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Chat looked down from the screen of his staff to the girl waving her arms up at him from the street below, even more confused. She didn’t even need to call him on the phone; she could have just shouted and he would’ve heard her.
Her motives aside, Chat had absolutely no problem taking a break from a boring solo patrol to talk to a friend, so he hopped down from the roof ridge where he’d been taking a breather and strolled over to where Alya was standing right outside the bar.
“Listen,” she called out as soon as he was close enough. “I’ve got a favor to ask!”
“What’s up?” Chat asked, looking around as he approached. Knowing Alya, this ‘favor’ could be anything from ‘my friend got mugged; can you beat up the asshole who did it?‘ to ‘can you foot my tab? They’re cutting me off until I pay it’ to ‘I look amazing and you need to take my picture right now.’
“Listen,” she repeated, beckoning him over in wide, sloppy gestures. “You know my friend Marinette, right?”
Chat did, in fact, know Alya’s friend Marinette.
Very cute, blue eyes, smile that could light up a city, and a stuttering problem bigger than the Seine.
“She’s… well.” Alya leaned forward, putting a hand to the side of her mouth for confidentiality. “She’s a little bit of a lightweight, y’know? And I kiiiinda accidentally let her have the hard drinks too early, and, well…”
She made a gesture with a head wiggle and a wince that would probably be incomprehensible to anyone else, but Chat somehow managed to gain, she’s dead drunk and rambling, please help.
Or maybe that was just conjecture. Alya was so expressive it was hard to tell sometimes.
“Look, the guys at the bar are gonna head out for another round and I want to go with them, but Mari really needs someone to take her home.”
Alya clasped her hands under her chin and batted her eyelashes.
Chat would be happy to walk Marinette back to her apartment, but he wasn’t going to let Alya know that just yet. He folded his arms and arched an eyebrow. “You want me to abandon patrol for how long, now?”
Alya dropped her hands and rolled her eyes. “I’ve got the outtakes from yesterday’s battle,” she sighed. “Including, like, three hundred pictures of Ladybug. They’re yours if you can do this one little thing that’ll probably take you half an hour, tops. C’moooon, Chat…”
“Relaaax,” he drawled back at her, dropping his arms too and grinning. “I was messing with you. I will take those pictures, though.”
Alya slapped his arm as she led him in. “You’re lucky I was planning to give them to you anyway.”
"D’aww,” he cooed, slinging an arm around her shoulders as they walked. “I knew it! You do care!”
She snorted. “About your Ladybug obsession?”
“Are you really one to talk?”
She just shoved her elbow into his side and walked ahead, calling out to her very cute and very drunk friend as she did so.
Well, this was bound to be interesting.
He… Well…
He wasn’t wrong.
Laying face down on Marinette’s bed while she rubbed her cheek against his butt wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind, though.
(The trip hadn’t been that bad — the worst of it had been the teary look she’d given him when he refused to stop for fish and chips, which might have been more effective if he hadn’t known they made her sick — but then they’d gotten to her apartment and she’d begged him to stay with her and he hadn’t refused.
He was now thinking that maybe he should have.)
“You realize,” he said into the pillow that smelled least like her shampoo, “that this could probably be considered sexual harassment, right?”
“Is it?” Marinette wondered, and— did she just kiss his butt? “It’s just…” She hiccuped. “Just such a good booty. Such a nice ass. Such a love-lovely derriere…”
As it turned out, Marinette was an affectionate drunk.
And, also as it turned out, she really appreciated his glutes.
And Chat appreciated his glutes too! He worked hard to maintain this body, and his backside wasn’t nearly last on the list. His booty was well-deserving of a little appreciation, in his own humble opinion.
But even he thought that this was a bit overmuch.
“…It thanks you,” he finally said as Marinette started to coo and attempt to hug said body parts.
He sort of wanted to take pictures for blackmail purposes, but he wasn’t entirely sure he wouldn’t be taking himself down with her if he did.
His biggest problem was that his body had exactly no problem with a very pretty girl who he kinda-sorta liked in a maybe-more-than-friends kind of way putting her hands all over it, and was celebrating this with little to no input from his higher reasoning.
She was drunk. He was in love with someone else. She was probably in love with someone else. She had no idea that it was actually her fairly good friend Adrien Agreste that she was putting her hands all over.
Once again, she was drunk.
All of these were very good reasons not to react, and yet still tingles shot down his spine when she purred and wrapped her arms around his waist, nuzzling the small of his back.
“‘Ou have a nice back— hic! —too,” she mumbled, wriggling up his body in a way that would’ve been incredibly distracting if there’d been anything to distract him from. “Do you ever tell it that?”
“No,” said Chat, surrendering himself to the role of living stuffed animal for the near future. “I don’t think I ever have.”
Marinette hummed disapprovingly and placed a kiss square on the curve of his spine.
(At this point, Chat was mostly praying his crotch didn’t make it onto her list of his body parts worthy of adulation, because while he didn’t doubt that it would feel new and interesting kinds of amazing, he wasn’t quite sure he would survive the embarrassment.
Or the amazing, come to think of it.)
Thankfully(?), Marinette seemed to be more focused on working her way up, rather than down. His arms were praised next, a smattering of wet, clumsy kisses were left on his biceps with muffled praises of, “Big, strong arms. Like noodles, except they’re a lot of noodles.”
“A lot of noodles?” Chat asked, amused.
“Many,” Marinette affirmed, eyes big and blue and glossy and her lips still pressed to the spot directly below his shoulder pad.
“Wow,” he said, doing his best to sound impressed rather than on the verge of laughter.
“Right?” she said, blinking She smiled a soft, bashful little smile. “I like them a lot.”
Chat cleared his throat, echoing a strangled, “Right,” back at her before burying his face back in her pillow.
(Full disclosure: he didn’t think he’d stopped blushing since her first mumbled compliment, and she’d been at this for a while.)
Marinette kissed his shoulder pad.
“‘Like you a lot.”
Oh.
Wait.
What?
He pulled his face back out of the pillow to stare at her.
Her smile got even more bashful and almost unbearably sweeter at the same time.
“Wait, wait,” he said, mentally stumbling hard. “You like me?”
The smile took a turn for the sheepish without losing any of its sweetness, and then Chat’s heart was stumbling pretty hard too. She tapped his chin with a tiny, kittenish kiss and said, “Why’re you surprised?”
“Oh, uh, I, uh.” he stammered, hot flattery and cold worry crashing through his system at the same time. “I’m not… I’m… Uh.”
(He was used to getting hit on for his looks and status, but not by people he liked.
It was a much less objectionable feeling than he might’ve suspected.)
(He couldn’t accept her, of course, but it felt… good, to know that she’d thought of him like that, if a little awkward.)
She kissed his chin again with a giggle, and moved up, eyes dark and glazed.
He put a hand over her mouth before their lips could meet.
“I’m… really sorry, Marinette,” he said, familiar words much harder to say than they normally were. He braced himself for the look she was about to give him. “I… I can’t accept your feelings.”
She blinked at him from behind his hand, expression clouding with confusion and sadness and then clearing in realization. She grabbed his wrist, fingers sliding under his cuff, and pulled it away from her mouth enough to ask, “Because Ladybug?”
Chat’s ears heated, but he nodded anyway. No use in lying about that.
Marinette, instead of crying or pleading or getting angry with him for turning her down for someone who didn’t even return his feelings, smiled even more warmly than before.
“She’s really lucky,” she whispered, and then pulled his hand over to kiss his knuckles, looking at him with eyes that were huge and dark and endless. “A lucky, lucky bug to have you.”
If she got any more affectionate, Chat was going to blush himself to death.
He choked out a laugh, strangled by the knot she’d twisted his heart into. “Now just tell her that.”
Marinette, in defiance of all logic, got even more affectionate. “Don’t have to. She knows, you know?”
“…Oh.”
Chat wasn’t quite dead yet, but he probably would be in the near future.
Marinette kissed the tip of his nose. “She loves you a lot. Everyone can see it.”
“…Right,” said Chat, mostly for fear that if he said what he was really thinking, she’d expand more on what she meant by that.
Everyone could see that Ladybug loved him?
Sure, she could’ve meant as friends, but that wasn’t what she’d sounded like she’d meant and oh god oh geez…
Marinette blinked at him for a few more seconds, and then clapped her hand over her mouth to cover a yawn that sounded only half-faked.
“Ask her tomorrow,” she advised sagely, and then collapsed on her bed next to him, dragging the pillow that smelled most like her shampoo to herself. “But later. After sleep.”
“…Right,” said Chat, bemused.
Marinette began to fake-snore.
“Got it, got it,” he murmured, laughing as he got up, crawling out of her bed to go retrieve the things she’d probably need in the morning — aspirin and water and a basin, at least.
‘Interesting’ certainly was one way to describe tonight, he thought as he left to the sound of Marinette’s fake snores.
Although it wasn’t nearly as interesting as what he found on Ladybug’s twitter the next morning.
(Nino had to crawl out of bed to keep Adrien from choking to death on his coffee.)
BONUS:
