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Marinette is so wrapped up in her writing, she doesn’t even notice Chat Noir (admittedly quietly) dropping in on her balcony.
She’s grown used to his visits, looks forward to them even, but today has been such a good day that her head is too wrapped up in her current task to notice anything else; the faint fairy lights bathing her periphery in soft hues that match the giddy mood she’s been in all day.
“Cher Adrien… oh, is this a love letter, Princess?” Chat Noir whispers in her ear. He’s so close, Marinette bumps her forehead on his chin when she jumps, startled. Clutching the paper to her chest, Marinette scoots away in her deck chair. When she dares look back at her superhero partner, he’s looking at her with an odd mix of mischief and curiosity in his eyes.
“Chat Noir!” she finally says when her heart goes back to beating at an acceptable speed. She lowers the paper in her hands a little, not enough for him to see, even though he’s trying to, if the way he’s craning his neck is anything to go by. “You peeping tom! What are you doing here?”
With the way his mask is poised over his eyes, it’s really hard to notice the way he faintly blushes, but Marinette manages to. it’s satisfactory to not be the one embarrassed, for once (even though she is very embarrassed to have been caught but hey, at least it isn’t showing), and Marinette lets the feeling push the confidence that she so often lacks without her spots.
“Can’t a cat visit his princess?” he quips, quickly recovering from whatever made him bashful. He makes himself at home the same way he always does, stretching out on the bean bag she sewed up just for him (green, like his eyes, like the color of the money he must have spent buying fabric to replace that which she used for the beanbag, the impossible cat), mindlessly toying with the end of his belt-tail. Marinette raises a disbelieving eyebrow. “I had a good day.” He admits, a rare soft smile adorning his features. “I wanted it to end well.”
Marinette keeps quiet for a while. It’s hard to talk to Chat Noir sometimes. He’s her partner and her friend, but all the time he spends with her when she’s not a superhero makes filtering her speech even harder than it already is when she responds to Ladybug (did he do this with Ladybug? Can I tell him this? Is it okay to tell him about myself? Am I being selfish?).
But it feels so nice, to have someone as amazing (and silly) as Chat Noir, seek her out. Marinette enjoys his company, flirty and annoyingly pun-filled as it is; she’s certain he would stop visiting her if she asked, but the truth is Marinette couldn’t ever find it in herself to tell Chat Noir to go away.
“I had a good day too.” She ends up saying with a soft smile. Her heart flutters and her stomach makes a Ladybug-worthy somersault when she recalls the bright smile Adrien directed at her earlier in the day, when he was announced winner of the fencing tournament. Marinette’s blue eyes wander from Chat Noir to the table upon which rests the banner she made to cheer for him, neatly folded inside a box. Her smile widens a little bit more.
“Does it have anything to do with that papurr you’re writing?” he asks, bringing her attention back to him as she levels him with a glare. His shit-eating grin is annoying enough to make Marinette want to flick his nose. If she were Ladybug right now, she would totally do it -but she isn’t, so her hands stay within the safety of her lap.
“You have to stop, Chat Noir.” Marinette says, deadpan. But she lets her disgust at her partner’s wordplay go as she smooths the note on her lap. The paper is a little wrinkled, so she throws it away with all the other failed attempts (a small pile beside her deck chair) and starts on a new one from her sketchbook. “There was a fencing competition in my school today.” She recalls. Chat Noir’s eyes are trained on her in that unnerving way cats sometimes look at you, so Marinette chooses instead to look at the horizon as she talks, lest her words fail her as they so often tend to do. “My-” classmate. Friend. Crush. The love of my life. The boy I can’t talk to. the boy who hardly talks to me. “Friend, Adrien, participated and won. I made a banner for our class to cheer on him, but he had to leave soon, and I didn’t have a chance to give it to him.” she rushes out, making a pause to breathe.
Chat Noir is still staring at her but Marinette, lost in her recollection of the day’s events, barely takes notice of it.
“So I baked him some cookies -to celebrate, you know?” she pauses. Alerts ring in her brain, telling her to stop talking to Chat Noir about Adrien Agreste. Reasonably, she shouldn’t have any qualms because he doesn’t know who she is and what are the chances he knows Adrien? but Chat Noir is her partner and she’s not unaware of his crush on her. it feels cruel to talk to him about her own crush when the same talk would tear him apart if she were transformed.
Mainly though, she shouldn’t talk to Chat Noir about Adrien because she trusts Chat Noir, because with him it wouldn’t be boy talk, but a serious conversation -one she’s never had, and one she might need now that Adrien seems farther away with every day that goes by.
“And I wanted to write him a congratulations note but… But I don’t know what to tell him.” she whispers softly, looking down at her hands as if she could will them to find the right words to write. “I never do, actually.”
Chat Noir studies her quietly for a long moment (Marinette can feel her skin prickling with the intensity of his gaze), and when he finally speaks it feels like he’s been waiting to say it for a long time.
“What’s so special about this Adrien guy?” Marinette looks at him. there’s undiluted curiosity in Chat Noir’s question, like the idea of herself getting tongue-tied about anyone is inconceivable to him. marinette sighs, standing from the chair with a grace that’s not usual in her without a mask, to lean on her balcony’s railing.
I want him to see me, she thinks, wishing once again to be courageous enough to say it to someone, but keeping it inside like she always does. Wishing Adrien would see her in all her clumsy, uncoordinated glory, and like her just a little. Wishing he’d talk to her again and touch her shoulder like he used to.
“I- Adrien… he’s…” and there she goes again, like the mere mention of his name is enough to render her speechless. Marinette takes a deep breath, steeling herself for the conversation she set herself up to. “Adrien is so kind.” She whispers. Chat Noir joins her on the railing, sitting on it rather than leaning, his gaze no less smoldering than before. Marinette wonders if she should be having this conversation with him of all people, but soldiers on. “I… have you ever wanted to talk to someone so bad that when you try to do it nothing you say ends up making sense?”
There’s tension in Chat Noir’s shoulders before he answers her question, green eyes looking away into the horizon for a moment. It’s getting late and Marinette isn’t any closer to finishing her note (or her physics homework) but she’s too far into this conversation to let it go now.
“The cat has got my tongue a couple of times, yes.”
Marinette snorts. Leave it to the stupid cat to try to lighten the mood with a cat pun. Marinette is so fond of him, it’s ludicrous.
“Ugh. Why do I hang out with you?” Chat Noir’s only reply is a self-satisfied smirk. Marinette huffs. “Anyway; when I try to talk to Adrien, I always say things in the wrong order or with no order at all. He probably thinks I’m a weirdo -it’s kind of a surprise he hasn’t called for a restraining order- but he’s always been very kind about it. ever since the first time I met him.”
She turns her head to look back to her room, but whatever she’s staring at is a mystery to Chat Noir.
“Isn’t he a model?”
“Well -yeah.” Marinette replies, blinking as she returns her attention to him. her brow furrows to form a light scowl, pink lips pursed into a pout. “But that’s not all he does.”
Adrien is floored.
“He’s a great fencer.” Marinette says, the moon painting silvery flecks on her bluebell eyes and giving her an ethereal aura that makes her particularly beautiful in the chilly night. “He won that tournament! He probably likes that better than modeling.”
He gives her a surprised stare. She’s not looking at him, but then she does and her cheeks acquire a rosy color that makes Adrien feel like there are supernovas running through his veins, exploding every time he breaths near this wonderful girl. Marinette reads his civilian self the way one reads an open book, and the accuracy in her analysis of him is (ha!) spot on.
Truth be told, Adrien doesn’t dislike modeling. It’s effortless, and he gets to keep some cool clothes after some shoots -but when he gets a compliment on his modeling, it doesn’t feel like they’re complimenting him. getting praised for looking pretty isn’t something he rejoices or takes pride on, because he does it to make his father happy. Fencing though, playing piano and basketball, those are all things he loves and has made an effort to be good at; the fact that Marinette can see that just makes her even more valuable a person in his eyes.
“I- I mean… I’m no one to know that!” she clarifies, hands gesturing wildly to make her point. “But, well, he always looks kind of wistful in his photos… not like sad or anything but- I think he likes the other things he does better. Before he came to school, he didn’t have any friends, and I think he likes being part of a team.” She confesses, smiling softly.
He’s never wanted to reveal himself as much as he does now. Every cell in his body is yelling “I’M ADRIEN! I’M RIGHT HERE!” at her, but his mouth stopped functioning sometime in the previous half hour. Marinette, wonderful Marinette must think he’s some weirdo, prompting her to talk about a classmate like that, but when he saw his name on that note he couldn’t help himself; after all, he has been avoiding her for a very long time, long enough that he would not be the least surprised if she had started to hate him.
(will she hate me when she finds out? A quiet voice whispers in his brain)
“Alright!” he says, an eternity later. Marinette yelps, startled. It’s late enough that he’s risking her parents finding him if he keeps talking so loud, but he feels that speaking any lower would let Marinette know just how hard his heart is trying to beat itself into her hands. “I’m going to help you write this note to this less ameowzing but cool-sounding Adrien guy.” he declares, eyes closed with self-satisfaction.
“You will?” Marinette asks, amused. She has one eyebrow lifted, and Adrien wants to kiss it back into place. “How will you accomplish that, Chat Noir?”
“Easy: just imagine you’re writing the letter to me.”
She lets out a laugh. “I’m not going to tell Adrien to stop visiting me already!”
“Why not?” he teases, wiggling his eyebrows.
“Well, for one, he doesn’t do that, you do, silly cat. And -well, he’s been acting weird towards me later so…” her voice drops a little, as well as her eyes. The victory of making her laugh tastes bittersweet in his tongue. “I don’t think that would help my case.”
He takes her hand in his gloved one, giving it a squeeze. “I’m sure there’s a reason for that. Why would anyone not want your company, princess? Now let’s write that note and show Adrien what he’s been missing!” right then, his miraculous beeps. He curses Plagg, who probably wants cheese already; he wants to stay to talk to Marinette some more and get drunk in her smiles, but knows better than to defy the moody kwami.
“Sounds like you have to go, Chat Noir.”
He desperately does not want to go, he wants to stay and tell Marinette he loves her and maybe beg her forgiveness and a chance to prove his devotion to her; but she’s already let go of his hand, so Adrien masks his disappointment with a smile.
“you are claw-rrect, Marinette. This is where I bid you adieu.” He announces, reclaiming her hands to brush his lips against her knuckles. Marinette is slower this time to pull away than usual and he rejoices in the touch of her soft skin. “Remember, it’s like you’re writing to me.”
Adrien goes to sleep with the image of Marinette smiling and telling him how incorrigible he is plastered behind his eyelids.
The next morning, he finds a white box waiting for him on his desk. Inside it, there’s a note that reads:
Cher Adrien,
Congratulations on winning the fencing tournament! I knew you could do it.
You really are amazing.
Here is the banner that we cheered you with, and a batch of cookies to celebrate.
-Marinette
He feels like the note is missing something, but he still carries it around in his pocket for weeks after.