Chapter Text
It started as a joke.
Chat Noir had thrown the idea into the air one night when they'd taken a break from patrol. The city was quiet, the breeze that danced through the open sky was refreshing, and the laughter accompanying his voice had made Marinette smile all too wide.
"What if we moved in together?" he'd asked with a nervous twitch of his tail. "I've been preparing to move out for a while, but... I don't know. Something about the thought of living alone makes me nervous."
"You mean-" Marinette's eyes widened. "Us? Move in together? Like Ladybug and Chat Noir living together?"
"Yeah," Chat laughed. "What if?"
At first, she'd given her partner nothing more than a chuckle and a dismissive pat on the shoulder, shaking her head at the simple notion. It had been such a funny thing for him to suggest that the giggles rising from her throat had been too hard to suppress. Even if she secretly didn't despise the idea, she knew it would never work out. How could it? Their identities needed to stay secret. That was the most important rule, Tikki had said.
It wasn’t possible! Things would be too difficult, too confusing, too risky...
"How would we even manage that?" she asked, swinging her legs over the ledge of the apartment complex they had paused upon and taking in a breath of the atmosphere. She could detect a small hint of food cooking somewhere, and in the distance, music played, which added to the comforting ambiance of the city she adored so much. "We'd just walk around in our home transformed like it was a normal thing?"
Chat Noir offered a shrug, looking a tad sheepish. "Hah, yeah, I guess that sounds kind of stupid."
A frown replaced Marinette's smile. She felt a smidge guilty for her previous comment. "Well," she said in an attempt to fix her blunder, "I don't know about stupid …"
"It would probably be weird," Chat continued. "And awkward at times... And it wouldn't be easy…"
Marinette nodded.
"...But I dunno," he sighed, shifting his gaze. "Part of me thinks we could make it work."
Allowing the thought to process, Marinette tapped her finger along the aged paneling of the roof they sat upon, teeth nibbling on her bottom lip as she sought a reply.
Would they be able to make it work?
After all, she'd been thinking about moving out of the bakery soon due to space, and she didn't like the idea of living alone either... And Alya was already sharing an apartment with Nino in California because of his record deal, so that wouldn’t be plausible.
What if… What if they could make this work?
No, it’s a terrible idea, she told herself, nearly rolling her eyes at her impulsiveness. It would never work.
But if it did...
"Maybe," Marinette said, a hint of humor in her voice. "But we'd be together all the time, and I can't exactly picture myself cooking dinner wearing a skin-tight suit. Even if it would protect me from burns."
Chat supplied a small snort of laughter at her statement. "I guess that's a bonus. Would living together be so weird, though?"
Marinette opened her mouth to answer with a "yes, of course!" , but paused as she couldn't exactly find an explanation for why it would be so odd for them to live together under those circumstances. Sure, it'd feel a bit off to walk around an apartment with her suit on, but Marinette was used to wearing polka-dots for long hours. She felt more natural in her transformation than she ever had seven years prior when she was fourteen, freshly new to the world of superheroes and saving the city, and for a brief second, the thought that maybe Chat's idea wasn't such a stupid one danced through her head.
It would be a hell of a lot more convenient for both of them. They wouldn't have to worry about when the other would show up during akuma attacks or struggle to go through a battle alone while one of them was on their way.
(Or, on the rare occurrence that a certain Ladybug slept through the akuma alarms during a rather difficult attack, Chat Noir wouldn’t have to suffer through another hour of holding a violet butterfly in his paws and panicking over what he should do with it.)
A small grin twitched at the corner of Marinette's mouth before a second thought passed her mind, causing the hint of a smile to fall.
She knew Chat Noir was dying to get out of his house. Twenty-one years old and still suffocating under the watchful eye of his parents (parent?), Chat often expressed his sorrows about his home life with a forlorn sigh. Though he never delved too deeply into personal details, Marinette could tell just by the carefully worded sentences that he had difficulty staying happy in the house he'd lived in since he was a baby.
And although she couldn't relate, Marinette did feel for her friend. There were often times when she had considered begging Tikki to let them reveal their identities to each other just so she could take Chat Noir to the bakery and gift him a place to live that he looked forward to coming home to.
(Too many nights had she found Chat patrolling the city when there hadn't been a scheduled patrol, after all.)
And now the words were on the tip of her tongue, the confirmation she knew her partner was secretly hoping for even though he was writing it off as a joke. A joke that tugged at his lips in a sort of dejected smile that did not— would not—reach his eyes.
"I wonder how that would work," Marinette whispered, eyes falling to the city streets below. Cars trailed lazily down the two-way street in a pale river of yellow lights. "Maybe we could make it work."
One of Chat's velvet ears twitched against his hair. His eyes met hers for a fleeting moment. Even in the second of shared eye contact, Marinette could see the tiny spark of hope that glowed within them, and she couldn't stop the smile that began to spread across her face.
Maybe they could move in together. Sure, she'd have to talk to Tikki about it first, and they'd have to find an inconspicuous apartment in the middle of the city together, and it wouldn't be easy…
But...
But... No. That was just silly.
It was a silly, silly idea. It wouldn't work out. How would they keep their identities secret? How would they be able to live life as normal civilians and go about their daily duties—work, university, grocery shopping—without revealing themselves?
You'll never know until you try, a little voice peeped in the back of Marinette's mind. What could be so bad about it?
What could be so bad? Well, they could accidentally come home destransformed, or sleepwalk in their pajamas, or both walk up to the front door at the same time without their suits on, or, or-
Or... What?
All of those situations could easily be avoided. They could set rules. Marinette could make masks so they wouldn't have to be transformed constantly, or they could turn out the lights now and then. Or they could set specific days to stay transformed so they could hang out.
Huh... The whole idea was beginning to seem much more straightforward than it had three minutes ago.
Yeah, Marinette replied to the earlier thought, what could be so bad?
She knew of plenty of things that could be bad, as her anxiety had ways of creating the most outlandish situations. For now, however, she ignored them.
Looking over to Chat Noir, Marinette smiled, giving his back (which was slumped over sadly) a gentle pat. He responded by sitting up straight, a question on his lips and hope in his gaze, ears perked up in interest. They stared at each other for a breath or two before Marinette exploded into a fit of laughter. Her stomach clenched with the force of it.
Chat flinched at first, obviously surprised by her sudden outburst, but a second later, he joined her in the ocean of giggles that had flooded between them. His smile was so wide that Marinette could see the white glint of his teeth and lovely crinkles around his eyes, as well as the shake of his shoulders and a single tear—whether it be from laughter or relief—that slid down his cheek.
And that was how a month later, Marinette Dupain-Cheng—Ladybug—twenty-one-year-old baker's daughter found herself transformed and heaving box after box into a two-bedroom apartment smack dab in the middle of Paris with Chat Noir trailing just a step behind her, placing a few of his boxes on the wide, empty floor.
It had been a crazy, crazy idea.
But sometimes, Marinette knew, the craziest ideas were the best of them all.