Chapter Text
Adrien couldn’t help being beautiful.
It was a rare thing, little shining moments interspersed between long periods of being a raggedy (if adorable) youth, and a rumpled mess.
He spent his days working his employers’ farm, tending the sheep, mucking out the stables, making repairs here and there, until he retired to the small shack reserved just for him. It had at one point been a shed, and he’d been offered the chance to expand it, but he didn’t have many possessions and only really needed room for a bed.
The farmer’s daughter, an exceedingly quiet creature named Marinette, brought him out his share of dinner every night, and although she never did much other than sit with him or stammer something about the weather, it tended to be the most human interaction he got in a day. He was always sincere when he thanked her and handed her back his plate or bowl, and she was always jumpy and nervous when she brushed off his gratitude and scurried back inside.
Suddenly alone, with a full stomach and an aching body, Adrien would retire to his hovel, collapsing immediately onto the bed. After hours of toiling in all kinds of weather, Adrien was most often a) filthy, b) smelly, and c) still, somehow, beautiful.
He was pretty pleased with the realization, when it eventually came to him. His mother had been beautiful, and he’d always been told he looked like her, so why shouldn’t he be beautiful too? He’d catch his reflection in the water barrel some days and pause for a while to stare into her green eyes, set in his own round, mud-caked face.
On these occasions, Adrien felt it was a disservice to her eyes, to be stuck in such a dirty, guileless face, and he’d scrub himself clean with the hem of his sleeves until satisfied. It was the closest to preening he got until, shortly before his sixteenth birthday, he rode into town to buy some candles.
And everyone ignored him.
Well… not everyone—but those around his age, certainly. They had never been close (Adrien spent most of his time on the farm or sleeping,) but casual nods would be exchanged in passing, gossip shared under the eaves of some shop or other. Now, in the glaring absence of these social niceties, Adrien found himself faced with absent glares.
From all around, narrowed eyes leered, and narrowed mouths sneered, and people muttered conversations he couldn’t quite make out.
Thinking that perhaps he’d committed some kind of faux pas, Adrien did his best to look contrite instead of bewildered and hurt. He bought his candles in silence, and went home somewhat shaken. He simply nodded at Marinette instead of thanking her for dinner, but if she noticed she didn’t say anything.
The next few visits to town went almost exactly the same, until one day Adrien couldn’t take it anymore. He cornered Théo one morning outside the blacksmith’s and begged to know where he’d gone wrong. Théo stared at him with disgust.
“I should think,” said Théo, shoulders stiff and fists clenched, “that you’d at least have the courtesy not to pretend to ask, after what you’ve done.”
“Done? What have I done?” asked Adrien, a little desperate.
“You’ve stolen them,” spat Théo, pushing his way past and leaving Adrien less bewildered but more hurt than ever. He stared after Théo, who shouldered his way through a crowd of tittering girls, and Adrien realized who ‘them’ was. Without a word, he returned to his horse and rode for the farm. He didn’t succumb to tears until he dismounted.
“Oh Cheval,” he sobbed into the horse’s mane, “what am I going to do?”
“Adrien?”
Adrien whirled so fast his head spun, and through a veil of tears saw Marinette standing in the small paddock before the stable. She looked deeply uncomfortable, but the concern in her eyes was unmistakable. Embarrassed, Adrien rubbed at his face with the side of his arm, smearing tears and snot and probably some drool and possibly some horse hair all over himself. Staring at his sodden sleeve, Adrien took a moment to think to himself, Well, it can’t get any worse—
And then he hiccupped.
Like the herald of a storm, the small chirp signaled a renewed onslaught of sobbing, and Adrien burst into fresh tears at this new humiliation. Choking and sniffling and hiccupping as he was, it took some time for him to notice the arm around his shoulders.
As his unrestrained weeping wound down to shuddering gasps and, still, hiccups, Adrien found himself sitting on the ground, his face buried in his knees, which he’d pulled up to his chest. The arm around his shoulders rubbed consoling circles on his back, and as he quieted down he could hear the small words of reassurance being offered.
“It’s okay,” said Marinette, soft and sweet as anything, “It’s all going to be alright.”
“You don’t know that,” he croaked, “y-you don’t even know what’s wrong.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
Adrien sat for a while, focusing on his breathing. Marinette didn’t say anything else, giving him time to sort out his feelings on the matter. Did he want to talk about it? It couldn’t hurt, probably. And it was so nice to have someone actually look at him, someone his own age. He’d been practically shunned for weeks now.
“Everyone hates me,” he said finally, pushing his face into his knees a little harder, so that the words were muffled by his pants.
“Who’s everyone?”
“Not… not everyone-everyone, but all the boys. An’ the girls won’t talk to me.”
“The boys?” asked Marinette. It was becoming increasingly clear to Adrien that she had no idea what he was talking about, but he didn’t really know how to communicate it without essentially saying ‘I’m so good-looking it’s a curse’.
“The boys in town,” he mumbled. She was still rubbing circles on his back, and it helped him calm down a little more. He tried to time his breaths to the top of each loop.
“Did something happen?”
Adrien groaned.
“S-sorry, I just mean—well—did you do something bad? I’m sure they don’t hate you,” Marinette clarified.
“They won’t talk to me,” said Adrien, sniffing. He tilted his head so one red, puffy eye could peer out at Marinette. “Some of them won’t even l-look at me. I didn’t do it on purpose…”
“What happened?” asked Marinette, gentle and supportive and probably about to laugh in his face when he said this next part—
“I got too beautiful and I stole all the girls.”
He winced as he said it, pressing his face back into his knees so he didn’t have to watch her process his words. Her hand stilled against his shoulders.
“You ‘stole’ them?” asked Marinette, her voice somewhat strained.
He peeked out at her again. She wasn’t laughing. She wasn’t even smiling.
“That’s what Théo said,” he told her. He was still mumbling a little, but the fact that she wasn’t openly mocking him was encouraging enough for him to raise his head from his knees. He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand.
“Théo would,” she muttered darkly. Adrien didn’t say anything, watching her eyes flash. He’d never seen Marinette get angry. Was that what was happening? Was she angry?
“Listen,” she told him firmly, looking at him with such a severe expression that he automatically sat up a little straighter, “I know it’s hard right now, and it might be for a long time, but this isn’t your fault. You didn’t do anything. If people like you it’s their choice or their feelings or whatever, and—and your face is hardly something you can control, so Théo’s just plain wrong. If the boys won’t talk to you, then just talk to the girls.”
“The girls won’t talk to me either,” he reminded her, “They all like me.” Okay, that was speculation, but it sure felt that way, and he was none-too-pleased. It was nice to be liked, and while he was deeply flattered and more than a little humbled, if being liked meant no one was going to talk to him for the rest of his life, he’d rather return to his blissful days of undesirability.
“Oh,” said Marinette, reddening, “R-right. Well—well you should still try talking to them. I bet it would make them pretty happy. I know it would make me happy, if um, if I were them.”
“Yeah?” asked Adrien, allowing himself to get a little hopeful. Maybe everything would be alright after all.
“Yeah,” she said, “and—they can get to um, get to know you a little better, too. Maybe they won’t be so bad about liking you once they’ve seen how silly you are.”
He gave a scandalized gasp, steepling one hand on his chest.
“You wound me, my lady! Are you implying they only like me for my pretty face? Am I just a piece of meat to you?”
She giggled, pushing his shoulder as he grinned back at her. They sat in companionable silence for a while, watching Cheval browse the edges of the paddock for spare bits of grass, until Marinette’s mother called her for dinner. She got to her feet, dusting off her skirts, and Adrien caught her wrist.
“Thank you,” he told her, and boy, did he mean it. He felt so sincerely grateful for her help and advice and concern that he almost teared up again on the spot. Marinette stared back at him, mouth clamped shut, face getting redder and redder the longer they looked at one another. Her eyes dropped to his hand around her wrist, and he released her immediately with an apologetic smile. She returned it, gave a small, jerky wave, and took off for the house at a dead run.
Adrien blinked.
Apparently her ability to form complete sentences in his presence had been temporary—which was a shame, because as it turned out, Adrien really needed to hear what she had to say. It seemed he’d been missing out on quite a bit of wisdom, these past few years.
He went about his evening chores, trying to figure out the catalyst for her sudden verbosity.
Let’s see, he had been crying—well hopefully that wasn’t it—she had been angry—again, wow, hopefully no—and he had been… silly? Flirty?
Adrien washed his hands and face, more to rinse out the snot than to make any attempt at hygiene, and waited outside the back door for his food. He fidgeted, overly conscious of how he was standing. He wound up posing against a tree trunk, leaning against it with a hollow bravado he knew Marinette would see through in an instant. Nervously, he crossed and uncrossed his ankles.
She opened the door, took one look outside, and burst into laughter.
“Hey!” he protested, though he couldn’t quite smother his grin.
“I’m sorry,” said Marinette, though she didn’t sound very sorry at all, “you just look—I mean—why are you standing like that? How are you standing like that?”
“Skill alone, my lady,” said Adrien, uncrossing his ankles and pushing himself off the tree with his back. His arms were folded over his chest, which he made a point of puffing out as he swaggered towards her. She was doing her best to stifle her giggling, with little success.
He took his plate from her with an elaborate flourish of his wrist, and a low bow. She was helpless with mirth at this point, but seemed to be more relaxed than she’d ever been around him before.
Hm.
Flirty.
He might be onto something.
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“My lady,” he said to her one day outside the stables, “will you polish my saddle? It need shine only half as bright as your eyes—though I’m sure no amount of varnish could do even that credibly.”
She had just finished polishing her own saddle, or he wouldn’t have asked; Adrien hated polishing anything, and avoided it at all costs, including lurking around the stables until someone else was already in the process of it.
Marinette’s cheeks colored as she met his playful grin with a roll of her eyes. “Only half as bright, you say? Maybe I’ll just keep them closed, and save myself the trouble of polishing anything.”
She turned away from him, a self-satisfied smirk playing across her lips. Well, that wouldn’t do. Adrien would be damned if he let her win another round of their banter before lunch.
He caught her by the waist with his fingertips, and she twisted back to him, surprised. She went crimson at their proximity but didn’t move away, staring at him. He stared back, feeling his own cheeks heat in surprise at his actions.
“I—I would never ask you to trouble yourself,” he stammered, swallowing his own embarrassment, “but to deprive myself of this view on the account of a chore? I can’t allow it.” He leaned closer to better illustrate his point, eyes still fixed on hers. He waggled his eyebrows.
Marinette shut her eyes then, growing impossibly redder, to Adrien’s great satisfaction.
“Well I suppose you’d better polish your own saddle then, hadn’t you?” she asked as she opened them again, her voice remarkably steady. She pressed her index finger to his nose, gently pushing him away. He stepped back immediately, and his victorious grin melted into a fond smile as she gathered some tools from the workbench and went on her way. He was about to call after her with some ill-thought-out farewell when she stumbled over a wayward brush at the entrance of the stables.
Adrien caught her by the elbow, and she fumbled to catch the tools. As she regained her footing, she heaved an exaggerated sigh. Her eyes narrowed as she looked back at him, but he knew she wasn’t irritated at him, or even at her clumsiness—she was just annoyed she’d lost her dramatic exit. His grin widened. If his specialty was flowery language, hers was sweeping away and leaving him to follow.
“Are you alright, my lady?” he asked, smothering a laugh.
“Yes, thank you,” she said tersely, as if she was being forced to, “I guess the ground here is a little… unstable.”
Adrien dropped her elbow as if he’d been burned, eyes shooting wide. She smirked at him again, smug as anything, but this time when she left, Adrien found he didn’t mind ending their encounter at a disadvantage. She’d made a pun. A terrible pun.
It was juvenile, an obvious distraction from her blunder, so why did he find it so endearing?
Why was it making his heart beat so fast?
“Oh,” Adrien gasped. “Oh, oh dear.”
Dumbstruck, he only realized he was standing outside the stable gaping like a gargoyle when she came to return her tools and looked at him curiously. Adrien snapped his jaw shut with a squeak and scurried away before she could see his blush.
He retreated to his shack, slamming the door behind him and pressing his back against it as a ward against intruders. Blood roared in his ears and colored his face, which contorted in a myriad of ridiculous expressions as he worked over his dilemma.
Okay. So he had feelings for Marinette.
That wasn’t such a big deal, right? He could be mature about this. He could just walk up to her and tell her that—
Oh. Oh no.
The flirting.
He’d been flirting with her for over a year, with increasingly extreme lines and gestures and poses, and she’d never taken him seriously. She’d been embarrassed, sure, maybe a little exasperated, but never stupefied like he felt now.
Even if she hadn’t taken him seriously, how was he supposed to top that? What could he do to convince her he was serious? Should he even bother? She didn’t seem very impressed with him. In fact, witty banter aside, he wouldn’t be surprised if she found him annoying as all hell.
Adrien groaned, sinking to the floor, his back still pressed against the door. This was a disaster.
He didn’t know what to do with himself.
He spent the next week in a miserable haze, slinking around the farm like a feral cat, bolting at any sign of ‘his’ lady (a sobering sobriquet he found himself reflecting on far too often). When he couldn’t avoid her company, he did his best to avoid eye contact, and kept conversation to a bare minimum, terrified of accidentally giving himself away and losing her forever.
One such evening found him hiding out on the hill that overlooked the pasture, watching the sunset with the bitterness of his self-imposed exile heavy on his mind.
He heard Marinette’s footsteps in the soft grass behind him, and realized he knew her step.
He should leave. He should run down the hill and hide among the sheep.
He closed his eyes. It had been nearly three days since he’d spoken to her, and he found he missed it more than he could have imagined. The sound of her voice, the sparkle in her eyes when she laughed at him, her constant, restless motion. Maybe giving himself away wouldn’t be so bad; he seemed to have already lost her forever.
She sat beside him wordlessly, and after a long moment he opened his eyes to find her watching the sunset. The dying light painted her milky skin a thousand shades, fiery and warm and so familiar it took Adrien’s breath away.
“You’ve been avoiding me,” she said.
Adrien swallowed.
“You’ve been avoiding me and I don’t know why,” she went on, gaze fixed determinedly on the horizon. “I’ve been thinking and thinking, trying to figure it out. If I said something, or did something, or—“
“No,” Adrien broke in, his voice hoarse and creaky. “No, you didn’t do anything.”
“Then why?” she whispered. She still wasn’t looking at him. The sun had set completely, and while its warmth lingered the colors began to drain away. He saw her as she was, pale and uncertain and… heartbroken.
Unthinkingly, he reached out and cupped her cheek, turning her face towards him.
Her eyes were bluer than the sky had ever been.
“I was scared,” he whispered back, “I still am.”
“What are you scared of?” she asked quietly.
He didn’t answer her immediately. He was scared of a lot of things. ‘Losing you,’ sprang to his tongue, but here beside her it didn’t seem like enough. It might be an answer, but it wasn’t what she was asking. Not really.
Adrien had lost so much in his short life. Family, friends—there were times he thought he’d lost his mind. Losing Marinette wasn’t just a possibility, but a certainty. He’d always lose everything, in the end. Even if she loved him, she’d realize her mistake one day and take off like his father, or she’d grow sick and die like his mother, or—or something. He couldn’t help losing her, but maybe he could help how he felt about it. Maybe he could do something to hold his heart together this time.
“Loving you,” he answered finally, when dusk had drawn around them and cast deep blues over the pastures. His hand slid from her cheek, retreating. He almost closed his eyes so he didn’t have to see the anger flash in hers, to watch her rage against him.
To his surprise, no anger came.
“Oh,” she said softly. She looked amazed more than anything, and he realized he had just inadvertently confessed. Well, good. Maybe she’d be disgusted with him and leave. Get it over with quickly. He looked away.
Marinette’s hand was cold against his face as she turned it back to her, the same way he’d turned hers. Her thumb rubbed his cheekbone and he realized he’d been crying at some point—before or after her approach he couldn’t say.
He met her gaze with guilt and fear, choking on his tumultuous feelings. Her eyes were unfathomable, deep and patient and something akin to awed. Adrien shook under the weight of them, pressing his face into her palm without breaking the stare.
She smiled, and it was like the sun breaking through clouds on a rainy day.
“It scares me too,” she admitted. “Loving you. I used to think there was nothing better, then that there was nothing worse. But… with you and me, it doesn’t matter. It’s scary, but we can be scared together. We can be brave, together.”
He trembled under her hand, under her eyes, under her spell.
“Besides,” said Marinette, stroking his cheek with an idle thumb, “I don’t know about you, but I don’t think I could stop loving you if I tried. It’s like… it’d be like trying to stop the sun from setting. I wouldn’t know how to go about it if I wanted to.”
Adrien squeezed his eyes shut. His whole body was shaking; this couldn’t be real, could it? If this was a dream he was going to have some very stern words with his subconscious. He curled inwards to stop the rattling, leaning towards her as he tried to hold himself together.
She lowered her face to keep level with his, and he could sense the weight of her gaze through his eyelids. She was so close that he could feel the warmth of her breath. She smelled like sunset and meadows and cinnamon.
“I love you,” she told him, scarcely above a whisper, and his eyes flew open. She had finally looked away, her gaze lowered as she blushed amaranth in the blue of twilight. Rather than looking embarrassed, she seemed almost defiant, the stubborn set of her jaw practically daring him to argue with quite possibly the best news he’d ever heard.
Adrien tried to speak, but found himself overcome. He pressed his forehead to hers, and her eyes darted back to his. She saw something in his pleading, terrified gaze that softened her immediately.
“I love you,” she repeated, even more softly.
Adrien kissed her.
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“I got you a present.”
“If it’s another dead bird, then—“
“I thought you liked pheasant,” he protested, sitting on the floor beside her. She was sitting at the kitchen table doing the mending, practiced hands guiding the needle with an easy grace Adrien knew she’d deny. If he pointed out to her how beautiful and confident her movements were, she became self-conscious and had been known to prick herself. He settled for admiring her instead, folding his legs neatly underneath himself and watching her nimble fingers.
“I like pheasants in stews, not bleeding on my freshly cleaned table,” she told him, her stern tone somewhat ruined by the smile threatening to overtake her.
“Just carrying it in here had me sneezing up a storm. After I went through all the trouble of catching it, it seemed only fair someone else handle the preparation,” said Adrien haughtily, turning his nose in the air. She pressed it with one finger, tilting his head back so far he overbalanced. Yelping, he leaned back and caught himself, the box his gift was in rattling against the floor.
Marinette’s eyes gleamed. “So it’s not a bird,” she said, voice carefully void of the curiosity he could read in every line of her face.
“I don’t know that you’ve earned a present,” he told her, grinning as he shifted the arm holding the box behind his back. “If you’re so set on rejecting my delicious and allergy-producing offerings, maybe you’re not ready for this either.”
“Keep it then,” she said primly, turning back to her sewing. Adrien startled, leaning forward in confusion. She ignored him, a faint smile still playing across her lips.
“My lady,” he protested, trying to catch her eye, “of course you’ve earned it.”
“And how have I done that?”
She asked like a teacher who already knew the answer. Maybe she did.
“By being the most wonderful girl in the world,” he told her dreamily. She turned pink but still didn’t look at him. “The kindest and cleverest and most beautiful creature in all the land, with patience and wit unmatched. By virtue of your—“
“Slow down before you pull something,” she muttered, now thoroughly blushing.
“But none of those is the reason I got you this,” he said seriously, smiling when she finally spared him a curious glance.
“Then why?”
“Because you’re a terrible farmer,” he told her.
She opened her mouth to retort, but he interrupted her by raising his free hand, grinning, and she rolled her eyes to indicate he could continue.
“You’ve couldn’t tell a scythe from a thresher if your life depended on it, you get distracted talking to the sheep when you’re supposed to be feeding them, I once saw you so busy drawing a bird that you didn’t realize it was eating your lunch, you—“
“There had better be a point to this.”
“—you scrunch up your nose when you’re angry,” said Adrien, “You celebrated the cat’s birthday last year. You taught Cheval how to count. You walk into walls on a regular basis because you’re daydreaming about something or other. You care about everyone and everything, and you do everything you can to make them happy.”
She stared at him. She wasn’t blushing any more, but the tender affection in her eyes gave him the courage to continue.
“You’re a good person, Marinette, and I love you. So I got you a present for no good reason at all.” He held the box out to her with an apologetic smile, and she took it, looking a bit dazed. When she sat staring at him for another minute, he chuckled and opened it for her, revealing her gift: a pair of earrings.
They were simple dark stones, nearly black, but as Marinette turned them over in her hands a scarlet schiller gleamed in the light. She looked up from them after a long moment, staring at Adrien wordlessly.
The unexpected apprehension he saw left him floundering.
“I—I know they aren’t much, but—”
She cut him off with a kiss, gentle where he would have predicted fire, but it left his lips buzzing and head swimming all the same as she pulled away, resting her forehead against his and gracing him with a blinding smile.
“I love you too,” she murmured, “but I don’t have pierced ears.”
“Details, details,” said Adrien breathlessly, leaning back in for another kiss, “I’ll make you a necklace.”
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“I don’t want you to go,” said Adrien, pouting.
“I’ll only be gone two weeks.”
“Fourteen days without my lady,” he whined, draping himself off her shoulders like a rucksack as she continued packing, unaffected by his theatrics. “Fourteen days without your conversation, and your beauty, and your kisses. What am I going to do without you, Marinette? Who shall keep me in my place? I’ll turn to a life of crime.”
“And here I thought you already had, stealing my heart like that,” said Marinette, smiling as she kissed the tip of his nose. She flitted around the room like a hummingbird, plucking this and that from her various shelves and drawers and folding it neatly while he clung to her, sagging behind her as she went along.
“Maybe you aren’t a good influence after all,” he declared, turning his face away in mock offense, “stealing kisses like that! Why you ought to be ashamed of yourself, my lady. We’ll be bandits at this rate. I suppose the advantage would be we could just steal fabric from some hapless traveler, instead of sending you gallivanting across the sea like—“
“Adrien,” she interrupted gently, “it won’t be that long. The harvest festival will only be a few days, most of the time I’ll just be traveling. I’ll be bored more than anything. Everything will be okay, I promise.”
He looked away, tightening his hold on her shoulders. He pressed his face into the base of her neck, lips against the thin leather cord of the necklace he’d clumsily assembled for her. She paused in her packing to lay her hands against his where they clutched at his sleeves.
“I’m the only one who knows which fabrics we need, and how to identify them,” she reminded him, “and you need to stay here to manage things without me—if you can.” Adrien, despite being a simple farmboy, did in fact do most of the work on the farm. It didn’t make him feel any better about staying behind.
He smiled at her teasing, but it faltered a moment later.
“I fear I shall never see you again.”
“Of course you will,” she murmured, squeezing his hands.
“But what if something happens to you?”
“Hear this now,” she said sternly, turning in his arms so they were face to face. He straightened, watching her anxiously. “I will always come for you.”
“But how can you be sure?” he whispered.
“This is true love,” she said simply, smiling up at him with such raw certainty that he found himself returning it in spite of himself. “You think this happens every day?”
She wrapped her arms around his waist and kissed him, and he relished in it, trying to hold onto as much of her as he could. It was going to be a long two weeks.
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Marinette didn’t reach her destination. Her ship was attacked by the Dread Pirate Ladybug, who never left captives alive.