#feb event

Kim wouldn’t usually say he was over-competitive, but Marinette would. And she was only saying that because today was the third time this week that Kim had asked her to help him master Ultimate Mecha Strike III to win a bet against Max. It was Tuesday. 

“You’ll just have to practise on your own, Kim. I’m busy.” Akuma attacks had been more frequent recently and Marinette barely had time between them to finish her homework. Designing had been shoved to the backburner, despite how much Marinette loved it because it was simply taking so much time just to keep her identity hidden. Being around Kim enough to help him beat Max was practically asking for something to go wrong. 

“I bet once I beat Max I’ll be a better player than you.”

Marinette shook her head, not wanting to be dragged into one of Kim’s bets. After he had lost the race to Alix he should have stopped, but the temporary hiatus only lasted a month at most before he was back to his old ways. “You can think that all you want, but I’m not agreeing to any bets.”

“Really?” 

“Yes, Kim. We all know how your bets turn out. Something will go wrong and one of us might end up akumatised.” Marinette knew she wouldn’t be akumatised, and that it was unlikely Kim would become akumatised after losing a little friendly competition, but there was no guarantee that someone else in Paris wouldn’t be akumatised. Coming up with excuses to rush off, possibly even out of her own house, in the middle of an akuma attack would strange. Marinette knew that one day people would start to realise that she was always missing during akuma attacks, but that hadn’t happened yet. People were just a little more oblivious than she had thought. 

Kim knew he wouldn’t be able to beat Marinette. She was easily the best Mecha Strike III player in the school, she had beaten both Max and Adrien with ease. Even if Kim beat Max, which was he wasn’t sure he could, he would still only be the third-best player in the school. Marinette would crush him like a bug. But she would be nice about it, at the very least. That was one of the things he liked about Marinette; she was nice to everyone. And while that was just something any of her friends would say, Kim wasn’t saying it just as a friend.

It had been a while since he last admitted to having a crush on anyone. The last time he could think of was the disastrous Valentine’s Day that had ended with him being turned into Dark Cupid, something that he didn’t want to repeat any time soon. But Marinette was different from Chloe and she definitely wouldn’t take a picture of him to laugh at and send it to everyone they knew. 

But could he really just ask her on a date when they hadn’t spent that much time together? Kim felt awkward just thinking about it and the only way he could think to spend time with Marinette was a bet and one that he was almost guaranteed to lose. But that was okay. If he could spend just a little bit of time with Marinette as friends, then maybe he could work up the courage to ask her out. Maybe. He couldn’t really tell right now. 

|||

Almost as if it had been summoned by Marinette’s thoughts, another akuma attacked the school that afternoon. The class had just returned to their classroom after lunch and were settling down for the final lesson of the day when a resounding crash echoed through the walls and the akuma attack sirens began to wail. Miss Bustier had dismissed the class early, calling their homework out as everyone evacuated the building in an attempt to find a safer area. With all the teenagers getting akumatised, the school was easily one of the worst places to be hiding out. 

Marinette scanned the crowd as they moved, looking for a chance to escape. When the akuma attacks had first begun, the chaos of everyone panicking had been more than enough for her to slip off undetected, but now that it was a multiple times a week event everyone knew what to do. Her class noticed when she disappeared from their group. 

Today, Marinette didn’t get a chance to transform until she was almost home. She slipped into an alley, hidden from the view of the street by a dumpster and whispered the words that would turn her into Ladybug. Then she was on top of the roof next to her, yo-yo spinning as she surveyed the area for the akuma. Where were they?

Another few seconds of searching yielded nothing so Ladybug leapt off the roof and swung her way back towards the school. If the destruction had been loudest over here, that meant the akuma couldn’t be far, right?

She was right. The akuma was pacing around the basketball court, grinning at something that Ladybug couldn’t’ see beneath the walkway. When she dropped down to fight, she saw that Kim was standing against the wall, trying not to look threatened by a much larger and more terrifying akuma. She had to save him. 

Working on instinct alone, Ladybug threw her yo-yo and wrapped it around Kim, glad that the magic from her earrings helped the yo-yo act as if she was controlling it with her mind. It made her job a lot easier. A single tug brought Kim flying towards her. She grabbed him out of the air and threw her yo-yo again, this time aiming to pull them both out of the school courtyard. They were gone before the akuma could react.

“What were you still doing at school? You should have evacuated with everyone else!” Ladybug placed them onto a roof a safe distance away from school, trying to work out where the best place to leave Kim would be. If she could keep the fight contained to the school she could just lower him to the ground and tell him to go home without passing the school, but if the akuma was searching for someone now she couldn’t predict where they would go. She should have confronted the akuma while they were still at the school. 

“I couldn’t see my friend Marinette, she left last out of the class and I wanted to make sure she was safe.” While he had seen Marinette just as she was leaving the classroom, she had disappeared into the crowd when he looked away for only a second. He tried to look for her when the group began splitting, but even when he looked towards the bakery he couldn’t see her. They hadn’t been that far apart, so how could Marinette have disappeared so quickly? It was only when he turned around to check back inside had he been cornered by the akuma, asking where Chloe Bourgeois was, just like most akumas did. 

He had put himself in danger to check if she was alright? Marinette felt heat rise to her cheeks beneath the mask and hoped that Kim wouldn’t notice. She wasn’t used to someone looking for her that closely since Adrien usually disappeared pretty quickly, and Alya dragged Nino off with her to try and capture footage for the Ladyblog. It was an easy pattern to learn and it allowed Marinette to slip off and transform with only a little suspicion from Alya if a group of them were trapped together. Kim noticing that she was gone put a dent in the whole plan. 

But she didn’t really mind. He was just being a good friend. That was all. 

Standing this close to Ladybug made Kim realise she looked remarkably similar to Marinette, something he wouldn’t have noticed unless he had spent as much time looking at her across the room as he did. Not in a creepy way or anything, but he always found his eyes drifting over to her, if only for a few seconds.  Her smiles lit up his day, even just being in the same room as she made the world seem a little brighter. But he was standing in front of Ladybug, not Marinette. And even though they weren’t the same person, the way he thought about Marinette made him realise that his feelings weren’t going away any time soon. 

The next time he saw Marinette, he was going to find a way to spend time with her, and then he would ask her out. No bets, no need for competition. It was going to go better than when he asked Chloe to be his Valentine and he was sure of it. 

|||

“Marinette, can I talk to you?” Since their encounter when she was Ladybug, Marinette had been thinking about Kim a lot. She couldn’t work out whether Kim was just caring about the other people in his class a little too much, or if there was a deeper meaning to his words. Well, from the nerves clear on Kim’s face it would be safe to bet she was about to find out. 

“Sure!”

He could do this, it would be fine. There wasn’t a single reason in the world that he should be worrying about this so much. “Do you want to hang out sometime, maybe play some video games? Not for a bet or anything, just to spend time with each other?”

Thank you to everyone who participated in our last event, all the creations were gorgeous!