#sneeky sneeky akuma reference | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

musicfren · 4 years

Text

tend hearts to bloom (our folly exhumed) part 2

Everything takes time to grow. Some good things take so much longer than you could have ever thought possible, and the best things might never grow at all. All you can do is tend to your garden. Part 2 is HERE y’all. Me and @nottesilhouette have finished part two of our hyper-extended flower metaphor saga :P You can read part 1 here. Happy @felinettenovember y’all! May this post last you a lot longer than 3 days <3

Felix lives in a state of “too cool”: too cool to be friends with the kids at school, too cool to be friends with the teachers and faculty, too cold to be friends with anyone at all. So he’s the last to realize when a new trend finds its feverish way across the school in whispers and muffled laughter behind lockers. Normally, he wouldn’t care-- schoolyard trends are little more than the transient, ephemeral whims of children drifting on the winds of their judgement, but there’s something about the ink that peeks through the sleeves of Kim’s shirt that demands his attention.

“What is that?”

“...are you checking out my muscles, bro?” Kim is genuinely baffled, not a trace of judgement in his tone but clearly trying to slot the puzzle pieces together as to when Felix became someone who cared about brawn, either in himself or anyone else. Still, Kim is nothing if not kind, so he flexes in Felix’s direction to give him a better look.

His sleeves ride up when he does, and Felix brushes his arm over the bulge of Kim’s forearm, which probably doesn’t help the confusion. But the ink is irresistible to Felix. It’s familiar and gorgeous, sharp clean lines on Kim’s skin, and so glossy Felix worries it might smudge. It doesn’t.

There on Kim’s wrist, perfectly framed by his bulging veins, is a comically cute grey dumbbell, and a doodled little snapdragon curled around the handle of the weights.

“Oh, dude, did you mean my tattoo?” Kim is clearly relieved that his perception of Felix can remain intact, and helpfully flexes a little more. This is a much more reasonable thing for someone like Felix to find attractive. “Yeah, I finally caved and got it done, I wasn’t really sure what to get, y’know? I didn’t want to show up there like an idiot with no idea what to say or ask for, but Max told me that she was really good about just listening to you talk about what you liked and working with you to get something nice done. I like Max a lot,” he shares conspiratorially.

Felix nods, as if this makes sense, and wanders away. Show up where? Get what done? Clearly someone was drawing this on Kim. There’s no way he could’ve done it himself; it was on his right wrist and Kim is right handed, but… Felix needed to know. He just didn’t know what to ask, or whether he should ask at all.

But Felix knows how to hold his tongue, how to say the right things and keep himself safe, so he waits three days before ending up in a partner project with Max. Not by design, he plans to insist to anyone asking. No one asks.

They’re listing their skills to decide who’ll take which piece of the project when Felix makes his move. “And you draw, too, right?”

“No?” Max looks flummoxed, and Felix panics immediately.

“Oh, well… I just… you had… Kim-told-me-you-drew-a-dumbbell-for-him!” He rushes the sentence out all in one breath, and Max looks more startled at his explanation than anything else, which sends Felix spiraling even more.

But Max just takes a moment (a way too long moment) to process, and then laughs. “Is that what Kim said? He must’ve explained poorly. Nah, he got it the same place I got this.” And then Max is unbuttoning his shirt, pulling it up enough to show off the robot brushed over his abdomen, adorned with a cheerful amaryllis where its heart would be.

“Where… um, where did you get it?”

“Oh, art room after school! I’m surprised you haven’t seen the line out the door yet, it reaches well past the auditorium and I know you like to practice violin there after school. So, the project?”

Max is too focused on the work to answer anything else after that, and Felix is too afraid to try. But he does know that Alya spends ages in the art room writing up articles for her blog as she waits on Marinette.

He doesn’t get a chance to ask Alya anything, though, because Chloe derails the rest of class bragging about the shopping bags on her bicep and thoroughly avoiding the subject of the creator. Each one of them has an orange lily stamped on it in bold color, and Felix snorts. Fitting, though he’d never say it. Beautiful hatred is the modus operandi that Chloe exists on.

The day after that, he waits until Nino is busy getting lunch to corner her at a lunch table.

“Cool drawing, Alya.” Compliments are good, right? Compliments help people get what they want. And Felix wants, needs to know what this is, because there’s something so familiar, important, the way they’re tagged, and he would know it if he just had one hint, the right clue to fit into this picture--

“Thanks! My girl’s talented, don’tcha think? I love the way she let me match Nino.” She tugs down her collar to show off headphones slashed through with a pencil, and the ball of a group of sycamore flowers dangling off the end of the eraser like a pom pom.

Felix bluescreens. No, no, that’s wrong. That’s not what he’d glimpsed on Nino’s neck, and Alya said they matched, something is wrong.

“Why is that flower there?”

Alya laughs. “Well, every designer’s gotta have her tag, right? She’s a real tattoo artist, tags every piece with a flower she chooses out of nowhere. No one can work out what the pattern is, even when we cross referenced traditional flower meanings, but they’re always gorgeous and fit in so well-- have you seen Juleka’s? You’d hardly even notice, it’s so punk rock.”

Nino’s making his way back and there’s no sycamore pom pom on his pencil, just an aster on the ear of the headphones, and Felix’s mind is whirring too fast to follow but Alya is walking away and the clues are slipping away like sand between his fingers and gripping harder only makes them slip away faster and--

“That’s the wrong flower.”

“What?” Nino startles, absolutely taken aback at this out-of-character greeting. He’s used to Felix being curt, speaking out of context, but this is beyond even Nino’s ability to nod through.

“It should be a marigold, right? Creative, passionate, absolutely driven by your art and the things you love, that’s who you are, why is it an aster?”

“...what??”

Felix can do little more than point. “Alya: sycamore, curious, journalistic drive, asking questions and doing everything she can to know a person so she can take care of them. Max: amaryllis, determined and focused on the work he builds and proud of it when it works because he has every right to be. Kim: snapdragon, strong and gracious and so, so, so protective, because that’s who he is so why is yours an aster?!”

“He deserves to know he’s clever, even if he doesn’t feel it.”

Felix whirls around, and Marinette is standing there clutching her bag to her chest, trembling, but glaring at him from half a foot shorter than where he stands. She’s so strong. She’s so strong, and Felix wonders if she kept marigold for herself. She deserves to, if she wanted it.

Maybe it shows on his face, what he’s thinking, or maybe she’s just always been the kindest person he was ever dumb enough to let go, because her gaze softens, hurt and hopeful in equal, anxious measure. “You remembered.”

“...you made it hard to forget.” The way her face crumples confirms that yep, nope, Felix is an idiot. He scrambles to fix it, take it back, get it right this time no matter who’s watching. “No, no!! Like… unforgettable.” His voice is breathy on that last word, nostalgic for a childhood they barely shared, and it’s wrong and someone’s going to make fun of it but right now just for a second he doesn’t care.

“...oh.”

What people really do make fun of him for is the way he ends up apologizing, for hours, sobbing into her blazer and wiping tears from her cheeks, and still not walking into school with her art on his skin, and Felix doesn’t correct them.

He was right: there’s a marigold inked over her heart like a treasure.

There’s a butterfly inked over his, now, landing on the petals of a geranium, and they’ve talked about now. Butterflies, first of all, can live for years, so that wasn’t even true, and friendships… friendships are like flowers. They take root and they grow, and when the sun hits right their seeds will burst into petal and stem and exist, persist, against every odd and obstacle.

She has no idea how apt that butterfly is. Felix brushes his fingers over a brooch barely visible behind his tie, and feels hope blooming in his chest for the first time in years.

This time, he knows how fragile it is. This time, he vows, he’ll keep the sunlight on it, patch the soil around its roots with fertilizer and keep it safe. This time… he’ll love her the way she deserves to be, the way she wants to be loved, the way he knows he’s allowed to.

#felinete #felinette november #felinette november 2020 #felinette month 2020 #felintte month #miraculous ladybug #PV felix #miraculous tales of ladybug and chat noir #tattoo artist #sneeky sneeky akuma reference #agressive flower metaphors #MusicFrenDoesWords

34 notes · View notes