Chance Encounters (Maribat idea I'm throwing around)
Marinette moves to Gotham to pursue fashion. She has to finish her last year of high school at Gotham Academy and do an internship over the summer, but if she does she gets a massive scholarship to Gotham University. They were more than happy to help out Jagged Stone's famously young personal designer. Obviously, this puts her in classes with Damien Wayne, who barely talks and only ever calls his brothers by their last names.
Jagged insists on setting her up in a penthouse for her stay in Gotham, but Marinette argues that being a single girl living in a fancy penthouse is like asking one of the Gotham rogues to kidnap or rob her. They compromise on a nice apartment with a state of the art security system, one owned by Wayne Enterprises. Another tenant on her same floor, Jason Todd, stops by to scope out the new neighbor. He seems nice enough, but he keeps calling his older brother "Dick" and Marinette can't tell if that's his name or just an insult. Apparently he does this whenever someone new moves in to see if he’ll have to move. Marinette tells him to let her know if he does, Because she says if he doesn’t feel safe living in this building anymore, she definitely wants to leave. Jason is amused by this and decides she can stay.
It doesn't take long for Marinette to encounter Gotham's bad side. After a few months of living there she's seen plenty of rogue attacks. She's been lucky enough to stay out of it. After all, if the villains aren't magical there's nothing her Miraculous Cure could do anyway. Her luck is apparently starting to run out though, because now she's being held up at knife point in an alley. She obviously takes the guy down after years of being Ladybug and calls the cops. Dick Greyson is the officer on scene. He's incredibly friendly and is super impressed that she managed to take the guy down, but Dick has seen corrupt cops take people in for self-defense if it means someone else owes them a favor. He gives her his personal cell in case anything like this ever happens again.
Through all of this, Marinette has been spending more and more time with Damien at school. Marinette is hesitant to trust all the smiles and niceties around her after Lila's manipulation and wants to truly get to know someone before she puts any trust in them. Damien is the only exception. She was warned of his reputation as the "Ice Prince" of GA before meeting him and found talking with him to be incredibly refreshing. There was absolutely nothing fake or over the top about him. He was straightforward and down to earth and Marinette found comfort in that. She decided that she trusted him on day one. Likewise, Damien finds her skeptical attitude toward the other students to be incredibly validating. Growing up in the League, everyone was always pretending, even to the other assassins. You had to act a certain way around the right people, and manipulation was the key to survival. Marinette seems to notice people trying to take advantage of her and recognize when someone just wants a favor, and he respects that. Regretfully, and to Jon's great joy, Damien finds that he thinks of her as a friend.
Word eventually gets out that Marinette is Jagged's designer. This is, of course, entirely Jagged's fault. Some good comes out of all the extra attention, though, when she learns that the co-CEO of Wayne Enterprises is a fan of hers. He makes a commission for a new suit and, upon learning of her situation, offers her a position as his families personal designer over the summer to meet her internship qualifications for GU. They set up a meeting in person for her to take measurements once her midterms are over.
When everything is going well though, something has to throw a wrench into things. The Batfamily raids one of Black Mask's warehouses late one night, and Red Hood takes a few too many bullets and a pretty big hit to the head. The kevlar took most of the hits for him, but he's badly bruised and nursing a concussion. It's the concussion that causes him to stumble into the wrong window of his apartment building and scare his new neighbor half to death. Marinette does what she always does and helps the vigilante without question. To do that though, she has to take off his helmet. She assumed he would have a mask underneath or something. He does not. Marinette is not as surprised as she probably should be, and Jason is pissed when he wakes up. He realizes after a while that this isn't her fault. She's been taking care of him since he was too stubborn to go to Bruce, and if she wanted him or his family dead she could have done something about it by now. He decides to put a little trust in her, but keeps an eye on her just in case. This is what clues him into the situation. In her time here in Gotham, she's managed to meet all of the Wayne brothers aside from Duke, and she has no idea they're even related.
Jason, of course, finds this absolutely hilarious and wants to see just how far this madness can go. He sends Duke to her favorite coffee shop. He refers Marinette to the same dance studio as Cass. Marinette, completely on her own to Jason's disbelief, enters the same Ultimate Mecha Strike tournament as Stephanie and absolutely destroys her. Jason lives for the chaos and Marinette is completely oblivious.
Eventually, after a few AO3 tags (slow burn, feelings realization) Marinette and Damien start dating. Damien feels guilty for hiding that he's Robin from Marinette, but he knows that he'd be sharing more than just his own secret and doesn't want to betray his family's trust. He realizes that if he wants to share everything with her, his family has to trust her as well. She'll have to meet them. He tells Marinette all of this, and she shares that she's been keeping her own secret as well. Marinette hasn't told him about Ladybug even after Tikki has given her blessing, and she's been feeling guilty about it as well. She encourages him to tell her whenever he feels ready and assures him that she can wait until then. She trusts him, and she asks for that same trust in return.
Damien trusts her of course, and everything goes back to normal for about 30 seconds. Then, Damien starts trying to prepare her for the chaos she's about to find in his dining room that night. Little by little, Marinette starts to realize that she already knows every single person he's talking about. Only, that means so much more than she could have realized, because if Jason is Red Hood and his brother "the Dick" is Nightwing, then that means Dick Greyson is Nightwing and Damien's older brother, which makes Damien Robin, and oh no she thinks she knows exactly what that secret is that he didn't want to share yet.
titsay
germansingergirl
romaincrisis
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
theartofmadeline
prguitarman
