"I can't believe this! It's completely unfair I know he ditched but this is just harsh!" Nino was on his feet, pacing at the front of the classroom of his second class, Marinette and Alya standing by their desks in a similar state. His phone was clutched in his hand, still open to a short and simple message from Adrien he had finally gotten in response after asking why he hadn't shown up to school. All three of Adrien's loyal friends were angry at the news, but no one felt horrible like Marinette did.

The girl sank into her desk, wishing she had just stayed home. She was still slightly ill but that was the farthest thing from her mind, instead only able to focus on the empty seat in front of her. Nino and Alya had both sent messages to check on him and been lucky to even get one word responses, but it meant he at least had his phone... was he just ignoring them then? Was he upset? Did he want to be alone? Would he just ignore her too if she was brave enough to write him?

She had to try though, to let him know she was thinking of him. It was her fault... it was all her fault. He had reached out to her despite knowing he would get in trouble, he had come to check on her. She could do the same for him, she would do the same for him.

She waited for a little while, letting Nino and Alya settle down and get distracted with the lesson as class began before slowly pulling out her phone and tucking it into the folds of her jacket on her lap. Using the material as cover she texted, "How are you?"

While she waited for whatever sort of response she would get her mind spiraled down into a distracted daze. The rain was as present as always, thunder chorusing behind it and she wondered when the storm would finally let up. The weather reports said it would last to Friday at least if not the weekend and it was only Wednesday... she wondered again how Adrien was doing. All attempts to distract herself with idle thoughts about the weather fading into nothing. Was he angry with her? Did he resent her for playing a role in his current situation?

Only a minute passed before her phone buzzed in her lap, making her heart leap. That was fast. She had been expecting something more towards the end of class. When she peaked down at her phone the message was considerably more than the others had gotten as well.

Marinette waited until she was relatively in the clear before reading it.

"Hey! I'm good, just sort of confused? So the book starts with Harry Dresden already being a pretty established wizard but does he ever like flashback to who taught him? Or does it just go from him having an office in Chicago? I really like the talking skull as well."

She blinked at the message in confusion. Talking skull?

Oh the books she lent him, the Dresden Files. After a moment's thought she had to silence a laugh quickly with her free hand, making Alya look over curiously.

Was the only reason he was barely responding to the others because he was caught up reading those books? Geeze...

She said as much in her response. "Nino and Alya have been worried. Maybe you should tell them you're just reading? Also yeah you meet his mentor later on."

She went back to waiting and smiled to herself when she saw first Nino and then Alya receive text messages. After they read them they both groaned and looked over at her with exasperated expressions before returning to their work. What a doof.

'How's class?' she received after a few minutes had gone by.

M- 'Fine, though I'm not really paying attention. Mostly just boring. How's house arrest?'

A- 'Pretty normal. He never takes away any of my stuff so I still have my computer and all of my games. I wish I could be at school though.'

Marinette stared down at the message, that heavy awful feeling worming its way back into her.

M- 'Hey... I'm really sorry you got in trouble because of me. Is there anything I can do to make it better? I feel terrible...'

The response was almost immediate.

A- 'Don't feel bad, I knew what was gonna happen and I'd do it again. Don't sweat it, okay?'

She didn't respond at first, still battling herself. It was her fault though, he had only left to go see her and because of that he wasn't even allowed out of the house to go to school. He didn't seem to be too upset about it but... the way he had looked when he was leaving...

He had been so closed off, completely different from the laughing boy in the bookstore. She had watched as he was forced back into the proper obedient son his father made him be, it was awful. It wasn't fair.

Her phone buzzed again once ten minutes of brooding and note taking had passed.

A- 'You're sweating it I can tell. Stop it.'

M- 'I feel bad...'

A- 'Well don't! Everything is fine : ) Once I get back to school though you have to show me your Cat Noir winter designs, I'm really curious. Then I can give you Wind Waker and laugh when you get stuck.'

Marinette smiled, deciding to at least try and distract him.

M- 'I haven't even played it yet! You have no faith.'

A- 'Something tells me you aren't the best at video games, call it intuition hehe.'

M- 'Rude!'

God texting him was so much easier, but it still made her all jumpy and happy.

Alya looked over again at the quiet giggle coming from Marinette, smiling when she saw her and Adrien were still texting. It couldn't hurt to push things a little.

Alya slipped out her phone and sent a message to Adrien herself.

---

Adrien was laying on his bed, still in pajamas with a book splayed face down on the covers to keep his place. Plagg was sitting on the foot of his bed with his cheese, snacking on it happily and occasionally sneaking crumbs into the sheets to stink up Adrien's room a little.

Adrien's phone went off in his hand sooner than he had expected, and was surprised to see another message from Alya.

'You texting Marinette? She's smiling to herself a bunch so I figured it was you.'

Adrien's face flushed red, but he couldn't help the building laugh from spilling out, warming his core and making him bounce a little on the mattress, jostling Plagg while he tried to shovel even more cheese into his mouth.

He was making her smile in class? The thought made him happy.

"Whats got you all bouncy?" Plagg spoke up, flying over to try and read Adrien's phone upside down before being shooed away.

"Nothing," Adrien replied a bit too quickly, still smiling to himself as he hid the screen from the peering cat.

"It's that cutey from class again huh? Let me say hi!"

Adrien blushed at how he referred to Marinette but still scoffed at the suggestion, sitting up on the mattress.

"Oh yeah, that will make sense. 'Oh Marinette by the way my kwami friend Plagg says hi. Don't worry about what a kwami is though just know he says hi.'"

Plagg twirled through the air, snickering at something. "Yeah say that! It would be funny!"

"No Plagg," Adrien sighed, taking his blanket and tossing it high enough to trap the cat on its way down. He groaned when he saw the cheese crumbs go flying.

"Stop stinking up my room!"

"It already smells gross cause of you. I'm making it better!" came Plagg's muffled reply as he wiggled to freedom from the blanket prison.

Adrien looked ready to say something before his phone went off again, and he forgot about arguing with Plagg in favor of reading the message.

Plagg sighed theatrically, shaking his head and earning a glare from his charge.

"What?" Adrien finally asked, his eyes still darting to his phone as most of his attention remained with Marinette.

Plagg floated back towards his pile of cheese, just sighing again and snickering to himself, which only annoyed the boy.

"What?" he asked again, finishing his reply and sending it so he could focus on glaring at his kwami.

"I don't understand why you keep spending time on these crushes," Plagg finally answered, pretending to only be focused on food, "Why not just have some cheese?"

"I- y- what!?" Adrien stammered, suddenly indignant as his face grew uncomfortably warm, "I do NOT have a crush on- I !" he insisted when Plagg just laughed.

"Oh come on! I've only seen that look in your eyes when you're thinking about Ladybug, except now it's impossible to pick out if you're thinking about one or the other. It's just like before, see the girl a few times and suddenly they are all you think about! Talk about a type, geeze!" Plagg cackled at his own joke. Falling for the same girl twice really was one heck of a type.

Adrien grabbed a pillow and chucked it at the stupid laughing cat, fuming when it was dodged almost effortlessly.

"I love Ladybug! okay?"

"Okay," Plagg allowed, already exhausted with his role of matchmaker but he knew this dunderhead was going to get nowhere fast without someone throwing him in the right direction. "What do you love about Ladybug?"

Adrien just gawked at the cat, completely unprepared for something like that coming from Plagg. He listened sure, but he never really engaged with the whole romance thing.

"I- everything! She's perfect!"

Plagg grinned again, able to see that he had his boy on the edge of a tangent, which is what he was going for even if it would be horrifically boring to sit through.

"What about her though. She just looks like a lady in spots to me."

Adrien's irritation flared once again, standing up from his bed to pace his room in sudden energy.

"A lady with spots!? Seriously!? She's so much more than that! She's beautiful, and graceful and smart and funny. She's inventive and brave! She's strong too, she cares! She cares about the people of Paris, she fights to keep them safe! She isn't just another girl Plagg she's Ladybug!"

"So Marinette's just another girl then?" Plagg countered, well aware of the thin ice he was treading.

Adrien stopped dead, whirling to face the kwami in anger and disbelief.

"What!? No! Of course not I didn't say that!"

Plagg shrugged his tiny shoulders, floating on his back and kicking through the air in feigned disinterest, playing Adrien like a fiddle.

"You're right, it's hard to notice normal girls like Marinette with Ladybug around. It's not like she's a superhero or anything, how could she even compete?"

Silence.

Adrien was furious, tired of people trying to say Marinette wasn't special or something. He got angry thinking about how nervous she had been to answer him when they were sitting in her room. She had thought so highly of him and so of herself that she had trouble even speaking to him, nervous that he would find her plain and common like she thought she was. How many people had made her feel unimportant before for that to happen? How many stupid comments like Plagg's before you thought you didn't amount to much just being yourself?

"SHUT UP Plagg!" Adrien suddenly shouted, so amped that he forgot for a moment that Plagg's existence was a secret, lowering his voice to continue but still spitting the words.

"Marinette is amazing! She's funny and sweet and gives a crap about me! She cares about the people around her and even though there must have been tons of people like YOU trying to make her feel like she didn't matter she STILL CARES. She STILL does her best to make people smile and she is just as ready to help protect people as Ladybug is! She's one of the only people around who think that Adrien is enough, that I'm good enough by myself and I'm not going to let you or Chloe or anyone else try and make her seem like she isn't good enough too!"

To Adrien's confusion Plagg seemed pleased with his outburst, only understanding when Plagg flew right up in his face and said in a sing song tone, "Seems like the type of girl you would like to meee!"

Plagg soaked in every aspect of Adrien's expression as his brain all but shut down, freezing with wide eyes and a flushed face as he realized that he had just been played. Hard.

"I- I- uh." Adrien tried a few times to start a sentence, but his mouth would just open and close while his mental functions tried to spark back to life.

Plagg loved it. God his boy really could be walked right into a brick wall, it was hilarious.

"I- I-" I like her his heart supplied while his brain slowly came back online.

And the second he saw it there was no going back, like he noticed there was a cliff only when he was halfway down. He liked her, he liked all sorts of different things about her. How long had he spent obsessing over his list? His list of things she liked and didn't. He wanted to know, all of it. Every tiny detail, it interested him, it mattered to him. He had a list for Ladybug too but it was so short...

He paid so much attention during their too short interactions through the rainy days, every passing moment driving him further along a path he had refused to even look at because it wasn't an option. Liking Marinette wasn't an option because he already loved Ladybug, but his heart had kept on going anyways. As soon as he had seen her for the first time she was impossible not to notice, and there wasn't a mask in the way. He could ask what her favorite color was and know he had a good chance at getting the answer. He could ask her about what sorts of books she liked and why, what sorts of things she agreed with and didn't. He could know her.

Plagg's smile dropped a little from his face as he watched the torment and conflict start to bubble up, knowing he had caused it. It would have happened eventually... he would have run into that wall without his help, but seeing it really sink in wasn't as fun as he thought it might be.

Plagg knew that going through it meant that his boy had a shot at being with someone who made him happy, so he had thrown him in, knowing it was for his own good. But watching didn't feel good.

Adrien walked slowly back to his bed and sank down onto it, suddenly very still.

Was... was he betraying his lady?

He loved her, he knew he did. There was nothing fake or halfhearted about how he felt, she had captured his affections the very first time he laid eyes on her and tightened her hold with every spoken word. He loved Ladybug... and he wanted with everything in him to say that it was as deep and unshakeable as any love could ever be... but he didn't know her. He wanted too, he desperately wanted too, but he couldn't. She wouldn't let him.

Had she ever had pets? Did she have a favorite subject in school? What things upset her, what made her afraid?

She was one of his best friends, his partner, his lady. It wasn't as if they were strangers, he understood her as she was as deeply and complexly as she understood him, but he knew there was that distance.

She didn't know he didn't have a real home, she didn't know he was lonely. She couldn't without knowing Adrien, and if she was suffering as equally in her own life he would never know. Those stupid flimsy masks created worlds between them, and as long as they were there he might never have the chance to remember the little things.

What gnawed at him was that sometimes he could swear she would look at him with something like... he didn't have a word for it exactly.

It was as if the word maybe had a feeling to it, an appearance, something you could see in the eyes of another person. He was a maybe, an almost. Did she care about him too? Did she have those feelings but smother them for some reason he would never know? Was there some damn reason on the other side of her mask that kept her from ever looking at him like he looked at her?

And why now were all of those intense, overwhelming emotions not enough to keep him from looking at Marinette?

He felt so confused... so heavy but so... ugh.

He buried his head in his hands. It didn't make sense, it was all too much, because even when he had all this crushing doubt and sadness he still felt happy.

He liked that he made Marinette smile in class, he liked that he could make her blush. He liked that he could be Cat Noir without having to have a mask, and still be dorky and overenthusiastic and have her just smile at him. That soothing gentle smile, or maybe her happy joyful one. It the two days of knowing her he had seen all the tiny nuances of her expressive face, forming a whole other list for her types of smiles.

She reminded him of Ladybug in many ways, sometimes the resemblance was almost startling, in the way she moved or cocked her hips, but there was still more. There were all the little things he could never have of Ladybug that he could see in Marinette.

She didn't like too much honey in her tea, she used places to draw inspiration for her designs, and she could be both unmovably calm and overeager within the span of seconds.

Two days.

Was that really all it took?

He couldn't call it more than like, more than the very edges of a fledgling crush, but he could see that cliff now and it was very steep. It wouldn't take much. It would be incredibly easy, she was just that sort of girl. It would take no effort at all to care about her like that, the only thing they needed was time.

The one thing he could say now for certain was that he was already an extremely loyal friend to her, wanting to protect and support her at every turn. He was driven to anger easily when others said something he took offense to on her behalf, and he knew that protectiveness had confused barely understood motivations behind it.

It was too soon to know, he just knew he missed her. He wanted to be at school to see his friends and Marinette, her name already in a new distinct category all her own. Thinking back to it now how soon had he lumped her and his lady together into one group, calling them his lucky charms?

That guilt sprung up again, the sense of betrayal but...

Why should he feel guilty? He knew his love for Ladybug was real, but when she put up such a wall there was only so far he could go before he hit it.

It wasn't anything yet it was just...

His mind faltered and slowed down to a crawl, filling the sudden void with the white noise of the rain.

He had hated that storm not even a few hours ago, but now he saw it for what it was doing for him. Without it, would he and Marinette have ever even spoken?

His phone buzzed again in his hand and he realized that there were now two messages from Marinette waiting to be read having stacked up during his breakdown, the second being much more timid than the first.

He knew he could only get so far before his mind would revert back to the calming numbness he had adopted throughout his life, flipping on like a safety measure whenever things were too big or overwhelming. So instead he just allowed a small smile, tapping away quickly to keep her company through her boring lessons that day.

It was... confusing, and complicated. He just tried to look at things like Plagg might in his ever simplistic approach to things.

Texting Marinette makes me happy, so I'll do that.

So he did.

It was easier than trying to peg things down when it was really too early to tell.