#notte collabs

"You haven't failed me at all, Confête!" Ladybug rushes to reassure him. "We knew it was a risk when I asked you to take the horse miraculous home, with your... father, and all..." The name hangs heavy in the air; after the revelations of the last week, Felix has hardly dared to breathe at home, terrified of his father turned terrorist more than he'd ever been before. Ladybug had offered him the horse miraculous as a ready means to escape, but Felix, in his infinite confidence that absentee Gabriel would never step foot in his room, left her behind as he spoke to Nathalie in the hall. By the time he returned, she was gone. 

Only a few days later, half-drowned in water until Gabriel had broken her enough to capitalize on such exquisite fear, Kaalki had been akumatized into Kelkie and was newly terrorizing the city, jumping from portal to portal, emerging in a new unrecognizable shape with each new emergence. 

Felix growled. "I should've been more careful. You know it's true." 

"C'mon, cupcake, don't be so glum." Ladybug bumps her shoulder into his, nearly sending him sprawling over the edge of the tower; she grabs his fluffy tails and yanks him back up. She starts the familiar process of untangling her fingers from his curls. "We'll reign in our friend in no time! She won't be able to stirrup trouble for long." 

Felix can't help himself: he laughs. 

On cue, a roar of flame ignites across the city, followed by the flash of another portal. They've lost her again. Every whisper of joviality drops from their grin.

"Let's go, Ladybug." Then the worst happens: Felix feels his throat constrict, his tail and hair and sleeves puff a little puffier. When he opens his mouth again, it's by no will of his own. "Ah-hyuck!! this is no time for hoRSING AROUND, hee-haa!!"

Piinkie Pie has taken over his hero self again, and there is no new low he can sink to. This is the worst possible time for his kwami to possess his body, and for a joke? Now? Ugh. 

Ladybug stares at him. He wishes the neon pink of his suit would hide his blush, but of course his mask leaves his cheeks open for vulnerability. 

“Alright, take ten, my dudes! We’ll go from Act III, Scene 1 after you get some snacks and chill.” 

Marinette lets out an amused laugh as she thumbs through her copy of the script, ignoring the throng of hungry students pushing past her, desperate for this grueling 5 hour rehearsal to end. Brevity may be the soul of wit, but certainly not of this play. Nino makes a good director, she thinkst: loud, relentlessly positive, able to carry the sagging energy of an entire unwilling highschool production on his shoulders.

But alas, poor Nino is fighting a losing battle. Everyone knows that the point of this play is the obligatory report they will all have to write for their literature class at the end of the week. Almost no one here can act, and Marinette’s arms are beginning to grow tired from carrying up the entire play. With scarcely a week left it looks like most people are planning to coast the rest of the way to a clean C+. The part of Hamlet still has not been cast.

Akuma attacks have pushed back the discussions they were meant to have on the play, and Bustier couldn’t cancel the major assignment for the unit; instead, she had told them to analyze the play through the role of their choice after embodying it for the few weeks it took to rehearse and perform the production. Their in-class discussions have been condensed into a take-home paper on top of the already obligatory theatre performance and pretty much everyone knows that Bustier would be lenient on them just for that. And Nino knows they know, and Marinette is starting to suspect that he is itching to “chill” like he keeps telling them to. 

Marinette chews on the corner of her pencil, running a finger over the veritable bloodbath of neat pink notes she’s crammed into the margins of every page. She’s on in the next scene, and she wants to make sure she’s got all the nuances of the character, her character, exactly as she plans to bring her to life. Looking over the script, Marinette starts to regret not typing the notes to begin with: her entire essay is definitely already fully composed. Maybe Max will consider building her an application that can scan the document and transpose it to a word processor as editable text… 

“Give me your hand, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.” 

Marinette looks up to see Felix quoting Shakespeare, trying very hard to look inconspicuous in his black stage-hand clothes, wheeling a stand of fake swords almost as tall as he was. She watches with some amusement as he struggles to set it upright, and makes absolutely no move to help him. 

“I wasn’t expecting to see you on stage any time this week,” she says, sticking her tongue out and being far cuter than it had any right to be. Felix, sweating, scrambles for a riposte. 

“I hadn’t expected you out of the home ec room at all. Shouldn’t you be half-drowned in fabric or something?” 

She sends him a quizzical look. He wonders if the akuma attacks have scrambled her memory. “Because...you’ve got costumes to work on? As the play’s costume designer?” 

“Oh, I’m not doing costumes this year, actually.” Marinette laughs awkwardly. “I’m not even sure what I would write about if I were.” 

Felix stares at her. The sword he was carrying slid out of his grasp with a dull clang.

“...what are you writing about as a stagehand?” 

Felix decides to pretend the last few moments were a fever dream and focus on answering this one very reasonable question. “I’m looking at the blocking and the prop placement and the lighting and how it impacts the effect of the character portrayal on the audience and what information manages to get conveyed to the audience.” 

Marinette offers a suitably impressed ooh at this. “How far have you gotten with it?” 

“Darling, we don’t even have a Hamlet. The titular character. I’ve done nothing.” Felix offers the most deadpan look he can muster and startles at her giggle. “What, how far have you gotten?!”

Marinette flashes her script at him, more notes than dialogue at this point. 

“You are possibly the only person in the class thinking anything even remotely deep about this play. What is all that for?!” 

“Hopefully for a handwritten notes to editable text conversion app.” 

Felix only narrowly avoids gaping. What?! “...is that what’s scrawled on every corner of that script you’re clutching?” He grins crookedly at her, and her traitorous heart skips a beat. 

“...oh! no, um, those are my notes. For… my essay? I’ve written out the character analyses into where the text supports my arguments and… um… yeah.” She flushes with the realization that 1) that was completely out of context for him because 2) he cannot, in fact, read her mind. 

“...Marinette, for what do you possibly need notes?” 

“...to play my character?” 

“Oh, wow, are you playing a guy? Impressive, tiny girl.” He rakes his gaze down her body and Marinette is flushed for a whole new reason now. She pushes to her feet and doesn’t bother to care about the swords she knocks over. 

“I’m not, actually.” 

“Why?! Who is there to play among the female characters? Marinette, I took you as someone who plays characters of worth.”

She looks up at him, eyes wide with dangerous innocence “Are female characters not valuable?” 

“I-- no, that’s not what I meant and you know it! Shakespeare is historical, and male-centric, and writes women who do little more than parrot the views of the men around them if they get any dialogue at all. There’s no substance there! Who are you possibly going to play, Gertrude? Ophelia?!?” Felix’s tone makes it very clear what he thinks of the only two options she has available to her. 

Marinette sweeps past him coolly, her hair whipping against his cheek. “I am playing Ophelia, actually.”

Stumbling, Felix turns and gives her a wry grin. “Oh darn, I’m sorry for your loss.” He makes a valiant effort at replicating her stuck out tongue, not that Marinette is looking. It’s for the best: it’s not nearly as cute on him. 

“Excuse you?” Marinette halts in her tracks, shadowed amongst the heavy curtains of stageside. Her voice echoes hauntingly around the empty theatre. 

“...c’mon. Ophelia does less than Gertrude. She even has fewer lines!”

With great restraint, Marinette manages to do nothing more than turn to face Felix, trembling with repressed rage. “Does less? Ophelia is the only person in this play who does anything at all that isn’t driven by a madman’s plot! Ophelia is the only person in this play who can pull Hamlet out of insanity, even if for little more than a moment.” 

Frustrated, Felix tosses the nearest item at her and growls when she catches it neatly. It’s a victory when she stalks off across the stage to the opposite wing, gathering her notes and settling herself neatly in a prim fury. She’s wrong, she’s wrong, she’s wrong. He whirls around and starts rearranging everything she knocked over, grumbling under his breath. 

“Ophelia is the only character in that play who makes zero choices of her own. Even her death was a result of her tripping into a lake.”

There’s a crashing sound, and Felix spins back around to see Marinette bolt upright, tempestuous in her temper. Felix may have gotten a bit too loud with that last statement.

“How can you say that? That’s the most significant choice she makes in the whole play!”

Felix can feel the irritation rising, hot and ugly in his chest. Why is she being so stubborn? Marinette makes a gesture at him, quick and angry from the other side of the room. Felix squints and tilts his head, struggling to what she was doing from across the stage. Then all at once it hits him.

“Do… do you bite your thumb at me?!” He splutters in indignant incoherency, his grip tightening on whatever he’s holding until the plastic grooves bite into his skin. 

“I do bite my thumb at thee, sir.” 

Felix steps onto stage, glaring. Marinette matches him step for step, glare for angry glare. Nino gasps, cowers, and then grabs his camera.

The class, milling around aimlessly as their ten minutes ticked to an end, comes to a collective halt. Nino sheppards them out of the way of the camera’s shot. They flock without protest to the edges of the theatre, terrified to watch this trainwreck unfold, terrified they’ll miss even a second of it. The die has been cast. Who now the price of his dear blood doth owe?

“...did I miss Marinette’s birthday?” 

“Dude, what are you talking about? Mari’s birthday is in April.” Nino shoots a pointed look at the snow drifting down to the streets as he shakes the now-sludgy water off his snow boots and starts unwrapping himself out of his winter gear, piling them up in a wet mess on Felix’s desk. Felix, for once, chooses not to complain, opting instead to focus on the main issue here. 

“Well, but there’s a gift on her desk and November seventh is definitely too early for holiday gifts.” Felix smirks slyly at a camera no one else can see as he said the date, making Nino send him a weird look. Then again, Felix was weird all the time. Nino is used to it by now, so he doesn’t comment any further. 

Nino shoots him a sidelong glance. “Dude, why are you specifically checking her desk?”

“Unimportant, I saw it as I walked in. Do you know who put it there?” Felix says, swerving the discussion violently back to the most salient point. 

“…bruh… her desk requires you to turn almost 180˚ from where you would need to go for your desk.” 

“Unimportant, I said.” Hopefully his Ladybug-red blush doesn’t show under the still-flickering half on lights that no one has bothered to flick the other switch for. The back half of the classroom is bathed in residual light and Felix can hardly see his own hand in front of him, but by Nino’s amused smirk, his blush is clearly bright enough to light up the path to his doom. 

Nino opens his mouth, but whatever snark he was going to respond with is lost under a quiet “ooooooh!” and the sound of wrapping paper being carefully pried apart. Felix turns and his meticulously coiffed composure slips a bit. 

“Marinette!” He half-falls out of his chair as he scampers anxiously to her side. He stands protectively behind her as if about to pull her to safety, hands hovering awkwardly around her waist, but she seems far too engrossed by the present before her to notice. Later, Felix will blush and be glad she didn’t. Later than that, she’ll admit she saw and just chose to ignore it, and Felix will blush again. 

“I wonder what it i-- ooh!!” With a small happy gasp, she pulls back the paper (a disgustingly garish shade of green, easily three shades off of the correct shade, obviously) to reveal a dainty box of chocolates and an elegant white card, ornately decorated in gold leaf print. Marinette curiously picks up the card as Felix cranes his head intently over her shoulder. Inside, in pretentiously penciled cursive, is a simple phrase:

“With love, your secret admirer <3”

Felix immediately scoffs, grabbing Marinette’s wrist and pulling her into his chest, but she scarcely pays him any mind, so engrossed is she in her gift.

“Gosh, that’s really thoughtful of them, picking my favorite!  Who… whoever they are…”

“It’s not even your favorite kind of chocolate!” Felix screams in his head, and refuses to acknowledge the follow-up question of whether he even knows what her favorite chocolate is. He’s quickly distracted, anyways, when Marinette giggles, which is a very distracting sound, Nino, stop looking at him like that!

“Haha, I could even say it’s… sweet! of them!!” She pops a chocolate in her mouth and Felix is riveted to the way her lips purse around the sweet, the way her tongue swirls around her finger as she sucks the last of it off. 

Nino shoots him an impressed glance and mouths, “Dude, nice!” but Felix’s mind is too busy spinning to process why. What on EARTH was happening?! 

It takes him the next two classes and most of lunch to work up the courage to ask. “Um… what’s a secret admirer?” 

Nino pauses mid-bite, fork dangling in the air, to give Felix such a dumbfounded look that Felix immediately chooses to google the term instead, furtively hiding his phone under the bench. “Dude… why did you use that word if you didn’t even know what it meant, you walnut??” 

Felix slams the lid down on his food and walks away immediately, footsteps echoing to the sound of Nino’s laughter. 

He hopes to put this baffling incident behind him, but to Felix’s immense distress, the parade of gifts does not stop there. At her locker the next morning, Felix finds himself needing to push through a group of students all cooing over… something he cannot make out from behind the crowd. As he gets closer, he notices flowers pinned up in the shape of a heart over her locker, with a grand bouquet of roses pinned in the center. Felix’s nose twitches, itches, and then-- 

“Achoo!!”

Rose petals go flying everywhere and Marinette laughs, delighted. Kim nudges into him. “Sick show, bro! She loved that, how’d you time that sneeze??” 

Felix doesn’t know. He’s confused. He wants to go home.

Two days after that, the PA system crackles through the classroom five minutes before the class  is scheduled to end. Principal Damoclese clears his throat with a sharp peak in the audio and says in his most bored, reading-off-a-paper voice: “Marinette Dupain-Cheng to the courtyard, please, that’s Marinette Dupain-Cheng to the courtyard.” Bustier winks and ends class early, and everyone floods outside to see a teddy bear holding a cute little love-heart. Marinette makes a beeline to it and hugs it immediately, burying her face in its fur. It’s adorable, actually, and Felix tries very hard to not be jealous of a stuffed toy. 

He does not succeed. 

“OHMIGOSH, Felix!!!” Rose squeals, “That was so romantiiiiic, you’re sooooooo good at this!!! How are you being this sweeeeeeet??? <3 <3 <3” Felix can hear the hearts in her voice. Juleka mumbles something that he can only assume is agreement. Felix just sits down where he was standing and puts his head in his hands. Why did nothing make sense?

Felix leans his head against the window of the car, letting the bumps in the road thunk his forehead against the glass in a nice, soothing, repetitive dull pain, better than the constant headache he’s been living with for the last week. Their words spin about his head, hounding his thoughts. His chauffeur is silent for once

“Dude, nice!” “Sick show, bro!” “How are you being this sweet???”

And that’s when it hits him, making a hollow thunk off his empty skull.

Someone is getting her these gifts. And they think he did it. 

Another heartbeat. 

OH NO, THEY KNOW HE LIKES HER! Wait. He likes her?! ...oh no. He DOES. 

Staring out at the road speeding by far too fast, Felix clenches his hands into fists. He’d never expected to find himself here: head over heels crushing on a girl that everyone knew he liked before he ever worked it out on his own, a week late into a competition he doesn’t remember entering. 

Well, no matter. There’s still time to enter, catch up, win.

The next day, Marinette finds another chocolate box on her desk, bigger, more expensive, and exactly the correct shade of green. Each one is handcrafted into increasingly more elaborate designs, laced with caramel and toffee and candied pecans. The spread takes over her desk and Alya’s, and Felix grins smugly. 

“Wait. Didn’t you already do this?” Nino asks, but Felix is too busy. There is an entire wheelbarrow of flowers to deliver by lunch. 

His competition moves quickly: by the end of the school day, the PA is playing a serenade for her in front of the whole school. As soon as the bell rings, he cancels his next order and places a rush on the biggest size they offer: clearly, he’s going to need to do better. He doesn’t bother to look at the sizing or the price. Nothing is too big or too expensive for Marinette. 

The next day Marinette finds a third box, so big it doesn’t even fit on her desk and instead sits next to it like an awkwardly crouched gremlin. Felix glowers at it, not having realized exactly how big it was going to be, and becoming increasingly concerned as she shrieks with delight, yanking out the artistically crinkled tissue paper and tossing it gleefully behind her, climbing into the giant box as soon as she makes enough space for herself. 

Terrified, Felix shuffles over and peeks over the edge. She’s curled up in the paws of his giant stuffed animal, half asleep, looking so cozy he can hardly bear it. 

...oh, goodness, he’s getting jealous of a toy again. His own toy, even!  

There’s nothing for a few days, and Felix relaxes, and then--

The entire classroom is covered in flowers of every kind come Thursday morning. Bustier cancels the first period and directs everyone coughing and sneezing to the nurse, and convinces everyone who can stand the pollen to help her move it out of the way. 

It turns out the class has been talking about the secret admirers-- a lot more than Felix expected. Sometime after the impromptu courtyard concert by Jagged Stone and the last minute fashion walk between classes, and between the endless planning and scheming and glowering, Felix finds himself cornered by Nino, who’s lost his hat, glasses hanging half off his face in a way Felix could’ve sworn they didn’t used to bend, looking more feral than Felix had ever seen him. 

“ENOUGH, FELIX.” And then Felix finds himself being dragged bodily to an empty classroom where at last he faces his opponent-- nay, his nemesis. He recognizes them at once, because of the way they, too, are being held prisoner, the only other put together person in the entire room. 

Felix meets Marinette with dirt under her nails and grass stains on her skirt, kneeling in mud cooing over a leaf. The day is sweltering, and the sweat that clings to every surface of Felix’s skin is starting to set his teeth on edge. He swats at a fly and looks down at her, seeming so at home in the soil and the silt.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?”

Relieved to have someone, anyone take some sort of interest in her work, Marinette brightens up instantly. “...there’s a caterpillar on this leaf. Shh, you’ll scare them away.” Marinette reaches one grubby hand back behind and, before Felix can manage to flinch away, clamps it down on his wrist and yanks him onto his knees with her. 

Felix yelps, trying desperately to avoid getting mud on his expertly tailored pants. “What are you DOING?!” The caterpillar scampers away and suddenly he’s face to face with the full force of a disappointed hurricane of a girl. He instinctively squirms backwards into remorse, halfway through stuttering an apology before her attention catches on something else. 

“A geranium!” Marinette brushes her fingers over soft petals and Felix finds himself blushing, not even sure why. She’s so gentle with it, barely touching it at all, rapt and delighted, and it shows in the bright blue of her eyes when she turns to him and asks: “Do you like them?” 

Felix has never cared for flowers. They belong to that irritating, uncomfortable, disgusting outside that he’s spent such a large portion of his tiny life avoiding at all costs. But now, kneeling in the earth with the warmth of her presence brushing against his skin, and her imploring gaze boring into him, Felix lets out a sheepish “...yeah, I… I think they’re pretty cool.”

She absolutely beams at him. “I think they’re beautiful! Flowers have so much to say, don’t you think? Hi, I’m Marinette!” She sticks out a hand absolutely caked in dirt, and Felix, entranced and repulsed in equal measure, finds himself taking it. 

He doesn’t even wipe the mud off afterwards. 

A week of furious planning and panicked focusing later, Felix finds Marinette kneeling in the same patch of earth. Without prelude he plops a massive stack of papers and drawings in front of her, nearly snapping the old wooden bench in two and sending Marinette recoiling from the thump.

“You… you, um, you said flowers said things.” He stammers, pushing himself over the edge of conversation with both hands. “So I’m gonna show you what they say.”

Marinette, intrigued but pausing to make sure her newly bloomed daffodils are okay, runs a curious hand over the pages. Felix bites his tongue and tries not to shudder as his immaculate tables become spattered with soil, and then considers the possibility of getting to see her fingerprints on his work for the rest of his life.

He shudders for a different reason, then, a pleased blush creeping across his face like vines over fresh soil.

“This is wrong,” she says after a long moment’s musing, jabbing at a page. Felix’s heart leaps into his chest, unsure how his construction could be wrong but terrified to have this veritable expert on flowers and love say it is anyway.

“Orange lilies should be something else. I don’t think they mean hatred!” 

“That’s… what it said, when I looked it up.” 

She pouts at him, lip wobbling. “But… they’re so pretty! Can’t… we just decide for ourselves?” 

Felix squirms uncomfortably at this. “But my research…”

Her pout intensifies, then dissolves into her idea face. “We could make our own flower language! One that means what we want it to say. Special, just for us.” She looks at him so fondly, so hopefully, Felix has nothing left in him with which to refuse. 

Half a week later, they’re speaking almost entirely in flowers, slipping references in wherever they can and giggling when they trip over their own imagination. There are still so many kinks in the system, and Marinette and Felix are looking forward to finding and fixing every single one. 

They work together after school and between classes, huddled in the back of the library scribbling madly over each other and filling their notebooks with flowers. The stack of pages gets taller and taller, blooming from a neat bud of paper to an overgrown shrub. Felix resorts to dusty books most of the time, but Marinette seems to always have a fresh metaphor ready to pluck from the garden of her imagination.

She peeks up at him with those bluebell eyes, sparkling with mirth. “Geraniums mean friendship, I think.” She plucks the pencil from behind his ear. Flustered, he leans over her shoulder in growing concern.

“Wh… no it doesn’t! I looked it up, see?” He jabs at the page. “It means stupidity. Or, fow-ley. Like a mistake, I think.” 

The shocked, hurt expression on her face makes him think he might have made a fow-ley of his own.

“Felix! You… you think geraniums are a mistake?”

Here’s the thing: he definitely doesn’t. 

Here’s the other thing: four different kids have shoved Felix in the hallways when Marinette is with someone else, making fun of him for his made up language and the time he spends looking things up for Marinette and the way he only smiles for her. They’re watching him now, or they’ll find out eventually, and Felix is suddenly in too deep to take it back. Words are flying from his mouth before he ever registers what they are, and by the time he does, he doesn’t know how to take them back or smooth them over. 

“...yeah. I do. Friendships are like butterflies, or flowers: they die in three days.” 

“Is… that what you really think?”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is.” He knows he’s said the right things when all four of his bullies nod slowly, respectfully. Her heartbreak is plain across her face, and they can’t see it, but Felix can’t escape. He wonders if they would relent at her expression, and then swallows down doubt like bitter regret.

Marinette’s hurt solidifies into furious calmness. “I guess our three days are up, then.” 

It seems easiest to let her walk away.