This one is long and absolutely shameless. Don't look at me...
Slow Burn
Slow burn.
That was how Adrien would describe his friendship with Marinette.
Down on the sidewalk below her bakery, he paced back and forth, torn by what he was about to do. Torn by the fact that in one fell swoop he might delete all the slow, hard-earned progress he'd made with her. Torn by the fact that he might have already deleted it and the crazy stunt he was about to enact was too little too late in salvaging the pieces.
"This a stupid idea," Plagg hissed from inside his jacket.
"Shut up," Adrien hissed back though his teeth. "Someone might hear you." He jumped as a family emerged from the Dupain-Cheng bakery. last kid out let the door swing so wide that Marinette's mother spotted Adrien standing outside. She clinked the register drawer shut and waved.
With a nervous smile, Adrien waved back. Now he had to go inside. Fate must be telling him to abandon all caution and go for it!
"Hi, Sabine."
"Hello dear." The small woman paused while ringing up the next customer in line in order to to push a domed plate of cookies his way. "Marinette's upstairs. Go on up."
"Thanks." With one last polite wave he pocketed a couple extras for Plagg, then headed toward the back to ascend the stairs into the residence portion of the unit. But he paused upon entering the living room of the house, taking a moment to smile at the familiar family photo placed lovingly by the doors.
In all honesty, Adrien wasn't totally sure how he and Marinette ever ended up this close. There was a time when he thought she hated him. But that hadn't been true at all. Marinette didn't hate anyone. (Well… except Chloe.) Ugh, Chloe. Thoughts of Chloe threatened his tentatively-good mood. Friendship with Chloe was not much more than a lingering side effect of all those years being paraded around by his dad like a show horse. It almost didn't even count. He certainly wouldn't put Chloe up there with someone like Nino, or Ladybug, that was for damn sure.
Meeting Ladybug on the day he got his powers was the first glimpse of what friendship could be. It made him curious. Eager for more. So eager that when Nino offered the next day, Adrien leapt on it with no hesitations. Nino's friendship was the assurance that yes, that glimpse he'd caught when he met Ladybug the day before was real and true and oh-so-attainable. Before them, Adrien didn't even realize people could be that close to each other. It was like, Ohh… So this is what friends are. A whole new shiny world had been opened up before him, and from then on he wanted nothing more out of life than to experience that closeness again and again with as many people as possible.
Of course, not everyone was receptive to that. (Chloe, for one, didn't take kindly to his "weirdo" attempts to actually get to know her better.)
But Marinette was receptive. Maybe she'd been shy around him at first but once he decided to be her friend, it was like night and day. Boom, she was an open door. And he loved it. Marinette turned out to be exactly the kind of person he wanted more of in his life; someone who was selfless, kind, and clever. Someone good. Someone who made him feel good too.
Back in the living room of the duplex, Adrien had to blink away the thoughts swimming through his head and turn away from the family photo on the bookshelf. Plagg emerged from his pocket then, telltale cookie crumbs all over his face. The little kwami made a face like he was about to complain about the choice of sustenance Adrien had offered, so Adrien shoved him back inside his jacket before he could talk.
"Deal with it," he whispered. "Mari now, cheese later."
He had to make it upstairs and go through with this before he lost his nerve. He sighed, giving the family photo one more furtive glance. Marinette's wide, happy smile sparkled back at him. Was this really such a good idea?
Maybe he should have just left her alone in the first place.
Maybe he was selfish for loving the way she made him feel when he'd always sort of known he was going to break her heart.
Adrien had never been very adept at the whole making-friends thing, and even when he thought he made one, much of the time they turned out to be fake. Fans who couldn't look past the glossy paper even after they got to know him, or even people who wanted to take advantage of him via his money, his connections, or his name. So when Adrien made real friends, true friends, a lot of thought went into it. A lot of heart and soul.
He'd already elected to pursue a meaningful friendship with Marinette when he realized she had a thing for him. (Sure he was a little dense, at times, but it grew glaringly obvious after awhile.) So was he wrong for pursuing friendship her anyway, even though he was in love with someone else? At the time he was aware that the situation might very well end in heartache for her, but he liked her so much that he couldn't bear the thought of just not being friends with her. That didn't feel like a solution at all. How would that have been fair to him, or her for that matter? He couldn't do that to her. Despite his misgivings, he went for it. Friends.
"Coming!" Marinette called from above as he knocked on the attic door.
"Wish me luck," Adrien muttered to Plagg, following her footsteps above with his eyes.
"Luck, huh? Thinking of your lovebug at a time like this? Ice cold."
Adrien flushed. "This isn't about Lady," he growled, "this is about-Marinette! Hi!"
She wrinkled her nose at him, the afternoon sun from the west-facing window cresting on her cheek. Dust sparkled between them in hazy channels of light. "Oh, uh… Hey, Adrien. I didn't think you were gonna come by today." After her initial pout, she snapped out of it back into her normal chipper self. "Sorry, you can come on in but I'm afraid my room's a total disaster zone. I've been working on a project."
The trapdoor clicked shut behind him as he climbed into her room. "I don't mind." But even as he said so she zoomed around her bedroom, scooping up stretches of fabric and jamming them into lush decorative boxes, and shoving the complicated set of fabric tools off her bed into a pile in order to offer him a seat. Adrien could only stare. Marinette was such a good person. Too good. Too good for him anyway. She deserved a lot more than what he had to offer, which was nothing (owing to the fact that he'd pretty much gift wrapped his heart for Ladybug three years ago, the day he met her).
The two of them had been hanging out for well over a year when Marinette finally got up the nerve to tell him how she felt. They'd been watching a movie on his laptop in her room, he sitting on the floor with it on his lap and she laying on her stomach on the bed behind him, her face dangerously close to his. When the credits rolled and he announced that he'd better head out "lest your parents go all Sweeney Todd and Mrs. Lovett and bake me into a meat pie," she'd turned to him with a strange sparkle of determination in her eye.
"Hey," she'd said. "I hope this isn't weird, but I'm... kind of in love with you."
Adrien went slackjawed. How was he supposed to react? He never expected her to just… to just say it like that!
From whence did she even pluck the nerve?!
If he had even half the nerve he'd have popped the ultimate question to Ladybug a year ago!
His mouth flapped open and shut. "Marinette…!"
At his tone she buried her face in her forearms and made a high pitched groaning noise that was frankly concerning. "I'm sorry, that was totally awkward. You don't have to respond if you don't want, or you can just leave now if you-" She squeaked and flinched when he laid a gentle hand on the back of her buried head.
"I'm not gonna leave," he assured her, finally relocating the synapses in his brain that connected his tongue to the French language. "In fact, don't freak out, but, I've kinda known that for awhile now."
Her head snapped up at lightspeed, dislodging his hand. "What? For real? It's been that obvious?"
"I only figured it out when we started spending so much time together." He tapped his forefingers together reluctantly. Crap, he should have prepared better for this. Why didn't they teach you this stuff in preschool?
"And you still wanted to hang out with me anyway?" she responded incredulously. He could tell she was already picking up on his intentions, then, to let her down as gently as unrequited love would allow.
"Of course I did. Marinette, I really like you. You're one of my best friends in the world. I… I think I could even love you too, if…" He swallowed, the words sticking in his throat. "If my heart didn't already belong to someone else."
"Oh." She went quiet for a moment and Adrien didn't dare look at her, terrified that she was deciding she wanted nothing more to do with him now that he'd rejected her. But she did no such thing. "Who is it?" she prompted gently.
That, he was not expecting. "Umm…" She was so not going to take him seriously if he said Ladybug! "I don't think you know her."
"Can I meet her?"
Adrien grimaced. "I don't know…"
"No, you're right, it would be weird."
"Are you, um… okay? Marinette?"
"Yeah, I'll be fine." But her tone was so… forlorn. And she wouldn't look him in the eye. Crud, she didn't believe that there was another girl at all, did she? She thought he was rejecting her and lying to her. "I appreciate you being honest with me," she sighed, like she didn't really believe him at all. "Really, it's fine. I love being friends with you too much to let something like this ruin it. In fact, I'm glad I got that off my chest. Now I can get over it!" She talked faster now, gleeful and giddy in an almost manic way. "Maybe you could tell me about her tomorrow?"
Adrien caught her eye. "Yeah," he sighed. "Okay."
When he got home that night, Plagg had a field day with Adrien's sort-of promise. "You're gonna tell Marinette, the friend that's been in love with you since the day you met, that you won't give her a chance because you love Ladybug?" The kwami doubled over cackling in midair and took a solid minute to catch his breath.
Adrien crossed his arms. This was so not funny to him. "She's important to me," he reasoned, arguing with himself as much as he was with Plagg. "She deserves to know why it wouldn't work between us."
Plagg wheezed. "She's gonna think you're a lovesick starstruck moron." Adrien flicked him so hard that he hit the mirror and bounced off with a disgraced, "Yow!"
"Not if she knows I'm Chat Noir," he whispered vehemently.
"What!" Plagg choked.
"If she knew I was Chat then she would understand. Marinette's a romantic at heart, just like me," he explained patiently with one hand over his chest. "She would see that my faithful love for Ladybug makes it impossible for me to even think about dating anyone else. Everyone knows that Chat loves Lady, thanks to Alya's ever-invasive, ever-persuasive blog. Marinette would get it. And then... maybe she'd be a little less heartbroken." That would be ideal.
"Maybe," Plagg shrieked. "Or maybe you're an imbecile and this is a terrible plan!"
"Marinette's one of my best friends," he deadpanned. "If I can't trust her with my secret then I can't trust anyone. Besides, it'll be good practice for telling Ladybug someday."
But when he was actually standing in front of Marinette in her room the very next afternoon, ready to tell her exactly why he couldn't go down that road with her (as interesting as the road looked..), he found that the language synapses in his brain had once again gone haywire.
"What?" Marinette grew uncomfortable under his stare. "This is about yesterday, isn't it? I'm really sorry if I made you uncomfortable," she groaned. "It just felt wrong keeping it to myself any longer, like I was lying to you by not telling you."
"No, that's not it at all! I mean yes this is about yesterday," he corrected earnestly, "but you haven't done anything wrong. In fact, if withholding information is lying then I'm the one who's been lying to you."
That threw her for a loop. "Huh? How so?"
"Marinette…" He took a deep breath. Showtime. "You might want to sit down."
"Ummm…" Very slowly and painstakingly she backed away from him and sat on her newly cleaned bed, fingers clenching into the quilted comforter. "Okay," she said nervously. "Sitting."
"I have to tell you something very important. You'll understand why I can't… why we can't… be anything. Once I tell you."
"Oh, that. Okay." She smiled at him, but sadly. "Go."
First her cleared his throat, then he got down on one knee so he was eye level with her. Then he panicked. This was proposal stance! With an anxious grimace he tried to stand again but tripped on his shoelace and went sprawling backwards, ending up flat on his ass.
Marinette looked like she wanted to help, but was wary and suspicious. "What's gotten into you?" she wondered. "Usually I'm the spaz."
"Sorry," he groaned, then pulled his legs into a cross-legged position in front of her and rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly. "It's just that I've never confessed this to anyone before. Anyone," he emphasized, hoping she got the message. You are important. "So I'm having trouble spitting it out."
"Oh, a secret?" she surmised conspiratorially, hiding a giggle behind her hand. "About this lady of yours?"
He flushed at her casual bullseye. "No. I mean yes. I mean… ugh." He took a second to press his hand over his eyes and center himself. He could feel Plagg shaking with laughter inside his jacket and fought the urge to smash him. "The secret is about me, not her." For a clearheaded moment he met her eyes head on and steeled himself as her giggle faded to surprise; she saw how serious he was about this. "Marinette, we've been friends for a long time. I would trust you with my life, so I know I can trust you with this secret. I'm…" His other name stuck in his throat and he but his lip so hard that it might have bled if Marinette hadn't intervened.
"Woah, you look so intense," she fretted, sliding off the bed onto her knees in front of him. "What is it, Adrien? You know you can tell me anything."
He gave her one last rueful smile-a final salute to the end of their friendship as it was and to the beginning of a new chapter. In truth he was beside himself at the prospect of sharing this amazing secret with someone, finally. "I know… Princess."
Her eyebrows shot up. "Princess?" Anxiously he watched the gears whirling at Mach 5 in her brain, the surprise turning to shock, the realization setting in that there was only one person who would call her something so stupid so unabashedly.
"You got it," he smirked. "I'm the one and only…"
"No."
"Yours truly…"
"No way!"
"Chat Noir."
"What?" she shrieked, totally ignorant of the charming catlike pose he had just struck. "No you're not! Why would you say that?"
Adrien deflated, squinting at her in confusion. He'd imagined a lot of reactions when he stayed up all night thinking about this, but 'shrieking in offended disbelief and pulling out her hair at the mere idea of such a thing' hadn't crossed his mind even once. "I am," he stated almost emptily. "Why would I lie about something like that?"
"I don't know!" she shouted, flailing up onto her bed now in an effort to get away from him, casting him odd glances over her shoulder all the way.
"Exactly. Because I wouldn't. Why are you so sure that I'm lying?" he added, hurt. He rose to his feet, tucking his hands in his pockets and kicking at a loose corner of her rug. "Is it really so farfetched to think I could be a hero?"
"What? No!" But she was still looking at him like he'd sprouted alien antennae, and clambered to her feet atop the mattress to gesture wildly at him. "You just-you can't be that hero. It's not possible."
Adrien scoffed at that. Sure he could just transform right here and now and prove it once and for all, but he was starting to get miffed that it was apparently so impossible for him to be the hero that he definitely was. "I assure you," he snapped, "it's possible, and it's true. I thought you'd understand but maybe that was naive of me. Lady was right. Our hero lives shouldn't mix with our normal lives."
He turned to go.
"So Ladybug is the other girl you were talking about. Ladybug." Marinette flopped down on her bed. "You're Chat Noir and you're in love with Ladybug. That's what you're going with? Seriously? You-you could have just said you didn't love me back, you know!" Marinette slipped into a teary whisper. "You didn't have to make up a crazy story. You could have just said no."
Adrien let the hatch fall shut again without climbing down, and wheeled back toward her instead of leaving. "I'm not lying, Marinette! Why don't you believe me?"
"Because!" she breathed. "You just can't be Chat Noir. I would know."
"And why's that?"
She sat up then, fighting back against the tears threatening to leak out, and threw her huge tiger pillow right at him. With a thick umf he stumbled backwards, and when he blinked the faux fur out of his eyes and looked back at her, his heart leapt through his throat. There on her shoulder was a little red speck, very alive, and very much waving at him.
"Because I'm Ladybug. You jerk," she sniffled as an afterthought. "This is my kwami, Tikki. She gives me my powers… You can stop waving now, Tikki, I think he sees you." Tikki shrugged and settled into her collar, giving Adrien the stinkeye. "So. I think I would know if you were Chat Noir."
The look of utter shock on Adrien's face must have been a real sight to behold. He almost wished he could see it himself. As it was, it was all he could do not to collapse into a singularity. So he simply gaped, the whole situation glancing off his skin like he was bulletproof.
"Lady?' he whispered, scarcely audible. He approached her slowly, floorboards creaking beneath his fluorescent converse as he crossed the room. She wouldn't look at him, even when he sat at the edge of her bed and lightly took her hand.
"The one and only," she said, repeating his earlier statement with a pinch of sarcasm.
"Oh man, you are not gonna like this," he laughed, and opened his jacket sleeve to usher Plagg out into Marinette's bedroom. "I told you that you'd fall for me one day, bugaboo."
Bugaboo's eyes flashed open. First she saw Plagg, grinning bemusedly at her from the bedspread. Then she wheeled toward Adrien, just in time to see him wink, slowly… oh so familiarly.
"Oh my god," she groaned. "Chat?"
"To be fair," he noted, "I was so sure I'd know if I ever met you in real life too. I guess we should have been paying more attention."
"This is officially the weirdest. Thing. Ever. And I have fought reanimated corpses! You rejected me for me. Oh my god. I'm the other girl!"
"There's only one girl, as far as I can see. And I've got cat eyes, my dear, so I can see pretty far." He hit her with the most charming smile in his arsenal, and was delighted when it had an immediate effect.
"You can't do that," she whined, pressing both hands to her cheeks. "It hasn't been long enough yet. Give me a second to soak this in! Christ!"
He blinked innocently, pulling her hand ever closer to his lips. "Do what?"
"That!" she scream-whispered. "That Chat stuff, when you're…!" She gestured wildly at him again.
"When I'm me?" he guessed lazily. Man, he could definitely get used to this. Ladybug, flustered by his advances? He must have done something reeeal good nine lives ago if this was the reward he was getting. "So I can't do this?" he wondered, and lovingly kissed her hand.
"Adrien,"she hissed, putting a finger to her lips as soon as he looked up and then pointing downward at the bedspread. There on the soft fabric, Tikki and Plagg were wrapped in a quiet, tight embrace, eyes squeezed shut.
"Aww," Adrien cooed sincerely. "I thought love was for losers."
"You'd say that too if you were 5.6 billion years old," Plagg grumbled, but refused to relinquish his hold on his dear old friend. "Come on, Tikki, let's go out on the balcony. I have a feeling things are about to get gross in here."
"Plagg!" Tikki worried over her shoulder at the two of them as Plagg zoomed toward the balcony. "Please keep it PG," she pleaded.
"PG-13," Adrien haggled, and shot Tikki a finger gun.
"Chat!" Marinette's other pillow hit him in the face. It was incredibly dense-memory foam or something-and knocked him right off the bed onto the hard floor.
Adrien checked to see that Plagg and Tikki had truly left, then righted himself to rest his chin upon the edge of the bed and blink up at her innocently. "Yes, my lady?"
Marinette could only bury her face in her hands at that. After a second of incoherent muttering she flopped forward, laying flat on her stomach. Altogether the whole scene began to remind him of her impromptu confession after last night's movie. "So let me check that I've got this puzzle laid out straight," Adrien said. "The reason you've been dogging my dashing attempts to win your heart was because you were already in love with me?"
She sighed in exasperation and a dangerous idea blossomed into his head. "I guess so."
"Cool," he surmised casually. "Cool, cool… So that means I can kiss you now, right?"
She pushed herself up on her elbows so she could stare down at him with something like loving disgust. Wait, was that even possible? Love and disgust?
Oh shit that made lust.
Really? Now the language synapses start functioning? Get your heart out of the gutter, Agreste!
Marinette's 'lust' morphed into straight amusement as panic briefly crossed Adrien's face, then gave way to calm. "I'm freaking out right now," Marinette stated plainly. "Like, actually freaking out. Dying, maybe. How are you not freaking out?"
Adrien shrugged. "I'll freak out tomorrow. Right now I just want to kiss you."
Marinette sighed, leaning toward him ever so slightly… then turned away. "I want to kiss you too. But…"
Shit. There was always a catch. "But what?"
With a petulant groan Marinette wrinkled her nose at him. "But then you're gonna be smug about it forever you mangy cat!"
"Mangy?" he complained. "I'm not mangy. You're ma-" He never got to finish the accusation because Marinette had seized his collar to drag his lips to her own. It took him a second to react, what with his being in desperate need of a defibrillator, but once he finally realized this was real, he surged upward on a set of wings, bringing both hands to her jaw in earnest affection. Upon the additional contact, though, Marinette broke the kiss, shyly looking away through half-lidded eyes.
Not wanting to push it too far, he released her face as soon as she relinquished her death-grip on his collar. But that didn't stop him from grinning like the lovesick idiot he most definitely was. He folded his arms in front of him on the edge of the bed, hiding the lower half of his dopey expression as he blinked up at her in a daze. "Wow," he breathed into his sleeves.
Without seeming to realize it, Marinette inched down until she was laying flat, mirroring the way he rested his chin on his forearms. "It's gonna take some time getting used to this."
Adrien wormed one of his hands out from under his chin until his fingers brushed hers, looping them ever so slightly together. "Can we start now?"
"Ugh, my least favorite kind of cheese." It was Plagg who had spoken, from the window where he and Tikki were peeking in. "They're not done being gross yet, Tikki, let's go back outside."
Marinette couldn't help it: she giggled. "I think we've already started, Chaton."
Oh no.
"What's wrong?" she blurted, shocked at Adrien's sudden shift from silent delight to gobsmacked distress.
Adrien lurched to his feet, looming over her. "You can't do that," he stammered out. "My-oh my god, Mari, my heart-"
Marinette pulled herself up onto her knees, utterly baffled at the turn of the conversation. "Do what?" she deadpanned, with the barest hint of sarcasm.
"That!" he whined, gesturing at all of her. "That-Ladybug-stuff! My heart."
"You love it," she stated simply.
"That's the problem," he groaned. "This is new and I realize we should kind of maybe start over now and take it slow but I just, I love you so intensely already!"
A soft expression took over Marinette's face, and he slowly untensed as she took his hands into hers. "That," she decided, "sounds like the opposite of a problem. I mean, you know how I feel about you already, so really…"
"You're right…" he realized, something incredible dawning on him.
"As always," she reminded him with a smirk.
"And that means I can…"
"You can what? Wait, what are you doing?" Her face morphed into one of total shock. "Oh my god, what are you doing? What are you doing right now? Say something you mangy alley cat!"
In his place on the floor, down on one knee, Adrien allowed a very Cheshire grin to spread across his face. "I've been carrying this around with me everywhere I've gone for a year," he told her as he reached into the pocket inside his jacket for a little black box that never left his side. Her shock elevated beyond the mortal plane when he pulled it out, and he ate up every second of it. "So what do you say?" he asked gently, allowing the barest hint of insecurity to leak into his voice. "Would you make this alley cat into a house cat? Mari? Oh no."
The love of his life had fainted dead away the second he opened the ring box.
He crawled up onto the bed, feeling terrible about what he'd just done to her. Too much? he asked himself. Yes, he answered himself angrily, definitely too much! Too much too fast! You made her faint!
But even as he adjusted her unconscious body into a more comfortable position on the bed, he knew that he didn't regret asking her. Because he thought his relationship with Marinette had been a long, slow burn, when she had been his first friend all along.
