Summary: Chat Noir, Multimouse, and Ladybug fall into a regular routine, and contemplation of Mari-Multi-Mouse on a twice-weekly basis enables Adrien to coolly and dispassionately admire his new partner. Just so he can get the paint scheme for his Multimouse figure down. He has to do justice to her.
Warning: Although Adrien is improving, his new perspective allows him to consider his tendency towards "taking the hit." There are some grim, but brief, reflections on the motivations behind those actions.
Sentiment and sensation have returned in a tidal wave that wipes clean the Earth, and if Marinette's the sun, and Ladybug the stars in the sky, then Multimouse is a rainbow after the deluge: a covenant that binds up the entire world and tells him that the nightmare will never come again.
Every time he picks her up for a training session, clambering down from the adjoining building as a liquid shadow that she can point out so easily, as if she instinctively senses his presence, the yearning that he projects towards her and her home and her scent and every single thing about her, he's blinded by the explosion of colours. There are too many hues for him to count, no way to separate them as they transition so smoothly, one to the next so that they're distinct yet one and the same.
Hot reds stab and boil his blood and leave him cooking from the inside out.
Hearty oranges are the flames of a campfire, setting his nose twitching with the curling smoke as he sits alongside a collection of friends in the wilderness, out on a safe adventure.
Warm yellows hold within them the sun, surrounded by every other feeling, made alive and highlighted.
Sickly greens are the tainted shade of every riotous thought that can't coalesce, the coloured filter to all those moments when she has to pluck out her fidget spinner to calm herself, or bite her tongue when Lila or Chloe speak, and suddenly it's alright because even something beautiful can have ugliness in it, and that's okay.
It really matters that it's okay.
The cool blues of a clear, crisp sky in mid-day and the sun soaks into his unmasked face.
Chilly violets, lulling him to sleep in the midst of a night where there are no terrors.
Patrols are doubled in frequency, with Carapace and Rena Rouge taking on the rare nights.
Multimouse is a regular fixture in training sessions that aren't actually designed to do anything more than instruct her on the basics of combat. As he should have expected after seeing her on the Piste – really seeing her the same day the he did Kagami, when she screamed to every student with her nimble footwork and keen eye for exploiting weaknesses, picking out the loose threads in Adrien's defences – she has "the basics" down in only a few weeks.
Legs part at the right angle; she knows to keep her eyes focused, avoid the appeal of distractions without sacrificing her peripheral vision to scan for possible amok or brainwashed civilians. With Marinette in a skin-tight costume as they spar, he realizes that he has the far more difficult task in that regard ...
Just because he's studying her callipygian figure in anticipation of one day crafting a Multimouse custom toy.
That's all!
Yep.
He teaches her how to beat him.
That's the most important thing, right up there with making sure that she can secure her own safety when the time comes, when things are at their most desperate.
Too many akumas have been able to brainwash him, twist up his will. It was always okay, always safe to let go and become nothing – just drift in that insensate oblivion after he leapt into the path of a gout of flame that seared away pain in an instant, a ray of ambiguous capabilities that could turn him into a hunk of cheese, or a pigeon, or a painting, or any number of inanimate objects.
Ladybug always redeemed his mistakes and then cradled his head in her arms, or pressed a glove, cool and smooth, to his cheek and his world was her eyes, pained and yearning, as she told him that she was so scared for him. That she needed him. That he wasn't allowed to get hurt anymore.
He understands the junkies whom he sees in the underground tunnels that he and Ladybug have traversed in some of their subterranean battles.
It's a hit.
He takes them.
But Marinette's not allowed to get hurt.
So, she has to be able to beat him, if he fails, and he can't fail anyways.
It's not all serious, though, when they're wrapped up together, her jump-rope coiled around his forearm as he shifts his weight forward in a stutter-step concealed by the dark haze of shadows in the construction zone.
The line goes slack and momentum propels him forward, but in that crucial moment as her eyes widen not with fear because she doesn't feel that with him and he doesn't know what he'd do – if he could take the hit – if she did, his arcing baton swipe sends him tumbling like the black and green fidget spinner that he's seen on Marinette's desk at school. Bones singing with strain and muscles firing randomly like they're trying to peel out from under his skin, flee from the collision that's coming, cat and mouse collide.
No.
It's not all serious.
Her breath is warm and moist against his chin and cheeks, goose-flesh breaking out across every inch that she's touching, and every inch that she's not, just for different reasons. Laying there in the wiry snarl of her jump-rope that's somehow become wrapped within his belt tail, itself looped around her waist, he's gazing down at the creamy peach flush of her cheeks, thinking about paint combinations because he has to think about something or he won't think at all and that's just too dangerous. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is no palette or airbrush or canvas that could do justice to that moment – the vision of her smile and the emblazoned blooming roses on her cheeks accompanied and complimented by butter-cream and mint breath that floods his nostrils, the two of them are so close, tempting and refreshing in turns.
Shakespeare got it wrong.
Women can totally have roses in their cheeks, and there isn't a perfume in the world that even Chloe could afford that compares to this.
The moment breaks, and he starts giggling like a schoolgirl, not that he's ever seen or heard that in real life, but he assumes that it's true, while tugging at his unruly tail that seems so stubbornly stuck on Multimouse that he starts apologizing even as Marinette babbles and bucks, tearing threads from the spiraling cord of her jump-rope.
It's not all serious by a long-shot.
But it is.
She's better that he thought she'd be, and that was already amazing. There is a heady novelty to their masked interactions. From their banter, it's like Chat Noir and Ladybug; from her uncertain stutter-steps, it's Adrien and Marinette; from his instruction and her submission to his tutelage, it's ...
It's like nothing that Adrien or Chat have ever enjoyed and there are no parallel experiences on which to draw, no comparisons or guidelines, so he has to invent the rules himself with Marinette as his ... partner.
Junior partner.
The taste of it is so sweet and sour in turns that it thrills.
Patrols with Ladybug's having been cut down to half their previous number are a delightfully old and comfortable flavor, savoured because of its rarity, but training Marinette takes the place of the sessions they decided to forgo.
She's attentive. Learns well. Is always eager to listen, and not just to his stupid instructions amalgamated and plastered over with generic language so that she can't put any of the pieces together, well aware of Adrien's extracurricular sports, hobbies, and self-defense training.
No.
She listens to him, no matter what he's talking about, whether it's his day in general terms, complaints about his boss and the overburdened schedules or a girl who's really interested in him and makes him feel filthy, like he is filth, when she touches him. That could come across as bragging, or false modesty – a boy being pursued – but he's been watching Marinette closely enough, long enough, to recognize disgust and moral indignation of the sort that set her jaw and launched her off on the warpath against Mayor Bourgeois' air pollution initiative and impractical space refuse plan, or even Adrien Agreste when he'd run afoul of her.
Those expressions and just the fact that she listens hurt so good, leave him so breathless as his cheeks ache with grins and laughter, that he can't even cry when he tucks himself into bed after a training session and falls asleep staring at the Lucky Charm bracelet that may be more magical than anything that Ladybug has ever conjured.
Probably due to the fact that it can be magic without a miraculous. Be miraculous without having been imbued with magic.
Funny that.
Then, one Monday morning, just when things appear to have settled at school, Lila having retreated and Marinette eating lunch with him, Nino, and Alya again because his weeks of punishment are over, Nathalie informs him that he is to have dinner with his father that evening.
Adrien can only wait and wonder through the rest of the day.
Fortunately, good friends and someone so much more than that now, Marinette and Nino and even Alya, all see it in his faint twitches and uncertain glances, leading Alya to ask to swap seats with him so that she can flirt with her boyfriend, much to the chagrin of their teacher.
Under the desk, her palm sweaty but her eyes sure and certain in a dare and an invitation that he sees each training night with Multimouse, Marinette offers her hand. With trepidation, his mouth dry, he takes it, and every muscle in his body tenses up, then releases luxuriously, as if he's been soaking in a warm bath for an hour, surrounded by soft white noise and jasmine bath oil, when she squeezes his hand.
Maybe that's not fair because of how she feels about Adrien, but he can't help it.
He holds on throughout class.
All he can do is hold on and wait.
Author's Notes
Hopefully, Marinette's intentions for assuming the role of Multimouse as Chat Noir's partner, rather than disclosing her identity outright, are clear enough, threaded into the story "between the lines." One of Adrien's great flaws as a genuine partner, be it as a superhero or romantic interest, is, through no fault of his own, a tendency towards deferential submission and overreliance on others to assume responsibility for the determination of "his" choice. As he is a victim of emotional abuse, which will be addressed and, as is so terribly challenging, acknowledged as we move forward, he embraces that tendency as a necessity and survival mechanism; however, it creates destructive power imbalances for him and those with whom he seeks to forge relationships. A gradual negotiation of his new relationship with "Multimouse," free from the assumptions that govern his unequally-yoked partnership with Ladybug, gives him room to define himself and grow.
The next chapter will be posted in just a few days, and is really a compliment to this one, as it seeks to emphasize certain parallels between Marinette and Gabriel's approaches to Adrien's evolution, fostering and suppressing it respectively.