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“You sure you got the right address, miss?” The cab driver asked her with a skeptic expression. It would have been alright if the man hadn’t asked the same thing in at least twenty different ways during the ride.
“Yes, thank you Monsieur. I’m exactly where I wanted to be,” Marinette answered with a tight smile, like the twenty previous times. Giving him the money she owed him, she got out of the car to stand in front of the gigantic gate of Wayne’s Manor. The place was kind of intimidating.
Still hearing the car behind her when she reached the intercom, she turned toward it. The driver was shamelessly looking at her, probably waiting for her to get refused access.
“Are you waiting for something, sir?” She asked, tilting her head slightly.
“You’re gonna need a ride back, don’t ya? I’m already here, might as well,” he smiled at her with condescending amusement. Marinette was tempted to tell him that she would prefer to go back to the city on foot than to get into his car again. But her parents raised her better than that, so she only smiled politely.
“There is no need, sir, I really don’t know how long I’m going to stay here.”
“Yeah, right,” the man huffed, still staring at her.
Deciding to just ignore him, Marinette turned to push on the intercom’s only button. It took a minute before an elegant and accented voice responded.
“Hello, how may I help you?”
“Ah, hello sir. I’m Marinette, Jason asked me to come?”
“Indeed, Master Jason warned me to expect you.”
When the gate opened, Marinette made a point to turn around to smile and wave goodbye at the cab driver. She would cherish his dumbstruck expression for a long time.
Her victory was short lived, though, when she saw how long the march from the gate to the house was going to be. Jason better be on the brink of death. Or the world, she wasn’t picky.
When she finally got there, an old gentleman she thought might be Alfred was waiting for her.
“Miss Dupain-Cheng, I’m Alfred, the family’s butler, it’s a pleasure to meet you,” Alfred said with a kind smile and a nod.
“The pleasure is all mine, sir. And just Marinette is fine,” she told him kindly, walking into the house. “Jason is okay, right? He didn’t say why he wanted me here, and I have to admit that he got me worried.”
Jason had been determined to keep her as far away from his family as he could manage before, and the sudden change was really odd.
“I see,” Alfred said slowly, closing his eyes for a second. “Master Jason is alright, Miss Marinette, do not worry. He just… Well, why not let Master Jason explain the situation to you himself. If you would follow me.”
Marinette followed him for a couple minutes through a couple of corridors, before he opened the doors to… a battlefield.
She thought that, maybe, it was supposed to be a living room, but it was hard to say, under all those decorations. They were literally everywhere. Throwing on the couches, a couple of boxes were overturned in a corner, a couple of garlands of little cartoon ghosts hanging hazradly from the chandelier. It was a mess, but she could see that someone probably tried to… decorate? Maybe? It was a really bad job, though.
Jason and a man she assumed to be his brother were battling with a plastic pumpkin and a skeleton respectively, while two more men and a woman—probably also Jason’s siblings, she heard Bruce Wayne was kind of a serial adopter— were cheering on the sidelines and a brooding teenager was glaring at them. Everyone froze as soon as they realized that they weren’t alone anymore. Alfred only sighed, nodded at her before going back to where they came from.
“Hey! Pixie! Great, you’re here,” Jason exclaimed excitedly, letting go of the pumpkin he was shoving into his brother’s face and stauttered toward her.
“Jason, in the name of everything that’s holy, what the hell?” Marinette asked with a voice deceptively calm. She could see the woman and one of the men behind Jason wince at her tone. Good.
“Well, see, we wanna decorate the house for Halloween, now that it’s time—”
“Jason,” she interrupted incredulously. “We are in September!”
“Well, technically, it’s already October in Russia,” the man that had been fighting with Jason piped up.
“Yeah, what Timbers said,” Jason said with a serious nod while Marinette could only look at him in astonishment. “Anyway, Bruce said we can decorate all the room in the Manor like we wish if we can make this one presentable, without the help of Alfred. And I really want to make a cat theme for his bedroom, so I thought; hey, you know a designer…”
“I’m a fashion designer, Jason, not an interior designer!”
“Same difference, Pixie. You’re my only hope, all of them are hopeless in terms of good taste.”
Marinette pinched the bridge of her nose, ignoring the various protests from Jason’s sibling, before taking out her phone.
“So you proceeded to send me ‘Hey Pix,” she said, reading the message he sent her earlier with a bad imitation of his voice. “‘Need you at the manor asap, urgence lvl 3’ before ignoring me, making me think that the world was probably ending—”
“World ending is at least a lvl 5, Pix, come on,” Jason interrupted with an offended expression. She ignored him.
“—Forcing me to take a cab with a absolute jerk driver—”
“Why did you take a cab? You have a car!”
“Adrien took the car, he is visiting Chloé in New York. But that’s not the point. The point, Jason, is that all of that was because you needed me to help you decorate for a day that is literally in a month?”
“Hey, Halloween is a very important celebration,” Jason’s brother, the one that had been cheering the loudest, told her with a solemn expression.
“I’m French, I don’t care about Halloween,” she deadpanned.
“I’m sorry, what?” The one Jason had called Timbers, probably Tim Drake, looked pained at the very idea that someone could not be obsessed by Halloween.
“I mean, we used to make speciales and sales at the bakery, and I’ve been to a couple of costume parties, but we don’t really pay attention to Halloween until around the 25 of October.”
“That’s sacrilegious,” Jason said, and almost all the others agreed in a way or another.
“Maybe for you, Americans,” she told him with amusement. “But it doesn’t change the fact that I’m not going to help you.”
What? Why?!” He exclaimed, his eyes widening.
“Because, one, I don’t have anything to gain from it,” she said, showing him one of her fingers before adding a second. “And two, do you know how long the walk between the cab and the door had been? And all of it just for decorations?”
“Aw, come on, Pix! Bruce is going to make Alfred judge, and I have projects for the cat theme!”
“There is nothing you can say that is going to make me change my—”
“Hey guys!” A cheerful voice suddenly interrupted her, the owner barging into the room like a whirlwind. The woman was slightly taller than her, with long blonde hair and blue eyes. She had a beautiful smile that brightened the room and Marinette could feel the hearts that were making their way in her eyes. The girl was cute. Uh oh. “You are decorating already?! Cool! Be right back, let me just grab my stuff!”
Then she was gone, and Marinette could only blink slowly, before turning back toward Jason.
“Alright, I’m in.”
“What? Why— Oh, no, no, no! You’re not going to crush on Steph—”
“Oh, her name is Steph? What a lovely name,” she mumbled, looking back in the direction she disappeared. “But if you don’t want my help, I can just ask for her number and let you fend for yourself with the decorations, you know.”
“Pixie!” Jason complained, making his sibling laugh or snicker at him.