Marinette: (furiously knitting)
Marinette: (furiously drawing)
Marinette: (furiously baking)
Marinette: (furiously optimizing hero squad's patrols)
Marinette: (furiously brainstorming new ways the hero squad can help Paris)
Marinette: (back to furiously drawing but not the same one as before)
Alya: you know - just because you have an idea doesn't mean you have to act on it
Marinette: what?
Alya: you don't have to do every idea you ever think of
Marinette: what are you talking about and also how dare you
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Gift (Core 4 and Adrien thinks, writing exercise)
“You didn’t have to!” Marinette says, squealing as she turns the t-shirt over in her hands. On its front is the visualiser art for Jagged Stones obscure first release, faded now by years of love and soap. Alya beams, leaning forward to see the gift through Marinette’s ecstatic eyes.
“It really wasn’t that big of a deal. You just happened to mention you’d discovered Crocodile Mania on the phone as I passed the second-hand store. It was fate really.” She shrugs but her pleasure in a successful gifting is betrayed by her smile.
Adrien can’t but feel slightly envious of her fortune. Marinette had loved the various gifts he’d given her (for example the blanket draped across her knees. While he couldn’t knit or sew, he knew that she was in dire need of something to keep her warm during the night because she kept shivering and denying it. He’d ironed on a few cat themed patches to the front and she’d glowed upon receiving it.) But nothing had quite elicited the same reaction (well, nothing material at least…)
Marinette puts the t-shirt to her face, giggling and falling back. As Nino hands his gift to Alya, she slips it on, cradling her arms around her chest. It fits perfectly.
“This is really nice Alya, I hope you didn’t spend too much. Memorabilia like this is usually-.”
Alya turns, her new set of earmuffs in her hands, and shakes her head. “It’s fine Marinette, it really wasn’t that much.”
“Alya,” she complains.
Adrien sighs internally. Always eager to give but chronically unable to receive, as Ladybug or as Marinette. At some point he’d figured out as Chat Noir that his roses weren’t rejected out of apathy or lack of feelings but by her inability to accept them. At first because she didn’t feel he was sincere, and then because she despised the money spent on it.
“It’s just too much,” she’d say. “Money better spent elsewhere.”
“It’s just too much,” she says to Alya now. “Money better spent elsewhere.”
“But for the look on your face? Priceless,” Alya assuages and partially convinces Marinette to relax her anxious frown. Adrien huffs, when he’d used that line last year she’d balked at him.
Money is it. The insecurity of it. The lack of it. Something he has in spades but his friends do not. That was the source.
The conversation moves on, the ‘friend exchange gifts in a circle with a STRICT spending limit’ over because none of them could agree what to call it. White elephant was too ostentatious according to Alya, sick of its results in her own family. She’d ended up with a bag of baby carrots, three golden Easter eggs the size of her head and a miniature chicken carved out of broccoli over the course of the years. Secret Santa deemed pointless by Nino because there were so little of them around they’d figure it out immediately. Finally Marinette vetoed grab bag for similar reasons to Nino. In the end, it mostly resembled regular gift giving.
“Speaking of Jagged Stone, did you see he’s performing in a few weeks. Tickets are crazy.” Nino lifts up his phone to show the dates and ticket price.
“That’s insane.”
“Who can afford that?”
“That’s not too bad-,” Adrien pauses, realising his response didn’t fit the other ones yelled out by the others. “That’s awful,” he corrects. Luckily, he only receives one odd glance from Marinette against his chest.
“Like maybe if it was later, but that’s so close. No one commissions me during January,” Marinette muses, playing with his arm as she speaks. Her hands make their way to his, intertwining and twisting until settling together. It’s quite distracting.
“Same here. Work doesn’t really pick back up until after they’ll be sold out. And then there’s definitely no getting them.” Alya groans and flops against the back of the couch. Balancing university and work had become the main struggle for many of them. To afford it they needed to work but to pass class they needed to study.
Notably not Adrien. The difference had become ever more starkly present since leaving collegé. While his friends took up odd jobs and dived for spare change, he continued modelling only because the evenings became incredibly boring with his friends often scattered across Paris, being more adult than him. He could quit, he should quit after everything, but then it was just be more obvious the free time his financial status afforded him. It wasn’t like he didn’t offer to help. But from there you ran into a different problem. Pride.
Case and point.
“I could get the tickets-,” he begins.
“ABSOLUTELY NOT!”
“Adrien no. Bad.”
“Don’t even suggest it.”
“And you can pay it back once things pick up again.” He finishes. Marinette relaxes her sudden iron grip on his hand.
“Oh.” The let out collectively.
From under his head Marinette hums. “That could work. I usually get work in February anyway.”
“Exactly,” he says. “It has no downsides.”
-
Wow. I can write again. Unfortunately it’s the present tense calling to me which isn’t my usual. Forgive, I’m stretching my bones.
Anyway this is sort of based off the discussions I’ve been seeing about Adrien and gift giving. Idk if it really hits it but I had fun and it was nice to play around in these characters heads again after so long.
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