Ed notes: I blame Quickspinner. It started with her dropping the idea of Marinette and Luka beign roped in to sing I See the Light from Tangled at Juleka and Rose's wedding, and having their own Moment. And then the rest of the LBSC crowd shoved me under the bus when that sparked Ideas (thanks!). This may have ended up being just a little more angsty than the original idea, but our sweet idiots have a few things to work out. Fear not, though - they will live Happily Ever After, or Rose will be Most Upset. This is as you may have already guessed, a Lukanette fic. There will be Disney. And do, please, let me know what you think - comments and kudos are love!

See the Light

A Miraculous Ladybug fanfiction

By Mintaka14

Chapter One – All Those Years

Luka Couffaine got the shock of his life when, six months before his sister's wedding, his past walked onto the boat. She moved with an assurance that she'd never had at fourteen. A little older at twenty-four, a little less arms-and-legs and a little more rounded curves, but still with those same devastating blue eyes.

Her hand curled on the rail, and he realised he was staring.

"Luka," she said. "Hi."

"Ma-ma-marinette," he managed, and that mouth of hers lifted in a tentative smile. "It's been a while."

"It's been a while," she agreed softly. "How are you?"

He said something, he wasn't sure what.

"I take it Juleka didn't mention that I was coming," she said. "I've offered to design the dresses for the wedding, and she suggested I come round today to talk about them. Are you… is it okay that I'm here?"

At that, Luka jolted out of his distraction and offered her a more genuine smile.

"Marinette, it's more than okay. It's good to see you again. You're looking well."

Her own smile grew a little brighter, and she flicked a quick glance down and back up to meet his eyes again. "So are you."

"Marinette! You made it!" Rose's shriek cut off any response he might have made. Rose barrelled up the steps from the galley and past him to engulf Marinette in a tight hug, with Juleka not far behind. Luka had a moment to collect himself while they caught up. All in all, he thought he'd handled it pretty well. He hadn't actually swallowed his tongue.

Marinette flashed a brief, rueful smile at him over her shoulder as Rose towed her below deck, leaving Luka to pull his scattered thoughts together. He hadn't seen her in ten years and she could still bowl him over at first sight. He turned absently to the stack of papers he'd been working on when she arrived, barely seeing them.

He hadn't made much progress half an hour later, and gave up, heading down to the galley. A burst of laughter drew his attention and in the other room he could see Marinette wielding a tape measure around his sister with brisk efficiency, while Rose sat on the table, swinging her legs as she flicked through a plain black sketchbook. He'd seen plenty of the same type of book back when he'd been spending a lot of time with Marinette all those years ago. He leaned in the doorway, unnoticed, watching Marinette at work.

It had always been hard to define exactly what made Marinette so overwhelming whenever he saw her. Maybe it was the sense of intensity and creative fire, as if her skin could barely contain everything that she was, or the fierce, giving heart that shone within her. Maybe it was the endless blue of her eyes that spoke to him of a limitless horizon. It seemed like none of that had changed.

What had changed was the dizzying rush he felt as she bent to pick up something and he found himself following the tight curve of her jeans and the contour of her strong, lean legs. He jerked his wayward gaze away, trying to fight down the heat in his cheeks and the fleeting speculation about what it might be like to have those legs wrapped around him, and those beautiful eyes of hers on him while he … God, Couffaine, get your mind out of the gutter! It had been ten years since he'd last seen her, and these were not appropriate thoughts to be having barely thirty minutes and less than a handful of words of conversation after she'd turned up in his life again.

She had always been a pretty girl, but that was nothing to the gorgeous woman she'd grown into.

He would have bet money that the jeans hugging those legs like a second skin were her own design, and the silky red shirt sliding artfully off one shoulder but never quite falling looked like it had come straight from the fashion week runway. The way Marinette filled it, though, was far more distracting than any model could have ever made it.

The pigtails were another thing that was gone, but he didn't spare them more than a moment of nostalgia, because the blue-black satin of her hair was caught up in a knot that left the smooth line of her neck bare, and that was a whole other train of thought that he cut off quickly. He looked up to find that she was watching him with a quizzical expression, and he managed to answer it with a smile of his own before Rose noticed him standing there.

"Luka!" she called out. "You have got to see what Marinette's come up with for us!"

She was practically bouncing, and shoved the sketchbook at him. He looked at Marinette, one eyebrow raised in a question, before he opened it.

"If Marinette's okay with that," he said. Marinette's mouth lifted in a smile at that.

"Marinette's okay with that," she told him, and he opened the cover. The slim book was full of designs and scribbled ideas and notes on wedding dresses. He'd seen her fourteen year old designs, and been impressed by them, but this… this was a whole other level, which, he supposed, wasn't surprising. He turned through the pages slowly. He paused on one that was clearly meant for Juleka.

"Wow," he said softly.

"That's one of my favourites, too," Marinette said. She'd come to look over his shoulder, and he was finding that rather unsettling for some reason. "Juleka's so elegant, she could wear just about anything, but I like that structure for her."

"It feels like her." He glanced up at Marinette. "Dangerous edges, with just a bit of sweetness underneath."

Marinette turned another few pages, and waited for Luka to find it.

"Rose," he grinned back at her. "Channelling her inner Disney princess?"

"The brief was Sleeping Beauty, live action, but more -" Marinette gestured extravagantly, opening her eyes wide, and from the table where she was perched, Rose stuck out her tongue at them.

"It's my wedding, and I'll princess if I want to," Rose sniffed.

Luka glanced back at the sketch, and was impressed all over again. Marinette had somehow turned flowers and glitter and pink and Rose into a few lines of charcoal and caught it on the page. Her own special brand of magic.

On the other side of the room, Juleka looked up from her phone.

"I've just ordered takeaway, and Ivan and Mylène are on their way," she told them, and levelled a look at Marinette. "You are staying, aren't you?"

By the time Marinette had been talked into it, and Ivan and Mylène had turned up in a bustle of exclamations and hugs and chatter, Luka had recovered something of his equilibrium. As darkness fell over the river and the lights strung up across the boat spilled a soft light over the deck, Luka handed Marinette a glass of wine and settled into the deck chair beside her.

"You're wearing a tie these days," she said with a hint of mischief, and he glanced down at the shirt he'd rolled up over his tattooed forearms and the tie he'd forgotten he was still wearing. "I never pictured you in the kind of career that would need a tie."

He pulled himself together enough to smile easily back at her. "Well, it's been a while. A few things have changed. I see you're not wearing those pigtails anymore," he teased her, and her hand went to the soft satin twist of her hair.

"No." Marinette leaned back in the chair, her wine glass in hand, and her eyes were on Rose and Ivan arguing amicably about something. There was an indefinable sense of distance in her that had never been there when they were kids, and he wondered what had happened to put that there.

"So when did you get back in touch with Jules? She didn't mention that she'd seen you."

"I was showing a couple of pieces at something Juleka was modelling at a while ago. We bumped into each other backstage, and when she mentioned that she and Rose were getting married I offered to make up the dresses for them. My wedding present to them," she said with a self-conscious smile, and Luka couldn't help a soft laugh.

"Only you would do that for someone you haven't seen in years."

"They're still friends." She rolled her eyes at him. "Like you wouldn't do the same."

Rose was standing on a stack of crates now, singing something about rainbows, while Juleka hooked an arm around her to keep her from overbalancing and Mylène snorted with laughter. Marinette looked over at them a little wistfully.

"It's nice to be back in touch with the old Kitty Section crew," she admitted. "It was nice to reconnect with Juleka… and you. I've missed that."

"I've missed you too," Luka said quietly. "Do you see much of the old school crowd?"

Marinette shrugged. "Not really. I run into Adrien from time to time. I see him at the fashion shows sometimes, but honestly, once we get past the awkward reminiscing about collège, and industry stuff, we don't really have a whole lot to talk about these days. I've sort of lost touch with everyone else."

"How about Alya?" he asked. Luka had never really warmed to the brash journalist-in-the-making, with all her Adrien-schemes, but she'd been best friends with Marinette back in the day.

"No." The one word was oddly expressionless. "I haven't see her in a few years."

There was a heartbeat when he thought she was going to say something else, then those lashes of hers dropped. Instead, when she looked up again there was that mischievous spark in her eyes again, and she said, "So what convinced you to put on a tie? Although I notice you didn't get rid of your blue hair." Was that an approving note in her voice? He ran his hand a little self-consciously through the longer, teal-tipped sweep of his dark hair, rubbing at the shorter hairs at the back of his neck. "What are you doing these days?"

"Playing the occasional gig whenever I get the chance, selling my music from time to time, teaching…"

"Teaching?"

He named the lycèe.

"Lucky students." Marinette tilted her head to regard him speculatively, a small smile playing at the corner of her mouth. "I'm having a hard time seeing you as M. Couffaine, though."

"Just Luka. I'm the cool teacher that half the faculty hates because I undermine authority."

"And the other half madly crush on," Marinette suggested, and Luka felt himself flush. She could still throw him off-balance, all these years later, although it was in a different way now. The fourteen year old Marinette he remembered would never have been able to say something like that without self-combusting, but here she was, watching him with that mischievous glint in her beautiful blue eyes, and it was just another reminder that things had changed.

"What about you?" he deflected. He gestured at the sketchbook she'd left on a nearby table with her handbag. "Following the dream?"

She gave a wry little smile. "Oh, I got through my degree in fashion design somehow, and I've been running a bespoke atelier out of my bedroom. It's not huge, but it pays the bills, and at least it gives me a certain amount of … flexibility." Luka couldn't understand the slight twist of her mouth at the word, but she had it smoothed out before he could be sure he'd really seen it. "And Ja… a few high profile people have been very kind and sent work my way."

Luka felt certain he knew who the celebrity had been. For that alone, he could forgive his father a lot. There was a long silence while Marinette contemplated her empty wine glass, then she met his eyes.

"You have no idea how sorry I am that I broke up with you like that, right when you were going through everything with... I just made everything worse, and it wasn't fair on you. I never really found a way to tell you that I was sorry for everything."

"Marinette, no!" Luka straightened in his deckchair, a faint frown crossing his face. "We were kids. I've always felt badly that I put you under more pressure when you were clearly having a hard time with something."

"There was a fair bit of that going around," she conceded, and let out a shuddering breath that he didn't realise she'd been holding. "But you have nothing to apologise for, you had every right to be upset about how I treated you. I regret a lot of things about back then."

"I don't regret that we tried," Luka said with unintentional intensity, and Marinette's eyes widened a little. "But I do regret that I lost you out of my life altogether. I've missed your song, and I've missed just hanging out and talking with you."

"I didn't think you'd want to see me after all that. And I thought it was saf -" she cut herself off abruptly, changing what she'd been going to say, "- better if I stayed away."

He shook his head, but didn't say anything in response.

She gave him a sidelong look. "I never really got the chance to ask you, did you… how did things go with Jagged in the end? Do you talk to him?"

Luka's expression turned wry. "It's complicated. It's always complicated with Jagged, but we talk a bit. He's going to be there for the wedding. Not sure how that's going to go."

Marinette made a sympathetic noise. He thought for a moment that she was going to ask him for the details, but instead, with another swift, perceptive glance from those blue eyes of hers, she changed the subject.

"So what's teaching like, M. Couffaine?" she asked lightly, and he settled back to tell her some of his stories, enjoying the ripple of laughter he drew from her over his students' antics, and the chuckles she surprised out of him with her own tales about clients and their most outrageous demands. He had no idea how late it had grown when the conversation was interrupted by a chorus of phones chiming all at once from various corners of the Liberty. Ivan was the first to reach his.

"Akuma alert," he sighed. "Aw, man, they've shut down septième. Traffic getting home is going to be hell."

"What's the bet that it's the Eiffel Tower again?" Juleka muttered.

Mylène was shaking her head. "Hawkmoth, and now Swallowtail, and there was that weird thing with the rats a few years ago, and the government keeps pretending that there's nothing they can do as long as they can just dump it all on Ladybug and Chat Noir to deal with the problem. We're still working on getting subsidies for mental health therapies, but they keep stonewalling us."

Marinette was getting to her feet.

"I really should go," she said reluctantly, and Luka stood as she gathered up her bag and sketchbook. "It was… really nice to catch up again, Luka. It's been far too long."

"Oh, but you'll be back again soon, right?" Rose cut in before Luka could say anything. "There'll be fittings for the wedding dresses, and we're not letting you lose contact again like that. We've missed you, right, Luka?"

Luka ignored Rose's unsubtle nudge, and Marinette said her goodbyes to the rest of their friends.

"It's good to see you again, Marinette," he told her, and accepted the light bise she brushed against his cheek. He caught a hint of vanilla and sugar as she leaned in, and oh hell, it suddenly hit him why the smell of cookies had always left him with a faint and peculiar sense of homesickness when his mother had never baked a cookie in her life. He closed his eyes briefly, and let Marinette go before he could do something stupid.

Luka watched her safely down to the dock, and he absolutely was not fixating on the sway of those jeans as she walked away, holy crap, and turned back to meet Rose's hopeful and utterly transparent look.

"So-oo," his future sister-in-law said with overdone nonchalance. "You and Marinette looked like you were having a good time together."

"Don't go getting ideas, Ro."

"Rose," Juleka muttered warningly from the bench where she was sitting, but Rose ignored her.

"I don't know what you mean," she said innocently. "I just want you to be happy Luka. It looked like you were really happy tonight. And it was great to see Marinette again."

"No ideas," he repeated, and Rose gave him a look of deep disappointment. She started collecting the empty takeaway containers, while Luka rounded up the glasses. Rose dropped a kiss on Juleka's mouth on the way past, and flitted down into the galley. Juleka heaved a put-upon sigh, and swung herself gracefully to her feet, scooping up a couple of stray cushions.

Luka picked up Marinette's wineglass, with the soft pink imprint of her lipstick.

"You didn't mention that Marinette would be coming round," he said, his back to his sister. "You didn't mention that you'd been in touch with her again."

Juleka shrugged, and dumped the cushions in one of the storage boxes on the deck. "Didn't think it mattered. It was ten years ago. You're not still hung up on what happened back then, are you?"

"No, of course not." And he was pretty sure that was true. This felt like he'd been blindsided by Marinette Dupain-Cheng in a whole new way.