"Sometimes I steal flowers from your garden on my way to the cemetery, but today you've caught me and demanded to come with me to make sure the girl is pretty enough to warrant flower theft, and now I'm trying to figure out how to break it to you that were on our way to a graveyard." AU

AKA my favorite au I ever wrote for the awful-aus blog


The Flower Thief


There was a reason that Adrien was standing with a freshly cut, stolen red rose in hand on the railing of Marinette's balcony at this ungodly hour of one in the morning, and in all his glory as Chat Noir to boot. There were actually several very good very logical reasons for Adrien to be here, of all the places and of all the times, doing this. But none of those reasons mattered when Chat Noir couldn't admit them to Marinette, who was now standing with her arms crossed and her eyebrow quirked, having caught him literally red handed in the act of desecrating her beautiful rooftop garden.

So, unable to confess any facet of the truth lest he compromise his identity, he went into full blown Chat-mode. Cheekily placing the stem of the crimson rose between his teeth, he slunk down off the railing from which he'd been about to jump and offered Marinette an over the top bow, then rose halfway, angling the rose petals toward her as if he'd meant the flower for her all along. "Princess," he said, the greeting slightly muffled by the stem.

"Nice try," Marinette snorted, "but you're caught, kitty. I finally caught my elusive flower thief. And it'sㅡ" she gestured at him tiredly, rubbing sleep from her eyes, "ㅡyou. I can't believe it was you this whole time." Marinette advanced on him, tapping her fingers on her crossed arms.

"Oh, you…" Rising to full height, he let the flower fall out of his mouth and into his hand, cat ears pressing flat against his head in shame. He had been kidding himself from the beginning. "You knew?" He figured if he only took one every week, she'd never notice the difference. There was such a large quantity of flowers here in her pots and tins and stacked terrace shelves, of so many breeds and colors and levels of bloom that it made his head spin. It had never occurred to him in his wildest dreams that all this time Marinette had been aware of the fact that she had a recurring garden thief.

"Well, yeah." She rolled her eyes and jumped up to take a seat on the railing beside him so that she was able to look down into his eyes instead of up. "I'm a gardener, Chat. I knew the second the first flower disappeared. You took the first daffodil that bloomed this year! How could I not notice?"

Adrien's mouth fell open. He was aghast at his own ignorance. "I didn't realize! I'm so sorry."

Marinette seemed not to have heard him. She was toying with a leaf on a short, fat succulent, a little smirk fighting its way onto her face. "To be honest, I didn't know what to think when I started losing a single flower every weekend, like clockwork. I got it in my head that maybe there was a stray cat hanging around the neighborhood that liked flowers. I've heard of cats eating grass before so I dunno. Seemed plausible."

"Well," Adrien chuckled, "you weren't wrong." The thorns on the flower stem slowly began to poke through his gloves as he squeezed it.

"So let's go," Marinette announced, spinning to face him and clapping her hands together beneath her chin.

Adrien, who'd been preoccupied with her very sudden movement and making sure she didn't fall backwards off the railing, flicked his ears. "What? Where?"

"You're not getting rid of me that easily," Marinette chided. "I have to make sure the girl on the receiving end of all these stolen flowers is worthy of all this thievery. And I know it's not Ladybug. I want to meet whoever you picked that rose for."

A wry kind of pride momentarily eclipsed Adrien's rising panic. Marinette sure was sharp. "How do you know it isn't for Ladybug?"

Marinette shrugged frenetically, avoiding his eyes. "Oh, well I'm best friends with the girl who runs the Ladyblog, you know. I'm positive I'd have seen something about it by now if you were out there giving Ladybug flowers every week."

"Okay," Adrien admitted, "you got me there. You're right. The flowers are for someone else."

Marinette positively glowed at that news, and slipped off the railing onto her feet as she squealed in excitement. "Please, Chat, please take me along?"

Adrien's hand rested at the back of his neck. "I don't know, Mariㅡ"

"Please."

"I'm not sure youㅡ"

"Please!"

"Marinette! Listen toㅡ"

"It's my rose," Marinette interrupted yet again, and fisted her hands on her hips, squaring her shoulders and jaw at him. She may be small, but when she wanted to, Marinette could make herself a formidable presence. "I grew it from a tiny little seed, all by myself. That makes me its mother! I think I have a right to know where it's ending up, don't you?"

There was nothing Adrien could say to argue with that, because he sort of agreed with her. They were her flowers that he'd been absconding with for months, and she deserved the truth about what he was doing with them. But that didn't mean he wasn't freaking out. He was. He was freaking out; she had no idea what she was getting herself into by demanding he take her along.

But, in the end it was her decision. And she had made it, obviously.

"Alright."

Hoping Ladybug would forgive him what he was about to do, he snapped his baton to attention before offering Marinette his hand. Not a second after she had placed her hand atop his, he had whisked her off into the glittering urban night.

With her arms clenched tightly around Chat's neck and her waist cinched to his with his left arm, it was difficult for Marinette to tell where they were going. When she was flying through the city on her own whims, the entire earth and sky opened up before her like a snowglobe, every direction hers, every bird, every building, every cloud. This way of travelling was different. She could hardly see, and with half her focus spent holding onto him, she soon gave up trying to figure out where Chat was taking her. As the seconds stretched to minutes and her arms grew tired, she realized it was somewhere rather far away. Past the school, past the river… When they passed the tower, she rested her head against the interior of his shoulder, shielding her face from the biting wind.

When Chat finally lit on the ground again, he released her gently onto her own wobbly legs.

"That was a long trip," Marinette joked, stretching the life back into her arms. "Your mystery lady lives very far away!"

For some reason beyond Marinette's understanding, this turned down the corners of Chat's mouth. "Yeah," he sighed. "I suppose she does."

Marinette giggled. "She better be worth all this. Although, you have good taste I'm sure. She's probably beautiful and classy andㅡ"

"Marinette," Chat intoned softly, and the tender, sorrowful expression on his face made Marinette bite her tongue. She didn't understand. Why was he looking at her like that? Chat had never, ever looked at her like that before, not at Marinette or Ladybug. Like… like someone had… "Haven't you realized where we are?"

He looked up, and Marinette's eyes automatically followed his gaze, to the sign stretched above them over a paved pathway leading into a dark grassy grove. Cimetière de Collines Soleil.

He had brought her to a cemetery.

"Chat?" she whispered hoarsely, sure there must have been some mistake.

But he was already beneath the entrance sign, waiting for her with an air of anxiety. "I have to warn you," he said, twirling the rose in hand. "If you come in with me... " He trailed off, weighing her with his eyes, strangely faraway. "Under my mask is someone that you already know. My real name, in my real life… Marinette, you and I are friends."

She couldn't help it; Marinette gasped. What?

"And if you follow me any farther tonight, you'll know who I am."

"Why… Why did you bring me here, then?" Chat looked hurt at her reaction, but she hadn't meant it that way. She was blindsided, that's all.

"Maybe I want you to know," he added shyly, which was weird and wrong because the Chat she knew wasn't shy at all. What was happening? Who was he? "Should I take you home?" he asked, when the silence stretched on for three moments too long.

"No," she blurted, then tripped over her own feet to catch up with him at the entrance. He had brought her here. He obviously needed her. Not Ladybug, Marinette. Whoever was under the mask knew her, and had sought her out and… was it wrong that she just had to know who it was that needed not only Ladybug but Marinette as well? "No, I'll come," she breathed, her heart racing away in her chest.

He seemed to sense her panic, because he slipped his hand into hers as they began walking and squeezed it gently. It was weird. Not because he was holding her hand but because he was doing it in a distinctly non-Chat way. The pistons in her brain fired full-speed as he spoke. "I got the idea when I visited your house once," he said, hardly daring to glance at her. "Without the mask, I mean. When I saw you fawning over your garden, something clicked."

"Oh?"

She wracked her brain for every person who'd ever visited her house.

"I'd always hated visiting her here," he admitted. "My father, he… he always has these stupidly extravagant and expensive bouquets delivered, and somehow never bothers to come himself. I used to hate seeing them here. What's the point? But when you showed me your garden, you told me about how you'd always pick the prettiest one whenever you went to visit your grandmother's grave, and I thought, well, a single thoughtfully chosen flower was infinitely better than a hundred flowers picked by a hired florist."

"I see. And I… remember that conversation," she admitted, but when Chat tensed she shook her head. "I don't remember who with, though."

He sighed, but it turned into a flustered laugh. "I don't know why I'm relieved," he said. "We're almost there, and then you'll know who I am anyway."

When at last Chat drew to a stop, Marinette was surprised by the extravagance of the monument they were standing in front of. It was among the tallest in the small cemetery: a wide, engraved base mounted with a two meter stone recreation of an angel playing a harp. In front of the statue on the grass lay a dozen professionally wrapped bouquets in varying states of decay. Marinette looked to Chat for some kind of direction or explanation, but he only released her hand, placing his on her lower back to gently usher her onward. He had brought her this far. This was the go-ahead to look.

Marinette could hear his footsteps in the grass as he followed her toward the monument, though he gave her a small berth of space as she crouched down to examine the words etched into the stone. She skimmed over the message until she got to the nameㅡand then her heart stopped.

Cecilia Agreste.

Oh.

Unable to look up at him, she squeezed her eyes shut, one hand still resting on the stone. "Adrien?"

"Surprise?" he laughed weakly. He reached over her to poke at his own small pile of flowers at the angel's feet. As he picked one up it broke in his hand, the brittle petals crumpling into a thousand shattered pieces. "I'm really sorry about your flowers, Marinette. I shouldn't have taken them. Now they're just…" With a frustrated growl he brushed away the rest of the dead flowers, scattering them to the wind and the grass. "I thought I was doing something good, but I was still just destroying everything. Guess that's why I'm Chat Noir, huh?"

That struck Marinette like lightning, and she shot upward, out of her shock and into action. ChatㅡAdrienㅡstepped back, surprised by her sudden movement. Squinting her eyes at him, Marinette quickly pieced together a worrisome picture. Adrien's loneliness and loss, Chat's doubts and insecurities… all of that was on this one person's shoulders. It was too much. "Don't you ever say anything like that again!" she barked, and didn't realize until Adrien grew alarmed that tears had sprung into her eyes.

"No, don't cry! What did I say?!"

"Destruction isn't always bad." Marinette had to fight through her angry tears to say it. She'd known she was going to have to have it out with Chat about this eventually, but she'd never dreamed that Adrien would be involved. That fact was muddying her well-prepared yin and yang speech. "Ladybug needs you, you know, just as much as you need her. Creation, destruction… Don't you get it? It's a balance the whole universe relies on. Those flowers would have died someday whether or not you picked them," she added in exasperation. "So stop beating yourself up all the damn time!"

She slapped her hand over her mouth after that. Crimony. What had gotten into her?

Luckily, Adrien seemed more amused than anything. "Geez," he laughed. "You sound like Ladybug." And if she wasn't mistaken, for a split second, he looked hopeful.

So she kissed him.

Adrien stiffened, but after a brief moment of shock he melted, threading one hand into her loose windswept hair and tilting her head back. This was a fast turnaround from crying, and though he wasn't sure exactly why she was kissing him he sure as hell wasn't complaining. She sighed and parted her lips. The warm breath that touched his face then invited him in closer, to taste her, to bring his other hand up to the small of her back and reel her in the rest of the way.

But the second his hand touched her back she snapped out of it, twirling out of his reach at light speed. "I'm so sorry!" she squeaked, hands on her cheeks. What was she thinking? Was she insane? Not only had she just kissed Adrien but she had kissed him next to his mother's grave. "This is so not the timeㅡorㅡor the placeㅡ"

"Don't be sorry," Adrien soothed, relieved that she had only broken away from the kiss due to respect for the dead and not because he was a bad kisser or something. "There's nothing wrong with kissing in a cemetery."

Marinette shook her head violently, unconvinced. "But your motherㅡ"

"Was a hopeless romantic," he finished for her. "Where do you think I got it from?"

Marinette allowed herself a small chuckle. "Not your dad, I guess. He doesn't seem the type."

"Nope. All her." His laugh faded and his face grew soft again as he looked at the girl who'd just kissed him, and the corners of his eyes crinkled with affection. "I think she would have liked you, Marinette."

"Really?" Marinette could do nothing to push down the sudden wave of euphoria that rose up. Was it really possible that Adrien liked her? She already knew Chat had his heart set on Ladybug but maybe, just maybe, Adrien saw something worth having in Marinette as well. "I wish I could have met her. I'm sure we would have made good friends."

"Yeah," Adrien sighed dreamily, and laid down the rose Marinette had watered and cared for at the feet of the stone angel. "You would have."