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Marinette finds her room as dark as she’d left it before she went downstairs for dinner. Balancing her tray of snacks on one hand, she closes the door behind her just as quietly as she opened it. She spots Tikki hiding behind her diary on her computer desk, and they silently exchange discreet nods.
She tries to keep calm as she climbs the steps to her loft, but she knows it’s a losing battle. Her heart always stutters whenever Chat Noir is around. It pounds when he’s in her room.
It’s a painful hammering when she’s worried about him.
She takes a deep breath, then she lets her eyes fall on that flaxen mop of hair, shining in the moonlight, amidst all the pink of her bed. He’s cocooned in the blanket he’s clutched to his chin, and he’d rolled to his side, facing away from the window. His face is obscured in the shadows.
“Chat Noir?” she calls as she places her tray on the foot of her bed. He doesn’t stir. She taps where his shin should be, and calls him again. Still no response.
Still careful, she kneels onto the mattress and scoots towards him to have a better look. His breathing is even, so that’s a relief. When he’d arrived, the way he’d gasped for air scared her. She places a hand on his shoulder to shake him awake—
And pauses.
There’s something different about his shoulder. She’s familiar with how warm and solid he is—she’s gripped and clawed at his shoulders far too many times to not know how it feels under her fingertips—but there’s something different. It’s…softer, somehow.
Curiosity mixes with the worry she’d been trying to rein in all night. Slowly, she peels her pink blanket away from him.
She gasps a sharp and loud, “G-HHHHHH—!!!!” as she jumps back. The inhale hisses inside her ears along with her now thundering pulse, and the tray almost crashes to the ground; she only barely manages to save it, thanks to her quick reflexes.
Behind her, Chat Noir groans.
Marinette swallows, feeling her neck and her ears burn as she fixes herself into a more proper sitting position. She keeps her back to him.
“Mh… Marinette?”
She knows that he literally just woke up, so that low, gravelly version of his voice should be expected.
However, it should also be illegal.
There’s a rustling of cloth. She imagines him sitting up and getting his bearings. She fights against imagining other details.
“Mari— Oh.”
Oh, indeed.
“So…” she begins as casually as she can. It comes out high-pitched and awkward. “Is— Is there a reason why you’re naked in my bed?”
A beat passes as more rustling sounds come, and she deduces that he’s hurriedly covering himself. Images of her blanket, the one she wraps around herself in the night, sliding on his bare, undoubtedly chiseled torso come unbidden. She clamps her eyes shut to stop them. It doesn’t help.
Sure, they’ve been a little…frisky…with each other before, but they’d always been fully clothed. None of her clothes had ever been removed, and his suit always stayed on. She’d never seen his skin that wasn’t on his forehead, cheeks, or jaw.
And now that she’s seen his unclothed shoulder, it’s fuelling her imagination in a way that would most probably stroke his ego.
“Er… I can answer the naked part,” he informs her. She can almost hear his wince. “Not quite sure about the bed part, though.”
She nods at her wall. “Do you remember crashing into my balcony?”
“Vaguely.”
“You broke some of my flowerpots,” she chuckles at him to somehow lighten the mood and soothe the crackling tension in her veins. “I don’t know how awake you were before then, but you were out cold when I hauled you inside. You were still transformed when I put that costume mask on you and covered you with my blanket.” She frowns, remembering why she had tucked him in so. “You were gasping and shivering, Kitty.”
He shifts. She can picture him scratching the back of his neck.
“Work’s been pretty hectic,” he admits. “My sleeping and eating patterns have been…off.”
“I figured.” She nudges her tray towards him. “Eat up, then. Cookies aren’t the healthiest thing, but I can’t exactly take a meal up here.” He makes a pleased noise, as if he hadn’t noticed the tray. “There’s cheese for your—”
“Ca~mem~bert!”
Plagg, whom she only knows by name but have never actually seen before, sing-songs behind her. His humming flutters away almost immediately, and Marinette guesses that he’s gone to the lower part of her room. She wonders if Tikki will reveal herself to the other kwami. She shakes her head, waving the thought away for another time.
“You should take care of yourself, chaton,” she tells him, returning her attention to the boy behind her. “What if you had collapsed in the middle of a fight? Ladybug won’t be pleased.”
“Ehh,” he says around a mouthful of cookies. “I don’t think it makes that much of a difference, really.”
Marinette bristles at his flippant tone, and she almost turns around to stare him down. She slightly turns her head, instead, just so he can see the annoyance on her profile.
“It does make a difference!” she insists, eyes fiercely trained on her bedding. “We— You guys are a team! Two halves of a whole! She won’t be able to do what she does without you! She needs you!” Her voice breaks as she remembers the many instances that he’d disregarded his well-being. With a clenched jaw, she tries to continue: “I need you. So… So you better—”
His arms come to encircle her from behind, and she turns her face away to glare at her wall, instead, refusing to be distracted by the feeling of his bare arms brushing hers.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes into her hair.
“How many times must we argue about this?” she asks.
“I know, I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I get an earful from Ladybug, too.”
Marinette only presses her lips together.
He sighs, and she feels it on the nape of her neck. He kisses her there, murmuring another “I’m sorry.” He nudges her earlobe with his nose and mumbles yet another “I’m sorry,” into her neck.
“Stop trying to seduce me to wriggle out of this.”
“I’m trying to apologize. But if you’re feeling seduced, I’m not complaining.”
She cracks a smile in spite of herself. Her fists on her lap relax, and without shifting her gaze from her wall, she covers his right hand with her own, concealing his ring before she can see it in its untransformed appearance. Only then does she allow herself to look down at his arms still around her. He has smooth, strong, well-toned arms. As to be expected of Chat Noir.
“You never explained why you’re shirtless,” she reminds him.
“I’d just gotten out of the shower when I got the akuma alert on the Ladyblog.” She tenses at that, which moves him to immediately add: “It was a false alarm. Just some girls in a bachelorette party using the Ladyblog boards to bait me as a…guest.”
Marinette snickers at his wording.
“If I wasn’t sleep-deprived, I’d have humored them. Thrown a few puns or something before leaving. But as it was, I was just pissed.”
“Better none of them turn into akuma as a result.”
“Nah. They were already too drunk to turn into anything. I’d be more worried about Alya. She was pissed, too.”
He rests his chin on her shoulder, half on her skin and half on her shirt. His hair tickles her cheekbones. She resists the urge to tilt her head and kiss him.
“I still have your mask on, you know,” he hints. “I’d like it if you looked at me.”
She shakes her head. “You don’t have your cat eyes. I quite like your cat eyes.”
“Who’s to say you won’t like my not-cat eyes, too?”
“Oh, I’m sure I’ll very much like your not-cat eyes. That’s the problem.”
The vibrations of his laugh roll against the line of her back before he moves away. She struggles against the need to lean back to chase him.
“I should go,” he says.
“Yeah…”
A pause.
“Aren’t you going to kiss me goodnight?”
“No,” she answers readily. “I won’t be able to stop if I do.”
“Oh? And what’s wrong with that?”
“You’re naked right now, Chat Noir.”
Another pause.
He hums.
And then he shifts the hand she’s still holding, the one with the untransformed Miraculous. Her eyes slam closed. He weaves their fingers together and lifts their intertwined hands. Up past her clavicle, past her jaw—she shivers when his thumb brushes her chin—past her shoulder, until he can press a lingering kiss on her knuckles.
“Good night, Princess.”
His voice has taken on that rough undertone again, and Marinette feels it positively rake through her.
And then he lets her go.
Her hand is still hovering in the air when he calls for his kwami, bathes her room with a swift flash of green, opens her balcony door, and leaps outside.
Her eyes are still closed when she falls back onto her bed, brushes her Chat Noir-kissed knuckles to her lips, and smiles.