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It went almost entirely without saying that Chat Noir was the most ridiculously excessive and excruciating dork whom Marinette had ever encountered – from the way that he swallowed his ice cream cones whole (which also became kind of hot now that he was more of a Rawr! sort of tiger who could, you know, eat her alive if he wanted, than a flopsy feline just-a-friend) to the obsessive fixation on the minutia of "Naruto Running" as depicted and broken down in a series of physics free-body diagrams in his effort to convince her of its merits.
Seated atop a roof's ledge, her legs dangling down into the abyss that was becoming progressively more inviting by the moment as her head fogged with drag coefficients and integral calculus equations, she'd listened as he'd tried to sell her on the notion that it was, indeed, the optimal form of running, when properly mastered.
Huge Dork with a capital D – not that she thought about his huge capital D, oh no! Like. The biggest. Matched only by the unflagging generosity and patience of that massive heart, evidenced when, for instance, he gave his ice cream to that young boy whose mother didn't have enough change to afford it; or scooped up an akumatized girl, who clung to his neck - kind of leaving Ladybug jealous and causing her to reconsider having three kids and a hamster to divide Chat's attention – and blew snot all over his collar as he rocked her back and forth, carting her off to teary-eyed and grateful parents.
Now, just because she had flushed and gone a little dry mouthed at the sight of him hefting the tyke up for a ride on his broadening shoulders, all wrapped up in leather and looking kind of gropable, did not imply that she was thinking anything untoward, such as immediately re-reconsidering those three and possibly more kids (they weren't going to be brought in by stork, after all). Nor was there any ulterior motive to stuffing him full up with a platter of passionfruit macaron – just a friendly reward between platonic partners since that's what he wanted them to be even though his eyes had misted over and he took her hand in his in such a way as to make her hope think that he was going to kiss it, but instead only squeezed it.
Squeezed it like a pal.
Indulging him this evening was just... rewarding a good friend for his good behaviour like a good girl who could whip up a good batch of cookies.
Everything was completely... good.
Positive reinforcement, as was the case tonight after a particularly grotesque akuma involving swarms of locust and frogs that culminated in, well, let's just say that they disclosed to the city that they were their family's respective first-born children given how they responded.
And, for once, Chat Noir didn't die. Miracle of Miracles greater even than her "Miraculous Cure" – and she hadn't even had to slap a smattering of lamb's blood on the Dork's forehead. The opportunity was right there for him to knock her out of the way of a plague beam and absorb the blow himself with the same kind of manic, almost eager abandon that left her wondering, at times, whether this was a death wish or maybe some kind of weird kink. Oh, he'd made the leap – was poised to interpose himself between her and cankers, sores, boils, pustules, maybe frogs, or a slow, lingering demise due to some pulmonary lesions, but, instead, he'd scooped up a trash can lid in mid-barrel roll and shielded both of them with the slightly stained metal disk that was none the worse for wear after absorbing the hit.
Good kitty.
And good kitties kept themselves safe. For that, he most assuredly deserved a reward. Which was why they found themselves on this rooftop, the resounding roar of a purr from Chat's throat echoing into the distance. He lay splayed out on the brickwork, shoulders set to her thigh and head on her lap. Fingers trailed through his lustrous golden hair while his booted feet trembled, shaking against the brickwork much like his flexing claws. Blissful abandon left his features slack, reminding her of a child just about to drift off to sleep, knowing only the softness of his blanket, the aura of his parents in the next room soothing as their murmuring voices were assimilated into nighttime background noises, and that bright dreams, and a brighter morning, awaited him
The luxuriousness of his hair drew her hands deeper, fingernails dragging along his scalp, the sensation dulled and unsatisfying because of her gauntlets, and not for the first time she wished not only that she could feel him in a completely non-sexual and yet not-platonic fashion, but also that she didn't have rough and jagged short fingernails, cuticles raw, from gnawing on them when she started to spiral.
Totally for the best though; she needed short nails for her sewing projects because anything flashy would just get in the way of her stitching, snipping, and embroidering.
But that really wasn't the issue here, she realized as the motion of her hands ground to a stop.
"Mm." Chat slow blinked up at her, one eye and then the other drifting closed and then open. "Anything wrong, Milady? That felt really nice. Why'd you stop," he asked in a slur, hazy eyes starting to focus and clear. "D'you have to go?"
Well, yes. Scheduling demands and a lack of sleep had required her to leave roughly a half hour ago, but that was far from the issue that plagued her mind, its gears ground to a halt as her mouth parted and gaped like a fish blorp-blorping up pellets of food.
Feeling was exactly the issue here. For Chat, it might have been the absence of his pets, but she was feeling the absence of something else.
"Chat," she began with strained, faux pleasantness that had him sitting up woozily and stretching lanky teen arms up towards the sky, little clawed fingers wriggling like a cat flexing his paws. Come to think of it, Chat really did act like a cat with alarming frequency.
Scampering about on all fours; merring, mewing, meowing, and myriad other feline mannerisms, to say nothing of the insatiable touch-starved pleas for pets.
Gazing on her with increasing trepidation and befuddlement, obviously having discerned her dour expression, Chat braced himself against the brickwork of their rooftop ledge and settled into a seated position.
"Eh, Ladybug, is everything alright?" From the twitch of muscles along his shoulders, he seemed to be attempting to quirk his head in confusion, but her hands shot out, Ladybug clutching into the sides of his cheeks, fingers running along the hairline of those fluffy banana-shaped locks of hair.
The ensuing blush was positively red-hot as she leaned so deeply into his personal space, and dragged his head in closer so that they were nearly nose-to nose, his minty-sweet breath tickling her cheeks after a quick hitch, deep in his lungs.
"M-my Lady,” he stuttered, raising his hands to the side as if struggling to determine whether he had to fend her off. “I don't know if I'm ready for this level of intimacy-"
"Mon Dieu, shut up!" Whereupon her fingers nearly turned into talons, like those of a hawk clutching up a baby sheep to try to cart him into the air, clutching at the sides of his head. His immediate reaction was a little yelp, accompanied by an expression of wide-eyed shock tempered by some degree of eagerness; her gesture could be taken in two ways, after all – either she was going to pop his head like a pimple or yank him down to crush their mouths together.
In actual fact, she was trying to grope him.
Not like that, though.
"Where are they?" she asked, patting the side of his head. Alright, it was less a pat and more an approximation one of those deafening open-palmed ear-claps, used to discombobulate, that she'd seen in some martial arts films that Alya enjoyed and that Robert Downey Junior Sherlock Holmes boxing scene.
"Wha?"
Chat did not appear any more or less discombobulated, his blonde brow arching upwards beyond the wide rim of his mask. "Uh, what?"
"I- I can't believe this!" she croaked, parting the hair along the side of his head and leaning in for a closer look like she was trying to pick out ticks from her pet indoor cat that had just returned from a lengthy adventure on the mean streets of Paris after having slipped out of her apartment. "They're just... gone?!"
A sunny laugh bubbled up inside of Chat's chest as if she'd just laid down a gut-busting pun, and that despite the fact that she had withdrawn trembling hands, which fell to her lap.
"Oh, my ears! Well... yeah? Why would I need two pairs?" he asked like she was the absolute idiot here and he simply was too polite to point it out.
The leather triangles atop his head twitched and then curved downwards, flattening into his hair before perking up again, popping from the sea of golden strands like bloody annoying vermin in a Whack-a-Mole game.
Then they started to wiggle.
Wiggle. Like the things were waving at her.
Mocking her.
Now those hands were clutched to the side of her own shaking head as she loosed a tortured groan.
"Of course you'd ask that," she choked, reexamining her life choices and the shift of her crush from Adrien, teen heartthrob and male model, to a leather-clad furry, "you degenerate."
“Oh,” Chat began, his face falling like the blade of a guillotine, heading straight for her neck in a well-deserved emotional execution for her cruelty and kink-shaming. “Do you think this is going to be a deal-breaker with Marinette?”
An aggrieved hiss burst through her teeth as she mulled over that question, watching the feline pout with those full, pink kitten lips, fingers laced in front of him and twiddling innocently and boots knocking against the side of the roof.
“... no.”
And, indeed, it wasn't.
So she'd fallen in love with a furry... also rendering her a furry.
She could live with that.