Miraculous One Shot Compilation

Discovery

A/n - Sequel to Adorkable. Suggested by KatherineSgro. The exact way it was suggested to me is a way I've seen other fanfiction writers come up with before, so I tweaked it a bit to try for a more original reading experience. I hope that doesn't detract from its enjoyability.

"But you love me anyway."

"You got me there," Marinette sighed and ruffled Adrien's hair. "You know I do."

Alya replayed the scene in her mind; it didn't make any sense! A dozen careful plans to get the same couple together must have run amok, and then - boom, they claim to be in love.

She could only come to the conclusion that the couple had been seeing each other far longer than they were willing to let on. How else would they suddenly be so comfortable together?! She, Alya, was going to blow their farce wide open!

Oh, how diligently she had eavesdropped on their conversations every time she saw the couple together - and yet, she never heard one thing that she could use against them. It was always the same lovey-dovey nonsense that had piqued her curiosity in the first place.

She'd even gone so far as to install a covert tracking application on her best friend's cellphone - and she monitored it diligently. Usually it reported to her that Marinette was right where she was supposed to be - at home, at school, at a restaurant to celebrate a birthday in the family. Yet, whenever Marinette pulled one of her typical disappearances, the signal went dead.

Alya was frustrated beyond belief. It was as though her friend had found the tracker, and was purposely switching it on and off at will. How could she? Alya had purposely hidden the download inside a file that was inside another file, one with no link to it from the main screen of the phone. To access it, she would have to look through the list of all applications - and just for an extra precaution, Alya had named the file the least interesting name she could think of: 'Virus Protection Platform'. She'd done all of that during a sleepover while Marinette was sound asleep. There was no way her best friend had gotten through all those levels of defense, was there?

There was only one way to find out. Alya needed to be watching Marinette the moment her signal turned on or off. The signal went off very suddenly and from various locations all around the city, but it more often than not turned back on at the girl's home and, Alya suspected, probably from inside Marinette's room. She was going to be hiding in there one day when the sneaky girl returned home from one of these rendezvous with her boyfriend.

The first time Alya tried this, fate would have it that Marinette's signal reinstated itself somewhere out in the park near the bakery, which offered no definitive answer to Alya. The blogger had needed to play off hiding in her best friend's bedroom as an attempt to jumpscare Marinette - a feat that she pulled off successfully. Her second attempt at gathering the information she needed turned out quite a bit more interesting.

--

The first thing that Alya saw when she pushed open the trapdoor to Marinette's room was a pair of black boots. That immediately sent up a red flag in her mind; she knew boots like that weren't a part of Marinette's personal style. Actually, they looked like they belonged to a boy - and not just any boy, Paris' cat hero. What was Chat Noir doing in Marinette's room?

Sleeping. He was sleeping, and not alone, either. Ladybug was half sitting up on Marinette's chaise longue while half slouching sideways against her partner. Chat Noir, in turn, slumped back on her. Despite what looked like an uncomfortable position to be resting in, both heroes were out like a light.

Alya could somewhat understand. She'd observed as earlier that day the two heroes had taken out a particularly bothersome akuma; they had every reason to be wiped out. It also stood to reason that Paris' beloved couple would want to cuddle while recuperating from their exhaustion - but of all places, why here?

Alya's first order of business was to snap a picture of the moment in front of her. It was evidence - both of the duo's closeness and of their presence in her best friend's bedroom. She wasn't quite sure what she was going to do with it yet, but she knew it was going to be useful. At least a sensational snippet to post on her blog if not a tool to coax a confession or two out of the heroes.

"Ahem," she tried to rouse the sleeping couple. She was eager to hear what sort of excuse they might have. "AHEM!"

Chat began to stir first, Ladybug still lost in her own world of sleep. He first nuzzled the sleeping girl beside him, then as his mind came into focus, raised his head, seeking for the source of the noise that had roused him. His still sleepy green eyes were confronted by the blogger's suspicious brown ones, and he startled fully awake. "Bugaboo!" he hissed, "wake up!"

"So," Alya spoke, tapping a foot, camera at the ready, doing her best to intimidate the famous trespassers into cooperating for her questioning. "What are you doing here?"

"We're, ah..." he shifted his attention back to his partner who had hunched up a little as the commotion disturbed but failed to pull her away from her dreams. "Come on, M'Lady, please, Mari!"

"Marinette Dupain-Cheng! So this is your big secret!" By the time Chat realized he'd called Ladybug by name in front of company, it was obviously too late. Alya had already processed the information and was cackling with laughter. "Ladybug! And right under my nose! I devoted a blog to my best friend without even knowing it!"

"What?" Ladybug was awake now, still not free of her foggy, confused state. She looked up at Alya, over at Chat Noir, and down at her own red and black apparel before her whole situation seemed to register for her. "Oh my," she breathed.

"Well played, Marinette." Alya congratulated her, "I knew something was going on with you, but I never quite understood what. You might have been able to slip under my radar yet again if your boyfriend hadn't spoiled it for you." She looked over at Chat, hands on her hips. "This is Adrien, isn't it? Otherwise I'm going to tell him that you're cheating on him, because this," she held up her photo of the sleeping heroes "is more than friendly."

"Tikki, spots... off." Ladybug-turned-Marinette couldn't quite meet Alya's gaze. It wasn't something to be ashamed of, being caught saving your home city, but it was still embarrassing to suddenly feel incompetent of doing so covertly. "Yes, now you know where I go every time I disappear, but you can't let my identity go viral, that's dangerous! As for Chat, he, well..." as much as she wanted to defend her loyalty to Adrien, Marinette was hesitant to give up her partner's identity, even if he had just accidentally done so to her.

"Plagg, claws in." Adrien returned from behind the mask of his alter ego and put an arm around Marinette, grinning up at Alya as he did so. "Of course I'm Adrien! Why would she want to cheat on me?"

Marinette rolled her eyes, yet still affirmed his claim by planting a kiss on his cheek. "I wouldn't want to, you're a wonderful boyfriend."

"I know I am, but I have to be if I want to keep my wonderful girlfriend."

Their lips met in an instant and their eyes closed. Alya was pretty sure they'd forgotten she was there. She shrugged it off. She'd watched the entire time as two of her friends came to the realization that they wanted to be considered an item; all she hadn't understood was how they worked up the courage for that first big jump into making their relationship official. She got it now. She understood that Adrien had accepted his infatuation with Marinette once he saw her emerge from behind Ladybug's mask. She understood that Marinette had relaxed enough to express her own infatuation with Adrien when the image she held of the perfect boy was softened by the realization of the playful nature he suppressed. The image they were presenting to Alya right now was what had become typical them.

All right, fine. If it meant that much to her best friend, Alya wasn't going to leak their identities. That picture, on the other hand, had already gathered sixty hits on her blog.