"What shall we use to fill the empty spaces

where waves of hunger roar?"

ㅡPink Floyd (The Wall, 1979) (cut)

Empty Spaces ㅡ Part Two

By the time he dropped onto Marinette's roof more than thirty minutes had passed since he originally contacted her. He'd told her ten minutes, then. Hopefully she was still awake. With a furtive glance at the deserted street below, he detransformed. A quick glance at his phone showed a frantic text from her two minutes ago.

[Mari]

(still cpming? did you get caught?! PLS tell me u didnt get caught my parents will seriousl y BAKE me into a MEAT P IE i am not kidding adrien)

"I am not going to even try to guess what you're doing here at this ungodly hour," Plagg deadpanned over Adrien's shoulder, reading Marinette's text with a disgusted curl to his lip. "I'm sure it's something gross and hormonal."

"Plagg," Adrien grumbled, stowing the phone and readjusting his backpack (he'd gone home for it on a whim) higher onto his shoulder. "It's not like that. Would you just shut up and get in my backpack, please? Come on. I even put food in there for you."

"Are there earplugs too? I feel like I'm gonna need them."

Blushing furiously, Adrien snatched Plagg out of the air and stuffed him in the backpack himself. "Sometimes I wish you came with a set of earplugs, for my ears." His phone buzzed again.

[Mari]

(seriously though adrien, do i need to come downstairs and rescue you from my parents? im starting to get concerned)

In lieu of answering the message, he took a deep breath, smoothed out his windblown hair a little, then crouched down to tap lightly on the skylight that he knew sat directly over the loft and her bed. The night air whistled along the roof tiles, gathering in eddies around his ankles. Without his cat ears he was forced to strain after the sound of her moving around beyond the black glass below him. All he could see in the window was his own faint reflection and that of the full moon that had just peaked out of the low-hanging clouds in the east, fractured in half between two of the glass panes. Looking at it, he saw himself. He saw her. Rent in two. He blinked at the pieces of the moon and then cocked his head to the side so that the reflection coalesced into a full circle again.

He grinned, and knocked again more fervently.

This time he could tell she had heard him. The shuffling sound crescendoed until the latch on the window creaked. When she pushed it up a tentative inch, he grabbed hold and pulled it open wide enough to slip through.

When he dropped down into the dark bedroom onto her bed, Marinette let out a surprised "Eeep!" Then she slapped her hand over her mouth to mask the sound.

"Hi," he beamed, hastily shifting out of the natural crouch he'd landed in. (It was instinct. He wasn't trying to give himself away.)

Marinette just gaped at him. "But, you…" Her eyes dilated to pinpoints and she pointed first at him, then at the window above, then at the trapdoor below that led down into the rest of her house. "Butㅡ" He knew full well that she'd been expecting him to come from there. "Butㅡwhat?" She screwed up her face at him. "Adrien Agreste, what were you thinking? How did you even get up here? No wonder it took you so long! What if you had fallen?"

Realizing belatedly that his dirty shoes were on her adorable flowered bedspread, he set about unlacing them. "I wouldn't have fallen. I've been rock climbing since I was five," he assured her, with far more practicality than ego. Of course, he hadn't really climbed at all. He'd pole-vaulted onto her roof from the one across the street. She didn't need to know about that tonight, though. Tonight was about being a good friend to her; everything else was on hold.

"ButㅡI can't wrap my head around this," she giggled manically. "I'm trying. I just can't. You, scaling the wall to my third story roof after midnight! That is so unlike you!"

That proclamation was sort of disheartening, yet it was to be expected. Part of his calibrated upbringing had been public image. So ingrained was the practice of toning down his eccentricities in the presence of other people (until the advent of Chat Noir, that is) that he'd gone on doing it even when he entered public school and got a breath of fresh air from the relentless supervision. So he wasn't surprised to hear Marinette thought of him that way. Reserved, well-behaved, and proper. This was the image he'd been trained to put out. Setting his converse lightly on the floor next to her bed so as not to draw any attention from downstairs, he turned back to Marinette with a playful expression, squinting his eyes in the dark. That image needed to be destroyed if he ever wanted to bridge this gap between them. Luckily for him, destroying things was what he did best.

"Actually," he said carefully, "it's a lot more like me than I usually let on."

This caught her off guard." O-oh," she stammered, faltering under his unabashed stare before leaning back on her arms in the pillows to regain her balance. "Really? You sneak out at midnight often?"

"What can I say?" he laughed. "I'm a delinquent. So how was your visit with Alya after school? Is she doing any better?"

Marinette averted her eyes, picking at the blanket distractedly. "She's… kind of doing worse, actually," she sighed. "She's in more pain than ever, and the doctors shooed me away after less than an hour."

"Did she get her card at least?" Adrien prompted when she fell into a sullen silence. "I had a feeling she might freak out over the Ladybug signature."

That made her break into a blinding smile, and the sight of it sent his heart careening off a cliff. "Yeah. I wish I'd filmed it, honestly. Her heartrate went so bananas that they called a code and like four doctors came rushing in thinking she was going into some kind of shock. That's when they kicked me out. I mean, she was fine, but the doctors didn't think it was very prudent of me."

"Well I think it was amazing of you," he chuckled. Leave it to Alya Cesaire to go into cardiac arrest over a signature from Ladybug. "Sorry you got kicked out though."

"It's okay," she smiled sadly, hugging her knees to her chest. "I'm not immediate family so I'm lucky they let me into the ward at all. Besides," and she held up her phone in mock triumph, "she's keeping me updated. We're waiting on the latest test results. Now I just need a distraction so I don't go crazy while I wait for them."

"I have you covered on that front," he smiled, and lugged his backpack across the bed to start digging through it. Halfway to Marinette's house the idea had struck him, and he hadn't been able to let it go. So he'd detoured across the city back to the Agreste Mansion to get this for her. When he found the book he'd gone back for and held it up, she blinked at it innocently.

God, she was so cute. It wasn't fair. "What is that?"

He squinted his eyes at the cover in the darkness. "The Landscape of Fashion: Paris, 1900-2000. It's my father's personal annotated copy," he explained, flipping through the first couple pages and scooting a little closer to her end of the bed to show her the notes lining the margins of the text. He flipped it one-eighty and passed it off. "It's got all his opinions and ideas scribbled in the sides. I thought you might like it."

Marinette's hands shook as she took the book from him and thumbed through a couple more pages, eyeing the hastily penned in thoughts. "I can't take this," she objected. "Do you have any idea how much money it's probably worth?"

"To him?" he shrugged. "None. It's been sitting untouched on his office shelf for almost ten years."

"But…" She touched a picture of a dress with arrows and critiques scribbled all around it like the page was etched in glass. "But why?"

"I told you," he reasoned, watching the way she handled the pages with infinite care and devotion. "All it was doing was gathering dust. He'll never even notice it's gone. I want you to have it."

"No," she whispered, closing the cover on the book and bringing it to her chest before looking up at him, loose hair falling around her face like curtains. "No, not that. I mean… why? Why do this for me?" There was no self-reproach or unkindness in her voice at all. She spoke with pure curiosity, and a hint of a headier emotion that he couldn't quite recognize. "Why are you here, Adrien?"

"Oh," he said, surprised. "That."

He hadn't expected to get to this part so soon, and the floodgate of anxiety opened wide. From the moment he'd dropped down onto her bed, up until now, it had been relatively easy to just pretend he was keeping his word to himself, the silent promise he'd made to her as she descended the school steps. Supporting her. Being a friend. Doing the right thing. It was easy to imagine that nothing had changed since this morning, that his whole life hadn't flipped upside-down.

A nervous laugh escaped him. Leave it to Ladybug to force his hand.

"Look, I'm going to be straight with you. I hope you won't take it the wrong way." Unable to wait for her to answer or gauge her reaction, he plowed on, anxiously kicking the one leg that hung off the side of her bed. "I know you and I have never been that close but it really bothered me today that no one came to sit with you and cheer you up. You've always been such a people person, I guess I assumed that, I don't know, everyone was your best friend or something. But you're more like me, aren't you? With me it's like..."

He held one hand up really high, so that it cast a moonlight shadow between he and Marinette on the champagne-rose colored blanket. "Here's Nino," he explained. Then he held his other hand down to his other knee, where it lay folded haphazardly between them. "Then here's everyone else. I'm just nowhere near as close to anyone else as I am with him, because he gets me."

"Yeah," Marinette admitted softly. "You nailed it. That's me and Alya, for sure."

"Which is cool," he said quickly. "Having such a good friend is amazing. But Nino's not always around. Alya's not always around," he added quietly. "Especially now that they've started spending so much time together," he joked with a sly lilt to his tone. "And, at least for me, when Nino's not around, I start to realize that maybe he's not the only the only thing that's missing. And then… even when he comes back, I can still feel it." He finally managed to meet her eyes and saw that she was staring at him earnestly, hanging off his every word.

"Feel what?" she whispered. The slow, careful way she blinked at him made him feel like she already knew.

"I, uh.." he murmured, drowning in her eyes. "The empty spaces, you know? Where other people used to be." He tempered his words with as much neutrality as he could muster. Mother. Father. "Where it feels like other people are supposed to be, and aren't, yet." Ladybug. "Where other people would fit perfectly," he sighed. You. "I always thought it was just me feeling that way, but today it struck me that maybe you did too. And I was thinking," he breathed, "hoping… that you and I could fill some of that empty space for each other. What would you say to that?"

"Oh, Adrien," she whispered.

Her face was alive with rich, passionate emotion that he couldn't hope to understand. It terrified himㅡthis freefall in-between, where he'd bared his heart already but she hadn't yet accepted it. Setting the book aside, she crossed the space between them in a single smooth movement, settling less than an inch from from him. The only thing between them now was his own folded leg. He stared down at her, mouth slightly ajar. Mesmerized.

"I'd say I know exactly what you mean. There is an empty space in my life where it feels like someone is supposed to be."

He couldn't help it; it slipped out. "I could be that person for you," he whispered.

If it struck her as odd that he'd just said the exact words Chat had said to her a couple of hours ago, she hid it well. She bit her lower lip, eyes half-lidded. A blush dusted her cheeks. But only when her eyes flitted to his mouth did he understand what she was doingㅡor, trying to doㅡand the realization was like a slap in the face with a million silken flowers.

Oh my god, she's working up the courage to kiss me.

Maybe it was wrong, considering he knew and she didn't. Maybe he should have waited for the playing field to even out before jumping off this cliffside. But the way she looked at him in that moment, like the world was a globe only ten feet wide and they were the only ones living on it, he could not possibly have rewarded her courage with rejection. (And in retrospect he could hardly believe he didn't see it coming. He knew she liked him, and the way he'd dropped in on her like this out of nowhere, saying the things he saidㅡhow else was she supposed to read his intentions?) So, regardless of the inherent complications, there was no way on Earth he was going to let her come out on the other side of this precious minute thinking he didn't want her. Not in this lifetime. So when her courage faltered and she started to pull away, he leaned down and kissed her.

A feminine noise of surprise parted her lips when he made contact. They were exactly as soft as he'd always imagined. The kiss took on a mind of its own as she surged upward, and he fought down a strained whimper in the back of his throat, then made to separate before he lost himself in her so thoroughly he'd never see daylight again.

But it was already too late. Her shaky hand found his collar and pulled him closer than ever before. He sighed and gave in. Bringing the hand he wasn't leaning on to caress the edge of her jaw, he pulled away a centimeter, just enough to turn his head and nudge her nose with his so he could come back again from another angle. But he wasn't prepared for the way her lips chased after his. The way the hand fisted in his shirt tugged at him like he was her only line to a ship lost at sea.

It unraveled him for good.

Caution trailed behind him like a comet's tail, cast off forever as he responded to her silent pleas, opening his mouth when she opened hers, dragging his hand around to the back of her neck when her hold on him tightened, tasting her bottom lip when she paused to breathe. She was wearing pomegranate chapstick, he noted faintly, in a faraway place in the part of his mind that wasn't trying to goad him into laying her down on the bed and showing her exactly how madly he loved her. For the rest of his life he would never be able to look at that fruit the same way.

When he released her lip she grew incredibly still, and in a fit of fear he looked up into her eyes. But he didn't see regret there. Only a mild dose of the same fear he was feeling. "I can't believe I just did that," she whispered, hands flying to her cheeks.

Gently he pried her hands from their death grip on her face, hitting her with the kindest smile in his arsenal. "Me neither. But I'm glad you did."

They way his words lit her face up, it was clear he'd given her the motivation to do it again. But they were still a hair's breadth from reconnecting when a phone buzzed on the bedspread, sending little tremors up Adrien's arm. He closed his eyes in disappointment when she pulled away, but then snapped to attention when she exclaimed, "It's Alya! Hello?" she answered. "Of course I answered on the first ring, I've been waiting all night to hear your test results! Spill! Immediately!"

Adrien settled back on his elbows, finding a comfortable position to lounge in while he watched the animated delight that was Marinette on the phone. Even for something so serious, Marinette managed to make a bit of a game out of it with Alya. He'd always admired that about the two of them.

"You're kidding," Marinette deadpanned after a long minute. "They're sure? I meanㅡI really don't know whether to give you my sympathies or my congratulations?" Adrien made a face of confusion at Mari, but she waved him off impatiently. He wrinkled his nose at her good-naturedly. "Well, I'm coming down there right now then!" There was a brief pause, wherein Adrien could sort of hear Alya's tinny voice pick up volume. "Alyaaa," Marinette whined. "God, fine." Pause. "Fine! No, you're right, I know they wouldn't let me in." Pause. "I know, jeez, I said you're right already!"

Pause. Her eyes flitted briefly to Adrien and she poked at one of her pillows.

"…Yeah, he did." Pause. She refused to acknowledge Adrien's questioning stare. "Yeah, he still is." Pause. "No, you cannot!" she hissed. "Alya, I swear to godㅡ Alya?" She pulled the phone away from her face and glared at it. The call screen was flashing with a little red phone and the word 'end.' No sooner had she realized that Alya had hung up on her, than Adrien's phone started to buzz in his pocket. The murderous look on Marinette's face when she realized the buzzing was not her phone but Adrien's was somehow both terrifying and hilarious at the same time.

"Don't you dare," she whispered at him with icy venom, and in that instant he would have sworn on his own future grave that she was Ladybug, even if provided with a mountain of disputing evidence. But unfortunately for her… he was also Chat. The pout on her face when he saw 'Alya calling' and swiped to answer was worth it.

"Hello?" he said.

"Well well well," Alya's voice droned through the speaker. "Well well well well wellㅡno wait, shit, that was too many wells. Hang up so I can call you again."

"I think Marinette would take my phone before you called back," he laughed uncertainly. He was pretty sure her clenched fists and dangerous eyes were for Alya, but not sure enough to test that theory. "So are you alright?" he asked. "What did the doctors say it was?"

"I'll let Mari tell you about that," she answered. "I only have a minute more to talk 'cause they're taking me for another whatever scan in a minute. I just wanted to say this. I don't know why you are over at Mari's house at one in the morning, but I wholeheartedly approve."

"Alya," he objected, flushing like mad. She was so blunt.

"Nuh. Shh. Listen, starchild. I approve, but also, if you don't behave yourself I will gut you like a fish, got it?"

Adrien gulped. "Got it."

"Good," Alya chirped. "So anyway, as long as you be-haave, you have my permission to distract Mari from my woes as much as is humanly possible. But also let her sleep. Poor girl didn't sleep a wink yesterday."

"I sincerely do not know how to respond to this," he grimaced.

At the other end of the line, Alya just laughed. "You don't have to. Just do me a solid. Marinette would kill me for saying this but she has liked you for a really long time. Don't mess with her, okay? If you like her, fuckin, tell her. Ya' dumbass. If not, you need to go home. Got it?"

"Got it," he parroted.

"Also," Alya squealed suddenly, "Ladybug signed my get well card. Did you see?!"

"I saw," he chuckled, and heard the unmistakeable sound of a nurse arguing with her on the other end. The line went dead without warning, leaving Adrien alone again with Marinette, who he realized had scooted all the way to the back of the bed in the meantime and crawled half underneath her life-sized tiger pillow.

"What did she say?" Her words were barely intelligible from under the faux-fur stuffed animal.

Adrien lay back and rolled over on his side to smile at her warmly even though she couldn't see him. "Nothing I didn't already know." Only when he dragged his backpack over to him and started rustling through it did she emerge from her tiger cave to see what he was doing. "Alya gave me permission to distract you," he said blithely, pulling out his old school Gameboy. "See, I've had a link cable for like ten years but I've never had anyone to link up with…"

Regaining just a smidge of her dignity, Marinette eyed the Pokemon yellow game plugged into his lime green Gameboy. "Okay," she laughed at length. "But I'll have you know, I haven't lost a battle in almost a decade."

As she climbed down from the loft onto the lower floor of her room, Adrien crawled over to lay on her fluffy tiger. "So… what's up with Alya, anyway? The suspense is killing me."

"You won't believe it." The soft hush of drawers opening and closing filled the room, and Adrien watched her searching in the dark by the light of her phone screen fondly.

"Try me."

"Apparently," Marinette began, "her chest pain was totally unrelated to the akuma punch she got in the ribs. You know how she's always had a little asthma?"

"Sure, yeah."

"Well, apparently it was never asthma. The doctors found a tiny hole in one of her lungs. So the akuma just aggravated an existing condition."

Adrien sat up in bed, wrapping his mind around this development. "Wait, so Ladybug's spell didn't fail after all? It just didn't heal her because it was a pre-existing medical condition?"

Marinette moved her search from her desk to a decorative trunk beside her dresser. "I guess so. Not only that, but apparently, if the tear had gotten any worse one of her lungs would have collapsed. As it is, they're prepping her for surgery to make sure it doesn't doesn't do that."

"Dang," Adrien muttered. "Wasn't she going on a backpacking trip in a few weeks? What if it had collapsed while she was in the mountains?"

Even though she'd at last located her Gameboy, Marinette sighed dispassionately. "With the altitude change? It almost certainly would have. And who knows what would've happened then? She could have died." Pausing at the side of the bed after climbing up, she weighed Adrien's playful expression. "What?"

"Oh nothing." He leaned back into the tiger as nonchalantly as he could. "It just sounds to me like maybe what happened to Alya was lucky after all. You could even argue that it saved her life."

That got a soft smile out of her. "Oh, Adrien," she sighed. "You're a regular knight in shining armor, you know that? How do you always know precisely what to say?"

He could only shrug, and hesitantly hold out his arms. She flushed, but crawled into them gladly, turning around to settle her back against his side and set about hooking their Gameboys together.

"Meowth, huh?" she giggled when they both called forth their first pokemon of the battle. She'd called out a Venosaur named dat boi. God, he loved her. "I wouldn't have pegged you as a Meowth kind of guy."

He nuzzled the top of her hair with his cheek, and picked the most damaging attack in his arsenal. If he went easy on her she would know, and would rightfully kill him. "Like I said, Mari, there's more to me than I usually let on."

Dat boi took a huge hit of damage, wiping out fifty percent of its HP in one go, and he waited for her to come back at him with something equally devastating. But the minute turned into two, and still she sat frozen. He leaned over her shoulder and saw that she hadn't even chosen a move yet.

"Hey," he prompted. "You okay? Did I say something wrong?"

"Adrien?" she said softly, totally ignoring his question. "Can I ask you something crazy?"

He stiffened behind her, and she took due notice, craning her neck around to look up into his eyes. The expression on his face was wary and grim, but her eyes were wide with tentative understanding. Slowly, she set her Gameboy down, and pulled his out of his hands too. He made no move to stop her. The fire in her eyes had him in a trance.

"Just don't… mock me, if I'm wrong," she worried.

Subconsciously his now empty hands sought something to hold, and he curled his arms lightly around her waist. She wasn't wrong. He knew it, and it was obvious she knew it. After all, he hadn't exactly been subtle. "A knight never mocks a princess," he told her evenly.

With a wild-eyed gasp, she reached up and pressed one hand over his eyes, parting her fingers just enough to let his eyes peek through, searching his face for… for something. He didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but when he grinned at her weakly she must have found it, because she snatched her hand away like he'd burned her.

"Oh my god," she whispered. "I'm right. And that meansㅡ" She squeezed her eyes shut with a grimace. "I gave myself away. I totally gave myself away, didn't I?"

He pressed his forehead to hers, delighted that she had yet to pull away from him. "A little bit," he snickered. "The fact that you're not screaming bodes well for me, I think."

"To be honest? I'm supremely sleep deprived and this whole entire night has felt like a dream."

Gently, tenderly, he caressed her cheek, urging her to open her eyes and look at him. "It's not a dream," he said. "At least, I hope not."

Her hand found his, and suddenly she was looking into his eyes again and the world had shrunk. It was just the two of them in the universeㅡand he had a distinct feeling that this is how he would feel for the rest of his life.

"Why are you so good to me?" she sighed.

That question rubbed him the wrong way. Did she not think she was worthy of all the stars in heaven and more? "I told you," he replied, like it was the most obvious and second-nature thing in the world. Because it was. "You're everything to me."

"Oh, minou," she whispered back, and punctuated the endearment with a loving kiss on the corner of his mouth, just barely missing his lip. "You're everything to me too. You know that, right?"

"Yeah," he sighed, and kissed her back on the nose. He'd always wanted to do that. "I know."

.

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So this was originally gonna be two chapters but it got out of control haha. Next chapter will be the last. So three total.