22. Chapter 22

Disclaimer: I do not own Miraculous Ladybug or any other copyrighted material.

Lucky Us

By: Princess Kitty1

Chapter 22

Twenty minutes after turning off her phone, the buzz of the intercom jerked Marinette out of her stupor. She sat up on the sofa, certain the throw pillow she'd been resting her head on left marks on her cheek, and smoothed her hair down. Had the horde of new customers brought on by Jagged Stone's tweet already come for her? Couldn't they read the sign on the bakery door that said "We'll Be Back September 1st!" with the cheerful smiley face she'd drawn when she was seven years old?

Marinette walked to the intercom beside the front door and pressed the talk button. "Who is it?"

Alya's voice burst out of the speaker. "Marinette, why the heck is your phone off? Do you know how long I've been trying to call you? Open the door! I brought dinner!"

Marinette stared at the intercom. Of course Alya must have seen Jagged Stone's tweet. How could Marinette not have expected her to come rushing over to celebrate? She left the front door cracked, descended the winding staircase to the alley door, and pulled it open.

Alya stood holding the kind of enormous bag delivery boys used to keep pizzas warm. "Sorry," she said, "as soon as I told Mom I was coming over she filled like twenty plastic containers with food and shoved them into this…" Her sentence died on her tongue. She leaned closer to Marinette, eyes wide. "What's wrong?"

Marinette blinked. Tears rushed down her cheeks. "Umm," she said as her eyes filled with more.

Alya safely lowered the food bag to the floor and immediately pulled Marinette into her arms. "Oh no… oh sweetie, it's okay!"

Marinette opened her mouth, but all she managed was a squeaky breath and a loud, heartbroken wail. She wrapped her arms around Alya, sagged against her, and filled the quiet bakery with her sobs.

x.x.x

Adrien sat at his father's right hand, picking at the food on his plate. One course into several and he'd already lost his appetite.

But it wasn't his father's fault this time. Part of it had to do with the delicious cake he'd eaten not even an hour ago. The rest had to do with Ladybug's sudden and strange departure from his life. A temporary departure, sure—she'd promised she would get in touch with him later—but he couldn't help his anxiety.

Have you ever lied to me?

Why would she ask him that out of the blue? He had no qualms about answering honestly; other than his identity he wasn't trying to keep anything from her, and in a perfect world he wouldn't be hiding that from her either. But for her to just disappear after such a strange response…

He wanted to email her. His heart screamed at him to email her.

"Adrien?"

He looked up from his plate, hoping his years of perfecting expressions had kept the mounting panic off his face. "Yes?"

"Is the food not to your liking?" Gabriel asked.

Adrien shook his head. "Admittedly, I may have had dessert before dinner," he said with an embarrassed smile.

"Ah," Gabriel said, then, "at the bakery on Rue Gotlib?"

For a split second, Adrien couldn't remember how his father knew about it. Then he recalled telling him about Marinette before he left for Chateau Margaux. Gabriel was under the impression she was his girlfriend. "Yes," Adrien said. "I volunteered to be a taste tester of new recipes while the place is closed for the month. But don't worry, Marinette and I are just friends."

Gabriel looked surprised. "The dating situation didn't work out?"

Adrien thought of Marinette standing in front of Notre Dame, crying her heart out for another guy. He speared a salad leaf, but made no move to eat it. "Thought you'd be relieved about that," he muttered.

Gabriel's jaw tensed and Adrien braced himself for the argument. So much for a nice dinner. If Chloe had been sitting beside him, she'd have slapped him upside the head and made him apologize. But rather than snap back at him, Gabriel put his utensils down and motioned for the waiting servers to leave the dining hall. Once they were gone, he spoke again, his voice level.

"While you were away filming the other week, I had many chances to observe your cat," he said.

Adrien frowned, not sure how they'd gotten from Marinette to his cat. "Plagg?"

"Yes." Gabriel kept his gaze fixed on the center of the table. "After a day or two in his company, I concluded that Plagg is a healthy, well-adjusted animal—something he would not have been in the care of an incompetent owner." He breathed in deeply. "Which led me to think of you, Adrien, and the image of the irresponsible son I had crafted of you in my own mind. When your friend Ms. Bourgeois was diagnosed with cancer, you put your whole life on pause for her until she recovered. There are not many who would do such a thing. I did not do such a thing when it was your mother who fell ill. Instead, I buried myself in my work so that I would not have to witness her suffering."

Adrien stared at his father in shock. He remembered those days, remembered the resentment he felt towards Gabriel for not being there when his mother needed him.

"After she passed away, I gave you Plagg so that you would not be defeated by despair," Gabriel said. "So that every morning you would wake up and know you couldn't stay in bed all day, because there was a living creature that completely depended on you. A creature that only knew how to love you, and wouldn't understand why if you suddenly began to neglect it. But that same lesson never sank in for me." He shook his head. "In my grief, I neglected you, Adrien, and yet because of who you are, you still put your whole life on pause for me."

"Father—"

"And I had the nerve to take that for granted, to get angry when you realized you'd had enough and started to rebel. I retaliated against you instead of wondering why an otherwise good and responsible child would suddenly turn on his own father." Now Gabriel did look at him, and his expression was so pained that Adrien couldn't meet his eyes. "I'm sorry, Adrien. You've held yourself back for my sake for far too long, and I see now how it has affected you."

"I'm fine," Adrien said weakly.

"You are not fine."

He sat staring at his plate, shoulders slouched. The salad leaf remained stuck to his fork, uneaten. "Yeah," he whispered, "okay. You know Chloe still thinks she's dying?" His grip on the fork tightened. "She's convinced her life is already over, that it's just a matter of time before she gets sick again, so obviously I didn't do shit for her." He laughed. "I'm still modeling. I'm so tired of modeling. Everyone's out there chasing their dreams, and I'm making out with women I don't have feelings for to sell cologne. And you know, I finally like this nice girl and I can't stop trying to hook her up with someone else because I want her to be happy?" He smiled at Gabriel, but when he spoke again he had to fight to get his words past the lump in his throat. "So maybe I'm not fine—but what's going on with your life, Father? How are you doing?"

Gabriel stood from his chair, walked over to Adrien's side, and wrapped his arms around his shoulders. "I'm so sorry," he said.

And Adrien, who couldn't remember the last time his father had embraced him, burst into tears.

x.x.x

Marinette sat on her living room sofa, swaddled in a plush blanket, an open container of food in her lap. She chewed her dinner slowly as Alya paced the length of the room, processing all the information Marinette had given her.

She hadn't held back. She'd started with the first email and ended with the pictures on Adrien's phone, and though Alya couldn't keep the I-can't-believe-you-were-emailing-a-stranger-for-a-year-and-didn't-tell me expression off her face, she only interrupted Marinette when she needed to clarify something.

And truthfully, Marinette wished she'd told Alya everything before. She knew why she hadn't: her reasons for talking to Chat Noir in the first place were rooted in the devastation she'd felt after breaking up with Nathanael, and the last thing she'd wanted at the time was more pity from anyone, including Alya. But when her feelings for Chat Noir had crossed the threshold into love, she should have told her. The lecture on stranger danger would have been worth it for some practical advice.

Alya stopped pacing and turned to face her. "I guess the question is… do you think this Chat Noir guy is Adrien?"

Marinette poked at her food. "I think anyone could pretend to be Adrien with some pictures and a subscription to Zag Weekly," she said.

"That's true. But Marinette, you were the one who accidentally emailed him, not the other way around. And why would he keep his identity secret if he was pretending to be Adrien? Wouldn't he lead with that to try to impress you?"

Her eyes widened. "What if he isn't pretending?"

"That's what I'm saying," Alya cried.

"No, I mean what if he legitimately thinks he's Adrien?"

Alya threw her hands up in the air, exasperated.

"What if I've been talking to a sick person all this time?" Marinette hissed. She pressed a hand to her forehead. Chat Noir was such a nice guy, too. Did she tell him to seek professional help?

Alya sat down next to Marinette, stole her food container and her fork, and picked at her leftovers. "Okay. Let's attack this from a different angle," she said. "Is there any evidence that Chat Noir and Adrien could be the same person? Something other than the cat? Hobbies, birthdays, verbal ticks?"

"Chat Noir makes cat puns," Marinette said desolately.

Alya stared at her. "Cat puns?"

"Like 'paws-itively' and 'meowch' and 'fur-get it'—"

"Okaaaay," Alya said, wrestling a bite of food onto her fork. "I don't think we've heard Adrien make cat puns."

Marinette lay back against the sofa and thought back on every conversation she'd ever had with Chat Noir. It would have been easier to sift through them on her phone, but she didn't think she could handle looking at his emails without crying. Then she remembered another occasion where she'd been crying, and asked Chat Noir for advice on reducing the swelling around her eyes. "He has an alcoholic best friend," she said. "A girl that he's always rescuing at bars."

Alya held her hand in front of her full mouth and flailed her free arm. "Chloe!"

Marinette groaned. "But that's public information. Everyone knows Adrien and Chloe are best friends. It's all over the tabloids."

Alya's shoulders sagged. She returned to her food while Marinette sorted through the events of the last few weeks.

Marinette sat up straight. "The week that Adrien was filming the advertisement in Chateau Margaux, Chat Noir was too busy to talk during the day," she said, then deflated again. "But that was public information, too. Saw a report about the commercial on one of those celebrity gossip shows." She stole the food back from Alya. Alya handed her the fork.

"There has to be something else. You've been talking to this guy for a year," she said.

"But I've only been talking to Adrien for a month," Marinette reminded her. "He just showed up at the bakery after closing time one day…" She let her sentence dangle as a memory stepped forward amidst the chaos in her mind. "Wait," she said, and felt around for her cell phone. "Wait." She found it half buried under the throw pillow she'd been resting on earlier.

"What is it?" Alya asked.

Marinette turned her phone on, waited as the loading screen took far too long to give way to the home screen, then pulled up her inbox. She ignored the Summer email thread and clicked on 2015 just below it. There were hundreds of emails. She scrolled through back to mid-July and scanned the first lines until she found the one she was looking for.

"Listen, Chat Noir.

"Whoever you are.

"It may not seem like it, but I know how you feel. A routine life where everything is safe and familiar? Never taking risks, chasing after your own ambitions? It's stifling, isn't it? Some days I can hardly breathe.

"But strange and wonderful things still happen to sleepwalkers like us.

"I accidentally emailed you, and rather than let it go, I took a risk and we became friends.

"It's time for you to take a risk.

"Sweet dreams."

Marinette checked the date. She'd sent it the Monday before Adrien had turned up at the bakery for the first time, looking for a moment's peace. She scrolled down to the next day and opened one of his replies.

"I a-paw-logize for my out of character behavior yesterday. You must have been worried if you stopped rejecting me long enough to offer advice. And very sound advice, I might add. I followed it to the letter and the universe rewarded me for my obedience. I'd like to think it was a gift from you, buginette. That your good luck rubbed off on me and made my day just a little brighter."

Marinette looked up from the phone.

He'd been talking about her.

The risk he took was visiting the bakery after hours. The reward was the cheesecake and her company.

She stood from the sofa, and would have knocked the food container over if Alya hadn't caught it in time. "Marinette, what is it?"

Chat Noir had practically begged her to enter Gabriel Agreste's design competition, had been ecstatic when she finally decided to do it. Adrien was in charge of the whole damn thing.

"Mari, what?" Alya cried.

Marinette looked out the living room window. Notre Dame stood across the river, bathed in the light of the setting sun.

The cute acquaintance. The woman Chat Noir had unrequited feelings for. He'd gone to ask her on a date and she'd shot him down because she was in love with someone else.

He'd been in front of Notre Dame because he was on his way to ask his acquaintance out.

Marinette ran across the river to find Chat Noir and found Adrien instead.

Adrien, in front of Notre Dame, on his way to ask her, Marinette, on a date.

And Marinette told him she was in love with her best friend.

With him. With him. With him.

"Adrien is Chat Noir," Marinette said.

It was Adrien who'd walked into Café Reflekta and asked for the Ladybug special. Chat Noir who'd brought her fake flowers. Adrien who'd stayed up all night emailing her when she was upset about Nathanael. Chat Noir whose hand she'd held in a dark movie theater. Adrien who'd sent her cat puns and poetry and internet memes. Chat Noir who'd kissed her cheek to play a trick on their best friends. Adrien who'd told her she made him feel like his stupid parody of a life was worth living.

Marinette turned to Alya with her phone pressed against her chest. "I'm in love with Adrien," she said, and the force of those words, the warmth of them seemed to fill every inch of her body. "Oh my God, I fell for him twice."

Alya looked ready to cry. "I so need a picture of your face right now."

Marinette smiled. She suddenly couldn't stop smiling. "That…" She ran a hand through her hair. "That… that little sneak!" she yelled as realization after realization began piling up on her. "'Join the competition, buginette! It's important to me because it's important to you! Don't mind me, I'm just running whole the thing!' I can't believe him!"

"He calls you buginette?" Alya screamed.

Marinette grabbed a throw pillow. "He told me he works in marketing! Stupid cat!" She buried her face in the pillow and let out a loud whine. "And of course he's a supermodel! Of course he is! He's not just unbearably smug about his looks, he actually has the looks to be smug about!"

"I dare you to tell me how that's a problem," Alya said.

"Oh, I hate him. I hate him I hate him I hate him!"

"Yoo-hoo! You just said you fell in love with him twice, remember?"

Marinette squeezed the pillow with all the strength she had left. "And why is Adrien Agreste on the internet sending cat puns to women he's never met?" she cried. Then she gasped, and the pillow slid out of her hands. "Alya."

"Yes?"

"Alya."

"Yeah, Marinette?"

"Adrien's in love with me."

Alya sat back with the food container and picked up the fork again. "I'm just going to get comfortable and watch you sort all this out," she said.

"I mean, I think he's in love with me. He's in love with Ladybug and I'm Ladybug but lately he's had a crush on me me but a crush is just a crush, you know? It's not love." Marinette pressed both hands to the sides of her face. "He thinks he's cheating on me with me."

Alya snorted, doubled over, and howled with laughter. "Oh my God, please let me be the one to tell this story at your wedding!"

Marinette grabbed her by the shoulders. "This is no time for laughing! What do I do?" she cried. But even as she waited for Alya to calm down enough to speak, she knew she already had the answer to her question:

She had to tell Adrien who she was.

It all seemed so simple. Before, she'd worried about telling Chat Noir how she felt about him because she'd never met him in person. She hadn't known what to expect. But now?

Now Chat Noir was Adrien. The humor, the confidence, the kindness, the loyalty, the consideration for her feelings—it all made perfect sense. How could he have been anyone else? Another enormous smile lit up her face as she imagined Adrien wishing he could spend the whole day talking to her, Adrien sending her flirtatious messages, Adrien swiping wine from his father's cellar to drink a toast to her big fat mouth…

"Earth to Marinette," Alya said. She waved a hand in front of her face. "Are you listening?"

Marinette ripped her giddy mind away from the memory of Adrien's body pressed against hers earlier that day. "Huh?"

"When are you going to tell him you're Ladybug?"

Marinette pulled her hair out of her bun and wrapped it around her finger. "Uh… if it's truly meant to be, he'll just look at me and know?"

Alya made an x-shape with her arms. "Wrong answer," she said.

Marinette collapsed on the sofa again, amazed at how she could be so tired when she wanted to climb out onto her balcony and sing a song of joy for all of Paris to hear. "I don't know," she said. "I decided that if I ended up a finalist in the design competition, I'd use that to tell Chat Noir who I was."

"But that was before you knew Chat Noir is a guy you fake dated to hook me up with his best friend."

"Let it go, let it go," Marinette sang.

Alya grabbed her face and squished her cheeks together. "Seriously. Why don't you tell him on Tuesday? Because if I have to invent an excuse to get Nino out of his own apartment, I will."

Marinette's eyes widened. Tuesday. The party. One moment alone with Adrien and she could drop a hint, or whisper it in his ear, or grab him by the shirt collar and scream it at him before yanking him in to kiss that ridiculously handsome face of his.

Oh. Kissing.

That was a thing that could happen. She'd forgotten about kissing. What would that be like: her, Marinette, kissing Chat Noir, who was not only beautiful in spirit but in body as well? She let her imagination take the fantasy for a spin and pictured herself throwing him a come hither look—did she even know how to make a come hither look?—which would lead to him sitting her on the counter beside the cash register—wait, how did they get back to the bakery from Nino's? It wasn't important. What mattered was Adrien and the aching desire in his resplendent green eyes as Marinette played with his shirt buttons and murmured a "here, minou" that drove him to tangle his hands in her hair and—

"I've lost you again, haven't I?" Alya said.

Marinette sighed as the fantasy fled to some other, darker corner of her mind. She had to focus. Plenty of time to think about kissing Adrien later. "I'm nervous," she said. "What if he doesn't believe me?"

"Then you show him the emails, rip off your dress and say 'here is your buginette, take me, handsome boy'!"

"Alya!" Marinette shrieked.

Alya shrugged. "It's quick, it's painless, and it gets you both right where you want to be." She draped an arm over Marinette's shoulders and pulled her closer. "I get it, though. You fell for him twice, he fell for you twice. Some people would say it's meant to be. But what happens when the novelty wears off and you realize you shotgun-married a guy who makes cat puns?"

"I'm not going to shotgun-marry him."

"Are you sure? Because you don't get a chance with the gorgeous and filthy rich son of your fashion idol every day. Just saying."

Marinette snorted. "Losing my head is what got me in trouble last time, remember?" She thought of her relationship with Nathanael, how high she'd flown and how far she'd fallen because she'd been too blinded by love to see the warning signs. "I don't want to mess this one up," she said. "It's too important to me." She closed her eyes. "Chat Noir—Adrien—is too important to me."

Alya squeezed her tighter. "Then take it easy. You'll know what to do when the time comes." They sat together in companionable silence. Alya drummed her fingers on Marinette's shoulder. "So…" she said, "can I read his emails?"

"Absolutely not."

To Be Continued

A/N: If you couldn't tell, I lost control of Marinette.

A lot of people have asked me if the thing about Paris bakeries closing for a month is true. First of all, why don't you just Google it? Second of all, yes, it's absolutely true. France takes its vacation time very seriously, so in the summer, one half of the bakeries in Paris close one month, and the other half of the bakeries close the next. Because bakers need rest, but people need bread.

Marinette knows! Adrien, not so much! The end of this story is on the horizon! (Way over there. That indistinguishable speck.) Questions, comments, screams? Leave them in the review box!