Fifty-Eight: Dreaming Up A Plan
Author's Note: Chat grapples with the unintended consequences of Ladybug's conversation with Rena – and discovers the only thing crazier might well be what his sleep-deprived feline brain concocts. Of course, Ladybug would never go for it… right?
Three dozen chocolate chip cookies, six loafs of French bread and a dozen croissants later, I was laying on the couch with Marinette curled on top of me, thankfully, we'd finally gotten back to the apartment. It had been Hell getting the Bakery kitchen back in order so Tom could start to work in just a few hours; for the first time in forever, I actually felt like an exhausted kitty. I felt bad for Plagg, knowing he was running on the (admittedly healthy portion of) Camembert I'd given him prior to heading out to meet Carapace many, many hours earlier.
But it had required extensive purr therapy and a half-liter of her favorite ice cream before I'd managed to get her calmed down; my bleary feline eyes wandered to what was left of the second half-liter as it melted atop the coffee table, knowing it had finally provided enough carbs to allow Marinette to nod off to sleep. Not wanting to disturb her had led to my current predicament, though in truth I could have probably dropped my transformation without waking her; each time I got close to trying, though, Mari would stir and sleepily trace some part of my costume with her finger for a moment before gently starting to snore once more.
I figured I could take one for the team and pay Plagg later with the extremely expensive stuff.
Our respective Miraculous had blessed us with such cranked metabolisms we could have likely plowed through the massive pile of baked goods currently sitting on the breakfast bar behind me and still been hungry, though my stomach rebelled slightly at the thought at eating anything else. For it was actually possible I'd polished off nearly a dozen of those oatmeal raisin cookies before we'd even begun to clean up in earnest, and as much as I loved them, I had a feline it would be a long while before I touched another.
Turning my tired masked eyes to the digits above our wall oven, I had trouble focusing on the time displayed before realizing I truly didn't need to know that it was nearly three. Sighing, I knew we both had to go to our respective offices in just a few hours; sleep was not coming easily for me, though, despite the massive yawns that threatened to dislocate my jaw. Not one to normally get stiff when transformed, I nonetheless had a tight muscle in my back and very, very carefully managed to stretch ever so slightly beneath Marinette without waking her. Popping the offending muscle felt amazingly good, and for a moment I thought it would be just enough to take the edge off and allow me to finally drop off.
As soon as I closed my feline eyes, though, my thoughts traitorously returned to the bombshell she'd dropped a few hours earlier. Sighing again, my masked eyes snapped open once more as I put a protective arm over Marinette; reluctantly, I finally allowed myself to revisit the strange situation we now found ourselves in – if anything could be stranger than my lounging on a couch in a cat-themed super-suit with my gorgeous fiancé slowly drooling on my chest.
I wasn't surprised that Alya had asked Marinette to be her Maid of Honor, for their friendship was as old and as deep as mine was with Nino. The two were nearly sisters in my estimation, and though Mari and I hadn't discussed it yet, I fully expected Alya to have the same role at our wedding. Nino had already asked me to be his Best Man, but that had been a request of Adrien; this unusual wrinkle where Alya had decided to throw a superhero wedding was something I'd not seen coming, and based on Marinette's reaction, neither had she.
What had surprised me was Ladybug agreeing; what floored me was this double-wedding concept that had resulted. Pressing my nose in Marinette's hair, I tried to sort through my conflicting issues on all of it. I did want to be part of Nino's wedding, that much wasn't in doubt; doing it as Chat, though? For once in my tenure as the feline superhero, I wasn't sure it was the right call. As a younger kitten, I would have defelinely jumped at the chance for my alter-ego to do something so public, but this seemed wrong – like I would take away from my friend's special day. It was only partially ameliorated with the thought that all four of us would be transformed.
There was no small part of me that desperately wanted Chat to be able to marry Ladybug officially, though, and those emotions – the culmination of years of dreams, really – were hard to set aside in order to consider the situation dispassionately. And, if I were being honest, I wanted that moment between us to be a very special, very private experience, no matter how close I felt I was to Nino and Alya. I couldn't deny I was a tad put out to have to share the spotlight, though being angry with Ladybug for accepting on my behalf couldn't have been further from my thoughts.
Marinette had given me the details between pastry rounds; though she had been reluctant to do a public superhero wedding initially, Alya had convinced her with a clever justification: if Hawkmoth knew we were already married to our soulmates, he might be less likely to seek out our civilian partners to use as leverage, knowing they were already masked up and ready to fight. It had been a carefully calculated argument, and in the heat of the moment, Ladybug had accepted it and the resulting commitment for us to participate. I found myself smiling once more at the simplicity of the argument.
It had failed to account for the already public Chat/Marinette relationship, though, and this more than anything was what had sent Marinette into her frenzy of baking. For in order to marry Chat as Ladybug, Marinette would need to dump Chat (especially since Chat wouldn't have it the other way around). Seeing as though we'd not made any significant progress on the Adrien/Marinette front, she'd uncharacteristically had a brain freeze with respect to digging ourselves out of this self-created mess. Looking at her beautiful long hair, I managed to free up a paw to gently run my claws through it and wondered if there was any way I could come up with something myself. Planning tended to be more in my partner's department, the more complicated the better.
Yawning once more, I wondered if there was any part of what Alya had done to us over Christmas that I could use. Certainly, the photos of Chat and Ladybug getting down on the rooftop of Dupont had gone viral, and from my prowling on the Ladyblog's discussion boards, how it had quickly fanned the flames of speculation that the two of us had unresolved feelings for each other. (I also learned it had a term – LadyNoir – which my partner hated more passionately than my calling her "bugaboo." Purrsonally, I'd fallen in love with the MariChat designation that had been spawned after Alya had caught our first trip to Nice.)
Having lived in the fashion industry for my entire life, though, I knew the value of a solid reputation – and how Chat would suffer in the eyes of Parisians if It were assumed he truly had two-timed Marinette; the same would be true for Marinette, if she were viewed as having treated Chat badly in any way. As a fledgling designer, she wouldn't be able to take the hit of some sort of messy breakup, especially if it happened to be a Hero of Paris. I squeezed my masked eyes shut again, this time against the nascent headache that was threatening to appear, for this truly seemed like a conundrum from which there was no exit. There was a reason I had the ring and not the earrings.
Somewhat sleepily, a funny thought occurred to me — It was a shame Adrien couldn't date Ladybug. Then he could marry her and I could have Marinette. Except, as sleep finally took ahold of me, I had both of them anyway… didn't I? My tired feline brain couldn't remember.
Dreams of Ladybug and I enjoying a late evening repast at a café gave wave to me frolicking in a tall field of grass, merrily chasing after Marinette who shifted between being Ladybug, Multimouse and herself as I pursued her. Another heartbeat and I was cuddled next to her on the beach at Nice, my transformation dropped for once as the two of us enjoyed the sight of the moonlit waves crashing upon the sand below us. One final shift and a much younger version of me was on my favorite rooftop in Paris, surrounded by my candles and rose petals, holding a long stem in my paws.
"I love another boy," Ladybug was saying, and for once my heart didn't break at the memory.
"I know," I replied with my best Chat smile. "It's me."
Ladybug looked at me and put a hand to her hip (oddly, it occurred to me that's not how I remembered it the first time) and raised an eyebrow. "Chat, I'm serious. I don't want to lie to you."
"You're not," I smiled wider. Carefully, I handed her the rose and then pulled her a bit closer to me.
"Let me prove it to you."
"What on Earth-"
"Plagg – claws in!"
The resulting green flash of transformation bled through my masked eyes, which shot open just as the wave travelled over my head and removed said facial covering. In the semi-darkness of the living room, and sans my night vision, it was hard for me to tell if my impromptu detransformation had woken Marinette; she was still snuggled up against me and though she shifted slightly, remained asleep. The darkness also hid the fact that I was clad in Gabriel boxer briefs, a nod to my original assumption that patrol was to have ended with us cozily ensconced in bed, not baking at an ungodly hour; the slight chill to the apartment resulted in goosebumps and my immediate instinct to don the feline ears once more.
It took a moment for me to see the glowing eyes of Plagg as he floated next to me. "Did I detransform from my dream?" I asked, murky thoughts asserting themselves.
"Cheese," was the only reply, and I watched the eyes float away from me and toward my end of the apartment.
"Not helpful," I whispered, but I couldn't blame him. Yet I was nearly certain I'd not been awake when I'd uttered the magic phrase. It was a little scary to think I could subconsciously control it that way, adding yet another item to my list of things to discuss with Plagg. If and when he ever returned from getting his much-delayed dinner.
Habit had me reaching for my baton to check the time – my civilian eyesight was incapable of reading the oven clock – and checked myself as I grasped at empty air. Shaking my head, I realized I seemed to have crossed over into that space where being Chat was second nature, and wondered if through all the years of keeping a secret identity I'd actually lost track of who Adrien truly was. That made me shake my head harder, for without question I knew the answer: Chat had always been me. Adrien would always be there, of course, but the more I thought about it, my civilian alter-ego had been simply a restrained version of my feline purrsonality. Polite, respectful, more-or-less compliant, and loyal to a fault.
Actually, that kind of summarize both sides of me.
Marinette shifted again, and this time I felt her head pop up. "Chat?" she asked sleepily. "What time is it?"
"I have no idea, Princess. Maybe four?"
I heard her yawn, and then felt a probing finger on a pectoral. "Uh… who are you and what did you do to my kitty?" she asked playfully.
"I'm your civilian fiancé," I laughed, "and I'm giving my feline alter-ego a chance to recharge."
Marinette pressed her head to my chest again and started to draw tiny circles with her finger along a rib. I tried not to giggle uncontrollably – Chat wouldn't, right? – as she sighed. "I've made a mess of things, haven't I?"
"Not intentionally," I replied. "But I will admit, I've spent most of the night trying to puzzle out how we do it." I chuckled slightly – not at the subtle tickling, mind you – and added: "I did have one thought just before I fell asleep: if only Ladybug could marry Adrien! Then we'd solve this whole crisis. Otherwise, you're just gonna have to break up with Chat, but to be honest, I'm not sure how he'll take it."
Marinette paused her finger, and I could feel her hair lift away from my chest. "Adrien… that's brilliant!"
"What is?" I replied, a bit confused. "I was kidding. It wasn't a plan."
"Maybe it should be," she said thoughtfully.
I frowned in the darkness. "Why do I feel like you've suddenly hatched a Lucky Charm to end all Lucky Charms…?" I asked.
"And then some," she laughed as she rolled off of me. "Time to get up, kitty. We've got work to do."
"Should I be worried?" I asked as I swung my legs down and sat beside her in the dark. "And will it involve my tail?" I added, referencing the insane number of times it had been a key ingredient in the Charm.
"Absolutely," she laughed. "On both counts."