Delighted shrieks decorate the small living room, accompanied by one breathless and excited five year old. Tiny feet patter against the ground as they make a beeline for the window, and decisive hands shove the curtains aside to reveal Paris winking back in silvery white sparkles.
She presses her face right up against the clear glass, cheeks smushed in a smile against the sting of the cold, her blue eyes enormous in her face as she watches the world outside become as deliciously powdered as Papa's madeleines.
Seeing is not nearly enough. All winter long, there have only been bitter rains and grimy slush. Now, fat, lazy snowflakes drift down in elegant twirls, just begging to be caught on eyelashes and waiting tongues.
Marinette doesn't waste another moment. Pink socked feet clamber into equally pink boots, and her arms thrust carelessly into her jacket before a large hand and a chuckle stops her.
"Hold on now, you're missing something," Tom grins at her. He turns the jacket right side out and watches in amusement as Marinette impatiently dances on the spot as she properly zips up, her puffed out cheeks already flushing in anticipation.
"Ready?" she implores, gazing up at him with devastating power in her wide, pleading eyes.
Usually, Tom buckles. Instantly. Instead, he draws up a pair of bright red mittens attached together by a long string of sturdy yarn, the kind of mittens that defy becoming lost, and watches as her expression grows soft and round with captivated wonder.
"Thanks, Papa," Marinette squeals, throwing her tiny arms around as much as she can reach. Hugging her pa is like hugging a mountain: an impossibility that she effortlessly conquers with fierce enthusiasm and will.
The mittens, impossibly tiny in his huge hands, slip onto hers in a perfect fit.
With no further delay, she zips out of the apartment and darts out of the bakery, gasping as the cold sharpens against her face, and smiling as snowflakes drift down to examine the speckles already peppered across her nose and cheeks. Hands reach to the sky, to the ground, to everything that she can touch and explore.
The bakery door swings open somewhere far behind her, the bell singing of Tom's arrival before his steps crunch down on the packed snow.
She turns and waves at him, one mitten already freed from a hand and swinging merrily from its connecting string like a bright red pendulum. Snow muffles the world around them, simplifying time into the slow pulse of red.
"Wait up for your ol' Pa," Tom laughs before gently catching the swinging mitten in the calloused palm of his hand.
Delighted, Marinette tugs him along the red heartline strung between them, fearlessly leading him forward into the unknown.
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There is only one person who knows Marinette can sing, and that is Nino.
"I can't sing," Marinette protests stubbornly, twin spots of flustered red high on her cheeks that say otherwise. "I don't sing."
Instead of pointing out the glaring difference between can't and don't, Nino just tilts his head up to the sky, casually nudges the brim of his cap, and hums, "So if you're goin' my way- that's the roooad you wanna seek!"
"I'm not-" Marinette huffs, crossing her arms. Her fingers tap to the beat. "Damn Nino, you're a good singer."
"Calcutta to Rome; or home, sweet home, in Paris, magnifique, you all!" he hums in response, glasses flashing a challenge as he finally grins down on her.
"Nino…"
"I only got myself, and this big oooool' world." His teeth flash white against the dark of his skin, baring his second challenge. "But I sip that cup of life, with my fingers cuuurled!" His hand juts out, pinky pompously extended in an exaggerated swagger, waiting.
Third challenge thrown; and hook, line, sinker.
Marinette stomps over, hooks her pinky with his, and yanks his hand down so she can sing straight to his face, "I don't worry what road to take, I don't have to think of that; whatever I take is the road I make, it's the road of life make no mistake!" Her enunciation snarls back in Nino's face, but her eyes spark to the beat and her warm, smooth voice rises and falls in powerful waves, edged with the effervescent foam of her clear vibrato.
The smile that splits Nino's face is less triumphant and more excitement. His pinky slides free of hers and he tosses his hands out in front of him, flicking his fingers to the beat as he effortlessly begins beatboxing a fluid rhythm for her to crest upon.
If Marinette is startled, she doesn't show it. She tosses her head back, grins at his improvisation, and continues singing, "For me, yeah! Abraham De Lacy, Guiseppe Casey, Thomas O'Malley- O'Malley, the alley cat!"
She dissolves into bubbles of laughter as Nino beatboxes a few moments longer, applauding as he finishes with a flourish.
Before she can comment on his impressive skills, he beats her to the punch. "You so can sing."
Marinette only crosses her arms, lifts an eyebrow up, and mulishly remains silent. Nino knows she's got stubbornness down to an art, and so resorts to baser tactics.
"Could you help me with some of my mixes?" he asks a little hesitantly. There's not much that Nino will truly devote himself to going after, but when he sees a golden opportunity- or a golden voice- he's not about to let it slide right by.
Luckily, it's Marinette. Marinette, who understands the impulse of creativity, who so often takes charge, but who also knows that this is his turf he's inviting her to step up to and share in.
She softens in the face of his vulnerability and nods, "Alright." Nino exhales, relieved. "Is this for anything in particular?"
He tells her. He might be over his crush on her, but there's no denying that her wide, inquisitive eyes in that shade of striking ocean blue can still yank his feet from under him in a powerful undertow. Particulars aren't needed; at the mention of, "I'm trying to get an apprenticeship at this recording studio-" Marinette rises to the occasion like a tidal wave, determined to help him however she can.
They spend sporadic weekends together, sometimes even staying at school during lunch to work out a new tune or a experiment with a new rhythm. They improvise well together, and the work is always more fun than arduous. Marinette's voice weaves playfully through his beatboxing, ebbing and flowing enough to stand out one moment and fade to let him shine the next.
Nino's sure he's never mixed a better album of songs. Collaborating with Marinette is natural, easy, and they end up high fiving with shared grins at the end of a satisfying recording session.
The only thing she asks of him is to keep her singing something between them. In some ways, Nino doesn't understand this; he knows she has a talent, one that can so easily be shared and celebrated. But in other ways, he gets that despite her openness and expressiveness, Marinette can be a very private person. He's chill with it either way, and zips his lips shut.
Of course, when he gets green-lit for the apprenticeship, he goes a step further to thank Marinette for her assistance.
"Nino…" Marinette gapes as she lifts a pair of headphones from the box, her lips twitching- in amusement or ire, he can't really tell. "I can't believe you."
"Thomas O'Malley," he sings, laughing as Marinette turns to swat him, "O'Malley, the alley cat!"
The headphones are ostentatious already with embedded lights encircling the earpads, but what really takes the cake are the set of cat ears built along the headband: thick, sturdy, and studded with speakers that light up-
"Blue," Marinette laughs incredulously. "You got me light up blue cat headphones."
Nino only grins, attaches the chord of the headphones to his phone, switches a flick, and watches her expression brighten like the sun breaking open across the dark of a new day as his beatboxing fills the air, emanating from the cat ear speakers.
Despite her laughter, Marinette slings the headphones up on her head, lifts her chin high, and sings, "I don't worry what road to take, I don't have to think of that! Whatever I take is the road I make: it's the road of life, make no~o mistake-"
"-for me, yeah!" they yowl together at the end, snorting in laughter before high fiving.
The cheshire grin that spreads across her face and dimples her cheeks, Nino notes, matches her new headphones perfectly.
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When Alix hands Marinette a set of black, sturdy kneepads, Marinette takes them with no small amount of confusion.
"For the next time," Alix explains without preamble, a wicked grin unfurling across her face, "you dive bomb your way on top of Adri-"
"Aaaarrghh Alix!" Marinette shrieks as she leaps to shush her friend.
Cackling in glee, Alix high fives Alya while effortlessly sidestepping Marinette's lunge- just in time for the aforementioned boy to scoop an armful of one flailing, sputtering girl.
The kneepads clatter to the ground uselessly, but Alix supposes Marinette won't really need them if Adrien is always there to catch her.
"Ditching the gloves was a good idea," Alya nudges Alix before picking the kneepads back up and slinging them together for Marinette to collect later.
"Yeah," Alix snorts, unimpressed with the painful awareness and humming tension thrumming between a brilliantly red Marinette and obliviously concerned Adrien. "Marinette has a thing for his chest, doesn't she?"
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Over the years, Rose has been told she gives rather unusual gifts. Great gifts- but definitely unconventional. Her only response to that observation is to hum lightheartedly, smile sweetly, and hand the gift in question over to the expectant- if wary- recipient.
Her sentiments are always wholehearted and genuine, and more often than not on the side of sincere rather than vindictive or snarky (though- Juleka could potentially offer the argument of subtle deviousness, if anyone can ever pry that sort of information from her).
Which is why, come Marinette's seventeenth birthday, Rose's gift is received with appreciation, seasoned well with a heavy blush and furtive glance at their other friends joking and talking around them.
"Rose, this is beautiful," Marinette draws her attention with a low murmur. "I don't- I mean, how did- is the size-?"
Her stuttering is a surprise to Rose, who knows Marinette to be confident, if not charged with the way she articulates herself.
Then again, gifting Marinette with a lacy, strappy, black bralette in the middle of all their collège friends might have made her understandably uncomfortable. All at once, Rose hurries to soothe her concerns.
"Alya helped me with size," Rose tells her blithely, drawing the attention of said girl to sling an arm around Marinette, laughing and rubbing cheeks with her. "Juleka helped me with the style-" Juleka stands by Rose's side like a pale shadow, but a pleased smirk edges on her face as Rose slips an arm around her waist, "- and Adrien helped me with the brand!"
A horrendous squawk emits from Marinette's mouth as she slaps the lid of the gift shut over the bralette, her face bright enough to single-handedly light the room up in glowing red. The noise attracts the attention of everyone else in the room, and Rose rushes to divert the focus once more.
"Only the girls know," she tells Marinette kindly, and it's like popping a bursting balloon. Air wheezes out of Marinette in ungraceful gasps, and Alya slaps her back in concern.
After coughing to clear her throat, Marinette sends Rose a weak smile. "Thank you, it really is a beautiful gift."
"I like to think it's nice to have a surprise hidden beneath every now and then!" Rose chirps back brightly. When Juleka nudges her side, she backtracks and almost wilts at how she potentially made things awkward again; but instead of embarrassment contorting Marinette's features, she looks a touch speculative, as if chewing on a new thought and deciding whether or not she liked the flavour.
Alya, on the other hand, looks positively gleeful.
The next get-together, a picnic at the park near their old collège, sees Marinette sporting a casual black top with a neckline low enough to show the black straps of her bralette slinging over the top of her breasts, edging onto her upper chest. It's subtle, sexy, and classy all rolled into one look, and Rose makes it a point of delightedly saying so to her. Marinette only laughs and hugs her tight, thanking her again for the gift.
"It's really comfortable," Marinette smiles, her fingers tracing the satin straps absentmindedly.
"Well," Rose laughs, pleased as she catches sight of an extremely flustered Adrien and a smug Nino from behind Marinette. "I'm glad, at least, that you find it to be so."
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Ladybug lands and ducks under the awning on her balcony before releasing her transformation, automatically cupping her hands together to catch Tikki as she whirls out of the earrings in complete exhaustion.
Despite the aches in her muscles and the bruises stiffening her limbs, Marinette holds Tikki protectively, carefully, as she eases them both through the trapdoor and onto the soft landing pad of her bed.
"Oh Marinette, I'm supposed to look after you," Tikki sighs as she weakly flutters up to inspect the purpling whorls stained across Marinette's skin.
"But then who'll look after you?" Marinette answers with a frown, pulling up a container of Tikki's favourite cookies. As the kwami dives for the food, Marinette continues, "Are you ok? That akuma landed a lot more hits than usual."
The akuma had whooped her ass for the better part of the afternoon, and though the suit had absorbed most of the impact, the suit was also Tikki. Even the Miraculous cleansing at the end could only minimize so much of the damage to the both of them right away since most of the magic went towards fixing everything else. Only time and repowered magic could speed the recovery of any lingering injuries.
"I'm fine, Marinette," Tikki assures her with a brighter chirp, munching on her cookie. Her sore body trembles slightly, though she is careful to hide that from her chosen.
When Marinette commits to carrying all of Paris on her strong, slim shoulders, she means it, right down to every last soul that looks up to her and Chat Noir.
The little god looks at Marinette with fondness and wonder, and muses when the hearts of humans had become so very colossal.
As Marinette brushes her bangs aside and winces at the large bruise on her forehead before giggling that hey, they match now even without the suit on, Tikki amends her thought. Not every chosen wears the spots well, but Marinette's known how it feels to fall, to bruise, and to get back up long before Tikki came. The art of perseverance is one Marinette is intimately familiar with.
Ladybug's suit, Tikki knows, is simply the same as the one Marinette has always worn.
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When Marinette makes it a habit of coming home with grubby hands cupped around some treasure or other that she's picked up, and with her clothes stained and repurposed into makeshift containers, Sabine doesn't scold.
She wipes Marinette's face clean, finds a box for her wonders, and takes the hint.
The next day sees Sabine plucking her bag of fabric scraps open on the kitchen table next to a large stack of Marinette's clothes. The precocious child rises on tip toes before clambering up on a stool to gleefully examine the innumerable patterns and colours sprawled over the tabletop, a veritable treasure trove.
Sabine thinks that in another life, Marinette might have been a magpie. Except it's not just shiny objects the young child is drawn to, but anything that arrests her attention long enough to decide that it's worth holding onto.
Marinette may be flighty, in the way small children often are, but she is also decisive in what she likes. Experience teaches Sabine this well, from the way Marinette chatters brightly about all the five-leaf clovers she just had to find, and the shiny bottle caps that would gleam the prettiest silver when the stickers peel off.
That is how Sabine knows Marinette to be truly like Tom: they are both inspired best through touch.
Each scrap of fabric passes through small, curious fingers, and as Sabine draws her own square towards her waiting sewing needle and a pair of Marinette's overalls, she watches her child sift through the vast selection before her with growing purpose.
As Sabine patiently sews the square onto the soft denim, Marinette pushes a delicate pink square dotted with blue stars on top of a folded daisy yellow shirt. With the singularly intense concentration of a child devoted to the task at hand, Marinette makes her selection and places them on top of the waiting pile of clothes.
Sabine takes the hint, and matches the squares accordingly as she sews on pocket after pocket.
They see great use, and Marinette wears the patchwork on her clothes with glee, filling the pockets up often enough that they frequently fray and give out. After some hesitation, Sabine relents to Marinette's enthusiastic pleas to help. Patience guides Sabine into teaching Marinette how to thread a needle and knot the ends, how to darn and repair the holes, how to sew a strong running stitch and backstitch to anchor off.
Marinette takes to sewing like a duck to water. Despite her characteristic clumsiness, she is nothing but deft and fluid with the colours and textures sliding through her hands.
Some parents look at their children's homework to see the growth in their writing; Sabine looks no further than the stitches anchoring the pockets in all of Marinette's clothes.
"I like being able to do this myself," Marinette tells her one day years later, with the sort of independence young teenagers covet. A smile flashes across her face. "I can always trust my stitches. Yours too, Maman. They'll never give out."
There is a sort of nostalgia that Sabine takes from her daughter's words, to hear her faith in her mother's sewing despite the fact that Sabine hasn't sewn her clothes in years.
Somewhere along the way, Marinette started constructing inner pockets, hidden pockets, reinforcing her stitches with double threaded upholstery nylon.
Sabine mourns the younger days, the carefree days. Wonders at the strength Marinette needs to keep her secrets.
Sometimes, Marinette tells her. Of mint leaves she tucks away, of impossibly soft white down feathers she collects, of tiny bells fallen from cat collars that she keeps. In true fashion, she often forgets or loses said objects throughout the day; but the idea, the inspiration, stays. These are small secrets she shares; safe secrets.
It is enough for Sabine to wonder what her daughter is hiding- or protecting- from her.
What Marinette doesn't tell her, Sabine often finds hints when she does laundry. Dirt used to dye all the threads of the exuberant pockets from Marinette's childhood. Ink splotches takes their place when inspiration strikes and designs start flowing. Cookie crumbles appear at an alarming rate, wedged between stitches with perplexing persistence.
They never seem to disappear, the cookie crumbles. Not an odd thing, for a baker's daughter, though it seems strange that they appear most in the inner pockets sewn with heavy duty industrial strength thread.
A few years down the road, hints of cheese start cropping up alongside the cookies. From the way it stains the inner cloth, Sabine guesses it to be brie, or camembert.
Sabine lingers, but doesn't pry. She trusts Marinette will tell her when she's ready.
The secrets that Marinette keeps smudge across the threads, staining the pockets and wearing the fabric thin; but even after all this time, the stitches Sabine taught her long ago hold strong, steady, and true.
AN: This story is cross posted on my AO3 and tumblr account (my username is matchaball for both!) with links to particular clothes/accessories. This site is incredibly awful with links so I'm not even going to try to put them here.
School's started up again for me, so this fic is a rather self-indulgent breather since it's really a collection of drabbles with little care to continuity. They're all unrelated to each other, and Marinette's age sort of ranges depending on the person, but I try to make it clear how old she is if she's an age other than her 15-year-old self.
If you have a favourite, I'd love to know who you liked :) I'd love to know too if you think any of my characterization is off! This is all supposed to be a patchwork character study of Marinette but the irony is I'm basically doing character studies of literally everyone else before actually getting to her in the process.
The unfortunate thing is that I don't have the entire story written (though it is all planned!), so updates won't be as often or as consistent as my last fic. I'm also in the process of planning/writing a flowershop/tattoo artist au that I'm super super super excited to share hopefully in the near future as well! I'm going to try to update this once a week, but it may vary depending on how heavy my schoolwork gets. Happy reading!