Archive of Our Own ^beta

She was beautiful.

At least, that’s what Adrien would think, if he could have thoughts and he wasn’t insanely captivated at the moment. Truth was, she was even more than that. She always had been.

She was Ladybug, there in the flesh at this stupid Parisian ball that his father had put on. She was there for… Who knows what reason. Really, if he could just transform for five seconds, he would ask.

He desperately wanted to ask.

To bad he was stuck there as Adrien Agreste. The famous model garnering even more attention that a hero of Paris would have. He couldn’t transform, not now—

But he could—If he was lucky enough—touch her.

He could look at her and that cloth-made mask and wonder who she really was, take in the artistry of her gown that had everyone staring—Marinette made it, no doubt—and memorize the way she looked in something other than a superhero costume. He could pretend to know her in another way, if only for a moment.

And it was stupid, and it was selfish, and it was everything he shouldn’t have done. But for just five minutes, he could pretend to be someone else, someone who Ladybug would let dance with her the way that he desperately wanted to. Someone who could talk to her outside of the mask and have those stupid, mindless conversations he always craved.

Adrien Agreste was a selfish man, and yet…

“Hi,” because there were no eloquent introductions in his repertoire, “if it isn’t too much, could I bother you to dance?” He’d repeated the proposition a hundred times before walking up to her, amazed that in this ball, for once, she was not the most important person in the room. No, she was somehow lost in an array of heroes and supermodels and bloggers and whatever else his father deemed moderately respectable.

And really, when he was talking to her, it was easy to ignore the way that his father watched him in the background.

She blushed a lovely light pink color that he’d wasn’t sure the origin for, but that he wanted to memorize and keep to himself for the rest of his life. Her hand touched his, devoid of the latex and leather that so often separated them, and her fingers slid into his far too easily. A part of him worried that she would realize why.

Maybe a few years in the future when he finally told her his identity, she would look back at this moment and laugh. Maybe she’d realize how ridiculously excited he was at that moment, that he was fighting every natural reaction in his body to not present her with sweaty palms. Maybe she would realize that when he slid his hand around her waist his hands knew how to grip her just right because he had done it hundreds of times before and her body’s shape was practically implanted in his palms.

Adrien swallowed as she drew close to him, one hand at his shoulder and the other tightening around his. Her blue eyes drifted up to meet his and that dusting of rose across her cheeks only became darker, a blush appearing across his own face to match it.

“You don’t have to be nervous around me,” he said. “I’m just Adrien, but you…” She was so much more—to him, to Paris—God, he wished he could tell her, but those words died on his tongue, replaced by the need to hold her and only that. He had to focus on what little he had in the moments that he had it for.

But it was like she knew that, that those fleeting, dreamlike moments were an anchor for him. They would be what he repeated in his head over and over again before he went to bed at night. Her cradled against his body, the two of them moving in perfect sync like they belonged together—like she was some creature that existed outside of his wildest dreams.

“You could never be just Adrien to me,” she whispered.

She had to make it better, didn’t she?