#2, marichat identity reveal?
2. With a hoarse voice, under the blankets
Marinette doesn’t remember when Chat starts showing up at her balcony, or why he keeps coming back. She doesn’t know how he stretches his visits a little longer each time, or where he finds the energy or time. He comes when soft twilight gives way to the deepening blue, and goes when the quiet dark lays over all the city to sleep.
She does know, though, that there is something he finds, in her company and her treats and her home, that invites him back. And despite her grumpiness at the late hour and her eyerolls at his exaggerated theatrics, she never turns him away.
She knows that he needs this, whatever this is.
(“You don’t have to always do that you know,” Marinette says lightly once, more out of fond amusement than anything else. “Show off all the time.”
“How else would you see how strong and wonderful I am?” Chat jokes, flexing his biceps for her.
“I’m not even really seeing that now,” she snorts. “C’mon Chat. There aren’t any cameras or crowds around. It’s just me.”
“Just you,” he echoes faintly, a funny look on his face that somehow warms her cheeks. “You say that like it doesn’t mean anything.”
“I mean… it shouldn’t,” she says slowly, because she isn’t interested in a performance. The curtains are down, the stage is dark, and all is quiet. “It’s only me. Just you, and me.”)
Marinette discovers clues about Chat’s life not unlike the way they sink into sleep: gradually, and accidentally.
It’s an inevitable fall. Nighttime brings all the barriers down in preparation for sleep and dreams, leaving them vulnerable and open, and it’s in this space that Chat unwinds around her.
This is how she finds out he hates spiders, that he loves Chinese food, that he watches anime. He tells her how he was homeschooled for the longest time, how he’s still new to this business of making friends, how he loves being a superhero. He fences, he plays the piano, he models, and despite the many glaring hints, it still takes Marinette a long while to piece it all together.
The realization settles over her when she’s telling him about her fashion designs. She lifts her eyes from the drawings scrawled over the pages of her sketchbook and up to the soft, bright green of his eyes.
He says, simply, “You’re amazing, Marinette.”
There is no distant rumble of thunder, no umbrella, no lucky bracelet passed between them, but she knows that admiring look in his eyes, that wry smile ghosting his lips. The air seems to charge between them, the buildup of something she should’ve seen long coming, and she carefully puts the sketchbook down. She sort of wants to yell into her pillow, or at Tikki, or maybe even at herself for landing in this predicament.
The panicked flurry in her chest quiets when she looks again at Chat. Whatever else, she knows she doesn’t want to yell at him. He needs this understanding, this openness, this friendship- he needs her.
Talking Adrien during class time, come morning, becomes significantly easier. She turns her flailing and nervous rambling around him into a fierce protectiveness over his well-being. She can feel the weight of his gaze on her, when he thinks she isn’t looking; and when she looks back at him, he doesn’t look away. That funny look in his eyes, the one that warms her cheeks, is much easier to read in the light of day.
Still, when the day settles down the sleep and night creeps over the horizon, Marinette unlocks her trapdoor and lifts her covers up for Chat. She knows now, what he finds when he comes back to her, what he doesn’t find at home.
No one should wonder what that kind of warmth feels like.
(As he settles down in the space next to her, the one she makes just for him, he murmurs, tentatively, “Love you.”
With the pads of her fingers brushing over his cheeks until she feels him smile at her touch, she murmurs back, “Love you too… Adrien.”)
