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Marinette ran the plate under the water, which had gone cold again. She could clean a dish without hot water, of course, but she hated the way the cold made the soap and sponge feel, and the way cold tap water just felt lazy, like it wasn’t doing anything to help other than moving across the plates as instructed by gravity.
“Do you think gravity has to instruct things?” Tikki asked.
Marinette had lived in the apartment long enough that she no longer jumped when Tikki started talking to her. “It would be funny,” she said airily. She had not lived in the apartment long enough to no longer feel nervous, on occasion, when Tikki chose to read her thoughts. (And really read: Marinette hadn’t put the thought to words herself.)
“How would it tell them?” Tikki asked. Marinette had decided Tikki must have been a writer. She was always personifying things.
The dish went on the rack, and another got the soap and cold tap water. “I guess it would have to scold,” Marinette said, unable to resist Tikki’s little dream. “I think things would want to drift in their own directions, and gravity would have to scold them all back. You always float in your own direction.”
“Is gravity cruel?” Tikki’s voice echoed in one of the high cabinets. Marinette looked at the cabinet, then at the serving dish kept in the alcove on top of the cabinet, then at the abandoned cobweb in the crook of the ceiling.
“No,” she said. “It’s just… firm, like my parents. It knows it’s right. And it is,” she added. Defending gravity to a ghost, she thought. “It is right. It’s a law.”
“I don’t have to follow it,” said a voice. “And you don’t either. Probably.”
Marinette didn’t try to hide her smile. “Hi, Plagg,” she said, switching from plates to cutlery as if trying to match the change in the room. “Slain any dragons lately?” She didn’t know what Plagg had really been, but she entertained his idea that he’d once been a noble knight.
“You know he hasn’t,” Tikki said, “lately or ever.” (Secretly, Marinette thought Tikki entertained the notion, too.)
“I scared a bird away,” said Plagg. Though he had no form, Marinette distinctly perceived a chest swelling up with pride: his voice was lowered, invisible diaphragm at work. “A swallow. Those are pests, you know. And they steal. Vermin,” he said, “really.”
At this point the tap water was becoming quite chilly. Marinette gave up the washing and took out a dish towel to dry. “Well, congratulations,” she said, and, keeping up her momentum, asked, “and how is my living upstairs neighbor?”
“I resent that!” Plagg said, as she’d known he would. “I do a lot of living, ladybird; I just happen to do it while dead.”
“Answer the question, you rogue,” Tikki said. “Marinette promised to bake a tart later, and I’m not letting your ego get in the way of dessert!”
“And I’m not letting your appetite get in the way of my intelligence-gathering,” Marinette said, whipping her towel around the plates industriously. “Go on, Plagg. How is he?”
Plagg, undoubtedly intrigued by the promise of pastry smells, spoke from nearer the kitchen counter. “Oh, he’s fine.”
“Fine?”
“Fine.” Marinette got the sense of his self-satisfied smile, a cat in a sunbeam, before Plagg relented. “I think he has figured out how to cook chicken at last—and it only cost him, if you can believe it, two baking dishes.” That explained a couple of late-night crashes.
“Only two,” Tikki commented drily. “That’s much better than when he was trying to learn onions.”
Marinette shushed her by snapping the dish towel through the air and hissing. (Very dignified.) “He’s trying!” she maintained. “It’s hard to see with tears in your eyes.” But she was delighted to hear real news of her upstairs neighbor—news not delivered in bangs, clangs, and shatters. “Anything else?” she asked Plagg.
“Nothing,” the spirit assured her. “Not a thing.”
“He’s lying,” Tikki said, as if that weren’t obvious from how earnest he sounded. “I’ll look myself—you don’t mind, do you?”
“I—” Plagg began.
“No; if you don’t follow gravity, I don’t see why should I,” Tikki announced, and Marinette could tell she’d gone straight through the ceiling. Plagg rushed after her, and Marinette started the tap again to see if she could heat the water before they got back. She’d wash the big pot: Tikki was fond of donuts.
She’d lived in the apartment for about five months, going on six, to the point where she told people she’d lived there half a year even though it didn’t feel half-a-year familiar. Tikki had wisely waited to introduce herself until the moment Marinette had finished unpacking the last box. That way, Marinette had been too tired to immediately escape. Instead she had spent a lovely, if bemusing, afternoon in deep discussion with a ghost regarding the matter of whether the bus routes (which Marinette had on a faded brochure in her purse) looked more like a dragon, two cats circling, or a crone. Of course, this discussion had been interrupted by a truly impressive sound from above. That was her upstairs neighbor, Adrien Agreste, who really seemed to be in perpetual trouble with all concepts relating to the kitchen.
(He’s alright with laundry, Marinette had thought once. I’ve never heard him dropping laundry baskets or banging the doors off the machines, and the building hasn’t been set aflame by leftover dryer lint catching fire. And, she had thought with a blush coming to her cheeks, and his shirts, which fit him very well, are always nicely pressed.)
Over time, Marinette had mostly grown used to Tikki, and to Plagg, who generally occupied Adrien’s apartment—since the man was forced by ineptitude to eat quite a lot of raw foods, including deli meats and nice cheeses. These Tikki scorned, preferring even the simplest loaf of baking bread, but Plagg was more adventurous (in his way) and sought out smells one might call controversial. Once, he had confessed to Marinette over the odor of burning chicken from upstairs, he had sustained himself for three weeks with nothing but the smell of a decomposing leaf of cabbage. Tikki had almost shrieked at the memory.
Marinette finished washing the big pot and moved on to her least favorite things to wash. These were those kitchen tools with tiny, special jobs that required tiny, special curves and nooks and pieces. The zester, the peeler, the grater. The dreaded garlic press.
She had just wrapped her fingers around the handle of her smallest mesh strainer when she thought: Tikki and Plagg have been gone for an awfully long time. And then she had just decided to go ahead and wash out the empty vases on the windowsill (she wasn’t very good with plants) when she felt the whirl-and-settle of the little spirits swinging in together, two moons falling into her orbit.
“Well!” Tikki said. “Well!”
Marinette almost fumbled the vase. “What?” she begged, cringing a little at the fascination in her voice. “What is it?”
“It’s not anything,” said Plagg, injecting boredom into his voice. “He’s writing, that’s all.”
“He’s already written,” Tikki corrected, though she still was speaking mainly to Marinette. “Index cards. He’s already written, and he was practicing his lines.” She said it as if this explained everything in the world, which it absolutely didn’t.
“Is he an actor?” Marinette hesitated to guess.
“No,” Plagg said.
“No!” Tikki all but swooned. “He’s practicing—”
“Let him have—”
“—what he’s going to say to you!”
Marinette froze. “To me?” Her voice felt like it came from across the building. The frenzied wobble she sensed from Tikki nodding did nothing to ground her.
“—ask you to teach him, I believe,” Plagg was saying. Somehow his forced nonchalance created a calm.
“I’m sorry,” Marinette said, picturing herself clinging to the countertop like a rock climber hanging onto a cliff’s edge, “he’s asking what?”
“I suppose anyone in the vicinity might notice a pastry smell or two, having been here long enough,” droned Plagg. “And I suppose anyone who did notice—particularly if they’ve been particularly unlucky in their own cooking endeavors—I suppose they might think to themselves: well, here’s someone who might be able to tell me what it is I’m doing wrong. I suppose.”
None of this succeeded in subduing Marinette’s interest. “He wants to ask me how to cook?” she asked, half to herself. “He wants to ask me to cook. I need to rehearse my lines,” she said suddenly, flinging the dish towel at its hook and hurrying to the living room to pace the long red-and-black spotted rug. “I’ll say hello, of course, probably before he’s said it—because it’s my apartment, so I should do the welcoming. Unless he’s decided it’s an intrusion, by which standards he ought to say hello first, like an apology. Not that he needs to apologize,” she added hastily. “Just that he might be planning to, in which case I have to let him know that it’s no trouble.”
“I told you to keep your mouth shut about it,” Plagg scolded Tikki from the kitchen doorway.
Tikki didn’t pay him any attention. “It’s alright, Marinette,” she called. “You can’t rehearse lines, anyway. You don’t have his half of the script!”
“How does that help?” Marinette squashed her cheeks in her hands. She was really going to regret not washing that strainer. “So he’s going to be the only one who knows his lines?”
“There aren’t any lines,” Tikki soothed. “He’ll have to adapt to the conversation based on what you say. His script will fall through before you know it. Index cards,” she emphasized dreamily.
“Still not better,” Marinette snapped. “You’re the worst ghosts I could ever imagine.”
“What did I do?” Plagg asked the ceiling.
“Think of it this way,” Tikki said. “Now you know you’ll get to talk to him. Haven’t you been wanting to for ages?”
“She’s wanted to talk to the idea of him,” Plagg said rudely.
“You can’t blame her,” retorted Tikki. “Ideas of people are so easy to talk to. Ourselves, for example.”
“You’re impossible,” said Marinette. But it had been the right thing for Tikki to say. “I do want to talk to him, not just the idea of him. And it can’t be as bad as talking to you two.” She untied her apron and took it back to the kitchen to hang. “Thank you for the spying,” she said. “Don’t do it again.”
“You could make some danishes,” came a voice from the ceiling, fading as it went. “Just a thought.”
Marinette rolled her eyes.
Naturally, just as she had decided there was enough time to wash the strainer, and just as she’d gotten the water hot and reached for the handle, her door buzzed.
She set the strainer carefully in the sink, toweled her hands dry, and smoothed her shirt, trying to fortify herself. He’s going to be very blond, she thought. Blond, and very clean, with one of those nice, well-fitting shirts. She dared to hope he would smile at her. She even dared to hope she would smile back.
Very clean, she thought. And either he’ll say hello first, or I will. She opened the door.
Adrien, floured head to toe and wearing a much-too-large apron, blinked at her. “I was going to make cookies,” he said, coughing a little on the flour. “I had it all planned out.”