Chapter Text
v.
“So,” Marinette said, tapping her pen against her chin as she whirled around in her desk chair. “First, we do some research. Here’s what we know.”
Sunlight filtered through the windows of Marinette’s bedroom. This was the first time that Chat had come to visit her during the daytime. He had done so on Marinette’s request; she felt that they had a lot of work to do in the next couple of weeks if they were going to introduce him to Alya and Nino without looking crazy or terrifying, or both.
“We need to figure out how you work.” Marinette began to jot notes down on her notepad as she thought out loud. “You can walk through things. And appear and disappear. Is that right?”
Chat’s eyes roamed up toward Marinette’s ceiling as he paused to think. “Yes. I can, but if I don’t think about it, I’ll walk smack into a wall just like I would if I were human.”
Marinette looked up at him from her notepad. She paused to study him in this new lighting—as she’d only ever seen him in the dark, or in very dim light, she was shocked at how much more solid he looked in the daylight. Still not human, of course, but the outline of him blurred into the background far less. “So you have to actively try to phase through something if you want to?”
“Yes. I think that’s why, say, I can sit on this,” he said, and the indistinct silhouette of Chat’s right hand gestured toward the chaise on which he sat.
“Interesting,” Marinette murmured, scribbling furiously. “So you can kind of ‘touch’ physical objects, then. But not people.”
“As far as I know, no. I mean, you’ve seen me run right through you.”
“Right,” Marinette said, and then, without any warning, she got up, walked over to the chaise, and picked up a throw blanket. “Okay. Sorry about this in advance.” She threw the blanket over Chat’s form.
“Hey!” Chat protested, arms shooting up to catch the blanket, but it didn’t matter; the blanket went right through him and slid off the edge of the chaise and onto the ground, as if he weren’t there.
“Oh.” He looked down at the blanket. “That’s weird. I thought it’d definitely land on me.”
“Me, too.” Marinette went back to her desk and wrote down some more observations. She giggled. “If it had, then you’d look like an actual ghost.”
“I can’t tell if that was supposed to be an insult.” He leaned down. “But then, see—” and he picked up the blanket off the floor and placed it carefully back on the chaise.
Marinette blinked. “Weird. But why didn’t it land on you?”
“I really had to concentrate on picking it up,” Chat explained. “I think it’s kind of like phasing.”
Marinette furrowed her brow and pursed her lips. “Who made up these dumb rules? They make no sense.” She checked her watch. “Okay, I think we need to call it for this afternoon. I’ve got to meet Alya for a group project meeting.”
Chat tilted his head. “You don’t sound too happy about it. Isn’t Alya your friend?”
Marinette wrinkled her nose. “Chloé is in my group, too.”
“The horrible girl.” Chat said this like a statement and not like a question.
“That’s the one,” Marinette said, and she smiled. “To be fair, I don’t think she’s totally rotten on the inside. She’s just… Mm. The good version of her is just buried very deep down inside of her.”
She met Chat’s eyes, and even surrounded mostly by the apricot-tinted darkness of his silhouette, they looked dubious. She burst into laughter, and he did as well. Marinette watched out of the corner of her eye as Chat doubled over, and again, she felt a pinprick of awe at how human the movement was for a being made mostly of shadow. Perhaps, though, she was more shocked at the rush of fondness she felt for him in that instant, too.
“You don’t sound convincing at all,” Chat said, once he’d recovered.
Marinette shrugged. She moved over to her desk, packing her bag in preparation to leave. “I tried.”
“I could come along and haunt her if you’d like,” Chat offered, amusement tinting his voice still.
Marinette giggled as she tried to jam another textbook into her already stuffed backpack. “Thanks, but knowing Chloé, she’d make a huge scene out of it. Maybe I’ll enlist you one day when she’s really made me mad.”
“Just say the word, and I’m all yours.”
Something about the inexplicable warmth in Chat’s voice made Marinette look up, and for a moment, when she caught his eye, he didn’t look away or speak. She wondered, not for the first time, what kind of boy he’d been when he was alive. She didn’t know how many seconds slipped by before she finally shook her head, and she could have sworn she saw Chat do the same.
“Well, Kitty,” Marinette said, lifting her hand up in a salute. She smiled softly at him. “Till tomorrow night. We’ve got lots of work to do.”
“Looking forward to it,” he said, and Marinette wondered if she was imagining a smile gracing the barely-visible features of his face. He bounded up the steps of her loft, and Marinette saw his eyes turn back to her. “See you, Princess.” He disappeared through the window.
Princess? Marinette felt like she should have been offended at the nickname as she realized exactly how much pink was in her room. But instead, she tucked the sound of his voice saying it—with that tinge of warmth and affection that she’d heard for the first time today—away inside of her, so that she could pull it out and revisit the moment before she went to sleep.
---
“And then, guess what she said next!”
“What?”
“She told Alya that we couldn’t use her camera to record the video part of the project, because she was just an amateur using a cheap child’s toy.”
Chat let out a low whistle. “I’d imagine Alya didn’t take that too well.”
“Of course she didn’t,” Marinette snorted, leaning back against the wall of pillows at the head of her bed and wrapping her arms around her knees. “You’ll see when you first meet her, but Alya is not one to just take an insult sitting down.”
Chat sat facing her, cross-legged at the foot of the bed. Marinette noted with interest that the blanket seemed to crease a little bit underneath where he sat.
“So what happened?” Chat’s eyes were wide, seemingly brighter than usual, as they remained fixed on Marinette.
“Alya told her that unless Chloé herself wanted to pay for a professional, Alya would do the filming on her camera, and that if she didn’t like it, she could go home and cry to her dad for all she cared.” Marinette’s lips broadened into a grin. “And of course, everyone in our group agreed. Alya’s video projects have always been top-notch.”
Chat let out a loud laugh. “What a fearless girl.” He paused. “I hope she likes me,” he added, in a smaller voice.
Marinette clucked her tongue. “How many times do I have to tell you? Of course she will. She’s only a firecracker to the people who deserve it.” She sighed and brushed a piece of lint off of her covers. “I wish I could be more like her. She’s never been afraid to tell people like Chloé off. I just let her walk all over me until I lose it completely and then get in trouble.”
Chat leaned in a little towards Marinette now. In the dim lamplight, she couldn’t really tell what kind of expression he was wearing, but his tone seemed to indicate a frown. “It’s not a bad thing, you know. To be kind and considerate, I mean.”
She shrugged, and her eyes fell to her fingers, which were drawing patterns into the creases of her covers now. “I don't think of it as being kind. I think of it as being a pushover,” she mumbled, and she was surprised at the level of bitterness in her voice.
“Hey,” Chat chided softly. “I like you how you are now.”
It took Marinette a couple of seconds to process the words, and then the mild jolt of shock she felt from them, and she looked up, slightly wide-eyed.
Chat’s own eyes were wide as well now, and his form seemed to waver a bit. “I—I mean—you just—you shouldn’t want to be anyone but yourself!” He said this last part resolutely. “Of course, I’d love to hear one day that you stuck up to Chloé—but more than that, I… Well, if you weren’t as kind as you are, where would I be? I’d be as good as dead.”
Marinette felt a smile tug at her lips. “Well, you technically are—”
“Don’t say it,” Chat groaned, holding up a hand.
They both laughed, and Marinette felt warmth fill the pit of her stomach.
“Thank you, Chat,” she said softly. “That makes me feel much better.”
“Good.”
His eyes were fixed on hers again in that same piercing way they’d been yesterday afternoon, and Marinette found herself looking for an excuse to look away. Her gaze landed on the clock on her wall. “Oh, it’s late!” she exclaimed. “We haven’t even done any brainstorming tonight!”
“That’s okay,” Chat said. “Why don’t you go to sleep? We can always meet up tomorrow after you’re back from school.”
“No, no,” Marinette said, getting up out of bed and scrambling around for her notepad before running back to her bed. “We should just try a little bit. Don’t want to waste the night."
But even with pen and paper in hand, Marinette spent the next hour talking to Chat about things wholly unrelated to revealing him to her friends, learning instead about what memories he’d retrieved so far, what his own theories were as to who he’d been, what happened when ghosts—or Chat, at least—tried to sleep.
“You don’t… You don’t sleep?” Marinette said, alarmed. “Well, I guess I never considered… But what do you do all night?”
“It’s like sleeping, I guess,” Chat said. “But it’s not totally the same. Usually, when the city quiets down, I try to shut off my thoughts. And after some time passes, everything goes blank for a while. And then I come back, eventually. It’s like waking up, but I don’t dream.”
“How long are you… out for?”
“Long enough,” Chat said, shrugging. “Enough to separate night and day.”
“But it takes you a while?”
Chat’s eyes bobbed up and down—a nod.
“It must be lonely.”
“Sometimes,” he responded, voice soft now. “But it helps a lot when I end the night here. Talking to you. It gives me something quiet to think about, if that makes sense.”
Marinette smiled warmly at him. “I’m so happy to hear that.”
Chat leaned back on his hands, and as he shut his eyes, they disappeared into him. “But I think even when I was alive, I had trouble sleeping.”
“Oh? How can you tell?”
Chat’s eyes reappeared, focusing on the ceiling. “Sometimes, I can see the vision of my old room at night, from my bed—but from a lot of different nights, where I was just awake. It’s always the same. Lots of moonlight, the details of my ceiling, me by myself. And I always feel like I was frustrated on those evenings, for being unable to sleep, for thinking whatever I was thinking.”
Marinette was silent for a moment. Of course, Chat was describing the very common phenomenon of tossing and turning restlessly in bed, but it sounded like he'd experienced it more often than not, if it was such a pervasive memory. “What do you think caused your sleeplessness?”
“I don’t know, I feel like I was stressed a lot, or maybe anxious—especially when…” Chat paused, and his eyes narrowed as he thought. “I know I only got that way after something happened, but I can’t remember what.” He let out a frustrated sigh.
Marinette felt it again, then—the nearly tangible sense of aching that emanated from him. She wanted to hug him.
In that moment, he began to ripple and waver, and in the time it took Marinette to blink, she could see, very suddenly, the faint outline of lips and a nose and eyebrows on his face, the hint of a collar at his neck and the shape of shoes at his feet. It was only the slightest change, but he looked remarkably more human like this, she thought.
“Chat,” she whispered.
He took in the tone of her voice and appeared to know immediately what she was trying to say. He looked at her, and then looked down at his hands, which were just a shade more opaque than before. “Doesn’t take a lot, does it?”
Marinette let out a soft breath as she first registered the dazed expression on his face, then realized that she could tell he looked dazed. “I can see your expressions now.”
“Really?” He stared at her for a moment. “You know what this means?” he said, his voice suddenly very serious.
She had no idea. She leaned in, holding her breath. “What?” she whispered.
“You can see me do this,” Chat said, and he waggled his eyebrows at her with a cheeky grin.
Marinette burst into delighted laughter and threw a pillow at him, which flew through him and off the bed.
They continued to talk long into the night, until Marinette began to stifle so many yawns that Chat insisted she go to sleep. Finally, she let her eyes drift closed as the will to stay awake left her.
The following morning, when she awoke, she would vaguely remember just a few things: Chat still being there for a while, at first, and rather than feeling unsafe about it, her wishing in the back of her mind that he’d stay; and then, later, the feeling of her blankets being pulled over her and Chat’s voice, far away and very close at the same time, telling her, “Good night, Princess.”