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Adrien doesn’t like silence. The walls were thick with it at home - it dripped from the ceiling and crept down his throat. It’s not a good feeling, to be wrapped in all that silence for so long. He goes out of his way to avoid it.
Except, it seems, with Marinette.
It’s not often, but often enough. He finds himself on her balcony, all done up in his black mask, and she must be annoyed with it by now, but she stands with him, and a certain beautiful quiet comes over him. It’s like silence, but better, because she’s there beside him.
Sometimes the stars are out, but more often they aren’t. Light pollution and cloudy nights keep them hidden, but there’s a still a stubborn few that poke through. He’s not sure, but he thinks those stubborn stars are Marinette’s favorite. Maybe it’s because they’re his favorite, or maybe they’re his favorite because he thinks they’re hers. Either way, he sees her eyes fixed on them more often than not. Maybe she sees something in them, those faraway suns, and maybe she extracts some meaning from them.
When he’s not looking at Marinette looking at the stars, Adrien looks at the moon. He tries his hand at extracting meaning from that silvery silhouette, just to see if he’ll look even half as pensive as Marinette does with her stars.
The moon is just a reflective rock, a huge mirror for the sun to look into and bounce off of, and the moon takes that light and makes itself something entirely new and beautiful to behold. And still, it’s a reflection of a whole. One piece of a larger picture.
When he looks at Marinette now, he sees the light of the moon bouncing off her face, and he sees that the moon is her sun, and he is seeing the reflection of the sun on her cheeks, brighter than ever in the dark. He thinks this might mean something. It feels like it means something.
Marinette turns her face toward him, his eyes heavy on her, and she raises her eyebrows. “What are you thinking so hard about?” she asks, breaking their soft silence in the gentlest way he could ever imagine. Her words fall into the air, and it cradles them, precious and smiling.
“The moon suits you,” he says, and it’s such a silly thing to say, but she just smiles.
“Funny,” she says, and she looks back up at her favorite stars, “I was going to say the same thing to you about the stars.”
—
Marinette is not a morning person. Mornings bear down on her, stick tar on her eyelids and glue weights to her limbs. Mornings come to her violently, unwillingly, another cog in a never ending cycle.
She deals with them, though, as much as she’s able. When she’s woken up before her alarms by the city imploding for the fifth time that week, she deals with the problem and then forces herself to sit on the front steps of her school, nursing any warm drink to make the blue hour hospitable. Sleep is a siren she refuses to submit to.
On those mornings, it’s always Adrien to find her first. The black car rolls up, and he steps out, the brightest thing in the blue, and he always smiles when he sees her.
They sit together, on the front steps. It’s too early for talking, and Adrien seems to understand that, so he gets ahead on homework or sits in companionable silence with her as she attempts to assemble herself into a person.
When the sun breaks over the tops of the buildings, golden daylight spilling through the air and over her skin, sometimes she holds her hands up, squinting one eye shut. The sun in the palm of her hand.
And then she drops her hands and she squints at the boy beside her, watching the daylight paint him a halo, loving and familiar caresses - they’re kin, the sun and him. They know each other.
She cups her hands in her lap, and she imagines what it would be like to hold his hand there, palm to palm. She imagines it may feel something like holding the sun.
“Don’t you just love sunrises?” he asks, and his words are dripped with gold, steady honey in the air between them.
She presses her palms together, looking back to the golden horizon. She smiles. “I do. But I hate mornings.”
—
Adrien wishes he saw Ladybug more often. She’s fleeting, beautiful and quick, a cherry blossom in the wind. He holds the time he gets with her cradled in the palms of his hands, pressing close to his heart, and it’s enough simply because it has to be.
But sometimes he does see her, outside of the fast-paced attacks and frantic fighting, and it’s always strange then. A tablecloth ripped out from underneath him, a little off balance, toeing the line of a well constructed ritual.
He wasn’t supposed to see her when he wasn’t wearing a mask - but he did, every so often, and it left him dizzy with light.
He would be on his way somewhere, anywhere - it never seemed to matter - and he would look up and see her perched on a roof, the afternoon sun making her new. As soon as he sees her, his eyes find their destination, that somewhere anywhere that he’s looking for.
And sometimes her eyes catch on his, too, and it’s almost as if there’s a recognition there, a shared familiarity, if only that they’re in the same place, standing under the same brilliant light, sharing the same gaze.
There’s a quiet in those moments, in those few milliseconds of contact. The world stretches out and narrows, so that it’s just him, and it’s just her, and it’s just the sun and all its poetry between them.
And then she nods her head, sweetly and minutely as if to say “beautiful day, isn’t it?”
And Adrien nods back, sharing with her a smile. “Yes,” he thinks. “A bright, beautiful day.”
—
Marinette thinks there’s a certain melancholy to sunsets. She can’t stand beginnings, as they always come startlingly, and she hates endings, as they’re sad even if you’re expecting them. And enduring an ending alone - the thought is enough to make her search out a partner on her melancholy days, a co-conspirator for her melancholy sunsets.
It’s always Chat Noir.
There’s something about sitting next to him, quiet on a rooftop, sharing a silence between them like a secret, a pack of sweets, a smile, while the sun sets. He can be loud and heard when he wants to be, but he holds his quiet as gracefully as he holds everything else.
It’s best when it’s just them - they always know each other well enough to know when and how to hold the air - and it’s better when Chat allows himself to sink into the sunlight, completely relaxed and golden.
He’ll lean back on his hands, tilting his face up to the sky, and that’s when Marinette will turn her head to look at him. He’ll have his eyes closed then, so he won’t see as she watches the evening light drape over him, illuminating him in swathes of sun.
She thinks about the sun’s rays, how they travel millions of miles nearly instantaneously, and how, in these last moments before they move on to a different part of the earth, they linger on him. On them. Together, she and Chat and the sun, they linger.
“Sometimes I wish sunsets would last forever,” Chat says, and he opens his eyes and looks over at her, and she holds the air between them in the palm of her hand.
“There’ll always be more,” Marinette says, but she closes her fingers over her palm, and she watches the last of the sun’s gold linger on him. “But I wish for that, too.”