Marichat May Day 11 - Aged-Up Marinette


Growing Up


"Excuse me, sir?"

The cashier at the corner-store looked up from the book he was reading and his mouth fell open in soft surprise. Marinette laid her smile on thick. Having caught her reflection on the glass door on her way in, she knew she looked like she just rolled off a crashing train. Soot tracks sat smeared up the left side of her face, there was a large tear in her jeans complete with a fresh cut to match, and to top it off (having ditched her heels long ago) she was now barefoot.

"Are you alright?" the man worried. "Do you need help?"

"I'm okay. But yes, actually. I do need help." She leaned tiredly on the counter and pointed to the landline resting on the wall behind him. "Can I borrow your phone?"

.

.

Adrien stepped out of the taxi and adjusted his sweater so that Plagg was fully hidden inside. "Do you think she's okay?" he fretted under his breath to the kwami as his eyes scanned the neighborhood park for any sign of his friend. "She sounded so… off, on the phone."

"Kid," Plagg whispered, "I couldn't tell ya. You answered the phone call, not me."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm just worried."

Truth be told, he was extremely worried. It was only recently that he and Marinette had become closer friends (with Nino and Alya steadily merging at the hip it had been an inevitability). But even though they spent time together almost every day, Adrien still couldn't shake the feeling that Mari wasn't entirely comfortable with him and never would be. It made sense, considering her aspirations in context with his family legacy. It was probably intimidating. So, although the prospect of never being as close to her as he wanted to be saddened him, he'd long since accepted it as the cold hard reality.

Which was why he'd been so shocked to get a phone call from her out of the blue from a random number, begging him to meet her at the park because she desperately needed his help.

He'd made it almost all the way through the empty park now without finding her, and he was growing increasingly concerned. It was only when the path reached a ramada that he spied a lifeform in the empty scenery, in the form of a mop of black hair with her back to him, sitting on the stone bench. The crunching of the leaves finally caught her attention and she rose, turning toward him as she went.

"Oh!" He stopped in his tracks two feet from the stranger he'd mistaken for Marinette. "I'm sorry," he laughed, "I thought you were someone else."

But the stranger didn't seem to hear him. She crossed the empty space and threw her arms around him, crushing him in a powerful hug and tucking her face into his neck. "You have no idea how glad I am to see you!" The hug tightened even further and he felt her sigh on his skin; a warm gust of air in the autumn chill.

"Have we met?" Adrien managed to ask through the lung-constricting embrace.

The woman pushed him to arm's length then and Adrien tried to get a proper look at her. She was disheveled in the 'just ran through an akuma warzone' sort of way that he himself was intimately familiar with. That was odd, because there were no akumas about today. She certainly resembled Marinette, so it was no wonder that he'd made the mistake, but she was also at least eight or nine years Marinette's senior. There was a rugged beauty about her and he found his heart speeding up as she stared at him in a way that made him feel utterly naked.

"I am Marinette," the woman finally said, and for some reason tears brimmed in her eyes as she spoke. "I'm sorry," she laughed, and hastily wiped one away as it spilled, smearing the soot marks a little further up her temple. "It's just, wow! You're so young. I thought I was mentally prepared to see you but now I'm going all sentimental. This is kinda overwhelming."

"You're… Marinette," he repeated slowly. Testing out the words. His brain jumped straight to the word 'impossible,' but then again, he was one of those people that experienced the impossible six times before breakfast. This wouldn't be nearly the craziest thing that had ever happened. Honestly, if this woman was telling the truth and she was Marinette, it was crazier that she had come to him for help than it was that she had magically aged.

"Yeah," she sighed, and released him. "I know this is a little nuts, but here goes. We were fighting an akuma together and it sent me back in time," she explained. "I got sent here from twelve years in the future."

"…Wait."

"I don't know exactly how it works, but I'm pretty sure it has to do with this creepy necklace," Marinette went on, poking at a pocketwatch-type necklace that hung around her neck. An eerie radiation oozed from the hands on the clockface. "Every time the akuma put one on someone they would disappear, and then I made a wrong move and he got me. Bam. Just like that, I ended up here," she shrugged.

"Iㅡ Marinette, what are you saying?"

"What do you mean?" she worried. "Should I start again? Or do you not believe me?"

"No, Iㅡ I believe you," Adrien reeled (after all, that necklace just reeked of akuma), "it's just what you said aboutㅡ"

"Oh thank god," Marinete breathed, her shoulders drooping with relief. "I don't know what I'd have done if you didn't believe me. I'm certain I have to break this thing in order to get back to my own time, but nothing I've tried so far has worked. I banged it on the ground, I dropped it off a building, I even put it in the road and let a garbage truck run it over! But it didn't leave a scratch!"

"Slow downㅡ"

"So that's why I called you! Could you cataclysm it for me please?"

The whole world blurred behind Marinette as he struggled to focus in on her. We, she said. We were fighting… together.

Adrien leaned in, squinting deep into her eyes.

Searching.

"…Ladybug?"

The color left Marinette's face so fast when he spoke that for a moment he was sure she would faint. "Um… yes?" she squeaked. "Oh my god. Adrien, you… you knew, right? Oh my god, please tell me you already knew."

"I know now," he said numbly.

Marinette's hands flew up to cover her face, her eyes squeezing shut behind them. "Shit! Shit shit shit! You were supposed to know by now!" she cried out. "You're sixteen right now, right? When we were sixteen you said I told you!"

"I'm sixteen right now." Adrien's mouth moved of its own accord, as if it was some separate entity from his body, because his heart and soul had left the premises to do a victory lap around the sun. A weird thought poked at his gleeful bubble. Something in her phrasing had been strange and off. "Wait, so in your future, you told me your identity when we were sixteen… but you don't remember telling me?"

"No," she groaned from behind her hands. "You just showed up at patrol one day said that I'd told you my identity under the influence of an akuma, and then told me yours. I really thought I'd done the math right when I called you," she said, and Adrien realized with a jolt that she'd started to cry. "Damn it. I thought you already knew, Adrien, I'm so sorry."

"Hey, hey," he soothed, gently prying her hands away from her face in order to lead her back over to the bench under the ramada, where they settled together on the chilly concrete surface. "Don't cry, bugaboo. What's the harm in accidentally telling me? So what? Now I know, and you just made me the happiest guy on the entire planet. Why are you so upset?"

Despite the tear tracks cutting through the soot on her cheeks, a playful smile caught her trembling lip. "You silly cat," she hiccupped. "It's been so long since you've called me that."

"Wait, what?" The bottom of his stomach dropped out. "Why would I stop calling you that?"

"Oh, don't get your whiskers in a twist," she said, and poked at his nose. "You traded that dumb nickname for a hundred better ones."

"Yet you miss 'bugaboo,'" he snickered knowingly. He couldn't wait to use that one on present-day Ladybug again, who so willfully insisted that she couldn't stand that nickname. That adorable little liar.

"Yeah," older Ladybug sighed, her voice wistful and full of sudden longing. "I suppose what I actually miss is you," she admitted.

"But… but you said we wereㅡ"

"Not like that," she corrected. "Don't you worry about that, we see each other every single day in my time period." If that wasn't enough to fuel his heart for the next decade, her following words did the trick. "I miss you in a nostalgic way. You know that feeling you get when you look at childhood photos and you yearn for those days again, even though you've come so far and you're happy now and you wouldn't really want go back?"

"Yeah," he smiled. "I know that feeling." She got all that just from looking at him? "Marinette?" he said slowly. He knew he shouldn't ask, just as he knew she wouldn't answer. And yet he couldn't control his tongue. "In the future, are weㅡ?"

"Uh-uh," she interrupted merrily. "I already screwed up the timeline enough for one day, don't you think? No questions about what the future is like."

"Yeah, yeah," he sighed.

That was so Ladybug of her. Although, tripping her way through revealing the secret her present-day self was still adamant on keeping was rather Marinette of her. It made him giddy, seeing her all in one piece for the first time, even if it was a Ladybug/Marinette so much older than him that he supposed he hardly knew her.

"Alright, I guess I should kill that necklace for you. Plagg, come on out," he said to his jacket.

He didn't want to send her back just yet, but there was another time period where Chat Noir was in desperate need of his Ladybug right now. They were probably good to just do the deed here; the entire park was deserted and the overcast sky made for a grey color scale that blurred the city, ensuring they wouldn't be easy to pick out from the apartment building a couple hundred yards away from this place.

"I wish I could stay," she sighed, mirroring his exact thoughts. "I'm so sorry I dropped that on you with no warning. It was probably a lot better the first time, the way it was meant to be before I came meddling in the past." She shielded her eyes from the sudden flash of radioactive light that burst forth under the ramada as Plagg flew into the ring and transformed him.

"I don't know," Adrien shrugged when he was finished transforming into Chat Noir, his heart doing a smug little dance at the way Marinette seemed to be memorizing his every feature a second time. "I don't know if there's any such thing as 'meant to be,' especially when you start mucking about with the fabric of space-time."

Marinette bit her lip and removed the necklace, handing it over to him with a smidge of reluctance. "You think so, kitty?"

The way the nickname fell from her lips so casually did not escape him. It had never sounded more loving or comfortable than it did in her mouth twelve years in the future, and that warmed him against the autumn breeze more than any sweater ever could. "I'm sure of it," he said. The hazy glow of the necklace reflected back at him in her eyes as he prepared to disintegrate it.

"Well, you're wrong," she smiled, and it was such a dazzling smile that he forgot how to breathe. "I can think of at least one thing that's meant to be." She stepped a little closer and he forgot how to think too.

"M-Mariㅡ?"

Even though she was twelve years older than her present-day counterpart, she still had to stand on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. By the time she pulled away he knew his face must be as red as her faded lipstick. That obviously tickled her to death, and she put her hand on his cheek too as if to seal her kiss there forever, her thumb brushing affectionately at the bottom edge of his mask.

"You grew up to be such a good man," she said softly. "I'm so proud of you."

"D-don't go," he blurted, fingers tightening around the necklace that had brought her here, to him, curling the thing subconsciously toward his chest. An hour ago he'd still been pining hopelessly after Ladybug, and sure that Marinette would never care for him with the same intensity he did for her. Now they were one person and she was here in front of him and all signs pointed to a world where they were best friends and more and he couldn't stand for her to leave him, to go back to the way it was before. He needed her.

"Oh, kitty." The nickname did dangerous things to him with the knowledge he now had. "I know it's hard to be young. To start from scratch and work your way up. It must be tough, seeing me like this, so much older, and not knowing what it's like for us in my time period. Growing up is tough. You never know which way the twists and turns will take you. It's scary. I'll admit it. But you know what the best part about growing up was?"

His grip on the necklace loosened. Ladybug had always been smart, but apparently the years had tempered the natural intelligence into something even more sage.

"What?" he wondered, too taken with the wonderful woman that Ladybug would one day become to foresee the obvious direction she was steering that sentence in.

It only hit him when she beamed at him and flicked his bell. "Growing up with you, of course.

The rush of hope that flooded into his heart at her words was undammable. He would never forget this moment.

"Now send me back to my own time, kittycat. And whatever you do, don't tell my past self anything about my future self, got it? I don't want to mess with the timeline any further."

"As you wish, my lady. You ready?"

She nodded. "Ready."

"I'll see you later, then, bugaboo. Cataclysm."

.

.

Marinette fell face first into a pool of gravity-bending light and then stumbled out of it the wrong direction just as quickly as she'd entered. Unable to see, she tripped on the cobblestone and fell to the ground, catching herself at the last second on her hands and knees.

"Mari!" It was Adrien's voice, but she couldn't see him through the spots in her eyes left by the light until the padding footsteps stopped and he fell to his knees in front of her. "Are you alright? What happened? Where did youㅡ"

"Shh, it's okay," she soothed. "I'm fine. I'm not hurt. I know what those necklaces do now, though."

He blinked at her. "What?"

"Send people back in time." She rubbed the last spots from her eyes, waiting for that to sink in. She could tell the moment it clicked.

"Ohhh," he gasped. "You mean you just…"

"Yep."

"And you sawㅡ"

"Yyyep."

An absolutely devilish smile erased the concern from his face. "Did you have fun with mini-me, lovebug?"

"So you remember that?" she asked incredulously. Frankly, she hadn't been a hundred percent sure how her appearance in the past would affect her future. She didn't know whether she'd created an alternate timeline or just altered her own. Who knew, when it came to time travel?

"Of course I do." He helped her briskly to her feet and curled his tail around her waist, pulling her in close. "I'll never forget the day I found out who you were."

"Butㅡ wait, but you always said I told you when we were sixteen," she floundered. This didn't make any sense.

"I said you told me when I was sixteen," he corrected. "I never said anything about how old you were."

"Wait, wait, wait. So this whole time, for all these years, when you said I told you my identity under the influence of an akuma, you were talking about this?"

"If I say yes," he worried, "are you going to murder me?"

"Maybe!" she screeched up at him. "Why didn't you say anything?!"

"I distinctly remember you telling me not to," he purred, wrapping his tail a little tighter about her torso for fear of her pulling away. "Something about timelines and altering them more than necessary."

"Yeah, but…" She scrunched her nose and lips into an angry mess, crossing her arms over her chest. "We've been married for six years, you mangy excuse for an alley cat. I thought we had no more secrets."

He knew she was mostly joking, but that stung just enough to prompt a real answer. "I'll be honest," he said, taking her chin in his hand. "I sometimes worried that if I told you the truth about it, you would decide not to tell me whenever the day came for you to be sent back in time, as some noble attempt to rectify the change you'd made to the past by telling me in the first place." He could tell by the sudden thoughtful look on her face that he'd nailed her; she was already considering it as an option. He was glad he'd kept it a secret. Because, "If you hadn't slipped up and told me that day, who knows how long it'd have taken us to come clean?"

Marinette's ire softened in the face of his vulnerable admission. "We would have told each other eventually," she reasoned. "You know that."

"Probably. But I couldn't bring myself to take the chance. And, now that you know what really happened that day…"

"…What?"

He pressed his forehead to hers. "I can finally make fun of you for it."

Marinette tried to shove away from him then with a roll of the eyes but Adrien's tail wasn't having it. "Tikki, where are you?" she called out. "I need to transform so I can escape this hell."

Tikki waved from her perch on top of the cardboard boxes. "Are you sure?" she giggled. "You two looked so comfortable, I didn't want to interrupt."

"You said you missed being called bugaboo," Adrien snickered.

"I said I missed you, you big fat idiot!"

"But you see me every freakin' day!" he cackled, still unrelenting as she tried to escape the iron grip of his tail. "We live together and work together and fight crime together and sleep togetherㅡ" (he paused briefly as she choked on her own spit) "ㅡoh, not like that, you pervertㅡokay, well also like thatㅡbut I distinctly remember you saying that you missed me. What was that all about?"

When she stilled in his arms he wondered if he'd somehow hurt her feelings. But then she looked up at him with that thoughtful expression again, and his heart stuttered in his chest. It was amazing how, even now, she could still give him butterflies. "Imagine if you got to go back in time right now, and see me how I was twelve years ago. How would that make you feel?"

He considered her words. Smugly at first… then very seriously. He imagined a young Marinette, lively and jubilant in everything she did, her cheeks still round with youth, her favorite hairstyle still those adorable pigtails. And he found, to his shock, that he very much missed her.

Marinette must have seen the switch flip, because it was her turn to grin up at him smugly. "See?" she said. "I'm not crazy. You miss me too!"

"Yeah," he admitted, and his playful hold on her turned soft and sentimental. "But not so much that I'd go back. You were right back then. The best part of growing up was growing up together."


.

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Not gonna lie, this was mildly inspired by the Time Traveller's Wife. But only the fluffy parts, not the devastating parts, obviously haha. So there was technically a lot of marichat in here, but I suppose it's more of a full square kind of fic since their identities are revealed. Hard to say where marichat ends and the rest of them begin at that point. Sorry if it doesn't fit in line with the spirit of Marichat May, but once I had this idea, I was helpless to do anything but write it.