Work Text:
How the hell does Marinette get herself into these situations?
Okay, no, each individual part she gets: First, when Chat started coming around to her balcony once a week, she wasn't going to turn him away. She's not sure what brought him to her in the first place. It was... awkward. Sort of quiet; topics of conversation erupted out of nowhere to loom between them with jagged and threatening menace as Marinette tried to weave her way through talking to her superhero partner without letting him know that she's his superhero partner.
She wasn't the only one who was awkward. Ladybug knows the side of Chat Noir that's playful and flirty and surprisingly casual about the horrors they throw themselves into every day; she's never met the Chat Noir that chokes over his words, that stutters, his sentences taking a left turn into something entirely unrelated to whatever they were talking about while his voice wavers, like puberty is an idea that hasn't occurred to him yet.
The Chat that Marinette knows isn't the same as the Chat that Ladybug knows. If she thinks about it that way, it makes sense, because Marinette knows that she's a different person, too; but it makes her feel like she's seeing inside of Chat more than she's supposed to, more than he knows he's giving her. It feels like she's taking something from him without his knowledge. Without his permission.
But there's nothing she can do about it outside of telling him her identity, and that's not happening.
After a lot of false starts, after some pointed comments and a verbal slapfight Marinette doesn't care to remember, they started to feel out who they are around each other. Where the limits were – what she can ask, what he's allowed to tease her about.
It wasn't effortless. It wasn't even easy. It was like finding the parts of herself that Marinette hasn't used as Ladybug yet and stitching them together into a new person, just for Chat.
But maybe a new (old) friend is worth putting the work in.
During the spring, Marinette would lie out on her balcony and sketch or do homework while Chat lurked on her railing like a particularly skinny gargoyle. Sometimes he was watching her hands and the pencil in them, sometimes the street, or looking across the city and sighing wistfully – Marinette had the feeling that he was thinking about Ladybug when he did that, but she never wants to ask that question, so. She refrained.
Instead, she asked other things: what was his suit made of, did the ears really move on their own, does it hurt when he takes the tail off. Fangirl questions. Things she can offer up to Alya as penitence if she ever discovers that Chat and Marinette have a weekly friend date to talk about nonsense.
Things between them get better, more natural, when Marinette starts to invite him inside of her room as the weather turns to the cooler days of fall. Chat is less awkward when he can lie on his back and toss a ball of yarn up into the air to fall on his face, and Marinette can work on her embroidery or sewing while she forces Chat to watch old episodes of Project Runway and translate for her.
It's more fun when she starts to argue with whatever garbage the judges say that he's just translated for her. Chat doesn't know whether to get defensive or stare at her like she's a crazy person. Sometimes he gets caught up in it and starts to argue back. The annoyed look on Chat's face afterward is one of Marinette's very favorite things.
(He knows way too much about fashion for someone who's never told Ladybug about having an interest in it. Marinette tries not to think about it, but – )
Eventually Marinette settles on a project that needs the yarn ball Chat's claimed as his. She grumbles over the state of the yarn and strictly forbids him from stealing a different one, even when Chat brings out the kitten eyes, even when he droops as miserable and pathetic as he possibly can to show how saaaaad he is about how cruelly she's treating him.
During their next hangout, while Marinette knits a pair of fingerless gloves for Alya and Chat lies on the floor like a sad sack, his hands empty and loose, his arms stretched out over his head to be as long as humanly possible, Marinette wonders whether he's the kind of person who needs something to mess with all the time, or whether it's the suit that makes him fidgety.
Or maybe he's just a cat who likes a cat toy.
She goes out to a pet supply store near her house the next day and buys a tiny mouse about the length of her finger. It's cheaply made and not very well stuffed, but it's got catnip in it, so Marinette thinks that she'll find out the answer to her question soon enough.
The next time Chat comes over, Marinette turns around in her desk chair, with the mouse trapped and hidden under her thigh, and watches as he slides down her ladder, turns, and pauses, his eyes narrowing.
Chat sniffs the air. His nose is twitching. So is his tail.
"Something wrong, kitcat?" Marinette asks innocently.
He spins in a quick circle, his tail flaring behind him. "Something smells weird," Chat says, wariness in his voice and in his body language: slightly hunched, his arm bent and ready to snatch his baton. "What is that?"
She hadn't expected him to startle like this, to be as worried as he is, and Marinette instantly ditches the several more minutes of teasing she'd been planning on. Deliberately pitching her voice to artificial heights, she scoffs. "I have no idea what you mean, Chat. My room has always smelled like this."
Chat freezes as he's turning back around. He turns his head to look at her slowly, his eyes narrowing on her like she's become his prey. "You're lying to me, Princess," he says. He sounds sort of impressed and irritated and cautiously intrigued, all at the same time. He prowls closer to her, looking her over from head to toe. "What is it? You're not wearing anything new."
Marinette gulps. He's not supposed to look at her clothes that intently. He might recognize the miraculous someday if he looks at them for long enough –
She snatches the toy from under her leg and throws it past his head. Chat turns his whole body on a dime, following the object with his eyes locked on it. The mouse bounces once on the floor on its way to slide underneath her chaise, but before it can get there, Chat pounces on it, his hands cupped over it as he braces himself on his knees.
This is already one of the funniest things she's ever seen.
Chat cocks his head at his cupped hands, watching them suspiciously, but when nothing happens he opens his hands with cautious care, like he's waiting for something to jump out at him.
Marinette can't see his face when he realizes what it is, but she hears the long, deep, resigned sigh that comes out of him, and it makes her giggle.
Chat turns his head to look at her over his shoulder, his eyes narrowed, but he can't hide the wry humor lurking in his eyes. "You're never going to let me forget this, are you?" he asks her.
"No," she says, and giggles some more.
"Great," Chat says on a sigh, getting up – but Marinette notices that he brings the toy with him.
It turns into the thing that Chat automatically reaches for when he comes into her room. He tosses it from hand to hand, he plays football with it, he lays on his back and chucks it at the ceiling only to catch it over and over again while he talks to Marinette about anything and everything in their lives that have nothing to do with dressing up in brightly colored suits to fight a madman. Sometimes he falls asleep with it draped over his eyes. Marinette's even caught him gnawing on the mouse's face once or twice when she turned around too fast from her sewing machine.
It's his. Marinette keeps it for him, but it belongs to Chat. It lives on the corner of her desk, and on the few occasions that it's not there, he grows increasingly sulky until Marinette finds it for him – once it was knocked underneath her desk and it took her forever to even notice it was there. Chat was downright whining by the time she hooked it out for him.
"I didn't sign up for adopting an actual cat," Marinette tells him snippily when she tosses it to him.
Chat brushes the mouse off carefully, turning it over and over as he examines every bit of it for floor fuzz and dust. "I can't believe you would treat it so disrespectfully," he tells her, shaking his head with mock dismay. "Marinette. I thought we were friends."
"Please tell me you're not going to put that in your actual mouth again," Marinette groans.
Chat freezes for a telling moment before he peeks at her from under his lashes. "Definitely not," he says. His tone is incredibly unconvincing.
Marinette wrinkles her nose. "God, boys are so gross."
"Catboy, thank you," Chat says, flopping down on her floor to stretch out in what seems to be his favorite position. "I promise I brush my teeth and everything."
"Doubt," Marinette says drily, but she turns back to her sewing machine before Chat can get a word in edgewise. She turns on season 5 of Project Runway and soon enough, she's arguing with Michael Kors and his bad taste – again.
The episode ends without Marinette moving to put on something else; she's in the zone and she doesn't want to stop for long, which means her sewing machine is the only sound in her ears for a while.
Until she hears something rip.
It's the one sound that makes Marinette immediately stop whatever she's doing, since it can mean her fabric is caught under her chair or on her desk or worse, caught up in her sewing machine. The sewing machine stops when she's no longer pressing the pedal, and in the silence, she starts looking over her project.
But nothing's caught. Everything's fine.
Marinette knows what she heard...
Her eyes narrow.
"Chat?"
Marinette spins around to find Chat with the most heartbreaking expression on his face she's ever seen, and a pile of very sad fabric and stuffing in his hands. She takes in the situation at a glance and sighs. "I told you not to put it in your mouth," she says to him.
"It didn't smell like me anymore!" Chat protests. He pouts at Marinette and holds the stuffing and scraps up to her. "Can you fix it?"
The part of her life that Marinette never expected to happen is this:
She's sitting in her chair with needle and thread, pinching the little mouse shut with one hand while she ladder stitches the seam back together. Chat is sitting at her feet, watching her hands move, his eyes huge and intent and fascinated by this very basic process.
It's weird.
Marinette has learned to deal with the unusual, but this is weird, even for her.
Luckily, Chat ripped the seam, not the actual fabric itself, which means the toy is more resilient than she expected. All she has to do is sew it back up and he should be able to mess with it for a few more months before this happens again.
(Marinette had the genius idea of reinforcing the crappy fabric about two minutes after she started sewing the thing back together. She can't bear the idea of ripping the seam back open and watching the light die from Chat's eyes again. She'll have to do it next time.)
"There have to be more interesting things to do than watch me sew, kitty," Marinette points out without taking her eyes off the toy.
"Was there catnip in there?" Chat asks, ignoring her statement completely.
"Yeah," Marinette says with a laugh that's mostly a sigh. "Not enough to get you high, I think."
"It smells good," Chat says dreamily. "Or maybe that's just you."
Marinette's fingers pause in the middle of a stitch, her shoulders rising up toward her ears. Chat seems to realize what he said when she stops, and his eyes go wide as he scrambles into frantic speech. "I didn't mean anything weird! I – I just, I – " He groans. "It's nice in your room? Like, comfortable?"
"Comfortable," Marinette repeats in a dubious voice, but her shoulders are slowly, slowly sinking back down where they belong. She goes back to sewing, thinking about it.
It makes sense, she supposes. Her room is cozy and they're friends. It would be weird if Chat weren't comfortable, when she thinks about it like that. But there's a difference between that and someone smelling good.
At least, there is to Marinette. Maybe not to a sixteen-year-old catboy.
She finishes the seaming and pulls the thread tight, watching the seam disappear with satisfaction. Ladder stitch is fun to use, because it's invisible if she's done it right, and she has. Marinette secures the thread and snips the tail, and then she tosses it at Chat's face and laughs when he snatches it out of midair, giving her a grumpy look.
"Enjoy," she says to him. "But not too much. I'm not bailing you out if you get arrested again."
"Liar," Chat says, grinning back at Marinette, and then he throws himself backward to toss the mouse up into the air.
Marinette sighs. Somehow she's acquired her very own cat, she thinks with a fond smile. The cat redistribution system is apparently working just fine.