Nino/Alya/Marinette/Adrien AU: they all live in the same apartment, they’re all miraculous holders, they’re all still completely clueless.
(under a read-more because it got. really long.)
(and yes I know zorra, like its English counterpart, has less-than-appropriate uses, but i’m using it literally here, and I like to think Alya would choose it despite of (or as an ‘f you’ to) people who use it as an insult)
“I like the blue.” Nino points to the paint sample in question.
“Alya said she likes the purple. Or the orange.” Marinette replies, taking another photo with her phone to send to their girlfriend.
“Alya always likes purple and orange. We are not painting the bedroom either of those colors.”
“Tell Alya that.” Adrien pipes up from the bed, where he’s looking at different paint swatches against the silver-grey bedspread. Nino looks away from the samples on the wall to watch for a moment.
“Dude. You know that color matches basically every other color, right?” He asks. Adrien shrugs noncommittally.
Ladybug giggles, sitting on the edge of a rooftop, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with Zorra. Both of them are staring out at the city, technically on patrol but glad to rest their feet since everything seems quiet.
“What?” Zorra asks, and Ladybug laughs again.
“I was just remembering when Chat and I first met you.” Ladybug admits.
“You were kind of a jerk to me at first.” Zorra points out, and Ladybug laughs again, nodding.
“I was so suspicious, after Volpina. I thought you were another akuma for days.”
“Well, good thing that didn’t last.” Zorra grins, wrapping an arm around Ladybug and pulling her close.
“So what do we think about doing each wall a different color?” Alya asks, before picking up her bowl to slurp at the rice noodles left at the bottom.
“In the bedroom?” Adrien catches on first, and pulls a slight face. “The colors we picked don’t really go together.”
Marinette and Nino nod in agreement.
“We’ll pick new colors,” Alya replies to all of them, once she’s swallowed her food. “We can each pick one, we just have to make sure they match.”
“Tavas! Heads up!” Chat Noir calls, tossing the wand through the air.
Tavas catches it, tail fanning out defensively as Hawk Moth’s latest victim whirls to face him. You’d think that after six years of superhero-ing, one of us would think of a better plan than playing keep-away, he thinks to himself, but, hey, it’s a tried and true distraction method.
“Zorra! Catch!” He throws the wand toward her frisbee-style, and the akuma follows the motion, leaving their back exposed. Ladybug is right there to dart in and grab the akumatized item (a hair pin), and crush it under her foot.
Tavas barely registers when she purifies the akuma, or the Miraculous cure putting things back to normal. He’s on the ground as soon as the pin is broken, just staring at the blue sky and really wanting a nap. He hears talking, then the zip of Ladybug’s yoyo as she swings away. Chat Noir vaults right over him to leave. Jerk.
“Five akuma in three days,” Tavas groans. Then he groans again when his miraculous beeps at him, signaling that he should probably get up and out of sight.
“Ugh, I know.” Zorra lies down in the road right next to him. Oh. He thought she left too. “I wanna sleep for a week.”
“Same.” Tavas holds up his arm for a fist-bump, which she gives him. Then (with great difficulty) he stands, waiting until she’s standing too before they both leave in opposite directions.
“Mari, honey, that pink is crazy bright.” Alya points out,
Marinette huffs in annoyance and puts the paint swatch back.
“What about this one?” Adrien asks, holding up a softer, darker, almost raspberry color.
“Ooh, that one’s cute.” Mari agrees, taking it from him. “Does it match yours?”
Adrien holds up his own choice, a vibrant natural green.
“How about this one?” Alya chimes in, showing them a gentle golden-orange shade, and wordlessly, Nino holds his choice up as well, a light sky blue.
They stare at the four swatches next to each other for a moment, before Nino nods thoughtfully, almost sagely.
“Our bedroom is gonna look like a kindergarten classroom.” He says, laughing when Alya smacks him on the arm.
Chat Noir lands on light feet, scanning the roof for people before releasing his transformation. He feels the small, familiar weight of his kwami on his shoulder.
“I’m hungry.” Plagg says immediately. Adrien rolls his eyes, and heads for the stairwell, letting Plagg stay on his shoulder until they reach their apartment door.
“Hide,” Adrien requests, digging in his pocket for his house key with one hand while the other holds his jacket open so the kwami can land in the inside breast pocket. They can both smell food from inside the apartment when Adrien opens the door.
“Did Marinette make cheese danishes?” Plagg asks, quiet but pleased, even as he burrows into Adrien’s pocket, out of sight.
Adrien turns to close the door behind him, and there’s a flash of motion in his peripheral vision, like something just flew under the sofa. Something fast and blue and orange.
“Did Mari open the windows?” He mutters, mostly to himself, narrowing his eyes at the couch. There better not be a bird in the house; it’ll be hell to get out again.
Moving slowly, he walks to the sofa, bends down, and peers underneath.
Nothing. Hm.
(Hiding completely still in-between the couch cushions, Fiiby and Kalyaan both sigh in relief when Adrien walks away to the kitchen.)
Nino is cross-legged on the bed, listening to music, eyeing the still-white walls critically, when motion on the balcony makes him startle. He looks over, and Ladybug looks back with wide-eyes. She waves, and Nino waves back. Then she swings away, off the balcony, out of sight.
He doesn’t hear the front door open, but a few minutes later, Marinette steps into the room, her face slightly pink.
“Hey,” he greets, pausing his music. “How was the meeting?”
“Ugh,” Marinette sits down on the bed, barely kicking her flats off before she’s twisting around, crawling across the bed to sit in front of him. “So boring.”
“But did you get the next show scheduled?” Nino asks, gently tugging her hair ties out, and brushing gentle fingers through her hair. Mari rocks from side to side slightly, clearly excited even before she looks over her shoulder so he can see her grin.
“Two weeks.” She confirms. “They’re setting up a runway in front of la Tour Eiffel!”
“That’s amazing!” Nino grins back, still running his fingers through her hair. Mari keeps rocking, and faces front to let him redo her pigtails.
“Why can’t we tell them, again?” Plagg asks through a mouthful of cheese danish, and Tikki fixes him with a Look.
“We can’t force it,” She says, for what has to be the billionth time since her miraculous holder moved in with the others. “They have to figure it out on their own.”
“But they’re so clueless,” Fiiby groans, reaching for Plagg’s danish. He pulls it out of her reach, hitting Kalyaan with it in the process. Plagg hisses, and Fiiby flashes sharp teeth at him in a grin.
“It’s better if we let them put things together themselves,” Kalyaan agrees with Tikki, smoothing down (and brushing pastry crumbs off of) his feathers.
“Fine,” Fiiby doesn’t sound too bothered; she’s busy trying to steal the danish.
Tikki sighs, looking to the closed bedroom door. That they haven’t found out already is a miracle in and of itself, she thinks.
Painting the bedroom goes well, until Mari accidentally catches Adrien’s arm with her brush, and he retaliates by putting a green handprint on the back of her paint shirt. She turns back toward him and wrestles him to the ground, careful not to knock over the paint cans. Adrien laughs, squirming, and Marinette presses her hand against his shirt, leaving a perfect pink handprint behind. Right over his heart.
“Mine,” she says, smiling, and Adrien wriggles his brush-holding hand free, painting a green stripe across her middle.
“Mine,” he returns.
“Oh, is that what this is?” Nino asks, wrapping one arm around Alya and leaving blue on her shoulder. She immediately gets him back, flicking her paintbrush at him so that he gets spattered with orange.
“Mine,” they both say at once.
“Alya, get over here, now I have to paint you too.” Mari orders, and Alya laughs, making the rest of them laugh with her.
(They all four end up having to wash their arms and faces of paint, but the walls get done eventually.)
Zorra jumps from roof to roof as her miraculous beeps at her, landing in a crouch on top of her apartment building. Her ears twitch, then swivel toward a small sound. She looks up, and sees Adrien watching her, looking not unlike a deer in headlights, his hands cupped against his chest like he’s holding something.
“Uh,” she scrambles for something to say. “Hi.”
“Hi,” he replies.
They’re both standing completely still, staring at each other, and Zorra doesn’t realize she’s out of time until her miraculous beeps again and her transformation falls away, Alya barely managing to catch Fiiby before the kwami falls.
She looks back up at Adrien, whose eyes have gotten impossibly wider.
“I can explain!” Alya blurts. The panic in her voice makes Adrien blink, shaking himself out of his shock, and then shaking his head at her.
“No!” He says, taking a step toward her, and Alya freezes. “I mean,” Adrien moves his hands down, holding them cupped in front of him in mirror image of how Alya is holding Fiiby.
“Oh,” Alya mutters, locking eyes with the tiny figure Adrien’s holding. “Hi.”
“Hey,” says the kwami, Chat Noir’s kwami, and holy crap, Adrien is Chat Noir. “About time one of you figured it out.”
“I’ll say.” Fiiby snickers. She flies up to curl up against the back of Alya’s neck, under her hair, and Alya tucks her necklace under her shirt, while Adrien holds his jacket open for his kwami to hide inside.
“I’ve been running the Ladyblog since we were in high school, how did I not know this?!” Alya demands.
“How have you been Zorra when you’re running the Ladyblog?!” Adrien shoots right back. “Don’t you have video interviews with her—with yourself?”
“I prerecorded my voice,” Alya shrugs. Fiiby makes a noise of irritation at being jostled.
“How did I not recognize you?” Adrien looks up at the sky, as if it will provide him with answers, which of course it doesn’t.
“We are so blind,” Alya facepalms, and hears Fiiby laugh at her.
Chat Noir and Zorra have been acting weird for three days, and while Ladybug is tolerating it, Tavas is fed up. Glancing between his two partners while they all perch on struts of the Eiffel Tower, he waits for one of them to say something. They don’t.
“Okay, what is your deal?” He asks them both. Ladybug looks up too, but quickly determined who the question was for and waits with him to hear the answer. “Did you start dating or something?”
“What?” Chat asks incredulously. (Over-incredulously, actually.)
“No!” Zorra exclaims at the same time. “Well…”
“Kind of?” Chat finishes for her.
“Uh,” Ladybug starts.
“We were already, sort of, dating, we just didn’t know that we were.” Zorra explains, and Tavas takes a moment to process that.
“Incredible,” he decides. Ladybug laughs, hiding it behind her hand.
“What does ‘sort of dating’ mean?” She asks.
“We’re both dating the same people?” Chat Noir answers, but it really sounds more like a question. Zorra nods in affirmation.
“I have a boyfriend, and he has a girlfriend,” She elaborates, gesturing to Chat, “but they’re dating each other, and we’re each actually dating both of them.”
No way, Tavas thinks. His mind kicks into overdrive, comparing, contrasting; putting the pieces together. (He’s too distracted to notice Ladybug’s thoughtful expression, while she does much the same.)
It’s the middle of the night when Ladybug gets home from patrol, landing on her apartment’s balcony, peering in at the dark room through the glass before releasing her transformation. Tikki zips down to hide in Marinette’s pocket. Easing the balcony door open, Mari freezes when the bedroom door opens on the other side of the room.
Alya sees Marinette’s figure in the dark and hurriedly flicks the light on, both women sighing in relief when they register each-others’ faces.
“What are you doing up?” Mari asks quietly. Stepping inside and pulling the door closed behind her, she glances toward the bed, where the top of Adrien’s head peeks out from under a mound of blankets. If Nino is in there too, he’s completely buried.
Adrien rolls over under the blankets, and Alya turns the light back off.
“I got up-- I needed a snack.” Alya replies. “…I didn’t hear you come home.”
Marinette is about to answer when her girlfriend’s eyes slide past her, widening slightly, and Mari whirls around to face the balcony just in time to see Tavas stand up from his landing. Blue light washes over him, and Nino is left standing in his place, the streetlights illuminating the blue kwami he holds his hands out to catch.
“Oh my god,” both girls say at once. Alya flicks the light back on, making Nino spin hurriedly to face them. He looks panicked when he sees them both, but he comes inside, smiling sheepishly.
“Hey, what are you both doing up?” He asks, in a less-than-stealthy attempt to avoid the subject of the kwami in his hands.
“Oh my god,” Marinette repeats. Then, “Tikki, get out here.”
“Fiiby, wake up.” Alya lifts up her hair. Then, much louder, “Adrien, get up.”
“Huh?” Adrien barely opens his eyes, but when he sees them all standing near the foot of the bed, he slowly sits up. “What’s up?” He yawns.
“The cat’s out of the bag,” Alya says drily. Mari sees a whiskered face phase through one of the nightstand drawers, then the rest of a black cat-like kwami.
“I wanted to say that,” it narrows its eyes at Alya, who doesn’t react.
Adrien stares at each of his partners for a moment, silently taking in their faces and the kwami that are with them.
“I’m too tired to deal with this right now,” he decides, laying down again.
“Good idea, kid.” Chat Noir’s kwami nods sagely. “Sleep now, scream later.”
It phases back into the nightstand, followed closely by the other three.
“I have to agree,” Nino says in the resulting silence. He climbs into bed next to Adrien, and starts snoring practically the second his head hits his pillow.
Mari and Alya share a look, then they both get into bed too, sandwiching their boyfriends between them.
The next morning, Marinette wakes up first. She’s eating breakfast, half convinced she dreamed the whole thing, when Adrien comes out of the bedroom with grin on his face and a kwami close behind him.
“Morning, my Lady,” he greets her cheerfully. Mari groans, drops her head on the table with a dull thump.
“We are so blind,” she says, blushing pink, and Adrien laughs.
