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It starts off like this: a wildly inappropriate question in a very public place, in front of people, strangers who wouldn’t understand that its not - that she doesn’t mean it that way.
“Ah!” she cries, holding another one up for him to see. Adrien gets knocked in the nose by a beautifully wrapped little bundle, something gold and white wrapped up inside. It smells like clean bedsheets he thinks, and something like honey, but he’s not sure because it’s…. “What is it?” he asks hesitantly, looking at it through one eye then the other. Plagg in the pocket of his jacket, makes another retching noise and he wraps his arms around his chest, smiling in a way he hopes isn’t suspicious. He’s been complaining about the smell for the last half an hour, to no avail. Adrien has been putting up with a lot worse from him for a lot longer.
She scrunches up her nose at him, ridiculously. If he made that face in public he’d be afraid of someone noticing but he’s glad Mari doesn’t follow his line of thinking. She seems more relaxed now and he likes that the more they are around each other, the more he hears her say.
"It's scented bath salts," she explains. "They dissolve when you take a bath."
“I don’t take baths” he says. Marinette looks shocked. It’s the strangest thing learning new things about Adrien, things that she felt she should know, after living in the same orbit as him, after having such a massive crush on him for so long. It’s the kind of offhand information she’d probably have picked up from behind him, like coins dropping from a pocket.
“How do you get clean?”
“I shower” he splutters. The question is nerve-wracking; he blushes to think that someone might’ve heard, but it’s not the question that short circuits his nerves.
“Do you want to take a bath with me when we get back to your house” she asks. And god she sounded casual but her face is red at the way he could’ve taken it, because she’s - if not over him - she can at least be friends with him. You’d think she was 13 again, buying every magazine with his face in it.
She buries her face in another display under the pretence of reading fine print on the sign, so she doesn’t see the symptoms of an impending aneurysm. It’s unfortunate because his face takes on a really flattering shade of eggplant behind her back.
“I’ll show you why people use them.” she continues, fumbling in the pause. “They’re really so nice, Adrien, I promise - oh!”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“I don’t have my bathing suit with me” Her forehead is wrinkled, preoccupied with the thought of interrupting her parents in the middle of preparing for a wedding. When they’d left the air had been thick with flour and when she’d called goodbye, her parents had been only vague shapes waving goodbye through the gloom.
Now that he’s clearer on what the bath entails, breath is making it’s way easier to his lungs and he hears himself offer her one of his shirts and swim trunks to wear in the tub. And even if he’s embarrassed and feels fumbling after almost choking on his tongue thinking about taking a bath with Mari, Mari with legs for days and freckles in places he could cry thinking about, it’s cool seeing her smile.
…
Nathalie is in the kitchen when they get back, on the phone with someone. Her voice sounds like a tuned piano string, that tense. She’s sneaking bites of her lunch while the person on the other end talks and she seems a little more human, a little more soft. When she sees him, she hangs up without another word.
“Your father left for Rome il y a une heure,” she snaps checking her watch. “He’ll be back tomorrow and he wants to have dinner.”
Mari takes on her role as unacknowledged bystander with fumbling uncertainty and Adrien feels a pang of pity as she falls back behind him a little towards the open space of the front hall.
The softness he thought Nathalie might possess has disappeared and instead she looks like the statues at the quiet museums maman liked, solemn and unreachable. He doesn’t answer, only pulls two bottles of water from the fridge and leaves her behind to deal with whatever it is she does. Being the personal assistant to Gabriel Agreste looks stressful even if Adrien isn’t exactly sure of what it entails.
“Come on,” he says in a voice he hopes isn’t unsteady. “My room is upstairs.”
Mari’s face is red and shiny and her fists are clenched and chou looks like she’s going to be sick a little. “Is everything ok?” she asks, but she wishes there were a better way to breach it. Pity is corrosive and Adrien is sensitive and smart so he feels it. He only smiles back at her, a little sad in passing. Next time they hang out they’re staying at her house, though upon reflection Mari realizes her parents probably wouldn’t be ok with them sharing a bath. The thought makes her blush again, that old companion, the embarrassment, the nerves playing music on her heart strings, her plucked nerves.
She changes into the swim trunks and t-shirt he gives her in his bathroom and she tries not to be intimidated because really, you know, she should be mature enough to know money isn’t everything. She can’t help thinking, though, that his bathroom looks kind of like a picture she saw once on the news of a hotel a member of royalty had been assassinated in once
Adrien walks in after the tub has been running for a few minutes. “Your tub is so big,” she mutters, frowning at the bare inch of water that’s sloshing at the bottom. She left her shopping bag at the bottom of the vanity and she kneels down and rummages through it looking for another bath bomb that looks like the one they chose on the way home. “We might have to use a uh, a… uhm.” and the words seem to have hit the same wall her thought process encounters because nothing is coming out. Adrien, tanned shirtless Adrien is standing in front of the tub looking tall, looking lean, looking terribly like something she wants to touch and never stop touching, to always have contact with and not just casual. She wants warm contact, she wants burning contact, she wants friction that could start a forest fire. She wants, she wants, she wants.
And it is not just him and his shoulders and his back that stops her short; it's his skin, the rugged purple whorls, the white lines that look like lightning strikes in the wrong light and don’t seem to tan, the tears that look like violent overblown stretch marks, black and blue that make her cringe with the empathetic reflex of feeling an echo of his pain. Before she can stop herself, she’s saying his name with something new in her voice that makes him turn around.
“Adrien, c’est oú que t’a reçu tes cicatrices?”
Oddly he looks guilty. “I used to be a rowdy kid,” he shrugs. “Sometimes things happened.”
He must mistake the empathy he sees for something else because his face changes and his voice is as heavy as hers when he says “It wasn’t my father.” He turns around and stares back into the tub. “He’s a jerk, but he doesn’t hurt me.”
“Ok.” Mari murmurs, goes back to rifling through the bag. She doesn’t have the courage tot tell him whatever he mistook for misgiving on her face was recognition. She has the same scars, the same angry looking skin from something she assumes was a lot more violent than wherever he got his injuries.
Her face is red when she kneels back down beside him. “I’m sorry, je m’excuse, je voulait pas - I didn’t mean to insinuate, I didn’t - they just look like they must’ve hurt.”
If she’d seen his expression she might’ve recognized the redness. If she’d seen his face at that moment she might’ve seen it - that fond sweet look, dumbfounded, in awe. Chat Noir looking struck dumb.
Once the taps are off the bathroom is silent, unnervingly so. They watch the bath bombs fizzle and it’s the only sound other than the steady drip of water left in the pipe.
They climb in slowly, adjusting to the water as they slip in and it’s companionable; neither of them break the silence as they get used to it. The water is dark blue and glitter ripples beneath the surface. Adrien lifts his hand examining the glitter that gets caught on his skin when the water rushes off.
“The last time I had a bath with someone else it was me and Alya and we were 8” she says through a reluctant smile. They both think about that for a minute, little Alya and Mari, in her parents claw foot tub splashing water up over the sides and screaming while they played.
“I like it,” he says finally. “it’s calmer than a shower.”
They sit in the tub until the heat pales and even then, side by side for a little longer. Mari likes his bathroom, the way it feels like an adventure, the way hotel rooms do and Adrien likes the company and he likes that Mari showed him something, and he likes that after she leaves he finds the bag she pretended to forget on his floor, smelling like lavender and shea butter. He can’t think of anything he can show her in his gratitude, except for the unacceptable - maybe another time, maybe when he’s not in love with someone else, maybe when she’s not so afraid around him still and she can laugh without covering her mouth.
He would like that.