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Marinette knows she will always remember the moment she realized she was irretrievably in love with Chat Noir. The moment when she finally figured out how completely and utterly necessary he was for her to remain sane, and how much she longed to allow herself to kiss him senseless, will be burned into the back of her eyelids until her very last breath.
Sounds dramatic, and like something a dumb teenager in love might say, but she can’t be held responsible for her thoughts when the swarm of magical ladybugs bring him back and drop him right in front of her. Her lungs feel as if they’re collapsing, her breath escaping her in stuttery puffs of air, her chest heaving with the need to hold him close.
She opens her mouth to tell him how idiotic he is for sacrificing himself for her even though she knows it needed to be done, but stops. She can’t yell at him for jumping in front an akuma at the very last instant, when it caught her by surprise, because she knows that he didn’t do it only due to his feelings for her – he did it because it was what Paris needed him to do.
She can’t yell at him for what he did, and the frustration boils in the pit of her stomach, like acid, threatening to spill from her eyes in the form of tears. She knows he had to do it but, damn, does she hate him for doing it. And for smiling at her softly, right now, as if nothing had happened, as if she hadn’t spent 7 horrible minutes trying to desperately defeat the akuma so she could bring him back, grinning with his stupid mouth as if it was no big deal.
Hell, she hates him in that moment. Which is, funnily enough, when she grabs him by the shoulders and pulls him closer. At first, it seems like she’s going to hug him, but before she knows it her lips have found his, in a frantic movement that catches them both by surprise. He gasps against her lips, but Chat has never been one for hesitation and immediately starts kissing her back, giving her no time to regret it – not that she’s even thinking about regretting it, as she winds up her arms around his neck, pulling herself to her tiptoes as she drags him down to try to close the already small distance between them.
His hands start wandering towards her back in a frenzy, but he’s careful with her in such an instinctual way that he makes sure that his claws don’t scratch her as he slowly drags his hands all over her shoulder blades. Tears have started to fall from her eyes, but she doesn’t care; she even ignores the fact that they’re in broad daylight and cameras must be going wild all around them. She doesn’t care about anything but the feel of him, warm and alive, in her arms.
It must have only been three minutes at most, but the moment feels like an eternity of sensations, and yet the yearning still taking refuge in her chest makes it seem as if they have only started kissing. It’s an oxymoron, in a way, the fact that she feels as if she’s had this moment for a thousand lifetimes and still she wants to keep living in it until the end of time.
The beeping of her miraculous gives her pause, and she starts to pull away; it’s then that she notices that Chat lifted her off the ground and has been holding her up. His eyes look wild, they’re half unfocused and at the same time they’re sharp, staring her down with an intensity she didn’t think was possible. She thought she knew the weight of Chat’s gaze before, but she realizes that she had been wrong because no one, not even him, has ever look at her like this before.
Was this how he looked at her before kissing her during the Oblivio incident? If so, she can understand why it happened. She doesn’t think she could ever be able to resist his soulful eyes, peering into the very core of who she is and choosing to love her anyway. She feels stripped down, but also fearless. And that’s how she knows this was always meant to happen, that they were meant to happen.
He grabs her by the waist and uses his baton to take her away from the cameras. And in that moment she doesn’t even want to hide her identity from him, even though she must; she wants to share everything with him, but she knows she can’t, and not for the first time she curses the secrecy they need to survive, and she curses her inability to ignore the rules and just be with him without barriers.
She detransforms safely in an alley, behind a dumpster, Chat not looking at her while she feeds Tikki. She longs to just grab him by the shoulder, make him turn around and kiss him again, without her mask standing between them, with her bare fingers digging into his hair and pulling him closer, with everything that she has.
She does kiss him again, once she’s back to wearing her spots. And she doesn’t let go, not ever again.