I swear, Miraculous Ladybug has completely taken over my mind. I love me some identity reveal, and I had the idea of sleep-deprived Adrien doing his shoulder-touch thing to sleep-deprived Marinette, her seeing it as an attack and hurling him into a wall, him bouncing off the wall, and then an unpowered accidental reflexive ninja battle in the middle of the schoolyard. So I wrote it. If anyone wants to do anything further with this, they’re allowed, just drop me a link so I can read it.
Marinette Dupain-Cheng was exhausted. Between a history paper, a physics lab, her normal schoolwork, helping her parents with a slew of large orders, and an abnormally large number of akuma victims, she had achieved a total of about two hours of sleep over the past 72 hours. So when she felt a hand on her shoulder, her first reaction was to assume it was an attack and react with a burst of adrenaline and instincts honed by months of superheroics.
So she grabbed the offending limb and, with a twist, sent her attacker hurtling toward the wall.
Adrien Agreste was exhausted. Between his schoolwork, tightly-scheduled photo shoots, fencing lessons, and a frankly excessive number of akuma victims, he wasn’t doing any better that Marinette was in terms of sleep. Without thinking, without even being properly awake, he’d approached his classmate for…something or other. Whatever it was he wanted to ask was driven from his mind by fact that he was hurtling toward a wall at high speed. Adrenaline and cat-like reflexes took over.
Twisting to land feet-first on the wall, the teen model pushed off, instantly reversing his course to try to tackle at his attacker.
Marinette saw her attacker coming, just a blond blur of motion, and, still working on Ladybug reflexes, attempted to flip over her assailant, using him as a springboard and driving him into the ground in the process. She did not expect a pair of strong hands to wrap around her arms and twist to the side, slamming both her and her attacker to the ground. Twisting her legs underneath her, she flipped upwards, in the process lashing out with a foot to try and take her aggressor by surprise.
Operating entirely on adrenaline, superheroic reflexes, and sleep deprivation, Adrien and Marinette were almost blurs in a complex dance of attacks, counter-attacks, counter-counter-attacks, blocks, dodges, and motion. Within seconds, half the students in the schoolyard had phones out, recording the brawl in what the internet would ultimately declare to be “totes fake- I can see the pixels!”
After about thirty seconds of high-speed combat in which neither one delivered more than glancing blows, Marinette and Adrien disengaged from each other, breathing heavily. Marinette reached for her side, where a spotted Bangalore usually rested at Ladybug, at the same time that Adrien tried to take his baton from this back. It was at exactly this point that reality penetrated, and they both realized that they’d been accidentally trying to pummel each other.
“OhmyGod! Adrien! Are you okay?” Marinette was mortified. She’d almost beaten her crush half to death! Oh God, now she’d never get to go out with Adrien for milkshakes and then get married and have a loving family of beautiful black-haired children with green eyes!
Adrien, on the other hand, was reevaluating his life choices, particularly those that pertained to Marinette, Ladybug, and being a superhero. When the pigtailed girl suddenly stopped trying to kill him, and instead ran over to him, shrieking his name suddenly everything clicked. Aside from Adrien himself, there was only one person in Paris who could fight while bouncing around like a demented pinball, and the instant the thought ran through his head, it was like the skies had parted and God himself had pointed out the obvious to him.
The words were like a punch to the gut, and in an instant, Marinette knew.
