bedtime stories for ants

Marinette looks at her lap and draws herself up and in. Like she’s wanted to tell him this for a long time. Like she’s only just found the words for it. “We were pretty close,” she says. “In grade school. Not as close as… Rose, yeah, Rose. But we were in the same class for a couple years. I helped her with some class picture stuff, she listened to me yammer on about Adrien after he joined our class… even helped me come up with some ideas on how to… confess to him? Win him over? I don’t know.” She rubs the back of her neck. “Actually, I think all my girl friends did that.”

Luka nods slowly, thinks of the school photos in the album Juleka bought from the thrift shop, tries to match faces in his head. He thinks he sees pigtails. Or maybe a bun. He could be wrong. “So,” he says, “you had it pretty bad for him, huh.”

“I dunno if I had it bad. Like I said, puppy love. I mean, I thought we were soulmates—God, I even named our kids—and I couldn’t even get out a sentence in front of him. I didn’t even like him at first. Plus, we were like, fourteen. I didn’t know any better.”

He shrugs. “Just cause you were fourteen doesn’t mean it wasn’t real.” He thinks he catches a blush stealing across Marinette’s face then, but maybe it’s just a trick of the lights. “So… what changed?”

“With Juleka? Or Adrien?”

“Both, I guess.”

Marinette turns her head away. “It’s dumb.”

Luka shrugs again, smiling faintly. “So?”

She starts to pick at her nails, like her hands are just looking for something to do. Without thinking, he gives the spinner ring on his index finger a flick to get her attention, then slides it off and hands it to her. She looks at it with questions in her eyes, then slips it on. It barely fits her index finger, and it wobbles when she gives it a curious flick of her own. It seems to get the job done, at least. “He lent me his umbrella,” she mumbles, final but sheepish. Then she follows up, before his brow can so much as furrow, “He was friends with an old bully of mine—Mrs. Bourgeois’s daughter, actually—and I caught him doing something with some gum on my chair. And I… misjudged him. “Another flick. “He was trying to make it up to me. And he said… he didn’t have any friends. He hadn’t even been to school.”

He lets out a hollow laugh. “Rich kids, huh?” And then, at the first sign of her discomfort, “Sorry, I—”

“No,” she says. “It’s okay, I was just thinking…” She presses her thumb into the curve and the aged grooves of the ring more than she actually spins it. Like she cares about losing it more than she cares about comforting herself. “I think everything around me told me that… that was how I was supposed to feel. Unwavering love. Now it’s been years, and I think… I think I just wanted to be that friend for him. I just wanted to be what he was looking for.”

Luka lifts his gaze from the ring to her face. “Who says that’s not love?” He doesn’t know where the words come from. They just feel like the right ones to say.

Marinette freezes, blinking at her hands. She doesn’t say anything; the only sound is the whine of his ring as the metal scrapes together with another flick.

When the silence goes on a bit too long for either of their liking, Luka clears his throat uncertainly. “So, um…”

She speaks so he doesn’t have to. “Juleka,” she murmurs. “Right, um…” It’s hard to tell who’s more uncomfortable between the two of them. Who's really supposed to say what next. “Well, I mean… you can sort of imagine that I wasn’t the only one who wanted to… y’know. Be with Adrien.”

Luka doesn’t have to imagine, but he nods anyway.

“Not”— Marinette hedges—“not that Juleka was competition or anything. I mean, duh. Just… there was this other girl—there were other girls, and…”

“You don’t have to tell me this,” he urges. “If it still hurts.”

She closes her eyes. Hard, and just for a moment. “Please let me tell you this.”

Her voice wavers. That’s all the cue Luka needs to stay quiet. To let her say everything, or nothing, at her pace.

“Her name was Lila,” she says. “She was a new girl. From Italy. Everyone liked her, except… she lied. Like, compulsively. About connections she had, places she’d been, charity work she did. And she did it because she wanted everyone to like her. She was just telling people what they wanted to hear because the attention made her feel important. She thrived on it.” She gets to her feet. “Sorry, I can’t sit still when I get all… agitated. You know?”

Luka gestures vaguely at the balcony space. “That makes two of us.”

Marinette takes that as her cue to start pacing and turning on her heels, only pausing every so often to stare up at the night sky. “I was jealous,” she admits. “I was also our class representative. And I might’ve… used that to my advantage.”

Maybe he shouldn’t say Hell yeah out loud, but he’s definitely thinking it.

“I kept tabs on people’s schedules, you know?” she says. “So we could work on important events and class projects and stuff. There was one we were planning for Adrien, to celebrate that he’d been in school with us for a year and all. And it just so happened that…” she shrugs, feigning apology. “All the days that worked conflicted with all her charity work.”

Luka whistles, half-impressed. “This the part where you tell me she decided to make your life a living hell like some high school drama villain?”

Marinette’s face falls. “Yeah,” she says, and her voice cracks, and he wishes he weren’t right. “But all she did was exactly what I did. Convinced… everybody… that every little thing I did was proof that I wasn’t a real friend. That I couldn't commit to anything because I committed to everything. And especially with how I avoided her… didn’t trust her, treated her cruelly. she turned everyone against me, a little at a time. Even Alya.” She shifts her weight. “Even Juleka.”

Luka’s heart sinks. He almost wants to reach for her hands when she paces toward him. Almost wants to kick himself for asking, “And… then what?”

She lingers at the balcony railing, perhaps preferring to tell the night sky the rest. “She got me expelled.”

Luka tenses.

Marinette doesn’t notice. “I’d been telling myself for months that I deserved it. Eventually I just… believed it. Let it happen. Never talked to my classmates again.” She shrugs. “I cried a lot. Transferred schools. Threw myself into… everything. Because if Lila said that was what I was doing—just over-committing—I might as well own it. And because if I was constantly doing something, then I couldn’t stop to think about all the bad things I deserved. And I couldn’t be paranoid about being judged for every little thing I did.”

“What…” He’s trying, with every fiber in him, to keep his heart from breaking for her. To keep himself from blurting out how well he knows the feeling. “What about Alya? And Adrien, and, uh… Mrs. Bourgeois’s kid?”

Marinette turns to face him, leaning back against the railing, and something in her face—no, everything—changes. There’s a tiredness in her eyes, a twitch in her hands. Lines in her face that shouldn’t be there for decades. As though she’s just lived them all over again. “I didn’t talk to Alya for over a year. I couldn’t be friends with her. I couldn’t even talk to her.” Her gaze lowers. “It was really hard on Nino.”

“Nino?”

“Our friend. well. My friend. Her boyfriend. He’s the one I’ve been helping for that summer project.” She folds her arms tight. “He apologized first. If it weren’t for him, Alya and I still wouldn’t be talking. And Chloé, well… Mrs. Bourgeois’s recommendation letter had nothing to do with her. I entered some contests with my portfolio and won a couple of them.” She flicks her gaze back. “I did run into Chloé once. In New York. I guess she decided to live with her mom for a while. She kind of took the ‘enemy of my enemy is my ally’ approach. Which was… weird. But tolerable.”

Luka searches her face, even at a distance, and settles on the end of the deck chair again. “What about Adrien?”

The pause that follows is heavy. He can’t tell who feels the weight of it more; he just hopes it’s equal. Marinette scrunches up her lips, braces herself on the railing, and all those decades come back. “Well,” she murmurs. “I guess you don’t really realize what you have until it’s gone, huh.”

He sobers. “He felt guilty.”

“I guess we all did.” She scuffs her heel. “I guess we all do.”

Luka waits. There must be more she wants to say.

There is. She even starts pacing again. “My guidance counselor used to tell me that all that’s necessary for the triumph of evil is that good people do nothing. It was supposed to be comforting.”

He raises an eyebrow. “It doesn’t sound very comforting.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” she says, “He reminded me they were still good people, and good people could do bad things, and even if they were still good, it was okay for me to not want those people in my life anymore. I dunno.” She rocks on her feet. “Maybe someone told Adrien the same thing and he couldn’t stand doing nothing anymore.”

“Did you want him?” he asks. “In your life? Do you still?”

She heaves a laugh like it’s hard to do. “Would you think it was messed up if I said yes?”

“No, of course not.”

“He could see it,” she says. “What Lila was doing. That was why he felt so bad. That was why he convinced her to clear my name. Turns out he knows how to use things to his advantage, too.”

Luka softens and runs his fingers over the body of his guitar. “He must love you a lot,” he says, “if he was willing to do all that for you.”

At first, Marinette doesn’t say anything, only grips the railing tighter. He can see it, how her knuckles go white, as though there’s something she’s trying to forget. Then she murmurs, “She tried to talk to me. Juleka did. To… apologize… I ghosted her. I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. For a while, I didn’t want to deal with anything anymore. I don’t want you to think it didn’t hurt me, because it did. It did hurt.”

Luka’s stomach turns. He puts his guitar down. “That’s why you’ve been so nice to me, huh…” There’s a lump in his throat that he tries to swallow; he only partly succeeds. “You felt guilty about avoiding her and just… wanted to make it up to her.”

Something flashes across Marinette’s face. Horror, maybe. Or shame. “No, I—that’s not what I—”

“I’m not upset.” He’s not. He’s staring at the floor with a pit in his stomach and a shake in his limbs, and his knee is starting to throb again in protest, but he’s not upset. “Really. I get it. If that’s what you needed for your own closure, then…”

A ragged breath and a sniffle cut him off, and he’s barely able to lift his gaze before Marinette kneels in front of him, placing his ring in his palm and closing his fingers around it. He can’t revel in the touch—won’t let himself—because her hands are cold. Trembling. “Don’t go,” she whispers, squeezing his hand tight, and when he looks up there are tears staining her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t even be asking this of you, just… please, don’t go.”

Luka learned, a long time ago, to look for the things unsaid. when I can’t make it really meant I’m trying to avoid you. when you’re certainly different really meant God, you are a level of fucked-up I can’t put into words. When we need to talk really meant it's over.

He hears, “Please don’t go,” and he thinks he finds, I want you in my life. Don’t you want me in yours?

Or, maybe, I need you.

Or maybe it’s as simple, as desperate, as, Not you, too.

He’s known Juleka, and maybe even himself, long enough to know what that sounds like in other people.

“Hey,” he murmurs. “Hey, I’m not going.”

Marinette freezes, still staring at their hands. “Why? You have every reason to.”

“Because I’m not.”

“You’ve known me for like, two months, as what? A baker’s daughter? Overly nice customer service? Someone who just gave you kindness out of some dumb high school guilt?”

“I’m not going,” Luka says again.

“You should.” Marinette rubs her eyes dry. “Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.” He coaxes his hand open, slides the ring back onto her finger. “Isn’t that enough?”

Marinette studies the ring, giving it a cautious flick. As though touching it might break it altogether. “It’s too big.”

“Then I’ll trade you.” Luka takes the ring back, digs around in his pocket, and fishes out a couple of guitar picks. “Here. Take one.”

One of them has a picture of Jagged Stone’s face. The other has a Kitty Section logo, crudely painted on with some of Juleka’s old nail polish. Marinette takes the first one almost instantly with another sniffle, examining it from all sides. “He’s… my favorite.”

“Yeah.” Luka smiles, not minding that she can’t see it, and thinks of the album cover. “Mine, too.”

She runs her thumb over the faces and edges, blinking away whatever tears threaten to stick around. “Why?” she asks again.

“To prove it.” He tilts his head. “To prove I’m not going.”

She turns the pick this way and that, but doesn’t put it away just yet. Instead, her eyes drift toward his guitar and the amp, and then up to him. “Hey,” she says. “Do you think you could do me a favor?”

“I know,” he tells her. “I won’t tell Jules about any of this. And I won’t make you talk to her if you don’t want to.” And I’ll stay. I swear to God I’ll stay.

“Not that.” Marinette presses her lips together, still sitting on her knees. Still holding on to the pick for dear life. “Can you play it again?”

“What, the song from your playlist?”

“Me.” She looks away, her cheeks flushed and blotchy. “Can you play me. Again.”

Luka’s heart picks up, so loud he can barely hear anything else. Even her. “Yeah,” he says, setting his guitar in his lap, “Yeah, I think I got it this time.”

It only takes a few days for his knee to go from “bulging, throbbing mess” to “sort of tolerable,” and he doesn’t understand how the time is so annoying and yet so relieving. He has to call out of work because there’s no way they—or Juleka— will let him bike or even hobble around Paris with an injury like that. But it opens up his schedule for more band practice. And more chances to talk to Bubbles. Or, more accurately, convince Bubbles that he can still hold his own and shred the setlist to pieces.

And yeah, he tries his hand at perfecting Marinette’s song, but it barely comes out any better. Whatever melody is swirling in his head sounds wrong on paper, and even worse on guitar. Checking the posts of his drafts doesn’t help, either; the likes and comments and reposts have mostly come to a halt, no matter how many times he bumps the latest version to the top of his profile.

He thinks, for the most part, that it’s doomed to live in his head forever. And he hates it. Hates that it doesn’t sound right or good. Hates that he’ll never get to share what he really hears, what he really feels... with anyone.

The best he can manage is hopping on the metro, with his guitar and his amp and his busking license tied around the belt loop of his jeans, and finding just the right stone ledge or just the right bench at the bridge with the padlocks. Sometimes he doodles, strums out whatever comes to mind and hopes it resonates with someone. Some then he takes requests or plays fan favorites, the kind that earns him a smile or even an extra euro in his case.

He’s got to make the money somehow.

One time, he plays by the fountain at the Place des Vosges. For the parents who need something to tide them over while their children ask for balloons and skin their elbows and ride the carousel one too many times. He thinks about angles, and hearing colors, and pear tarts fresh from the oven, and business cards that look like flyers. He thinks about the color blue, too. Ocean blue. But he doesn’t play it. He’ll save it for a better occasion, when he’s not weighed down with cutting deals and combing through backstory that he’s not quite sure he’ll ever earn. When he’s not thinking about Marinette dropping a few coins in his case at the padlock bridge and almost looking guilty about it.

He shakes his head and gathers his paltry earnings for the day into the side pocket of his gig bag, stretches his leg to see if it’s worth putting weight on again. It doesn’t protest too much, thank God; at least he’ll be home before it gets too dark. But the sound of music stops him once he crosses the street. A radio. And it’s playing outside.

And it’s just over his head.

It takes him one moment to realize he’s stopped in front of Tom & Sabine’s, and another to look up. There is Marinette, watering some flowers in a box and resting her chin in her hand. Humming along to the music. when she meets his eyes, it sounds like her. Like exactly what he’s been looking for. Good, and right, and perfect.

And... sad.

The one thing Luka’s grateful for is that he wasn’t standing there long. Instead of fear or panic, he’s only caught up in mild surprise, and to his relief, so is Marinette. He readjusts his weight on his good leg, and he manages a wave with his free hand. “You know,” he says with a weak laugh, “we really gotta stop meeting like this.”

The smile Marinette gives him in return is just as sad as her humming, but harder to read. He doesn’t know if it’s telling her she agrees or disagrees, or if she doesn’t want him to go. Or if it’s something else entirely, something he’s not a part of. “Hey,” she says, leaning over the balcony to get a better look at him. Or maybe just at his leg.

He glances down at it, gives it a little shake, and shrugs in the face of the urge to wince. “It’ll be fine,” he says as nonchalantly as he can. “I’ll be back at work in a day or two. But, y’know... let me know if you’d rather I go busk somewhere else.”

Which, he’ll admit, is code for, let me know if you don’t want to see me anymore. He’s given her enough reasons for her to feel that way.

If Marinette’s somehow waded through to the real meaning of it, she doesn’t show it, and Luka doesn’t know if that’s a good thing. Instead, she leans over to pause her music, brushes her hair out of her eyes, and says, “Do you... wanna come upstairs?”

Well.

He wasn’t expecting that.

Luka can’t get any words out, so all he does is nod dumbly and limp toward the side door. On a better day, he might have been able to scale the bakery and hop over the balcony railing, if all his work on the Liberty is anything to go by. But maybe his guitar wouldn’t necessarily appreciate that. And neither would Mr. Dupain or Mrs. Cheng; he’d probably scare them half to death. Not to mention that maybe this is the sort of stunt reserved for Actually Cool People, and Luka is only ever Actually Cool in the recesses of his imagination or with a guitar in his hands.

Marinette meets him by the side door and lets him in with barely a sound. It doesn’t seem like she’s trying to sneak him in, the way she might have if they were in high school. If she might have even pulled off something like that in high school. But they slip into the apartment with Marinette’s whispered explanation that her father’s closing up shop and her mother’s getting ready for a dinner date. It reminds him, as they head to her room and she shows him how to hoist up onto the balcony, of all the dates his ma tried to go on. And how one day, she just stopped trying, and didn’t shed a tear over it.

Maybe, he thinks as he leaps up on the weight of one leg, he’s built for something like that. Or should be.

Marinette lets him take the deck chair so he can rest his leg, despite his weak insistence that he’s fine. She doesn’t go back to watering the flowers, or even leaning on the railing and giving the city that wistful look he thought was only reserved for Adrien Agreste. Instead, she sits cross-legged on the floor, and she watches him, never lingering on one part of him for too long. Like she’s expecting him to say something. Maybe it’s payback, in the end, for all the times she must have caught him.

“Hey,” he finally says to break through the quiet. “That song you were listening to... Can you play it again?”

She jolts to attention then, nods without a word, makes a grab for her phone. With a few taps, the song bleeds to life with a few piano notes, the rise of a few violins, the thrum of a cello. Luka thinks he’s heard this before, once. The words are all in English, so he doesn’t quite know what they’re saying. All he knows is the blue. It’s electric, it’s swelling in his chest, buzzing under his skin, closing his eyes. It sounds...

Like the ocean.

Like a world Marinette’s pulling him into. Her world. And he’s stepping into it. Just for a while. Or like, perhaps, just for that while, they’re meeting in the middle.

She must know what the song is about. She can wade through the colors and the sound, right to the words, as she sings to herself in accented English, as her voice dips low but not quite low enough, as her breath snags on the notes it can’t hold for very long. Maybe that’s why she seems so sad. Or maybe it’s something else.

“That song sounds like your eyes,” he says once the violins fade. It sounds like what I’ve been looking for.

Marinette looks at him like he’s lost his mind, and maybe he has. But there’s a softness to it. Like maybe no one’s ever said anything like that to her before. Like, secretly, she’d spent years wishing someone would. “What?”

“Oh, uh. It’s...” He can’t tell if it’s the music, or the evening sky, or Marinette that’s making it hard to snap back to himself. Maybe it’s all three. “It’s... that sound-color thing I told you about—”

“No, I—I figured.” Marinette fumbles as she turns down the volume. He hardly thought her the type, but she does it like it’s something she’s done for ages. Like she’s tapping into someone she used to be. “You... think about my eyes?”

Luka can feel his face burning, his stomach lurching. He’s overthinking, he knows it, but somehow it doesn’t feel wrong for him to say, “I’ve been trying to get them right for a long time.”

She gives him a confused look at first, but understanding cracks across her face once he unzips his gig bag, sets up the amp, and sets his guitar in his lap.

“Can you play it again?” he asks. It’s quiet, and unsure, but there’s a tinge of hope to it. “I want to get it right.”

Marinette’s eyes go wide, and her cheeks turn pink under the delicate string lights. It seems like she holds onto her breath for longer than she means to, but she nods, and she does that fumbling thing again as she reaches for her phone. Once those first piano notes trickle out, she looks to him expectantly. That’s all it takes for his fingers to find the strings. For his heart to find that ocean blue. He doesn’t quite copy the melody note for note; instead, he finds the little pockets where his music fits, and he makes it sound a little fuller. A little more like her.

Maybe it’s not perfect. But it’s good enough.

Somewhere along the way, Luka closed his eyes, and when he opens them again, he finds Marinette sitting closer—just across from him, in fact. She’s huddled up with her chin on her knees, all but marveling at him in silence. When she finally speaks, it’s after she’s paused the next song, and it’s only to breathe, “Wow.”

Luka’s not feeling particularly flirtatious; actually, the most he does is laugh sheepishly and rub the back of his neck. “I’m not so good with words,” he says. “But music gets me pretty close to what I want to say. So… maybe I was wrong about not having an angle. Maybe my thing is playing people.”

Marinette snaps out of it long enough to laugh, all breath, and say, “Where I’ve been, that sounds an awful lot like you’re a con man.”

“I’m not a con man, I mean... what people sound like. Their hearts, or... the parts of them that are most beautiful. That sound like that”— he gestures toward the speaker, and then up to the sky—”or remind us that... whatever we’re made of, it came from up there. Somewhere. That’s what I wanna think about, when I play…”

He catches himself and goes silent, but Marinette’s already giving him a meaningful look, teeth sinking into her lip. Somewhere along the line, her face went right to scarlet.

“Me,” she says. “That’s what you were playing in the park. Me.”

Luka doesn’t know how much of him has been discovered, but he keeps quiet all the same. He won’t give any more of himself away. It’s only as he’s about to apologize—for what, he’s not entirely sure—that Marinette cuts him off.

“Look, I… I need to tell you about something.”

Marinette doesn’t tell him exactly who is going to kill her, but she doesn’t have to. It’s, uncomfortably, all over her face as soon as they pull up to the bank of the Seine, where Juleka is waiting for him. As Marinette climbs to take his place in the front seat, she gives him a tight smile. The kind that tries with all its might to be kind. The kind that tries with all its might to cover something up.

Luka’s eyes narrow. “Are you… okay?”

The smile never leaves her face; in fact, it seems like it’s trying even harder to stay. Her gaze drifts just past him, then flickers down to where he’s shifted all his weight to his good leg. “I think I should be the one asking you that.”

“Marinette…”

She gives him a little wave goodbye before pulling the door shut, and Luka swears he can see traces of some sudden fatigue through the tinted glass of the passenger window.

Juleka’s expression is just as muted when he hobbles over to her. “Come on, dumbass,” she says, slinging his arm over her shoulder. “You can tell me all about it inside.”

That’s the nice thing about Juleka, at least: she puts the people she loves first, always. Sometimes even in spite of herself. It seems like she and Marinette are similar that way.

“So,” he says, even as she all but dumps him on the couch. “How long am I gonna be in the middle of, uh.” He gestures vaguely with the hand that hurts less. “Whatever’s going on here?”

“I dunno,” Juleka shoots back with a shrug, already looking for an ice pack. “How long am I gonna be in the middle?”

Well. She kind of has a point. “Sorry.”

“No, I…” She sighs, “I’m sorry. It’s just… weird. I can’t even ask if you get it because, duh, of course you don’t.”

Luka studies his nails. “They’re looking kinda chipped, y’know?”

“Sounds like you just want me to wait on you hand and foot.” Juleka sinks onto the couch, carefully resting the ice pack on his knee. For a while, she doesn’t say anything else, simply focuses on where his leg is propped up and occasionally on his nails. Once, her gaze darts over to the postcard still in his hand, and then it flicks away almost immediately, as if maybe it shouldn't have lingered there. Before long, she sits back, still not looking at him, and says, “Why are you doing this, Luka?”

It’s vague enough that Luka doesn’t feel entirely stupid for asking, “Doing what?”

To her credit, she doesn’t give him the look that says the Lord is testing her. But then, neither of them really totally believes in a Lord, anyway. “All this… Marinette stuff.”

It’s the first time he’s heard Juleka say her name. It doesn’t sound as bitter or scared as he thought. Just… hesitant. For all he doesn’t know, it still checks out. “I thought you were cool with it?”

“I mean, I am,” she says, but it doesn’t feel as relieving as it should. “I don’t wanna get in the way of… whatever’s going on. It's your thing, so it's your business.”

“I don’t think you’re in the way,” He pauses. “But… I wasn’t totally joking about the whole ‘caught in the middle’ thing. I don’t want—I don’t wanna try anymore if you’re just gonna get more uncomfortable with it because of…” A shrug. “Whatever’s going on. Or went on.”

“No offense,” Juleka quips back, “but it doesn’t seem like that mattered much when you started talking to that Bubbles guy.”

“You’re upset about the gig.”

“I’m not upset about the gig, I just—” This close, Luka can see nearly every muscle in her body go tight; she must feel vulnerable, because she bolts to her feet and makes for the fridge to start on dinner. “You kind of cornered me with this shit,” she says, once she’s got some distance on him. “It felt like, yeah, I could say no, but I’d be an awful person if I did. An awful… sister.” She pauses only to tie her hair up and out of her eyes; it’s nice, how mature she looks when she wears it that way. Or maybe it’s just her words getting to him. “That’s why it bothered me so much when you kept insisting you weren’t doing it to impress her. And maybe you don’t think you are, but… all the stuff you’re doing isn’t exactly convincing me otherwise.”

She’s staring at the postcard now, allowing herself to, as if it might prove her point, and... well, Luka can’t entirely refute it. “D’you wanna cancel it? “he asks. “Call a meeting?”

Juleka shakes her head, wrinkling her nose when the end of her ponytail tickles her face. “We’re already in this. Might as well keep going.”

“I mean... “ He gestures toward his leg. “We have an out.”

“Unless you’re planning on doing some sick-nasty knee-guitar playing like Jimi Hendrix or something, I think you’ll be fine.”

“I don’t think Jimi Hendrix ever played with his knee,” Luka scoffs, wincing when a few pots clang together as Julie’s trying to wrestle are out. He wishes he could help; it’d actually beat picking the rest of the polish off his nails and feeling out the way his knee won’t stop throbbing. “Would… you still feel like this if it were somebody else?”

Juleka pauses; Luka was sort of hoping it would tell him more than it actually does. “I mean… yeah, I guess? Maybe just… not as much.”

“Will you ever tell me what happened? Between you two?” He probably shouldn’t ask. He definitely shouldn’t ask. But somehow, he doesn’t really regret it. And he doesn’t regret it, either, when he adds, “Do you… hate her? Secretly? Or something?”

The stove clicks to life, and Juleka shakes her head even as she’s rummaging through the cupboards. “Nah,” she says, hollow though she sounds. “I don’t hate her. But I guess I wouldn’t be surprised if it were the other way around. I’d probably deserve it.”

Luka doesn’t know what stings more: that Marinette could ever be capable of hating anyone, or that anyone could ever be capable of hating his baby sister. Or that she could ever think that she deserved it.

Then Marinette’s words ring in his ear again—why would you ever think that you deserve any pain?— and his thoughts die away. He’s got no leg to stand on, literally or figuratively. Or maybe it’s that if he can think that Juleka’s good and deserving, then he can think the same of himself, someday. Or someone else can think the same of him. someday.

But “someday” and “maybe” feel like nothing more than a spark that’s gone as quickly as it arrived, and Luka can’t be bothered to stick around and find out when—if—it’ll ever burst into flames.

“Look,” Juleka says over the cooking. “I’ll cut you a deal. You stop throwing yourself, and Kitty Section, into all these new ideas just so you can impress or get close to Marinette... and I’ll figure out how to tell you what happened. All right?”

She doesn’t have to do this; she’s made her point already, no matter how much his own curiosity is getting to him. But he knows how she gets when she’s set on something, because it’s practically in their blood. He holds his tongue and nods dumbly, trying to work his knee through the scrape and the swelling. It still throbs and stings in protest, though not as badly as before. He’ll try not to push it—by which he means he’ll be up and at it again tomorrow, just… hobbling instead of sprinting.

“What’re you gonna tell Ma?” Juleka asks.

“Easy.” He smiles, half-satisfied, and slumps back. “I fell for someone.”

“I cannot stand you.”

“Then sit,” Luka says, and he makes a grab for his phone.

to: itsdjbubbles just got plenty of time to practice before the 29th, huh?

from: itsdjbubbles man, you’re ridiculous

Especially for those freeze-frames of time that he wonders, to his own horror, if Bubbles has been Adrien Agreste all this time.

It takes him the better part of an hour of pacing and fidgeting with his guitar pick to realize that no, he hasn’t been casually messaging a fashion mogul’s son who also just so happened to be Marinette’s own gigantic crush. He doesn’t seem like the type to use “dude” in everyday conversation, and for another thing, it didn't exactly like up with what Marinette had said about them knowing each other in middle school.

One day, Luka swears, he’s going to take this anxiety thing out back and have it meet its maker.

Even if, maybe, he sort of is its maker.

(Okay, maybe he's going to take his brain out back, because he's definitely not responsible for that.)

But he figures, once that initial panic and urge to scream into his pillow wear off, that it might be a cool talking point between him and Marinette. One that, for once, doesn’t have much to do with either of their jobs. Or with how tongue-tied he gets around her because she just won’t stop being so pretty. Not that that’s a problem; both his sister and his mother would have his head for ever thinking that way, and even then, Rose would tell them to get in line. Something about how they didn’t raise him this way, even if two of them didn’t even raise him at all.

Luka waits a couple of days before stopping by the bakery again; it gives them both some breathing room and the time for those postcards to be finished and printed. He thinks about it a lot. The postcards. The effort. Marinette, too, but in his quietly flustered opinion, he thinks that’s a given. He doesn’t get the chance to come until close to closing time again because of his delivery shift; he just hopes they don’t mind too much. He braces himself the whole ride over for whatever may be coming: another friendly crack about napoleons and pear tarts, the beauty of the postcards, maybe even another offer of kindness if Marinette’s pattern is anything to go by.

The one thing Luka doesn’t brace himself for—which, of course, is the one thing that ends up happening—is the door propped open, and the music drifting out through the crack. And he can’t even revel in the fact that it’s one of his favorite songs playing, because…

Because Marinette is dancing. Rag in one hand, spray bottle in the other. No, it’s not like, a flawlessly choreographed routine or anything. It’s more like a mix of what Rose does during their down time when she has too much energy and nowhere to put it, and what Juleka does when she’s trying to find the rhythm of a new song. It’s blissfully unaware, and beautiful, and it feels like home, and Luka can’t stop staring.

He doesn’t mean to. He knows he shouldn’t. It’s just… he can’t remember ever seeing a moment when she was simply “Marinette, “instead of “Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Friend to Practically Everybody.” or “Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Daughter of the Owners of The Best Bakery In Paris.” or even “Marinette, the Girl Behind the Counter with the Sketchbook Full of Secrets and the connections to Jagged Fucking Stone.”

Okay, maybe he’s been watching a couple too many fantasy movies lately.

And he definitely needs to look away, like, right now, because she does this thing with her hips that makes his brain forget how to function for a second, and he needs his brain to function in every sense of the phrase, and God fucking damn it, Marinette Dupain-Cheng is hot and he’s not supposed to think that she’s hot—

And she’s looking at him. Frozen. right as he’s about to get off his bike and knock.

And, like the total idiot he can only manage to be at the worst possible times, he trips. Over his bike. And faceplants, right in front of Marinette Dupain-Cheng.

He’s somewhere between waiting for death to take him, and thanking his Ma for always getting on him about wearing a helmet, and wondering if he really was so stupid that his first instinct was to run, when the bell over the bakery door rings like mad. Someone cries out his name, and the music cuts, and there’s a skitter of footsteps on concrete. When he comes to himself and starts to sit up, he finds himself face-to-face with Marinette, who's kneeling beside him and already scanning him for any injuries.

The first thing she says, with her hand in her hair, is, “Oh, God. She’s gonna kill me.”

The first thing he says, with a wince, is, “Yikes.”

It’s then that the pain sinks in, dull and searing and throbbing all at once, as if punishing him for choosing to say that, of all things. He sits up a bit more, pain chasing up his spine and stinging his palms; his knee is badly scraped and starting to swell, he realizes once he gets a good look at the rest of him. He can’t tell yet, whether Juleka would call this karma or kismet. All he can think is that at least his jeans were already ripped.

“Can…” Marinette swallows hard, but otherwise she’s entirely unfazed. “Can you stand? Put weight on it? Oh God, oh my God, she’s actually gonna kill me.”

“I…” Cautiously, Luka tries to get to his feet, and Marinette makes space for him. All it takes is one step for a jolt of pain to shoot up his leg, and he staggers and clutches the closest streetlamp, nearly tripping over his bike again in the process. “Shit,” is all he can bite out after drawing his breath in through his teeth and holding onto it for too long. He lets it out, little by little, and his grip on the lamppost loosens. “It’s okay, I’m—I can just walk my bike to the metro station, and—”

It’s like she isn’t even listening to him; she’s looking around the bike, evidently searching for something. Finally, she finds it—his bike lock—and after it and the bakery door are secure, she coaxes his arm around her shoulder. It’s almost comical, because he’s got a good thirty centimeters on her, but it hurts too much to laugh. Or, apparently, to stammer in protest when she leads him through the side door and up the stairs to her apartment.

Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Seeing her in her pajamas was enough of an invasion of her privacy. But seeing the inside of her literal, actual home? Oh, no. No way.

“You’re hurt,” she says simply, as if she’s read his mind; her voice is trembling, the way voices do when they know they shouldn’t. “It’d be against like, everything I am as a person if I just let you leave.” She only lets go of him to unlock the door, and only then does it occur to him that, for a few moments that should have been blissful, they were side-by-side, and in some places skin-to-skin.

Mr. Dupain gives them a funny, almost unreadable look when Marinette opens the door. One look at Luka’s leg seems to answer any questions he might have had, and effortlessly he helps Luka to the couch while Marinette disappears into the bathroom. “You know,” he jokes under his breath, “When I imagined someone falling for my daughter, I didn’t mean literally.”

Luka’s face goes hot. “I didn’t—I’m not—”

Whatever he wants to say falls on deaf ears, and Mr. Dupain makes himself scarce as soon as Marinette emerges from the bathroom. Even as she lifts his leg onto the coffee table, Luka swears he can feel those kind, quietly insistent eyes burning holes into him all the way from the kitchen. He doesn’t get to think much more about what Mr. Dupain might have meant, or what he would have said to refute it, because Marinette is pressing an alcohol pad to the scrapes, and it stings like a motherfucker—which is probably a good thing for more reasons than one.

“You don’t have to do this,” he says weakly, because somewhere along the way, I don’t deserve it got stuck in his throat and refused to come out.

Marinette gives him a look. He can’t quite figure out what it means. “Yeah. I do.”

“Nah.” He readjusts, braces himself for the second sting of the ointment and the bandages. “I kinda deserved it. Jules would call it karma, I guess.”

There she goes again, wincing at the mere mention of Juleka. Or maybe… maybe it’s something else. Without a word, she gets up and disappears into the kitchen, and he spends her whole absence wondering what he said or did. He’s only relieved when she returns with a bag of frozen corn and a shrug as if to say, It’s all we had. She presses the bag to his knee, breathing deep in time with him, or maybe in hopes that his breathing will start to match hers. Then she speaks, and her voice wavers.

“Why would you ever think,” she murmurs, “that you deserve any pain?”

Luka opens his mouth. Shuts it. Opens and shuts again. This time, at least for a while, the words don’t even make it to his throat. Eventually, all he can spit out is, “I was. Watching. You.”

“I know,” Marinette says, turning as pink as her shorts. “I saw.”

That’s the one thing he can appreciate: she doesn’t try to downplay it or say it was dumb. Even now, she’s unapologetic, and direct, and God, maybe he’s just fallen a little more. “I shouldn’t have,” he says. “I was gonna knock, I was…” He shifts again, his knee still in her gentle grasp, and flinches. “I just… wanted to see your postcards.”

I just wanted to see you.

“Marinette.” His lips tingle just from saying her name, and his stomach is churning. “Who… who’s gonna kill you?”

This time, Marinette goes scarlet; it would look about as pretty as literally every other color and pattern she wears if she didn’t seem so… mortified. “I’ll go get one of—the postcards,” she says—stammers, more like—and as she’s heading upstairs she calls out, “Papa, he can’t walk. Can we drive him home?”

From the kitchen, Mr. Dupain winks.

1 Photo Attached

RIP lol

and no, i’m not talking about my jeans. those were already like that.

Bubbles isn’t corporate bullshit. Luka feels like he’d be able to figure out something like that from conversation alone. But their talks have been friendly—and more than that, supportive. He’s even shown a few messages to the band, just to check that he wasn’t losing his mind. And he saw how their faces softened in approval, or lit up with excitement. Even Juleka’s.

Besides, Bubbles makes music. And when he samples something, he actually credits it. He knows how to play the game. And it feels like they’re on the same side of the board.

Bubbles has that stage presence; the fact that he only needs that one shadowy picture on his profile is more than enough of an indicator. And Bubbles has a reputation that precedes him. So even if they’re on the same side of the board, it feels like Bubbles is always just a couple of steps ahead.

At least his bandmates are on the same side, and at the same step. All it took was a casual mention, during a late-night band practice, of “the bakery he keeps getting their snacks from” being all in on getting them even more exposure. They didn’t exactly do a good job of hiding their excitement, but he wouldn’t have wanted them to, anyway. Even Juleka, after practice ended, had to admit, “You did good.” And then, with perhaps a bit more snark, “Maybe she’s the one trying to impress you. “

“Stop,” Luka said with a roll of his eyes, but he couldn’t help thinking about it once the partition between their beds was up. There was no way Marinette Dupain-Cheng was trying to impress him.

…Was there?

By now, nearly a day later, Luka’s still asking himself that. Still hemming and hawing like they have more than just two weeks to get their act together. Pacing below deck with his phone in his hand, thinking about pear tarts and pretty faces instead of going to see them in person, and staring at Marinette’s phone numbers until he thinks he’s accidentally memorized both of them.

He doesn’t recognize the pattern or the area code of one of them, so he can only assume that it's an American number. But he still hasn’t mucked up the courage to text or even save the French one in his phone. Why does he need to be scared in the first place? It’s a phone number, and this is strictly business, and everything between them has been strictly business.

Well. Nearly everything. Nearly strictly.

He thinks.

Okay. Okay. All he has to do is say… what? Hi? Who just starts texting someone for the first time with “Hi?” But he can’t go writing a whole essay either, even though at least now he has the power to edit his words instead of just saying them and hoping for the best.

This is harder than it needs to be. And yeah, maybe he’s just making it harder than it needs to be, but it’s not like his brain and the shake in his hands are giving him much of a choice in the matter.

Luka switches back over to his message thread with Bubbles and shoots off a quick reply—flatterer—because maybe answering something easy will make the hard stuff more tolerable. He finds himself looking toward his guitar as though it might lend him strength… well, what the hell. It couldn’t hurt. He plays a doodle or two, idle notes, and catches himself before his fingers can drift toward the beginning of the ocean-blue song. At this point, it’s neither perfect nor good, and he can’t tell if it’s personal dissatisfaction or the numbers that the latest draft has been doing online.

Both. It’s probably both.

Messaging Marinette ends up being just as hard after his attempts at centering as it was before—because as it turns out, the whole music-giving-him-unbridled-confidence thing really only works while he’s playing it. So now he’s left still staring at the blank NEW MESSAGE screen, the cursor blinking almost tauntingly at him because of course it is. Because somehow, he can write a note telling a girl her eyes are pretty and survive long enough to see her smile about it, but he can’t send that same girl a text. It’s not like he can even see her reaction this time, anyway; that just gives him even more of an advantage.

Okay. Okay. He can actually do this. Maybe. He thinks—no, no, he has to.

With a deep breath that he holds longer than he releases, Luka opens a new message.

To: Marinette hey. it’s luka.

And like an idiot, he hits SEND before he’s even put the rest of his message together. So now he has to make a mad dash to come up with something so he doesn’t seem like a total creep for messaging her out of the blue.

For fuck’s sake. This is exactly why he writes his messages in the notes first.

To: Marinette sorry, hit send before i could finish. anyway, just wanted to tell you the band is cool with the postcard idea. i can pay you next time i come to the bakery, if that’s cool.

To: Marinette anyway, it’s really cool of you to offer your help like this. sorry if i didn’t say so yesterday, it’s kind of been... a wild time.

Luka locks his phone before he can agonize too much over what he’s sent, stuffs it away and starts pacing again. It’s not a frantic, shaky thing; no, he’s learned to keep the shakes on the inside until no one’s around to see them. He jumps when his back pocket vibrates, and he nearly drops his phone trying to fish it out. It’s only Bubbles, and he can’t tell whether he’s relieved or disappointed until his phone buzzes again. Twice. And this time, it actually is from Marinette.

From: itsdjbubbles Sorry, I was getting some stuff ready for my next project. Listen, I’m just saying. Don’t sell yourself short as this stuff. Paris is gonna hear you up there, and it’s gonna lose its collective fucking mind.

From: Marinette hi luka ☺️ no worries, i do that too sometimes. here’s the mockup for the postcard. let me know what your band thinks, i’ll do some tweaks and send it to print. sound good?

Luka balks, both at the tone of the message and at the picture she sent. It looks almost exactly like the flyer, same color scheme and everything. The only difference seems to be in the composition, which makes sense; she’s got more of the eye for this stuff, even for someone who only “dabbles.”

To: Marinette wow, this is... thank you? that was fast. and this is really well put-together. i think they’re gonna love it.

you really weren’t kidding, huh.

Luka finds himself sinking onto his bed and staring at the message thread instead of actually doing something productive. And strangely, he’s fine with that. The more time passes, the less scary it is to see her typing back, again and again and again.

From: Marinette course i wasn’t kidding. “help” is practically my middle name to the people who matter.

and i mean, there’s only a little bit of time until your show, right? so, gotta get movin.

anyway, i gotta run. my friend needs help for his summer class and i promised i’d go visit today.

Keep me posted about your band!

♥️

There is far too much in that message for Luka to need to process. “People who matter?” “Keep me posted?” The literal heart emoji at the end? He reads their messages over and over, mostly to confirm that this really, actually just happened, but he’s not going to push his luck. Maybe she just talks to everyone like that, and more importantly, the two of them haven’t been much more than a series of transactions anyway.

A... lot of transactions.

That she’s been doing a lot of giving for.

Luka tries and at least sort of succeeds at shaking the thought from his mind; he can’t read hers, and he shouldn’t try to. He sends her one last text—cool, have a good one—and switches back to Bubbles before he can worry if his words were too casual.

To: itsdjbubbles Thanks for the vote of confidence. I guess you’re not the only one? the bakery I go to, they’re offering to help too.

or, I mean, CBG is offering to help.

Bubbles’s reply doesn’t come until a few hours later. It’s presumably after that project work he mentioned, and definitely after Luka’s had some time to play out the rest of the shakes before he goes busking. His phone buzzes with the notification just as he’s about to leave, and what Bubbles has to say makes his stomach churn and his blood run both hot and cold.

From: itsdjbubbles wait. wait wait wait. hold on i just scrolled your posts.

CBG is *Marinette Dupain-Cheng?*