This time, luck is on his side: Ladybug is running late coming back from her half of the city patrol, meaning he’s got extra time to plan. Chat lounges against the ledge of the roof they’d agreed to meet back on and run through what he’s already prepared. She was going to be so pissed.
A few minutes later, she swings onto the roof. She’s halfway to him when he starts up.
“My Lady, good to see you! You know I’m a cat, right?”
Ladybug stops, expression dropping into one of familiar suspicion. Was it his voice? Maybe she was getting too good at predicting what he would do.
“I’d figured you’d forgotten and were measuring my life in dog years instead, because it feels like I’ve been waiting for seven years.”
Ladybug rolls her eyes and starts making her way over to him once more.
“Sorry,” she says, “I did forget you were a cat, considering how much of a bird brain you are.”
Ouch, she’s getting better. Despite her teasing, Ladybug meets his open arms with zero hesitation. A moment later, she rolls up onto her tiptoes and kisses him squarely on the mouth. It’s his favorite sensation, second only to the next one: the jolt of warm energy that shudders across his skin when she releases her transformation. Tikki waves as she spins out of Marinette’s earrings and then darts away. He can’t tell, the kwami being bright red all of the time, but he likes to think Tikki sports a blush as she goes. Plagg had mentioned before, the mix of energy that floods him when Chat Noir and Ladybug kiss - something about yin and yang and *gross human stuff* - and there’s no doubt it’s the same for tiny Tikki. Marinette is ever considerate of it, now; given how much Plagg complains about, well, everything, Chat enjoys giving the cat god some extra grief.
He sinks into her kiss. And maybe he sports a blush soon after: the idea of him, kissing Ladybug, who was Marinette, still fills him with a sense of awe. Her hands run up and down his sides, then course over his back. It’s almost enough to distract him, which was, in retrospect, likely what she was trying to do. Chat breaks their kiss and does not let her soft mewl of disappointed want lure him back in.
“But seriously, I thought you would try to be more PUNctual than that.”
“Chaton, no. Don’t you dare start again.”
“But you and bad jokes are my favorite thing in all of exkisstence.”
To prove it, Chat ducks in and sweeps away the furrow between her brows with his lips. Marinette giggles, then frowns, looking mad at herself. His hands settle on her waist.
“Just remember that it was your terrible puns that got us into this mess in the first place,” she says.
He steps in closer and pulls her to him. Just like that, Marinette’s shifts. Her lips part a fraction and her chin tilts down. A pretty flush darkens her cheeks as she looks up.
“I thought you rather liked this mess we got into,” he breathes.
Chat can already taste the sassy retort on her breath, so he covers it with his mouth. The cluck of protest in her throat fades fast.
The first time they kissed had been their second ever, really, but it had taken no time for their second to become third and their third to become three-hundredth. By now, she doesn’t just know his lips; she’s mastered them. She sucks his bottom lip between hers.
The purr she summons in his throat rumbles down his spine and gathers in his hips. So there’s no controlling the slide of his hands further down: his fingers fan out over her backside then dig in. He crushes his body against hers and lets her tongue plunge deeper into his mouth.
It’s teeth and tongue and wet heat between them. And still it’s not enough. Chat curls his fingers, claws sinking into her ass. Contrary to everything he’d wanted, Marinette draws away.
“Nu-uh, Kitty, claws in.”
He’s never gone so cold so fast. The sensation is undeniably familiar, as is the tickle of laughter at his temple.
“Plagg, don’t do it!” he yelps.
In the rush of it all, he sees Marinette’s eyes go wide.
She’s electrified in green light.
The weight of the worst kwami in the world plops on his shoulder.
“Oh my god,” Adrien groans, scrubbing a hand over his face.
Plagg doesn’t even try to apologize or come up with an excuse, he just snickers and flutters away. Adrien can hear Tikki’s light reprimand, but it doesn’t matter.
Marinette’s lips part for a very different reason.
“Uh,” he starts, “So… hi. Um. Yeah. Hiiiii…”
She’s forming words with her lips but nothing comes out. It’s everything he’d ever feared: Marinette never spoke to Adrien. That’s why he’d insisted on waiting, with the hope that Marinette might fall hard enough for Chat to forgive him for being Adrien.
“I, uh, I swear I can explain why-”
“I’VE BEEN MAKING OUT WITH ADRIEN AGRESTE FOR THE LAST TWO WEEKS?” Marinette shrieks.
She grabs him by the shoulders and shakes him. His head snaps back and forth. He does nothing to stop it, because really, he must feel the same way she looks. Without a doubt that’s desperate fear on her face.
Marinette finally releases him, only to hide behind her hands. If it weren’t for the fact that it was impossible for either of them to become akumatized, Adrien would be concerned that her rising groans were the sign of one newly evilized. It’s a bit like a cross between a banshee and an asthmatic goat; he’d laugh if he weren’t so freaked out.
Adrien wants to comfort her, to quell her short, sharp breaths with his hands and his words and maybe even his mouth, but he can’t tell if it would push her closer to or farther from hyperventilating.
“I…” he looks away, but the words have to come out, “I know you don’t like me very much in school, Marinette, but I hope…”
He doesn’t expect her hand on his chin, doesn’t expect her to yank his head up so that they are eye to eye.
“That’s what you thought?” she whispers.
“Because you barely talk to me…?”
She lets go of his chin to throw her arms up in the air.
“You thought- all of this time you, Adrien Agreste, thought that I- that I couldn’t talk to you because I didn’t like you?”
He nods again, unable - no, unwilling - to repeat himself.
Marinette lets loose another groan and tugs at the ends of her ponytails.
“Adrien, Chat, that’s not-”
But Marinette doesn’t finish. Instead, she bites back her words, plants both hands on his face, and kisses him hard. It’s not all that different from a few minutes before, but this time he stiffens, eyes wide and uncertain. The kiss doesn’t last all that long, but Marinette is panting when she pulls away.
“This entire time,” she says, “I had the biggest, most ridiculous crush on you, Adrien. I couldn’t even get two words straight. And so when I started feeling things for Chat Noir it was like, Oh thank goodness, I can finally act like a human around Adrien.”
The revelation doesn’t rattle the universe, but it does make his knees go weak. He feels his mouth pull into an open half-smile, an echo of the warring disbelief and hope in his gut.
“Wait, so, is it a… a good thing, or a bad thing, that I’m me?”
She doesn’t grace him with a response. She lets her lips answer him in a different way, with their soft press against his. All of the tension he hadn’t known was bubbling up in his chest boils over, released and relieved under her touch. They kiss until neither can breathe, or stand, straight.
The sliver of space between them is enough to shift just so: he rests her forehead against hers, and her hands move to his shoulders.
“I’m so happy you’re you,” Marinette says.
“I’m happy you’re happy I’m me,” he says, the words making him dizzy just saying them, “I think it would have been pretty catastrophic otherwise.”
Marinette reacts as Marinette always does, with a sigh and a rolled eye.
“Just because you’re my superhero boyfriend who also happens to be my super-hot crush doesn’t mean I won’t consider kicking your butt.”
