Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Marcus and Linda Doe were a perfectly normal couple. They lived in a three bedroom house, had a golden retriever named Boomer, a small tabby cat named Ricky, and a vegetable garden that took up most of the backyard.

Marcus worked in an office, 9-5 every week-day, and went for drinks with several hockey friends every Friday evening at the only bar in town that had pay-per-view programs on their TVs.

Linda was a medical office assistant at the local walk-in doctor’s clinic, and was well-liked by everybody in town. She helped organize bake sales once a month to raise money for charity, and held a book-club meeting every Sunday afternoon after church. 

Everything was perfect, and the day that Linda Doe learned that she was pregnant was a day of much joy for all of her and Marcus’ friends and family. There was a large baby shower, and much gossip was had over what the baby’s name and gender would be. 

Exactly on time, Linda went into labour at sunrise on the spring equinox. Catherine Marinette Doe was born at exactly noon with no complications, and Linda and Marcus left the hospital three days later with a perfectly healthy and adorable daughter. Her eyes were blue and the colour only deepened after several days, a trait that Marcus shared, and many a family friend coo’d and aww’d over how adorably chubby her little cheeks were.

This set the pattern for the first two years of young Catherine’s life.

-----

The day that young Catherine said her first word would first change, and then set, the tone of her life for years to come.

Mère.

Not mother, or mom, not even mama. 

Mère.

Now, this wouldn’t have been at all alarming if it were not for one thing. 

Nobody in Catherine’s life spoke French. Only one person in town spoke French fluently, and that was the local French teacher who worked at both the elementary school and the highschool because nobody else was qualified enough to teach French. Ms. Duran was a kind woman from Québec, but not particularly close with the Doe family. She had not spoken with them for more than a few seconds in passing since Catherine was born, and certainly never in French. 

There was no reason for Catherine’s first work to be French, and yet it was.

But Linda and Marcus brushed it off. Canada is technically a bilingual country, little Cathy must have heard it somewhere. 

Now, if Cathy’s next words had been in English the incident would have been forgotten. Linda could have laughed and told people that her daughter’s first word was mama and nobody except Marcus would have known there was anything wrong with that statement.

The issue was, however, that Cathy didn’t stop at just mère.

Père was next, followed by (for whatever reason) pomme de terre; and then it became an endless flow of more and more words that were spoken perfectly, enunciated, accented, clear, and completely, entirely, French.

But that was easily solved, especially given that neither Linda nor Marcus had any particular interest in learning or speaking French, and by the time kindergarten rolled around Cathy was speaking English just like the rest of her classmates. She was just very, very careful to avoid speaking in French. Linda and Marcus had never explained why she wasn’t supposed to speak French, but aside from this little language issue Cathy’s younger years were perfectly, totally, normal . 

And everything was fine again.

For six years everything was (mostly) fine. 

Yes, okay , Catherine would sometimes wake in the night, crying hysterically about strange monsters, brightly coloured villains, and evil purple butterflies, but by morning those nightmares seemed forgotten and Linda and Marcus put them out of their minds. They lived in a world with people like Superman, Wonder Woman, and the Martian Manhunter (ominous name for a hero, really) showing up in conflict with actual supervillains in the news regularly; a few nightmares about things like villains and magic weren’t entirely unexpected. 

And sure, Catherine had decided adamantly that she would rather be called by her middle name, Marinette, instead of Catherine, as soon as she could articulate that fact in English, but plenty of people went by their middle name instead of their first! Why, Linda and Marcus knew three people in town whose first names were all ‘James’ and who had gone by their middle names for years instead to avoid confusion.

The little, one-off concerns were brushed aside as tricks of the mind or ignored after a long day at work (things like Marinette pressing a glowing pink hand to her scraped knee and removing it a second later to reveal smooth, unbroken skin; or like when Linda walked into their backyard to see Marinette clinging upside down to a low hanging branch of their douglas fir tree, only to reappear without a sound or flash of light on the ground and pretend like nothing happened).

-----

Then Marinette turned eleven. Now, normally this would have been like any other birthday, except poor Marinette had also woken with horrible cramps and bedsheets covered in blood. After a teary (and horror-filled) conversation with her mother, Marinette had learned that apparently this was just something she would have to live with for the next forty-or-more years of her life, and that spontaneously bursting into tears was also something she would likely have to deal with.

Later that day, tired from both her emotional morning and her Wonder Woman themed birthday party, Marinette is laying face-down on her couch and dozing off as her parents tidy up, both equally exhausted after supervising the rambunctious pack of children all afternoon.

With a quiet grumble Marinette curls into the back of the couch, eyes shut, muttering softly under her breath.

“Should we wake her?”

Marcus throws a small crumpled ball of fluorescent pink wrapping paper at Linda. “Let her sleep, Lin. She’s had a long day.”

Linda huffs, peering under the couch Marinette is sleeping on and eyeing a yellow icing stain with exasperation. “And we haven’t?”

Both parents look over as Marinette starts whimpering, curling into an even tighter ball. “Non, non, s’il vous plâit, non…”

Linda and Marcus exchange a concerned glance. “She’s speaking French again.”

Marcus stands abruptly, expression blank, before stalking into the kitchen. “I thought we’d moved past this.”

Kneeling next to Marinette, Linda carefully brushes some of her daughter’s straight black hair out of her face, grimacing at the bits of glitter she can see in it. “You know she can’t always help it, Marcus. “

“She shouldn’t have to help it, Linda. Normal children aren’t born knowing entire languages.”

“Marinette is perfectly normal, and if all that’s… different… about her is that she can test out of French classes once she gets to highschool then I don’t see why we should be concerned.”

Marcus sighs, dishes clinking as he loads them into the dishwasher. “We’ve talked about this before, Lin. What if it’s more than just French.”

Knees cracking, Linda groans quietly as she stands up. “It’s been just French for nine years, Marcus, and we live in Canada. Speaking French isn’t exactly something to be concerned about.”

“Western Canada, Lin. You know how few people give a shit about French around here, we can’t just assume things are fine! You know how many stories there are about kids who get powers of some kind once they hit puberty? And she started her period this morning! We need to prepare-”

Linda laughs, a cold, horrible laugh. “Prepare? Prepare for what, Marcus? Should we cross our fingers and get ready for the day she suddenly starts speaking Spanish? Or Russian? Oh, I know.” Linda rolls her eyes. “We should contact the RCMP if she wakes up tomorrow speaking Hebrew.” 

Marcus slowly closes the dishwasher, the quiet beeps it makes as he sets it the only sounds in the room aside from Marinette’s subdued muttering. “Lin, you know that’s not the worst that can happen.”

With a shaky inhale Linda looks at the ground, “It’s the worst that’s happened so far.”

Marcus sighs, tugging Linda into a hug and ignoring the way that her breaths get uneven and his shirt damp. “We can worry about it later.”

A shout has the pair turning towards Marinette with panic, and Linda takes a step forwards as Marinette shoots up, eyes wide and unseeing. “NON!! HUGO!!”

And then the couch disintegrates, leaving a now awake Marinette hyperventilating on the floor surrounded by black dust in the shape of what was their couch.

Both Linda and Marcus freeze, staring at Marinette in shock as the girl  slowly, shakily, brings her hands up to her face, eyes wide as the black glow around them slowly fades away, almost seeming to soak into her skin without a trace.

-----

Things change, after that. 

Linda calls Marinette in sick for school that week, easily talking one of the doctors at the clinic she works at into writing several sick notes for Marinette, as well as calling in sick herself. Everyone who asks hears all about how poor Marinette is having her first period and she’s just so exhausted, the poor thing. Several co-workers stop by during the week with baked goods, and Dr. Anderson even stops by with her husband to offer kind words and an entire tuna casserole stuffed into a few too-small tupperware containers.

Marcus, on the other hand, works later and later every day, and on Friday he stays so late that he ends up going straight to the bar with his friends and not getting home until long after Marinette has fallen into an uneasy sleep.

Slowly and with much confusion, Marinette wakes to see 02:43 glowing in blocky red numbers on her bedside clock. She doesn’t remember having a nightmare (memory), so why is she awake?

Then she hears the raised voices.

Marinette spends all of five minutes staring at the ceiling, eyes wandering as she traces the swirling paths of glow-in-the-dark stars stuck to her ceiling. They had been a gift for her sixth birthday, and she had sat on Marcus’ shoulders to stick them all over her ceiling. They stopped working very well a few years ago, but she knows where they are by heart.

The voices don’t stop. If anything, they get louder, clearer, louder . Loud enough that Marinette can hear words without really having to try to listen at all.

“-UT OF HAND, LIN! SHE DISINTEGRATED OUR FUCKING COUCH! YOU CAN’T JUST KEEP BURYING YOUR HEAD IN THE SAND AND PRETENDING EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OKAY!”

Something makes a loud slamming sound. A door? Someone’s hands on the dining room table? It makes her jump.

“THAT’S NOT WHAT I’M DOING AND YOU KNOW IT! ALL I’M DOING IS GIVING OUR DAUGHTER THE BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT! SHE’S A GOOD KID AND NOT SOME CRAZY VILLAIN ON TV, MARCUS!”

The fan that Marinette uses for white noise isn’t doing its job very well, she thinks to herself. Her stuffed black cat, Adrien, is also less comforting than usual as she curls around him underneath her covers.

“WHAT IF THAT WAS A PERSON, LIN? YOU THINK ABOUT THAT? WHAT IF SHE GETS MAD AT SOMEONE AND WE GET CALLED INTO THE SCHOOL ‘CAUSE OUR PRECIOUS LITTLE GIRL COMMITTED MURDER OVER A DODGEBALL GAME?”

Pillows aren’t very good at blocking out loud noises, but if she also hums very loudly then Marinette can almost block out her parents’ screaming voices. 

The argument ends when the clock reads 03:17, and Marinette flinches when she hears what sounds like the front door slam shut.

The hallway creaks, and Marinette hurriedly feigns sleep, head on her pillow and facing away from the door, curled around Adrien and shielding him from the door. A quiet click, and a sliver of light shines into her dark room, the shadow of her mother visible in the middle of it.

Marinette hears a quiet sigh before the light beam slowly narrows, another click signifying the door has closed again.

-----

It takes another year before things change again. A year of arguments; of tense, silent dinners; of her father avoiding her and her mother overcompensating and smothering her; of sympathetic looks from adults who gossip about marital troubles; before everything changes.

It’s not Marinette’s fault, not really. Her grades have been suffering, and so has her sleep schedule. Her parents are arguing at least two or three times a week, sometimes quiet, sometimes loud, sometimes during the day, sometimes at night. There’s a boy in her class, Logan, who throws things at her during class when the teacher isn’t looking.

Bits of eraser, crumbled little balls of paper, tiny pencil stubbs, one day he even brings a bag of tiny bouncy balls to throw. 

Marinette’s best friend, Carla, tries to defend her, but Logan is stealthy, and whenever Marinette or Carla tell a teacher they get brushed off.

“It’s a boy thing, sweetie. He’s just trying to get your attention.”

“If you ignore him, he’ll get bored and stop bothering you.”

“Logan’s such a sweet boy, he wouldn’t do that!”

And so on, and so forth. Day after day.

Until Marinette snaps. 

Something hits one of her pigtails. She can hear snickering, and when she reaches up she finds something sticky stuck to her hair. The black strands are long enough that she can undo it and pull it around to see the area in question, and finds a piece of chewed gum stuck to her hair. 

At the desk next to her, Carla looks concerned, biting her lip and glancing anxiously between Marinette and the teacher.

Marinette doesn’t notice.

It’s picture day today, and the gum is so stuck to her hair that she can’t pull it out. 

Her hand shoots into the air, and the teacher, Mr. Stevenson, gives her a stern look and only partially turns away from the blackboard. “Questions can wait until after the lesson, Miss Doe.”

Her face crumples, “But-”

“Marinette.”

“Logan threw-”

“Marinette, please.”

Slowly her hand goes down, cheeks heating when she hears some of her classmates snickering at her. 

Mr. Stevenson turns back to the board, writing out more cursive letters and talking about how important writing in cursive is because all of their highschool teachers are going to ask that they write everything that way.

(None of the other elementary teachers care about how they handwrite things, just Mr. Stevenson, because everyone says he’s old-school.)

Marinette takes a deep breath, then another, and another, and another, slowly calming herself down and ignoring how angry she is (an action that feels strangely familiar). She’s just about gotten herself under control when she feels something else hit the back of her head. A slow hand reaches up to feel her hair, this time much closer to her scalp, and finds another piece of chewed gum.

She tries to calm herself down again. Really, she does. 

But everyone has limits. And after everything at home, and after so many of her teachers ignoring her, this is her limit.

Marinette stands up, chair squealing as it’s shoved backwards. Her classmates are silent, and she can see Mr. Stevenson turning around, but Marinette doesn’t care.

She turns around and hears gasping, but her eyes go straight to where Logan is sitting. Suddenly she’s right in front of him, and her classmates get even louder, but Marinette is focused on the idiot boy in front of her.

“Listen up, Logan,” she snarls, unaware that her eyes are glowing and her unbound hair is starting to float a little, as if she were underwater. “I am telling you to stop throwing things at me because I’m tired of it and it’s bothering me and you’re being terrible and if there’s anyone in this class that I could say I hate it would be you.” Marinette slams her hands onto his desk, something dark and cruel and vicious rising inside of her. “I am done with putting up with your shit,” she says, and in the background she can hear Mr. Stevenson’s protests get a little louder at that, but she’s beyond caring at this point. 

“Back off, Logan.”

For whatever reason, perhaps sensing an opportunity to get Marinette into trouble, perhaps just completely oblivious to the danger he’s in, Logan smirks. “Or what?”

Rage joins in the cruel darkness inside of her, the audacity of this boy is infuriating (and in the back of her head she thinks the name Lila for some reason) and Marinette lifts her hands from Logan’s desk, palms up and fingers flat. The darkness inside of her flows downwards almost without effort, pooling in her hands and causing a dull black glow to form around them. 

Finally Logan starts to look scared. 

“Or this,” Marinette hisses, pressing her palms into his desk again with a grin, bright and vicious, as the whole thing turns to dust.

-----

Things change again , after that.

The RCMP shows up to the school within minutes, lights and sirens blaring. Marinette’s mother is following closely behind. 

They sit in the principal's office, silent and tense, listening to the raised voices outside the room. Marinette notices that Mother isn’t touching her. She looked like she wanted to when she first showed up, but when Marinette looked at her Mom, lost, scared, there was no comfort to be found there. 

Maybe she hates me too now, just like Dad does.

People in weirdly intimidating black suits show up. They don’t have black sunglasses like in the movies where strange government people show up, but they have the same feel to them. 

They ask to speak to her Mom outside, and she goes without a second look at Marinette. No reassuring touch, no heartfelt speech, no quiet words of comfort.

Nothing.

Time passes. The voices outside the room get louder, then quieter, then louder again, but never loud enough for Marinette to properly hear. The school bell rings for second recess. Then again to call everyone back to class. 

Eventually the people in suits come in again. Marinette can’t see or hear her Mom anywhere through the open door. 

“We have a few questions for you, Miss Doe. Would you be okay answering them?”

Marinette tries to answer. Really, she does. But her voice suddenly stops working, and her throat feels tight, and Marinette is afraid. 

She’s heard enough of her parents’ arguments, seen enough movies,  read enough books, to know what could happen to her. To know that these people (who maybe aren’t even part of the Canadian Government, they could be anybody and part of anything) could be here to take her away and do horrible things to her. Experiments. Experiments to figure out how she can make things turn to dust. Marinette isn’t sure if she teleported in class, but she thinks she did for a second there. Just another thing for them to try to figure out.

They don’t even know she can heal little scrapes. They don’t know she was born knowing how to speak French. 

They don’t know about her nightmares . 

They don’t know that Marinette can remember bits and pieces of a whole other life; about her whole other life where she had a husband and children. One with magic, and tiny gods. They don’t know that Marinette was almost a minor goddess herself; that she lived a whole other life before this one.

But they could find out.

They could try to take her apart, and make her hurt. If Mom told them the little things that she and Dad have noticed then they could be trying to figure out all kinds of things about her in horrible ways, and Marinette is only twelve.

She can’t disintegrate a whole government when she’s just twelve. Even now she feels tired, like she could eat two whole meals and sleep for a week, and all she did was maybe teleport the width of a chair and turn Logan’s desk to dust.

“Miss Doe?”

Marinette can’t breathe. 

Her throat is closing, and she’s panicking (she knows that she’s panicking and she can’t stop), and everything is too bright and too loud and her thoughts keep spiraling into fear fear FEAR.

Nobody is here for her. Mother was here but she left. 

Marinette is alone.

They are going to take her away.

The fear builds inside of her, just like the rage and cruelty did before, except this time Marinette wants it to go away.

It doesn’t.

It builds, and builds, and she can see black spots and and the people in suits are saying more things and moving closer to her, but she can’t hear them because everything is a little fuzzy now, and Marinette can’t even move she’s so scared.

She just wants to get away.

She doesn’t want to be alone. She wants to be somewhere she can hide and nobody will look twice at her for her strange powers or weird dreams-that-are-memories. Where she can be safe.

Silently, without light or sound, Marinette disappears.

In her wake people are shouting, the people in suits are furious, her Mother is crying, her Father is on his way to the bar, and her classmates are whispering to each other and spreading rumours about their crazy magical classmate who tried to kill Logan and who is getting arrested while Clara sits silently and worries.

Across the country, in a rainy, dark, dank alleyway, Marinette appears.

Chapter Text

It takes all of thirty seconds for Marinette to be completely soaked through.

Carefully she edges towards the street, looking around slowly, ready to duck back into the alley she’s appeared in at a moment’s notice. The buildings are dark and grey, there’s a lot of stone and brick, and the buildings somehow look old and fancy while also being rundown and slightly creepy at the same time. Across the street there is a large brick building with two metal pipes sticking out of the front for some reason, going from the second to the fourth floors; the sign on the front of the building has the words La Maison Du Chat in large black letters with the small silhouette of a black cat at the end. 

To her left up the road she can see a large glowing blue sign that says WAYNE across it. For some reason there are large metal pipes across the road above the glowing WAYNE sign that lead into a tall building with another glowing blue sign on it, this one in the shape of an ‘L’ that says Lacey’s Department Store. Way down the end of the street, past a wrought iron gate that looks very spikey and intimidating, is a building with G.C.P.D. on it in large letters.

Wayne? GCPD? Is she in Gotham City? In the United States?? 

To her right is a glowing red sign that reads Chinatown, which doesn’t really help clarify things given that a lot of big cities have a Chinatown. 

Marinette ducks back into the alley as two women walk by. They look normal, one has on a grey hoodie with a black bat on it, and they’re speaking in English. Their accent sounds funny, and a bit like one she remembers hearing on TV a few times, but she can’t remember where from. 

Marinette decides to explore a bit to try to figure out where she is. She goes left, towards what she’s pretty sure is the police station. Police are supposed to be helpful to people who aren’t criminals, right?

Wait.

Marinette steps off the sidewalk and out of the rain, into a large entryway that has double doors and a sign that says Men’s Fashion on it with photos of men in suits everywhere.

What if people think she’s a criminal now? She ran away from people who were maybe-probably working for the government. What if they reported her? What if the police here take her home and she gets taken to a secret facility and experimented on?

What if she really is in the United States, and they figure out she has powers, and they take her and experiment on her? The US has people like Superman and Batman. They probably have way more experience capturing people with powers than whichever maybe-government department has a building near some random small town in Canada.

Deep breaths , Marinette tells herself. She needs to find out where she is first, then she can figure things out from there. She steps back onto the sidewalk, heading towards the police station again but taking the first left she can. At the end of the block a large metal thing goes across the road, and as she watches what looks like a strange white train go across it. 

A Sky Train? Like in Vancouver? Or maybe here it’s called a monorail? Or one of those weird subways that also goes aboveground? She can never remember the difference.

To her right across the street and a few stories up is a large billboard with two very scary people in police uniforms on it. The woman on the left is scowling and punching her fist like people do in movies before a fist fight, and the man on the right has sunglasses so you can’t see his eyes and a big black thing that looks a bit like a baseball bat over his shoulder. Gotham City Police Department are the letters in the middle, and the left and right sides of the billboard light up flashing red and blue like police sirens on a cop car.

If that’s what their advertisements look like, maybe they wouldn’t be friendly even if she wasn’t a criminal.

What kind of place has billboards for police stations anyways?

Marinette keeps walking. On her left is a very tall building with a detailed metal archway above a large front door. A huge glowing red sign, at least two or three stories tall, sits above the archway. It’s a little hard to make out the exact shape of the sign because of the angle, but it looks like a building with the words GOTHAM TOWERS below it, also glowing red. 

Well. She’s definitely in Gotham. Across the continent. In a different country. 

Now what?

Marinette carefully explores her immediate area, doing her best not to looks suspicious or dangerous (given what she’s heard of Gotham City she doubts people will look twice at her, but better safe than sorry) finding quite a few different stores like Bon-Bon’s Box Boutique, Laz-R-Us Spa Center, Pauli’s Diner, and Janus Cosmetics.* There are also a lot of stores that just have names like Groceries, Jewelry, Laundromat, and Electronics for some reason. 

If she had any money, Marinette would buy something to eat and drink. As it is, she doesn’t even have a change of clothes. 

It seemed like it was getting darker. School hadn’t ended yet when Marinette teleported away, but Gotham was on the other side of the country, and probably in a different time zone. No parents around to tell Marinette to go to bed, but that’s not really fun because she has no bed to go to.

Marinette finds herself huddling down in the alley she first appeared in, staring across the street at La Maison Du Chat, watching the man inside serve drinks while a bunch of cats wander around. It looks cozy, and a warm drink and food sound amazing.

But again, no money.

Marinette rests her head against the brick wall next to her and closes her eyes. She was already tired after turning Logan’s desk to dust and her tiny teleport, and that was before she accidentally teleported across the whole country and walked around in the rain for a few hours. 

Maybe everything will be better when she opens her eyes…

-----

Gunshots.

Or maybe firecrackers.

But this is the United States, and Gotham City on top of that, so probably gun shots.

Marinette opens her eyes, pushing back against the brick wall of the alley and hoping nobody has seen her. 

As she watches a woman in a shiny black suit sprints across the alleyway entrance, followed by two police men. A few seconds later a police car rushes past, sirens blaring and lights flashing.

Maybe this isn’t the best place for her.

But… where else can she go? Marinette has no food, no money, she doesn’t know anybody, it’s possible that she’s a criminal or worse so she can’t go to the police station in case they take her and hand her over to horrible people for experiments or something.

She has… nothing.

Marinette slumps back against the wall again, this time in despair. 

Would anybody care if she just… starved to death? Dad hates her, maybe Mom does too, her classmates probably all think she’s a freak because she threatened to kill Logan and turned his desk into dust, and her extended family is probably going to hear all about how crazy she is from Mom and Dad, possibly even the news if her classmates blab.

As she watches she sees the man working in La Maison Du Chat go around and pet all the cats because there’s only a few people sitting around in the shop. He looks very nice, and all the cats seem to love him. He even offers them treats, and picks up and carries one of the black ones while he goes around to check on some of the people drinking coffee.

Life would probably be easier if she were a cat.

More gunshots echo down the alleyway, thankfully not from people in her alley, but definitely nearby. Marinette can still hear sirens in the distance. It hasn’t stopped raining yet, if anything it’s started raining harder. Her socks are wet and gross, she can’t feel her toes; her fingers are numb, and her ears are burning with cold.

As she watches, one of the cats jumps up and tries to stick its face in one of the women’s coffee cups, and she gently picks the cat up and starts petting them instead.

It looks warm.

And dry.

Marinette really wishes she was a cat.

Suddenly she feels really tired, and she curls up against the wall again. Maybe she just… won’t wake up.

-----

She wakes up again.

Surprisingly. 

It’s still dark out, still raining. The sky seems a little lighter, but not much. La Maison Du Chat is still open, and Marinette can’t hear any gunshots or sirens. 

Slowly Marinette stands up, only to trip and fall on her face. 

Carefully and with great focus, she tries again to stand up, moving one leg at a time.

Front leg, front leg, back leg, back leg.

…

What .

Marinette looks down to see that she has paws, and when she looks up again everything seems much, much bigger. Something moves out of the corner of her eye, and Marinette whirls around to see what it is, except the thing moves with her! 

After enough circles to get seriously dizzy, Marinette sits down again. 

This is ridiculous. 

A whisper of a memory, someone saying “Ridicule! Tout à fait ridicule!” while loudly stomping their foot. A lot of yellow.

Marinette shakes her head, spotting the black thing again.

She pauses, considering what exactly it could be. 

Is she a black cat? If she is, then it could be her tail. Marinette was wishing she could be a cat before she fell asleep.

Oh no, what if cats are colourblind? What if she’s actually bright orange or something? How is she supposed to hide in this wet, dark city if she’s bright orange?!

One paw in front of the other, probably looking quite strange, Marinette makes her way to the nearest puddle. It’s grimy, and there is a rainbow shimmer across the surface meaning she is definitely not going to be drinking out of that puddle any time soon, but she can see her reflection. Bright blue eyes stare back at her, the same colour as her eyes when she’s a human. Her fur looks like it’s all the same colour as her hair was too, black-blue and all one colour.

Marinette looks around the alley again.

Great.

Now what.

Would La Maison Du Chat take in a stray cat? For some reason Marinette feels like she has experience with both places that serve food and pets, as in she knows that they don’t mix well and probably violate some kind of health code.

But a cat cafe would have to be different, otherwise it couldn’t exist, right? Right. 

-----

He didn’t let her in. The nice man wasn’t mean when saw Marinette in his store, but he didn’t let her stay either. He quickly herded her back out the door and scolded her, telling her that she was a “bad kitty” and that “outside cats do not come inside.” He did put small bowls of clean water and food out, but that was it. 

So much for a dry place to stay.

The food and water were nice, though. Drinking water took a bit to figure out. Time to look for a dry place to stay, and maybe if she comes back the nice man will feed her and provide clean water again.

Maybe life as a cat will be easier here in Gotham. Nobody knows she’s anything other than a normal cat. People don’t really pay attention to stray cats except to stay away from them or kick them most of the time, so she can try practicing her powers now that her parents aren’t around and nobody is going to pay enough attention to notice and report her. And even if someone did report her, how would they describe her? A black cat with blue eyes? In a city this big and dark? They would never find her.

This is perfect.

She can make this work. 

Time to start life in Gotham City, as a cat.

Chapter Text

Marinette had found a few reliable sources of food; she had several routes with surprisingly useful dumpsters on each of them, and as a last resort she’d go back to La Maison Du Chat.  She could also get water from the Wayne Botanical Gardens; there were one or two clean water features that actually had drinkable water, and some of the plants had leaves big enough that water pooled on them when it rained (which was basically the only kind of weather Gotham had). 

With food and water at least semi-secured, Marinette spent her days exploring, practicing her abilities, and stalking people. 

Gotham was big enough that the two years she’d been here weren’t enough to learn every nook and cranny by heart, but she could reliably find her way around and knew what areas to avoid and who the main rogues and/or bosses were. She also learned how to teleport on purpose, as well as turn things to dust intentionally. Given the events in her dreams Marinette kept expecting another power to randomly show up, but so far it had yet to happen. In her spare time she’d sit near a busy part of the city and choose an interesting person to follow. 

Sometimes the gunfire and sirens kept her awake, so she’d taken to stalking people at night too. Somehow she could also jump very far, as in from rooftop to rooftop if the buildings were the same height and only an alleyway apart. 

Which led to her first sightings of Batman and his various bird-themed minions. She usually watched them from afar, avoiding them as much as possible. If she was wanted on some government list then it was best to stay out of sight of the kind of people who worked with powered heroes and were probably very familiar with people in high places amongst various governments.

So she avoided the Bat and his little birds as best she could. That being said, sometimes she just had to stop and watch what kinds of strange things people were doing.

Back in her small, Canadian town, someone in a strange costume climbing through the fourth story window of an apartment building would have either been spectacularly drunk, or committing a crime. Especially if they had a strange looking red helmet, were very obviously armed, and also had body armour that (for some unknown reason) had exaggerated muscle definition built into it. 

Marinette’s dreams (memories) were particularly vivid after watching any one of Gotham’s vigilantes in action, which was another part of why she avoided them. This one, Red Hood, however, was different. 

He may have a red bat(ish) shape on his chest but during her infrequent stalking she’d watched him shoot someone in the head for trying to sell drugs to kids, knock someone out and throw them in an especially disgusting dumpster for bragging about urinating on a homeless person, break all of the bones in a women’s arms and legs because she tried to kidnap someone on their way home from work, and escort a dozen battered women to the nearest legit women’s shelter after he strolled into their place of “work” and killed all the patrons and other staff members. 

She’d also once, while visiting Cat Woman (who absolutely lived up to her stereotype by instantly adoring Marinette’s small black cat form) during one of her “game nights” with Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy, watched as Red Hood had walked in the front door and joined them for a long night of strip poker. Somehow he’d manage to avoid losing his helmet and boxers every time, but he’d consistently lose everything else. He also was given a shiny neon pink baseball bat by Harley that night, which he then used to beat up a small gang that tried to ambush him on the way home.

None of these actions were the kinds of things Marinette saw usually being done by Gotham’s heroes/vigilanties. 

But they were all intriguing nonetheless. 

Her first meeting with him would happen at night (of course) while making a strategic retreat to avoid the current Robin who was leaping from rooftop to rooftop and grappling whenever jumping wasn’t feasible like some kind of brightly coloured monkey (if monkeys were coloured like traffic lights and helped arrest people).  Marinette was trying to climb down the last level of a fire escape, scrambling really, and slipped. Luckily it was only from the second story, so she twisted mid-air and braced herself, prepared to land on her feet. Before she could, however, someone caught her. 

Their arms were solid, and it hurt possibly more than landing on the ground would have (because she was prepared for that at least), but she didn’t land in one of Gotham’s very disgusting puddles so that was nice at least.

“Easy there, kitten.”

Marinette looked up, surprised (but at this point somehow also not) to find herself in the arms of Red Hood, staring up at the blank white spots where his eyes should be. 

He looked up at the fire escape, then back down at her. “You’re pretty calm for a cat that just fell off the side of a building.”

Marinette settled down, purring softly. She could feel the hard forms of several knives and other likely dangerous things underneath his jacket, and decided to ignore them. The longer she sat here the more comfortable she felt. When was the last time she had contact with someone who wasn’t just stopping for five seconds to pet her? Since she received any kind of affection from someone who didn’t almost immediately start walking away?

…

Possibly since she arrived in Gotham.

She heard him sigh. “Well this is happening, I guess.” He shifted, moving carefully so Marinette didn’t fall out of his arms, and gently started to pet her. 

Marinette relaxed, letting herself turn into a loose pile of satisfied cat and purring louder than she ever had. She could feel Red Hood moving, gently swaying and talking to her as he walked somewhere, but didn’t bother paying attention. 

This was really nice.