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“Were you on my balcony last night?” Marinette demanded immediately, not even a second after Chat landed, the boy coincidentally trying to end up on the other side of the roof where she wouldn’t see him. He had landed there in an attempt to be respectful and give her space, knowing that she was stressed about an upcoming test, and then she hit him with that—
He almost fell off the roof.
“Excuse me?” Chat asked, throwing her a look over his shoulder.
“Were you on my roof last night?” She repeated in the same demanding tone of voice, unrelenting.
“No,” he said immediately, because technically he wasn’t. Adrien was there, but…
“Liar,” Marinette said simply, grabbing his arm and hauling him over the side of the roof, off the back wall that he was trying to disappear behind. She had surprising strength for a young woman, he couldn’t help but feel ever so slightly shocked at it, but she didn’t even acknowledge it.
No, she acknowledged something else. Or rather, focused entirely on something else with a surprising amount of intensity. Gesturing to her sketchbook, which laid open on the lounge chair on the roof, she gestured to a page in it.
One he knew far too well.
‘I think you’re kind of purr-ty,’ a rough sketch of a cat proclaimed, one which Adrien had left behind to cheer her up after a particularly heinous study session. Turns out, she hadn’t found it until tonight.
“That’s you,” Marinette summarized. “You were here.”
“No,” he tried, because Chat Noir simply wasn’t supposed to be there, not when Adrien was there, but then—
“It’s your handwriting and your style of drawing,” Marinette said, flipping back in the sketchbook, revealing a page that she’d let Chat draw on one night while she was working on a design while the young man snuggled in beside her. “I know it,” she declared.
Evidently, Adrien was never allowed to draw in front of her again.
“How can you be sure that it’s not from another day?” Chat tried, helpless. Marinette raised an eyebrow, flipping to show him the other side of the page he’d defiled.
Right, she’d know if he drew on the back of that page, seeing as how she’d been working on a design on it. In fact, she probably just got back to working on it today and saw it.
Well, if the shoe fits, wear it... even if it was a little bit snug this time, and he really would have liked to have taken credit for it as Adrien. “Yep, that’s me, a Chat Noir original.”
“And you didn’t come in?” Marinette asked skeptically.
“Do you find it easy to tell charming young girls that they’re pretty?” Chat shot back, relishing in the way that she blushed. He liked Marinette’s expressions far too much.
She stuttered ever so slightly, backing away in that way that was simply textbook Marinette. Ah, maybe Adrien wouldn’t get to take credit, but it was worth it in the end. She was far too cute.
“See, it’s not easy,” he said with a grin, turning to cup her warm cheeks in his hand and force her to look upwards, “the prettier they are, the more flustered they get.” Her eyes widened impossibly round and with that, he pulled away, chuckling ever so slightly. “You caught me Marinette, I’ll try to be a little bit more clever next time.”