Well this was new. Most people who wanted to figure out her identity did it with investigative work, not overt threats. Only most, because she was pretty sure Lila had stooped that low more than once if Alya was right. Of course, now Marinette had to navigate a conversation about herself without revealing more information than she was supposed to know about herself because she wasn’t herself (at the moment). This would all be very confusing if it weren’t for the practice being Ladybug provided.

And people said that superhero skills were inapplicable in the real world, ha!

“She’s, um, a fashion designer? And she’s in charge of this shoot?”

“Tt. Then where is she?”

“She doesn’t like meeting people or something, because she only communicates through these notes she leaves and my job is to go around making sure everyone finds all of them so nobody misses any directions or whatever.”

“Something or whatever,” the boy repeated to himself before decisively nodding. “I see.”

Marinette blinked. Blinked again. Then decided not to question whatever conclusion he’d come to.

“So you do work here. But that doesn’t explain why you’re in this particular room.”

It was time to distract him. “I’m Marinette! What’s your name?”

“Damian. Now answer my question.”

Failure! Well Marinette could roll with the punches!

“I’m here because MDC told me to be here.”

“Why?”

“Do you work here?”

Damian drew back, confused. “No?”

“Then,” Marinette graced him with a smile, “I can’t answer that.”

A thought occurred to her. “Actually, now that I think about it, you’re the interloper here.” Okay, it more re-occurred to her.

With a quick kick of her feet against the wall she used her height to rise above Damian and force her arms out of his wrist lock. She used the momentum to grab his shoulders, pushing her weight onto him and forcing him to step backwards. Then Marinette swung her feet instead of letting them hit the ground, swinging both of them to his right and causing the pair to swap positions as they finally landed. With a sudden shove, she forced him back against the wall, her forearm pressed against his neck as her other hand held his wrist down.

“And since you’re the intruder, I should be marching you to security.”

“Impressive,” Damian replied. Marinette ruthlessly suppressed the quiver of satisfaction his approval brought, even if she allowed herself to express her more general (innocent) happiness.

“Thank you!”

He seemed a little taken aback at the sight of her genuinely beaming face, but if Marinette was being honest she was just genuinely proud. Akumatized villains didn’t generally stop to compliment her, she wasn’t supposed to know any of this stuff as Marinette, and Chat was too busy flirting over her looks to see her skills. So she was gratified at his compliment, that’s all.

“It was a little sloppy, however.”

And, gratification gone.

“You went right when you should have gone left. As a result you left one of my hands free. And that’s all I need to capture you.”

With that, he put a hand on her hip and… things happened. Marinette wasn’t quite sure exactly what, partly because it was a move she was unfamiliar with and partly (completely) because he had his hand on her hip.

And in Marinette’s defense, it wasn’t just on her hip! His fingertips were curled around her delicate bone structure and gently, but firmly, pressed onto the edge of her backside. Just barely! But enough for a thread of heat to run through them and into Marinette’s…

Hip! Just her hip! And nowhere else!

Also, at the point they’d finished moving, Marinette made the realization that she was now the one against the wall again (somehow) and that he’d moved a whole lot closer. He also hadn’t locked up her wrists this time, instead resuming his grip on one of her upper arms. He was distinctly inside her space.

From this angle, his edges had a certain symmetry to them. Now that she could focus on how he fit together (instead of focusing on how he fit against her) it was obvious he was a naked blade. His hips were the hilt, the place where power built from and the center of his movements. From there, each action was like the slice of a sword as he’d captured her. But just like the smooth movements of a master flowed into one another, she couldn’t make out where each move fit together. Instead, all she could do was see how it began and ended.

Speaking of how it ended, she could tell his eyes were the point of the blade. They were penetrating, and resting on Marinette’s throat. She swallowed lightly, feeling the point of his gaze trace the movement.

“I,” Marinette paused, unsure of what exactly to say. Finally, she settled on, “You caught me?”

“I did,” he sounded pleased with himself. Annoyingly, since they were so close now, his breath tickled her as he spoke. It sent a shiver down her spine, clearly just because of how uncomfortable it was!

If his eyes were the point, his arms were the heft of the sword. They moved in sweeping motions that cut away everything unimportant, which at the moment was literally everything else in the room except her, him, and the sketchbook she’d miraculously kept in her hand during all of this. Seriously, she’d almost forgotten it existed because Damian didn’t seem interested in taking it and she’d had a lot of experience dealing with Lila trying to.

But now it was a problem, because the sketchbook was taunting her. She could see the images in her mind, how she would draw outfits for this boy in a series of straight lines. From a distance it would look like a cacophony, but up close it would resolve into a pattern. The pattern itself would be a kind of silhouette, evoking the specter of a Gotham-esque battle between old and new. Perhaps even the silhouette could be Gotham inspired, a bat against a Parisian bug (she wasn’t arrogant enough to think of herself as a symbol for the city, certainly, but as far as animals went it was better than pigeons).

Thinking of Gotham, Damian would look at home there in a blend of bright and dark aesthetics designed to tease out his razor sharp lines in strategic places for emphasis while rendering him a loose frame elsewhere. Perhaps something like tight dark pants combined with a loose maroon hoodie. The combination of dark and light, particularly against his black hair and green eyes, would draw out the points of color even further and emphasize his most penetrating feature up close.

Definitely with a jacket pulled over the hoodie, probably made of leather or a blackened material, something rigid, with lots of polished silver zippers. It would be waterproof, something practical he could use in the rain. From a distance, through the screen of water and night air, the silver would flicker in and out of view catching the eye until he cut through the droplets like a katana.

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Perhaps she could include the distinct wave pattern that adorned those weapons somewhere, running up the central zipper line maybe. It would need to be subtle, but not invisible for those who knew where to look. It was the kind of design she needed to get on paper as fast as possible before the clarity of it started to slip away, and yet this boy was in the way.

“You caught me,” she squeaked, “now un-catch me please.”

Damian blinked a couple of times, his eyes dragging up from wherever they’d been dissecting her body below. Apparently she wasn’t the only one who got sidetracked. At least her interest in his body was strictly (mostly) professional. She wasn’t sure why he was keeping eyes on hers.

And then his eyes hit hers and she was no longer interested in his body for strictly (mostly) professional reasons. She was just interested.

Well, she was admittedly, maybe, just a bit, like a small, small bit interested in him before. Only a little though.

Still, up close was completely different from across the room or even a short distance apart. Up close his eyes had hidden depths to them, secrets she could explore at length if he let her. Up close she could unpack everything in them for hours, finding the hidden motes of light and dark that flickered in the shimmer of his iris. Marinette had heard people describe eyes as pools, but his weren’t wet. She couldn’t imagine him crying.

Instead they looked like the points of hundreds of tiny blades held aloft, either in victory or in the taking of some deep oath. It created a fractal pattern with pinpricks of different elements poking through to the surface where it all blended into that miraculous green.

Marinette had the sudden urge to hand him a miraculous, and unlike Dick and Kory not to see him in a skintight suit. Well, not only to see him in a skintight suit. Instead, she wanted to see what his eyes would look like framed against a simple mask. A solid color that would do nothing to get in the way of the complexity in his gaze. Something that would subtly draw the viewer in, creating a kind of runway for their look to tumble down across the planes of his face until your eyes hit his eyes and you simply couldn’t look away.

Or breathe.

Marinette had heard people say someone took their breath away before, but she didn’t really believe that was possible. It was supposed to be an exaggeration, like when people claimed eyes were the windows to the soul or that the only person on the planet who had a nicer ass than Bruce Wayne’s son Richard was his girlfriend (some American model if she recalled right, but then who could keep up with celebrity dating?). Instead, Marinette was here, struggling to breathe as she tried to pull herself out of those eyes and avoid getting skewered on the points within.

Although, depending on where he skewered her…

It would be bad! No matter where!

Marinette felt like an overripe tomato on a cutting board underneath those eyes. Messy, and with the potential to leak everywhere leaving nothing but a sticky juice puddle behind. She just had to hope that he didn’t slice her apart, even if she did have the persistent notion that his teeth might feel pleasant sinking into her skin until she burst. The thought of Damian with her juice dribbling down his chin, a satiated look on his face after eating his fill of her now that was…

Bad! Very bad! Very, very bad! What if Damian was allergic to tomatoes?

Or what if he didn’t like tomatoes? You know, because they were messy and red and cared a lot about fashion and were bad at standing up for themselves (but they were getting better, honest!) and tended to ramble when stressed (even if it was just internally) which was a lot of the time because growing up was hard enough and being a tomato was even harder particularly when there were shadowy hawks and moths in the garden that really shouldn’t be there but there weren’t any gardeners so the tomato had to handle this situation itself and it was just a tomato. A plain, slightly squished from the pressure, tomato.

A tomato that had ideas she needed to write down!

Marinette decided that waiting around for Damian to get over whatever was causing him to keep pressing his body in close to hers and holding onto her free arm was taking too long. All she had to work with was the wall against her back (which was instrumental in keeping her standing since her legs were having a little trouble) and her hand wrapped around the sketchbook. Not a lot to work with. But she’d done more with less against akumas.

So she let the slight remaining strength in her legs go, slipping down in a sudden movement that caught Damian by surprise. She landed on her butt as he stumbled forward, forcing her to duck before his… pants… hit her in the mouth.

Marinette might have been a little slow when she did finally duck (obviously due to her legs and not any indecision regarding the potential merits of staying) so she was much closer than she intended to be. She was lucky that it was only her surprised exhalation of breath that hit him. Well, that and perhaps her hastily raised sketchbook. She had to defend herself after all! Who knew what he was carrying around in his pants!

Then again, it might be safer for her to find out…

Just to verify that he wasn’t carrying any concealed weapons, obviously! Marinette had a civic responsibility as superhero that clearly included patting down suspicious men as required. As thoroughly as required.

However! It would be a gross abuse of power for her to act in such a fashion! And having dealt with Chat for so long, Marinette knew how awful it was to deal with unwanted attention, even if he’d never gotten that physical. So she would set a better example and avoid grabbing Damian to…

Verify his measurements (and nothing else)! For her sketches (and nothing else)!

Speaking of sketches, Marinette realized she needed to get to work on hers! A moment later she was popping back to her feet and zipping over to her desk where she began drawing frenetically, capturing the look of Damian in the hoodie in the rain before it was gone.

Damian didn’t follow her. He had a hand pressed into the wall, the other wrapped around his… pants… as he audibly grit his teeth and held back more emphatic exclamations.

“Sorry!” Marinette said brightly as she grabbed a different color and went back to her work.

“Tt!” He turned around with a pained expression on his face.

“Sorry,” she repeated, absentmindedly. The precision of this line needed to be exact for the rest of her design to remain true to scale. And there it was. Precisely.

Surreptitiously, Tikki handed her a different pencil from somewhere inside her pocket and Marinette got to detailing the wave pattern on the zipper. It required one with a fine tip to get the pattern right.

“You… hit me,” he hissed at her in a strangled tone.

“Sorry,” Marinette trailed off, completely absorbed in her work.

Damian waited for her to finish drawing, however long that was, before slamming his palm down on the table next to her in a quick motion, interrupting Marinette before she could start in on her next design. “I do not appreciate your fighting style. It is dishonorable and reckless.”

“You shouldn’t have tried to keep me after I asked you to let me go,” Marinette pointed out quite reasonably before reaching for her pencil.

Damian rolled it out of her reach. “You shouldn’t have tried to fight back after I asserted my superiority. I am extremely well trained, but not practiced at this kind of combat. You merely caught me off guard.”

“What kind is that?”

Damian rolled the pencil back to her outstretched fingers, letting his hand linger and straightening after adjusting himself. “Non-lethal.”

He said it with such certainty and confidence that Marinette, for no reason at all, wanted to believe him. The thing was, he was sixteen by his own admission. So it was a lot more logical that this tiny edgelord was simply trying to intimidate her. Although, as she glanced up and caught his eyes, for some reason Marinette found that she could completely believe Damian was lethal. It felt like he was cutting into her right now.

So, she wasn’t completely aware of what she said next. “Sounds like you need someone to practice with.”

Damian’s fingers stilled, the pencil stopped moving with them. Marinette was acutely aware of the fact that there was nothing more than two glued together pieces of wood and a bit of graphite in between them all of a sudden, and she got the distinct sense that Damian was similarly aware.

“I have practice partners already.”

Marinette suppressed the sharp feeling of devastation with the efficiency of someone ruthlessly practiced at it. He already had a partner. Partners. No space for tomatoes in his garden.

“My brothers.”

Tomatoes grew on vines, though. Vertically. So there was probably some space for a motivated gardener. Marinette just had to ensure said gardener was motivated to get on his knees and get his hands dirty digging out a space to grow tomatoes.

Damian seemed to be contemplating the same thing as he began rolling the pencil again. Marinette’s fingers curled and his uncurled, together they pushed the object between them. It was on his side now, but not for long. The tips of her fingers drifted up, capturing the wood and rolling it back toward her in a steady motion.

Damian took an involuntary step forward, bumping into the table as he did. Scowling, he spoke. “Perhaps I would benefit from sparring with you. Your style is certainly unique, but it seems to catch me from unexpected angles.”

Marinette looked up at him innocently, her hesitation at finding a sparring partner completely forgotten in favor of this chance to tease him. “I caught you?”

There was a pulse in Damian’s neck that wound down slowly as he swallowed. Marinette traced it with her eyes, watching Damian watch her drifting lower. Then the pencil popped from the pressure of his fingertips digging in and his hand was on hers.

And it was the only thing Marinette could feel.