Chapter Text
She shouldn’t have flirted back at him. Or at the very least she should have done something to discourage him, given him a cooler reception than she had, ignored his ridiculous puns and jokes more than she had, been---when you got down to it---less affectionate with him than she had. Something.
But her the silly cat had dropped that damnable package off---a little something for the trouble, he’d written, a little something as compensation for the inconvenience of her needing to get him out of trouble instead of the other way around---and she’d had to open it just out of courtesy because it’d be rude to throw away a present and she’d had to find the bolt of finest silk inside, enough for a dress and a half, two if she wanted to shorten the hem and skimp a little on the material elsewhere, and she’d had to arrange for another meeting just to thank him and then she’d had to set up a third meeting when she’d noticed how reluctant he was to leave that time and then they’d just clicked somehow, like she and Alya or Adrien and Nino had clicked.
There was a long chain of "justs” and “hads” leading them here. To this time, and to this place.
“Hey, Princess?” Chat says, waving a hand a few times in front of her eyes. She blinks and swats at it on reflex as his words---tinged with shades of warm amusement and edged with mild concern---burrow down and nestle someplace next to her heart, a sudden boiling weight, a sudden tightness in her breathing, a sudden pressure in her chest. Chat holds both his hands up in mock surrender and leans away from her.
“Hey, hey,” he says with a slight smile---and her breathing is just incrementally tighter as she answers it with a slight scowl---as she flails weakly once more at him for the look of the thing. “You wouldn’t want to cripple me here, Princess, Ladybug might need my help and I can’t do that if I’m laid up in hospital with my arm shattered by one of your mighty blows.”
“Wuss,” she says, and Chat breaks into a quiet chuckle, her bones resonating with the sound. It’s not fair that he can do this to her. Not when he’s just a friend, just someone like Nino or Alya.
“Okay,” he says after a quiet minute. “Seriously, what’s up? I know I’m pretty, but I think something’s wrong when you’ve been staring at me for more than thirty seconds straight.”
Marinette catches herself and forces her gaze back down into her lap. She’s wearing, yes, her usual pink pajama pants, loose and comfy and warm, the cotton weave wearing a little thinly at the side of her knee, where she’d taken to rubbing at it with her thumb on nights like these, when the dark thoughts came to her
She quashes the upwelling tide and forces her thumb to still its motion.
“Come on,” Chat says, his voice low and smooth. He nudges her gently in the side with an elbow and she hammers down the instinctive urge, the by-now old habit to nudge back, to turn to him laughing or frowning with such overacted intensity that he’d immediately burst out laughing with his wheezing little cackle of a laugh or smile toothily back.
“Come on,” he repeats, a little quieter, a little more gently. “It’s me, Marinette.”
Which is the entire issue, of course. Him. Him with his cheesy jokes and his pyrite cheer, his fierce kindness wielded like an axe against the evils of the world, his utter refusal to be anything other than a decent person. The him that gave kids piggyback rides and capered for their amusement and came back after a hard battle to comfort Papillon’s victims. Him, looking at her under the wan light of this half-moon above.
The him that was so hard not to fall for, in spite of all the flirting. In spite of Adrien.
“All right,” Chat says after a minute. He scoots away a little and reclines languidly on his elbows, watching the twinkling stars above with a small contented smile as Marinette watches him from the corner of his eye.
It couldn’t hurt. Just. Just to admit it to herself, at least. Just to say that her affections were more than merely friendly.
“You look nice,” she says, her tongue mangling the words in her head on instructions from the sentiments in her heart. “I want to kiss you.”
Chat blinks, then turns towards her, his ears perking up. “I’m sorry, what?”
Shit. Shit. The enhanced hearing, how could she have forgotten about his enhanced hearing, oh shit.
Deny, that was the thing.
Deny everything, it was just a quote, or something misheard, deny it deny it deny it.
“I said if you died I wouldn’t miss you!”
She feels the words slip oil-slick from her tongue, propelled by ill-considered panic with all the unstoppable inevitability of a lit match spiraling downwards under gravity's clutching fingers, sees his eyes go wide with shock, the little exhale as though she’d just driven a knife into his chest, the reflexive recoiling from her shout.
She sits there. He sits there. Neither say anything in their shock.
Then Chat rises, his every movement measured and slow and overly careful, the movements of a man walking alongside a precipice, the waves crashing at the rocks below. His hand trembles once before he clenches it into a tight fist.
“I,” he says, “wasn’t aware. Of the strength of your feelings. On. On this matter.” A tight breath that Marinette struggles to replicate, breath enough to apologize, to admit the error, to drag him back even as the avalanche thunders down towards the both of them.
Just one breath, just enough breath to say one word, to say “stop”, to stop this to preserve this to save this.
“I won’t bother you further Prin---Marinette,” he says, correcting himself. Then he coils and leaps away.
No.
The skylight behind Marinette creaks open after some time.
“Marinette?” Sabine says tiredly. “Why are you up here this late? Was it you that shouted?”
“Couldn’t sleep, Mama,” Marinette says, staring blankly out at the night.
“All right. Just be sure to get to sleep,” Sabine says after a moment. The skylight creaks back down and shuts with a dull clunk of metal against metal.
Marinette sits as the dew settles into her clothes and the chill seeps into her chest, and the half-moon’s wan light descends towards the dawn.