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Chapter Text

The touring of Metropolis, New York City, and Gotham had been going well as far as Marinette was concerned, no matter what Chloé says to her about carelessness and naivety.

She’s glad her, Adrien and Chloé all decided to take this summer trip before they started University in the fall. It sucks that it was just the three of them, she wishes more of their friends could’ve tagged along but, alas, it wasn’t meant to be.

Kagami was in the middle of fencing season and couldn’t come. Luka was touring with his father, learning the tricks of the trade and other things. Nathaniel had already been commissioned to paint a mural downtown before they really finalized dates. Nino was in much the same boat as Nath, just with music and pitch meetings for his movie script. Felix hated travelling and Alix was doing… something. Time travelling, probably. Or at least spending more time in the burrow.

Marinette was certainly starting to notice the way she’s begun talking about ancient history like she was actually there when she goes on rants now. Felix also probably noticed but Marinette’s also sure that he’s aiding and abetting her in exchange for insider information so…

She’ll probably have to deal with that later, unfortunately. But not today.

Their tour group was going to Amusement Mile later that afternoon but had been given free roam until then. Marinette decided to spend the time up until lunch at the park near the meetup spot in Gotham Square and Chloé hadn’t complained or vetoed that idea so the trio happily camped out on the grass.

Marinette had returned to her sketch of Lady Gotham in between eating bites of her sandwich. She much preferred the style of it to New York City’s Lady Liberty and Tikki agreed with her. There was just something about the Statue of Justice that inspired her.

She’d been doodling it since they left the marina yesterday and had plenty of pictures of the statue for inspiration later. There’s one she especially likes with the sun peeking out over the statue’s shoulder and starbursting over the image but still allowing her to see the silhouette. She’s thinking of printing it out to put up on her wall at home.

She’s playing with the idea of draping fabrics for formal wear designs like the roman togas both Lady statues seem to wear when a tennis ball rolls up and bumps into her leg. She has only enough time to move her sketchbook out of the way before a large dog bowls into her, tail wagging happily and barking up a storm.

“Oof!”

Adrien’s already halfway up the tree, startled out of his light doze by the barking and Chloé only daintily moved away from Marinette, leaving her to her fate.

Pushing herself back up so she’s not crushed by what feels like one hundred kilos of dog, she comes face to snout with quite possibly the biggest dog she’s ever seen. There was really only one choice of action Marinette could have followed.

“Oh! Well, aren’t you just the prettiest boy?” she tells the dog happily, reaching up to give him scratches. “Such a big boy! You nearly bowled me over, didn’t you?”

If it’s possible, the dog’s tail begins to wag even faster, enough that he accidentally overbalances himself and decides to roll with it, flopping onto his back and letting her rub his stomach. Marinette does so enthusiastically, her baby-talk to the dog devolving into broken not-words and the occasional exclamation of good boy! in both English and French.

The dog was a great dane, and had the softest coat of black fur she’s ever seen. There was a thick red collar around his throat, and Marinette stopped furiously rubbing his belly long enough to look at the silver tag attached to it.

“Titus, huh?” she says to the dog. “Such a strong name for such a distinguished boy, huh?”

“Oh god,” she hears Adrien groan from his spot still up in the tree. When she looks up, she finds him eyeing Titus with distrust, the absolute kitten. “I hope whoever his owner is, they’ve never read Shakespeare.”

Both she and Chloé blink at the strange non sequitur.

“Uh, why? Exactly?”

“Because they have shit taste in his plays if they do! Titus Andronicus is, like, Shakespeare’s worst play.”

Chloé glares up at him. “You’re such a nerd. Now stop being ridiculous and get down from there.”

“But, Chloé! It’s a dog.”

“Adrien Algernon Agreste!”

Marinette tunes out the two blondes as they devolve into sibling-like bickering. It’s a skill she’s had to learn and learn quickly with living in such close quarters with the pair for the last few weeks and also being friends with the pair for the past three years.

“Speaking of your owner, I wonder where they are?” She scratches under Titus’ chin thoughtfully. “Should we go look for them?”

Titus' head flops to the side, almost like he’s listening for something, before he clambers up onto his feet to tower over her. He’s almost twice as tall as she is sitting, which is just ridiculous. Why is everything in America so big?

Getting to her feet herself, Titus still stands almost as tall as her. She can rest her elbow on his back when she grabs his collar to make sure he doesn’t run off. He leads mostly, pulling her along at a steady trot she has to jog to keep up with.

He truly was such a well behaved dog and certainly lived up to his breed’s reputation as a gentle giant.

Or, at least she thought so, until the call of “Titus! Here!” echoes through the park and he goes racing off towards it, dragging Marinette along for the ride no matter how much she tries to slow down.

Titus comes to a skidding stop, and Marinette barely stops herself from falling by keeping her arm around Titus.

“And who are you?”

Looking up, she finds a young man, probably around her age, staring down at her. He doesn’t look happy—but most Gothamites don’t, Marinette’s found. He’s also, despite the glare he’s giving her, very  attractive.

When she opens her mouth, incoherent French comes tumbling out, much to her embarrassment.

Ah. ‘Not being able to speak coherently to people she finds attractive’, she had wondered where that particular personality trait had been as of late. Even after so many years hanging around people who should be—and are—supermodels, she still acts like a nervous wreck. Great.

Why is she like this again?

The man raises an eyebrow at her, looking very unamused.

She tries again. “Ah- Je suis- I mean, I am very sorry. Your dog found me sitting over there with my friends and I figured I should find his owner instead of letting him just wander around and I assume you’re his owner because if you aren’t this is very embarrassing for me. Not that it wasn’t embarrassing before but, oh, I’m definitely rambling and I’m going to shut up now.”

Pressing her lips together as tightly as humanly possible so her tongue will stop making horrible life decisions, she holds Titus’ bright yellow tennis ball out to his owner.

The man huffs, taking the ball from her hand. “I didn’t ask for your life’s story.”

Marinette blinks and then frowns. Her hand tightens around where she’s still holding onto Titus’ collar and she has to very carefully unclench her hand before she breaks it or something.

“I didn’t give it,” she says through clenched teeth, embarrassment abruptly forgotten. There’s no need for the man to be rude.

He scoffs. “Could’ve fooled me.”

She doesn't really have anything to say to that. Instead, she turns to Titus, who’s sitting like the good boy he is. She very seriously leans down to eye level—she does not have to lean down far—and tells him, “Your owner is an ass. But you are still a very good boy.”

She plants a kiss to his forehead that makes his tail wag, gives him one last scratch behind the ears and walks back towards her friends without looking back at the rude man.

In her pocket, she can hear Tikki giggling.

***

Colonel Bug: so I met kagami and felix’s lovechild today

MY HONOR: I would never stoop so low.

the evil twin: I would never stoop so low.

ShutUpTurtleMan: Nettie

the evil twin: Okay first of all-

ShutUpTurtleMan: dearest

sunshine

light of our collective lives and reason I breathe

what the fuCK

YoureUnderAgreste: Kagami, my love, how could you?

The Betrayal™

Queen of Salt: ew

GottaGoFast: ew wtf

sneaky snake: Send pics or it didn’t happen

give me art or give me death: [a photo of the ‘right in front of my salad?’ meme]

Queen of Salt: wait

I was with you all day when did this happen?

was it the owner of the dog that attacked you?

ShutUpTurtleMan: WHAT

Colonel Bug: he didn’t attack me!

chloe stop spreading misinformation!

titus was a sweetheart!

YoureUnderAgreste: incorrect

he was, in fact, a menace

give me art or give me death: wait was Titus the dog or the lovechild

ShutUpTurtleMan: ^^^ ?

Colonel Bug: shut up adrien

all animals are great

stop being elitist

give me art or give me death: okay but seriously what kind of dog was it

the evil twin: why exactly was he our lovechild?

GottaGoFast: because of the dramatic tryst you and Kagami had obviously

keep up

Colonel Bug: because he was as pretty as he was rude actually

And gave me the feeling that he’d rant about his honor and parentage if it given the chance

MY HONOR: you say something once as an unsocialized preteen

GottaGoFast: MARI YOU DOG!

ARE U GETTING TAIL IN GOTHAM OF ALL PLACES????

Colonel Bug: ??? no alix

did you not read the part about how rude he is?

YoureUnderAgreste: i mean,,,,,

Felix is pretty rude and we all still like him

ShutUpTurtleMan: and Chloe

YoureUnderAgreste: oh good point nino

Colonel Bug: i hate it here

Queen of Salt: Okay first of all-

YoureUnderAgreste: so i mean it’s not really a dealbreaker yaknow?

Colonel Bug: this familys a nightmare

i shoulda left you all on the street corner where i found you

YoureUnderAgreste: BUT CHA DINDT

ShutUpTurtleMan: but yA DIDNT

GottaGoFast: BUT CHA DIDNT!!

sneaky snake: but ya didn’t

***

Robinson Park is beautiful. The plants here flourish in a way the rest of the city doesn’t and Marinette isn’t sorry for dragging her friends inside. Chloé loves flowers just as much as she does, even if the stubborn blonde will never admit it.

Being a bug has its side effects, but this is perhaps one of Marinette’s favorites. She just barely stops herself from burrowing into the bushes and vines lining the secluded area she’s found. (Tikki, of course, has no such reservations and dives into a patch of flowers immediately.)

This part of the park is practically deserted. No one walking the paths for this hidden corner of paradise.

It’s not as well-groomed as the rest of the park, a sort of wild and untamed feel to it all, which she assumes is why people ignore it. But Marinette much prefers the unfettered life soaked into the air here, then the clipped and trimmed hedges outside.

There’s a sign at the entrance, that says gardeners welcome. And, truly, that was all the permission Marinette needed.

Uncaring of her clothes, she rolls up her sleeves and begins weeding and watering and digging her fingers into the dirt beneath wilting flowers, making them blossom once more. She gets into the rhythm of it and isn’t really sure how long she’s been there for until a voice speaks up from behind her.

“That’s a neat trick.”

Marinette jumps, heart in her throat as she whips around to find herself staring up at a beautiful woman with red hair and eyes greener than even Adrien’s. She’s looking down at the flowers all around Mari, a sort of knowing in her too green eyes.

Shit. This was bad.

Gotham wasn’t Paris. And even in Paris she shouldn’t have been- what was she thinking?

Metas weren’t allowed in Gotham- well. Meta heroes really. Not that she was Meta, or acting as a hero at that moment. But Meta hate was much worse in America. And she doesn't think anyone is going to ask her questions before they try anything.

“I’m not- I’m not doing anything. No tricks! I don’t know what you’re-”

“Calm down, girlie.” The woman smiles and crouches down next to the flowers.

Marinette snaps her mouth shut and watches, fascinated, as the woman reaches out her hand. Almost instantly, the flowers that were trained on Marinette turn to follow her, straining for the woman like she’s the sun.

Marinette turns to her wide-eyed.

“Your secret’s safe with me. Us gardeners gotta stick together, don’t we?” the woman winks as if sharing a secret. Which, Marinette supposes she is.

Still nervous, Marinette nods hesitantly.

“I- Do you visit this park often?” she asks.

The woman’s lips quirk, the kind that hides an amusing secret. “Yes, I’m quite fond of it. It’s very… natural.”

Marinette beams. “I thought the same! I like it a lot. I wish I had something like this back home. But there’s really only the garden I keep on my balcony.”

“You’re not from here?”

“Non, my home is Paris. I’m here with my friends travelling through America for the summer. We return tomorrow actually, and I’m glad. I miss my city. It is… very different here.”

The woman snorted, but in a way that seemed elegant. Marinette very much wants to know how she does that. Not even Chloé could pull that off.

“You’re adorable,” she tells her and Marinette blushes. “Most Europeans call us a shitshow, so thanks for trying to be nice about it.”

Marinette opens her mouth to dispute that claim and rant about all the wonderful things she’s seen since she’s been here but the call of her name makes her pause. It’s Adrien, and it seems they’re supposed to be heading back to the hotel soon for dinner.

He probably needs her help to drag Chloé and Pollen away from the hydrangeas again.

Marinette gets up to dust herself off and says goodbye to the strange woman.

“Stay safe, little bluebell. I have a feeling we’ll meet again.”

She’s gone the next moment, leaving Marinette alone and with a bouquet of bluebells cradled in her hands, roots tangled between her fingers and all.

Tikki pokes her head out of a rose bush. “She seemed nice.”

***

She returns to Gotham, following behind her whirlwind of an uncle with barely restrained amusement. It hasn’t even been a half a year since she last stepped foot on American soil, but Uncle Jay had been invited to a charity gala and insisted Marinette come along.

“You already visited my hometown without me,” he’d whined, “The least you could do is come with me this time and help fend off all the pompous fat cats. Besides! I can hardly stand to auction off an MDC without her there with me.”

He had then proceeded to go into a whole ten-minute rant on all the reasons she should join him on his trip. He’d been so impassioned about it—he always was when it came to her, the overly affectionate drama queen—that it had taken the combined efforts of her and Penny to get him to quiet down long enough to say that she already agreed to come.

After that, it’d been a madhouse. All the planning and making sure all the pieces she was auctioning off were ready as well as Jagged and Penny’s outfits for the night. She’d already been working on everything but her own dress long before Uncle Jay was suddenly hellbent on her coming along, so there was that at least.

Their plane—private jet actually, Marinette was getting oddly used to the extravagant wealth she seemed surrounded by nowadays—arrived in Gotham a week before the Charity Ball. Which was, admittedly, a strange occurrence. Most guests, if travelling, didn’t show up until the day before.

But Uncle Jay was on a mission.

Officially, they were in Gotham for the annual Martha Wayne Foundation Charity Ball auctioning off items to help fund the charity's education and healthcare programs.

But unofficially, they were here because Jagged was offended Marinette’s first trip to Gotham wasn’t with him and he was going to rectify that by ‘showing her all the real sights any two-bit tour guide wouldn’t have even thought to bring her to.’

She’d heard Jagged speak of his hometown a few times, always with that tone of voice one has when they’re fond despite themselves. He knew how bad his hometown could be but he was one of the lucky ones; grew up on the better side of town, he says, with parents on the straight and narrow.

Bad things happened, but not so much he couldn’t also remember the good of it all.

He left and was glad he did. Glad to leave and explore the world and exist without having to watch his back, but sometimes he spoke as if he missed it. The thai restaurant down the street, the friends he’d made but hadn’t spoken to in years, the graffiti walls he said you could find if you knew where to look.

Marinette couldn’t quite understand, all she’s ever known was Paris, but she didn’t need to understand in order to allow him his fun.

The first three days there were filled with Jagged dragging her all around the city, excitedly showing her everything he could remember and dramatically retelling stories about this place or that thing.

The way he saw the city was practically magical. He wasn’t by any means blind to the pain, and there were certainly stories he told of tragedy or darkness—the sheer casualness with which he told her “and there was the first place I got mugged” was mildly concerning—but it wasn’t long before Marinette found herself falling in love with the city too.

Dark it may be, but hopeless it was not.

***

Somewhere, at the center of the universe, there must be a rule written in the stars that decrees Marinette Dupain-Cheng is forever meant to be late.

Tikki can call her dramatic all she likes, but Marinette knows it exists. Right next to other ones like, ‘Marinette is destined to trip over every crack in the sidewalk’ and ‘Marinette is never to be able to speak coherently around people she finds attractive’.

Exhibit A: the fact that Marinette has just knocked a man on the street over because she’s five minutes away from the restaurant she was supposed to be at five minutes ago. She promised Uncle Jay that she’d be able to get to the reservation on time.

She was a dirty, filthy liar apparently.

Damn the interesting fashion scene in Gotham! She’d gotten too mixed up in all the odd little idiosyncrasies she found in their clothing. Zippered pockets are very popular here. And a lot of other odd things not native to America as a whole if Audrey’s fashion lines are anything to go off of.

But back to the man she’s just accidentally acquainted with the sidewalk pavement. Marinette at least had enough grace to not follow him down, but that kind of just makes her feel even worse.

“Oh, Kwami, je suis désolé. I’m so sorry, monsieur. Here,” she reaches down to help him up, tugging the poor man to his feet with perhaps more strength than she should have. He’s surprised for only a second before a charming grin spreads across his lips.

“Don’t worry about it, sunshine.” The man dusts himself off, laughing. “Where’s the fire?”

Marinette blinks, hands stilling in the air from where they’d been fluttering about his person but not really touching. “The… fire?”

“Yeah, the one that’s got you runnin’ like a bat outta hell?”

“Oh!” she exclaims. One of those American sayings then. “No, no fire. I’m just,” she checks her phone, sighing. “very late and… lost apparently.” She squints up at the nearest street sign with some nonsense names on it. “At least New York streets were numbered,” she grumbles under her breath.

“Where you tryin’ to go?”

“Sprang Bridge?”

“You’re heading the wrong way for that,” The man thinks for a second, then nods. “But it’s your lucky day. I’m heading that way, actually. I can take you there.”

Marinette pauses and takes a second to more fully look at the man. Tan biker jacket, scars where his skin is visible, wild, tousled hair with an odd silver streak at the front. He’s broad and stands much taller than her (a frankly ridiculous amount, if you ask her—nobody needs to be that tall). But he’s not- Marinette doesn’t think he’s dangerous. Or at least, he’s not planning on anything malevolent towards her.

She’s hesitating visibly now, but he doesn’t seem offended. In fact, he looks rather… pleased? Or glad, maybe, that she hasn’t trusted him right off the bat. She’s pretty sure that’s a strange thing to do.

But, again, he seems safe enough and she needs help.

“It’s not a bother?”

The man gives her a lopsided grin. “Nah. C’mon, it’s this way.”

He then takes off down the sidewalk at a jog and Marinette rushes to keep up with him. The pace he sets is brisk but easy and they quickly eat up the city blocks.

“I’m Jason by the way. Don’t think I introduced myself.”

“Marinette,” she says brightly. “It’s nice to meet you, Jason.”

***

‘Covert’ is not exactly a term Marinette believes to exist in her Uncle Jay’s dictionary.

He could, and has, toned it down for the streets of Gotham, but he is still obviously Jagged Stone. Anyone just vaguely familiar with her uncle would see through his ‘disguise’—a trilby hat, sunglasses and forgoing his iconic striped pants—in a heartbeat.

Jagged spots her first, quickly followed by Penny whipping around to face her as the two rush at her like overly protective mother hens. “Rockette!”

The two rush for her, and she can feel Jason stiffen at her side as the pair get closer. She’s practically tackled to the ground by Jagged, much to her fond exasperation, before he holds her out at arm’s length.

“We thought something horrible happened!” he yells at her and Marinette has the good grace to look sheepish.

“I lost track of time.”

Penny breathes a sigh of relief, hand brushing a piece of hair from Marinette’s face. “If you were going to be late, you should have at least texted us. I know you’re an adult-”

“But you worry, I know. I’m sorry. But I’m fine! See!” She waves her hands out at her sides as if to emphasize how okay she is. “All in one piece.”

“Yes. I see that.” Penny’s gaze moves behind her, eyebrow arching. “And who might you be?”

Marinette turns around to find Jason still standing there, watching them all with something like disbelief. Particularly, he’s watching Uncle Jay but she can see his eyes flicker to her, too.

Jason, it seems, is more than vaguely familiar with her uncle.

“Oh! Penny, Uncle Jay, this is Jason. I… kinda ran him over. He helped me get here.”

“Is that so?” Jagged says, eyeing him up and down before a wide smile overtakes his features. “How very rock and roll of you! Thanks for helping my niece, mate.”

Jason blinked. “It, uh. Was no problem. Couldn’t exactly leave her to fend for herself, right?”

“Hey!” Marinette protested. “I’m perfectly capable of handling myself! I just… can’t figure out this city. It’s practically a labyrinth!”

“Sure, squirt,” Jagged teases, “We all know how suitably badass you are.”

“Uncle Jay!”

“I’m sorry,” Jason speaks again before Jagged can retort. Three pairs of eyes swivel back towards him. “I’m just- You’re Jagged Stone, right? I’m not just off my rocker or anything? You’re the Jagged Stone.”

Jagged laughs, whipping off his glasses and tucking them into his shirt. “The one and only, kid!”

He’s quiet for a second and then turns to Marinette who’s still tucked under her uncle’s arm. “Sunshine,” he tells her, very seriously. “You didn’t say that one of the people you were meeting up with was Jagged Stone.”

“In my defence,” she says, “I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Not relevant - I-!” Jason sighed roughly, running a hand over his face before extending one to Jagged. “I’m a huge fan.”

“A man of good taste!” Jagged laughs, shaking his hand. Penny rolls her eyes fondly behind him.

“Do you mind if I get a picture?”

“Of course! Especially for the fellow Gothamite with enough of a heart to help my poor niece.”

Marinette pokes him in the side sharply for that, but he and Jason just laugh at her and force her to take dumb pictures of them being ridiculous. She has to bite the inside of her cheek to stop herself from laughing at their antics. It wouldn’t do to encourage her uncle.

She has to spend the rest of her day with him after all.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Jason,” Penny says smiling, “but I’m afraid we must be going. We’re fifteen minutes late now for our reservations.” she sends a significant look to both her and Jagged who cows a bit under her gaze.

“Sorry, Penny. It was rockin’ to meet you, mate. Thanks for taking care of our little star.”

“No problem,” he waves them off, throwing Marinette a sloppy, two-fingered salute. “Enjoy Gotham, Sunshine. Try not to get into too much trouble. Not all us Gothamites are so kind-hearted.”

Marinette snorts but takes his words for the sound advice they are. “Merci. Thank you again for helping me. Bonne journée, Jason. Au revoir!”

***

Most Gotham visitors don’t see the famed Dark Knight and his gaggle of child vigilantes, much less meet them face to face. He prefers to keep to the shadows and isn’t really one for cameras and press anyway.

There are Gothamites who’ve lived in his city for years that haven’t spoken with him. If they’re lucky, they haven’t even seen him either. (No native actually wants to meet Batman. Because natives understand the only way to meet him is if you’re in a situation that needs Batman.

And no one ever wants to be in those situations.)

Marinette meets him on her second trip to Gotham.

Right after her subway train gets hijacked.

***

Marinette doesn’t know how she gets into these situations.

Tikki tells her that despite her supposed penchant for ‘luck’, as a Ladybug and Guardian, she’s drawn towards mischance and disaster because she is meant to help. And, okay, she can kind of see where she’s coming from. After Hawkmoth’s defeat, she was still drawn to protect the city of Paris as Ladybug and as Marinette she certainly gets into more trouble as a civilian than is perhaps normal. She’s never been able to turn away someone in need but… this is Gotham.

Surely the Bat and his team can take care of this?

This isn’t some creep on the streets or an arrogant customer in need of being put in their place. This isn’t a little kid who just wasn’t looking where they were going as they crossed the street or a person who looked just on the wrong side of too sad.

This is Two-Face.

Marinette doesn’t care what any of the Kwami say. There’s no way that the Powers That Be actually decided that it was necessary for their Chosen to go up against a Gotham Rogue as a civilian. Because that's how The Powers That Be get their Chosen killed.

She watches, crowded between Penny and Jagged and hidden away as much as she can be, as Two-Face starts talking about their odds and teaching someone a lesson, backstabbers and acid throwers and double-crossers.

She doesn’t quite… follow all of it, but he seems angry about something. Marinette doesn’t need to know what. She’s handled powerful adults throwing temper tantrums all throughout her early teens, the fact that this one has a pair of pistols instead of magic just pushes him a little outside her realm of normality.

Then, a little girl is ripped from the arms of her caretaker by a goon and thrown at Two-Face’s feet.

(Marinette would, perhaps, like to think there was ever an option of her not stepping in and getting involved. Because that means she has control over herself and doesn’t just throw herself headfirst into danger like all of her friends accuse her of doing.

In reality, the moment there was a chance of someone who was actually a civilian being thrust in the middle of this particular circus, she’d already made up her mind.)

She’s pushed herself in front of the girl before anyone can blink, and suddenly she’s face to face with the man himself. Her first thought, upon looking at him point-blank, isn’t fear—hasn’t been fear in years, really—and it’s not any kind of disgust at the state of his looks as she’s heard people express.

Her first thought, after looking at the burned and scarred remains of his face, is that it must be incredibly painful.

“Oh? And what’s this? A little girl playing hero?”

The muscles and tendons, exposed and healed wrong wrong wrong— the body trying to fix what cannot be fixed—pull and tug as he speaks. Marinette, in all her eighteen years, has never thought about what lies under her skin. Now, it’s laid out before her in horrific detail and she cannot unsee it.

Marinette pulls the girl closer, and from the corner of her eye, she can see Penny holding Jagged back, can see the terror on both their faces. Her heart aches, but there is nothing she can do now. She can’t—and won’t—take back her actions or fade back into the crowd or even send them a reassuring smile.

Looking at them will draw Two-Face’s attention to them and she will not do that.

“Don’t hurt her,” Marinette pleads. The girl, so small, even against Marinette’s short five foot two and slender build, clings to her like a lifeline.

“I’m afraid that ain’t up to me to decide,” Two-Face grins down at her and from his pocket, comes out a coin. The coin.

Marinette furrows her brows and- oh. Oh.

Of all the rogues for Marinette to have encountered, of all the dangerous people to be thrown at her, she’s come up against a man who relies on chance to make his decisions. 

Perhaps the Powers That Be weren’t drunk after all. Not that that will stop her from having words with Them when she gets the chance.

She needs to stall him, keep him talking until help arrives. But she has no tools. All she has are her words and she isn’t Felix or Chloé or even Nino. Her words are not the weapons theirs are.

But they are all she has all the same.

“What has she done to you?” Marinette snaps because her brain immediately translates ‘stalling’ as ‘taunt the maniac toting guns’, apparently. Maybe her friends did have a point. “Surely a child couldn’t have pulled one over on you.”

“That’s none of your business, girlie.” Two-Face snaps right back before slipping a hand into one of his pant pockets almost casually. His other still fingers the coin. “But, since you seem to care so much, I’ll make you a deal.”

Her lips purse. She doesn’t think she’ll like this deal much at all.

“Good Heads, I shoot the girl. Bad Heads,” he pauses to grins at her, lopsided and bloody. “I shoot you.”

Sometimes, Marinette wishes that she wasn’t right so often. Just one of these days, she’d like to be happily surprised after a bout of realistic pessimism.

Well, she’s already dug her grave this far. Might as well lean into this whole ‘taunting known criminals’ thing.

She pulls her Ladybug confidence around her like a well-worn cloak and hopes it is thick enough to protect her. “Ah, but Monsieur. It’s a bad idea to bet against me in a game of chance.”

His one eyebrow raises. “Is that so, girlie?”

Oh, all of her friends—and probably Jagged—are going to call her utterly stupid later. She’s going to need to bake so many apology macaroons.

“Oh, yes. I think you’ll find I’m very lucky.”

“So be it, little lady.” The coin flips, soaring up and up and up.

Her gut twists.

“Let it fall!” she cries, “I want to see it!”

His hand pulls back and she watches as the coin clatters down and spins and lands… on its side.

Two-Face jerks back like he’s been slapped. “No. No, that can’t happen.” He reaches down and snatches the coin off the floor, immediately flipping it again.

The coin lands on its side.

“It can’t land on edge!” he shouts, flipping it again. “How can I decide if the coin doesn’t land-”

Two-Face doesn’t get the chance to see what his coin would land as a third time. A flashbang goes off, disorienting him and many others. She can’t see and her hearing goes kind of wonky, but Two-Face is still in front of her.

Seizing the opportunity, Marinette shifts her crouched position, sweeping the girl into her arms and swinging out her leg in a full 360 to slam into Two-Face’s shins. The man goes down with a sharp yell and Marinette hurriedly backs up.

Her vision is spotty—ha—and she could probably take down another goon or two but the Bats can surely handle it from here. She did her part. And there’s still a girl in her arms. Marinette’s first priority has to be keeping her out of the action and safe.

The girl clings to her, shaking hard enough that Marinette worries she just might shake apart. She rocks her gently, trying to be as soothing as possible. She can hear fighting, but she focuses on crooning and comforting the girl.

***

Okay, so, she perhaps hadn’t actually met the Batman, but there was a significant number of his team there. Or… she thinks.

Is three a lot for him? The agreed-upon number of heroes he has varies greatly but she’s sure that’s somewhere around half. She doesn’t know their names but there’s a yellow one whose suit looks more high-tech robot than the others, one with a red and black color scheme and cape, and a third whose only color was the blue bird symbol across his chest who seems much more bouncy than the others.

They quickly deal with everything and the police arrive not long after. Marinette hands the little girl off back to the adult she was taken from and almost immediately Jagged and Penny are upon her.

She doesn’t think she’s ever seen them so upset. She allows them to fawn and worry over her to their hearts’ content, only putting up the barest of resistances to their fretting.

Behind her, she can feel the heroes’ interest in her like a prickle on the back of her neck. She hadn’t noticed them before the flashbang, but they must have been lying in wait for a little while before they jumped in, assessing the situation and such.

She gets the feeling they saw her protecting the girl. Marinette also gets the feeling Gotham doesn’t get many civilians trying to play at hero.

A few police officers ask her some questions and then Marinette is being dragged out of the subway by Jagged and Penny before the three heroes get the chance to talk to her… or something. She gets the distinct feeling she’s been placed on some sort of watch list.

Which is… great. Just what she needs.

***

Later, after Jagged and Penny have gotten all their fretting out of their systems and spent two hours pressed tightly onto either side of her as if to reassure themselves that she’s there—that she’s safe— Marinette bites the metaphorical bullet and calls her friends.

She’s going to get in so much trouble for telling them about it, but she’d get into a lot more if she didn’t tell them, so. (Marinette holds no illusions that her friends wouldn’t somehow find out and then they’d be pissed because she tried to hide it from them.)

It was currently… three am in Paris, but Marinette didn’t think her friends would care very much. Well, Chloé might. But she’d get over it, especially after Marinette started talking.

Colonel Bug: Court is in session

Marinette pauses, thinks about how her friends will take the coded message without context, and quickly adds:

Colonel Bug: Nothing bad btw

Just news youll want to hear sooner rather than later

the evil twin: news related to you is almost always something bad

What have you done now?

Colonel Bug: …

no comment

ShutUpTurtleMan: oh my god

Colonel Bug: just get in the call

***

Reasons Marinette had left the Miracle Box in Paris: it was more defensible than her hotel room. She trusted her friends to protect it. She was here on mandatory vacation and needed to relax.

Of all the reasons Marinette left the Miracle Box behind, giving her friends the ability to bribe Kaalki into opening up a portal on the roof of her hotel so they could all yell at her in person was not one of them.

But, she supposes, betrayal was inevitable.

Tikki, at least, was on her side. But then Plagg pointed out Tikki was practically the selflessness to his selfishness and so the arguments she made in Marinette’s favor were abruptly disregarded. Marinette still thanked her for trying.

Her friends yell at her for half an hour until they tire themselves out. Then, they all refuse to leave, saying that the second they turn their backs, she’ll throw herself into oncoming traffic or something.

(“That was one time, Nathaniel!”)

Kagami, ever practical, brought a large, plush blanket with her—likely the comforter off her bed—and lays it out on the hotel rooftop. Then, her friends pull her down and form a puppy pile with her at the center, despite her relevant protests.

She ends up with Adrien and Nino on either side of her, their foreheads pressed tightly into the crook of her neck and arms were thrown over her and tangled together. Chloé’s somehow tucked herself in between her and Adrien and is using Adrien’s side as a pillow. Luka and Kagami have somehow curled around each other in a way that still allows Kagami to lie half on top of Adrien as well. Nath is curled up back to back with Nino, and Marinette just knows the redhead his wedging his too cold feet in between Nino’s legs. Felix, the tall bastard, lies at the top of their pile and somehow manages to wiggle himself under all of their heads like a living pillow. Alix just flops over all their legs and ends up across Chloé’s lap.

The kwami are tucked somewhere between Nath and Nino, she thinks. Probably in their own miniature pile if the sounds of Plagg and Longg purring is any indication.

“You’re ridiculous, you know that?” Marinette says to no one and everyone as she wiggles into a more comfortable position.

Nino burrows further into her side, arms tightening around her. “All I’m hearing, Dudette, is that I need to make you about a thousand more Protection talismans. That way, when you throw yourself at danger, it hurts the danger instead of you.”

“Here! Here!” a few of her friends—sorry, traitors—grumble sleepily.

“But I already have three!” Marinette whines, “Everyone else only has the one!”

“Everyone else has an actual sense of self-preservation.” Felix points out to her then pauses. “Well, no. Adrien doesn’t. But he has significantly more lives than the rest of us, so.”

“This is discrimination. I will not stand for these double standards!”

Someone’s—she thinks it’s Chloé’s—hand suddenly lands on her face, but it’s Alix who speaks. “Shhh, you’re being punished.”

“Now this is victim-blaming.”

“Shhh!” all her friends whisper-shout at her and she grumpily settles in. there’s no getting out of this once she’s in it. Marinette can barely tell where she ends and everyone else begins. And she certainly can’t tell if that’s Kagami’s foot against her leg or Alix’s somehow. But she feels… content.

It’s been a while since they all had a sleepover like this, all piled in as close as they can get. Marinette hadn’t realized how much she missed it. She allows the warmth in her chest and the heat and press of the bodies around her to lull her to sleep.

They’ll all have to go back to Paris in a few hours, but for now, Marinette can bask in the feeling of her Court, her new Order, her friends pressed in around her.

***

She always enjoyed designing for her Uncle Jay. Men’s fashion was normally so restrictive, with no one ever wanting to stray far from the typical suit. It stifled her creativity.

But Jagged encouraged everything.

He hated the ‘prissy high society type’ formal wear. When it came to him and his clothes, the motto was practically ‘the more outrageous, the better.’

Marinette had half a mind just to send him in a dress or half-naked. It’d be so much easier and would likely give everyone in attendance the heart attacks he’s no doubt gunning for. He does so love riling up the ‘boring old fuddy-duddys’ as he likes to call them—normally to their faces, much to Penny and his PR team’s exasperation.

They show up at the tail end of socially acceptable tardiness, just after fashionably late, and the cameras outside the venue flash and pop when Jagged makes his grand show of sweeping out of the car, before reaching back inside to help Penny, then herself out of the car.

It’s utter bedlam. Marinette can barely hear the questions all the press are throwing at them, and Jagged steadfastly ignores almost all of them. It’s only when they get halfway down the aisle, does one reporter ask the lucky question.

“Jagged! Who are you wearing tonight?”

Immediately, he zeroes in on the reporter stopping and giving her his full attention. Marinette knows exactly where this is going and lets her face fall into her open palm. The decorated Colombina mask she’s wearing conceals half her face, allowing her to freely act as MDC—she’s not quite ready to let that secret identity go public yet—but it does very little to hide the blush rising on her skin.

She knows Jagged is peacocking before the cameras now, showing off every angle of her work and pointing out the same intricacies and hidden features she’d gushed over with pride when she’d shown him. An oversight on her part, but she hadn’t expected him to use her iridescent embroidery and custom guitar lace against her.

She missed a bit about what he was saying but is suddenly tuned back in when he throws an arm around her shoulders.

“I’ve never met anyone as talented as this little rocker here. She puts her heart and soul into every piece and I’ve never seen anything like it. I’m lucky to have met her and she inspires me to be a better musician.”

“Uncle Jay!” Marinette says, sounding touched and embarrassed and put upon all at once.

“It’s true, Rockette!”

“Are you saying this young lady is the famed MDC?” a reporter somewhere to their left shouts.

Jagged grins and Marinette gives a small, exasperated smile, waving her hand. “The one and only!”

Finally, Penny deems their time on the red carpet up, linking her arm with Jagged’s she begins pulling them away, picture-perfect smile on her face. She speaks over the press, even as they clamour and riot and Marinette wishes for nothing more than being able to pull off the kind of poise she has.

“MDC will not be taking questions at this time, she’s here to support the Martha Wayne Foundation with her own charitable donations, not debut to the public. It’s against many of her core beliefs to take attention away from such a great cause. Thank you all for understanding and we all hope you’ll think of donating as well.”

The second they’re away from the cameras and prying eyes of the public, Penny slows down her walk and places her hands on Marinette’s shoulders.

“You okay, pumpkin?”

“I- Is it always so loud?”

“Yeah,” Penny tells her, tone blunt but not unkind. “But you’ll get used to it. I’ve never seen someone adapt as easily to chaos as you, Rockette. Your first red carpet is just always overwhelming.”

She nods, even if she only half believes Penny right then. Marinette has never done well as the center of attention, not unless she’s in spots. But she trusts Penny. And Jagged. And neither of them would ever willingly steer her wrong, so.

“Okay,” Marinette breathes in, then out. Centering herself and readying to dive into the belly of the beast. Firmer, she repeats, “Okay. I got this.”

“Atta girl!” Jagged cheers, clapping a hand down on her shoulder. “You’ll knock ‘em dead!”

***

They ended up arriving only a few minutes before the auctioning was slated to start, which meant there was less socializing for Jagged to do. He’d make his rounds after the auction, but for now he just grinned smugly at Penny for so ‘cleverly’ getting out of it this time.

The auction was… interesting. She bid on, and won, a few things like a beautiful painting of the Gotham skyline and a lovely little cat statue she plans to give Adrien for Christmas.

It was certainly a shock to find that the Tim Drake—fortune 500 co-CEO of Wayne Enterprises and certified genius—was a fan of hers.

The bidding war he’d started for one of her commission and consultation slots had been a sight to see and left her almost speechless. Uncle Jay had laughed at the look on her face for a full five minutes, much to her embarrassment and dismay.

***

There’s something to be said about the Eccentric Billionaire Stereotype.

Namely that, from Marinette’s (strangely expansive really) experience, it should be renamed Eccentric Billionaire Children. It’s something she’s been thinking about since she befriended Adrien and Chloé, both of who regularly dress up as animal-themed superheroes and are willingly following her into a magical secret society.

Then there was the addition of Felix. Felix is… Felix. He’s not a superhero in the normal sense, but he’s certainly following her into the magical secret society as well. He's strange enough to run with them and like it which just says enough about him in her opinion.

The Wayne children—or the ones she’s met at least—are just more evidence to her argument honestly.

Granted, she perhaps shouldn’t judge by first appearances but… she’s pretty sure they’re just always like this. The look on Duke’s face—the newest Wayne son, but not the youngest—says it all.

“At least they’re entertaining?” Marinette says to him in way of greeting after he audibly facepalms, looking distressed at the mess his siblings are making at the snack table. Hors d'oeuvres table? That’s what rich people would call it, right?

“Oh yeah.” He still hasn’t taken his head out of his hands, like if he ignores the fact that Tim and Dick are throwing mini quiches at each other they’ll stop or disappear or something.

Oh! Dick just caught one in his mouth. He seems very excited about his grand accomplishment.

“It’ll be super entertaining when the Gotham Gazette covers it tomorrow and Vicky raves about how disrespectful and uncivilized we all are.” Duke groans. “They aren’t going to be allowed out of the house for a week after this.”

Marinette giggles despite herself. “I know the feeling.”

Duke finally raises his head to look at her. “You have siblings?”

“No. Well, not officially. But Jagged is enough to handle, honestly. His PR team works non-stop to tone down his eccentricities for the public.”

Duke blinks at her. “Jagged… Stone?”

Marinette grins brightly. “The one and only.”

“You know Jagged Stone.”

Marinette sticks out her hand, still grinning. “I suppose I should introduce myself. MDC. Jagged Stone’s—among others—personal designer.”

Duke blinks at her again, then abruptly leans back on his heels as his eyes widen. “Oh! Oh my god. The mask makes so much sense now,” he waves a hand around his face as if to indicate one of his own. Then quickly takes her still outstretched hand. “Sorry, sorry. I’m Duke. Duke Thomas.”

“Enchanté. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Duke!”

“Same here. I mean, wow. You’re a lot younger than I expected.”

She gives him a wry quirk of her lips. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”

Before Duke can say anything else, a young woman a few years older than her with short black hair in a very pretty cocktail dress—Marinette can’t help thinking she could’ve done better—pops up on her other side without Marinette even noticing. She tries very hard not to startle at her sudden appearance.

She fails.

The woman smiles faintly at the startled eep! she let out as Duke sighs fondly. “MDC, this is Cassandra, one of my sisters. Call her Cass.”

Once Marinette gets her heart rate back under control, she greets the woman. “Bonsoir. It’s nice to meet you.”

Cass stays silent, waving her hand slightly in greeting. Marinette tilts her head but doesn’t ask. Instead, she smiles and waves back. Cass smiles just a bit wider and Marinette gets the feeling she’s passed some invisible test.

“What do you guys normally do at these things?” Marinette asks Duke but directs the question to both of them. “I’ve only been to a few and this is the most high-end one.”

“Well…” Duke trails off, thinking. But Cassandra pointedly looks off to her right where Tim and Dick are still being ridiculous.

Marinette giggles, easily following her train of thought. “Oh?” she gives Duke a sly grin. “And you played so high and mighty about being the good son.”

He frowns, looking over and playing catch up. Then, he rolls his eyes. “Only Cass can get away with causing trouble at these things.”

Something glitters in Cass’ eyes as she looks at her brother. “Make good trouble,” she says in a soft voice, as if the solution was obvious. 

Duke shoots her a look, but the corner of his mouth is twitching up like he wants to smile.

From there, Marinette and Duke fall into steady conversation, punctuated by Cass’ laugh or soft word or finger tapping on the table they’ve gravitated towards. Duke looks a little surprised every time Marinette easily picks up what Cass had been trying to say or was careful to not exclude the woman.

Just because the woman wasn’t talking as much as them, doesn’t mean she wasn’t speaking. Luka was much the same sometimes. Words weren’t his strong suit either.

Luka and Cass by no means had the same alternate language, but the principle was the same as far as Marinette was concerned. She did her best to understand Luka when he spoke, and she’ll damn well extend the same courtesy to Mademoiselle Cassandra.

***

When Jason appears to throw an arm around Duke’s shoulders, complaining about how boring everything is and that someone called ‘Demon Spawn’ was being a little shit again, Marinette would be lying if she said she wasn’t very surprised. She hadn’t even known he was here.

She’s even more surprised when it’s revealed that he’s actually Jason Todd. Second eldest of the Wayne clan, presumed dead for a few years after a kidnapping attempt gone wrong.

Duke introduces her and Marinette feels the resignation settle in her stomach.

She sees the exact moment Jason pieces it together—the tiny, beloved niece of Jagged Stone he met only a few days prior and the just as tiny, acclaimed designer to the same man standing before him now. It is, admittedly, not hard to connect the dots when they are as blatant as this.

Marinette is surprised for the umpteenth time that night by herself when, instead of panicking and floundering at the sharp turn this all has taken, all she does is place her finger on her lips and smiles at him as if they’re sharing a secret.

Jason, the clever bastard he is, catches on and smirks back.

“MDC, of course. You wouldn’t happen to be able to get me an autograph, would you?”

Marinette sniffs. “I’m sure you could ask Jagged yourself.”

“Not from him.”

She opens her mouth to say something to that but falls flat, her cheeks heating up underneath her mask. She glares up at him playfully, hands planted on her hips. “You’re ridiculous. You didn’t say you were a Wayne.”

“In my defence,” he parrots her in a horrible imitation of her voice that makes her want to scowl and laugh at the same time, “I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Haha,” she says flatly. “You’re hilarious.”

“So is that a no?”

Duke, who looks very confused by their interaction, leans on the table more fully. “What’s it matter? We all know you’re just going to use it to lord over Tim.”

“And that’d be my business,” Jason snarks, nose raised self-importantly.

Marinette finally lets the laugh she’d been keeping down out. The offended look on Jason’s face only makes her laugh harder.

***

By the end of the night, they’ve all exchanged numbers. Or well, they’ve all given Marinette their numbers. She’s sure they already had each others’.

She knows that, perhaps, it was only meant to be a superficial gesture, but Marinette likes these people, this trio of siblings nestled into a larger whole. And when Marinette likes people she doesn’t let them go unless she has to.

So she keeps up contact, even when she returns back to Paris and they can only really talk for a few hours a day and even when they give her radio silence for days on end. (They, strangely, almost always do it at the same time but all three apologize and respond to whatever her last ignored conversation starter was so she’s never really mad about it.)

They don’t really talk about anything important, and Marinette really only knows the most random, nonsense things about all of them.

She and Cass speak almost exclusively in photos and the odd meme.

Jason tells her the strangest anecdotes and weird internet opinions that mean almost nothing but end up in hour-long ridiculous text arguments anyway.

And Duke is the one she talks with the most consistently and normally. He complains a lot about the craziness of his family and Marinette laughs at his misery and shares tales of her own team-turned-family. They bond over being the only sane ones in their respective groups.

She likens them all to the internet friends Adrien keeps. Or the kind of casual friends normal people who aren’t a part of a superhero team that has to fight for their lives on a bi-weekly basis have. (When you have to regularly trust someone with your life, ‘casual’ kind of gets tossed out the window.)

Marinette, truly, only has three friends and all of them live a whole ocean away.

The rest of the people she fills her life with are family.

***

The next day, Marinette reads a headline that says Talent Runs in the Family: MDC Revealed to be Jagged Stones’ Niece?

She slams her head on the table and releases a high pitched whine as Jagged cackles at her from across the table and Tikki snickers from her sweatpants pocket.

Jagged doesn't even have siblings.

Duke, at least, will be happy. She knocked his siblings’ shenanigans all the way to page five when she got herself plastered across the front page instead.

Chapter Text

A year and a half after Marinette had last been to Gotham, the internet implodes with news of Jagged Stone getting engaged. For the next month, everywhere she turns people are talking about the rockstar ‘finally settling down’.

It is, she supposes, a better alternative to the wild theories she keeps finding on the internet about the who, what, when, where and why of Jagged’s wedding.

Popular opinion seems to be that Jagged Stone’s wedding can only be the event of the century, which makes Marinette laugh every time she sees it. The reception, perhaps, will be as wild and rock’n’roll as Jagged can get it, but the ceremony is about as private and small as the two can manage. Family and friends and a few other people the couple can’t afford to not have there.

How disappointed they’ll be when they learn about that.

Marinette is, of course, in the wedding party. She was one of the first people they told of the whole engagement, and about five minutes after, Uncle Jay asked her to be his groomsmaid.

“As my favorite niece, it's only right that you stand on my side of the altar.”

“Uncle Jay, I’m your only niece,” she couldn’t help pointing out, but agreed anyway. There was no use arguing with Jagged about these types of things, and Marinette was honored to be asked anyway.

Luka was asked to be Best Man, unsurprising considering his place as Jagged’s son—and hadn’t that been a revelation and a half—which means he was almost as busy helping out with the wedding as she was. Juleka was… less involved. But not for lack of trying.

No one really liked talking about it.

***

You know what they say about the third time being the charm.

The same holds true for stepping foot in Gotham apparently. The moment Marinette is within city lines again, the little cloying shadows of misfortune that lay over the whole city surge.

She hadn’t realized how bad the miasma was during her last trips, couldn’t quite feel how thick and cloying it had been.

How blind must she have been two years ago, to not notice all of this?

Luka—who’s always been better at this than her, at knowing things he shouldn’t and listening to the rhythm of the world around him—is wrinkling his nose like he’s smelled something foul.

“Well,” says into the shifting night air and shadows that are too thick and too dark, “That’s not something you see every day.”

Marinette hums, her mind already whirling.

***

Marinette is in a small but well-stocked gymnasium when she meets Dick Grayson. Not that she really knows it’s him at the time.

Luka has kicked her out of her flat—the one Jagged insists she stay in for the entire month before his wedding because creating the wardrobe for the whole wedding party is apparently a full-time job that requires a fully furnished penthouse according to her dear eccentric uncle.

(Nevermind that most of the dresses and tuxes are practically finished by this point.)

She had apparently complained one too many times about being forced to stay in civvies for the whole month—nevermind that it was her rule—and he’d had enough.

He strummed a quiet but discordant melody on his guitar. It was jittery and uneven, the notes he played out of order and too close together.

Marinette stops her pacing sheepishly.

“Find another path,” he tells her with that steady wisdom he holds, beginning to pluck out a more pleasant tune. Sass slithers out of the hood of his jacket to turn his too-knowing eyes on her.

“It is not just Ladybug who can fly,” Sass offers languidly, like he has all the time in the world. Luka hums in agreement.

Marinette huffs, glaring at the two of them. “I hate when you guys use your reasonableness to gang up on me.”

The twin laughs they give her are soft and hissing and entirely too similar. Sometimes, Kwami and their Chosens were just too much alike.

But back at the gymnasium, Marinette watches a man do some sort of routine on the trapeze set, the one she’s almost never seen anyone use. 

(When she thinks to ask about it, she learns the whole set was donated by some mysterious benefactor. She also learns the benefactor insisted on a veritable mountain of safety regulations and rules to go with it. Which is why most people don’t use it too much.)

The moment she lays eyes on what he’s doing, Marinette is enamoured. Truly, she thinks this is what love at first sight is supposed to be.

She’s so absorbed in watching him leap and fly and contort himself in ways Marinette has only ever seen her and her friends do, that she is almost—but not quite—surprised when he does some tricky move with a fireman's pole nearby to land in front of her.

He must’ve noticed her staring. To be fair, she wasn’t being subtle.

In any other circumstance, she’d be extremely embarrassed about that, and she still probably will be, but- later.

Right now, she doesn't even wait for the man to speak before she’s babbling at him. “Oh my Kwami, you have to teach me how to do that. Immediately. As in right now. I have never wanted anything so bad ever, pretty please.”

It’s really fortunate for her that instead of being freaked or creeped out by her strange and sudden obsession with trapeze, the man just grins and says, “Okay.”

She’s pretty sure she actually shrieked with glee. The man is nice enough to not mention it.

***

When Uncle Jay had stood up a month into planning his wedding and said that Bruce Wayne was going to be one of his Groomsmen, no one really knew where he was going with that.

Marinette, admittedly, still doesn’t.

The relationship Jagged shares with the infamous ‘Brucie Wayne’ eludes her even after the twenty-minute dramatic retelling he’d gone into when she asked. She thinks there was something about their teen years? And ‘experimentation’? And then years of separation before Jagged suddenly decided he wanted Bruce back in his life (Penny made a joke about dragging him kicking and screaming which only made her  more confused).

And now Marinette has to dress the man for the wedding.

She remembers the first time she saw him, the famed Billionaire Playboy and Gotham’s Former Most Eligible Bachelor (taken off the market recently and with very little warning). She never spoke to him directly at the charity gala, but she’d seen and heard a lot from a distance.

She’s also heard plenty of tales in passing from her three friends within the gaggle of Wayne children.

The two are… very conflicting portrayals.

But, Marinette supposes she’s going to get the chance to see for herself what the man is all about.

“Ah, Good afternoon Mister Stone, and the young Miss Dupain-Cheng, I presume,” an older gentleman with a light british accent greets at the door. He steps back, opening it further to allow them entry. “Welcome to Wayne Manor. I am Alfred Pennyworth, the Butler of the house.”

“Bonjour Monsieur Pennyworth,” Marinette returns politely.

“Heya Alfred,” Jagged grins, clapping the man on the shoulder, “Long time no see!”

“Always a pleasure Mister Stone.” The man’s voice doesn’t really change, but Marinette gets the feeling that there’s something like exasperation in his tone. “Please, come with me. Master Bruce is in the drawing room.”

They obediently follow Monsieur Pennyworth down the hallway but Marinette can’t help but think there’s something… odd in the air. A feeling just out of her reach or a word just on the tip of her tongue. She tilts her head at Monsieur Pennyworth’s back, trying to figure it out.

If she focuses, perhaps there’s something- oh. Oh. Now, isn’t that interesting?

Through the haze of Gotham’s miasma, she can pick up the barest hints of potential on him. She’s never known someone outside of their youth to hold so much of it. The magic of the Miraculi takes a certain amount of flexibility on the Chosens part, something that comes to children more easily than adults.

Foolish it may have been for Master Fu to send her and Chat out untrained, he was not wrong to have chosen children. And truly, the Powers That Be had done more of the choosing than he did.

The flavor of Monsieur Pennyworth’s potential is… different to that of her Court. Perhaps it is only all of the misfortune in the air, or his unusual age.

She’ll ask the kwami about it later.

They come to the drawing room and find… more than just Monsieur Wayne.

On the floor, wrestling like schoolyard tots, are Jason and her new gymnast friend. A third man, who was perhaps a few years older than her and looked twice as tired, was heckling the pair of them with a wide grin on his face. Monsieur Wayne was sitting off to the side, rubbing at his temples and a woman with bright red hair stood just behind him, holding a little girl who was also yelling at the two men on the floor, though she seemed much more encouraging about it.

They must have really good soundproofing in this place because Marinette hadn’t heard any of it before the door opened.

Jagged takes one look at the scene and promptly bursts out laughing.

There are suddenly six pairs of eyes on them. Jason and her gymnast buddy even freeze mid face smoosh and hair-pulling to stare at her. It is… unnerving. Marinette is still not a fan of being the center of attention while in civvies.

“Su’shine?” 

“Salut Jason,” she greets. Then, because her default settings when uncomfortable are snark or stuttering mess, she says, “You better be winning. I’d hate to have befriended the loser brother first.”

She wants to snatch the words back almost immediately, but then her gymnast buddy, the tired man and her Uncle Jay all ‘ohhh’ dramatically and have smiles on their faces so maybe she didn’t make a complete fool of herself, at least.

“Ye of little faith!” Jason scolds, shoving her gymnast buddy off of him to stand up.

Monsieur Wayne stands as well and gets to Marinette and Jagged before Jason can, acting almost as a barrier between them and him.

“Jagged, Miss Dupain-Cheng. I apologise for them. Alfred had tried to teach them manners but it doesn’t seem to stick.”

Marinette giggles brightly, taking the offered hand. “Non. Do not worry about it, Monsieur. I know how Jason can be and Jagged is most certainly worse.”

Both Jagged and Jason gasp at her, mock offence dripping from their frames. “Mari!” “Rockette!”

Monsieur Wayne quirks his lips at that. “So you’ve met Jason, apparently.”

“Oui. We spoke at your last charity gala. He’s become a… comment dire? Pen-pal? When he bothers to respond, that is.”

“I said I was sorry!” Jason cries, popping out from behind Monsieur Wayne.

Marinette tsks, “Even Cass is better at communicating than you, and she barely even talks.”

The tired man pops out on the other side of Monsieur Wayne. “You know Cass, too?”

Marinette blinks at him. His eyebags look even worse up close. They kind of make her want to snatch the coffee out of his hand and tuck him into bed.

Her Maman must be rubbing off on her more than she thought.

“Uh, yeah. And Duke. But I’m afraid I don’t really know the rest of you, except him,” she waves a hand towards her gymnast buddy, “Though I never caught his name.”

The tired man’s eyes narrow just slightly, flicking up and down her form almost too fast for her to catch. Is he… scanning her? Evaluating?

She’s seen Felix do the same, but it rarely means something good.

His mouth opens but Monsieur Wayne cuts off whatever he was going to say. “This is Tim. And the one who never introduced himself is Dick, my eldest. How did you meet, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“He’s teaching me trapeze.” She pauses. “Well, actually I mostly just beg him to show me how to do all the moves whenever we’re both at the gym.”

The woman—the very tall woman—walked up to her and also offered her hand. She was beautiful, with lovely tanned skin and otherworldly green eyes that matched the little girl’s in her arms. Mother and daughter, Marinette assumed.

“Oh! So you are the little bird Dick spoke about! He was very excited to teach you. I’m Kor’i, Dick’s wife. And this is our daughter, Mar’i.”

The little girl grins, wide and bright and Marinette can’t help but coo. She must be just about four years, and on the smaller side.

“Bonjour Madame. Et bonjour Mar’i! You know, my friends call me Mari too.”

Little Mar’i gasps, before turning to her mother. “She has my name! And our hair is the same, does that make us twins?” she whips back around to look at Marinette before her mother can respond. “Are we twins? I’ve always wanted a sister!”

And what was Marinette supposed to say to that? The truth?

Ha.

“Of course!” Marinette hears herself saying. “I’ve always wanted a twin, too.”

In the next moment, Mar’i launches herself at Marinette and it’s only by the grace of her miraculous strength that she doesn’t end up knocked flat on her ass. This kid’s got some power in her, that’s for sure.

Most of the Wayne family take a step forward as if to catch her but stop abruptly when they see she hasn’t fallen. Mar’i must do this often, then; jumping from person to person. She settles Mar’i more firmly against her hip, grinning.

“Well aren’t you just a petite grenouille.” She gasps, as if coming to a revelation, and runs her thumb under little Mar’i’s eye, making her giggle. “And you have the green to match! Can you ribbit too?”

“The sun,” Jason gasps dramatically. She turns back to look at him and sees his hand is raised in front of his eyes as if to shield them. “It is… too bright. Too pure.”

She sends him a flat look.

It gives him pause for a moment, and then everyone around her is laughing or trying very hard not too.

Marinette blinks. That is not the normal reaction.

She turns to look at Mar’i and finds her trying to mimic the face Marinette was just making. She is not quite succeeding, instead landing somewhere around an exaggerated caricature of mad.

Which is just… adorable.

“Uncle Jay is being silly,” Mar’i says with solemn disapproval in her childlike voice.

Marinette nods, just as solemn. The people around her are still laughing and her lips twitch with the effort to not join them. “Yes, he is. He is a very silly person.”

“Silly looking!” both his brothers chorus, shifting Jason’s attention toward them as they begin to squabble. Monsieur Wayne sighs while Kor’i laughs.

The three boys may not share a single strand of DNA, but in that moment, Marinette thinks they could not look more alike. 

She is not an expert of any means, but she likes to think she knows something about family, blood and otherwise. Marinette’s forgotten the amount of times people have asked if she and Alix were sisters, or her and Kagami, or even her and Nino. And Adrien, Chloé, and Felix get mistaken for siblings so much it’s not even funny anymore.

There is a physical resemblance between them all, similar features and coloration, but that’s not what she means. She’d seen it a bit with Jason, Duke and Cass back at the Gala over a year ago, but it’s practically being shoved in her face now.

The three of them all move the same, the way people who have spent more time together than apart do. Tim and Dick have the same teasing grin, and Jason stands with his arms crossed the same way Tim does, but keeps throwing them out as he speaks like Dick. They shift in and out of each others’ spaces like they’re orbiting one another, like personal space isn’t quite in their dictionaries anymore. It’s cute how similar they all are to one another.

How much this family must love, to mimic one another so much and so well.

***

She does, eventually, get to the whole consultation part of this visit. Monsieur Wayne leads her out to another room so she can take his measurements without his sons 'bothering her and causing havoc’ as he said. She tried to explain that it was no trouble at all, but he’d insisted.

So they’d left Jagged to deal with the boys while Kor’i put little Mar’i down for a nap. She was sure they were pestering Jagged about his music and such things, not that the man would mind. He loved his fans. And, according to Jason, that’s exactly what they all were.

Jagged and Penny had given her almost complete creative control of the wedding outfits, only asking to keep to a simple theme and color scheme. That, and letting them see the sketches of the outfits she planned to create.

Penny’s a bit more involved in the making of her wedding dress, but it’s not like Marinette can truly blame her. A wedding dress is the pièce de résistance - any bride would want it to be perfect.

But, Marinette’s whole brand is abstract motifs and subtle but elaborate embroidery centered around her clients or whatever her particular muse for a design was. Monsieur Wayne is giving her very little to work with here.

She wonders who it is that picks out his suits because he knows nothing about fashion.

Oh kwami, Marinette has a horrifying thought. He doesn't just wear plain black suits and ties all the time, does he?

Oh, this poor man.

“Whatever suit you make will surely be amazing,” he tries to deflect, as if that was ever the problem here or even a thought in her mind.

“Please,” she jokes. “When worn by the handsomest man in Gotham—at Jagged Stone’s wedding no less—I don’t think anyone will be paying my suit much attention.”

“I doubt that. Jagged has spoken of your talent at great length and your reputation precedes you, Miss Dupain-Cheng.”

She huffs a laugh. What a charmer this Bruce Wayne seems to be. She can see why so many adore him. It is always easy to adore those that use charm and sweet words like a disguise, like a shield to keep the world at arms length.

“A reputation is just a fancy word for expectations, as my nonna would say. And I live to defy expectations. But,” she sighs, waving a hand. “we must still uphold some of them, non, Monsieur? I am thankful that mine are not as tiresome as yours, at least.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Marinette looks up from the preliminary sketches to see him looking at her, a lightly bewildered expression on his face. It’s good, and she’d fall for it if not for the fact that it’s one of Felix’s favorite expressions to use when playing innocent.

She raises an eyebrow at him. “I pride myself on being a good judge of character, Monsieur, and I know cleverness when I see it. You are not the caricature of a person the press likes to flaunt. One look at Wayne Enterprises and the dozens of markets it’s revolutionized while under your care and I could see it. So I can only imagine the charmingly senseless persona you present to the press is carefully cultivated.”

Monsieur Wayne blinks and gives nothing away. He’s very good at hiding his emotions it seems. No wonder he is such a good businessman.

She tilts her head back down, smirking secretively to herself. “It’s much easier to hide in plain sight when no one thinks to look your way, wouldn’t you agree, Monsieur?”

Before he can say anything to that, the door to his study opens and in comes a young man, closely followed by a large black dog.

“Father, I need to speak with you.”

Monsieur Wayne sighs, turning to look at who must be his youngest son. “I’m in a meeting, Damian.”

The man—Damian—flicks his eyes towards her dismissively. “This is of more importance.”

Marinette’s lips purse, focusing on her sketchbook and pointedly not looking at them. “It is perfectly fine, Monsieur Wayne. Your son isn’t disturbing me.”

“But you’re disturbing me. I need to speak with my father alone. Leave.”

“Damian-”

“Don’t worry, Monsieur,” she gently interrupts.

It is good Kagami and Chloé had taught her how to control her voice. She wants nothing more than to give back as good as she got, but she is a professional, and the Waynes she’s met, sans this one, have been nothing but kind. She doesn’t want to alienate them just because of one bad apple.

“I’ve heard far worse from people I held in higher regard,” she continues, then smiles and jokes, “And you had warned me about the quality of manners your sons held.”

Monsieur Wayne begins to smile but Damian’s face contorts into a scowl. The dog that followed him in chooses that moment to break away from his side and trot up to her, practically begging for pets. And who is she to deny something like that?

“Well aren’t you just a sweetheart?” she coos at him, one hand scratching behind his ear while her other grabs the tag on his collar, “Titus?”

Marinette pauses, the name tickling something in the back of her mind. It’s… familiar? Somehow? It’s giving her the strangest sense of deja vu.

“Titus?” she thinks, “Like titan? Large and powerful?”

Damian scoffs. “No, like Shakespeare. Titus, come.”

She freezes and - oh. Oh no.

She stands up quickly and gathers her things. “I should be going anyway, Monsieur. I can send you the final sketches by tomorrow and you can choose which one you like best. If you have anything you’d like to have me add before then,” she pulls out one of her business cards, “you can contact me. Bonne soirée, Monsieur.”

Turning to Damian, she tilts her head slightly and very carefully does not look him in the eye, “Et bonne soirée à toi, Monsieur Damian. I hope your urgent matter is resolved quickly.”

Then, she leaves as quickly as she can without looking like she’s trying to escape.

She is not sure how successful she is.

***

Clever Girl: kill me right now

please just put me out of my misery

TheDukeIsBack!: why

what did you do now

Clever Girl: i called your brother an ass to his face!

TheDukeIsBack!: who? Jason?

he probably deserved it

Clever Girl: No!

Damian!

TheDukeIsBack!: oh

like rn?

he probably deserved it too ngl

Clever Girl: omfg no

i mean i wanted to do it today but your father was right there

i mean, i guess i did kinda insult him anyway?? But subtly

TheDukeIsBack!: uhhh

wait were you at the manor?

Clever Girl: yes duke keep up

i’m making your father’s tux for Jagged’s wedding i told you this

anyway i actually DID call Damian an ass but like,,, more then 2 years ago

it was my first trip to Gotham

do you think he remembers?

TheDukeIsBack!: maybe? probably not

youd know if he remembered

i think you’ll be fine

Clever Girl: i cannot believe i insulted a wayne

kwami i could’ve been RUINED

TheDukeIsBack!: ??? you literally insult me all the time???

Clever Girl: that’s different

it comes from a place of affection when i call you a fucking idiot

i actively wanted to knock damian on his ass

TheDukeIsBack!: gee thanks

also i would pay you fifty bucks to do that anyway

Jason would probably double it

and tim

honestly so would anyone who’s met him

you could probably make a killing ngl

get your artists friends to make posters. it’ll be the event of the century

Clever Girl: omg n o

stop it im not doing that

TheDukeIsBack!: this is entrepreneurism M

but fine

wanna get ice cream?

Clever Girl: this is so you can find out how i met damian isnt it

i see your ploy

TheDukeIsBack!: okay but what if i buy?

Clever Girl: done

***

She doesn't so much meet Red Hood as she finds him collapsed in the alleyway behind her flat.

She stares down at the man twice her size and knows to be dangerous and debates with herself for all of two seconds before she hauls him up off the ground and drags him inside.

Tikki flits around her head in a panic and calls her insane.

Marinette politely asks her to get the door.

After, she goes to grab the medkit while Marinette lays Red Hood on the couch as gently as she can, so she’s sure Tikki isn’t too upset by her poor life choices.

“Wonderful,” she deadpans, pulling at his ruined leather jacket. “I’m getting bloodstains on a ten thousand euro couch. How the hell am I going to explain that to Uncle J?”

“Just tell him you rescued another stray.” Tikki zips over to her side, squinting down at the helmet. “It wouldn’t even be a lie, technically speaking.”

“Tikki!”

***

Red Hood wakes up—or at least stops pretending to be passed out—when she dumps rubbing alcohol over the knife wound stretching across his stomach.

He sits up quickly with a rather alarmed “Shit!” which, of course, aggravates the wound she was just tending to. He falls back to his lying position rather quickly, teeth clenched in pain.

After Marinette gets over her surprise at his sudden movement, she scowls down at where she assumes his eyes are. “Stop moving. You’re going to ruin all my work.”

“Wha-? Where am I?”

“An apartment on sixth. I found you behind the dumpsters.”

Red Hood goes to sit up again and Marinette firmly presses back down on his shoulder.

“Let me up!” he demands, beginning to struggle.

“No! What part of ‘you’re going to ruin my work’ did you not understand?” she presses once more, firmly on both his shoulders. “Stars above! I’m not going to kill you or whatever idiotic thing is through your head! I’m patching you up! Now sit still.”

He does obediently stop moving, but he feels tense under her hands now and she groans inwardly. Dealing with stubborn, paranoid vigilantes was not how she wanted to spend her Friday night and yet here she is!

No doubt Tikki will say she brought this on herself.

Marinette moves to clean off the new blood Red Hood pushed out of his wound with all his struggling. She can’t stitch it shut if she can’t see it after all.

Dear Kwami, she wishes Nino was here. He’s so much better at this than she is.

Marinette has no talent for the healing arts, everything she knows, she has fought tooth and nail for. Her abilities align with creating from nothing, from scraps and broken things. She cannot coax life into speeding up and cannot twist her power the way Nino can.

The closest Marinette gets to healing magic is creating new blood and that was a skill she had to practice painstakingly just so her friends would not bleed out while Nino fixed them.

Miraculous Cure may heal the injured and revive the dead and fix what was broken but Tikki had explained long ago that those are side effects more than anything else. Her Cure is, first and foremost, a way to right the immediate destabilization of the balance.

It is not a fix-all, and it cannot work without reason.

It worked in Paris because the people Hawkmoth killed were not yet meant to die, it worked because the streets were not supposed to be destroyed by people-turned-monsters, (it worked, because she was young, and too kind, and the scales she judged against were tipped in her favor).

(The Black Cat, the second side of the same coin, has their own version of the Cure. She doesn't know what it is called, but the Kwami once mentioned that the last time it was used was during the Black Plague.

She's kindly asked them not to tell her any more and pointedly does not ask Adrien.)

“What’s the point of having teammates if they don’t keep you from passing out in random places to bleed out?” she grumbles indignantly, only half speaking to Red Hood.

He huffs a laugh anyway. “Wouldn’t know. Don’t really have any myself. More of the lone wolf type, I guess.”

Marinette side-eyes him, both for the comment and trying to decide if she should even bother with stitches she knows he’ll end up pulling out. Red Hood doesn't exactly strike her as the type to bench himself for a couple weeks to heal.

And his words… taste odd in the air around them. Not quite a lie, but not a truth either. Some strange in between. Or, perhaps, not even he knows how true or not they are.

And, well, she’s got a dangerous vigilante on her couch that can attest to her inability to leave well enough alone, so.

“I’m not so sure about that, little wing.”

Red Hood jerks beneath her, head snapping in her direction. There’s an aura around him now, one of danger, one that reminds her a little too much of the deadlier akumas she’s fought.

Oops. She’s trampled all over a sore spot like an idiot. Dammit.

She pauses for a fraction of a second, before continuing her work, ignoring the distrust and anger she can practically taste in the air.

“How the hell did you know that?”

“I didn’t,” she says simply. “Not until you said something that is.”

Red Hood is worryingly silent, but the miasma of darkness scatters. He’s wary of her now—she can feel the prickle of it on her skin, the way his eyes follow her every move—but he’s not actively aggressive towards her. Which is the most she can expect, she supposes.

When Red Hood doesn’t move to speak, she fills the space instead, explaining.

“I met the rest of your flock at a train hijacking. The blue one—Nightwing, I believe?—was talking about a little wing causing trouble at the docks again. And well,” she shrugs, not so subtle glancing at the bat symbol on his chest. “It’s not hard to figure out the trouble maker from there. Gothamites like to gossip, especially about their resident vigilantes. Strange, that no one has made the connection before.”

Not quite true, but true enough. Nightwing did say that, and she did ask around, but even before she spoke to anyone, Marinette knew. She does that sometimes, knows things she shouldn’t and guesses too accurately about things she barely knows about.

The others have those moments sometimes too. Luka and Alix more than anyone, and Nino the least. Felix gets them sometimes as well, but his talent has nothing to do with magic.

He’s just terrifying like that.

“I’m not a vigilante,” he growls, obviously trying to intimidate her. Only, Marinette isn’t in the mood to play games like that. That’s more Felix and Chloé’s wheelhouse anyway.

“Of course,” she snarks, tugging at the string a bit harder than necessary. “Should I call you Godfather instead, O Lord of Crime? How terrified I am, sewing you back together after finding you half-dead in an alley.”

He’s silent for a bit, and she can feel his eyes on her even through the helmet.

“You’re a mouthy little thing, aren’t ya?”

“It’s one of my better qualities,” she quips, and smiles when Red Hood laughs hard enough to wince.

They’re both quiet for a while, and Marinette moves onto the other knife wound in his thigh. Geez. If this is how he turned out, what happened to the other guy?

(Likely death, if rumours are to be believed. Not that she puts much stock into those things, but Red Hood’s covered in a lot of blood and not all of it can be his.)

“Back to my original question, don’t you have anyone you actually know to patch you up?”

“I think you’re doing a pretty good job of it so far, half-pint. Don’t sell yourself short now.”

She rolls her eyes. “Thanks. I’m practically a cutting edge hospital. Don’t dodge the question. Don’t you have any back up? It’s dangerous to go out alone in Gotham, even for not-vigilantes.”

“Like I said, more of a lone wolf.”

She gives him the same side-eye as last time. “Bad blood then? Or are you just not talking to one another right now?”

“You ask a lot of dangerous questions for someone who looks eighty pounds soaking wet.”

Marinette harrumphs, offended. Red Hood chuckles at the look on her face.

“I’m just curious! Parisian Heroes don’t have nearly this much drama.” Only slightly true. They don’t have this kind of drama at least—meaning, the kind that she’s not directly involved in. “You’re like a soap opera. Forgive me for being invested!”

“My statement still stands.”

She blows hair from her face, cheeks puffing up as she shoots him a look. “This is no way to treat your doctor. The least you could do is say thank you.”

“Yeah, yeah. Thanks for not letting me bleed out.”

“You need to work on your sincerity. That was atrocious.”

“Beggars can’t be choosers, sweet cheeks!” he tells her brightly and Marinette rolls her eyes.

***

She’s shoving Red Hood out the door—or window, really—with strict instructions about his injuries she just knows he’s going to ignore when he stops suddenly.

“Hey, where’s my jacket?”

Marinette frowns. “Ruined. Come back in three days, I’ll have a better one made to replace it.”

“What? Hey, no. I like that jacket!” he protests and no matter how hard Marinette tries to push him out onto her balcony—without resorting to miraculous strength—he stays stubbornly still. “This is stealing!”

She gives him a look, “Are you being serious right now?”

“Yes!”

“It was torn to shreds. Mourn and move on.”

“It has sentimental value!”

“Oh my fucking god, fine. I’ll fix the one that’s in ribbons and covered in blood, you absolute lunatic. Come back in five days.”

“I thought you said three?”

“Yeah, well. Fixing something that broken is unsurprisingly a harder task than making one from scratch. Now leave. I have so much sewing to do tomorrow and not all of it is for you and your stupid ‘sentimentality’.”

***

She’s still deciding if she should tell anyone about having met Red Hood when Luka pops over from next door—because Jagged is renting out the whole floor, not just her room. Fucking rich people—and takes one look at her before sighing.

It’s his ‘not really disappointed but definitely not surprised’ sigh so she knows the jig is up.

“In my defense-” she starts but Luka just grabs her by the shoulders, pushes her to sit at the kitchen island and starts making tea. Pomegranate tea, because it’s her favorite and also the universe has a strange sense of irony she supposes.

“I think,” Luka starts, as Sass pops out of his jacket hood to join Tikki in the cat tree Marinette renovated for Kwami use, “I remember a certain melody I know saying not to get involved with the local wildlife around here.”

Tikki makes a triumphant noise. “I told her not to take in any more strays!”

“In my defense,” Marinette starts again, firmer this time, “He was bleeding out! What else was I supposed to do?”

“Mhmm.” Luka nods his head in understanding. Then, he pointedly looks at the pile of sweets on her counter. It is obviously more than the usual amount she keeps on hand for Tikki. “And the pastries you’re leaving out for him?”

She opens her mouth. Closes it. “He’s not the first hero I’ve done that for?”

Luka doesn’t really do flat looks—doesn’t really do pettiness or ill will or any of that—but he gets pretty close with her sometimes. Normally on her behalf, but sometimes her recklessness gets to him, she thinks.

“I’m being careful,” she says, because she’s not in the business of making promises she can’t keep and she gets the feeling Red Hood is… important. She’s not sure how or why or if he already is or will be  important but… she can’t walk away.

He sets her slowly steeping mug of tea in front of her, humming lightly. It’s a tune she’s familiar with, both on the battlefield and off. He’s humming trust. “But just so Red Hood knows, I’m not giving up my title of best older brother. He can fight me for it.”

“Luka!” She laughs despite herself. “C’mon. I want you to try on your suit to see how it fits. Then we can make fun of hilariously bad rom-coms before one of you three inevitably snitch on me to the others.”

***

She finds a note on her balcony the next night that only says ‘sorry about the blood’ with a wad of bills neatly tucked into it.

Marinette rolls her eyes, grabs a piece of paper from one of her many notebooks and writes ‘it’s fine and i don’t need money as incentive to help people’. She tucks the money and the note into Red Hood’s newly repaired jacket and leaves it on the balcony that fifth night along with a plate of cookies.

She wakes up the next morning to half the cookies gone and the bills she tried giving back tucked up underneath the plate with another note. 

‘then consider this your tip/my compliments to the chef :)’

Marinette scowls even as Tikki laughs over her shoulder.

***

Red Hood’s been stopping by for a little over a week, effectively filling up the last of her dance card.

Her days have been completely booked as of late with the wedding party outfits, the wedding itself, staying updated on her business, and hanging out with her Waynes—not that she ever calls them that to their faces. Jason, at least, would never let her live it down.

Evenings with Red Hood are her only calm moments these days. Well, exempting Luka, but he’s almost as busy as she is.

She’s only just closed the sliding door for her balcony and turned around to find a face hanging upside down in front of her. Instinctively, she moves to punch the supposed intruder but they catch her wrist before she makes contact.

A good thing, since it’s Robin. One of Batman’s many… teammates? Associates? Either way, she’d rather not break his nose.

Marinette can’t really tell because of his mask, but his face is close enough to hers that she thinks he might be a little surprised. She isn’t sure why seeing as he’s the one who showed up on her balcony unannounced and all.

“So this is where Hood has been running off to after patrol.” She can’t see his eyes, but she gets the feeling he’s scanning her; evaluating. He’s also still holding her wrist. “You aren’t his normal type.”

“Excuse me?”

“For bed partners,” Robin says slowly and tactlessly, like she’s an idiot and, oh, she kinda wishes she’d been able to punch him in the face now. “Childishly young and overly cutesy aren’t his normal modus operandi. Neither is visiting them as many times as he has you. It’s out of character for him.”

She stares at him for a long moment, letting what he said hang in the silence. Maybe, on the off chance Robin actually does have a conscience (because he must, right? Why else would he run around saving people all evening?), he’ll realize how far he’s overstepped his bounds.

He does not, and she is disappointed.

“Are the other vigilantes as rude as you are?” she says calmly, just as slow and scathing as he’d spoken to her. “Or is your modus operandi harassing innocent civilians for absolutely no reason besides your own amusement?” She rips her hand from his, crossing her arms and hoping to exude how unamused she is by his belief that he can speak to her that way. “Because if so, I’m glad I’ve only been associating with Red Hood. He, at least, is polite and apologizes when he gets blood on my furniture. You, on the other hand, dance around insulting me and then speak ignorantly of things you don’t know about. Didn’t anyone teach you manners growing up?”

In one fluid motion, so quick she almost doesn’t catch it, Robin flips and lands before her on his feet. He stands an entire foot taller than her and with his hood up, casting his whole face into shadow, he cuts quite the intimidating figure.

She stares into the whites of his mask and refuses to be cowed. She was on the frontlines during Hawkmoth's terrorization of Paris. Robin isn't near as intimidating as being a teenager having to deal with that. 

“I had the best etiquette tutors to be found,” Robin insists, obviously offended. “I can't imagine a baker’s daughter would have had the same rigorous education I was given.”

She raises an eyebrow. “Maybe so. But I don’t need any of that to know how to treat people with respect.”

“I give respect only to those deserving of it.”

“Funny how we looped right back around to the whole ‘you being an ass’ thing,” she snips, stepping around him to pick the plate up off the small tea table so she can go back inside. “Now get off my balcony. You can choose to be a bully all you like, but I don’t have to stand here and take it.”

He goes to say something else, but she slams the balcony door in his face and pretends not to hear it. She also pretends not to hear what is very likely an unflattering string of words in- is that Arabic? Robin is insulting her in Arabic.

Typical.

***

Two days later when Red Hood visits, Robin is with him. Which was… not something she was expecting.

She hears the telltale thump on her balcony that lets her know Red Hood is actually trying to get her attention and let her know he’s there. She’s well aware he can come and go silently enough to never alert her, so it is a kind gesture.

She opens the glass door, a mug of tea in each of her hands and a smile on her face when she spots Robin perched on the railing. She blinks, but makes no other show of surprise.

“Bonsoir Hood. Monsieur Robin,” she greets them both.

She can’t see his expression through the helmet, but the tone of his voice makes Marinette believe Red Hood is smiling at her. “Mousette! Tell me, who’d you get to yell at today?”

Sometime during the past week, Red Hood had run some sort of background check on her. Dug around in her life and rooted for the shiniest bits.

She should, perhaps, be a bit upset by that but she can’t quite manage it. He told her about it almost immediately, and she understands why he did it. It also doesn't hurt that he only brings up the Multimouse thing, which is already the worst kept secret in Paris so she doesn't much care.

Marinette snorts at him, handing him the mug he won’t actually drink from. At least, not when she’s looking at him.

She knows he has another mask under his helmet, but he tells her his hair is… distinctive. She doesn’t ask, and politely turns her back so he can eat and drink on the nights he stays long enough and doesn’t just run off with her hard work.

“You know that’s not actually what I do, right?” she feels the need to remind him.

“But that’s the most fun part,” he points out logically. “C’mon. You’re helping plan the most rock’n’roll wedding in existence. Gimme the details.”

Marinette shakes her head at him and then ignores him in favor of Robin. “I’m afraid I hadn’t planned on extra company. There isn’t enough tea to go around. If you give me a moment, I can make more?”

“Don’t worry about it, Mousette. I don’t really think the gremlin even eats. He just absorbs all the anger in the air or something. Like photosynthesis.”

She tsks at him disapprovingly, smacking him lightly before turning back to Robin. “I know it’s probably not the kind of tea someone who had ‘the best tutors to be found’ would drink, but I can get some for you if you’d like?” she smiles, to show she’s only teasing but Robin narrows his eyes anyway.

“I’d rather not be poisoned, so I find I’ll have to decline.”

Red Hood straightens, making as if to step toward Robin but Marinette puts a hand on his arm to stop him.

“I won’t have you two fighting on my balcony,” she tuts, “Think of the flowers.”

“You can’t seriously be letting him speak to you like that,” Red Hood asks incredulously. He’s familiar with how little bullshit she takes these days after all, seeing as he’s the one she rants to the most. Besides Tikki, that is.

She hums contemplatively, raising the mug to her lips. “Well, insinuating that I might poison him is a step up from last time where he all but said I was a, what was it? An uneducated floozy undeserving of respect, I believe?”

“He what? Wait- Last time? He’s visited you before?”

“He’s still standing right here.”

Marinette ignores Red Hood’s outburst, turning back to Robin. “Yes, and may I ask as to why you’ve decided to pay me a visit again?”

“No,” he says, probably just to be difficult. “It’s classified.”

She hums, taking another sip of tea as if having Gotham’s vigilantes prying into her private life is a completely reasonable choice of action for them to take. “I am deemed a threat then?”

“What?” Red Hood exclaims, sounding very much not happy. He should be careful or he’ll spill his tea.

“You’re an unknown. Gaps in data are dangerous and not seeking out more information on them is foolish.” Robin once again scans her, not so subtly evaluating her. When his eyes return to hers, something in his posture shifts and she can’t help the feeling that he’s found her lacking in some way. “Threat is too strong a term for what you are though.”

She cocks her hip to the side, wondering to herself why she thought it was such a good idea to associate with the vigilantes again?

“Damn. And here I was almost flattered.”

“Being a known threat is flattering?” Red Hood asks incredulously.

She turns and looks at Hood like he’s the crazy one. “Of course it is. I take my ability to be badass very seriously. Being a threat just means someone else recognizes it.” She also shoots Robin a look, a wry smirk dancing on her lips. “Being a threat also means you give someone a level of respect for their abilities. Of which I still don’t qualify apparently.”

“You would hardly be able to take me in honorable combat,” Robin huffs, crossing his arms like a petulant child.

“Only a thoughtless brute believes the only way to take someone down is with a punch,” she quips. “I don’t need to know how to wield a blade or bench press two hundred kilos to defeat my enemies.”

Robin’s head tilts like he’s rolling his eyes. When he speaks, his tone is scathing. “Oh yes, because killing a mugger with kindness is such a reliable method.”

She blinks, wide blue eyes up at him. So many don’t look past the sweet, naivety she draws around her like a well worn coat. It’s almost disappointing Robin seems so determined to find nothing else. Red Hood had looked deeper within only a few moments of him waking up.

It’s the fastest anyone outside her Court has done.

“Who said anything about kindness?” she asks innocently, batting her eyelashes.

Behind her, Red Hood snorts and Robin scowls. “And what would you use instead, then?”

“You can’t really think I’d actually answer that, right, petit oiseau?” Marinette tuts disapprovingly. “Where’s the fun in just giving you the answer?”

***

It becomes a Thing oddly enough.

Robin shows up with the same frequency as Red Hood, but not always on the same days. It’s rare that Marinette finds her balcony empty at night for the last weeks of her stay.

Not every visit is welcome, of course.

Robin may be abrasive, but no more than Chloé or Felix are most times. She can certainly handle his snark and give back as good as she gets. She even comes to enjoy their verbal sparring, he keeps her on her toes and she likes that.

But sometimes, it seems as if he drops by just to provoke her. Maybe because he’s an ass, maybe as some weird interrogation tactic, but Marinette doesn’t give two shits as to the why. The second she realizes what he’s doing, she slams her balcony door in his face and closes all her blinds.

Her days of being a welcome mat are over, and she doesn’t care who they are, she’s not letting anyone make her one again.

When Marinette asks herself one night why the vigilantes seem to hang around her so much, she’s surprised when Tikki speaks up.

She had not been expecting an actual answer.

The tiny goddess is going through Marinette’s emails, having long since become Marinette’s pseudo-secretary and PA. Tikki gets bored sitting in Marinette’s purse all day, and had practically demanded that Marinette give her something productive to do. She seemed to like it well enough, and it certainly helped Marinette.

“You are a being of Creation,” she says almost absently.

Marinette tilts back in her chair to give more attention to the kwami, “Huh?”

It takes Tikki a moment to finish what she’s doing. “I only mean that it is not so surprising that you attract such individuals so filled with chaos and destruction. It is… a balance. You call to fellow creators and destroyers alike. It’s why your new Order is filled with so many.”

Marinette mentally goes through the list of all her friends.

Adrien was a destroyer, obviously, and so was Felix. Nino, Nath, and Luka were all creators like her. The last three were a bit harder to place, landing somewhere in the middle, or swinging back and forth like pendulums on any given day.

“Oh,” she says dumbly. She never really noticed the pattern until it was pointed out to her.

Tikki giggles. “It seems the universe believes you need more Chaos in your life.”

Marinette tsks. “As if I don’t already have enough.”

***

She visits Wayne Manor three more times, twice for fittings regarding Monsieur Wayne’s suit and an additional time when Cass invites her to use their dance studio (her Waynes prefer to hang out outside the Manor for whatever reason).

She runs into Damian every time she’s there. Once, literally.

She even sees him the one time she goes to Wayne Enterprises instead to do Monsieur Wayne’s fitting there because he was particularly busy.

It was frankly ridiculous. She had half a mind to ask if he was following her or something.

The only saving grace was that he seemed more… civil than her first impressions. She wouldn’t call him friendly by any means, but he was polite at least. Which was more than she could say for some people.

She’s in the garden when he finds her—again. Tikki is off somewhere in the hedges, and Duke left her to go get snacks. She’s sat under a tree, sketching. She’s thinking about a line of dresses based around the flowers around her. Maybe she can fashion the skirts to look like different kinds of petals? Oh! She could even do a line of matching hair accessories!

She’s so invested in furiously scribbling away at her sketchbook that she doesn’t notice he’s there until he says something.

“Dupain-Cheng.”

She jumps a foot in the air. “Merde!” Her hand comes up to her chest, her heart thudding against her ribcage. “Mon dieu, tu m'as fait peur. Don’t do that.”

When she looks up at him, there’s the barest hints of amusement on his face, the dick. Except that’s an insult to Dick, who’s actually a sweetheart just like his daughter. Mar’i certainly comes by it honestly.

“You should pay more attention to your surroundings. You never know who will sneak up on you.”

Marinette gives him an odd look. “Have you seen the security system you live in? I am sitting in perhaps the safest place in all of Gotham.”

“Not an excuse.”

She rolls her eyes. Damian isn’t exactly one to admit defeat, but she knew that even before she formally met him. It’s number nine on Duke’s Wayne Family Survival List. “Can I help you with something?”

“Unlikely,” he says, then drops down next to her with far more grace than any person should have and pulls out a book from seemingly nowhere. The title reads ‘Lord of the Flies’.

She gives him a strange look. “Um… okay then?”

“This is my spot in the garden,” he says, answering the question she didn’t ask. “Stay or don’t, but I’m not leaving.”

“Oh,” she blinks, turning her attention back to her sketchbook. “Okay.”

They sit there for a long while, only the sounds of the garden and Marinette’s pencil on paper and Damian turning a page in his book to break the silence. It’s surprisingly… peaceful.

Then, she gets a text from Duke, saying something came up suddenly and he has to cut their hangout short. Marinette sighs, rolling her eyes fondly before going back to her sketches.

Would Chloé wear a sunflower dress? It’s her color, but Marinette isn’t quite sure the shape would suit her friend. Maybe tulip instead? Adrien would wear the sunflower dress though. Maybe she’ll make one just for him.

She doesn’t really notice she’s mumbling until Damian speaks up.

“Do you normally do that?”

“Huh?” Looking up, she finds that Damian is staring at her. What was she-? Oh. “Oh, merde, je suis désolé. Sorry! Sorry! I don’t normally… do that, around other people.”

Damian blinks at her, raising one perfectly manicured eyebrow. “You normally speak to yourself?”

No. She normally speaks to Tikki because while she prefers to let Marinette figure things out and create using her own talents and ideas, she’s a fantastic rubber duck and the embodiment of creation. If Mari hits a wall, Tikki can circumvent it. It’s merely a matter of if her dear little deity will.

But she can’t say that to him so, instead, “Yes?”

He gives her a look and she moves to defend herself. “It’s not that strange! People talk through problems out loud all the time.”

Damian carefully marks his page in his book and places it on his lap before shifting slightly to better face her. There is something like amusement hanging around him, but his mild expression of judgement does not change.

“And this problem would be?”

And, she means, she’s not very close to Damian—like, at all—but he’s trustworthy as far as she’s concerned and he also asked so really it’s his fault for opening the gates of hell. Her explanation slash rant about how she might get the different skirt types to lay properly with the petal pieces starts off slowly but quickly gains speed. It isn’t long at all before she’s talking a mile a minute and her hands are flying everywhere.

There’s so much technobabble in her speech and half the things she says are incomplete thoughts and barely coherent because her mind is working so much faster than her mouth can keep up with but Damian doesn’t leave and he doesn’t make fun of her.

He sits there, humming and nodding at all the right places. She doesn’t give him a single moment to interject but he sits quietly and listens and… doesn’t complain.

It might be the nicest he’s been the entire time she’s known him.

Fitting that it was brought on by him not saying anything at all.

***

She ends up sitting next to Damian at the rehearsal dinner.

She’s not sure which one of the boys orchestrated it—probably Dick—and she’s not quite sure why, but when she confirms who it was, she’s going to punch them in the face.

Damian does not like small talk, and Marinette is kind of horrible at it anyway, so she tries to focus on the other conversations happening at the table. But, then she feels bad for excluding Damian and tries to draw him in.

She must do something completely, horribly wrong because the entire table somehow turns to the topic of Gotham’s local heroes—

“Vigilantes,” the Waynes correct her in sync which causes Jagged to scoff.

—and Marinette is trying very hard not to reveal the fact that she has regularly been meeting with and feeding two of them. It seems like something that should not be shared, something she should keep close to her chest. So she stays as vague as possible and gently pushes all questions onto Uncle Jay who is more than happy to give his opinions.

Which was apparently her second mistake, because he then starts talking about how the Bats were ‘pretty cool and all’, but Paris’ Court was ‘majorly rock and roll’.

“Especially, Multimouse. Not even the Spots herself can measure up to our little rocker, right here.”

“Uncle Jay!” she hisses at him, panicking. She shoots a glance across the table at Luka who looks far too amused for the situation at hand.

Jagged just laughs, slinging an arm over her shoulders and jostling her. “Ah, c’mon, Rockette! Live a little! Bask in your glory!”

“There is no glory to even bask in, ” she insists, elbowing him none too gently in the side.

“You are one of the parisian heroes?” Damian asks, and of course the first time he interacts with the conversation on his own, it’s about a topic she’d rather never have been brought up in the first place.

“No,” she says at the same time Jagged excitedly tells him, “Yes!”

“Uncle Jay, no,” she insists.

Jagged scowls. “Look, just cause you ain’t in combat very often, doesn’t make you any less than Ladybug. Reynard doesn’t fight, and neither does Viperion and they’re still part of the Court.”

“It really does, but that’s not the point.” She turns back to the Waynes with an exasperated expression. “I’m not a hero, not anymore, and I barely counted as one in the first place. I was a part of the temporary heroes back when Hawkmoth was still active, but only a few times. I’m more of a… civilian aide.”

“C’mon melody,” Luka says smoothly, giving her a shit-eating grin that never means good things. He’s been spending far too much time with Adrien lately. “Stop being so modest. Half of Paris knows you and Sparrow are the wizards behind the curtain.”

She scowls, pointing her fork at Luka, “I hate you,” then Jagged, “And I hate you. And I really cannot begin to explain how untrue that is. Stop spreading these lies. ”

“What do you do as a civilian aide?” Damian asks, and Marinette misses that way most of his siblings shoot him glares.

“Judge our heroes for their poor life choices?” she says, “Play babysitter because Sparrow won’t? Grown adults they may be, but sometimes I swear there is not an ounce of common sense among them. But, I mean, at least half of them have backstories tragic enough to make even Batman weep, so… it’s not like their parents will pick up the job of keeping these idiots alive. And what was I supposed to do? Not make sure they ate and took care of themselves? As if.”

The Wayne kids all turn in sync to stare at their dad, who looks to be doing his best not to acknowledge them. The expressions on their faces are odd, and most look somewhat amused—Dick looks like he’s trying very hard not to laugh—and Marinette isn’t quite sure what that’s all about but doesn't question it.

Monsieur Wayne clears his throat, still ignoring the pointed stares of his children. “If I may ask, if your cover was compromised, why are you still working with them? Doesn’t that put you in danger?”

It’s not the first time she’s heard this question, and she doubts it will be the last. And, as much as it rankles that so many believe she’s incapable of taking care of herself, even after they learn that she was on the front lines for a time, Marinette knows it’s a valid question—it’s a concern she has for her parents after all. But that does not stop her from being upset by it.

Emotions, she’s learned, so rarely make logical sense.

Her lips press into a thin line, “Perhaps. But no more danger than I would be by associating with Jagged, or the Mayor’s daughter, or the son of a known former supervillain, or you all. ” She waves her hand, as if waving off the issue. “I cannot live my life cowering in fear, I have too much I need to do with it. And I’d think you would share that sentiment, Monsieur, especially considering your specialized R&D department created just for funding Batman and his escapades and your lesser known charitable donations to the Justice League, oui?”

She can see Tim and Steph covering their mouths, likely to hide smiles, and Jason is full on grinning without remorse like this is the best thing he’s seen all day. Jagged is not far behind him.

Monsieur Wayne doesn’t quite frown, but he does something that very much gives off that impression. Her Maman does the same thing, only her Maman is much scarier than he is.

“Such high profile individuals have bodyguards, usually. Or some sort of protection detail.”

She gives him a flat look. “No offence again, Monsieur, but I’ve never once seen you with a protection detail. Unless you count the Batman, who seems to come to your rescue more often than not.”

Jason can’t hold back his amusement anymore and bursts out laughing. Duke looks at her with something like awe and Cass is smiling with all her teeth.

“She’s got you there, B,” Dick snickers, elbowing his father playfully. “Batman does seem to have a soft spot for you.”

Monsieur Wayne glares at his eldest son, but the rest of his kids—sans Damian and Cass, who smile and snicker—erupt into thunderous laughter.

“You better be careful, old man,” Jason jeers, “or them rumors about your and Batman’s torrid love affair will start cropping up in the papers again.”

Marinette blinks, sharing a look with her fellow parisians who look just as confused as her.

Leaning over to Damian, she whispers, “He’s joking right? Did that really happen?”

“Not even a little bit,” he says, whispering right back. He looks more amused now than she’s ever seen him. Happiness looks good on him, she thinks. “It took over a month for the story to run its course. Father was asked about it almost every day.”

Huh.

***

Later, Marinette is waiting on her balcony. She barely even waits for the two vigilantes to touch down before she starts speaking.

“Okay seriously, you gotta spill. Is Batman really Bruce Wayne’s ex? Because if he is and you didn’t tell me I am going to hate you forever on the grounds of you being horrible friends who keep insanely important information from me.”

They both sit there frozen for a whole five second before Red Hood laughs so hard he falls off her balcony. Robin sighs like he’s been put upon, but his shoulders are shaking with barely repressed laughter, so… Marinette calls it a win honestly. Even if they never actually answer her question.

***

On the day of the wedding, Marinette, despite being one of Jagged’s groomsmaids, spends almost the entire time before the ceremony with Penny. There are a lot of things to see to before the bride walks down the aisle, but the most important—in Marinette’s opinion—is the wedding dress.

The bodice was made almost entirely of intricately delicate lace, a soft lavender color, just shy of white. A sensible, lace bateau neckline layered over a sweetheart crossover made up her bust before flowing down into more lace detailing that slowly fades out before her thighs. The dress hugs her form until mid-thigh, then flares out around her feet and fades from pristine white to vibrant purple the same shade as Penny’s hair along the hem.

But that couldn’t be all, of course. No rocker is complete without her jacket.

A cream, faux leather vest with purple buttons was pulled securely over her shoulders, embroidery that matched the lace from the rest of the ensemble sewn into the back, and sleeves made of yet more lace.

It was her greatest masterpiece yet.

The first time Penny had seen it, she’d cried.

Jagged cries the first time he sees it too, but Marinette thinks it might have more to do with the bride in the dress, rather than the dress itself.

***

The reception is just as crazy as Marinette expected. An antithesis to the beautiful, private ceremony, this was practically a rave the moment the bride and groom exited the floor after their first dance. But, a circus the reception may be, that does not change that fact that it is still wholeheartedly Jagged and Penny in every minute detail.

She spends most of the night dancing and trying to ignore all the celebrities that keep coming and going. Having the venue in Gotham dissuaded more than a few people, but certainly not all of them.

She dances to slow songs with Cass, letting her friend lead her through the wide complicated step patterns. Jason and Duke bring her up to the dancefloor for separate but equally cheesy pop songs, and Jagged drags her on stage to be ridiculous while he sings. Luka pulls her into one of those silly folk songs with lots of clapping and twirling, not letting her leave until she’s red-faced from laughing so hard.

Tim also asks her to dance, an old jazz song she vaguely recognizes, but Steph sweeps in and steals her away before he actually can. Her and Steph laugh throughout the entire song because of the look on his face.

Mar’i asks for dances too, and Marinette gladly obliges, swinging her around and picking her up and dipping her in that overly dramatic way kids love. Mar’i’s giggling the whole time which was Marinette’s goal in the first place. By the time Marinette is done with her, the little girl is about ready to pass out and Marinette needs to sit.

She’s spent much of the night passed from one partner to the next and while she’s not complaining—she loved every second—she needs a moment to catch her breath.

She catches sight of Dick and Tim crowding around Damian, likely trying to get him out of the corner he planted himself in almost immediately. He… does not look too happy with their attempts. He looks very  unhappy actually, which is just unacceptable for Uncle Jay’s wedding.

Marinette bits her lip in indecision. Unhappy he may be, but it’s not really any of her business, right? She doesn't even know if he’d appreciate her stepping in. She doesn’t need to play hero here.

A notification pops up on her watch.

Spots: Stop worrying so much.

Oh. She may have been speaking out loud. Tikki sends another message from her pocket.

Spots: Go over there. It can’t hurt to try :)

Except that it very definitely can, but whatever. She wants to help, and Tikki is the only push she really needs.

She plops into a seat right next to Damian, giving both Dick and Tim significant looks. “There’s a whole party going on, and you both have such lovely dates, why aren’t you enjoying it?”

Dick blinks down at her, surprised by her sudden appearance. “Uh…”

“I did not spend over a year helping plan this thing so you could just ignore it,” she scolds playfully, lips twitching upwards. “Go enjoy yourselves.”

“We were just trying to get Demon Spawn to come. He’s been sitting here all night.”

Marinette casts a look at Damian who’s glaring at Tim for all he’s worth. “And here is where I will stay. I have no wish to dance.”

She sends a wry grin to the two other men. “If you’re so worried, I’ll keep him company. I need a break anyway. Now, shoo! Go enjoy yourselves!”

Tim nods before turning away to go find Steph and while Dick is a bit more reluctant, he eventually runs off to go find Kor’i. She waits a few minutes, making sure they’re out of view before she pulls out her phone to begin playing some puzzle game Nath has gotten them all addicted too.

“I- why aren’t you pestering me?”

She looks up from her phone to stare at him incredulously. “Did you want me to?”

“No.”

“Well, okay then.” She goes back to playing.

“I just, why did you come over here then, if not to talk?”

She doesn’t look up this time. “You looked ready to stab one of them. Figured you could use an out.” She clears her stage, and does a mini fist pump in celebration. She was beating Felix in the leaderboards now. “Yes! Also, I really do need a break from the dance floor. So, you know. Mutually beneficial and all that.”

“Oh.”

She hums absently.

After a few moments, he speaks up again. “If you move that piece there, you’ll be able to open up the passage in four moves.”

She opens her mouth, but runs that through her mind and, oh. He’s right. She should’ve though of that. She quickly cycles through before passing onto the next phase.

“Thanks.”

“Of course.” He doesn’t move away from where he’d leaned forward to look over her shoulder. She tilts the phone screen just a bit so he can see better, and they spend the next half-hour practically flying through the stages.

That is, until they hit one that gives them both trouble and they can’t quite agree on the proper way to beat it and end up bickering about it. They spend ten minutes on it before Marinette gives in, much to Damian’s frustration, and just asks the game for a hint.

(It turns out she was closer to the answer than he was. The pout on his face is very satisfying, especially when he spends three minutes insisting it’s not there.)

She spends almost the entire rest of the night there, with periodic breaks courtesy of her Waynes and fellow parisians snatching her up for more dances or trips to the snack table. But, despite her socializing with some of her favorite people, she keeps returning to that back corner.

Her and Damian cycle through three other puzzle games that result in twice as many bickering disagreements.

It is, in Marinette’s opinion, a pretty good night.

***

Going back to Paris is both the hardest and easiest thing she’s ever done.

She has missed her city. Missed the familiar streets and swinging across rooftops and all the people who look up and wave when they see her. Paris is all she has ever loved, it’s her home—the place where all her family is gathered in close enough that she can touch.

She should be ecstatic to be back after so long away. And she is!

But only for about a week.

After that, she feels like she’s clawing at her skin. The itch to leave and the whispers tucked away in her chest telling her go go go! have become almost unbearable. Luka is much the same. Not quite as bad, but she can tell he’s antsy.

He also, when she asks, had apparently expected something like this to happen. He, Chloé, Felix and Nino were already elbow deep in contingencies and arrangements. She was kind of miffed at being left out until that point, but she can see where he was coming from.

She huffs, burrowing deeper into Adrien’s side. He’s the only one who can keep her still for any significant amount of time. (Marinette tries not to think about how much he feels like Gotham or how much that thought is equal parts concerning and comforting.)

***

Marinette, almost inevitably, returns to Gotham.

Only this time, she’s here to stay.

Chapter Text

“Mr Drake is a very busy man. Normally such meetings are handled by lower-level personnel. But he seems to have taken a…” the secretary paused, looking her up and down, “ personal interest in your proposal.”

Her smile is all teeth—just like Chloé taught her—and she pretends that she can’t hear the insinuation in the woman’s tone.

“I’m honored,” she says politely, snarling in a way so few people can pick up on, “It means a lot that he’s taken the time out of his busy schedule.”

The secretary hums, and knocks on the large double doors that lead to Tim’s office. “Mr Drake? Your one o’clock is here.”

“Let her in!” comes a semi-familiar voice inside. He sounds just a bit excited to Marinette, and she suddenly remembers that he’d been a fan of hers.

Well. This is going to be even more fun than she’d expected.

She sweeps past the nosy secretary without a backwards glance, zeroing in on Tim. His reaction is even better than she expected. Confusion and surprise war across his face before a strange sort of calculation settles in his eyes.

“Marinette?” he asks and her smile feels far more real when she directs it at him.

“Bonjour, Tim. It’s nice to see you again!”

Tim blinks, opens and closes his mouth, then all but collapses back in his chair. “I’m an idiot. Of course, you’re MDC.”

Marinette laughs, arms out at her sides like she’s a magician who just pulled off a particularly impressive trick. “Surprise!”

He gives her an appraising look as he offers her the seat in front of his desk. She drops into it, acting far more comfortably than she would if her business partner were anyone but Tim.

“You—MDC you, I mean—are much younger than I expected.”

Marinette’s lips twitch upwards. “Funny, Duke said the same thing when we first met.”

Tim’s eyes narrow, a thought catching his attention. “Wait, but- Gabriel Designs was renamed MDC Fashion House years ago. You would have been,” he pauses, does some mental calculations before looking at her with wide eyes, clearly impressed. “Sixteen. You owned, ran, and rebranded an international company at sixteen?”

She waved her hand in a ‘so-so’ gesture. “Not exactly by myself. I had help.”

She had lots of help, actually. That particular year had been a whirlwind.

Buying up the majority of shares for Gabriel as covertly as possible had been a pain in her ass, and likely impossible without all the help from her friends and Jagged. The company was supposed to go to Adrien after that, but he'd wanted nothing to do with it. He much preferred the pâtisserie her parents were all but throwing at him, since she wasn't interested in owning a bakery the rest of her life.

And well, she already had the company by then. What was she going to do? Give it back?

The company was hers and the first thing she did with it was gut the whole operation. Modeling contracts were reestablished with healthier practices, more diverse models were immediately hired, and Marinette personally saw to the new employee standards of care, including, but not limited to: living stipends, healthcare and dental insurance, higher education paid for by the company, and paid leave.

When the board decided to throw a fit about it, she’d turned on them as well. Thorough audits and vetting processes revealed quite a few things she’s sure the men would have preferred to keep hidden.

Marinette didn’t give a damn what they preferred.

Half the board resigned with a little persuasion while those with more severe offenses were blacklisted and served enough lawsuits to drown lesser men. The empty seats were then filled by far more ethical choices, handpicked by Felix and Chloé themselves.

Marinette ruthlessly tore through the entire structure and shady businessman after businessman until she emerged from the other side victorious and with the newly birthed fashion house she always dreamed of cupped in her hands.

Master Fu was appointed CEO for those first two years, but really he was little more than a figurehead. Her, Chloé, Felix, and the Kwamis had been the oligarchy behind the whole affair, and still were really, though Chloé had finally taken her rightful place as acting CEO on her eighteenth birthday. Felix preferred to stay in the shadows and Marinette had enough trouble being the metaphorical soul behind the company to worry about all the business bits.

“It was hardly anything compared to what you surely had to do to gain and keep your title as CEO of Wayne Enterprises in your father’s absence,” Marinette deflects, “Alone, might I add.”

Tim snorts. “If you say so.” He leans back in his chair, hands clasped in front of him. “So, to what do I owe the pleasure of a personal meeting with MDC herself? I thought Miss Bourgeois handled the business aspect of things.”

Marinette laughs. “If you want to deal with her special brand of ruthlessness, be my guest! But, I figured, since I actually like you and your family, I’d spare you the terror.”

“How kind,” he jokes.

She grins, “Aren’t I? But- to business. Chloé will kill me if I don’t actually get something productive done besides catching up.”

Tim waves his hand in an inviting gesture. “The floor is yours.”

Marinette straightens, and it’s like a switch is flipped. Her friends like to call it Ladybug Mode, the professional, no-nonsense demeanor she wears even outside the mask sometimes.

She hands Tim a packet filled with all the necessary information, drafted contracts, and NDA’s.

“MDC Designs is opening up a branch here in Gotham, directly overseen by me and I want to extend a partnership to Wayne Enterprises. I’ve done a very thorough background check on your company Monsieur Drake, and I must say, I believe our ideals and business practices align quite well even with our differing clientele.

“I’m sure you’re aware of MDC Design’s policy regarding local labor, and I believe Wayne Enterprises would be more than helpful setting up production lines and vetting personnel for the immediate area. And, in exchange for your help and resources, my board of directors has agreed to shift our fashion magazine into whichever one of your publications you wish, provided we hold final creative say, of course.”

She pauses, giving Tim a moment to process all that she’s just said.

“This is quite the partnership, Miss Dupain-Cheng,” he says after a moment. “You seem to have everything planned out.”

She laughs. “Oh, please. There’s still plenty left to discuss and fine-tune, but those are the basics. Well, no. There is one more thing.” Tim raises an eyebrow for her to continue, and who is she to not take the opportunity presented to her?

“I’m hoping to release a new line of casual wear geared towards something a bit more… Gotham street-savvy, you could say. And a little birdy told me that your R&D department is working on a more affordable and readily made kevlar substitute that would work for regular wear.

“You get me that fabric to work with, and I’ll create the entire line with credit to Wayne Enterprises. Profits will, of course, be shared between us both and you no longer have to worry about how to use the fabric.”

Tim’s eyes widen. “How did you know about that? Those are for our military contracts-”

“Which will fall through,” Marinette tells him simply, without judgment or scorn. She’s merely stating a fact. Alix has seen it. “It won’t be up to the Colonel’s standards and he’ll drop the contract for the fabric and demand something else. But you’ll already have the prototypes made and production half set up. Give it to me instead.”

Tim stares at her bewildered. “Is this a threat? Some sort of sabotage?”

She smiles, loses some of the steel in her spine. She doesn't want an enemy of Tim, he’s powerful and well connected, which is dangerous even at the best of times. But more than that, he’s someone important to her friends, which makes him important to her.

“Of course not. I did my homework and a bit of accurate guesswork. This partnership will be beneficial to us both I assure you. And if you care about the common people in Gotham like I know you do, then I have no reason to blackmail you anyway.”

He’s quiet for a long moment, staring at her with sharp eyes as his mind spins behind them. Marinette knows that look because she wears it too.

“I’ll need to speak with my father and some of our department heads before a decision can be made.”

She nods her head and moves to stand. “Of course. I expected nothing less.” She reaches out and taps the folder still in his hands. “The preliminary contracts drafted by MDC Designs’ lawyers are in there. You and your people can look it over. Contact mine if there are any questions or stipulations you’d like answered or negotiated.”

As she lets herself out, she can’t help but turn back around to smile at him. “I sincerely hope we can work together in the future, Monsieur Drake. I think there’s lots of good we could do.”

***

So it might be a little bit of a lie to say that she’s strictly here for the opportunity with Wayne Enterprises. That was more of a… happy coincidence than anything else.

Truly, she was here because the city has sunk its claws into both her heart and soul and doesn’t seem keen on letting go anytime soon. She’s left and returned too many times and the city is angry.

The kwami say this phenomenon is normal for matured Guardians, that they will be naturally drawn to places where they—and the Miraculi—are needed most.

Of course, the reaction isn’t normally so aggressive, but the running theory is that her many coming and goings have made the Powers That Be particularly upset and they didn’t want her leaving again. 

And, of course, her first self-assigned mission as a full-fledged Guardian would be one of the most chaotic cities on earth with a miasma of misfortune so thick and cloying it chokes her sometimes.

(“At least you aren’t drawn toward 'Eth Alth'eban and the infestation lurking there,” Plagg told her once when she complained close enough for him to overhear. “Now that’s a mess.”

Marinette didn’t even want to know what he was talking about.)

Batman and his flock of vigilantes are doing fantastic work here and she hates to step on any toes, but she can’t help but think they’re treating symptoms rather than the source.

Monsieur Wayne seems to be closer to what the city needs long term, building infrastructure and security. He helps the people of Gotham, not just the victims. When less people are desperate, less people resort to desperate measures.

Marinette is here to help treat the source and she’s hoping that she can work with Wayne Enterprises to do it - even if she’s starting small.

***

It’s only two days after her meeting with Tim that she runs into Robin again.

Well, she says ‘runs into’. More likely he was following her and chose to make his presence known at the precise moment it would freak her out the most. That seems more his style.

If that isn’t what he was trying to do, then he has absolutely zero social awareness because appearing before her in a dark alley is liable to take about fifteen years off her life. Her fist is already moving before she realizes who it is, and by then he’s grabbed her wrist.

They stare at each other for a long moment.

“Well,” Marinette blinks at his upside-down form. “Isn't this familiar?”

“I thought you left Gotham?” he asks, instead of anything normal he could’ve said like hi or nice to see you again.

“I did. But I came back, obviously. Job opportunities and all that.”

Robin looks at her strangely. “Most people don’t come back to Gotham once they leave.”

Marinette laughs. “Yeah well, this is my fourth visit to the city. Well, I wouldn’t really call it a visit since I plan to stay here for the foreseeable future.”

“You’re moving to Gotham?” Robin asks her incredulously.

“Have. Past tense.” She rolls her eyes at his dramatics. “But yes. Don’t worry, I’m sure there’s enough room for us both on these streets, Boy Wonder.”

“I- Why would you do that? Do you have some sort of death wish?”

Her eyebrows furrow. That… wasn’t quite the reaction she expected from him. Not that she ever really knows what to expect from him. But if it were anyone else she might’ve said he sounded… worried?

The wording certainly echoes that of her parents when she told them she was moving (they still weren’t over the whole Two-Face incident).

“No?”

“That should not be a question.”

“No,” she says firmer, pulling her hand from his grasp, “I don’t have a death wish. I’m just surprised you care. Didn’t think you took such an interest in civilians.”

“I don’t,” Robin snaps, an odd mix of harsh and soft only he could pull off.

When he doesn’t elaborate further Marinette fills the silence herself. “Well… I need to get home before my friends send out a search party. And I’m sure you’re busy patrolling, so-”

“No,” he says, flipping onto his feet in one fluid motion. This time, his hood falls away and leaves just his mask to protect him. His hair is disheveled, Marinette can’t help but notice. All windswept and wild.

Sex hair, Adrien would no doubt tease. She quickly pushes that thought very, very far away.

“I’m walking you home,” he says finally and Marinette blinks.

“Oh… kay?” she’s starting to think she might’ve missed a bit in the middle there. “I live this way.”

***

Marinette lives in the same flat she had last time she was in Gotham because when Jagged heard she was moving for good he gave it to her. Her friends—the ones who insisted on following her like a trail of ducklings—all live in the same building and have somehow acquired all the other flats on her floor.

Marinette, while unaware of this development until the day they were all moving in, wasn’t really surprised. She and her Court are all painfully co-dependent at times, and in a city like Gotham, she’s not really sure that there was ever any other way this could have played out.

This, of course, also means that when Marinette gets walked home by Robin, all of her friends know about it immediately.

Robin’s barely even swung away with a curt ‘farewell’ before they’ve descended on her.

“Hello, people who do not live here,” she greets all eight of the people sitting in her kitchen, not even blinking at the fact that three of them should definitely be in Paris at the moment.

(Poor Kaalki. She’s going to get a workout opening portals from here to Paris practically every other day because, again, painfully co-dependent.)

Marinette drops her bag onto the floor after Tikki twirls out of it, descending onto the counter where all the other kwami have gathered.

And she does mean all. Not just the ones in use by her and her Order.

Marinette can’t really bear to keep them all shut up in the Miracle Box, not after Duusu let it slip that they used to be allowed to roam free so many years ago. And certainly not after Mullo once said that the box reminded them of the Beginning, back when none of them could interact with the world.

She doesn’t know much about the Beginning, but Tikki’s said enough for her to know it wasn’t good. It doesn't sit well with Marinette to keep them all trapped in the box that reminds them of a time when they were so powerless.

So she lets them roam about to their hearts’ content.

The apartments were all properly warded and laid with enough glamors to convince someone that even Adrien’s puns were funny (meaning: the unbelievable seems believable). Nath, Trixx, and her had seen to that.

(Being a Guardian who was unafraid to allow the kwamis to operate on their own unsurprisingly opened a lot of doors.)

Anyone looking from the outside in won't be able to see the Kwami, and if Marinette or anyone is directly interacting with one of them, it alters the scene to show whatever the person least finds suspicious. Like her talking to a cat or on the phone or something.

They anchor all the glamors into the plants she keeps on her windowsill and balcony because the glamour needs an energy source that isn't a Kwami.

Normally, the glamours would drain too much energy from the plants and they'd start dying. But luckily, Marinette's a Ladybug, and Chloé is a damn good Bee. And they’re not just any run of the mill insects, but Guardians, which give them that extra oomph in everything. Marinette in particular is the closest a human has come to pure Creation in millennia; no plant that spends enough time in their presence will wilt, let alone die.

Felix doesn’t even look up from the book he’s reading. “And greetings to the biggest hypocrite in the city.”

Luka strums amusement on his guitar, quickly followed by the teasing chords of infatuation. “Yes, Melody. How are your strays faring?”

Everyone laughs as her cheeks grow red. She snatches the crackers out of Nath’s hand, plopping down on the stool next to him and ignoring his protest. “They aren’t my strays,” she protests, shoving a cracker in her mouth. “And I only talked to Robin. I haven’t even seen Red Hood.”

Luka hums. “And yet you still knew who I was talking about.”

Marinette shoves another cracker in her mouth, staunchly refusing to look at anyone in the hopes they’ll all just shut up and forget about this.

She is, of course, not that lucky.

“You and Robin seemed pretty friendly,” Adrien says, cheek propped against his fist as he grins toothily at her.

Marinette snorts. “‘Robin’ and ‘friendly’ do not belong in the same sentence. He’s about as ‘friendly’ as a cactus.”

“Is that why he showed up on your balcony every night?” Luka asks lightly, the traitor.

“He what?” all her friends screech at the same time. Well, Felix and Kagami don’t, because they’re more poised than that. But they both look some strange combination of wrong-footed and disappointed which is almost worse, really.

Marinette bangs her hand on the counter, calling for order. “Look,” she says over the clamoring of her friends, “It’s not like I could’ve stopped him anyway-”

Chloé snorts indelicately. “We all know that’s a load of bullshit, DC.”

“Yeah!” Alix pipes up, “C’mon Bug, we all know you could totally take down one of the bats.”

Marinette grumbles, hating her friends and their dumb logic. “It’s not about if I can-”

“You don’t have to be embarrassed,” Nath tells her gently and Marinette has half a second to think he might be on her side before he continues with: “Just because you’re hero catnip doesn’t mean that-”

“I am not hero catnip!” she screeches as Adrien and Alix cackle.

“You are definitely hero catnip,” Nino argues. “How else do you explain all of us? And the bats?”

“You guys don’t count and I’ve only met two bats.”

“So far,” Kagami adds unhelpfully. Marinette pouts at her.

“Et tu, Brute?”

Kagami shrugs then shifts further into the arm Adrien has thrown over her shoulder. Chloé has her feet thrown over Nino’s legs as he paints her toes, back to back with Felix as the two blondes use each other as a backrest. Alix is practically in Nath’s lap and still somehow invading Luka’s space as well (how a girl so small can be so large, Marinette will never know).

She sighs, dropping her head to pillow on top of her folded arms, basking in the feeling of almost all of her favorite people gathered around her, warm and breathing and yeah, sure, unfairly teasing her - but they’re happy so Marinette wont complain.

Mullo, Trixx, and Nooroo immediately dart into the little crooks of her neck and bent elbows when the space is made available, burrowing into her and forcing her to bite back a fond grin.

“You’re ridiculous,” she says to no one in particular in a voice that's entirely too warm and fond.

“Utterly ridiculous!” they all chorus back in kind, not missing a beat and making Chloé grumble the way she always does. And, really, she loves her friends too much. Marinette never stood a chance.

When she starts laughing, the rest of her friends and kwami aren’t far behind.

***

Wayne Enterprises gives her a whole floor to use as her workspace and to fill with employees and designers as she sees fit while in the city; the only condition being that her new hires pass the Wayne Enterprises background checks.

It’s far more than she ever expected to get, an almost suspicious amount. If she didn’t know half the Waynes personally, she’d be convinced that there was some ulterior motive at work here. (There honestly still might be, but she’s about ninety-five percent sure that if there is one, it’s not nefarious or anything. And she can certainly take care of herself anyways, so she’s not too worried.)

Chloé, at least, seems content with the office and Felix takes one look at the wide empty space and begins making arrangements for her equipment to be ordered and set up to her liking. He’s a thoughtful control freak like that.

Marinette looks at the wide-open space and wonders, briefly, if she could turn a corner of it into a small kitchen. She throws out the idea immediately as ridiculous.

Instead, she turns to Felix and says, “I want to own a soup kitchen.”

He doesn’t even blink, making a note in his trusty planner. “Should I try starting from scratch, or would you like to completely revamp an already existing establishment again?”

Marinette hums, like she’s thinking about it and hadn't already made up her mind before the words even left her mouth, plans spider-webbing outwards as her mind spins and whirls.

“Let's start from scratch. I have a feeling this city needs more food kitchens.”

Felix nods. “As you say, Madame President.”

She smiles and pats their prickly little sparrow on the cheek. She does so love Felix and his practicality, he handles all of their eccentricities so well. Hers, especially.

***

Her first official line had been themed around Paris’ Court, back when she was still only eighteen and MDC Designs was still reorienting itself after her major overhaul. The press had raved about the casual clothing line for weeks.

It was quite a shock to learn that MDC had been behind the Court Street Fashion movement for years. (Marinette loves supporting her friends so of course she based several items after them and then accidentally started a trend. What else would you expect?)

Before her meeting with Tim, Marinette already had half the designs set and ready for her new Gotham-inspired line.

When she finally revealed what the theme was, she was a little—but not completely—surprised at how vehemently the Wayne CEOs had tried to change her mind. There were plenty of complaints and arguments against why her first Gotham line shouldn’t be based around their infamous vigilantes but, quite frankly, Marinette didn’t give a shit.

She knows what she’s doing, and their utter lack of belief in her tiptoes just a bit too close to insulting.

She’s in Gotham to make it safer, not raze it to the ground by aggravating the local villains into attacking innocent civilians. She has a plan for the fashion line, and, okay, maybe the Wayne’s don't know that she has a plan and has certainly been doing this longer than they think but honestly.

Just because she wasn’t born in Gotham doesn’t mean she lacks common sense. She’d appreciate a bit more trust, or at least the illusion of it. And even if they don’t trust her, they can’t order her around anyway. She retains creative control and can do whatever she damn well pleases.

And what she pleases is a line centered around the vigilantes. Weaving defensive magic into clothing—or anything, really—is always so much easier if the subject is already thought of as good and protective. Like calls to like and all that.

Logistically, Marinette can’t weave Protections and Luck into every piece of clothing, it would drain her and likely wouldn’t work anyway. The magic has to be woven in throughout the whole process and adding it to the final product would be superficial anyway and prone to wearing off too easily.

But, she’s been at this for years. And she has more than the normal reasons for keeping all her production local.

She begs the addresses for all the warehouses involved off the Wayne boys, throwing out excuses like ‘needing to check the merchandise’ and ‘being curious as to how they do it all in America’. Then she drags Nino and Nath all around the city for the next week, pressing magic and hidden runes into the metal of the machines.

Nino and Wayzz are in charge of the weaving machines, Protection best added to the base. Nathaniel and Trixx throw themselves at the dyeing and printing work, as well as making sure the carvings are well hidden and will remain untouched.

Marinette and Tikki take most of everything else, but focuses on the winding and cabling of thread. Luck is better as a compliment and in subtle and smaller doses. Too much Luck and it will sour; Marinette learned that the hard way during her early days.

Luckily, she was still only in the testing on herself and friends stage, otherwise that would’ve been a nightmare.

When Marinette is finally content with the work they’ve done, all three of them are practically dead on their feet and aren’t seen by anyone but the rest of the Court for the next three days - not that anyone had seen much of them the entire week either.

The radio silence concerns her favorite vigilantes, apparently, because Red Hood all but breaks her balcony door down in his quest to figure out where the hell she’s been and if she’s okay. It’s sweet, in a terribly destructive way.

(He pays to replace her door at least.)

***

Marinette blinks into the office she’s sure was empty last week. Now, it’s lavishly furnished, if a bit sparse and lacking personality.

“I didn't think you worked here.”

Damian doesn't look up from his papers. “I don't.”

“Huh.” She steps into the room, taking his response as an invitation. “Does it still count as breaking and entering if you technically own the building? Or are related to the man who owns it?”

“I didn't break-in,” he scoffs. “I've been ordered to be here.”

“What? Why?”

He scowls down at the paper in his hand. “Father has given me a Sisyphean task in the form of planning the upcoming charity auction.”

“He- wait. That’s in a week and a half. Shouldn’t that be planned already?”

Damian snorts. “It was. But Father wants me to replan it as some form of punishment. It is admittedly more effective than grounding ever was.”

Marinette opens and closes her mouth before settling on narrowing her eyes. “What did you do?”

He finally looks up to glare at her. She’s honestly surprised he hadn’t done that earlier in this conversation. Damian, from what she’s seen, doesn't tolerate questions very much and she has done nothing but ask them.

He opens his mouth and she half expects him to say something along the lines of ‘none of your business’ but… he doesn’t, for whatever reason. He turns back to his papers, pretending to be busy with them.

“I… may have placed myself in unnecessary danger. Multiple times. Over the last few months.”

Marinette blinks. She doesn’t recall anything in the news about the Waynes being involved in anything, not recently at least. And her Waynes certainly never said anything, which is more than a bit suspicious, but whatever. They’re private people who stray far off into the woods for weird. Not that Marinette has much room to judge.

She thinks it over for a second before sitting down on the edge of his desk. “Okay. Promise me you won’t do it again.”

Damian gives her a look like he thinks she’s particularly insane. “Excuse you?”

“Promise me you won’t needlessly endanger yourself again,” she repeats. “Not if you can help it.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “And why should I do that?”

“Because I can’t in good conscience help you when, frankly, I agree with your father. You should value your safety more and parents have a right to discipline their children.” She pauses. “But, I also don’t want to see you fail, and I know you’re a man of your word, so… Promise me.”

“I don’t need help.”

Marinette snorts. “Everyone needs help sometimes. It just takes a certain kind of strength to admit that.”

She sits there, staring at him for what feels like forever, neither of them wanting to back down.

Then, finally, Damian growls. “Fine. I give you my word.”

“Wonderful!” Marinette claps happily. “Tell me what our budget is and I’ll get started on the catering. I’m sure I can bully a few places into taking an order with such short notice. Do you have a guest list? Or an estimate for how many people will attend? I need to know how much food we’ll need. Have you thought about what kind of place we’re looking at for venues-”

And she was off.

***

Marinette was a spinning dervish of planning and terrifying levels of competence. She turned his office into a war room from which she commanded an army, Damian at her side as her second-in-command.

Normally, he would have been boiling mad at being pushed to the side and forced into anything but a leading role, but it was easy to see he was outclassed in this instance. 

(The acknowledgment of which, is not as bitter on his tongue as he expected.)

He may have confidence and an unwillingness to back down, but he lacked her charm and personable demeanor. It was more likely that he’d insult and create enemies than coerce people into helping them.

So he worked on the things that hadn’t required direct human interaction and allowed her to lead the charge. She threw herself into her—his—work with reckless abandon and Damian couldn’t help but be… impressed.

He already knew she was terrifyingly efficient and refused to back down when challenged, but this was… different. And her company was not as grating as most people's, he could easily tolerate her presence even without the mask he wore as Robin.

She’s like a more competent Jon. Smarter, but just as bright as one of the few people he’s ever deemed worth his time.

“How do you know how to do all of this?” he finally asks, curiosity getting the better of him.

Marinette pauses, looking over at him as she mulls over the question.

“Um, a combination of growing up in a very popular french bakery and helping plan the wedding reception of the century I think.” She turns back to her work. “No offense, but after that, this is almost a piece of cake.”

***

“What are you wearing? Do you only own black clothes? Don’t you rich types have people to dress you? I’m pretty sure that a rich person, if not already in possession of a fashion sense, is provided one before being allowed to go out in public. This is ridiculous!”

Damian stares at Marinette who’s stood in front of him, hands on her hips and looking inordinately offended. He is, despite himself, amused and can’t quite help the quirking of his lips as she rants.

“That’s it. I have no choice! I am obligated, by the fashion gods themselves, to help your poor misguided soul. I cannot let you go to the Gala looking like- like this!”

“And what, pray tell, do you plan on doing about it?” he asks, eyebrow raised. “You can’t construct an entire suit in a day.”

Marinette scowls at him, as if his perfectly reasonable fact was a slight against her honor.

“You,” she points a finger in his face then down at the ground like she’s calling a dog to heel. “Stay here.”

He wants to snap back something witty, but she’s already dashed out the door. He has half a mind to just leave to prove a point but… his curiosity gets the better of him. He at least does not have to wait long because she comes running back in with a pile of carefully folded fabric in her hands and a container of pins.

She shoves the fabric in his hands and plucks the pins off the top before shooing him to the bathroom connected to his temporary office. “Put this on. And be quick about it!” she orders before slamming the door.

Damian blinks and can’t quite wrap his head around what just happened. But, he obediently puts on what he can now see is a suit. A very good one, he’s a bit reluctant to admit.

It’s a mesmerizing mix of dark gray and forest green, subtle patterns and embroidery were hidden along the hemlines of the suit. Simple in some places, and elaborate in others, if he looks close enough, he can see feathers and the shape of birds hidden within the pattern which is… concerning. Maybe.

(She can’t know he’s Robin, surely? How would she have guessed?)

The suit was a slim fit, and made his silhouette seem taller and lither. He may have inherited his father's looks, but he would never have his build. Damian was far more suited to the speed and agility of his mother than he would ever be to Father’s brute strength.

He exits the bathroom to find Marinette sitting in his desk chair, spinning herself lightly with one foot. “Should I be worried about the fact that you have an entire suit made to my measurements?”

She’s out of her chair in an instant, circling him critically. She snorts at his words.

“This suit isn’t for you. Or- it wasn’t. But Felix will get over it, I can make him a new one.” She manhandles his arms into certain positions, has him roll his shoulders and go through a list of stretches for the next ten minutes. She eyes every shift in fabric critically and pins certain places tighter to his body or makes notes about letting out the seams.

“Kwami!” she exclaims when she asks him to flex his shoulders. “Stop, stop! You’re going to hulk out of my suit. Stars above, Damian, what does your father feed you boys? All you Waynes are unreasonably fit.”

She’s too busy fussing over the ‘poor, abused fabric’ to be paying attention to him, and for that Damian is perhaps grateful. The compliment Marinette had unintentionally paid him was phrased more like an insult, but that fact that it was treated like a fact by her…

His reaction is nothing short of embarrassing. He’s never been one to preen at an acknowledgment of his appearance, and he’s certainly not going to start now.

(The pleased curl of his lips and the almost unnoticeable tint to his cheeks beg to differ.)

***

She and Damian arrive together - for a definition of ‘arrive’. The pair have been there for the last two hours making sure everything was set up and running smoothly.

This particular gala was not set up to raise money for the Martha or Thomas Wayne Foundations, but rather a smaller charity geared toward animal rights. Likely, Marinette believes, because Monsieur Wayne had expected his son to fail, as was the point of the punishment.

That, and the fact that Damian’s love for animals is no secret. Especially not to his family. 

Of course, that was before Marinette took on this challenge with him. Damian’s hatred of failing may be all but notorious, but Marinette isn’t that far behind him.

Failure, with both of them at the helm, was never an option.

Small though the foundation may be, this is still a party thrown by the Waynes. Everyone who is anyone is in attendance, and truly, that’s all Marinette needs to work her magic. She entices and charms, woos her way into their wallets and ploys them with honey-sweet words - all for a good cause, of course.

The predicted amount of donations is exceeded within the first two hours and Marinette doesn’t stop.  Instead, she keeps talking and talking and talking, switching out the Wayne on her arm every so often to suit her needs.

Jason is great with the younger ladies, unafraid to put his charm and good looks to use when Marinette’s there to step in before their target gets too handsy. Duke endears himself to the older couples, and plays well off of her sweetness with his own. Cass is most useful with those who hold onto their pocketbook the tightest. Marinette talks and she gives hints and clues about how to press their advantage.

Damian ends up on her arm many times throughout the night as well, but never when she’s speaking to a potential donor. His talent lies in being a good rest stop when she wants a break from speaking to people. No one dares get close to him for fear of his sharp tongue and her being on his arm doesn’t change that.

“Talking people into donating more than peanuts to this thing is exhausting,” she complains to him somewhere around the night’s halfway mark. “Why come to a charity gala if you don’t care about the charity?”

Damian snorts as if her plights are amusing. “Rich people like to be around other rich people,” he answers, catching two passing champagne flutes and handing her one. She takes it gratefully. “For them, coming to a charity event is good press first, and a genuine endeavor to help another living being second.”

Her lips purse in response, eyes narrowed at the nearest grouping of twittering socialites.

“Regardless,” he continues, “Wayne Galas are famous for their staggering successes regarding donations, so there are benefits to all the gasconading and pageantry, I suppose. During especially boring affairs, my brothers and I make it a competition to see who can swindle the largest donation out of the cockalorums.” He waves a careless hand at the crowd and Marinette has to bite back her grin. “Exaggerate enough one-upmanship, add an inordinate amount of champagne and I’ve seen people donate themselves into a new tax bracket.”

Marinette almost chokes on her drink. “You have not.”

Damian smirks, raising an eyebrow at her.

But before she can demand to know more, Monsieur Wayne and his lady love step out of the crowd and make their way toward them. Marinette has met Selina only a handful of times, seeing as they never seem to be at the manor at the same time, but she finds that she quite likes the other woman.

She’s snarky and has a unique perspective on the world at large. She also, unfortunately, has a penchant for cat-themed jokes and phrases, which means Marinette can never let her and Adrien meet. Ever.

“Damian,” Monsieur Wayne greets with a smile. “And Miss Dupain-Cheng. What a surprise.”

“Evening Father,” Damian dips his head, “Selina.”

“Bonsoir,” Marinette greets cheerfully, clinking her champagne flute against Selina’s. “Are you both enjoying the party?”

Selina’s eyes twinkle, “Oh, certainly. Mingling is always so fun. Don’t you agree, darling?”

Monsieur Wayne gives her a wry grin. “Our definitions of mingling must be different,” he says, eyes sweeping along her wrist and it’s then Marinette notices she’s wearing a bracelet she certainly hadn’t had when she’d arrived.

Marinette hides her amused smile behind her flute. That was another thing she liked about Selina: her sticky fingers. Perhaps, as a superhero, Marinette should be more disapproving about that habit, but she isn’t.

She doesn’t like being a hypocrite, after all.

Monsieur Wayne refocuses on his son. “But I wanted to congratulate you. You’ve done an incredible job with all of this.”

“Thank you, Father. But I can’t take all the credit.” Monsieur Wayne raises his eyebrow just so and- wow. She can see where Damian gets it from now. “Miss Dupain-Cheng was crucial to tonight’s success.”

She blushes. “It was nothing, really.”

Damian doesn’t say anything, but hums like he doesn’t agree with her at all, which is… kind of sweet in an emotionally constipated kind of way. Which as far as Marinette is aware, is just kind of how the Wayne boys—sans Duke—operate, so…

But then she sees Monsieur Wayne begin to frown and- oh!

“I volunteered to help,” she says quickly, before he can come to the wrong conclusion, like Damian purposefully shirking his responsibilities or something. “Actually I forced him to let me help, really. After he promised to be more careful.”

Now Monsieur Wayne looks surprised and Selina downright amused. “Is that so?”

Damian scowls and if Marinette didn’t have first-hand experience being on the receiving end of Robin’s glower, she’d say that this was the embodiment of the phrase ‘if looks could kill’.

“The terms of our agreement are no concern of yours,” he says curtly, before turning to her in an obvious dismissal of his father and Selina. Marinette bites her tongue to keep from reprimanding his rudeness.

She’s not his keeper, and she’s damn sure he wouldn’t appreciate the scolding.

“I believe Thomas is looking for you to save him from the clutches of his aging admirers. And Grayson mentioned earlier that his progeny and paramour both wished to speak with you before they left.” He doesn’t offer his arm, because her hand is still tucked in the crook of his elbow, but he does raise it slightly in a way that makes her think he would’ve if she wasn’t still there. “Shall we?”

Marinette sighs and gives him a wry smile, placing her champagne flute down on the table. “I suppose we shall.”

And then they were back into the fray.

***

Marinette had thought of everything regarding the party she helped Damian plan. The catering, the venue, the guest list, the entertainment - everything.

Everything, it seems, except the press.

The next day, she finds that Damian and her are splashed across the cover of every magazine and online article she’s looked at. Pictures of her hand tucked in the crook of his arm, her laughing at something he’d said, the two whispering conspiratorially, a moment of him looking at her instead of the benefactor they were talking to - the list went on.

A week into the media storm, one clever reporter even pulls up photos from Jagged’s reception that featured her and Damian leaning over her phone when they’d been playing strategy games, huddled into each other’s personal space.The next day, there’s a resurgence of photos from that night, all of them focusing on her and Damian.

Every headline she reads says some ridiculousness about her ‘finally melting the Ice Prince’ or ‘taming the beast’ or—and her friends are absolutely furious about these ones—her being Damian’s latest (and first?) ‘plaything’ or ‘arm candy’.

She scoffs at every one she reads and can’t help but feel offended on both her own and Damian’s behalf. She spent half the night with the rest of the Waynes, but did the media care about that? Of course not.

(For the love of kwami, she’s been out in public with Duke, Cass, and Jason plenty of times. Why on earth are they latching onto this?)

They haven’t gotten her name at least - or perhaps Gotham just truly loves their nicknames that much, because there are plenty of things they call her instead. They change depending on what relationship the article believes she and Damian have, but the monikers Lady in Red and Sunshine Sweetheart seem to be particularly popular and likely to stick much to all of her friends’ unending amusement.

***

There’s a ridiculously large bouquet sitting on her desk when she comes into work after the charity ball. The note attached to it has only two words: ‘thank you’.

She gets another one a week later, just as ostentatious and expensive, but the note is longer. ‘the press are fools,’ it says, ‘pay them no mind.’

Each time, she finds herself smiling just a little bit more throughout the day.

***

Marinette squints at Jason as he throws himself on the fainting couch someone—probably Adrien—bought for her. Duke, who is polite and currently her favorite Wayne, rolls his eyes at his brother and greets Marinette like a normal person.

“What is it with you Waynes and showing up in workplaces where you are not, in fact, employed?”

“It’s called visiting, Pixie-pop.” Marinette snorts, turning back to the prototype embroidered suit jacket she was making. The high society types frowned so much on changing the shape of a suit that she had to get creative when making mens formal wear.

Luckily (ha), that’s practically her whole schtick.

“Also I own this building,” he says, self importantly. “I can go wherever I want.”

“I think your father owns this building, actually,” she quips, making Duke laugh and Jason pout.

“Same difference.”

Marinette rolls her eyes and gives up on getting any work done while the boys are here. She spins her chair to face them, leaning her chin on her hand. “So, to what do I own the dubious pleasure of your company? Except you, Duke. I’m happy your here.”

Duke grins at her while Jason squawks in the background. Walking up to her, he drops a kiss to the top of her head, the same way he does with Cass. It makes Marinette feel unbearably fond.

“Figured we’d take you to lunch. Also, Alfred wants you to come over for dinner Friday. I think he’s planning on charming that mini quiche recipe out of you.”

She snorts. “He can certainly try. That’s an old family secret. Maman would kill me if I just gave it away.”

“What if he traded you that hot chocolate recipe you’re dying to have?”

Marinette pauses, then shrugs overly casual-like, grabbing her things to leave with the boys. “Well, then I suppose that’s as good a way as any to open negotiations.”

***

The thing about Gotham, is that she may be well on her way to helping the people themselves, but the city has been steeping in misfortune for so long, it’s practically woven into the brickwork of the buildings. And that is… bad.

So she needs to fix it. Because that is her job.

As a Ladybug, she has an upper hand on twisting misfortune into good luck. It is, quite literally, her whole schtick. But there are two problems with this plan of hers.

The first, is that she can’t cleanse the miasma at night. The shadows are too strong and too thick then - too much going wrong at the height of Gotham’s own personal criminal witching hour.

No, Marinette needs the sun. Needs the daylight beating down on the bricks and lighting up all that’s sick and wrong with the city so she can better see what she must fix.

The second problem is that unless she wants to chip away at the whole pain in the neck for the next decade and a half of her life, she can’t be Marinette when she does it. She needs to be Ladybug, in the bright light of day where anyone can recognize her.

This is how she meets Signal, Gotham’s Daytime Protector, mask to mask.

(So much for having only met two of the bats.)

***

She’s sat, cross-legged on a roof in her suit that’s gotten only slightly less garish with age, when Signal drops onto the roof next to her. She’s so focused on clearing the miasma from this block, that she doesn’t notice his presence until he says something.

(This is why everyone wanted you to bring the kwami along, her mind scolds her. The voice sounds suspiciously like Nino.)

“Who are you?” Signal demands and Ladybug jumps a foot in the air in response, swearing and accidentally setting off sparks in her palms. Her wings start fluttering immediately as well, making her hover there above the asphalt.

She sets immediately to trying to wrangle the magic back under control—she’d rather not get hit with backlash, thank you very much—and once she does, she glares at the new arrival. “Are you trying to give me a heart attack? I thought you bats had a no-killing policy.”

Signal blinks at her, opens and closes his mouth. “Who are you?” he settles on repeating.

“Ladybug,” she tells him distractedly. She won’t be able to completely wipe out the misfortune here today - she’ll need to come back. In the meantime, she needs to get to a stopping point before Signal gets too jumpy. “I mean you no harm and I’m doing anything illegal, I promise.”

“That… does not fill me with confidence,” he tells her, but she can see the slight relaxing of his shoulders so what does he know anyway?

She hums and ties off the last thread so her not-quite-spell doesn’t unravel before she can come back to it. Sighing, she dusts herself off and stands before Signal. He’s taller than her, but then again, so is everyone. His suit is even brighter than she remembers, but not badly designed. It’s certainly not the worst suit she’s seen.

And the two points on his helmet that look just a bit too close to ears are just adorable. And the bat design mask painted on top of his helmet is creative, she’ll give him that. Hood’s helmet was just smooth, red polycarbonate. (Which, from what she’s heard, is an improvement on the original design, at least.)

“Okay. You’re curious.” She waves her hands in front of her in a ‘go on’ gesture. “Ask away.”

Signal’s lips purse, and while his hands are no longer in a defensive position, she can tell he’s poised for a fight. She tries to relax her posture as much as possible in response, just like Cass taught her.

“You’re Ladybug?”

“The one and only!” she says brightly. Her wings flare out just the smallest amount and she can see Signal follow the movement, but he doesn't ask.

“What are you doing in Gotham?”

“I’m here on business regarding the Miraculous,” she tells him curtly. She pauses and says, “Wonder Woman can vouch for my story.”

“Wonder Woman sent you?” he asks skeptically, and Ladybug crosses her arms with a scowl.

“No. I sent me. I said Wonder Woman can vouch for me. I’m a Guardian, which means I go where I’m needed. And Gotham needs me.”

Signal straightens, but it’s awkward, like he’s not used to wielding his authority. “Batman doesn’t like outsiders.”

Ladybug hums. “Yes, I know. And I am sorry that I’m here when he obviously doesn’t want me, but I’m not interfering with anything that’s not my business. And I truly can’t leave the city limits without getting sick until I finish what I started so…”

“What are you doing then?”

And isn’t that the million-dollar question? How much should she tell the Bat? He can be trusted, she’s sure. Her friendship with both Red Hood and Robin is enough to convince her of that.

The only problem is that Batman is notoriously paranoid and nosy. Trustworthy he may be, but that does not mean she wants him sticking his nose into everything regarding her and the miraculous. Not without her having actually met the man.

But, she thinks, she may have already shown her hand a bit too much to hide it now. Wonder Woman may know who she is and what she stands for, but she is not loyal to Ladybug, not like Hippolyta is.

Ladybug can’t expect her to choose the Miraculi over her trusted shield brother. If Batman asks Wonder Woman anything, she will surely answer, and that leaves Ladybug between a rock and a hard place.

Ladybug taps her fingers against her arm in thought, then sighs. “How familiar are you with magic?”

***

By the next night, it seems that news of her alter ego—or one of them, at least (Kwami, she gives herself a headache)—being in Gotham has spread through the vigilante grapevine.

“Why is Ladybug in Gotham?” Robin says the moment he drops down on her balcony, skipping past pleasantries just like always.

Marinette blinks at him, wondering in the back of her mind if this is Robin’s own curiosity and paranoia at play or if this is a task straight from the Bat himself. She supposes that depends greatly on how much the Bat and Hood are getting along this week, because she, at least, would have sent Red Hood over Robin any day.

Red Hood, unlike Robin, has the ability to ask nicely. (Though, Marinette thinks, it isn’t likely a skill he uses often in his line of work. The thought makes her feel just a bit special and a lot fond that he uses it so much on her.)

She puts down the watering can beside the bluebells she received from, who she now knows was Poison Ivy, all those years ago, and pouts up at Robin. “And here I thought we were past the interrogation phase of our friendship.”

“We’re not friends,” he insists flatly but Marinette just waves him off. He’s not really fooling her anymore with his whole ‘stoic, unfeeling Boy Wonder’ schtick. He abruptly lost that when she saw him cooing over one of the alley cats that also frequent her balcony (and no, she’s not talking about Adrien or Plagg).

“Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms and leans her hip on the railing next to where he’s perched. “What makes you think I even know what Ladybug’s up to? I’m not her keeper, and Multimouse isn’t exactly high up on the Court’s chain of command. You know this.”

He’d all but pried as much information out of her about her position as Multimouse those first weeks. If Multimouse wasn’t a cover for her being Ladybug and a Guardian and about a million other secrets she’s hiding from the world, she’d be really concerned.

She was still a bit concerned honestly, but he eventually tapered off with his third degree so Marinette tries not to worry about the very likely existence of her ever-growing file in the bats' databases. She’s been a person of their interest since the Two-Face thing and, despite her greatest efforts, she can’t seem to lay low in this goddamn city.

“Did you know she was in Gotham?”

Marinette tilts her head, “She may have mentioned it.”

In the space of a breath, Robin twists himself off of the railing and plants himself in front of her, hands caging her in and using his height to his advantage to loom over her. She blinks at the quick movement, but is, again, unimpressed with his intimidation tactics.

“And you didn’t think to mention that?” he all but growls at her.

She pulls a face. “She’s not a villain, Robin. And, no offense, but I’ve known her a lot longer than I’ve known you. If I owe my loyalty to anyone, it’s the Court, not the bats.”

His lips pull down into a frown and she can see his forehead furrowing with the movement of his eyebrows. “So you’ve chosen your side.”

Marinette sighs, slumping down as if the sky itself is pressing down on her. “There aren’t any sides and I’m not choosing. You’re both heroes.” 

“Heroes have been known to fight before,” he tells her, just to be contrary.

“Stop being so dramatic,” she scolds, finally uncrossing her arms and placing them on his shoulders. They, admittedly, do not have to travel far. He’s barely an inch from her, his tall frame curling over her like a particularly vicious cocoon. “It’s not a good look on you.”

He opens his mouth to say something but before he can, the balcony door slides open. He’s immediately tense and defensive, stepping away from her and whipping his head toward the noise. He’s placed himself between her and the door, which just has her friends in it. No danger. 

Actually, wait- nope.

She recognizes the looks on their faces. Her friends might actually be worse than a potential assailant in this case.

“I tried to stop them,” Felix tells her, like the liar he is. “But they insisted that they be allowed to meet your other pet vigilante.”

“Pet?” Robin says with no small amount of outrage, face swinging back to hers and Marinette really wants to punch Felix.

“I do not call you that,” she quickly assures, glaring at her friends. “What the hell guys?”

Kagami—who’s in Gotham for the week thanks to Nino graciously picking up the slack in Paris and also helping Adrien out with his half of the wedding planning—steps out of the group huddle and approaches Robin with that look in her eye. The one she wears sizing up an opponent, the one she uses on potential enemies and combatants.

(The one Kagami uses when her fiancé is being particularly trying on her patience.)

“What are your intentions to our Mari-hime?”

Marinette lets her face fall into her hands. She does not let herself release the high pitched whine that wants to escape her throat, but it's a close thing.

Chapter Text

After the not-so-impromptu interrogation courtesy of her friends (because there was no way they hadn’t planned that, it was too coordinated) Robin doesn’t stop by for two weeks.

Which is… fine. Marinette is plenty busy anyways. The extra time she has free now that she isn’t entertaining a bratty vigilante, goes to more productive uses of her time. Like watching bad horror movies with her friends and jeering at the horrible acting and special effects.

(Red Hood stops by in the middle of watching Grizzly Rage and proceeds to rant for twenty minutes about ‘shitty, unrealistic blood splatters’. Marinette has long since passed the point of being worried about it.)

So, yeah. She doesn’t see Robin.

But Damian, oddly enough, seeks her out.

It’s early, and there isn’t anyone else in the studio right now which means Marinette has her music blasting and she’s humming along as she hand paints silk for Clara’s dress. It’s loud and she’s in her zone, so it’s only by Tikki warning her that she realizes someone entered her sanctuary.

Her eyebrows raise when she sees who it is.

“Uh, bonjour Damian," she greets confusedly, reaching over to lower the volume on her speakers. "I hadn’t expected to see you here. Is there something you need?”

He stops before her workstation, only slightly bigger than the ones the rest of her staff use due to the sheer amount of open commissions she normally has. She has an actual office on this floor, but Chloé uses it more than she does. Marinette likes the open space and being around her designers more than she likes the privacy.

His eyes catch on the two bouquets of flowers she’s yet to take home, neither of which have even begun to wilt—and likely won’t. (She’ll have to take them home soon before people start asking questions.)

“I was called here by Father, but he’s currently indisposed. I’ve been told to wait.”

She waits a moment for him to continue, and when he doesn’t, she asks, “So you came to visit me?”

“Yours is the only tolerable presence to be found.” His lips purse, and he crosses his arms. “And that includes that imbecile Drake who is no doubt still in his office like the pitiful insomniac he is.”

Her tongue is already halfway around a joke about excuses—she didn’t befriend Felix for nothing, okay? She knows how people like Damian work—when she realizes what he just said.

“Wait. Tim’s been here all night?”

Damian snorts. “He certainly didn’t return to the manor.”

She’s out of her seat in an instant, frowning and muttering up a storm as she rummages through the storage cubes pushed up against the far wall. She has a blanket, pillow and plain cotton shirt in her hands before Damian registers that she even moved.

“I’m going to kill your brother,” she says simply. “Would you like to come with?”

She’s gotten closer to Tim since working in Wayne Tower. He’s a notorious recluse and rarely leaves his office when he’s in the building, but Marinette makes it a point to visit him during lunch and before she leaves for the night.

He isn’t one of her Waynes, but he is a Wayne and her Waynes love and care for him so there’s not much of a difference really. She does like to think they might be something close to friends at this point though. And if the way Tim comes down to visit whenever he ventures out of his office means something, she might even be right.

Another thing that should be noted, is that Marinette is very much a ‘ride or die’ kind of person when it comes to the people she cares about. She will ruthlessly bully her loved ones into taking better care of themselves on threat of death because she is the semi-hypocritical mom friend and damn proud of it.

Damian looks her up and down, eyes lingering on the items in her hands and the determined set to her jaw and says, “Of course.” Then he’s plucking her things from her hands, offering her his arm and saying, “Shall we?”

Marinette laughs as she loops her arm with his. “We shall.”

***

She spends ten minutes scolding Tim before wrangling him onto the couch in his office and wrapping him up in the blanket so tightly he’d need to be an escape artist to get out of it. He tries to struggle anyway, but Marinette has too much practice at this and he doesn’t stand a chance in hell.

Damian stands at her shoulder and smirks the entire time, eyes dancing with amusement as she forces the CEO of Wayne Enterprises to take a fucking nap. Then, she’s treated to the sound of his surprised laughter as she begins switching out all of Tim’s regular coffee for magic-decaf—not that Damian knows it’s magic.

(By the devilish smirk playing at his lips, she’s starting to think that maybe Damian really is just as sadistic as Duke and Jason say he is.)

***

Damian starts dropping by more often after that (read: starts dropping by at all). Not that Marinette minds. She quite likes his company, actually.

He normally stops by first thing in the morning when Marinette is the only one in the workshop, walking in like he owns the place. For the first couple days, he asks about Ladybug and the rest of Paris’ Court, claiming that he’s curious about them.

She answers them, but only as far as she’d answer them for any reporter and is careful not to give away any sensitive information not known to the public. He gets a bit frustrated at one point, complaining that she must know more, but she stays stubbornly silent about it and, sometimes, steers the conversation deftly to the Great Bat and his Flock instead.

He eventually stops asking about the Parisian superheroes and instead their morning conversations turn to a thousand random things. Complaints and anecdotes and a silly back and forth between the two.

Marinette’s never been much of a morning person but having Damian there to keep her company is… nice.

She almost finds herself looking forward to mornings now.

***

When her Waynes learn that she’s started a food kitchen and makes a habit of spending her weekend there, they immediately insist on joining her, despite her protests.

“You guys really don’t have to do this,” she says even though the three of them are already in their aprons and Cass is eyeing the boucher, Vivian, and her collection of knives with glittering interest.

Duke grins at her, “We know, M. But we want to.”

Jason finally turns back to her from where he’s been staring at the kitchen with something just shy of awe on his face. “You’re downright incredible, you know that?” he waves a hand out at the seating area, and then at the people in the kitchen assembling the healthiest and cost-efficient meals she and Felix could find after days spent researching. “I would’ve killed for something like this when I was on the streets.”

“It’s not just me who’s got this up and running-” she tries protesting but then Fiona, the woman Marinette actually put in charge of this place, is at her side and all but shoving the four of them into stations.

Marinette ends up by the pastries, like always, and she can see Jason making sandwiches. Duke's been roped into making eggs and bean casseroles and Cass, by some grace, actually ended up by Vivian and is having a blast cutting up all the meats as fast as she can.

They don’t stop until lunch, all four of them helping prepare meals for the upcoming week in bulk. After, they all go out for ice cream by the pier and Jason smears chocolate on her nose and Duke carries her around on his back when she complains about being tired.

Cass takes pictures of it all and later, Marinette gets them all printed out.

It ends up being a really good day.

***

The buzz from the charity gala and all the press regarding her and Damian’s non-existent relationship had calmed down weeks ago. There was still the odd article about Marinette being seen with her odd assortment of Waynes and the newspapers still called her ridiculous names when they got a picture, but it was about as close to normal as she gets.

The quiet lulled her into a false sense of security.

Ice Prince and Sweetheart Finally Seen on Date: Fairy Tale Romance or Publicity Stunt?

The ‘date’ in question was a coffee and lunch run for her designers and also Tim (because kwami knew he'd work through lunch if allowed).

Damian normally didn’t stay past Lilliane arriving in the morning (the poor dear was chronically late and always the last to arrive) but he hadn’t shown up until after she came that day and overcompensated by hours—which she hadn't minded. He kept to the fringes of her workspace and didn't distract her, instead focusing on his own thing. She wasn’t quite sure what he was up to, but she knew he was switching between his computer and sketchpad every so often.

(She's pretty sure he was hiding from Dick for some reason. He’s the only Wayne brother who doesn’t visit her at work, seeing as they have their bi-weekly gymnastic sessions; recently, with the addition of Mar’i, who still calls her ‘twin’ and whom Marinette still adores.)

And then lunch had rolled around, and it was Marinette’s turn to go out so she brought Damian with since he was still there.

They were out together for forty-five minutes. Tops.

“Why me?” she whines into the surface of her desk.

Damian, the asshole, just laughs at her and she can’t even be mad about it because he’s only just started laughing around her and not hiding behind so many of his walls. He laughs and Marinette knows it's precious so instead of shooting him the glower he deserves, she finds herself having to hide the smile slowly creeping on her face.

***

They’re splashed across the papers again less than a week later, only this time she has her Waynes there too.

Marinette's wearing her bright red sundress and she's somehow convinced Damian to wear a jacket with elaborate crowns and snowflakes embroidered up the sides. Because, as Chloé says: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

They see the camera this time and the photo splashed across the page the next day is of Marinette laughing with Jason’s arm slung across her shoulders as both he and Damian flip off the camera. Meanwhile, Duke and Cass stand just far enough in frame to capture their expressions of pain and amusement respectively.

(Marinette makes a mental note to order apology gift baskets for the PR department.)

There are a lot of headlines the next day about Marinette’s ‘harem of Waynes’ and how she’s a ‘horrible influence on such bright children’. She spends about ten minutes trying to decide whether she should be horrified or laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of it and eventually decides on both.

Adrien, the little shit, sees the headline and immediately prints it out to hang in her kitchen.

It reappears every time she tries to take it down.

***

Gotham does not smile upon daytime heroes.

Not to say that Gotham really smiles on anyone, but it’s especially vicious to those that think they’re owed anything. She’s heard the way Gothamites talk about Superman and The Flash—it’s not exactly what one would call adoring.

But Ladybug's been a daytime hero her entire career and it is not difficult to see that there's something distinctly different about the way daytime heroes and Gotham’s vigilantes operate.

Something more vicious, maybe; something more restrained.

Without the light of day and without the people’s eyes watching them at every moment, the Gotham Bats have become something else entirely.

Signal, their Daytime Protector, is especially strange.

A bat who's meta, straddling the line between day and night. The Day Patrol, trained by the night.

Sometimes, when she and Signal talk about heroing, there is such an odd type of disconnect that it throws her. Nothing horrible or major, but little things she’s sure she wouldn’t notice if she wasn’t so intimately familiar with it all herself.

They don’t always talk about heroing though. After two months, Ladybug is proud to say she seems to be worming her way past his outer shell nicely. He tried so hard to keep his distance from her, but Ladybug’s always liked a challenge, and it isn’t long before she has him relaxing around her. 

Well, for a definition of relax anyway. He's still a bat after all.

But then, it’s pretty easy to get past Signal’s barriers when she’s already had practice breaking through the more stubborn bats like Robin and, to an extent, Hood. Not that Signal, or any of the bats, know that.

Which, speaking of the bats, isn’t it a bit weird she’s only met three spread across two of her alter egos? As Ladybug, she’d expect to be hounded by a few of them but the only one she’s met is Signal. She can’t decide if it’s because he’s the only one that operates in the daylight, or if they just don’t want to spook her into running or something.

Either way, they’re going to start giving her a complex. She’s heard so much about the rest of the Batfamily, and not one of them even wants to meet her? Either her?

(Maybe Marinette should ask Robin and Hood what’s up with that? The way they talk about how nosy Red Robin is, she’s surprised he didn’t drop by months ago and- is it weird that she’s offended by vigilantes not prying into her private life?

…Probably.)

***

Marinette blinks, stopping dead in her tracks.

Damian's on her fainting couch, sketchpad in his lap as he waits for her.

“Why are you wearing a beanie?” she blurts out instead of greeting him like a normal person. "You never wear beanies."

Luckily, Damian scowls at her question rather than at her. It’s a subtle but very important difference.

“Sorry,” she apologizes anyway, putting her bag down. “I haven't had coffee yet.”

He hums, then nods to her desk where she finds a steaming to-go mug. Her face lights up and she quickly snatches it, breathing deeply the lovely aroma. “You’re a godsend.”

That brings a quirk to his lips, closer to a smirk than a smile, but progress nonetheless.

After a moment, where she sips at her overly sugary monstrosity—just the way she likes it, when had Damian even noticed that?—and he continues sketching she asks again. “Okay but, I actually am kinda curious. What’s up with the hat?”

He sighs heavily, closing his pad. “It’s… better than the alternative.”

Marinette snorts. “Alternative to what? A top hat?” But instead of snapping back like she expects, he just continues to frown. Immediately, her lips turn down into a concerned frown. “Is there something wrong?”

“Yes,” he grounds out and Marinette puts her coffee down. She’s just about to open her mouth and say something else when he reaches up and rips the beanie off his head.

For the second time in less than five minutes, she stops dead.

Marinette opens her mouth. Closes it. Blinks, but the scene doesn't change.

His hair is still blue.

Damian Wayne's hair is blue.

Damian Wayne’s hair is vibrantly electric blue.

Her hand shoots up to cover her mouth as she tries to stifle her giggles.

Damian’s scowl deepens. He moves to shove his ridiculous beanie back on his head but her hand snaps out before he can.

“No! No, I’m sorry I just-” she giggles again. “You looked so upset by it and you took me by surprise. I like it!”

He glares up at her, still sat on the fainting couch so it’s her who has the height advantage for once.

“Don’t patronize me.”

She rolls her eyes, the hand that wasn’t settled on his arm reaching up to touch the bright strands. It's slow enough that he can stop her, but he, surprisingly, makes no move to.

His hair is a lot softer than she expects it to be. But she supposes he didn’t use that gel stuff today, planning on keeping his hair under a hat the whole time.

“It looks good on you,” she says softly.

He snorts disbelievingly and she smacks his shoulder lightly. “It’s true! I swear you could look good in any color.” She clicks her tongue longingly. “I wish I had your skin tone. I’m too pale to wear pastels like I want.”

He wrinkles his nose at her. “Pastels?”

“Oh you hush,” she quips, finally pulling her hand from his hair. “Anyway, if you don’t like it, why’d you dye it blue in the first place?”

“I… lost a wager with Todd.”

She laughs, starting to move around and get ready for the day. She doesn’t have any meetings scheduled, which means she gets the whole day to create. She’s pretty excited about it.

“I should’ve guessed it was Jason’s doing.”

Damian shrugs, settling back into the cushions. He drapes himself across them in a way that’s effortlessly elegant and like he’s ready to be photographed for a magazine cover or something. Must all her friends be so pretty? It’s playing hell on her self-esteem.

“But blue is your favorite color, right? So there’s that at least.”

Damian hums. “Todd had threatened to dye it pink or some other equally garish color.”

“Hey!” she exclaims in mock outrage. “What’s wrong with pink? I’ve been wanting to dye my hair pink for ages.”

“Nothing. It’s just simply not a color I appreciate.” He makes a face. “Like orange.”

Marinette huffs, but there’s a smile on her lips. It's quiet for a moment, for long enough that she thinks the conversation's been dropped. But then-

“Why don’t you?”

“Huh?”

“Why haven’t you dyed your hair?” he repeats. “Your friends—Couffaine and… Kubdel? They both have colored hair.”

Marinette shrugs. “I dunno. Never got around to it I guess. I suppose I could do it now. Dye mine in solidarity,” she jokes. “Oh! We could match even! Wouldn’t that be fun?”

“I thought you wanted pink?”

“Well, yeah. But blue is nice too. Besides,” she smiles wryly over her shoulder, “you just said pink was ‘garish’.”

Damian frowns slightly, shaking his head, “On me, perhaps. But I think you’d look very fetching in pink.”

“Oh,” Marinette pauses, feeling her face grow warm at the sudden compliment. “Well- Uh, pink it is, then.”

***

(Damian watches the blush rise on her cheeks as she turns away to try and hide it. Yes, he can’t help but think, fetching in pink, indeed.)

***

Luka insists on being the one to dye her hair, citing that he’s the one who had dibs all these years, but Alix and Jason both all but demand to be there too.

Her bathroom is not big enough for all four of them to sit in.

Not a single one of them cares.

Cass and Duke ask for progress pics along with Uncle Jay, and all her Parisian friends cycle through standing at the bathroom door to see how it's going.

The constant stream of people looking at her makes her feel not unlike an animal at a zoo. (When she wryly tells this to Alix, all she gets is her friend cackling on the ground.)

But, after all the bleaching and conditioning and waiting, she stares into the mirror with soft pink hair the color of bubblegum and thinks, yeah, it was worth it.

She thinks it again when Damian walks in the next day and almost trips over his own feet.

(She’s also wearing her Robin themed sundress, complete with hood, matching boots and personal touches not found on the mass-produced version—but Marinette doesn’t know why that would be relevant.)

Her favorite reaction to her new hair color though is, by far, Mar’i’s.

Marinette doesn’t see the young Grayson until a week later when she’s invited to the monthly family dinner Alfred insists all the Waynes attend—which includes her now, apparently (she tries not to show how pleased she is by that).

She arrived with Damian, who was kind enough to pick Tim and her up from work, and Mar’i takes one look at Damian and her standing next to one another before she starts babbling excitedly about Lilo and Stitch and Angel. A character who is—apparently—Stitch’s girlfriend and the complimentary pink to his blue.

Marinette is momentarily surprised, but Mar’i’s enthusiasm is contagious and it isn’t long before the rest of the Waynes are teasingly calling them Angel and Stitch. Marinette thinks it’s all very funny and adorable.

Damian, on the other hand, most certainly does not and threatens everyone who calls him that ‘ridiculous nickname’ with graphic depictions of bodily harm.

‘Angel’, oddly enough, sticks for Marinette. She finds she kind of likes it.

***

Later, Damian asks her about nicknames.

Well, he calls them ‘asinine titles’ and doesn’t so much ask as demand she explain why she allows anyone to call her by them seeing as she has a ‘perfectly serviceable name,’ in his opinion.

Ignoring the fact that she’s heard Dick call him multiple nicknames he hadn’t protested to, she says, “Well, I guess it’s that everyone uses Marinette. A nickname is something… special. A little more personal, I guess. And, I dunno. My parents named me Marinette, but it’s nice to share something between other people. And it shows they care.”

Damian looks confused after she’s done, but also thoughtful. He doesn’t say anything to that and Marinette doesn’t really expect anything to come of it.

She's proven wrong when, a week later, Damian calls her Starling instead of Marinette.

(And the transition from Dupain-Cheng to Marinette had been enough to make her beam—this is just ridiculous.)

***

When Robin disappears a second time, Marinette doesn’t get the chance to notice his absence on her own. He’s only stopped showing up four days ago—which is longer than normal, but not unheard of—when she hears unfamiliar voices on her balcony.

Looking out, she finds three semi-familiar individuals clustered around the plate of treats she leaves out for Robin and Hood.

Nightwing and Red Robin are both stuffing their faces full of the fruit tarts she had made while Spoiler glares at them and seems to be cursing the fact that her mask covers her mouth the same way Hood always does when she makes those raspberry scones he likes.

The scene is… odd. For many reasons but most pressingly that their arrival has come out of nowhere.

“Well,” Nightwing explains when she asks, “We wanted to visit ages ago, but baby bird threatened to stab us all if we tried.”

“He’s very… particular about you,” Red Robin tacks on while Spoiler nods sagely like she hasn’t crafted some strange straw monstrosity just so she can drink tea while still wearing her mask. Red Robin has one too, but his for the aesthetic rather than out of necessity.

Marinette stares at the three of them. “That… does not explain why you are here now.”

“Robin can’t stop us now, obviously,” Red Robin says casually, like he hasn't just kicked her heart into high gear with a few words.

“What? Why?” she demands, trying very hard not to sound panicked. “Is he okay? Was he hurt?”

Red Robin blinks, going quiet in that way Hood and Robin do when they’re judging her just a bit. She hates this family.

“No, he’s… fine.”

“B’s just benched him for the time being,” Nightwing helpfully supplies, amusement flickering at the edges of his lips. “He’s a little too… conspicuous at the moment.”

Marinette’s shoulders relax even as her brows furrow. Conspicuous? What in the world is that supposed to mean?

“Does that mean he won’t be coming around for a while?” she asks before she can think better of it.

The three vigilantes in front of her share a look before Spoiler says, “Probably. But the gremlin’s never been one to sit still so who knows?” she smiles, eyes crinkling at the corners as she leans toward Marinette conspiratorially. “But don’t worry. We can keep you company in the meantime!”

“We’re much better company than the demon anyway. Certainly less insulting.”

“Oh, he’s not that bad. He’s an ass, for sure, but you can tell when he means it and when he’s just stumbling over himself.” Marinette smiles fondly, “For someone so dignified, he trips over his tongue quite often.”

Now the vigilantes are really staring at her. She’s starting to feel pretty uncomfortable about it all when Nightwing beams at her, jumping up from his seat to sweep her into a hug. It startles her, but she doesn’t push him away, instead laughing at the sudden affection.

“Oh you really are perfect!” he exclaims, setting her down and still grinning like an absolute lunatic.

She’s smiling, because Nightwing’s joy is infectious, but she's even more confused than before. And then, before she can ask what he means, Red Robin’s wrist computer lights up—and damn, isn’t that cool? Marinette wonders if Tikki could do something like that for the Ladybug suit—and the three are moving to swing back out into the night.

She waves them off and they all promise to visit again.

Marinette shakes her head before going back inside with the empty pastry plate and four empty mugs.

***

Damian knows of Marinette’s friends of course. It'd take more effort not to when she talks about them every chance she gets and tells him all the wild stories about their escapades and misadventures.

(They also all came up in the background check he ran on her when they first met.)

Most of her friends are exceedingly normal oddly enough. Well, they’re all mildly famous and the leaders of their various fields, but they’re just civilians.

The only exceptions being, Bourgeois, Agreste, and Graham de Vanily.

Bourgeois is a former hero like Marinette, only she doesn't seem to still be in contact with the Parisian Court. All the articles he could find spoke about how Queen Bee was deemed unfit for her mantle and later replaced by the new bee hero, Ambrosia. Agreste was caught up in the scandal of his father being Hawkmoth, but he was found innocent and ignorant of his father's crimes (something Damian made sure to confirm). He now works at and is being groomed to own the bakery Marinette's parents run, seeing as their daughter has little interest to do it herself.

And finally, Graham de Vanily, Agreste's cousin, has a history of causing trouble wherever he goes. Nothing villainous, and rarely even malicious, but there's something about him that makes the hair on the back of his neck stand up. Not everything is as it seems with the Graham de Vanily heir.

Besides those three outliers, Marinette's friends seem to be untouched by the vigilante life. Which means he thinks they must be utterly boring.

Only, when her friends start coming around to visit and drag her out for lunch or some other random outing, Damian keeps finding himself baffled by each of them.

They act strangely and with a dangerous air none of them should possess, except for Tsurugi. The questions they ask him are strange and the jokes they make have no sense. He's been warned about how he better treat Marinette so many times, he's started to lose count. (Which is ridiculous. He treats her just fine and would never intentionally harm her. What are they trying to insinuate?)

But, by far, his most memorable encounter is with Lahiffe. A veritable wolf in sheep's clothing.

Marinette is excitedly babbling about her newest idea for her summer collection, pressed up against him on the chaise and practically shoving her sketches in his face as she demands his critique and thoughts.

Her hands are waving every which way and, on more than one occasion, he has to quickly lean back so she doesn't hit him in the face.

He’s focusing on what she’s saying so much—because she has a habit of forgetting things if she doesn’t write them down and needs someone to remind her of the ideas she had at a later time—that he doesn’t even realize Lahiffe is there until he clears his throat.

Marinette jumps, almost elbowing him in the stomach. “Nino!” she shouts, springing up and flinging herself at the other man who catches her like this is something she does often.

“Heya, Nettie.”

“Wait- what are you doing here? You’re not-” she jolts back to look at Lahiffe’s amused expression. “Oh kwami, is it time already? Shit. I wasn’t paying attention. I’m so sorry! I have to give this one thing to Publishing but then I promise we can go, okay? Like, just five minutes!”

She's already moving before she finishes speaking, sweeping up papers and rearranging files and putting things away with all the swiftness and agility of a speedster. Damian watches her go about her routine, occasionally handing her something she’s dropped or pointing out a thing she’s missed, weaving around her chaos with practiced ease.

Then she’s sweeping out of the office with a distracted “be right back!” and he’s alone with Lahiffe.

The second Marinette leaves, the man’s attention swings onto him with a strange weight. For a long moment, he doesn’t say anything and Damian’s hackles raise with every passing second.

He doesn’t snap at him though, because he’s one of Marinette’s friends. Insulting him would only serve to make her upset and that’s something Damian's been trying to avoid causing as of late.

“Man,” Lahiffe says at last. “Alix wasn’t kidding about the whole besotted thing, huh?”

Damian rears back, straightening up to his full height. “I beg your pardon?”

Lahiffe laughs and waves his hand about like that’s supposed to mean something. “Ah, no need to be embarrassed about it, dude. You’re far from the first of us to fall for her charms.”

“What.”

“Yeah, we've all been there. I think over half of the Paris crew crushed on her at some point, including myself. None of us are into her like that anymore, so as long as you treat her right, you got nothing to worry about."

“I’m not- I'm not interested in Marinette,” Damian tries to protest but Lahiffe just calmly steamrolls over him.

“Nah. Everyone loves Nettie. It’s universal law or something. First, there was me and Adrien, then Luka—who she actually liked back for a while there but are now practically siblings. Chloé liked her in collége, but she hadn’t really come to terms with that at the time. Alix might’ve, but she’s pretty grey-ace and fluctuates on the romance points, so who knows.

“Oh! And Nath. He also snagged a date with her, but he was an Akuma at the time so I’m not technically sure that it counts. And he’s with Marc now anyway. Thinking of adopting a kid, last I heard. Anyway- my point was: everyone loves Nettie. And don’t bother trying to fight it, because it only makes her pull of gravity worse.”

Lahiffe then claps him on the shoulder like their talk amiable and not the most confusing speech Damian’s ever heard.

And then he doesn’t even get to say anything to that because Marinette is sprinting back through the door, grabbing her jacket and bag, telling him goodbye, and dragging Lahiffe out to who knows where.

Damian stands there longer than he cares to admit trying to make the world make sense again.

***

A week and a half after she learned Robin was benched, Damian catches her staring off into space as she doodles tiny robins in the margins of her sketchbook.

He gives her an odd look when she scrambles to hide them, blushing hotly and babbling about how she’s “Just fine! Nothing to worry about! I’m just, maybe, perhaps, a little worried for a friend even though I shouldn’t be, because his family says he’s just fine and-”

He looks contemplative when he leaves that day, but he didn’t ask about her outburst, so she extends the same courtesy to him.

***

That night, Robin returns.

“What,” she says around the laughter threatening to bubble out of her throat, “are you wearing?”

Robin scowls from behind the full cowl he has on that she’s pretty sure belongs to Red Robin. It makes him look a whole ten years older and she can’t get over how ridiculous he looks. If he keeps doing stupid things with his face while wearing that monstrosity, she is definitely going to laugh at him.

“What are you wearing?” he shoots back petulantly.

She blinks in confusion, then realizes she’s still wearing her Red Hood inspired jacket right now. Tan colored fake leather with fuzzy, red inner lining, done with all the same pockets, buttons, and zippers Red Hood has on his own jacket. It looks almost exactly like the jacket she fixed for him all that time ago, except she's also added a soft, crimson hood and his own personal bat symbol stitched across her shoulder blades.

As far as things she's designed goes, this is one of her simpler ones. It's nothing like the elaborate creations she makes for the Ambrosia or Ryuko themed items.

But Red Hood was a simple kind of person, and she likes that it’s reflected in her work.

Robin doesn't seem to agree if the poorly concealed disdain on his face means anything.

“What?” she asks teasingly, “You jealous?”

He scoffs and looks off to the side. “Of course not. I simply do not understand why you’d want anything to do with that simpleton. Especially not when I know you have clothing articles referencing far superior individuals.”

She snorts good-naturedly, "What 'individuals'? You mean you?"

The way he raises his nose self importantly is answer enough, and she can't stop herself from rolling his eyes. "Well, it's certainly a start. But I'm not the only one."

"Oh, yeah? And who else is marvelous enough to stand on the same level as you?"

"Multimouse."

Her mouth goes dry, and she can tell Robin is pointedly not looking at her.

“Come inside,” she blurts in lieu of all the things she really wants to say—which are mostly just embarrassing variations of I missed you. “I can, uh, make us tea. If you want.”

It's the first time she’s ever invited him inside and she can see the small bit of shock on his face—well, what she can see of it anyway—before he schools it.

“Yes,” he says in a tone of voice that implies it was his idea in the first place. “That sounds… good.”

She steps aside, allowing him to pass her by into the flat. Only instead of just walking past her, he stops halfway through the doorway and stares at her. She’s about to ask what’s wrong when he reaches out with his hand to gently grab a lock of her hair.

“Pink suits you, by the way.”

She quirks her lips, “Yeah? You don’t think it’s… too much?”

The corners of his mouth turn down, “Absolutely not. You look…” he trails off, mouth flattening into a line and dropping his hand.

She blinks at the odd behavior. “Nice?” she offers tentatively.

He nods, but it’s a little jerky and strange. But before she can ask about it, he’s already turning to enter her flat like he owns the place, remarking about her choices of tea and if she’s finally acquired an ‘adequate teapot’.

She shakes off the moment and goes in to follow him before he wrecks her kitchen in his careless search for tea supplies.

***

MinnieMouse: COME GET YALL JUICE

and by juice i mean me

I still do not have an american license

JaneAustenStanAccount: what do we get out of it?

MinnieMouse: ???

the pleasure of my company??

also youre literally the one that invited me to watch megamind

JaneAustenStanAccount: and??

daisyduke: shut up jay

we all know youre soft for M stop tryin to play tough

MinnieMouse: this is why duke is my favorite

he’s a living callout post

swanlake: :(

MinnieMouse: second favorite

im so sorry cass ily

swanlake: :)

daisyduke: i aint even mad

JaneAustenStanAccount: I AM

guys wtf

MinnieMouse: you brought this on yourself

maybe you should be nicer to me

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

daisyduke: ‘get fucked jason’ -marinette 2k20

btw im omw for you now

MinnieMouse: thnx ur the best

also im bringing scones as movie snack

daisyduke: noice

swanlake: !!!

JaneAustenStanAccount: FUCK YEAH!!!

MinnieMouse: you dont get any Jay

JaneAustenStanAccount: >:(

i hate it here

***

Marinette doesn’t know a lot about Robin’s past, which she assumes is by design. Secret identities don’t lead well to handing out details and concrete information about one’s personal life.

But, she thinks, one would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to not see that whatever facsimile of a childhood Robin had was about eight different levels of fucked up.

It’s in the vague allusions to ‘training’ and the scorn filled way he says the word ‘mother’. It’s in the not-quite-confusion—because whatever family he has is better now, at least—of Marinette telling him about her own parents. About the happy memories she’s shared with them, of learning to bake bread and croissants and macaroons under the loving guidance of her father and practicing delicate designs and frosting techniques with her mother.

So, yeah. She knows he’s kind of messed up and definitely checks off the childhood trauma box that’s apparently one of the requirements for being her friend.

So when Robin suddenly decides to go against everything she’s learned about him up until this point and actually share something about himself—and when that thing he shares just so happens to be a story from his childhood—well… Marinette wouldn’t say she’s prepared, but she’s not- prepared.

He’s in her kitchen, because Marinette has learned her lesson about bleeding vigilantes on her couch, and she’s pretty sure he could’ve gone back to the Cave for this, but he came here for whatever reason. (Was closer, he said. Marinette doesn’t know if she believes him.)

She’s cleaning the knife wound on his arm, and she has his cape laid out across her island. There’s a hole in it she plans on sewing back up after she finishes sewing the hole in her reckless vigilante back up.

“You need to be more careful,” she scolds. “You’re lucky this didn’t nick something important.”

“It's hardly the worst wound I’ve ever acquired,” he tells her in a tone of voice that he probably thinks is reasonable. “At seven years old I had to dig a bullet out of my side in the middle of a Himilayan snowstorm while still making it back to base with time to spare after having successfully assassinated a Russian ambassador.”

Marinette pauses where she’s smoothing the gauze onto his bicep. Her eyes flick up to his, and she sees the exact moment he seems to realize what he just told her. He’s gone utterly still beneath her hands, with terror or worry or the effort it takes not to bolt out the window immediately, she doesn’t know.

“That’s horrifying,” she tells him as she finishes securing the obnoxiously bright bandage, “Never tell me that story again.”

She then drops a kiss onto his bicep, subtly imbuing it with enough luck that it will keep off any infection—the wound was filthy when he came in, seriously, was he in a sewer?—and pats his cheek warmly before moving to clean up all her supplies.

She feels his eyes on her the rest of the night, but every time she turns to him, she can’t tell what he’s thinking. All she knows is that he seems… softer, in a way.

***

Three days after Marinette’s unexpected look into Robin’s past, she finds a box on her desk. It’s a jewelry box, and the only reason she doesn’t immediately freak out is the fact that it lacks any of the miracle box markings.

Still, she opens it hesitantly, and inside, she finds a necklace. A completely normal, non-magical necklace that’s simple and pretty and very much shaped like a tiny toy mouse.

There is no note.

***

(Lahiffe was right.

The Earth spins around the sun. The sky is blue.

Everyone loves Marinette.)

***

The necklace is obviously supposed to be a reference to her Multimouse days, but that doesn’t exactly narrow down who could have left it for her.

Or well, it does, but all the people it narrows down to don’t make any sense.

Multimouse is a badly kept secret, but it’s still a secret. Most people outside Paris don’t know about her and the people in Paris didn’t exactly recognize her off the street either.

Her Court knows, obviously, and so do the Waynes and the bats. But her Court wouldn’t leave her mouse themed gifts, they tend toward ladybugs or their own animal motif as a gift (the amount of cat and bee themed items she owns is ludicrous).

Which leaves the Waynes and the bats.

But her Waynes wouldn’t leave the gift on her desk, and they certainly wouldn’t forget to put a note, so Duke, Jason, and Cass are out.

She must stand there thinking about it too long, because then Jeremy's walking in, just as bright and early as ever.

He sees her holding the box and his face turns a strange mix of curious and outraged. “Is it your birthday? I swear, Boss if you didn't tell us it was your birthday-”

“No, Jeremy,” she says, amused despite her confusion. “That’s not for a while yet. I found this when I walked in,” she shakes the box slightly for emphasis, “but there wasn’t a note.”

“Oh.” A smile slowly spreads across Jeremy’s face. “Oh?” he purrs, waggling his eyebrows at her. “Does the boss have a secret admirer?”

Marinette blinks and- what?

“What? No. I can’t- That doesn’t-” she splutters but Jeremy just laughs and walks over to his station to start setting up for the day, leaving Marinette to her breakdown.

Because this can’t have been left by a secret admirer. That’s just crazy.

There are exactly two people who could’ve left this for her and neither of them would be an admirer of any kind. And she wouldn’t want them to be anyway because that would be stupid and ridiculous and weird.

She doesn’t like Robin or Damian like that…

Right?

***

It’s impossible not to love her, he realizes, mostly by accident.

She loves, wholeheartedly and unafraid and so much more than Damian had ever thought one person could. She loves with a ferocity and passion no person deserves or can match.

And Damian, foolishly, loves and wishes to be loved by her anyway.

***

There are roses on her desk the next day, potted and still healthy.

The day after that, there’s a box of expensive chocolates. Like, the kind only Adrien, Felix, and Chloé buy without a second thought. The gossip has spread far enough that all of her designers know about the gifts and probably-admirer.

On the fourth day, there is a box full of high-quality pencils and a new sketchbook, one with nice thick drafting paper, but small enough to fit in her favored bag. Her name is embossed across the front, along with her personal motif of delicate apple blossoms.

On the fifth day, she shows up to find there is only a drawing, which should point to it being Damian, but drawing-her is holding a robin in her cupped palms which cannot be a coincidence. Drawing-her also looks serene and beautiful with her mouth curved slightly and her eyes gentle and soft and Marinette is as touched by the image as she is frustrated by it.

There are hair sticks on the sixth, and delicate pins shaped like flowers on the seventh. Another stunning drawing of her on the eighth, a bottle of wine older than Master Fu on the ninth, the softest cashmere blanket on the tenth, a basket of sweet floral lotions, a glass statue of a bird in flight—she gets so many gifts, Marinette has to stop keeping count.

It’s somewhere around day six that her designers must’ve ratted on her to either Felix or Chloé because it’s not long after that, that all of her friends learn about the gifts and start being terrifically unhelpful about the whole situation.

They each try to give her advice, which would be sweet if it wasn’t all equally terrible and conflicting.

They’re also placing bets on who they think her admirer is, Damian or Robin. They’re trying to be discreet about it—which means they’re failing miserably.

Marinette, admittedly, never expected any different from them.

***

Marinette begins watching Damian in the mornings with a newfound interest.

The gifts are always there before she arrives, which means they're also there before Damian arrives, so she’s in a prime position to catch his reaction.

Or, she would be, if he ever reacted. He barely glances at them and never says anything unless the gift is particularly obnoxious, like the giant stuffed mouse she found sitting in her chair last week. (It was almost as big as she was. Adrien, Nino, and Alix had ended up on the floor from laughing so hard when they’d seen it.)

Damian almost never comments on the gift she received that day, but whenever she uses or wears something that her mysterious admirer had gotten for her, he makes sure to compliment her. Which would be  very suspicious except that Robin does the same thing.

It’s just- they’re both so frustratingly silent about it all! Marinette is this close to just grabbing one or both of them by the shoulders and just shaking until they tell the truth.

It’s driving her insane! Before the necklace appeared on her desk, she didn’t even know that she liked Robin and Damian.

And now she’s overanalyzing their nonreactions. She hates it.

It feels too much like she’s back in collège, trying to sort out her feelings for Adrien and Chat. (Who ended up being the same person—which was just very inconsiderate of him, really. The least he could do is let her angst have meaning dammit!)

And- ugh. What if she doesn't even like either of them? What if her mind is just making her think she does because the idea of them liking her was presented? What then? Or what about the fact that the two boys are also ridiculously similar when she thinks about it. What if she only likes one and is just projecting her feelings onto the other because her mind associates the two?

Oh, she doesn’t like that thought. That thought makes her feel upset and like she wants to cry into a tub of ice cream.

Nino happily indulges her and doesn't even complain when she eats her way through his stash of mint chip as she dramatically complains about stupidly confusing boys.

Honestly, she may as well be back in lycée.

***

What Marinette does not realize in the midst of all her careful analysis of his reactions, is that it’s not the gifts he’s focused on.

When she wears the necklace and hair sticks, she misses the way his eyes linger on the slope of her neck. As she cares for her roses, she doesn’t notice the way he follows the easy nimbleness of her fingers. She uses her sketchbook and eats the expensive chocolates and doesn’t pay attention to the way he steals glances at her lips. She doesn't see the way his hands twitch when she ventures just near enough to touch.

(She exists next to him, in any form or light, and he is captivated by her very presence.)

Marinette looks, but it is in all the wrong places.

***

Strangely enough, it’s Signal who helps her with her internal crisis—completely unintentionally and in a very roundabout way—but he helps all the same.

He’s taken an… interest, she supposes, in her magic. One that is entirely his own and has very little to do with that Bat from what she can tell.

His abilities and hers stem from different origins, but she would be lying if she said his weren’t oddly complementary to her own. His precognition abilities stemming from his photokinesis has been useful on more than one occasion regarding the experimental spell matrices she, Tikki, and Nooroo have been testing out.

The magic is normally invisible to people without a Miraculous, but Signal seems to have little trouble seeing what she’s doing, even if he can’t interact with it the way she can.

(There is also the fact that she seems… more when he is around. Days that he spends watching her do her work go by faster and smoother than when he is away. Her magic is easier, and her mind spins with ideas and creations faster.

It’s an odd phenomenon and Ladybug is looking into it.)

There has been more than one occasion where Signal had warned her of the matrix’s imminent collapse with enough time for her to prepare herself for its blowback.

The version she’s working on today is their fifth iteration. It’s supposed to pull the miasma out of the building, filter it through her and Tikki’s own magical energy, before flowing back into the brickwork. Marinette had thought of the idea while talking with Nooroo.

If she can get it to work, it will shift the misfortune into good luck and order and release it back into the environment. Then she’ll only need to cleanse strategic portions of the city in a lattice network, and the creative and destructive energies will mix from there, balancing themselves without much input from her at all.

Of course, that’s only if she can actually get it to work. It’s been almost a month and this is the fifth version and it’s already collapsed on her three times in the last hour. Signal must see the frustration on her face and has taken to trying to distract her with small talk.

She’s very thankful for it, actually. If he wasn’t doing that, she would probably start screaming right here and now, on this random rooftop in the residential district. Which would just be very startling and embarrassing for everyone involved, so. You know. Glad she doesn’t have to do that.

Eventually, she asks him, apropos of nothing, “You’re a detective right?”

He pauses, and blinks at her, likely trying to follow the train of thought that led her to that question. She assumes he did not find it because when he speaks, he still sounds confused.

“Yes? I guess that’s technically what I am.”

“So you’re good at figuring out who’s behind a crime?”

Signal only looks more confused. “Yeah? But Ladybug, what-”

“Great, so. Hypothetically, if you had two suspects for a—well it’s not a crime. A… thing? Situation. How would you figure out which one of them is actually behind the… situation?”

Signal’s lips quirk, just a bit despite his confusion. “I think I’m gonna need a little more to go on than just ‘a situation,’ LB.”

Ladybug purses her lips and stares down at the light weaving intricate patterns in the space between her palms. Slowly, carefully, she tells him, “There are items being left where a person can find them. But the identity of the person leaving them and their intentions are unknown.”

“Are the items dangerous?” he asks worriedly.

Ladybug shakes her head. “No. They're more like gifts.”

“Are the gifts unwanted or creepy? Unsettling? Threatening?”

Another head shake. “Just confusing and… thoughtful.”

“Someone is leaving you thoughtful gifts and you're worried about that… why?” Signal asks, slowly and disbelievingly. 

“It’s because I- wait! I’m not the person!” she panics, causing the magic to spark dangerously in her hands but she barely notices. “The person doesn’t even exist. It was a hypothetical question!”

Signal stares at her. She can’t see his eyes or the top half of his face, but she just knows he’s raising his eyebrow judgingly at her.

“Stop that!” she snaps. “Stop being perceptive! I have enough perceptive people in my life so knock it off!”

Signal laughs like the horrible person he is. “But don’t you need me to be perceptive? That’s like, a requirement to be a detective.”

“Stop it,” she says again, mulishly and very childish.

And isn’t that an odd thought to have? Ladybug being childish.

How novel. Ladybug has never once been childish. She can’t afford to be, because when she is behind the mask, she is all the most important parts of herself. She is the Grand Guardian, is the one who must be in control at all times because she has an entire team to keep safe and alive.

Behind the mask, she’s all of her greatest responsibilities.

But here, in Gotham and with Signal, she is none of those things to him. She is simply another hero, that is his age and very much like him in ways so few are. Ladybug, in the moments she spends with Signal, is probably the closest she has ever been to carefree while in the mask.

It’s as comforting a thought as it is terrifying.

Signal raises his hands in surrender, but his lips are still quirked in amusement. 

Ladybug regrets starting this conversation.

She regrets it even more when, five minutes later, Signal manages to pull the rest of the story from her… along with a name.

She realizes her mistake a second too late to stop herself, and then all she can do is watch.

She watches, with ever-growing horror, as Signal slowly puts the pieces together. She watches, as her whole secret identity starts unraveling around her for the first time ever. She watches, stricken, as Signal opens his mouth to speak.

And then she grabs both sides of his head and Orders him to sleep.

***

The second Marinette bespells him, she regrets it.

She was panicking, okay? And Marinette panicking is very different from Ladybug panicking and truly, she creates messes just by existing.

Nooroo flies out of his hiding place to make distressed noises at the now unconscious Signal with her, which is… actually kinda soothing, if not exactly helpful.

At least she knows she’s not the only one upset right now.

“Oh no, oh no, oh no!” Nooroo frets, flitting around her head with agitated wings. Hers aren’t much better, if she’s being honest. “What are we going to do, Guardian? He knows who you are! This is bad.”

Marinette worries her thumb between her teeth, shifting her weight from foot to foot. With a thought, she's back in her civvies and Tikki is perched on her shoulder, blinking at the scene she’s suddenly a part of.

“Well,” Tikki says, sounding far too calm for the situation. “This isn’t ideal.”

The laugh that escapes Marinette is on the edge of hysterical. “You think?”

“It’s not ideal,” Tikki repeats firmly, “But neither is it a disaster.”

Nooroo lands on her other shoulder as she kneels down beside Signal to rearrange his limbs to not be so uncomfortable. “But he's unpredictable!” he argues, curling into the side of her neck like she will hide him from the world. “We don’t know what he’ll do with this information!”

Tikki hums thoughtfully. “Then we will have to ask. There are far worse people we could have been revealed to. We're lucky it was a friend rather than foe.”

“You think so?” Marinette asks softly, voice barely louder than a whisper.

She knows the Bat’s flock are good people. Many of them are her friends, or people she hopes to call friends soon.

But she doesn't know if these people Marinette calls friends could be Ladybug’s allies.

The bats hoard secrets like black holes, and perhaps they would keep hers just as well, but they could just as easily use it against her. Batman barely tolerates her presence, she can tell by the way Signal talks sometimes, and it is no small stretch of the imagination that he would use this to try and kick her out of Gotham.

Marinette cannot, as a Guardian, leave Gotham.

But more importantly, she doesn’t want to leave Gotham. It’s… her home now. Her friends are here. Her family is here. Robin and Hood and the other bats are here. Damian and all her Waynes are here.

Leaving Gotham would not only make her sick and jittery at the imbalance, but it would break her heart.

If, when Signal tells Batman, he reacts poorly, there is so much that Marinette is set up to lose. And that terrifies her.

Some of that thought process must show on her face—or perhaps Nooroo has just picked up on the turmoil in her chest—because the two Kwami are pressed on either side of her face, nuzzling and hugging as much of her as they can reach.

“We’ll make it through this, Marinette,” Tikki says firmly, no room for argument. “Don’t worry so much. Both of you. Everything will turn out just fine, you’ll see.”

Chapter Text

It takes roughly twenty minutes for Signal to wake up.

She’s in the middle of pacing, mind running through about eight different versions of the goodbye speech she’ll have to give to everyone she knows, when Signal groans. She’s at his side in the next second, helping him sit back up and fluttering her hands around his shoulders in her nervousness.

“Easy,” she cautions. “You might be a little woozy for a while yet. I put too much force behind it.”

“Shit,” Signal says with feeling, turning his head to her only a little dazedly. “Did you punch me?”

“No!” she says a bit too loud, making him wince at the volume. She lowers her voice but is no less intense. “No. No punching. I just, uh- just knocked you out with magic?” She winces again. “Kwami, I am so sorry.”

There’s a long moment of silence, where Marinette is politely letting Signal get his bearings and trying very hard not to vibrate out of her skin with nerves. She can feel Tikki and Nooroo offering silent comfort from where they’re curled into the hollow of her throat, hidden by the giant scarf she’s wearing.

Eventually, Signal speaks.

“So… you’re Marinette.”

If she’d been in a more stable frame of mind, she might’ve joked about stating the obvious since she wasn’t even wearing her mask anymore, but she’s not so she doesn't. Instead, she nods, not trusting her voice, and Signal lets out a low, drawn-out whistle.

“Well… I can honestly say I never saw that one coming.”

She laughs, high and reedy and just a touch hysterical, but you know what? She thinks it’s deserved at this point. “That is kind of the point, isn’t it?”

“I guess,” he agrees distractedly, “but how did none of us notice? How did I not notice? This is like, super embarrassing.”

She opens her mouth only to close it. “Embarrassing?”

“Well, yeah. A collection of the greatest detectives on Earth and we couldn’t figure out your identity even when it was right under our noses? Batman couldn’t figure it out?” Signal blows a large gust of air from his lungs, shaking his head. “Damn, B really is losing his touch.”

“Is… he going to be mad?” she asks tentatively.

“Who? Batman?” he asks. “I mean, I don’t think so? B ain’t too big of a fan of magic, but I don’t think he’s holding any grudges. Mostly I think he’s frustrated cause you’re an unknown and he can’t really figure you out. But you’ve been neutral and haven’t caused problems so he’s not real worried about you. Or, well, no more worried than he is about anything else.”

“So… he’s not going to make me leave?”

Signal jerks back, and she imagines that, behind his visor, he’s giving her a look of utter incredulity. “Make you leave? Why the hell would he do that?”

Marinette shifts, uncomfortable under the attention even though it’s just Signal. “Because he doesn't like me or want me in his city? And now that he knows who I am he can get rid of me?”

He opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again. “Ignoring how that makes us sound like a mafia family, why would Batman know who you are?”

Now it’s her turn to look incredulous. “Cause you’re going to tell him?”

Signal leans back a bit, surprised. “Do you want me to tell Batman?”

“Well- no. But-”

“Okay,” he interrupts, “then I’m not going to tell him.”

But of course things are never that simple, not when Marinette and anxiety are involved. She had twenty minutes to think of worst-case scenarios, and while this one hadn’t crossed her mind, her brain was already rocketing into overdrive to come up with completely new ones, this time focused on Signal.

She is silent for all of three seconds before she starts speaking faster than the speed of light.

“You can’t just not tell Batman. He’s Batman. You’d be withholding important information from your leader, from your whole team actually! You can’t just do that!”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s your team,” she near-screeches. “I’m a foreign hero you met a few months ago! Why in the world would you protect my identity at the cost of keeping your team in the dark? Of being punished somehow? Because surely keeping this kind of secret would result in you getting in trouble at best or in some horrible fall out between you and the rest of the bats at worst. I’m not worth that-”

“Mari.”

“-of risk. You said it yourself: I’m an unknown! And everyone who’s anyone knows how much Batman doesn’t do not knowing things. How can you pass up learning more about a potential-”

“Mari.”

“-like that? Not to mention the magic. How has Batman not showed up threatening me for that alone, honestly? It doesn’t-”

“Mari!” Signal shouts, grabbing her shoulders and forcing her to look at him. “I don’t care about the consequences.”

“But-!”

“No!” he interrupts. “No buts! You’re my friend. And friends don’t go blabbing about secret IDs the moment they learn about them. That’d be a shitty thing to do to anybody.” He sighs, running a hand over the top of his helmet.

“And I- Look. Let's get one thing straight, LB: I trust you. And that’s a damn hard thing for a bat to admit, much less do—but I trust you. If I could, I’d tell you right now who I am and make us even but I can’t because if I did, you’d figure out everyone else and that- that’s not my call to make, okay? But you can damn well believe that, if you don’t want me to, I won’t ever tell anyone who you are. Not Batman. Not Red Robin. Not anyone. I know it doesn’t put us on equal footing or anything but-”

She hiccups, and Signal freezes, just now realizing that Marinette is crying. He panics for a second before she flings herself at him, squeezing him in a bone-crushing hug. “No,” she manages to get out through her tears. “That means everything. Thank you, Signal. Thank you.”

He hugs her back, pressing a kiss to her forehead that makes something warm bloom in her chest. “Anytime, LB,” he promises and something in Marinette settles, just a bit. Happy and warm and safe.

***

Marinette comes back to find her apartment transformed into a war room.

No kwami zip over to her for their customary greetings as the door opens, which is the first thing she notices. And there’s none, as she looks out into the greater chaos of her apartment, that are flying about the room at all. All the kwami without Miraculi in use are absent, and Marinette can only assume they’ve been tucked back into the miracle box for safekeeping.

Viperion, Chat, and Ambrosia are all bent over the Grimoire and holding what may as well be a war council at her kitchen island as they argue over plans and contingencies. Ryuko and Bunnyx are on the floor in the living room, all the furniture pushed to the walls and the rug shoved out of the way. Each of them wields a stick of chalk in their hand and are drawing out a complicated magic circle Marinette can only kinda sort of follow.

By the combination of grounding agents and placement of circles and lines, it is meant to be a binding circle? But there are also elements of compulsion to it and Felix—who is only half-dressed as Sparrow with his mask on and hood not pulled up, the Horse Miraculous perched atop his head—is furiously doing calculations and directing the two girls in the finer detailed work.

(Those three together means that whatever is being drawn onto her floor is likely experimental and untested—possibly even being come up with on the spot. Kwami, Marinette hopes they don’t end up putting a hole in the floor again.)

Nino is untransformed but pulling at the wards at the windows with Wayzz, strengthening them and doing something that twists at the very air and makes her feel safe and calm. Reynard Ombre is in the darkest corner of Luka’s apartment, flute at his lips and playing a subtle melody that spreads out across the place, protecting them and all their actions from prying eyes and listening ears.

Everyone looks up the moment she steps in the room, and as Marinette stares into the eyes of eight odd masked and unmasked versions of her friends, she realizes she probably should have followed up her initial coded message with some form of reassurance.

For a moment, nobody moves. Then: “Where the hell have you been?!”

Ambrosia breaks away from her task first, heading right for Marinette with a thunderous look in her eye and - oh, fuck, is she in trouble.

***

It takes much longer for her friends to tire of yelling at her this time.

Which makes sense she supposes. Telling them her identity’s been compromised and then going radio silent for over half an hour is understandably worse than, you know, going against Two-Face on a train.

Not that it makes Marinette pout any less as she watches her friends work out a schedule for what is basically just babysitting duty.

“This is stupid. I can take care of myself just fine,” she grumbles under her breath.

Adrien scoffs from where he’s been draped over her shoulders since she came back. She pinches his side hard enough to make him yelp and fall over.

***

Two days later, Marinette is invited to the manor. None of the Waynes are at home, currently, but she’s not there to see them anyway, so. 

Apparently, the entire brood had gone on some urgent business trip to Asia. Jason had been kind of vague about it in his text, and when she asked Tim, cause he’s better at explaining things, he’d been suspiciously tight-lipped.

She doesn’t actually believe the business trip angle, of course, but the boys could try to be better at lying to her at least. Truly, the likelihood of Jason going anywhere with all of his family without some sort of incentive is extremely low.

Her current theory was that they all absconded to another country—probably not Asia—for some kind of vacation. Monsieur Wayne probably just wanted to spend time with all of his children and lady love. (Perhaps he’s planning to finally put that ring they all know he’s been carrying around to good use?)

It was still odd to be in the manor while it was so empty, but Monsieur Alfred made it a point to invite her to tea whenever the lot of them were gone.

She remembers the first time Alfred invited her. It was far into her acquaintance with the Waynes, but it had taken time to secure a moment with her alone, she assumes.

The manor had been empty then, too, but only for a few hours rather than days. Alfred had greeted her at the door with a gentlemanly bow and a pleasant “Ladybug,” that startled her into speechlessness. “Or shall I use your proper title, Grand Guardian?”

Marinette had long suspected Alfred knew who and what she was. She had asked the kwami about him and his odd potentiality soon after meeting him and was told that it was not Potential she’d sensed on him, but Realization.

Alfred was a Holder once upon a time. And according to Duusu, a damn good one at that. (It wasn’t as much of a shock as she thinks it should have been.) 

Which, she supposes, is the reason she wasn’t as freaked by Alfred’s knowledge as she was Signal’s.

Alfred was bound tightly to his Miraculous—the same way Marinette is, the way all her Court is. Even with his decades of inactivity, a bond like that doesn’t fade. Not in any of the ways that matter. 

He would recognize the aura around her just as easily as he could his own, but there was no chance of him saying a word. Regardless of Alfred’s loyalties, unless Marinette wills it so, the magic of the Miraculi ensures that none can speak of a Guardian’s identity nor of the Miraculi and their Wielders.

Eventually, Marinette had shaken off the ambush and smiled wryly at the older man. “Oh, that’s a rotten trick, Monsieur,” Marinette scolds lightly. “And hardly fair when I can’t return the same courtesy.”

Alfred’s lips twitched, his eyebrow rising high on his forehead. 

He never did tell her what he had called himself, but he didn’t call her Ladybug or Guardian either, so she hasn’t pressed him for his secrets.

Today, while the Waynes were not home, the manor was far from empty.

Marinette had decided that, rather than just bringing Duusu along, she’d take out all the inactive kwami for the opportunity to stretch their legs. A few, she knows, had been going stir crazy with only the apartments to run around in and Alfred had seemed delighted when she’d suggested it.

Now, with Duusu perched on his shoulder as she was wont to do, he watched with something like amused indulgence as the kwami flit about the drawing-room and beyond. Kaalki, in particular, was inordinately pleased with the manor and its various furnishings. The glee in her voice as she found more and more expensive things to fawn over was making it hard for Marinette not to start giggling.

“This is the happiest I’ve ever seen her,” she tells Alfred quietly, eyes trained on the kwami, making sure she didn’t try to actually take any of the decorations.

“Well,” Alfred remarks drily and Duusu giggles, “at least someone appreciates my decorating.”

Marinette hides her smile in her cup of tea, while Tikki giggles freely from where she’s devouring half the snack table. After a moment longer of watching the kwami cause minor havoc, Marinette sets her cup down and turns to Alfred.

“Thank you,” she tells him, apropos of nothing. “I’ve been… stressed lately and this - your company helped a lot. So, thank you.”

Alfred blinks at her, not quite looking surprised, but something close. He sets his cup down as well. “Of course, miss. We all need a moment to relax and I greatly enjoy your company as well. It’s unfortunate that none of the children seem to enjoy teatime as much as you do.”

Marinette smiles, thinking of how chaotically hyperactive all the Waynes were. Cass is quiet, but she’s rarely still and while Jason likes Alfred enough to spend time with him, he can only ever sit still if there’s a book in his hand. Damian could probably do it—and would, if she’s being honest—but she knows that he only ever drinks eastern green tea which no doubt offends Alfred and his traditional English tea service, so.

“Of course,” she says, smiling. “How could I ever pass up your world-class scones?”

He returns the smile back at her, and they sit there in silence for a long moment, listening to the excited chattering of the kwami. It’s a comfortable sort of silence, the kind born of understanding and trust.

“If I may be so bold, Miss Marinette,” Alfred begins slowly, breaking the quiet. “A word of advice to hopefully help with your… stress. One shouldn’t force themselves to make a decision about certain things, especially when those things are matters of the heart.”

Her mouth opens and closes like that of a fish, struggling to formulate a response to that.

She can’t just… do nothing, can she? This is a problem isn’t it? She’s supposed to solve problems. That’s what she does, but - she trusts Alfred, at least. And his advice hasn’t steered her wrong yet, his advice hasn’t steered anyone wrong, as far as she can tell.

Finally, she finds her voice. “I… Right. I’ll - I’ll keep that in mind. Thank you, Alfred.”

He inclines his head to her, in something that wasn’t quite a bow, but was certainly close. “Of course, Miss. Anytime.”

***

It’s nearly four days before she sees Signal again.

Four days of worrying and soothing her anxious friends, and the first words out of his mouth the moment he lands is not ‘hi’ or ‘how are you’ or anything pleasant. No; instead, the first words out of his mouth are “So… Damian Wayne and Robin, huh?”

“Salut, Signal,” she says, pointedly ignoring his question. “How nice to see that Black Mask hasn’t killed you.”

He scoffs, plopping down on her left to study the matrix she’s using today. “Like he could.” She hums neutrally, making him sigh dramatically. “Hi, Ladybug. Hello! Lovely weather we’re having, aren’t we? Can you answer my question now?”

She lets the matrix fizzle out in front of her. She has a feeling this is going to need more of her attention. “Do you need an answer? You already know it. It’s kinda the whole thing that gave me away in the first place.”

“Well, no, I know. But it hadn’t really clicked at the time. I was preoccupied by other revelations!” he answers easily. “Now I’m prepared to tackle this one.”

The look she gives him could curdle milk but he continues on unfazed. Which makes sense she supposes. He’s had to have been on the receiving end of Robin’s glares before, and hers just don’t stand a chance against that.

“So! You like Damian Wayne, son of billionaire Brucie Wayne and Ice Prince of Gotham-” she scowls at the reminder of the media and its perception of Damian, “and Robin, moonlight vigilante and quite possibly the most annoying partner Batman’s trained. You like both of these people?”

“Are you being rude and judgmental on purpose?" she asks archly. "Because neither of them are actually that bad.”

Signal makes an exaggerated motion towards the sky. “If you launch into a speech about how there’s actually a heart of gold underneath all the insults and brooding looks, I’m going to scream and hope a rogue attacks us.”

Ladybug tuts. “Didn't take you for a cynic.”

“I’m not,” he denies. “But I’d rather not risk the cavities you’re bound to give me.” She sticks her tongue out at him, which he mirrors not a second later. “Also, you’re still avoiding the question.”

Making a pained noise in the back of her throat, she answers. “Yes, okay? I like both of those guys and it’s… well. It’s kinda nice for now, but not feasible in the long term. Which is why I asked for your help, not your teasing. I get enough of that from my friends, thank you.”

“Hey! I’m your friend!” he protests, mostly in jest.

“Civilian friends. Obviously, you’re my friend too, don’t go fishing for compliments,” she scolds, waving him off. “But you can see the problem, right?”

Signal hums, but she can see the corners of his lips twitching just barely. “Not really. Seems to me the only problem is your horrible taste in men.”

Ladybug glares at him and doesn’t even feel a little bit sorry for punching his arm with enough miraculous strength to dent the shoulder piece.

***

So Marinette calms down in the wake of her almost-disaster.

(Almost losing everything you’ve built will do that to you, she’s heard.)

She walks into work on Monday morning to find a knife sitting on her desk, beautiful and deadly in equal parts. She smiles, and admires it, and doesn’t allow herself to overanalyze the implications of the gift past the fact that he wants her safe (whichever ‘he’ that he may be).

Her only-sort-of-secret admirer is remaining anonymous for a reason, she assumes, and she’s not about to push the issue. Kwami know she understands wanting to keep something secret.

She’s never been very good with the whole ‘waiting’ and ‘what will be, will be’ kinda thing—she’s more of a lady of action, if she says so herself—but she can be patient for this. Who knows? Maybe letting someone else set the pace for once will be fun.

Luka smiles, just on the edge of laughing when she explains her thoughts to him. “Time will pass as it must, Melody.” His hands tap and strum the rhythms for patience and affection in alternating intervals, making her heart warm. “There’s no rush on love.”

***

Of course, ‘calming down’ doesn't make Marinette any less of a spaz with a crush.

She’s not as bad as what she was with Adrien—she’s older and wiser and far too familiar with both Robin and Damian to ever be that much of a disaster around either man—but that doesn’t make her new, adult version of nervous wreck any more comfortable to wear.

She blushes far more than is probably healthy and jumps when Damian and Robin move quietly enough to just appear right next to her. But her tongue, at least, doesn’t betray her as much as it had in her teen years. It still happens, and Robin stares at her a little oddly when she swaps words around or stumbles over mundane sentences because his hand accidentally brushed hers or something, but she can handle that, she supposes.

She can handle it if it means they get to keep sharing tea on her balcony, and if Robin keeps coming to her when he gets any superficial cuts or bruises because he knows she always laughs and patches him up and ‘kisses his boo-boos better’.

She can handle it if it means she gets to see Robin go utterly still when she reaches up to run her fingers through his hair because it’s the first time in forever that he’s visited her without that ridiculous cowl and she’s missed seeing how spiky and wild it was.

She can handle it, as long as she gets to keep doing all the things she knows Robin never lets anyone else get close enough to do.

She can handle it, as long as she gets to keep him.

***

It was a slow day. 

The kind of slow that meant none of Marinette’s projects were turning out right and she’s struggling to find even the barest pieces of inspiration and creativity. She’s frustrated and irritable and already planning on scraping the whole day when Damian shows up during lunch with take-out from that amazing Thai place three streets over.

He’d already been there that morning. She wasn’t expecting to see him again.

But there he was: pulling her from her desk only to bully her onto the fainting couch, shoving Pad Thai into her hands, and distracting her from work with talk of his own. He sat on the floor next to the couch, leaning against it with his long legs stretched out in front of him and a lap desk sat atop his thighs.

He looked… comfortable. Relaxed. Sitting there sketching out the Gotham skyline while he talked to her about half-important nothings.

Half the things falling from his mouth were insulting or disparaging about some person or another, but even so, the scene made something warm and happy bubble up in her chest.

(This, she thinks, is something she never wants to have the chance to miss.)

***

Marinette has met a lot of people in very strange ways over the course of her life. Normal is something one stops expecting after a few years of heroing under your belt, after all.

So when a man falls out of a tree at the park and nearly lands on top of her—well… she can’t say it phases her all that much. In fact, her first thought is less, ‘what the fuck’ and more, “Oh my Kwami, are you okay?” as she reaches to help the man up.

He bounces to her feet before she can even touch him and she reels back at the sudden movement. “Fine! A-Okay, stranger, thanks for asking!”

Marinette blinks as the man—who’s not so much as scratched—gives her a thumbs up. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and looks somewhere around her age but with the same childish innocence she’d see in Nino’s little brother. His floppy black hair is a bit disheveled from his fall, and his chunky, black glasses sit askew on his face.

He quickly fixes the glasses and grins even wider at her, if that’s possible. His eyes crinkle at the corners, and Marinette can’t help but notice how incredibly blue they are. Almost inhumanly so, in fact.

She tilts her head back to look up into the branches. He must’ve dropped at least ten feet, she thinks. And, looking at the snapped branches barely clinging onto the tree, he definitely hit a few things on the way down.

Before she can say anything about it though, he sticks out his hand and introduces himself. “I’m Jon Kent, by the way. It’s real nice to meet ya!”

She takes his hand hesitantly. “Marinette Dupain-Cheng and… likewise. Do you often fall out of trees?”

“Not generally, no.” Jon grins wider, if that’s possible. “Only when I get too excited.”

Her lips quirk, “I can understand that. I get clumsy when I’m excited, too.”

Jon gets a suddenly thoughtful look on his face, almost exaggerated with how he squints at her. “Hey… your name seems familiar. Any relation to the Waynes? Damian Wayne, maybe?”

Marinette frowns, hand moving to rest on her purse. Three deliberate taps against the side and Tikki contacts the team with an SOS—a precaution her team insisted on implementing after the whole Two-Face fiasco.

There’s something… off about this guy and Marinette doesn’t like it. 

Warily, she answers. “And if I am?”

Immediately, Jon backs up, hands raised in surrender. “Ah! Sorry, sorry! It’s just, I’ve heard a lot about you! I was excited to meet you.”

“Heard about me from where?” she asks, getting even tenser around this guy. Who even is he?

Jon rolls his eyes, looking just barely fond. “Well I should have heard about you from Damian—considering I’m supposed to be his best friend and all—but I had to hear about you from Kon instead! Who had to hear it from Tim! I mean really-”

“Oh.” Marinette relaxes almost immediately. “Kent. Of course. I can’t believe I didn’t realize. Damian talks about you all the time.”

Jon perks up, not unlike a puppy waiting for a treat. “He does?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, ‘all the time’ for Damian, anyway. But he rarely insults you when he brings you up and that’s the important part, I think. The worst he’s called you is a ‘gullible brute’—which is practically high praise considering the things I’ve heard him call Dick, who I know is his favorite brother.”

Jon snorts. “That sounds like Damian alright. Can’t take it too personally. I mean, who doesn’t he insult?”

“His animals,” she answers simply, smiling as she shares in the joke. “But that’s understandable, I think.”

“You’re nicer than I expected,” Jon says smiling. “You’re actually a lot different than I expected.”

Marinette chooses to take that as a compliment. “Well,” she starts, “Jason’s theory is something about ‘opposites attract’ and ‘sunshine incarnate’ or something equally ridiculous. Mostly, I think Damian just lets us get close cause we’re nice enough to forgive him for the shit he pulls, but firm enough to not let him get away with it twice. At least, that’s my experience with him.”

And Robin—which she doesn’t say, but he’s the same way now that she thinks about it. Really, what happened to her type being ridiculously charming sweethearts? 

Jon blinks at her, a little stunned before he grins, showing off all his perfect, white teeth. “You know, I think you’re right.”

She scoffs, and pretends to flip her hair like Chloé does. She can't, obviously, because her hair is in a bun, but it’s about the joke anyways, so.

“Of course, I am,” she says, nose in the air and fighting off a smile, “I’m always right.”

“Hah!” Jon laughs. “I think we’re gonna get along just fine.”

He offers his arm out to her, much like Damian does but also different in a way she can’t quite put her finger on. “Mind if I join you for the rest of your walk?”

She decides not to think about it, instead taking Jon’s arm with a smile. “Not at all.”

***

Marinette was meant to attend the monthly Wayne family dinner at the Manor after her walk. And, since Jon has yet to actually tell the Waynes he’s in town, she invited him to tag along. It seemed like a great idea. The Kents are practically family anyway and have known the Waynes for far longer than she has.

Only, when she walks through the door with Jon at her side, Damian goes still and silent in that way that makes the danger-sense in the back of her mind go positively cuckoo.

“Er, you’ll never believe who I ran into at the park,” she jokes, in an effort to break the tension.

But no sooner are the words out of her mouth that Damian grabs Jon and drags him down the hall. Marinette stares after them before turning to her Waynes. They look more bemused than worried, but still she asks.

“Um… is he going to be okay?”

The trio look at each other.

“He’ll be fine,” Jason assures while Cass walks up to loop her arm with hers.

“Yeah,” Duke agrees, looping her arm on her other side. “There ain’t much Jon can’t handle. And if any of us can survive a pissed-off Damian, it’s him.”

She sends one last look down the hallway they disappeared down. “If you say so…”

***

“What were you thinking?” Damian hisses at Jon who looks unusually calm for someone on the wrong end of a Wayne’s ire. Particularly this Wayne’s ire.

“I was thinking that my best friend didn’t tell me about his new friend slash crush and it’s my job as said best friend to make sure she’s good enough for you.”

The look Damian gives him could curdle milk. Jon just looks back at him, brow raised and completely unfazed by the death glare.

“And you thought that, what? Following her around just so you could coincidentally bump into her was the way to go?”

“Well if you’d just introduced me I wouldn’t have needed to do that, now would I?” Jon argues back.

Damian growls, storming out of the room before he does something stupid like try to punch him and end up with his hand broken… again.

***

Damian doesn’t speak to Jon for the rest of the night.

It ends up being more of a punishment for him instead of Jon because of course Jon just hangs around Marinette the whole time, which means Damian can’t unless he wants to lose this battle of wills.

He hates it when Jon actually acts as smart as Damian’s always known him to be.

***

She’s not quite sure how it happened, but by some unholy force, all the people Marinette has claimed as hers are stuffed into one of the Wayne’s theatre rooms watching old Scooby Doo cartoons. Her Court likes to make fun of the villains and compare them to akumas, while the Waynes all throw popcorn at the screen whenever the show displays some particularly offensive detective work.

(“What?” Jason says innocently, when she and her Court all look at them. “We like crime documentaries!”

“Plus,” Duke adds reasonably. “Chief Gordon is an old family friend. You pick up a few things over the years. Especially when living in Gotham.”)

She hadn’t even known her Waynes and Court were friends.

But here she is, squashed into a loveseat with Damian and Cass on either side and Adrien pressed against her legs in front of her, Nino lying half on top of him.

Chloé, Kagami, Tim, and Felix are all on a nearby couch, bickering amongst themselves about something unrelated to the cartoons, while Alix, Nath, Jason, Duke and Luka are all sprawled across the floor in a makeshift nest of blankets. Alix and Jason seem to be having some sort of feud over a pillow that Luka and Nath have given up on trying to mediate. Which: good call.

In Marinette’s opinion, they were more likely to lose a hand than succeed at stopping them.

“Oh!” Adrien exclaims, mostly from nowhere, drawing near everyone’s attention. He has his phone in his hand, looking at something. “Amusement Mile is doing a Bat Family Appreciation thing next weekend. It’s supposed to be themed and people with costumes get discounts. We should go! Support our heroes and whatnot.”

Nath hums, ignoring the common ‘vigilantes’ correction from the Waynes. “Amusement Mile is that amusement park by the water, right? I don’t think any of us have been there yet.”

“Do they have any cool roller coasters?” Alix asks, mostly to Jason. “Tilt-a-whirls? Anything that’ll make me throw up, really.”

Jason frowns, thinking about it. “There’s always a dead body found behind the funhouse on the last day, if that works?”

It probably says a lot about their collective life experiences that that observation isn’t all that alarming.

“No,” Alix waves off frustratingly. “I haven’t puked at the sight of a body since I was fourteen.”

“Why don’t we all go?” Duke offers. “We normally make a habit of attending appreciations around Gotham. And you got to try Amusement Mile at least once. You’re not a true Gothamite until you do.”

Nino wrinkles his nose. “I thought you weren’t a true Gothamite until you started using ‘riddle me this’ in conversations unironically.”

“The two are not mutually exclusive,” Tim points out without looking up from his phone.

Marinette leans down to peer over Adrien’s shoulder, who helpfully tilts his head and raises his phone so she can see better. She runs her fingers through his hair a few times as thanks. “Do they have to be actual costumes or can we wear, like, my fashion line? Casual things. I feel like actual cosplay level stuff would be dangerous in Gotham.”

Adrien scrolls for a bit. “I think your clothes should be fine. Just anything recognizable as Batman and co.”

She smiles, doing a little bounce. “Great! Next weekend right? We should go Saturday, maybe around one?” She turns to Damien, who she expects to have to convince a bit to come along. Amusement parks don’t really seem like his thing after all.

But to her surprise, he’s thumbing through his calendar and adding the time so he won’t forget. “I’m agreeable to one, Starling.” Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Jason make a face at Duke, and by the way Damian’s eyes flick behind her, Cass is probably communicating something as well.

She chooses to ignore it. “Are we meeting there?”

“Well unless we wanted to take the limo, we’d have to,” Chloé points out.

Luka tilts his head. “I’m not sure we’d even fit in that actually.”

They talk for a little longer, planning and joking around and calling dibs on which of the birds they get to be. (“Well we can’t all go as Black Bat! Some of us have to be someone else!”)

It’s a good night—a great night actually—and Marinette falls asleep listening to the sound of all her friends in one place. She’s excited about their planned outing, ideas and half formed daydreams flooding her mind so much she doesn’t even realize she’s falling asleep on Damian’s shoulder.

***

Everyone else noticed, of course.

Adrien doesn't shut up about it for the next three days.

***

Being Ladybug during the day has had certain consequences. Signal, being the first which has led to most of the others—including but not limited to: unintentionally revealing her identity and being mistaken as a new bat by more of Gotham’s populace each day.

The newest consequence though, has nothing to do with Signal. Surprisingly.

It was only a matter of time, she supposed, when she would have to step off the concrete roofs and hide amongst the trees of Robinson Park.

Of course, now that Ladybug isn’t some random tourist and has lived in Gotham for quite some time now, she knows that Robinson Park is claimed territory. It’s risky to walk through wearing a mask, and even riskier to stay there for hours on end. But her grid pattern cuts right through the park, and even if it didn’t, Ladybug would have to visit anyway.

The energy is unstable there. A lot of bad things happen here, but it’s also a place for nature to flourish, which causes intense opposing forces. Atrocities committed on natural, beloved land are always more scarring to the earth and the spirit of the place.

The luck surrounding the park is a pendulum, swinging wildly between two extremes.

She spends longer there than she normally would, trying to wrangle the miasma into something manageable. She’s finished her spell nexus to change bad luck into good, but it won’t work with something as unstable as Robinson Park so she has to do it all by hand.

She’s about halfway through, and going to call it a day when the branch beneath her moves. She doesn’t even have a chance to react before she’s hanging upside down, staring at two of the Sirens.

She does have a moment to mentally punch herself in the face though because how could she have forgotten? The trees are no hiding place for those with the Gift, and whose Gift is more powerful than Poison Ivy herself?

“Oh, look, Red! You caught a fairy flitting about the forest!” Harley giggles as she drapes herself over Ivy’s shoulders. “Her wings are so pretty aren’t they? Oh! Oh! Oh! Can we keep 'em? Pretty please? They’d look so nice above the mantle, wouldn’t they?”

“We don’t have a mantle, Harley.”

“Uh, Bonjour Doctor Isley, Doctor Quinnzel.”

Harley gasps, and leans further over Ivy’s shoulder. “Aw, well ain't you polite? That’s sweet. Not enough people mind their manners these days, yaknow?”

Poison Ivy narrows her eyes. It’s hard to read her expression from upside down. “You’re not one of Batman’s little brats.” Poison Ivy doesn’t ask, but rather says.

Ladybug, who is upside down, alone, and has few options for escape, nods. “I’m not. He’s not too keen on me anyway. I use too much magic for his tastes.”

Poison Ivy raises a brow. “Is that so? And the Bat just lets a rogue hero run around his city?”

“I’m not a hero. I used to be, back in Paris. But I don’t fight crime anymore.”

“That’s what they all say,” Harley tsks. “Once a hero, always a hero, sweetheart. You don’t leave the business unless you’re dead.”

She shifts uncomfortably in her branch cocoon. “Look,” she tries to reason. “I’m not here to cause problems or start a fight. I’m just trying to-”

“I know what you’re trying to do, Bluebell,” Ivy cuts her off. “The whole forest is talking about it, about the little guardian come to fix what’s broken.” Ivy reaches up to caress a low hanging branch and, all at once, Ladybug is flipped over and dropped to the ground.

She’s disoriented enough from the sudden twist that she lands in a heap on the grass instead of her feet. She is very out of practice, it seems.

The moment her hands touch the earth, flowers begin to sprout and blossom outwards from her like a wave. She hadn’t been able to dispel her magic properly, too surprised by Ivy’s appearance, and she still has creation bursting from her fingertips.

Harley oohs and ahhs at the display while Ivy just looks… pleased? Satisfied? Something non-murderous, at least.

“It’s not often I meet another with the Gift.”

She pulls her hands back from the newly grown meadow, flexing her now sore hands. Ugh, she’s going to be so tired later.

“It’s not- I don’t have the Gift. Not really.”

Ivy hums, pointedly looking at the flowers happily swaying all around them. Harley, who was bent over a cluster of chrysanthemums clumsily digging them out by the roots rather than picking them, snorts. “This is some magic trick then, fairy lady. But I think ya skipped a step. Cause I’m pretty sure you’re supposed to make ‘em disappear before bringing ‘em back.”

“My domain includes nature, but it’s not the focal point. I don’t have the true Gift. I create, but I don’t command.” She glances at Ivy. “Not as you do.”

Ladybug isn’t sure what she expects from Ivy—she doesn't know enough about the woman to guess—but whatever it would be, it certainly isn’t laughter. She chuckles, and the trees sway, curving down as if to reach her, while the flowers turn to her like the sun.

It reminds Ladybug of something she can’t quite remember.

Ivy sighs when she finishes, but her bright red lips stay quirked with something almost amused. “Look around you, child. Does this look like control to you?”

No, Ladybug thinks. Even before she’d spawned a mess of blooms, the meadow had been flourishing and green and wild. And now, even as the wind sweeps through the tall grass, she can still see the way they reach and strain for Ivy. It’s familiar, the way plants seek her out like sunlight. The same thing happens to Chloé and, as Ladybug looks down at the small cluster of blooms gathered around her knees, the same thing happens to her.

Smiling, she reaches out to a geranium and watches it grow bigger and brighter at her touch.

“Mother Nature does not love often, and certainly not kindly,” Ivy tells her, “But that does not make Her love any less of a gift.”

Ladybug blinks, and knows she’s going to be thinking about the implications of that a lot later and will probably end up pestering the kwami with questions for the next few weeks.

Before she can say anything in the moment though, Harley stumbles into Ivy, dirt somehow in her hair and with an armful of flowers still clinging to dirt clumps by their roots. She shoves the whole ridiculous bouquet beneath Ivy’s nose and practically shouts, “Red! Look at these new additions for the greenhouse! Won’t they just look swell? And I even pulled them out by the roots like ya told me too!”

“They’re beautiful, Harls,” Ivy says, pressing a kiss to Harley’s forehead and doing something with the roots to keep them from losing any more dirt.

The look Harley gives Ivy makes Ladybug’s cheeks go red. She suddenly feels like she’s intruding on a very private moment.

Ladybug coughs. “Um… I’m sorry about trespassing in your garden. I- well I’m not actually finished here yet, so would you mind, Doctor Isley, if I came back in a few days?”

Ivy’s eyes flick to hers and sharpen from where they’d been softly gazing at Harley. “Fellow gardeners are always welcome here, even ones with masks. Just don’t insult me by believing you can enter without my knowing about it, Bluebell.”

“Of course, Doctor Isley. Thank you.”

With that, Ladybug beats a hasty retreat before either woman changes their mind. She’s officially on the Siren’s radar now, which means the rest of the Rogues aren’t far behind.

She’s going to have to be more careful in the future.

***

(Which, of course, is exactly the moment Ladybug gets taken off guard; so worried about the Rogues, that she forgot to watch out for Vikki Vale.)

***

For a group of various, fairly important people who need to be on time for things on a regular basis, it takes nearly an hour for all of them to show up. The first of them to arrive at Amusement Mile—a small group consisting of Marinette, Nino, Alix, Luka, and Nathaniel—don’t even get there until fifteen minutes after the intended meet up time when they finally decided to cut their losses and let the Glamour Trio (plus Kagami) make their way over when they’re ready instead of waiting another half hour.

Eventually though, everyone arrives, laughing and smiling and ribbing each other for the horrific time management they all seem to share. They’re all wearing her Gotham line, except for Chloé who’s in a Harley Quinn themed outfit that Marinette designed but hadn’t been included in the official line.

She’s planning to do a Siren line soon though, since she’s gotten so many requests for it. (Never let it be said that the Sirens’ don’t have a fan club.)

Of course, since they’re such a large group and all of them are some form of famous, they split up almost as soon as they joined together. Smaller factions break away only to reunite and shuffle around before splitting up once again. It’s a special kind of chaos with these ridiculous group dynamics that come and go with head spinning speed.

Her first ride is on the spinning teacups. She somehow ends up shoved into a circular bench with Tim, Alix and Duke while Nathaniel, Jason, and Adrien are all shoved in one on the opposite side of the ride.

Alix and Duke team up to spin their cup so fast that Marinette seriously worries they're going to fly off the ride. She can hear Nath screaming from where Nino and Jason are no doubt doing the exact same thing.

Tim, unsettlingly, closes his eyes within moments of starting the ride and keeps them closed until it stops. She thinks he fainted from the g-forces or something right up until he casually blinks his eyes back open and yawns like he just woke up from a nap.

After, Jason drags her to the hall of mirrors where they find Luka and Cass seemingly having a conversation without ever actually speaking.

(Marinette just knew they'd get along.)

Jason spends most of his time making short jokes about her instead of looking at his equally ridiculous reflections. Cass eventually punches him in the arm just to get him to stop.

The rest of her night continues in a similarly chaotic vein.

Marinette doesn’t think she’s laughed this much in ages.

***

It’s starting to get dark, and all the bright, colored lights on the game booths and rides are beginning to turn on. The ferris wheel stands like a beacon against the dark pink sky.

Marinette is hovering next to a ring toss game, watching the trio of Kagami, Chloé, and Damian all stubbornly refuse to admit defeat to the rigged game. They’ve been at it for more than fifteen minutes and spent far more money than one should reasonably spend trying to win the cheap, vigilant themed stuffies, but it’s not like they don’t have the money to burn, so.

Marinette had won a Robin plush to go with her Robin themed outfit after only five throws, much to her friends’ chagrin. It’s a side effect of the whole ‘bound to the incarnation of good luck’ thing. Kagami and Chloé had both shot sour looks at her prize, but it’s not like she can turn it off. And both of them know that after more than a decade of friendship, so they don’t actually hold it against her or anything.

(Though, it has been a Court rule ever since they were teenagers that she’s not allowed to play much of anything on group game nights besides twister or charades. Since only Adrien can compete against her in luck games, and she’s practically unmatched for strategy ones, it’s a wholly unfair advantage and she mostly just cheers her friends on from the sidelines.)

“Boo!”

Marinette jumps, and only barely stops herself from slamming her elbow into the solar plexus of the man behind her. Then she registers the man is Jason, and she elbows him anyway.

“Ass,” she scolds, turning around to find Cass and Duke with him as well. “What trouble were you guys getting up to?”

“Roller Coaster.” Cass hands her one of the sticks of cotton candy she was holding. “Then snacks.”

Duke offers some of the funnel cake he’s eating while Jason pointedly holds his corn dogs out of her reach—which, of course, means she’s going to steal one the moment he stops paying attention. She’s not even that big a fan of corn dogs, but it’s the principle of the thing, really.

“We were going to head down by the water, there’s some booths down there doing face paintings and temporary tattoos,” Duke tells her. “Want to come?”

She pops a piece of cotton candy in her mouth and slides her gaze to Jason.

“I'm not sitting still for a full henna sleeve."

Jason immediately begins pouting. Ever since she dyed her hair, Jason and Alix have been pushing her to get some piercings or tattoos. Marinette’s pretty sure they like the idea of ‘corrupting’ her girl next door look.

"Killjoy," he grumbles.

Marinette rolls her eyes. 

“Sure,” she agrees, looping her arm through Duke’s. “Lead the way.”

Jason leads the way, actually, and he cuts through the crowd so quickly that Marinette doesn’t even notice the slightly sour look Damian shoots at her new group. She’s too busy laughingly trying to keep up with Jason’s ridiculously long legs.

***

They don’t make it to the henna station.

Before they even get there, disaster strikes in the form of Jason running his mouth.

“So we heard you been roped into goin on a date with the she-devil next weekend,” Jason says, throwing an arm around her shoulder.

Marinette blinks. "Who?"

"Vikki Vale," Cass helpfully explains. But now Marinette’s confusion is laced with the slightest hints of panic.

“Yeah! So what shady shit did you get into that Vale is suddenly sniffing around?”

"What? Nothing," Marinette dismisses. "Who told you I was meeting with Vale?"

"Duke did," Jason tells her, looking at her strange now. "Said you seemed stressed about it and might want company."

Said Wayne, who’d been on the other side of Jason, looks suddenly panicked and stops walking entirely.

"Duke?" Marinette questions, stopping too. She's confused and worried and - what? She never told Duke about the interview; how would he even know?

For obvious reasons, she only told her Court—who wouldn’t have said anything to anyone—and also mentioned it kind of offhandedly to-

(Marinette is clever. Cleverer than she wants to be most days and as the realization dawns, her mind spinning and whirling, she already wants to take it back. It's not her secret to know.

But the disjointed pieces click into place without care for her wants, nearly too fast to keep up with and- oh. Oh.)

She twists out from under Jason’s arm so she can stare incredulously at Duke’s face.

He at least has the decency to not feign ignorance, only giving her a sheepish smile that looks caught between wariness and resignation.

“You!” she shouts, poking a finger at his chest.

Duke doesn't flinch, even when she absolutely pokes him harder than any normal human should be able to. “Me,” he agrees, grimacing.

Her mouth opens and closes for a long moment, words lost, before she grabs his shoulders and shakes him back and forth. Duke, agreeably, lets her manhandle him despite how she must look like a lunatic.

“Holy shit. Holy shit. Are you serious?” Her voice has taken on a distinctly hysterical quality now, several octaves higher than her normal register.

“Would you believe me if I said no?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Well there you go then,” he says and she shakes him harder for joking when she's in the middle of a crisis.

“I feel like I’m missing something,” Jason pipes up and Marinette whirls to pin him with her intense stare. His hands fly up in surrender, though by his expression, she doesn’t think he knows, exactly, why he’s surrendering.

Her eyes flick over his shoulders, to his waist, to how tall he is and fuck. No wonder he always wears a helmet. That white streak is pretty damn distinct.

“I’m an idiot,” she says flatly.

“Uh…?”

“Kwami, how didn’t I notice?” she asks herself frantically. “I'm around you all the time! You don't even have any glamors!"

“Mari, what the hell are you talking about?”

She ignores Jason in favor of rounding back on Duke, who is also Signal, apparently. "This is your fault! Why did you tell them? What happened to being friends—twice over, apparently!—and keeping my secrets?"

Duke looks vaguely offended for a moment. “How was I supposed to know it was a secret?”

“Because I'm not doing the interview as Marinette, you shrimp-eyed, asshole!” she hisses.

Duke opens his mouth before closing it quickly. “Well you didn’t say that,” he says petulantly.

“What the fuck are you two talking about?” Jason interjects, patience worn too thin by this point. He’s got that slant to his lips that belays how annoyed he is with being left out of the loop. But before Marinette can figure out how to organize her erratic thoughts into coherency, Cass steps in for her.

“Masks and bats,” she says, regarding her calmly with her head tilted. "Marinette knows.”

“Huh?” Jason blinks. Then: “Oh, shit, really? Fucking- how? Did you realize it just now?”

“Yes!” she exclaims. “Obviously! Why else would I be having a crisis right now?”

She shouldn’t have asked. She shouldn’t have asked. The question was rhetorical, but that doesn’t stop the universe from answering anyway.

No sooner have the words left her mouth, do the lights in Amusement Mile go dark and the speaker system crackles to life. “Now this,” a voice echoes all across the park, “is exactly the kind of sample size I needed for my newest experiment. Thank you all in advance for participating in this revolutionary study.”

Scarecrow is attacking the park.

***

Staring at the screaming crowd of civilians, half out of their minds with fear, Marinette feels an almost overwhelming sense of deja vu.

Civilian, once again, near helpless in the face of a Rogue terrorizing citizens right before her eyes. Only this time, the Rogue is not one who fights on her turf. This isn’t Two-Face who deals in luck and chance which she can bend to her will.

This is Scarecrow, a man who breeds fear and panic. Already Marinette can feel her hands shake and heart pound despite being at the farthest edge of the gas cloud and holding her shirt firmly over her mouth. Her Waynes look grim at her sides, eyes flicking all around as they lead the way around the edge of the park.

She can’t imagine they like the situation any better than she does.

“Plan?” she shouts to her companions over the din, deferring to their greater experience. (Which is still insane to think about, what the fuck.)

“Batman will be here soon,” Jason relays. “But if we can get to the car, then we can-”

Jason stops in his tracks, so fast that Marinette just barely stops from slamming into his back. They’re close to the entrance, running along the fence’s edge, which of course means they run into trouble.

In front of them are a group of Scarecrows thugs, burlap masks smiling wide and terrifying at the four of them. There’s only seven in front of them right now, probably in charge of crowd control and making sure no one escapes before the ‘experiment’ is over.

Four against seven is good odds for them, but they’re civilians right now. Pampered rich folk who are only supposed to know the broad strokes of self-defense. Well, actually - Jason grew up on the streets, and it’s no secret to Gotham that Cass knows martial arts, but Marinette’s not willing to risk it. Not unless one of her Waynes gives the okay.

“Well, well!” one of the thugs laughs. “Ain’t we the lucky ones boys? Looks like we caught ourselves some Wayne brats.”

Jason places himself more solidly in front of her and Duke as the group starts toward them. His feet are planted and fists clenched at his side and Marinette is abruptly reminded that ‘fight’ is just as common a reaction to fear as ‘flight’ is.

She reaches forward to grab his jacket sleeve right as Cass hisses, “Hold,” at all of them.

“The boss is always looking for more funding,” a different thug says. “I’m sure ol’ Brucie will cough up a pretty penny to get em back, yeah?”

Duke presses up against her side, free hand wrapping around her back to grab at Cass. The four of them are tangled together, pressed as close as they can get, and probably look the perfect picture of scared, soon-to-be hostages.

For Marinette, at least, it’s only partly an act. They’ve all been breathing in the toxin for far longer than can be healthy, and each moment they stand there, it only gets worse.

“Plan?” she asks again, because getting themselves captured cannot be it.

A thug chucks something at their feet before Cass can answer, and Marinette is moving before it even comes to a stop. She’s jumpy and halfway to terrified and the moment the canister gets close enough, her foot is already mid-swing to kick it back towards where it came from.

It slams into the face of the thug who threw it with a loud crunch. He goes down like a bag of bricks.

The thugs stop in their tracks, staring at their fallen member, and her Waynes stop to stare at her.

For a moment, nobody moves. Then, “Nice shot,” Jason compliments, right as the canister gives a weak hiss. The nozzle must have flattened on impact, compromising the gas flow.

There’s a clever joke about luck in there somewhere, but Marinette can’t really think about it right now.

“Praise me later,” she says, shoving at Duke and Jason to get them to move. “Run now.”

The four of them take off like Hell is nipping at their heels, but it doesn’t take long for the thugs to get with the memo. They have a head start, but it’s hard to lose a tail when the paths are so wide and they can only stay on the fringes of the park or risk the effects of fear gas.

Running this much is already a risk. They’re breathing too much. Under normal circumstances, they could easily outlast their pursuers. But they don’t have the gas masks Scarecrow and his thugs do.

Eventually, she and her Waynes will succumb to the toxin. Eventually, they’ll be easy pickings.

Her Waynes must be thinking the same thing, cause when they come across yet another fork in the path, Cass tells them to scatter.

There’re six guys now, if they split up, at least two of them will have a reasonable chance of taking down their single pursuer and getting away to the entrance.

Marinette ends up with two of them. Which is good and bad. Good, because that means there’s two extra vigilantes on the way, instead of just one. But bad because she has to keep running.

Her heart is pounding and her ears are ringing and she has to focus so hard to ignore the terrifying things she keeps seeing in the corner of her eyes. She nearly jumps out of her own skin when Tikki flies out of her purse to float next to her face, easily keeping pace.

“Loop back around, Marinette!” Tikki shouts. “The masks! You can take one from the criminal you knocked out!”

Marinette’s mind is so addled, she hadn’t thought about that. Thank the Powers That Be for Tikki and her immunities to human ailments. She cuts through an abandoned booth, making a wide loop around just to be safe, before heading back the way she came.

When the sprawled body comes into view, Tikki shoots forward and starts tugging at the mask. There’s buckles and straps and she only just barely gets the thing off enough for Marinette to lean down and snatch it off the thugs face while running past.

She can see the entrance, she could escape. It’s right there.

But one of her Waynes is heading for it, or perhaps already at the car, moments away from actually being able to do something, to help. She can’t risk that.

So instead she makes a sharp turn in the opposite direction and ducks into a large bush. She ignores the sting of branches scratching at her skin and coaxes the bush into growing thicker, shrouding her completely. She presses the burlap to her face, muffling her breaths and Tikki is there, curled into the crook of her neck. Reassuring and steady.

The thugs run right past her, cursing and huffing for breath. Marinette wants to sob with relief.

But Tikki keeps her on task. “The mask, Marinette. Quickly.”

She fumbles with it, unable to see properly and jumping at every rustle of leaves she makes. She eventually gets it over her nose and mouth and her first breath of clean air is sharp relief. Tikki secures the thing around her head, tugging at straps and buckles while Marinette just breathes.

Slowly, her heartbeat steadies. Her hands still shake—there’s too much left-over adrenaline coursing through her for them not to—but it's manageable now.

Marinette begins to calm.

Tikki sighs, nuzzling against her temple. “You’re okay now,” she promises. “You’re safe.”

Marinette pushes back against her, gently, eyes fluttering closed. She feels suddenly exhausted, like she could sleep for a year.

But she can’t. Not yet.

“Roll call?” she asks and appreciates that Tikki doesn’t need her to elaborate. Quickly, her kwami swoops down to her purse and plucks out the phone.

“Nathaniel, Felix, and Tim were riding the ferris wheel when the gas went off. They’re still up there now,” Tikki reports. “Our rabbit was fast enough to outrun the cloud and picked up a few stragglers along the way. Luka hasn’t checked in yet. Adrien and Nino are searching for him. And…”

Marinette tilts her head. “What is it, Tikki?”

“Chloé was affected by the toxin. Kagami got them both to safety, but… they don’t know where Damian is.”

Marinette jolts. “What?”

“He disappeared as soon as the lights went off.” Tikki sounds almost apologetic when she says, “They had no hope of finding him in the ensuing panic.”

She panics for all of a second before her brain click-click-clicks and Marinette is instead flung into the realm of furious and bruised. The Waynes are all vigilantes and there’s only one vigilante Damian could be, only one that makes sense.

He’s Robin—has been Robin this whole time.

She’d been distracted before, too busy to think about it much but now she has and it makes something in her chest rattle hard enough to ache. 

“That bastard!” she hisses, fists clenched at her sides. Oh she is going to give him an earful when she finds him.

The branches part for her as Marinette steps out of the bush, and close seamlessly over her hiding spot behind her. Tikki flutters nervously at her shoulder, but she must’ve come to the same conclusion Marinette had because she doesn’t say anything when Marinette reaches out and twists the luck in the air so that when she starts walking in a seemingly random direction, it’s precisely the path that will lead her to Damian.

She’s tracking him down because she’s pissed and confused and wants answers, but he’s also missing and could be hurt. It’s near certain that he slipped away to become Robin, but he also could have easily succumbed to the fear gas before he got there. All of the carnival games weren’t set up far from the middle of the park.

Robin - Damian - is capable and highly trained. He’s probably fine.

But Marinette isn’t going to risk probably. If she finds him, and he’s fine, then great! She’ll get to yell at him sooner. But if he isn’t, if he needs her… then she’ll be there.

***

The screams have quieted and she can hear sirens in the near distance. The wind from the pier is dispersing the gas enough that it will probably be clear enough to walk without a mask in half an hour. She doesn’t know how long she’d been hiding in her bush, letting her fear fade, but she gets the feeling that the fight is over or is at least near it.

She’s proven right when, after about ten minutes of walking without coming across another person—evacuated most likely, a good sign—she finds Robin slamming the hilt of his sword into a thug’s head, knocking him out hard enough that he’ll probably have a concussion. Not that Marinette has much room to talk tonight.

There’re still two more up and fighting, but quite a few unconscious men lying about the area. Rounding them up, probably, so that he can take them all out at once.

What a showoff.

She waits at the fringes for him to finish, watching him twist and lunge and dance around his opponents. It’s quick work taking them down, and she’s not surprised that he immediately turns to her when he’s finished. He probably knew she was there the whole time.

She is surprised that he turns to her sword first and she ducks beneath his swing. She kicks herself mentally, she’s wearing a gasmask while he was just fighting Scarecrow’s goons.

“Robin!” she shouts hands raised in a vain effort to protect herself.

He stops himself just short of slicing her shoulder open, eyes wide behind the mask as he stares at her. “Wha- Marinette?”

His sword drops quickly, disappearing back into its sheath. His eyes flick over her, lightning quick as he steps closer. “You’re unharmed,” he says pointing out the obvious—which he hates when people do—and as he looks at her, she can see something like relief in the slant of his shoulders.

The softness, which would normally melt her insides and send her into stuttering fits, instead makes that thing in her chest rattle angrily.

“Don’t,” she snaps.

Robin frowns. His hand reaches out for her, worried. “Marinette? Are you alright?”

“No,” she swats his hand away. “No, I’m not alright. I’m angry at you.”

He looks at her, incredulous. “For what? Attacking you? If so, my sincerest apologies but I hadn’t known-”

She cuts him off. “No, that isn’t it.”

“Then what?” he asks. “What have I done?”

“I don’t know, Damian. What could I possibly be upset about?”

Robin goes utterly still. “Oh.”

“Yeah, oh,” she snaps and hits him in the chest. It helps a little and he’s wearing high grade armour so she does it again. “What was the point? Befriending me twice, giving me gifts. I just- why? Were you trying to confuse me on purpose?”

“No!” he exclaims as if affronted by the thought. “Of course not!”

He tries to stop her onslaught but she’s stronger than him and the last thing he wants to do is hurt her by using the holds for super individuals. It’s an advantage she has no qualms about abusing at that moment.

“Do you even realize how conflicted I’ve been for months? Ever since the gifts started showing up and I couldn’t figure out which of you was leaving them and then I had a crisis about which of you I liked that way and of course the answer was both and - ugh!” She hits him again. “You were just the same person the whole time?!”

Quite off topic and utterly missing the point, Robin smirks. “So you admit you like me ‘that way’?”

She glares at him. “I’m going to punch you.”

He takes advantage of her stillness to grab her wrists, pulling them close to his chest and her with them. “I wasn’t trying to trick you,” he tells her softly. “Truly.”

She huffs. “Sure feels like it.”

“No, I-” he sighs roughly, then sweeps his gaze over the bodies and the park around them.

Out of nowhere, he releases her wrists and instead pulls her in by her waist. She’s about to protest and begin hitting him again when he whips out his grappling hook and then suddenly they’re swinging through the air.

The sensation is odd, and a bit more nerve wracking when she’s not the one in control of trajectories and destinations.

Her arms come up around his neck like lightning to keep herself from falling. His grip on her is tight, and she doesn’t really think he’d let her fall, but that’s not the point.

They land on a nearby roof after no time at all, and he sets her down on her feet gently. But he doesn’t let her get far before he reaches behind her head to release the gasmask, his eyes flicking over her now exposed face hungrily. His follows not soon after, and they both end up on the ground at their feet.

The moment is oddly intimate and she’s so caught off guard and wrong footed that when he speaks again it takes her a second to reorient her mind on the conversation at hand.

“The gifts were meant to be clues.”

Marinette eyes him suspiciously. “Clues?”

“Yes, Starling,” he confirms, running a hand through his hair while Marinette very pointedly ignores the way her heart still flutters at the endearment. “I didn’t want to start courting you without you fully knowing who I am, otherwise, it just felt… dishonest. Hiding our identities is necessary, but here it merely felt despicable. I wanted you to know, but it is not my place to tell you when it would mean revealing the rest of my family as well.”

She frowns. “So you were trying to tell me… without telling me?”

“Starling, you are exceedingly clever and observant and I hold your wit in a higher regard than anyone I know,” he tells her, earnest and simple. A blush rises on her cheeks despite her best attempts for it to stop. “I believed giving you the tools to make your own way to the truth would be my best course of action.”

She worries her lip between her teeth, running the thought over in her head before saying something. “Intentionally being transparent still sounds like you telling me. Wouldn’t your family get upset?”

He shrugs with a sort of carelessness she’s rarely ever seen from him. “I am honor bound to my family and our shared duty but I’ve also been told over and over again that I cannot let it consume me.” He pauses, lips twisting as his shoulders hunch just a bit.

If she didn’t know better she’d say he looked… bashful.

“And, well.” He clears his throat. “As Grayson is so fond of telling me, sometimes the loyalties of the heart weigh heavier than those of blood.”

Well now Marinette is really blushing.

“Oh,” she says eloquently and Robin nods stiffly in response. “Well that’s…” she clears her own throat too. Then, with a spark of courage, she reaches out to grab his hand and holds it between both of hers. She stares down at it, smiling as her heart tap dances away in her chest. “I’ve found that often to be the case as well. Dick seems to know what he’s talking about.”

“Yes,” he agrees wryly. “I suppose this time he had.”

She huffs a soft laugh, barely audible over the distant sirens on the streets below. They’re quiet for a long moment, absorbing the things that had just been said.

“Marinette, I…” he starts abruptly and she looks up to meet his eyes.

He’s serious and intense and so achingly earnest in a way he so rarely is that she squeezes the hand she’s holding reassuringly. “Yes?”

His hand twists between her own, moving to grip her back tightly. Like if he’s not holding her she’ll disappear. “It wasn’t my intention to cause you distress. I don’t ever mean to cause you distress, now or in the future, but I fear I will continue to do so unintentionally. I’m not… good at this, at people. But I hope you’ll forgive me, even when I’m an ass and insist I’ve done nothing that needs forgiving, because I- Because you’re-” he stops, opens and closes his mouth. Then, almost desperately, “Well you must know.”

She can’t see his eyes behind the mask, but she knows him. Knows him twice over, learned and relearned his quirks and habits and nuances. His eyes are wide and bright and filled with an emotion she hadn't known what to name until this very moment.

She steps closer to him, until there is barely any space between them, until she feels more than hears the breath catch in his chest. She can’t imagine she’s much better, with the way her heart pounds against her ribcage hard enough that there’s no way he can’t hear it.

“Of course I know,” she assures, soft and quiet into the space between them, slipping her hand out of his so she can cup his cheek and curl the tips of her fingers around the back of his neck. “And do you?”

He almost seems to sway towards her, like he can’t physically stop himself, like he doesn’t want to, and something so unbearably warm and fond burns to life in her chest.

“Yes,” he says, like a promise, like a plea. “Can I…?”

Their lips are barely a hair’s breadth from one another, she can feel the ghost of warmth on her lips and-

“Oh, are we interrupting something?” a voice says, too loud, shattering the moment into a thousand, itty-bitty pieces. Marinette jumps and knocks her head against Robin’s, making them both yelp.

She whips around to find Red Hood and Orphan—Jason and Cass—standing on the edge of the roof, looking at them both with gleeful amusement. Or she assumes, since both of them have their faces completely covered.

Grumpily, she rubs at her forehead and glares. “What are you doing here?”

“The Demon Spawn wasn’t responding to comms,” Jason—Red Hood?—says, tapping the side of his helmet. “Considering he’s supposed to be on roundup duty, B got a little worried.”

Cass pulls off her mask to grin toothily at them. “Playing hooky, little bird?”

“I was… distracted,” Robin says gruffly, crossing his arms. Then his eyes flick to Marinette, and something about his posture softens, just the smallest amount. “A more important matter required my attention.”

Marinette smiles at him, red staining her cheeks.

“Cute,” Hood says but in a way that he actually just means ‘gross’.

Cass hits him in the arm so Marinette doesn't have to walk over there and do it herself. “We’re happy for you.”

“Ecstatic,” Hood intones. “Can’t wait to give Tim the twenty bucks I owe him now.”

Cass tilts her head. “Alfred didn’t win?”

“Only because he didn’t bet,” Hood explains. “Also I’m not stupid. I learned years ago not to bet against Alfred. The man never loses.”

He likely wouldn’t, Marinette thinks, not with his affinity for truths. Alfred’s ability to just know things is on par with Alix—better even, since he’s had longer to hone it than her.

Then the conversation catches up with her. “Wait,” she says, pointing at Hood, “Did you bet against us?”

He has the audacity to shrug. “Not really. Just thought you two would pine after each other for at least another month.”

She opens her mouth to say something to that but her phone, which had been intermittently vibrating in her purse for the past few minutes, begins to play Everybody Wants to Be a Cat. Quickly, she pulls it out.

“Did you find Luka?”

“Huh?” Adrien stalls from the other end. “Oh, yeah. We updated the chat ages ago, he’s being treated now. Him and Chloé will probably need a cuddle pile tonight, but they’ll be fine.”

Marinette sighs in relief. “That’s good.” She’s heard stories of people going mad from Scarecrow’s toxin and, if she’s being honest, Luka has a lot more reasons to go mad than anyone in her Court. He doesn’t talk much about the things he’s seen in the timelines that don’t exist anymore, but she knows that it haunts him sometimes.

“Yeah, it’s great,” Adrien says dismissively, but not unkindly. “That’s not actually why I called.”

Marinette’s brows furrow. “Then why did you-”

“NETTIE!” she flinches away from the sound of Nino shouting directly into her ear. The three vigilantes around her look mildly startled. “I cannot believe you chose the bird! I was rooting for the rich kid! Do you know how much money I had riding on him being your pick?”

Marinette blinks, but before she can form a response, there’s the brief sound of a scuffle, and then Adrien is talking again. “Don’t listen to him, Bugaboo. We’re happy with whoever makes you happy.”

In the background of the call she hears Nino again. “You’re only saying that ‘cause you put fifty on Robin!”

“Hold up,” Marinette interrupts, pinching the bridge of her nose and pointedly ignoring how many of her friends have been betting on love life. “How do you guys even know that I-” Well, not that she finally picked because she didn’t really, which is something she’ll have to figure out how to explain later—but that’s a problem for Future-Marinette. “About me and Robin?”

“Felix, Nath, and Tim are still stuck on the ferris wheel,” Adrien relays and she turns around to face it incredulously. It’s at least five blocks away. “Tim brought one of his fancy photographer cameras to take pictures with and it has a miraculous zoom distance on it.”

Right as he says that, she catches the glint of what must be Tim’s camera lens.

Damn snitches. She flips them off.

Not a moment later, the sky above the ferris wheel shifts just enough for her to see the stars now read ‘R+M forever’ surrounded by a heart. She presses the phone between her ear and shoulder so she can flip them off with both hands, even as she knows that a photo of her doing so will inevitably end up framed somewhere in her apartment.

“I hate all of you.”

“You love us~” both Adrien and Nino singsong over the phone. She hangs up when Nino starts actually singing Kissing in a Tree while Adrien makes accompanying kissy noises. Focusing back in on the three vigilantes in front of her, she finds Jason’s taken off his helmet while Robin looks at her expectantly.

“What was that all about?”

She huffs as she shoves her phone back into her purse. “Tim’s been spying on us with his camera and told all my friends about it. So that cat’s out of the bag.”

“Pixie-pop,” Jason says, falsely sympathetic. “The cat was already out of the bag.”

“Well, I was at least hoping to figure out how to explain all of this,” she waves her hand, hoping to encompass the whole situation, “without spilling all your secrets, so.” She groans. “This is going to be such a mess.”

“Perhaps,” Robin agrees, grabbing her hand to hold tenderly in his own and smiles. “But I’m quite happy with how things turned out.”

The smile she gives him is wry, but no less happy. “This is mostly your fault, you know. You should at least help me clean it up.”

“Of course,” he agrees easily. “And every mess after that, too, for as long as you’ll have me.”

It’s such a romantic notion, with an edge of devotion that she hadn’t quite expected to come so plainly from his mouth, not when he hides everything so close to his chest. So Marinette does the only thing she can in the face of something like that. 

She grabs the sides of Robin's—Damian's—hood and finally pulls him into a kiss.

He's surprised for all of a second before his hands are on her hips and his mouth is moving against hers, intense and warm and adoring. She pulls away, aware that they have an audience and very much not wanting to give them a free show. Damian sways after her, chasing her lips for another peck before stopping to press his forehead against hers.

Jason is gagging while Cass claps excitedly. Someone, distantly, yells ‘fucking finally!’ over the rooftops while Nathaniel makes fireworks explode soundlessly in the air above them, the unsubtly bastard. 

"Yeah," she says, into the night air surrounded by people she loves and is loved by in return, with even more scattered but near enough for her to be content. She can't see Damian's eyes through his mask, but she doesn't need to. "I think I like the sound of that."