with a heavy thump. He watched as she darted across the floor below him, flicking her laptop computer to life and dropping down the stairs into the apartment below. By the time he made it down the ladder (he was tempted to flip off the rail and onto the floor, but he didn't want to give her another heart attack when she came back up), Marinette had reemerged, a DVD movie case in her hand.
"Here!" She tossed it to him across the room and disappeared back downstairs. Noir caught the case with ease and flipped it to the front to examine it. The majority of the case front was taken up by an animated male lion, with a couple other animals in the foreground (as well as what looked like a baboon holding up a lion cub – what the heck was that all about?). Just as he finished examining the back cover (he didn't recognize any of the actors names, which honestly didn't surprise him very much), his friend came back into the room, this time with a large white bowl and a pair of juice bottles in her arms. Trading him the bowl and drinks for the DVD, she grabbed her computer off the desk and climbed carefully back into the loft, untangling the sheets and spreading the comforter back out so they could sit on it. When he didn't follow, she stuck her head over the edge to look at him. "Are you coming up?"
"Oh!" Finally realizing what was happening, Noir passed the popcorn bowl up to her, the scaled the latter with one hand to join her in the pile of cushions. She opened the disc drive on her laptop and clicked the DVD into place, spinning it slightly before pushing it back into the computer. The hardrive began to whirr to life as Marinette reached for one of the bottles, twisting off the cap and fast-forwarding to the movie menu at the same time.
"Are you ready to witness one of the greatest cinematic masterpiece of all time?"
"That good, huh?" Noir, having left his boots on the ground below, twisted so he was half-propped up on the pillow behind them with his legs beside hers, the computer half on her lap and half on his.
"Oh yea."
As the music started to build, Marinette, completely enthralled, shifted slightly adjust the computer screen, not realizing that this put her closer to the boy in black (not that he was about to complain). He watched as the sun began to rise red over Africa, smiling slightly and settling in to witness one of the greatest cinematic masterpieces of all time (or so he had heard). By the time it was over, he was just an enthralled as she was, and had almost – but not quite – failed to notice when she fell asleep on his shoulder three fourths of the way through.
"Hey Marinette, wait up!"
True to form, Marinette tripped at the sound of his voice, somehow managing to stutter without saying a single word.
"A-Adrien! How are you…today?" Fortunately, the blond ignored the strange emphasis and answered the question as though it had been asked normally.
"I'm doing really good! I actually wanted to ask you something?" Before Marinette could think of a thousand different terrible scenarios in her head (before she could even think of one, which is impressively fast), Adrien started again.
"Do you wanna come over and watch a movie with me sometime?"
Marinette opened her mouth, closed it, then opened it again, all without a single coherent word. Great job, Mari, keep up the good work.
"Well, I, uh," She could hear Tikki's voice in her head cheering her on. The word is 'yes', Marinette, just spit it out!
"Yes?" Close enough!
"Great! Cause I just got the second Lion King movie and I haven't seen it yet." Adrien kept talking as they walked down the hallway, waving his arms dramatically. "I mean, the first one is just so good, ya know?"
"A cinematic masterpiece," Marinette replied quietly, earning her a grin from the boy next to her, reminding her strongly of the laugh she had gotten from using the very same phrase with a different blond the day before.
"Can I tell you a secret, Mari? I'm tired to hiding it, and I need help to fix the problem." She nodded, not trusting her voice to not sound squeaky. He was using a stage whisper and leaning close to her, as though afraid that someone would overhear but still speaking loud enough that she was sure half the hallway was listening in.
"I've only ever seen like three Disney movies!"
Hiding things…oh good grief is this what he was talking about the day before? Marinette would almost swear she could feel her pink bag laughing. He wasn't talking about me at all! (Tikki, of course, knew that Adrien had been talking about something completely different the day before, but Marinette didn't need to know about that – at least, not yet).
"Well that sounds like a problem," she finally said, snapping out of her thoughts.
The bell sounded around them, making them both jump and hurry inside for class.
"Can anyone tell me what a motto is?" Ms. Bustier asked several minutes later. In the dead silence of the room, a single voice rang out from the very front row.
"Nothing, what's the 'motto' with you?"
Needless to say, poor Ladybug was stuck with many, many Lion King puns for the next week straight (though, oddly enough, she didn't really seem to mind).