"Alright, Alya. I've got it all figured out now."
Hiding her grimace by clutching her chin in both hands, nails digging into her cheeks and elbows set on her thighs, Alya did not think that Marinette had it all figured out.
Despite the dangerously manic grin on Marinette's face, Alya restrained herself from taking a flying swan dive out of her best friend's bedroom window. Marinette was blocking the passage to her hatch, so defenestration was the only means of escape, and one Alya was seriously considering at the moment.
"I'm the blackberry ice cream, Kagami is orange, and Adrien is mint, and we all know that mint doesn't go with fruit!"
"That's right," came Alya's tentative reply.
"But there is an orange julep with a sprig of mint on the side." The pointing ladle in Marinette's hand slapped against a picture of an orange mint julep, one of many images in the elaborate display on the drop-down sheet that once held Adrien's schedule. It was now plastered over with photos of various fruits, clandestine spy-shots of Andre's cart, and scribbled conspiracy notes including one that really, really made no sense to Alya: Andre is rabbit miraculous holder sent back in time to avoid Blanc-out scenario?
A hundred multicolored lines of yarn yoked various images and speculations together, though a handful got snagged on the bulbous scoop at the end of Marinette's pointing ladle. It took her a minute of struggle to wrest her instrument free.
"So, that might mean that Kagami and I can only take Adrien as sides and not mixed together. He's at the core and has two girlfriends who are friends but not "friends," the baker clarified, hair noticeably disheveled.
"Oh-kay..."
"Ah-hah! I got you! That's not it at all!" Marinette cackled, gaze flitting about the room as if she was afraid that someone was watching from the corners while she gestured towards the image of a bowl of fruit. "I fell for the same tick!" She thumbed her nose at a blank pink wall. "Not today, Satan!"
Satan? Alya sighed into her hand, slipping off her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose.
"See, what's really going on is that we have to eat around each other's ice cream" - Marinette made a little swirl with her pointing ladle as if she was using it for its intended purpose: stirring soup, but that would just be crazy - "and our own just to enjoy his because mint is fine on its own and so each of us can have it while he eats both of us which sounds kind of dirty, I know, and maybe we should speak to Andre about his more adult flavors like coffee or rum after we figure all this out..." Marinette trailed off, staring at the photograph of a sprig of mint and ... licking her lips thirstily.
Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and Majestia.
"Alright, girl, could you slow down a little bit? I don't think that I follow."
"Don't you get it?! It's telling us that we have to work on ourselves before we can work together. Discover new flavours that will allow us all to fit together into the same ice cream sundae. See, we have to live with the reality that we each only have half of Adrien's heart!"
"I don't think that love works like that."
"So you're saying that it more like the love of a parent whose heart grows to encompass all the new affection for a second or third child? That's so deep, Alya!"
Was it? Had she said any of that?
"It's just what I would expect from someone with younger siblings!" Marinette snapped her fingers in glee at an apparent eureka moment. "Oh, maybe that's what Andre's trying to teach us because we're all only children so we need that kind of lesson for when we have all of our beautifully boisterous baker babies, born as buns in the oven!"
Huh. Marinette alliterated nonsensically when she was losing her mind. Good to know.
"That's-"
"Not that Adrien would really need it because he'd make a great daddy." She tensed, eyes flicking towards the friendly and natural and not stalkery at all image of Adrien alongside the rest of the class that was affixed to her wall. "Oh, shit. He'd be a really great daddy, yes please!"
"Marinette, when was the last time that you slept?"
"Yesterday."
"How many hours ago was yesterday?"
Marinette stumbled through an apparent attempt at long division on her fingers.
"Eighty-three?"
"How are you still conscious?"
"You don't want to know the things that I've done," Marinette explained, slapping her pointing ladle into the palm of her hand. "You can't handle the truth, Alya. I make light of your truth-handling abilities. Anyways, that's not important right now! What's important is the daddy kink thing."
Yes, that did seem rather important.
"That makes me think that I don't mind sharing my ice cream, but orange is worse with mint than blackberry, so is Andre telling us that Kagami won't accept it because she's too competitive? Maybe we both are! That's why her orange flavour matches so well with my blackberry."
"Wouldn't they clash if that was the case?" Alya groaned at herself. Marinette's madness was contagious. She shouldn't be encouraging this, but madness was like gravity. All Alya needed was a little push, especially when it came to elaborate shipping. That was most assuredly her kink. "Doesn't that mean that you could work out a compromise?"
"You're right. They would clash, and orange and blackberry do work together so it can't be that." Marinette waved a paw over the set of three images depicting Blackberry-orange trifle and a healthy and delicious orange blackberry salad. "So..."
Alya had to wince and leap to her girlfriend's side when, with a gasping yelp, the other girl collapsed to her knees, legs spread out behind her, as she stared up at the collection of orange and blackberry images.
From the radiating heat of her cheeks, Marinette's new flavour was "strawberry" or perhaps "cinnamon candy" because that blush burned hot.
"Oh, god, mint is horrible with either flavour! But blackberry and orange?" She looked up at Alya with the wavering, watery gaze of a lost child who had just met up with a kindly policewoman. Broken shudders raced through her body as Alya tried to pat her shoulder in comfort. "What if we're meant to "work out" and not Adrien, who is the odd-man - and only man – out? Have I just been using Adrien and a silly over-the-top crush as a way to hide my lesbianism because of unacknowledged internalized homophobia, just like Kagami?"
"I think that's a little-"
"It explains so much! I'm always self-sabotaging, like with the whole 'I gave you a proscription for laxatives instead of my love-confession by accident, I swear!' thing.' Her hands fisted in her hair as she groaned. "I mean who does that?!"
"Sweetie, you just mixed up some papers."
Marinette's arms jerked towards Alya, and for a moment the redhead feared that her best friend had cracked fully and was about to use all that bakery-girl muscle to snap Alya's neck. Instead, iron fingers curled around Alya's collar and the baker wrenched her down into near kissing distance, close enough for Alya to wonder if she was using Nino as a beard because those pretty pink lips looked mighty tasty at the moment.
"Did I?! Did I really?! The heart is desperately wicked, Alya; who can know it?! And I've sinned so much! Like every single night! Like so desperate and so wicked!" she screamed into Alya's face, which necessitated a quick covering of the blogger's ears, though that meant she couldn't protect herself from the flying spittle.
"What if I never really wanted a relationship with Adrien to work out? Was he just a conveniently unreachable goal, someone I could put on a pedestal so that I didn't have to confront my sexuality by telling myself that I could never be good enough for him? It's so obvious. That totally explains why Luka and Chat Noir don't do anything for me even though they're objectively drop-dead gorgeous and sweet."
"That's just the simp energy, Marinette," Alya hastened to explain now that the shouting had died down.
While with further, extensive consideration, Marinette did agree that Chat Noir and Luka were massive simps, the girls were not able to reach a conclusion regarding ice cream symbolism on that particular 102 hour day.
It was a good thing that Miraculous stamina transferred over to Marinette in her civilian life.
Or a very bad thing.
Eventually, the time came for another ice cream date, where, once again, Adrien and Kagami put the burden of choice and interpretation of the complex subtext of ice cream flavours on Marinette's shoulders.
Adrien and Kagami one step behind her, holding hands, Marinette examined the myriad flavours at Andre's cart for tortuously long minutes.
"Have you made a decision, Marinette?" Adrien asked eventually.
No. How could she make this kind of choice for all of them? It was flattering that they trusted her so much, but, really, it was also kind of unfair.
"Uh." Huffing and drawing upon the well of Ladybug resolve within herself, the baker guided the other two lightly-smiling teens to stand beside her in front of the jovial Andre. "Can you help me decide? You deserve to. I mean, you get the subtext of what's going on here, right?"
"Oh, Marinette." That smile, the one that reminded Marinette of that day in the rain when she fell in love, banished every fear. "Don't be silly."
Oh, thank goodness. She didn't have to make this choice for them. She wasn't alone in this uncertainty and fear. They too must have spent the past several days caught up in the same kind of frantic scramble of thoughts that plagued her: Adrien no doubt fearing his father's oppressive reprisal and Kagami questioning her burgeoning bisexuality and her ability to give Adrien the depths of affection and care that he needed in light of his home life while balancing time spent with him and Marinette and still pursuing her dreams of Olympic gold.
"We're eating ice cream." Adrien shook his head with a massive grin that made him look like a panting, dopey dog, flopping all over himself. "We're not studying literature."
"Books have subtext." Kagami agreed as if she was indulging a child, and then her nose pinched up in thought. "Not ice cream. Although we are thinking about the number of ice cream scoops we should add to our cone, so if anything, this is more like ... remedial math class."
As if preparing for the synchronized embarrassment team for some Bizarro-World Olympics, Marinette and Andre facepalmed simultaneously.
Marinette had stumbled into the remedial class, alright.
The rotund confectioner scraped his hand down his nose and pudgy chin and then smiled, gesturing to the tubs of orange and mint ice cream.
"Are you sure you want these two other flavours?" He raised a gentle hand to placate her, and continued as if he was in on some savoury secret. "Blackberry goes very well with blueberry, you know."
"Was this what you meant?"
Andre hissed in a long, slow breath and nodded with an apologetic frown.
Marinette sighed.
"Fuck it! Just throw 'em all in. We'll figure it out."