My break ran longer than expected whoops. But hey, thanks to IB Music I can write In the Rain in a minor key (Though it's pretty unrecognizable cause of where the notes fall on the scale haha)

I did get pretty frustrated with this chapter. Apologies if it sucks, cause I find myself… strongly disliking it.


It was dark in her room—she hadn't bothered turning on a light. The TV was glowing from its little stand across the room and cast dark, harsh shadows all about the room, the light making everything seem just the slightest bit blue. Some random infomercial played along onscreen. A Nutribullet, she was pretty sure. She watched, only half paying attention, as the guy shoved some poor vegetables in the blender, cranked it on, and out popped a healthy smoothie. He said some things then soon, he was making another. From outside, the streetlamp cast a little light, but besides that and the commercial, the room was black.

The guilt wouldn't just stay in the back of her mind. No matter how many times she tried, it was there. The guilt, the disappointment, the shame—all of it was still there, settling on her shoulders like dust. She just wanted to forget about it, let it sit there so she could clear her mind and try to think through it.

Yet all she could think about, sitting there, watching that mind-numbing infomercial, was how easy it'd be. How it'd be so easy to fix her mistake.

How easy it would be to just string 'Bug' and 'Marinette' together in the same sentence, to just… tell Chat the next time he came by. She could tell him she was Bug, or that she knew Bug, or that somehow the two of them were connected, and she knew he'd believe her, and then the problem would be fixed like that.

She'd invite him in with a smile like she always did and sit him down on her bed, spill everything about the costume in her closet and the mask she'd worn. Her mistakes would be no more, she could fix things that easily. She could pull out that costume and show him, say 'see, Bug can be trusted, see? I'm Bug' and then things would just be all peachy keen and everything would be fixed, and they'd go on about their day like normal. He might be upset—she had pulled a stupid move, after all, what with the whole 'no experience, putting yourself in danger' thing—but things would be better between him and Bug than they were. Or they wouldn't be; he could end up being more upset than before. But the option still held more hope. It was doing something. It was a chance at fixing things. It was easier.

But… it was impossible.

No, it was out of the question.

She couldn't.

No matter how much she wanted to, she couldn't.

Connecting her own name and Bug's would be putting everyone around her, including herself, in danger. She couldn't tell him that she was bug, nor could she use her name to validate Bug's words because what if something happened later down the line? What if he got caught or she got caught or something happened and somehow her name got put out there? Hanging around with Chat in her room and running around the city committing crimes with him were two very different things, with completely different stakes and consequences. If she associated herself with Bug, then one slip up was all it'd take.

And Chat Noir wasn't associating himself with anyone, was he? No, he wasn't. Everything about his identity was kept under wraps, leaving her with no idea who he was—that was how it was supposed to be. That was the way it had to be. To keep himself safe, to keep those around him safe, to let him live his life without fearing anything, that was how it was supposed to be.

It wasn't a simple head or heart decision. It wasn't even a decision, there was only one good option.

She'd made her mistakes, and she wasn't going to put anyone in danger to fix them. Her friends, her family, nobody deserved that, none of it was near worth the risk. They shouldn't ever have to pay for her mistakes.

The infomercial played on, the guy onscreen blabbing on and on and on about a reduced price and "only blah blah blah for shipping and handling if you order right now!"

And, as was inevitable, he came. She got through ten minutes of relative silence, of being left alone to think on and on about it all, trying at every turn to push it all away, before he showed up.

Tap, tap.

Dread curled up in her stomach at the mere sound of it, but she went ahead and looked up anyways.

A cat-eared silhouette sat on her railing, stark against the dim streetlamp and TV. Bright blue light hollowed out his cheeks, darkened his eyes, made sure she saw the black mask on his face. His teeth gleamed—a smile.

She couldn't say her heart didn't race at the sight of him. He was there. He was there.

Tap, tap.

More insistent. He'd seen her sitting there—not that she was trying to hide or anything along those lines; she was sitting in plain view of the balcony. But something about curling up under a blanket in the dark made her feel like she was hidden, like she was alone despite the open blinds across the way.

But there he was, and suddenly she didn't feel so hidden.

"Hey, the door's locked."

She met his eyes through the glass, not moving from her little ball on the bed. There he sat, looking at her with those eyes of his pleading, a bag of something in his hand. It was brown with a grease stain across the bottom of it, and going by the logo on the side, from the Chinese place down the street. The one she and Alya went to all the time. The one she'd mentioned to him.

He'd remembered her favourite Chinese place, for no reason, and gotten food there just for her.

It was stupidly sweet.

He was stupidly sweet.

And…

And she couldn't help but think that there she was, sitting on her bed and moping, trying not to think about the problem just because she didn't want to, and there he was, being so nice for no good reason.

He was a living, breathing, too nice reminder that she'd royally screwed up. She'd done the stupidest thing she could've possibly done, realized she'd backed herself into a corner, then run off when he reacted like a normal human being. She'd gone out with little to no plan and interfered when she shouldn't have, gotten involved when it would've been better to hang back or do literally anything else.

She'd been stupid.

And so yes, he reminded her of it all. How she'd messed up. How she had no idea what to do. How there wasn't much she could do.

Yet… none of it was, in any way shape or form, his fault. She'd been the one to charge out with a half-baked plan in her head, dressed up like a giant bug. He hadn't done anything. She shouldn't shun him, pretend he wasn't there, just because she'd screwed something up.

She couldn't just leave him out there.

It was with that stupid idea in her head that she got up, unlocked the door, and let him in.

In silence, he put the food down on her desk. He didn't move to turn on a light, just stood there for a moment and looked at her in the darkness. She looked up, meeting his eyes.

A beat of silence passed.

"Hey," he said.

She tried to muster up a strong voice and forced her face into a smile, but it didn't work, and instead, all she did was mutter out her own pitiful-sounding "hey."

It only took half a second for him to pick up on it, for him to hear the guilt just leaking and leaking on into her voice. "You… are you okay?" he asked, sitting down next to her.

"I'm- I'm good."

"You don't look good," he said.

She frowned.

"I mean, you look upset. You still look good… Not to sound weird or anything."

She smiled the slightest bit, watching him get twisted up in his own words. It was endearing—even in her piss-poor mood, she could let herself enjoy it. "I'm okay, kitty," she said. It fell flat though, sounded hollow and wrong—like a lie, through and through, even to her own ears.

A couple of seconds ticked on by. The Nutribullet man was muted off in the corner, showing off some aspect of the thing that Marinette didn't give two hoots about. She focused on the TV to avoid thinking about anything else—her mistakes, Chat sitting beside her, all of it.

"Something's wrong, isn't it?"

Finally, he'd said it, the question she'd been waiting for. She tried to swallow the thick lump in her throat, but failed miserably.

"It's nothing."

"Doesn't seem like nothing."

"Well, it is nothing."

Another beat of silence passed, and he didn't respond. The man onscreen handed a woman a smoothie, fresh out of the Bullet, with a gleaming white smile that seemed too fake to be true. She could practically hear Chat's head whirring away beside her, mulling over every single little detail in some attempt to figure out what was wrong.

It was about a minute before he spoke.

"You know…" he said, his voice soft, "You can tell me whatever, right?"

"Chat."

"I'm not trying to pressure you-"

"I know you're not."

"-But… you do look upset. And saying it's not important… it's worrying. If there's something going on, you should know you can tell me. No matter how bad it is."

He was assuming the worst in the situation. He was assuming that something had happened, that that something had nothing to do with him, that something had happened to her and she wasn't going to talk about it. The oh-so-heavy pit just got heavier in her stomach, sinking down and down further in there at just the thought of what he was thinking of. The scenarios he seemed to be dreaming up, the implications of what he was saying, what he thought had happened.

"Chat, there's nothing going on, I'm telling you," she said. "There's nothing to worry about."

He frowned in thought. "I can't help it," he said. "I'm worried about you."

"I'm okay, really."

"Marinette-"

"Chat, whatever you think you're seeing- you're- you're not seeing." She fiddled with the edge of the blanket in her hand, rubbing over and over and over. "I'm fine."

Guilt, again, rose up in her. Her thoughts fluttered about in her brain, despite how hard she tried to push them down.

Another moment of silence passed. He was still worried, she registered.

She stared at him.

And, just like that, she was back in her stupid little pit of angst, thinking about the stupid problem that she'd oh-so-stupidly created. The lull that he'd brought was shattered by her stupid, stupid thoughts about everything that was wrong and how she knew she was going to mess things up.

His eyes drifted down to her hands, took in the blanket rubbing, then came back up to her face. The worried expression only got stronger. He'd read her. And, fiddling with the edge of the blanket, she sat there open like a book. She let go of the blanket with a sigh and put her hands in her lap, willing them to be still.

"Marinette, you don't have to tell me what it is," he said, looking her in the eyes. "But I want you to know that… I really am worried. I'm trying to take your word for it, but I don't think I can. You look so upset, I just- never mind."

"Chat, there really is nothing wrong."

"That's not what I-"

"Chat," she said. She let out a long sigh, trying to get herself to calm down before her brain of hers made her snap at him. He was worried, he was allowed to be worried, he wasn't trying to make her more upset. "I get it that you're worried, but I don't want to talk about it. There's something wrong, you're right. And you have every right to be worried. But… just- stop bringing it up. Please."

He stared at her. Again, she could see the cogs whirring around in the back of his brain, but this time, she couldn't tell what he was thinking. His whole face was just a still shock, with nothing but that there in any hint of his face.

She'd raised her voice on accident, she realized.

He was silent for a moment. Still, the blue light of the TV bounced around on his face, hollowing out his cheeks, sinking in his eyes, making the crease of his brow just that more noticeable. His eyes were still wide out in shock, surprised that his tiny little princess Marinette had raised her voice at him, that she could raise her voice like that to begin with.

And, immediately, she just felt all the more guilty.

He'd been trying to help, and she'd gotten that upset with him for no good reason, gone out and yelled just because he wanted to understand what was wrong. For all she knew, he was just following her own advice, all that 'friends tell each other things' bullshit she'd spouted off. He didn't know how she really felt, how all the 'upset' he was seeing was just her upset over her own stupid mistakes.

He didn't know. He had no way of knowing. He'd just assumed the worst and worried about her, like all good friends did when the word 'upset' was involved.

"I- I'm sorry. I didn't mean-" she started to say, but he held up a hand to stop her.

"It's okay," he said, smiling softly.

"No, it's not okay, I shouldn't have raised my voice, and I shouldn't have snapped like that, oh my god I snapped at you. I'm so sorr-"

"Marinette. It's okay." Again, there was that warm smile.

"But I yelled at you."

"It's okay. I'll survive," he said. "And… I'd hardly call that yelling."

She nodded, hanging her head just the slightest bit.

There was a pregnant pause, seeming like it just wanted to weigh down on her shoulders, pushing her down and down until she could do no more. She felt like your average Atlas, with a whole world of guilt and remorse just weighing down on her head.

When he spoke, his voice was soft. "The food's probably gonna be cold soon."

"I have a microwave," she said.

"Eh… reheated Chinese food isn't the best. Turns it chewy."

She smiled just slightly, nodding along. "If you say so, kitty."

With that, he got up and snatched the bag off her desk. "I didn't know what to get, so I got… a lot," he said, opening it up. He fished out a couple boxes, some chopsticks, and a couple cheap fortune cookies, putting some in her lap and the rest in his. Then, the channel was changed to Cartoon Network. Some crappy movie from forever ago—a live-action Scooby-Doo—was being shown. The plot and the acting were terrible, borderline hilarious with how bad they were, but… 2004 CG Scooby-Doo took the cake.

They sat there, eating that cheap Chinese food, in relative silence. The movie played on. They laughed at the unbearably bad parts, frowned at the confusing parts, and shared hushed words of uncertainty when the villain was revealed.

And, somewhere along the line, she forgot that she was supposed to feel bad. Maybe that'd been his goal when he'd flicked through the channels, or maybe it was pure happenstance, but regardless, she forgot. She didn't think about how she'd run across the rooftops just hours ago, or how he'd looked at her when he thought she'd been lying. For a little while, she was fine. Watching that stupid, terrible movie, she felt… okay. Good.

When the movie ended and the credits played, the food was gone. She sat there on the bed, the blanket still draped around her shoulders, full of bad food and sitting next to Chat Noir, and she still felt… okay.

She felt like everything could be alright.

Maybe it was a little bit of an assumption on her part, thinking things could turn out right so soon, but maybe it wasn't. Maybe she was letting her guilt make the situation bigger than it was. Maybe she hadn't screwed up so much as she thought, the situation was much more fixable than she believed.

"Chat?"

"Yes?"

"Thanks, for that. I think I needed to get my mind of things."

"All in a day's work, my princess," he said. "If it makes you feel better, then I'm more than happy to oblige."

She smiled.

"Although," he said, eyes flicking over to the clock. "I may have to get going."

She looked at her alarm clock. Bright red numbers read 1:36. "I didn't realize it's so late."

"Don't fret, purr-incess. I'm no stranger to late nights."

She laughed. "Alright then. I'll let you go."

"See you soon?"

"See you soon," she said, nodding.

And then, he just opened up her balcony doors, and was gone.


So there's that.