Anything For a Friend : A Miraculous Ladybug Fanfic

Chapter 10

The last few days had been... odd , to say the least. Every time Marinette walked into a room to talk to her friends, she found Alya and Adrien with heads bowed together, whispering. This wouldn't be altogether unusual, given Alya's penchant for conspiracy theories, except for the fact that they stopped as soon as they noticed her enter. What's more, Adrien would smile--no, grin --as soon as his eyes alighted upon her. It was the kind of grin that made her heart sore for someone else entirely, and it irked her that she could not fathom its source.

That alone would not have bothered her over much, if Chat Noir hadn't been acting strangely too. He seemed to have gotten over his anger at her, and was back to his silly flirty self, but the way he looked at her was strange. She'd caught him staring at her before in the months they'd worked together, but he always looked away when she turned to face him. Now, his stares were long, amorous, and completely unashamed.

Somehow, this made it more difficult for her to confess her feelings for him. Every time she turned to tell him, he was looking at her with hearts in his eyes, and her tongue glued itself to the roof of her mouth. And then, because her life was a mess, something would usually explode. It wasn't easy talking about feelings while in hot pursuit of an akuma victim, after all.

To make a weird week weirder, on the Monday after she'd ended her fake relationship with the previous boy of her dreams, she rushed downstairs to find several hundred francs worth of flowers in the bakery.

"Special occasion, mama?" she asked, despite being inevitably late for school.

Her mother smiled cryptically and pressed a card into her hand before pushing her through the door of the bakery and out into the street so that she could make it to school. As Marinette jogged over to Françoise Dupont, she looked at the card curiously.

I thought I might make your family's bakery as beautiful as you, Marinette. From your not so secret admirer , read the card, followed by a cartoonish doodle of a winking, green eyed cat.

Marinette slowed, her face suddenly very pale, and read the card again. Her gut instinct was to say that Chat Noir had sent it--after all, who else was a not so secret admirer? And that cat signature was telling, wasn't it? She tore her eyes from the card and walked into the school building, biting her lip as she tried to think of who else could have left the flowers for her. After all, she reasoned, Chat Noir didn't know who she was. Chat Noir couldn't know who she was.

There had to be another explanation, and that was that.

When she burst into the classroom, Adrien was already seated at the front, his hands folded on his desk. He looked at her expectantly, and she flushed slightly as she tried to slide the card into her pocket without him noticing.

As she settled into her seat, she took out the card and slid to to Alya. Alya scooped it up and peered at it critically, but the small smile playing about her lips gave her away. Although they couldn't discuss it in class, Marinette had a growing suspicion that Alya had something to do with this.

Silently, she began working out a hundred different scenarios in which Alya could have had contact with that silly black cat, and what reason he would have had for sending her such an extravagant and aromatic gift. She supposed, after a while, that it wasn't Chat Noir after all.

Suddenly, she eyed the back of Adrien's head. Would he...? No, he wasn't a secret admirer of hers, after all. He was just a friend. Right? He didn't have any other feelings toward her...unless...

No. She couldn't afford such doubts. It was Chat Noir pranking her somehow, probably.

"Do you have any idea who could have sent this?" she murmured to Alya, glancing at the card and then back at her friend.