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soulmate-game · 4 years

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Continuation of the story from Day 1, because you guys requested it enough that I started Thinking, lol.

Bio Dad Bruce Wayne Month 2020

Day 3: Siblings

—*—*—*—*—*

Dinner. One day after meeting her father for the first time. She had managed to postpone any sort of… socialization and emotional bonding, during their meeting earlier for everyone to choose from Marinette’s initial sketches for them and generally consult some more, by once again steamrolling everyone with Professionalism and Business Marinette.

But no longer. She couldn’t escape. Staring at a giant wooden, elaborate door like it was her pathway to Prison—

“Stop dramatizing everything in your head, Mari,” Adrien fondly scolded, gently rapping the side of her skull with one knuckle. “I got things to do, for your company I might add, so I can’t stay. But, you’ll be fine,” he leaned in, smirking at her and winking as he lowered his voice. “Besides, you’ve been through way worse than a little family reunion, Bugaboo. You’ve faced down way scarier people than the Waynes. You got this,” he encouraged before giving her a solid clap on the shoulder and a chaste kiss on the cheek, walking back towards their sleek but understated dark red car. Rented, of course, for the business trip, but nonetheless very nice.

Adrien had driver’s licenses for just about every major country. Marinette stopped questioning it a while ago.

She waited until he was gone before throwing her hands up. “Scarier people, he says. Like the Bat clan isn’t known for being some of the most intimidating heroes and vigilantes in the spotlight,” she grumbled. When she turned around, it was to the door already being open, and she jumped a bit in surprise. She hadn’t heard anyone answer the door, but sure enough Alfred Pennyworth stood there holding the door with a small smile, with Bruce Wayne and all of Marinette’s siblings gathered behind him. At least this time, nobody had their spouses or children. Every one of them was smirking, some more sharply than others (Damian).

“Would you like to come in, Miss Dupain-Cheng?” Alfred asked, waving his hand to gesture to the fact that there was plenty of room for her to enter. Blushing, she did just that, taking a breath and forcing herself to actually look at the family she had just met instead of down at her glossy navy blue pumps. Jason, the man with the white fringe in his hair. Second Robin, current Red Hood, her mind supplied, spoke up with a grin and his arms crossed over his chest.

“You don’t look so suave anymore, little Queenie,” he teased. Marinette instantly made a face, screwing up her nose.

“No. That nickname is vetoed. One of my friend’s nicknames is Queenie, and not only will she never let me live it down if she finds out someone called me that, but, just no,” Marinette dramatically shivered. “Most of my friends call me Princess nowadays anyway,” she shrugged. “Adrien started it, and it somehow caught on. It’s too much work to protest at this point.”

“You’re not good with crowds,” the soft spoken woman, Cassandra, decided to add. Marinette winced, shifting on her feet even as she followed the group to the dining room.

“Ehhh. I’ve gotten used to dealing with press and stuff, to a certain degree anyway considering my alias. And wearing my Business persona always helps in consultations. But, I’m not…” Marinette bit the inside of her cheek, clearly a little uncomfortable as she looked around. “The best at… actually talking to people outside of my small group of friends.”

Bruce sighed as most of his kids chuckled or snorted at that. Dick, the oldest but second-shortest of the men besides Tim, came over and draped an arm familiarly over Marinette’s shoulders. He still towered over her though, so he had to slouch a bit to do so.

“Ah, that would be the genetics. Let’s hope you stay where you are at instead of getting as bad at communication as B,” he told her cheerfully. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“What about Damian?”

“He’s even worse!”

“Tt,” said teenager tutted, rolling his eyes as they entered the dining room and he was able to come up to Marinette’s other side. “That was mostly how I was raised before I met Father. I have gotten a lot better than I used to be, Grayson.”

Dick gave him a smile, graciously relieving Marinette of the close contact in favor of rustling Damian’s hair despite the fact that the younger Wayne was taller than him already. “Yes, you sure have! But you still need improvement, baby bird.”

Soon enough, everyone managed to get seated around the large dining table. Bruce insisted that Marinette take one of the seats next to him at the head of the table, across from Damian, since this was her first family dinner. Dick sat next to her, Jason across from him, followed by Tim and Duke on Damian’s side of the table. On the other side of Dick sat Cassandra, and then Stephanie. Alfred served everyone before also taking a seat at the table, on the opposite end from Bruce.

And, true to BatFam tradition, everything was a little awkward for the first minute or two. Marinette didn’t know what to say, and nobody quite knew where to begin. Dick would normally start a conversation, but he was trying to glare into Bruce’s head a silent message of “talk to her, damn it.”

Finally seeming to get it, Bruce cleared his throat and turned to Marinette. “So, I wanted to ask. When do you find out about being my daughter?”

Several people around the table closed their eyes in mourning for Bruce’s social skills. Marinette though, just smiled in slight relief at the decision of how to start talking being taken from her.

“Oh. It was in stages, really. When I was ten, we started our unit in school on genetics. I don’t usually care enough about science to do much more than the school requires, but genetics captivated me for some reason. I researched it almost obsessively at home for a while, almost instantly realizing that there had to be a reason that I had blue eyes when none of the rest of my family did. After a week or two, I found my Maman and Papan’s adoption papers in their room,” she blushed, tugging on one end of her bangs, which she had framing her face since she was wearing her hair down that day. “I uh… I’ve always been a little nosy. I never told them that I found the papers, to me it was just the answer I needed. I didn’t think about it at all after that, and my obsession over genetics went away. It wasn’t until I was thirteen that I decided to look into my birth parents,” Marinette sighed, shoving a bite of food in her mouth to buy her time before continuing. Everyone was focused on her, and it was a little unsettling. Every one of them had a sharper gaze than a normal person, and it made her feel like she was made of glass and everyone else could see right through her. “I was going through a lot, back then. I wanted someone to be mad at, I wanted to be able to blame my DNA for the things that had happened.”

“Things?” Bruce interrupted, back straight and eyebrows drawn down. “What things?” Marinette giggled, tilting her head instead of answering and just letting her eyes study him. Bruce Wayne, Batman, the Dark Knight. Original vigilante of Gotham city, one of the founding members of the Justice League. Famous for his secrecy, intimidating presence, and intelligence. Then she switched her gaze, one by one, to everyone else at the table before leaning back and taking a sip of her soda.

“Do you guys know anything about the situation Paris experienced for four years?” She asked, instead of directly answering. It was Tim who frowned, leaning forward to look at her and reply.

“I heard very vague rumors of weird things, but nothing concrete enough to investigate. What happened?”

Marinette hummed, deciding to sum it up for them. “The short version? When I was thirteen, a classmate of mine spontaneously turned into a giant rock monster and destroyed a good portion of the city. Turns out, that was the first of many attacks by our city’s very own supervillain, Hawkmoth. He had a magical artifact that allowed him to take advantage of anyone’s negative emotions to give them powers and brainwash them into being, essentially, temporary villains that he used for his own means. Two heroes showed up out of nowhere, powered by similar magical artifacts, to combat him and free the people he corrupted. Ladybug and Chat Noir, the original Parisian heroes and the leaders of the team that later had to form.”

Jason frowned, along with everyone else at the table. Finally, it was Duke who asked:

“How did we not know about villains in Paris?” To which Marinette just gave him a dangerously wicked smirk that was far too similar to Damian’s for anyone’s comfort.

“Because I do my job,” she told him flatly, sipping from her cup as everyone stared at her in various amounts of shock. “That’s why finding out that my biological father was Batman made so much sense. That’s why I wanted to find out who my birth parents were. I wanted to blame the heroism on genetics. And, it doesn’t look like I was exactly wrong.”

—*—*—*—*—*

Yeah, that was how her first family dinner and subsequent identity reveal went.

Luckily, considering that Bruce had hired MDC for a pretty long job, Marinette was able to finish school online instead of going back to Paris for it. There was no real need anyway, they had defeated Hawkmoth and gotten Adrien emancipated so for now it was calm in Paris. They didn’t need their heroes anymore, for the time being. This meant that Marinette and Adrien, along with a few employees that helped measure and cut fabric and do secretarial duties they needed help with, got to stay in Gotham while Marinette went back and forth to Wayne manor, Wayne Tower, and back to their temporary home.

After about a month, Marinette was comfortable enough with the Waynes that she found herself lounging in the bat cave as she sketched, though she kept raising her eyes to the glass tubes that held old uniforms. Damian was sat across from her, essentially laying out over two chairs while he played some game upside down on his phone. He might usually be a cold brat, even for a sixteen year old, but even he liked to abuse the way furniture should be used and ignore the world via technology.

But he still caught her constantly wandering gaze.

“You don’t like them.”

“They suck!” Marinette immediately agreed, slamming her sketchbook on the metal briefing table. “Your Robin outfit is the only passable one there is! The colors aren’t even the issue, even high fashion designers can appreciate a good color clash moment. But what was Father thinking?! Putting Grayson in that glorified onesie— why are there no pants?! Jason’s at least as a cape that can cocoon his body and prevent anyone from seeing the disaster beneath. I should thank Tim for at least upgrading the suit to having pants, but he still kept the outside-underwear look that I cannot forgive. The attempt at fashion, though, is appreciated. Disappointing, but appreciated.”

“That pretty much sums them all up,” Damian quipped, getting a snort of amusement out of his sister. Maybe that was one thing he had grown to like about her. She didn’t reprimand him for his sense of humor, and usually she even laughed along. The more morbid humor would get a playful shove and a glare, but no real animosity. And she understood him on a different level, too. One he appreciated even more.

“You said, yesterday, that the Cure brings back everyone who dies during a Miraculous-related incident,” Damian spoke up again after a moment, pointedly not looking at her. “Did you ever count?”

Marinette, this being one of the reasons he was quickly growing fond of her, immediately understood. She sighed, closing her notebook. She might have only been two years his elder, but she had had what felt like a lifetime of more experiences than he did, usually in the friendship and social department though. They were roughly equal in their heroism experience, which was weird to think about, but Damian still valued her input. It was different from the rest of the family.

“It was different in Paris than it would be for anyone else. I didn’t keep track of the number of people who died,” she finally answered, taking her hair out of its work bun and running her hands through the midnight black locks. “But I kept track of how often. Since nobody remembered their deaths, I guess I felt it was my responsibility to remember my failures for them. My former best friend, Alya. Over the course of those four years, she died seventeen times. Her boyfriend, Nino, died fourteen. The Mayor died three times. Chloe, my current friend and former bully, died twenty-two times,” she grimaced at Damian’s shocked expression, nodding grimly. “During those first two, maybe two and a half years, she was one of the primary Akuma targets. She was still either an active bully or in the beginning of trying to change for the better, so she caused a lot of negative emotions everywhere she went. Things got better once she matured a bit, though. Anyway, there’s this girl I used to babysit. Manon. She died five times before she was even ten years old,” Marinette shook her head, that look of age and exhaustion that Damian saw in every Wayne and every hero he had ever fought with seeping into her eyes. “My parents, they died thirty-seven times. They were constantly worried about me, and ran into danger on several occasions trying to find and keep me safe. But I could never tell them who I was. I physically could. I had the power to sit them down and say; Hey, I’m Ladybug. Stop running out and getting yourselves killed. But I never did. I valued my identity first. So I usually ended up seeing, in the middle of a fight, one or both of them squished under falling debris. Or drowned. Frozen solid. Burned alive,” she paused, taking a deep breath to steady herself. “So no. I don’t understand what it was like for you, to count bodies as you felled them. But hell, if it doesn’t feel like I should. Logic doesn’t mean much in the face of emotion, especially guilt. I know I didn’t kill the people I care about, but every single one of their deaths weighs on me like I was the one that caused it.”

Damian nodded, and they shared a few moments of peaceful, contemplative silence as they both ruminated on their less than pleasant memories without fear of being yelled at for what those memories contained.

“But, I do have a secret,” she admitted softly, attracting her brother’s emerald-eyed attention again. The normally cheerful woman was much more subdued even than before, sapphire irises self conscious and vulnerable, which was rare. She licked her lips, even more rare considering her love of her light pink lipstick, and moved off her chair so that she was, instead, sitting on the cold stone floor. Without hesitation, Damian joined her.

“Technically, it didn’t happen. It was a timeline that my friend, the one who I gave the snake Miraculous, essentially erased when he reversed time. But I remember it even though I shouldn’t. How could I forget?”

“You took a life,” Damian whispered, grimacing in empathy. “First time?”

“And the second, and the fifth,” she admitted. “Viperion had to try seven times before I stopped repeating it. But it was always the same person, back during our final battle. I killed Gabriel Agreste seven times. But nobody but me and Luca will ever remember.”

Damian and Marinette both knew it wasn’t the same as Damian’s childhood. They both knew that they would likely never fully understand one another’s trauma. Not the nuances of it. But they did understand the important parts, the broad strokes. Despite their vastly different lives, they understood the big parts that shaped one another.

That was why Damian took to her so quickly. If he had been younger and still bratty, naive, and angry at everything, then it would be a different story entirely. But he was matured, more willing to let himself feel sympathy. And that made the difference.

“You never forget the first person,” he remarked.

“No matter the age or timeline,” she agreed. “I saw how hard it was to stop. How sickeningly addictive it can be, but I hate what it makes me more than I like how it feels.”

“... me too,” Damian whispered. “Me too.”

—*—*—*—*—*

“Wooo!” Marinette cheered as she flew through the air, her hands latching onto Dick’s. There was no audience, but there didn’t need to be. Just the two of them, doing a routine that they’ve been working on during the few chances they had for the past several weeks. Marinette had never done trapeze before Dick helped her learn, but her time swinging through Paris streets helped tremendously alongside her general Gymnastics experience.

Marinette and Dick flipped through the air, swinging from bar to bar, Dick occasionally catching and tossing her again. They soared through the air, both curling through two flips before landing on their respective platforms with matching wide smiles. Marinette, chest heaving a bit since she was slightly out of shape (meaning that she wasn’t at all out of shape, only out of practice when it came to swinging through the air for any length of time. There’s a difference). She met Dick on the floor, who proceeded to ruffle her hair happily.

“That was awesome! Looks like you finally got the routine down,” he praised. She laughed, elbowing him.

“I bet I’m better on the balance beam,” she challenged, making Dick grin widely.

“Oh you are on!”

—*—*—*—*—*

“Ya ever died before?” Jason asked, making Marinette chuckle.

“Two-hundred and eighty-seven times.”

“You started as Ladybug at thirteen, right?”

“Yup. No training or mentor for the first year either.”

“Yeah, then that sounds about right. Wanna go break all the traffic laws?”

“Only if we take your bike.”

“Fuckin’ Duh. What else?”

—*—*—*—*—*

“You stalked Adrien?” Tim asked, smirking that insufferable smirk of his. Marinette groaned, flopping back onto the sofa.

“No! I didn’t mean it that way, anyway. I just took a lot of pictures and spied on him.”

“Yup. You’re Bruce’s kid,” he remarked, tapping away at his laptop. Marinette narrowed her eyes.

“You have noooo place to judge, Mister ‘Dick Grayson is the only person alive who can do four somersaults in the air!’ And ‘Yes, I‘ve known that you are batman since I was eight. Look at all these pictures I took when I— what was your terminology again?”

Tim rolled his eyes, but a grin was peeking through. “Yeah, yeah.”

—*—*—*—*—*

Four months later, and Marinette was staring down at all the garment bags she had painstakingly filled. Outfits for every single one of her new family members. It took a while, but they were ready for the Wayne Gala. Adrien slung am arm over her shoulder.

“You’ve outdone yourself again, Princess,” he praised, grinning at the array of coveted outfits they were about to transport. “But one teensy weeny, tiny little thing.”

“What is it, Chaton?”

Adrien grinned. “Do you have a dress for yourself? Bruce invited you, too, didn’t he?”

Marinette’s face drained of color, right as a knock sounded on the door. Adrien, seeing as Marinette was so far into Panic Mode that she could not be reached at the moment, went to open the door. A second later, plastic was all Marinette could see. Blinking, she raised her head.

It was Cass, holding out a pink garment bag with Marinette’s name on it.

“Thought you would forget,” was all the other woman offered as explanation. Marinette, after gaping for a moment, slowly took the bag from her. Cass smirked. “Present from WE.”

Marinette laughed.

“You guys are the best.”

—*—*—*—*—*

@momothefemur @ladybug-182 @starlightshield @trippingovermyfeet @greatcatblaze @sam-i-am-0222 @bluesimani @ruelukas22 @acoolspacegirl

#mlb x dc #ml x dc #maribat #b!dbwm2020 #bio dad bruce wayne #Day Three #platonic Brucinette #Platonic Daminette

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