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“Purrincess”
“Catastrophic”
“Feline fine, My Lady”
“Pawsitively purrfect”
“Sounds clawsome!”
“You’ve cat to be kitten me right meow”
You’d think that after years of being around Chloe, Marinette would be used to having to deal with bullshit. But Chat Noir’s puns fall into a completely new territory of bullshit that she wasn’t prepared for. She didn’t expect the sheer annoyance of his cat themed jokes, the unbearability of them. Oh sure, the first few were funny, cute even. But they grew predictable, redundant and aggravating, especially when Ladybug would be trying to figure out how to defeat an akuma.
At least she only had to hear them as Ladybug, when akuma attacks usually happened biweekly at most. That’s what she thought before Chat started visiting Marinette at night, anyway. But of course, wherever she went, his puns seemed to follow, slamming into her ears, and beating against her brain. Marinette even found herself shooting off puns herself after a while, much to her chagrin. Sure, Chat was a great guy, charming if not a bit too flirty. However, his puns had to go. She simply couldn’t handle them anymore.
After months of torture, Marinette came up with the perfect plan to deter such annoyances and make Chat’s company much much more enjoyable. She found a spare box down in the bakery; big enough to fit a certain teenage boy masqueraded as a cat, and brought it up to her room. She then set to work, decorating it in ladybugs, paw prints, and dots, labelling said box as the “Punalty Box”, and signing her work at the bottom corner in the back. If her plan were to work, she would no longer have to listen to his puns as Marinette.
The following night, Marinette heard a knock on her skylight. She replied with a “one sec!” and pulled out the Punalty Box that she was keeping under her desk, placing it in the middle of her room. When she was satisfied with the position it was in, she invited Chat Noir to come in. When he joined Marinette in her room, he noticed the box immediately.
“What’s this, Princess?”
With a completely deadpan face, Marinette responded with, “The Punalty Box.”
“Oh, and what’s this for?”
“You’ll soon see, Kitty.”
The night continued on, complete with pastries, hot chocolate, and definitely not cuddles. Until he was finishing up the last croissant, and stood up to leave for the night.
“Well, Purrincess, I hope our paths will croissant again!” he said.
“Not so fast,” Marinette said, pointing to the Punalty Box. “Five minutes of The Box first.”
Chat glanced at the cutely decorated box and laughed. “Fine, just five minutes though. You know, it’s not that much of a prison because cats love boxes.”
Marinette smugly watched the blond boy clamber into the box and make himself at home, somehow filling up the entire box as if he was liquid. He looked at home in that box, and he was still shaking with laughter at the sheer absurdity of his situation.
“Oh, and before I forget!” Marinette retrieved a paper from her sketchbook and ripped it out. She grabbed the nearest pen in her proximity, and quickly scribbled a note on it. She handed it to Chat, and told him to pose with it for a picture.
And that is how she ended up with a picture of Chat Noir in her camera roll, where he was draped in his Punalty Box, posing dramatically as he held up a sign that read “I’m a filthy sinner”. After five minutes of sitting in the Punalty Box, Chat left with a “good night” and a wave. Smiling, Marinette looked at the photo she took and favorited it.