Author's Note: This is a fic based off of a comic written and drawn by hogeky on tumblr by the same name. Please go there to view images and support her comic!
Permission was received to write this fic.
Adrien looked down at the pink envelope in his hands.
"I read your letter properly! Why can't you read mine?" she said, a hint of tears in her voice. He could hardly bare to look at the hurt expression across her face and it surprised him that she even wore it. This letter, it meant a lot to her for him to read it, just as his letter had for him.
He supposed he should.
He wasn't sure what he was expecting though. Would it be worse to receive a rejection or a confession? If Ladybug was rejecting his feelings, guilt would eat at him for days, but at least he could throw himself wholeheartedly into his feelings for Marinette. Then again, if she had come to reject him, she wouldn't have looked so nervous and intent on making him read her letter.
What would he do if she was confessing to him?
Accept her? Deny any of his developing emotions for Marinette? Date a super-heroine without ever learning her identity?
Or reject Ladybug? Adrien wasn't even certain he could reject her. For how many years had he loved her, only to have his feelings snuffed. And to now possibly learn of her feelings toward his civilian self? Would it even be right for him to accept? Would it be right for her to love him? Questions swirled through him, causing his stomach to simultaneously sink into the pits of his body, and push its way up his throat.
Adrien peeled back the ladybug sticker sealing the letter with agonizing slowness.
Dear Adrien,
Thank you so much for letting me know your feelings and giving me time to figure out my own. I am sorry for being so late with my answer. I don't think that you'd be able to receive or understand my true feelings by just reading a letter. I prefer you hear it from me personally. I hope you believe me when I say I have known you for quite some time now, and from the beginning, you have always been the one. I want you to know something I've been dying to tell you all this time.
The letter ended without conclusion, somehow providing more questions than answers.
"What?" Adrien muttered, reading the letter over again before raising his head to speak. "What are you - ." What he was faced with, stole every sentence, every breath, from his lips.
"I wanted to tell you this for a while now," Marinette began, her voice ringing in the numbness of his ears. She stood smiling simply, as if this were rather modest and without extraordinary interest.
Though perhaps she only looked that way because every fiber of her being was fighting to keep from shaking.
"Adrien," she continued, "I… I love you."
He was fairly certain he had ascended into another plane of existence. His mind went soaring, flashing through every single thing he had done in the past few months, lingering on the fact that he had given a love letter to Marinette, fallen in love with her while simultaneously falling out of love with her, and then rejecting her in order to date her.
It was all very confusing.
But it didn't matter. Well, it didn't matter at the moment.
The only thing that mattered right then and there, was that he loved Marinette. And that she loved him in return.
What else could he do but want to hold her.
Except nothing this good ever happened to him. Could it really be her? Could he have been hallucinating? Could he have been dreaming?
Adrien hardly realized that he had gone to her; hardly realized that he was inches from her face, staring into the depths of the fear in her eyes; searching for a familiarity he had already found, but was too terrified to accept.
"It's really… it really is you."
Author's Note: Short chapter yes, I know. A lot of tension drawings and such. I changed up the physical bits of the last part of the story, making it a little bit more romantic because words wouldn't translate the emotion correctly… Also, the story is almost over! Hogeky is posting the epilogue!