Two weeks later and Ladybug hadn't reappeared. There hadn't been an Akuma attack to draw her out and she had even faded away from the newspaper covers and the blogs. Adrien was grasping for distractions. Thankfully, they were everywhere. Classwork was piling up as the semester got started and he was packing in his readings around the preparations for the winter show. A book in one hand while someone measured his arm or held fabrics up to his face to debate his skin tone.

If he wasn't at work or in a class, he was out wandering the city. Sometimes he went as Adrien, sometimes as Chat. There wasn't any trouble but he hadn't come up with a better way to find her. The fear that she was gone again kept picking at his attention. Maybe she had only been passing through. Maybe he'd only had that one chance and he'd missed it. Maybe he would never see her again. He changed and popped open the little phone screen at least twice a day. It was driving Plagg crazy but if she called while he was Adrien, he'd miss it.

"Why don't superhero phones come with voice mail?" he asked after another call failed to go anywhere. The little screen was infuriatingly black and there was no one to answer him. He turned back into himself and slumped into a chair. He tilted his head up at Plagg and asked again. Plagg just scoffed. Adrien considered locking him in the vault with all the Akuma for the rest of the afternoon but Plagg had already settled into his shoulder bag with a piece of cheddar. Getting him out again seemed like more trouble than it was worth and Adrien needed to get to work.

In the lunch room that afternoon, he palmed some brie and dumped it into the bag for Plagg as a peace offering before picking out the food he was allocated by his nutritionist. Being a model came with some infuriating drawbacks and the nutritionist who determined when and what he could eat was the most grating of them.

He did not say, "I have superpowers and spend my nights running across the Paris rooftops. You can afford to feed me another slice of turkey without risking me not fitting into the new shirts," but he wanted to. Instead he thanked them and followed the instructions and went home and ate like Plagg until he wasn't hungry anymore.

Liam gave him a wave from one of the tables by the window but Adrien caught Marinette looking at him from a table with a couple of other young people whose names he didn't know. They were likely the rest of the incoming group of interns. He changed course and sat down in the a chair beside her.

And immediately regretted it.

"Hello," he said and then said nothing else because he didn't know what to say. His mind had gone blank. Perfect. He was going to make an idiot of himself in front of her.

"I think there are assigned seats," she said with a laugh. Then she froze, looked at him, turned bright pink and started to stammer, "I mean, you can sit where ever you want. Of course you can. I didn't mean you couldn't sit here. You can sit here. It's just that usually all the models sit together. I didn't mean... You can sit where ever you want."

"Would you rather I sit somewhere else?" he asked tightening his hold on his tray in case she asked him to leave.

"No," she said immediately and he sat down and started pushing at his lettuce.

She looked at him all starstruck and awkward for a second before she dropped her attention back to her sandwich. He wanted to shake her and remind her that she had been his classmate. He dreaded the idea that she could look at him like that: like he was a pretty thing that could be collected up and put on display. They had been through physics and literature and that biology class he had despised.

If she couldn't look at him like a person after seeing him throw up onto a formaldehyde-soaked dead frog, maybe no one could.

That thought was exhausting and terrifying. He almost got up and walked away. He might have if he hadn't heard Pietro laughing somewhere over his shoulder. Even if she thought of him as a celebrity, she was still better company than Pietro.

Adrien glanced away from her and across the table at the rest of the intern team. If Marinette was awkward, they were terrified and that was worse. He introduced himself, leaving off his last name though it was hardly a secret who he was. They wouldn't look at him like that if he wasn't Gabriel's son but he pretended he was normal.

If he pretended hard enough, maybe he could make it true. He could stop being famous and be Just Adrien.

He had had lessons on small talk. Literal lessons on how to be charming and he did his best to be charming to these strangers until they stopped looking at him like he was a member of an invading army come to destroy their city. He didn't ask if the hazing had begun or if anyone had already dropped out of the program. Light and friendly and then once they were talking to each other instead of gawking, he turned his attention back to Marinette.

"How was New York? It was New York you moved to, wasn't it?" he said.

"Montreal," she said, "That's in Canada. My mother has family there."

"I'll tell Liam he can't call you Americano anymore," Adrien said. "Canadiano? Canadiana?"

"Canuck," she said, "But I am French. I was born here."

"You are, I know," he said, "And France is glad to have you home."

For the first time since he sat down, she looked right at him and gave him a smile that wasn't strained or forced or shell-shocked. He returned it. Maybe, just maybe, being Just Adrien was possible.

As the lunch hour was winding down and Marinette and struck up a good natured argument with girl across the table named Marie-Claire, Liam came to join their table. Adrien bristled when Liam leaned on the table at Marinette's other side and she turned to look at him. He crushed down all his responses as utterly inappropriate. He had no right or reason to be all territorial. He did not need to be so protective of her. Besides, Liam wasn't going to do anything to her. He was just flirting, leaning a little too close as he talked.

Adrien told himself that he was probably just jealous because he couldn't flirt to save his life unless he was hidden away behind Chat Noir's mask. He made girls like Marinette Dupain-Cheng stare or bolt and girls like Chloe Bourgeois attempt to remake him into the pretty puppet they wanted him to be. Still, he was surprised that he wanted to lean in and wrap his arm around the back of her chair and draw her attention back to him.

"We're doing a test shoot this afternoon, do you want to come along?" Liam asked.

Marie-Claire blinked at him and his terrible accent for a moment before enthusiastically agreeing on everyone's behalf. Marinette turned to Adrien and raised her eyebrows and he smiled. She turned back to the others and let them sweep her along. He wondered if she had been asking his advice. It had seemed like she was asking his advice but maybe he was reading too much into it.

They called it a 'test shoot' but really it was an excuse to bother Les Nouvelles. Adrien had seen it pulled out against new photographers, new models, new interns, even once a new junior designer. They usually didn't try it with anyone who worked closely with Gabriel Agreste in case he heard about it. It had been years before Adrien had been allowed to attend and he suspected it had been Liam who had pleaded his case for him.

It was actually fun. Most of the things they did to new interns were awful and he avoided the entire enterprise like the plague. Test shoot day was an exception. It was less mean spirited than some of the pranks and an excuse to be silly in a way that models weren't usually allowed to be silly. At least not models who were on the Agreste line. Adrien had seen fashion spreads that were bright and funny and unusual but he'd very rarely done one and he'd never had one of those pictures chosen for an ad or a magazine.

"The items I create are classic and elegant and any photographs of them need to reflect that," Gabriel liked to say when the topic was brought up.

The kind of test shoots they ran on days like this were not classic and they were not elegant.

They used an empty office as their studio and piled into it. Agreste's clothing lines tended to focus on men's wear so most of the models were male but a few of the girls had tagged along as well as two photographers and the four interns. There were nearly twenty people in the room. Marinette tripped over one of them and when he tried to catch her, she flailed. He made an undignified noise as she hit him in the stomach and they both almost fell down.

She turned to him with wide blue eyes and started to apologize but he was still holding her by the elbow and that seemed to render her utterly unable to speak. He snatched his hand back and stepped away before he could undo all his progress toward a friendship with his idiocy. Before he could say anything, everyone was settling into around the room. Marinette, thankfully, didn't go and sit on the other side of the room to avoid him.

"Test shoots are just for experimenting," Pietro had grabbed Marie-Claire by the hand and was explaining the afternoon's plan. He was syrupy and kind and so very unlike Pietro. Marie-Claire was pretty in a way that would turn heads anywhere but in a room full of people who were professionally pretty. Pietro pulled her over to the desk and sat down on the edge of it as he talked, "It gives us a chance to try new poses and set ups. So it's just for fun, but you'll help with that right?"

To her credit, Marie-Claire giggled through the pelvic thrusting and the thing Pietro did with his tongue that always made Adrien a little bit uncomfortable and he'd never been that close to it. Marie-Claire set the tone for the rest of the hour. Everyone else relaxed and giggled their way through it. Some of them even played to the camera and let things go from silly to ridiculous.

In a moment of madness, Adrien grabbed Marinette's hand and pulled her forward. She gave him that awkward wide eyed look and he regretted not asking first. Why had he thought this would be acceptable? Why hadn't he just asked her first?

"Want to see Adrien screw it up?" someone asked and Adrien turned to look at the girl who had spoke. Naveen smiled at him and he couldn't tell if it was meant to be cruel. He could never tell when she was joking and when she wasn't, "Ask him to try and redo the silent partner shoot."

"What's that?" Marinette asked.

"It was three years ago," Adrien said.

"And none of those pictures were any good now were they?" Naveen said which started everyone laughing. Adrien smiled along. They all had their bad shoots and in a fashion house like this, that was this small, everyone knew everything. Besides, it had been an awful shoot. Awkward. So awkward.

"The girl's meant to be a prop, he's supposed to pose around you but you aren't allowed to look at the camera," someone explained to Marinette.

"That shoot would have been much better had they let you look at the camera, Naveen," Adrien said because he knew flattery was worth everything with her.

Marinette turned to look back at everyone else who heckled her to turn around. Adrien was more self conscious than she was. How many ways could he make a mess of this? He was about to find out. If he had better self-preservation, he would have bowed out but there was a part of him that balked at the idea of someone else being up here with her. What if they were rude or made her uncomfortable?

The original shoot hadn't worked but he could still remember the direction. He was good. He had been trained from childhood to model and he was good at it. It had frustrated him to not be able to make that shoot work. All the complaints were about things he couldn't figure out how to fix. There had been missing spark and energy and he hadn't managed to figure out how to recapture either of them.

With Marinette, here, just playing around, it didn't matter and that made it easier.

She didn't turn around. She kept her eyes on him and gave him nervous little looks if he got too close. He hadn't yet succeeded in his plan to convince her he was just a person. She still saw him as a celebrity but it didn't make him as uncomfortable like this. He wasn't really himself when a camera was on him.

She was the first one to touch and it threw him off far harder than he had thought possible. He ducked around her, circling and watching her and forgetting about everyone else. She reached out, almost unconsciously and let her fingers rest on his shoulder. He stepped into it until she had her arm around is neck.

This was something Chat Noir would do, not Adrien. Marinette was staring up at him and he smiled back. He was over confident. Not Chat Noir, but also not entirely himself. He had simultaneously slipped into being his model self and had forgotten the audience entirely. He let his hands settle to her waist and stepped in closer.

She was warm and her eyes were a shade of blue so familiar they looked like home though he wasn't sure what memory went with that feeling. He couldn't make it make sense but he didn't care. She was prettier than he remembered her or maybe he'd just never spent this much time looking at her before.

He cupped her chin in his hand because it was the type of thing you did in a shoot like this. And maybe, if he took a moment to be honest, he wanted her to keep looking at him.

She startled at the touch and backed away from him. She stumbled into a chair behind her, yelping and pinwheeling her arms. He slammed back into himself. Who she was and where they were and how far out of line he was: it was all suddenly crystal clear. He was as bad as Pietro and Mathias playing games with girls they didn't even know. He dropped his hands and stepped away as soon as she had righted herself.

She gave him a look that was all wide eyes and he made a couple of hasty apologies and bolted out of the room before he could make anything worse.