Chapter Text
Felix lifted the trap door and climbed the last few steps into Marinette’s bedroom. He had been here several times to work on group projects for school and, as before, the room wrapped him in the sweet scented muffling of pastry laden air, stacks of half finished sewing projects, and an abundance of pink. Despite her shyness, clumsiness, and occasional awkward behavior, he generally found Marinette to be organized as a class representative and incredibly competent in everything she put her mind to, so to be confronted by such clutter was always a bit confusing.
“How am I supposed to find her sketchbook in this mess?” he asked himself, carefully lifting a stack of cut-out fabric pieces to check under it.
“Beats me,” Plagg grumbled from inside his shirt collar. “But you know you can’t say no to Bakery Girl when she bats her eyes at you, lover boy!”
Felix rolled his eyes and scoffed. “Please.”
“You think her babbling is cute,” the kwami said, smugly. “And she might stammer her way through a conversation with you, but you like it. You’re a sucker for her. Admit it, kid.”
Felix twitched his shoulders uncomfortably as he sorted through a stack of notebooks. “Her social anxiety is not pertinent to this conversation and there is nothing to admit. Mr Dubois paired us for this assignment. Her home is conveniently closer to the library, making studying here more practical. It is also practical as there is a presentation display required for the project and Ms Dupain-Cheng already has a lot of crafting supplies. She happens to be busy with outlining the display board right now and it is expedient to divide our resources. Since I am not creative-“
“Heh, understatement of the year,” Plagg interjected with a rude noise. “Besides, I know you can see those pictures from your last photoshoot on her board there. That doesn’t ring any bells at all?”
Felix brushed that aside. “Irrelevant. Ms Dupain-Cheng wants to be a fashion designer, so it makes sense she would have some of Father’s work on her inspiration board. It also makes perfect sense for me to assist in our project by retrieving her sketch book,” he finished, nearly in a growl at his kwami’s teasing. “She said it was pink, but which pink? Every other thing in here seems to be pink!”
With a frustrated sigh, Plagg emerged from Felix’s collar and phased through the piles of items on Marinette’s desk.
“Not here,” he said, crossing his paws.
Felix frowned. “Alright, you check the chaise and I’ll look by her bed.”
Plagg shrugged and did as he asked for once without complaint or begging for a cheese bribe.
Setting that particular oddity aside to examine later, Felix climbed the metal stairs that led up to Marinette’s loft bed. Above the head of the bed were two narrow shelves which held books, a vase of paper flowers, a conch shell, a little lamp with a purple glass shade, and a charger for her phone, but no notebook. There was another cork board here that also held pictures of her friends, her parents, a postcard bearing the picture of an Indian Bazaar, and several of himself.
Both of him.
There was a picture of him giving a speech at school, gesturing to his right towards a slide that was just out of frame. There was one from the latest photo shoot with him in a chocolate suede duster coat and a charcoal scarf on a snowy day. Then there were several shots that had clearly been printed off the Ladyblog.
Shots of him as Chat Noir.
Huh, he thought, slightly confused as to why Marinette, a reasonably logical girl by most standards, would have pictures of Chat Noir on her bulletin board. Well, they are next to the fashion pictures, so… maybe she is inspired by the design of my suit?
That seemed unlikely and he would have undoubtedly been able to ignore the strangeness of her having pictures of both his personas next to her bed if it hadn’t been for the plushie.
Carefully placed in the center of her pillow, stubby little arms spread wide as if awaiting an embrace, was a Chat Noir plushie. This was no generic, mass produced fan merch. This was a soft, cuddly-looking figure with an oversized head, a wild mane made from scraps of yellow fleece, and embroidered green eyes in the same exact shade that Felix had often seen from behind the mask.
Before he realized it, the thing was in his hands. The detail was incredible for something only one-eighth his size. The smug smile, the silver embroidery on his baton tucked away at the small of its back, even the soles of its little feet had tiny paw prints. Not the hands. Just the feet.
And the bell? It was made of the same fleece as the mop of hair with white embroidery to mimic shine. The material was incredibly soft to the touch - even with the pilling that often occurred when fabric was consistently rubbed.
Rubbed. Like it had been held… stroked… cuddled.
For several seconds all Felix was aware of was the squishy form in his hands and a blur of white noise.
Marinette had made herself a Chat Noir doll. Not bought, not been given, but had chosen to make it. More than that, she had done it with such elaborate care to every little detail, proving she had studied Chat - studied him. Not many people knew about the paw pads on his boots. He hadn’t even been aware of them for the first year he and Ladybug were fighting Hawkmoth. In fact, it hadn’t been until he got knocked head first into a mound of gelatinous resin by an akuma that Ladybug had noticed them and teased him that he had found out at all.
But Marinette, with her artist’s eye and her designer’s touch, had crafted his hero persona in such loving detail and… slept with it in her bed? Did that mean she… liked Chat Noir?
She does have pictures of him… me… on her bulletin board, Felix thought, frantically trying to cram pieces of a puzzle together in his head without having all of them or even the box lid to guide him. And Chat is attractive enough - my popularity as a model is evidence of that. But for Marinette to…cuddle it?
Felix had never had cause to resort to what others crudely, and inaccurately, described as a mental reboot, but he did now.
“Whoa! Found yourself a little friend, did you, kid?” Plagg sniggered, jarring Felix from his mental spiral with all the elegance of being born. “Pigtails did you proud. The stitching, the attention to detail-“
“Plagg,” Felix hissed, his throat strangely tight as if a fist was lodged there. “What does this mean? Why would Marinette have a plush figure of Chat Noir?!”
He noted, with some small, undistracted corner of his mind, that he sounded panicked. While he hated to admit it, that was not an unreasonable assumption.
Plagg smirked and rolled his eyes. “How should I know? I’m just a kwami. You, on the other hand, are a human and know all about your strange, pre-mating rituals.”
“Mating rituals?!” Felix’s voice cracked for the first time since puberty. The fact that he did this in what amounted to a whisper-shriek merely added fuel to his already burning cheeks.
He stared at the doll of himself, his mind’s eye suddenly, and unhelpfully, superimposing over reality a scene of Marinette cuddling it, whispering secrets, and kissing it goodnight. And all while wearing something of pink silk, edged in lace, and entirely not something he should be visualizing.
Could Marinette… be in love with him? With Chat Noir?
“Better pull your tongue back in, Casanova,” Plagg said smugly tucking himself back inside Felix’s collar. “Pigtails is coming up the stairs.”
Heart pounding in sudden panic, Felix stuffed the doll under the pink pillow, threw himself over the railing of her loft, and just managed to stick a loud and partially dignified landing just before the trap door opened.
The bluest eyes in the world looked at him in surprise and confusion.
“F-Felix,” Marinette stammered, her cheeks tinged with pink. “Are you okay?”
The image of Marinette wearing a silky nightgown and cuddling the Chat Noir doll dropped before his mind’s eye again most inconveniently.
Felix cleared his throat with what he hoped sounded like a dry cough instead of his choking on his own tongue.
“Yes,” he replied, rather hurriedly. “Why do you ask?”
Her eyes flicked between him and the desk behind him. “Th-The thump? I mean, there was a thump as I was coming up the stairs and…”
“Ah, yes. I…” He scrambled for a reasonable excuse. “I knocked my knee against the desk.”
Felix looked at her. She looked at him. An awkward silence settled on them like a certain plushie wrapped in a weighted blanket. The slight jiggling of Plagg smothering laughter inside his shirt collar adding to his crumpled dignity.
“I couldn’t find your sketchbook,” he blurted out, afraid that if he didn’t find something innocuous to say to fill the silence, then questions about the doll would pour from his lips in streams of humiliation.
Marinette just looked at him in confusion, her lips slightly parted and her head becomingly tilted to one side.
Oh no. She’s adorable, he thought, brain backfiring on all cylinders. When did I start thinking of her as adorable? I have to get out of here!
Thrusting his hand into his pocket, Felix pulled out his cell phone, pretended to mash the button, and held it to his ear.
“Yes? I see,” he said, hoping she didn’t realize he was faking it. “Yes, I will meet you there. Goodbye.” He looked at Marinette and gave her what probably amounted to a pained grimace. “I have to go. Last minute photoshoot. I will complete the research on my end and send it to you as soon as it is done. Alright?”
Felix realized he had said that much too fast to be either polite or dignified, but it was the first excuse he could think of. And why did she look disappointed? Was it about the project, his curt breaking off of their time, or…
“Oh,” Marinette said, her eyes finding the floor and giving his composure a slight reprieve. “Yeah, sure.”
“My apologies,” he said, awkwardly. “I…”
“It’s o-okay. I understand, F-Felix.” she said with a one-sided shrug. “You b-better g-go. You d-don’t want to be late, though I’m s-s-sure the shoot will g-g-go well. You d-do good work.”
Now he felt guilty about more than just seeing the doll.
“Yes, well, I will see you tomorrow,” he mumbled and beat a hasty retreat to the trap door.
Felix kept silent on the ride home, but that didn’t stop his mind from betraying him with vivid imaginings of Marinette cooing, cuddling, and whispering secrets to his plush counterpart. Felix cleared his throat several times and if his driver noticed how red his face had grown, the man wisely said nothing.
He could feel Plagg twitching with suppressed laughter in his shirt collar all the way home, knowing the little menace was just waiting until they were alone to break loose with a snarky commentary.
Sure enough, as soon as his bedroom door closed behind him, the kwami flew out into the open with a burst of laughter so hearty one could almost presume it had propelled him out of hiding.
“Hohoho! Boy, kid! You are a mess!” Plagg exclaimed, clutching his stomach with his tiny paws and his eyes squinted shut with laughter. “I mean, it was fun watching you dance around Bakery Girl like an explosion waiting to happen. But today? You are a delightful, chaotic, nervous blush-fest and it’s all because of a doll!”
Felix groaned. As much as he wanted to lash out at his kwami’s outrageous teasing, Plagg’s assessment was unfortunately too accurate to dismiss.
***
The next day, Felix found himself staring at Marinette. Watching… as if he was waiting for something of which he wasn’t consciously aware. From the moment she skidded into class with two seconds to spare to the way she smiled nervously at him when they were dismissed for lunch, he was focussed on her. It was if that blasted doll had coded his eyes and mind to Marinette and her alone. Everything else smeared by him in a grey blur, but she was there is all her vivid, high definition, technicolor glory.
And Felix was wrecked inside.
“Hey, F-F-Felix,” she stammered, her cheeks pink and her thumb rubbing anxiously against her bag strap in an adorable nervous tick. “How d-did the photoshoot go yesterday?”
“Photoshoot? What photoshoot?” Felix blinked, trying desperately to banish the memory of the little plush Chat Noir lounging idly on Marinette’s pillow.
She frowned. Uh oh. He had missed something, hadn’t he?
“That’s what you said yesterday,” she murmured, confused and maybe a trifle hurt?
Blast! Felix thought, mind scrambling to catch up. The photoshoot! I lied about it to get out of there before she saw me panicking over a plush toy!
“Oh, yes. The photoshoot,” he said, faster and louder than was his norm. “You know how these things go. Boring, chaotic, utterly forgettable.”
Not to mention completely fake!
The fact that particular line of inner dialog sounded like something Plagg would say did nothing to help his state of mind.
The frown cleared from her brow and a slight smile returned to her lips. Felix fought off the image of those lips kissing a certain fleece mop of yellow hair.
“Well, I can’t wait to see the pictures,” Marinette said. “You make them look good.”
She paused for a second then her mouth fell open as if she had been thumped on the back of the head with a particularly dense textbook.
“N-N-Not that you d-d-don’t always look good,” she blurted out in a rush. “You do. I mean, you could make a paper bag look like high fashion - not that you would ever do that. Wear a paper bag. You wear normal things like shirts. That shirt - wow! You wear it nice. It’s very textile. No, wait! That isn’t what I meant! I meant it’s very fashion. Fashionable. You’re wearing it and I noticed!”
Felix stared at her in abject confusion as her face passed through half the color spectrum and may have been on its way into the ultraviolet. Her dainty hands crept up to cover her mouth. Either that or strangle herself. What with how she was trembling, it was hard to tell.
“I… suppose that is true of shirts,” he said, his heart pounding harder in his chest than was warranted by Marinette’s awkward compliment.
She nodded and from behind her hands came words in the tiniest of squeaks. “You shirt well.”
Then all semblance of coherence vanished and she sprinted away from him like a fawn escaping a hunter’s arrow.
Felix watched her escape with a bewildered sigh. Marinette found no comfort in his presence, only confusion, embarrassment, and awkwardness.
No wonder she preferred the plush Chat Noir.
He could feel Plagg smothering his laughter against his collarbone.
“Kid, you may not get the girl,” the kwami whispered so only Felix could hear him. “But this is comedy gold!”