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She almost, almost catches the glass in time.
She should be able to catch it in time. If she can parry a sword in the same amount of time, she should surely be able to catch a falling glass, no matter if she’d been lax enough to let it slip in the first place.
She doesn’t catch it, and it hits the floor and shatters, shards scattering everywhere and the little water still in it splashing across the floor of Marinette’s room, and Kagami- freezes.
So does Adrien, she notes almost idly, even though he hadn’t been looking anywhere near her.
Marinette does not. She doesn’t even flinch, and Kagami is reasonably sure that Adrien had flinched and that’s something that rouses an interest in her- she wants to know why, she wants to know more about both these people, both her friends, with the kind of silently obsessive drive that she usually reserves for sword work and she does not yet know what her own reasoning for such a thing is. She’d like to discern that, too.
“Everyone’s okay, right?” Marinette asks, and there’s her anxiety, in her voice rather than her physical reactions. Kagami should have known.
Adrien raises a shaky hand, giving Marinette the soft smile Kagami only sees when the other girl is with them. She wonders if Marinette has any idea that Adrien only does that around her. She doubts it.
“I am not injured,” Kagami says, when she realises Marinette and Adrien are both looking at her. She glances down at the shards scattered around her feet, repressing another flinch. “I apologise, I should not have let myself become so distracted." She’d been distracted because Marinette and Adrien had been laughing at something one of them had said and Kagami had found herself unable to do anything but study them both. She’d heard that laughter could transform a person’s face, but she’d thought it only an expression. She’d never actually seen it before.
Even now the smile Marinette turns to her is one she’s never seen before. Kagami’s been cataloguing them all, somewhere in the back of her head. Adrien has professional smiles and event smiles and polite smiles and she hadn’t known what a difference it would make to see a smile that reached his eyes, reached all of him.
She wonders, absently, if her own smile ever reaches her eyes.
It must, when she’s with her friends. Certainly her emotions surge around them and surely they show in her face or her countenance somehow.
"Don’t worry about it,” Marinette says, directly to Kagami, with a warmth that she’s still growing accustomed to. When Kagami is with Adrien they usually have supervision, right up until they escape it, and so they both keep up their professional appearances until they can escape.
When they are with Marinette they’re already free from expectations.
And Marinette herself does not seem to police her expressions at all.
“Kagami?” Adrien says, drawing her attention from her thoughts. She looks, and while she’s sure now that she did see that flinch and she doesn’t miss the way he’s drawn his feet after him onto the chaise lounge where before he’d been sitting forward, he’s looking at her with enough real concern that it overwhelms her analysis for a long moment.
“I’m fine,” she says, faintly, suddenly aware of how Marinette must have felt around him all that time ago. The full force of Adrien’s worry is too much for her, so she switches focus to Marinette, but that doesn’t help. Marinette’s posture is full of concern, too.
It is unlike Kagami to be so clumsy.
“Seriously, I’ve dropped so many dishes that my parents have a cheaper set just for me," Marinette assures her, though she flushes as she says it and doesn’t look at Adrien. "That was one of those glasses. Just don’t move and I’ll get the broom. And the vacuum,” she adds, almost as an afterthought, and Kagami could swear that Adrien flinches again.
Marinette notices, if the way her glance flickers sideways is any indication, but she doesn’t comment.
And then she’s gone through her trapdoor, leaving Kagami and Adrien alone on opposite sides of her room with glass strewn between them.
Kagami’s eyes are drawn to the broken shards. Light glints off them, refracting and throwing tiny rainbows into the air. They seem to direct her gaze back towards Adrien.
“It was a mistake to come here." Kagami doesn’t know what she’s going to say until she’s already said it.
Adrien’s head comes up like a startled horse, eyes flashing oddly for a second. "It’s never a mistake to come here."
He says that with such conviction. Kagami has to admire his certainty, even if she thinks in this case it’s unwarranted. "They’re going to notice we’re missing eventually."
"Your mother will, anyway,” Adrien mutters, fingers rubbing across his ring.
She wonders if she should inform him how obvious a tell that is. Surely he knows? Even if he doesn’t, it’s the sort of thing people sometimes react badly to learning. He’s right anyway- they’ve been sneaking away with Marinette for weeks now and Gabriel Agreste has yet to notice. Even his assistant, who Kagami had pegged as far more observant, either doesn’t know or doesn’t care.
Adrien’s bodyguard definitely knows. He also hasn’t put in more than a token effort to stop them.
“I should go,” Kagami says abruptly, emotions she doesn’t care to identify churning in her gut. “Perhaps I’m- more anxious than I thought, if I’m inattentive enough to lose my grip so easily.”
“Or,” Marinette suggests, head and shoulders emerging from her trapdoor first, shoving a broom carefully ahead of her to avoid any stray glass. “You’re the expected amount of anxious.” Her voice softens. “This is still a pretty new situation for you, right?”
It is. Kagami’s never had friends before. The sneaking out isn’t as new as her friends likely think it is, but the part where she has other people to join certainly is. “Yes.”
“It’s just a glass, Kagami,” Marinette says, turning to haul up a vacuum behind her. Adrien begins to get up to offer her a hand, but they both catch him in time. Neither of them has to do more than glare before he sits back down, sheepishly.
“There is still broken glass by your feet,” Kagami informs him. “Do not walk over it.”
After all, she reflects inwardly, they’re still teaching her that she doesn’t have to.