Work Text:
“I want to marry you.”
She said it at 11:37pm, cheek pressed against the kitchen table, eyeliner smudged after a 14 hour work day, and voice slurred from the sleep she’d been without for close to three days. Alya had driven out to her office, coaxed her away from her designs, and laid her out on the back seat of her car, blanketing her with her jacket before driving back to their apartment. The dozen or so other times they’d done this, Alya would always brew her fresh tea over the stove – with actual tea leaves, not store bought bags – to help her sleep, only to find her snoring across the couch or at the kitchen table before it was even ready.
Alya was ready to keep the tea warm for herself and carry Marinette back to their bedroom, but Marinette muttered tiredly from her seat at the kitchen table and made Alya stare into the pot of tea, afraid to look behind her.
“…what was that babe?”
Marinette yawned in response and said nothing for a long minute, convincing Alya that it was just something silly mumbled from half-sleep, or something that Alya had misheard. But Marinette merely repeated what she’d said – stronger this time, as if its repetition was enough to keep her awake past what her body demanded. “I want to marry you.”
Alya swallowed and picked a mug from the cabinet above her. “I don’t understand.”
“You know, weddings,” Marinette explained. “Both of us in white dresses. A room full of relatives we haven’t seen since we were in diapers. Chocolate cake. In a hall or a garden, because I know you don’t like churches. Everything purple and pink.”
There was trepidation making her chest feel tight, but Alya still had enough in her to laugh. “That’s pretty thought out. Not surprising, considering it’s you.”
“I think about it a lot,” Marinette admitted quietly, her nails scratching at one of the cracks in the wood table. “I was thinking about it today. I just wanted you to know.”
Alya poured the tea from the pot into a mug and turned around to see Marinette gazing at her – eyes tired but focused. She pulled out the chair right next to Marinette and offered her the mug of tea, which Marinette refused. “Do you….” Alya cleared her throat, took a large gulp of tea, and winced when she burned her tongue. “Do you want to do this now?”
“No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“That’s a clear answer.”
“I’m running on caffeine, fumes, and the grace of God, right now. I don’t have the energy to be eloquent.”
Alya knew that Marinette was picking up on her attempts to dodge a clear answer to her statement, but for some reason was deciding not to draw attention to that bit. Instead, she was staying quiet, watching the steam float up from the rim of Alya’s cup, and waiting for her to say something that wasn’t just a hurried attemptsat deflecting. Marinette overanalyzed where it didn’t matter and jumped on impulse where it did. It was only with Alya that she achieved a masterful balance of when to push and when to let the conversation go slack. It made Alya guiltily scramble for some pithy explanation, despite the fact that Marinette would likely let her go without giving one.
“I didn’t expect you to ever say something like that,” Alya admitted. “At least not this soon.”
Marinette frowned and walked her fingers across the table until her hand was braced gently around Alya’s wrist. “It’s not that soon, is it?”
“We’ve only been dating for five months.”
“But we’ve known each other for five years.”
“We were friends for most of those five years.”
“So?”
Alya sighed out through her nose and bit on her thumb nail. “I’m trying to think of how to explain this…”
Marinette sucked on her bottom lip and started to pull her hand away. “You don’t have to say yes or no. I wasn’t expecting you to.”
She scrambled for Marinette’s hand before it slipped back into her lap, gripping around her four fingers and rubbing her thumb along her bony knuckles. “You deserve a yes or a no,” Alya told her. “And…it’s not like I’m debating between saying yes or saying no.”
“You look like you’re debating something.”
“I am. But it’s not what you think.”
Marinette pulled their intertwined hands closer and pressed a kiss to the nail of Alya’s thumb while she waited. Her eyes were slow to meet her own, but when they did Alya squeezed her hand back tighter. Marinette looked at Alya like there were diamonds in her lashes and words written in her eyes. She was always marveling at something, always trying to find something, and always being enchanted by everything she saw. That’s how Marinette had been looking at her since the day they met, and it was that look that always made Alya’s heart stutter and feel as though it was getting its fill of something too rich to be true.
“Did I ever tell you when I knew I was in love with you?” Marinette shook her head. “It was like a switch. It happened right away, and it was like all these shadowy, blurred things sharpened all at the same time, and I just sat there in front of you feeling like I was seeing you for the first time. It was just short of a year after we met – when I failed my history exam and stayed home to mope, and you crawled into my bed and held me for hours until you had to go home the next day. Right there in your arms. It hit me.”
“We’ve slept in the same bed plenty of times before that,” Marinette wondered.
“I can’t explain it,” Alya shrugged. “I can just tell you when it appeared. Quick, sudden, and heavy.”
“Heavy?”
Alya snorted. “You know when you fall in love with enough straight girls, you start getting used to the fact that your feelings are always stronger, bigger, and more cumbersome than theirs? I thought the same with you for a really long time. And maybe that was my fault for not telling you the truth sooner, but it always just seemed like I had this huge, awkward thing to carry around that would always be two steps ahead of what you felt for me.”
“What are you saying?”
Alya laid her head down next to Marinette’s until their foreheads were almost touching. “I thought that for close to five years. So I guess…it’s an old habit that’s hard to break.”
Marinette’s other hand came up to brush away the hair from Alya’s temple. “You think I’m not serious…”
“No, it’s not that,” Alya promised. “I don’t think you’re lying or playing a game. I just get surprised when you say things like that. It still feels like I’m two steps ahead of you, so it doesn’t feel real. Like sometimes I’ll see you standing in the kitchen making us breakfast or I’ll wake up to you sleeping right next to me….and I can’t conceive of how I got here.”
Marinette licked her lips and ghosted the tips of her fingers along Alya’s hairline. “So when I say things like ‘marry me’….”
“I think this can’t possibly be real.”
Words were the sort of thing you needed the ability to say and the courage to mean. Otherwise they turned into muted secrets or empty placeholders. It was never a question of whether Marinette was sincere or whether Alya had the ability to say what she felt. It was always a question of whether Alya could bear being comfortable with one feeling more of less intensely than the other – whether that sort of imbalance was natural or something Alya should continue to feel wary of. She wasn’t sure if all of that was vocalized in the little that Alya told Marinette, and she suddenly felt silly for having such a poor reaction. “Sorry,” she muttered. “I shouldn’t be doing this when you’re so tired.”
They stayed still for so long that Alya feared this was the awkward end to the conversation she wasn’t prepared for them to have. Marinette’s gaze hadn’t faltered at all during that time, and Alya wasn’t sure if that was due to exhaustion or due to some poor reaction to what Alya had shared. She got her answer when Marinette kissed her – slow, lazy, and too quick for Alya to melt into and enjoy.
“I hear you,” Marinette muttered against her lips. “And I respond to that by saying…I still want to marry you.”
Her lips were leaving small pecks on Alya’s eyelids, cheeks, nose, chin, and lips again. “New storefront has me strapped for cash, so I can’t afford a ring or dresses or a hall right now. But give me a couple of years when everything will be smoothed out, and when my savings will be more than just a long line of zeroes. I’ll want to marry you. I’m going to marry you.”
Alya laughed and felt one hand pulling loose the tight bun on the back of Marinette’s head. “I believe you,” she decided. And she did. Deep down, in her heart of hearts that was so hard to blindly listen to, she believed every word of it.
“Listen,” Marinette explained. “I don’t know if I can fix the feeling that things are uneven between us aside from telling you that it doesn’t matter who felt what first or who feels one way and not the other. I just need you to know one thing. I love you down to my bones – like you’re too much a part of me to just rip out. I can tell you it’s deep, it’s honest, it’s wonderful, and it keeps my head high and my heart bursting. If you believe anything I say, believe that.”
Alya let out a shaky sigh of relief and pressed a kiss to the middle of Marinette’s forehead. “I love you too,” she whispered. “Down to my bones. It’s the one thing I know how to do without thinking.”
Marinette grinned. “I know things like marriage and weddings are really far away, but I needed to tell you how I feel. And you don’t have to feel the same way right now. I’ll wait. Waiting with you would be a beautiful thing.”
“You won’t have to wait long,” Alya said, a promise and a desire already brewing that she knew wouldn’t need much to flourish. “I know you won’t.”
Marinette’s thumbs were brushing her cheekbones when they kissed again. “I get what you mean,” she said. “When you said that it feels like this isn’t real sometimes. I feel the same way. Like something this nice is just meant to slip through your fingers one day.”
Alya tightened her grip on Marinette’s hand – tight enough to feel a steady, strong pulse beat in between their hands. “I’m not going anywhere,” she promised. “I couldn’t dream of it.”