Adrien was raised on order. His life is meticulously planned, a neat pattern of fencing-Chinese-piano with three meals, all eaten alone in the oppressive silence of the Agreste mansion, sandwiched in between. Each day is as reliable as the equations he studies in physics and calculus. Even the times he's allowed to dream of other (literature assignments, video games, computer time spent Googling her) are cookie-cutter-organized and time-blocked.
Starting school was a tsunami of newness, and all at once. He was hurled into a world where physical touch was given freely, where people could shout and swear amongst each other without fear of being corrected. He remembers vividly the first time he allowed himself to slouch, after Nino told him to get the stick out of his ass (an expression he'd never heard previously).
It wasn't that he didn't want change- god knows how hard he'd fought to go to public- it was that change wasn't what he'd thought it would be. Coming-of-age movies, shoujo manga, teen magazine advice columns- all had led him to believe that changing was as quick and easy as jumping into a pool from a diving board. The initial plunge, he thought, was where all the work went. After that, it was freestyle.
Instead it was belly flop after belly flop, anomaly after anomaly.
And then his miraculous and the clumsy girl who tangled him up in her string and, even after releasing him, never really let him go.
Even so, he finds comfort in their archetypes: Adrien plays the role of the swoon-worthy, suave wisecracker, and Ladybug is the perpetually un-wooed. It stings like peroxide on a paper cut but it's predictable; their interactions being clockable- borderline formulaic- gives the whole thing a sense of being contained. He can easily slip on his facade, run his lines, and off he goes!
He's read it, studied it, been tested on it (and aced it!): the axiom of equality. x = x, always. He thinks if he could read the very code of the universe it would be written there. x = x.
So he lands on the roof, walks to Ladybug with a practiced swing in his step (stick? what stick?). x = x.
Ladybug responds to his cat-pun greeting with a punch to the shoulder and a bitten-off grin. x = x.
Patrol is uneventful (x = x), they discuss the latest episode of the shitty reality show they both watch (x = x), and they end up sequestered in their favorite little spot: an alcove hidden in the stone arches of an old library (x = x).
"Can I ask you something?" asks Ladybug with surprising earnestness.
"I'm always here to listen, Bugaboo."
She doesn't tell him not to call her bugaboo. This is a violation of several laws of nature.
"Something… embarrassing?" she continues, and, if he didn't know it was impossible, he might think her bashful.
"Shoot."
"Do you think it's possible to like two people at the same time?" Ladybug bites her lip in a way that makes his stomach pirouette.
Adrien considers the question. Ladybug is his one and only: the cone to his ice cream, the flip to his flop, the pain to his au chocolat. She's his sun, moon, and every other celestial body. If he could, he'd simultaneously inhabit every dimension in which she exists just to experience more of her.
And yet, there's a box somewhere deep in his brain labelled "DO NOT OPEN," the contents of which have been crammed down and duct-taped securely shut. This is where, with great deliberation, he tucks away Marinette's hair, blue-tinted in the daylight, and Kagami's barely discernible smile.
"I think," he says. "That crushes are inevitable, but that you can only truly love one person at a time."
"You've been… in love… then?" Ladybug drops to a near whisper when she says the L- word, as if it's an obscenity. Adrien swallows.
"I think so, but I have nothing to compare it to. This is the first time I've ever felt this way."
It takes Ladybug's cheeks blooming poppy red for him to realize that he'd spoken in the present tense. He longs for life to have a backspace key.
"I'm sorry," Ladybug says hurriedly. "I know we don't usually talk about personal things like this, and I don't want to make you feel uncomfortable-"
She's rambling like another pig-tailed girl he knows. Despite his discomposure, he cuts her off with, "I'm an open book, M'Lady."
She smiles in relief, but quickly regains her look of hesitance. "Can you- if you don't mind!- can you tell me… what it's like?"
Ladybug watches him with careful anticipation, and her wide-eyed stare (stratosphere blue) turns his insides into spaghetti. Surely this is a unique form of torture.
"It's… huh," Adrien's mind reels with the effort of not sounding pathetic. "It's like… I've heard people say it's like coming home, but that's not how I feel, not exactly. It's like finding something completely new and so good that you'd give away everything to stay with them. And when they touch you… it feels like going down a roller coaster, but drawn out, if that makes sense. It's-"
"Miserable," Ladybug finishes, and, although it wasn't what he was going to say, it's pretty damn accurate.
"In the best of ways."
"And, you want to punch something," Ladybug continues. "Super hard, because everything about them is so… so them that it's infuriating! But you also want to curl up with them and fall asleep and never wake up, like maybe if that happens you could just blend into each other and become one person-"
She stops herself, and Adrien's head buzzes with thoughts of Symposium, of humans being created with four arms and four legs and two faces then ripped apart, ambling around desperately in search of their other half.
"Something like that," Adrien mutters. "Maybe without the punching."
"What can I say?" Ladybug giggles. "My love is violent."
Adrien has never wanted to have his ass kicked by someone more.
"But," Ladybug continues. "Despite your more brazen remarks, I've always imagined yours as gentle."
He can practically hear reality splintering around him. "You've… imagined…?"
"Of course," she shrugs. "Haven't you?"
"Yes-" (every day, every instant. her name is written in the margins of his notebook alongside the equations that govern his universe, screamed into his pillow every night)- "The, uh, the thought has occurred to me."
Ladybug nods, entirely too nonchalant for someone who's sent every one of his molecules reeling. "I mean, it's hard not to, what with all the fanfiction people write about us-"
"You read that?"
She flushes. "Yeah… I was curious about how they perceive us. They get a lot wrong, actually."
Adrien swallows. "L-like what?"
"They don't seem to know that you're a huge dork," she chortles. "And they think I'm quite stoic. Plus, the kiss scenes are always off."
"Hungh…" he lets out a broken little noise, thinking back to the Dark Cupid pictures that he has saved on his phone. He's studied every pixel, etched the image of her hands on his face, her demanding lips, into every groove of his brain.
After a humiliatingly long silence, he finds it in himself to speak. "How… how so?"
"Well," she says. "For one, they always make you the one in control."
God, he'd never make that mistake. The burning glow of his cheeks is more than indicative of who calls the shots here.
Ladybug clears her throat. "Well. Moving on. Thanks for humoring me with all this love-life talk, but I'll leave you to pursue whoever it is that's captured your attention.
"She- or he- is lucky," says Ladybug, and it's a million punches to the solar plexus.
"Are you-" Adrien shrieks, nigh involuntarily- "Are you kidding?"
Ladybug stares at him blankly.
"After- after all the-" he sputtered. "It's been five years of me flirting with you and you still haven't gotten the message?"
Record scratch. Adrien has broken Chat's rule of the smooth approach, and he's now in unchartered territory. Reality splinters further.
Ladybug gapes. "I thought it was a bit. It's like, your thing."
"Only with y-"
"You flirted with Marinette!" Ladybug exclaimed. "She-she told me!"
"I…" The tape on the DO NOT OPEN box is peeled back. Infinitesimally. "With you, I mean it."
"So all the stuff you said earlier, about the roller coaster and- and coming home… that was about me?"
"Surprise!" he says weakly.
At least he recognizes this part of the movie: the heroine dodges an unrequited confession before running off with some superior guy. She'll tell him that she sees him as a brother, or that he's a great guy, I mean it, but that dating would ruin their friendship. (And he'll cry tonight, silently as his can, and his heart will be crushed under a mallet, but at least it satisfies the equation. x equals x equals x equals x)
Instead, Ladybug draws in a shaky breath, pulling herself up from her sitting position and kneeling. Hands on the floor, she crawls towards him until his back is flush against the wall.
"Do you…" her voice is an almost-whisper. He can feel her breath fire-hot against his face. "Do you want me to show you how I think they should write our kiss?"
Adrien isn't here anymore, leave a message after the tone.
He nods. She deposits herself between his legs, places her hands on his cheeks, and slams her lips onto his.
The greats of romance line his bookshelves, from Shakespeare to Sparks, but they could only dream of conjuring words to describe what the kiss does to him. His thoughts become alphabet soup as Ladybug's lips move against his. His head bangs against the wall as she throws herself at him, deepening the kiss. He's too drunk on her to care.
When she bites his lip, he lets out a string of expletives that would bring immeasurable shame to the Agreste family.
"See?" Ladybug whispers. "You aren't as smooth as they imagine you are. I don't think-" She kisses his cheek, his temple, his ear- "I don't think I've ever seen anybody blush this much."
The only response Adrien can summon is a guttural whine. Ladybug smirks, and tugs at his ear with her teeth. He lets out a choked moan, and Ladybug responds with a pleased noise of her own.
"You know," she pants. "I've pictured this moment so many times, but this is better than I could have imagined."
Everything in him screams in agreement. He pulls her closer.
Nothing could have prepared him for the feeling of her teeth on his neck. It's a symphony of sensation; she lights his nerve endings ablaze as she moves down, down, down. She focuses on one spot, chewing and sucking at it, and he's blinded with arousal. He can hear his own heart beat building speed as if to crescendo.
Ladybug's hands begin to wander, fingers splayed as she moves from his pelvis up his abdomen and finally to his chest. Feather-light touch.
He imagines her hands everywhere, the crooks of his arms, the curves between his fingers, the ticklish spots behind his knees. Her hands continue their dance, brushing against his concealed nipples and fuck, he's never even considered how good that might feel. She moves lower, and his abdominal muscles spasm as she strokes them. He's dizzy with anticipation, stomach somersaulting relentlessly as he waits for her to touch him where it aches-
Ladybug pulls away and smiles coyly. "See? Told you my love was violent."
His mind is sluggish. Thinking is like wading through quicksand, and for an instant he struggles to understand what she said. Processing, processing…
Oh.
"Your… your love?" he wheezes.
"My love," she affirms.
Adrien can barely remember that axiom now. Ladybug has dethroned Euclid and Frege and Russell with two words, reduced their life's work to meaningless scribbles. His brain is plagued with a jumbled mess of disproven formulas.
"I thought I loved this boy," said Ladybug. "I spent half a decade completely obsessed with him, but… you were an anomaly."
"Huh..." Adrien utters weakly.
"Because somehow, no matter how much I wanted to love him," Ladybug smiles. "You were the one I thought of when I wanted to escape. Every problem I have, I feel like it can be fixed just by holding you. And I intend to do a lot of that, if you don't mind."
Adrien's mind has entered the most wonderful kind of delirium. "I… I can't think of anything I want more."
"Promise?" Ladybug's smile is wide and crooked and dopey, not the practiced one she reserves for the public. When he reads legends of the "greatest love of all time," he's filled with hesitance to believe them. Romeo and Juliet fall by the wayside, Orpheus and Eurydice can take a hike, because he knows he's found it here.
"I promise." He's struck with the compulsion to be truthful, and he allows himself to embrace his clumsy heart. "I feel… I feel everything for you. Everything in me feels everything for you. It's a lot of everythings."
"I feel everything you feel," Ladybug chuckles. "Times a hundred."
Ladybug's eyes hold enough light to cause a singularity. He wants to marry her so hard.
"Times a thousand," he challenges.
"Times infinity!"
"That's mathematically impossible."
"Honestly?" says Ladybug as her hands make their way back to his face. "I don't give a damn."