When Gabriel realizes that Ladybug has a thing for his son, he strategically sets up advertisements of Adrien shirtless all over the city, to distract her while she’s fighting the next akuma. It’s super effective!
Part two of a two-shot. 1100 words. Rated PG for mild comedic ogling.
Now with 600% more puns.
Read part one here.
Adrien had been self-conscious all morning. It was normal for people to get excited about the new ads, and he was used to people whispering and blushing around him more than usual, but this time it was different. He’d never done a shirtless ad before, and even his friends were acting oddly around him afterward. Well, it was mostly Marinette that was being strange, and he didn’t want to ask her about it.
He was relieved when an akuma was spotted. Finally! He’d felt like he’d been waiting forever for a chance to be someone else for a while. As soon as he reached the battle, he suspected something might be wrong with his partner. She had let herself get knocked around, which was unusual for her, but she was also in a terrible mood, not to mention very sunburned, though that probably had nothing to do with her current state.
The second time he rescued her, he thought maybe she was sick, and that the redness in her cheeks was due to fever, not sunburn. By the fourth time he rescued her, he was seriously concerned.
There were other odd things about her behavior that he couldn’t explain, too. She was awkward, distracted, and she’d spent almost the entire fight staring at him. He’d spent a lot of time imagining what Ladybug staring at him would be like. It was usually highly romantic and ended with him hugging his pillow and Plagg making retching noises in the background. It was nothing like the reality he now faced. Ladybug’s eyes bored into him, hard and slightly manic. He wasn’t sure what to make of it, and he wasn’t sure he was brave enough to ask her about it.
They chased the akuma around a corner and found themselves face-to-face with another one of the ads. Why, oh why, did the akuma keep leading them back to these stupid things? Cat Noir was tempted to cataclysm it, but he stopped himself. It would raise too many questions.
Ladybug seemed to having as strong of a reaction as he was having. She whipped around to him and starting staring again.
And that was when he realized it. Ladybug hated Adrien. She wasn’t staring at Cat Noir, exactly. She was avoiding the billboards. She was disgusted by them, couldn’t even stand to look at pictures of him.
He believed that for all of two minutes, until he found her after getting separated again. She was staring at a billboard, face redder than he’d yet seen it, openmouthed. He landed as quietly as he could next to her, but she shrieked anyway.
"I wasn’t distracted!“ she screamed at him.
"I never said anything about-”
"I wasn’t staring!“ Her eyes flicked back toward the billboard before fixing on his face, desperate to prove wrong the new, tantalizing idea that was forming in his mind.
"Let’s go akuma!” she yelled. “I mean, fight. Fight the akuma.”
Cat Noir didn’t move, letting his gaze volley back and forth between her and the billboard. A sunburn, ha! She’d been blushing this whole time! Hate him? Ha!
A smirk sprouted on Cat Noir’s face. “You think he’s attractive, don’t you?”
"No!“
Cat Noir leaned in, letting her flustered, red face fill his vision. "You have a massive crush on him, don’t you?”
"NO!“
That was all he needed to hear. Next time he saw his father, he was going to give him a big hug. Ladybug liked him! She thought he was handsome!
"You want to stare at him all day, don’t you?” he asked, too giddy to stop himself, even when his partner gave him a menacing look. “Maybe you should sneak over to his house later. I bet he’ll let you stare at his muscles in person.”
"Can we just fight the monster, please?“ Ladybug said. Every bit of her visible skin was a deep shade of crimson by now, and she was using a hand to block her view of the billboard, all pretense of not avoiding it gone.
”Abs-olutely.“
Ladybug wrinkled her nose and jumped away, but that didn’t stop the stream of gleeful puns.
"I can see why you like him so much, My Lady. He’s such a suit-able match for you.” This earned him a slap on the shoulder.
When she told him to hurry up, he told her to keep her shirt on. When she lied about liking Adrien a second time, he joked about her being in denial of the naked truth. She threatened to toss him into the Seine for that one.
Each joke made Ladybug angrier. (Though, when he accused Gabriel of being a very clothes-minded man, she laughed.) She got more ferocious with the akuma, and he finally realized that his puns were actually helping the fight. She focused on being angry instead of the on the ads, and it was clearing her head.
One thing he couldn’t figure out: Why was she glancing at him with concern? He caught the brief pitying frowns she threw at him, between her angry scowls, and he wasn’t sure what they were for. He was having the time of his life, and it showed.
Once they’d discovered the antidote was puns, the distraction of the billboards didn’t have much of an effect on their fighting. The battle took a little longer than normal, but they cleansed the akuma and set everything right within a few minutes, like they always did, and none of Paris seemed to be the wiser about the delay.
They fistbumped atop the Pont Neuf, overlooking the river. Ladybug waited next to him as the white butterfly fluttered out of sight, completely harmless, and then rested a hand on his shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, voice earnest. “You really helped me focus.”
That had honestly not been on his mind at all, but okay. “You’re welcome,” he said.
"That was-“ She removed her hand and looked away, down toward the swirling water. Her hair hung limp and damp from her own swim a few minutes earlier. "Are you okay? We don’t have to talk about my crush on Adrien if it makes you uncomfortable,” she said quickly. “But that was probably difficult for you, and I wanted to you know I’m grateful for your help, and to make sure you were okay, and… yeah. Sorry.”
So that’s what the pity had been about. She thought he was hiding his broken heart behind a wall of puns. To be fair, he did that a lot and she knew it, but NOT TODAY!
"What can I say?“ He pulled himself up to his full height and threw out his chest impressively. "I’m an im-pec-able partner.”
Ladybug knocked him off the bridge and straight into the river, and he smiled the whole way down.
Okay, so @pope-duwang-i left a comment ages ago (on ch 3 of Seeing Double) about Gabriel making a shirtless ad campaign when he realizes Ladybug has a thing for his son, to distract her while she’s fighting. And a few weeks later I made that pun about pecs, and then those two things combined together to form this beautiful monstrosity. (I’m not even sorry.) Thanks for reading!
ruinedchildhood
