In the wake of his wife's disappearance, Gabriel Agreste receded from his life like an unmoored boat drawn out to sea. That is to say, with both deceptive speed and inevitability.

She had loved the water.

One of their early dates had been a day trip to the seaside - a train outing with a group of mutual friends. Working diligently (not sulking) in the encompassing shade of a beach umbrella, he had startled from his sketchbook at the dull 'whump' of something heavy hitting the sand nearby. Glancing over he had discovered an oversized floral bag stuffed to bursting, accompanied by delicate pink toes with blue nail polish Then the toes were gone, as their owner bolted past tide-left drifts of knotted wrack and into the waves. She hadn't cared about the long white skirt she was still wearing, he had noticed with a growing flush, as transparency crept up from where the salt water kissed her thighs to reveal high-waisted bikini shorts.

(His first collection utilized long, flowing sheers, playing with opacity and movement and layering, centered around a blue gradient color palette; reception at the time noted great promise, considering the deft manipulation of highly structured pieces with the illusion of effortless drape, and intriguing texture contrasts between soft and sharp design elements)

Later on, Emma had hiked the skirt high over her right hip and secured it with a scallop-shaped brooch. In a quiet cove beyond where the sandy beach roughened into tumble-down blocks of granite, she had introduced him to the animals that thrived in the rocky pools and puddles left by the retreated ocean: shore crabs, hermit crabs, limpets, mussels, sea stars. She held his hand for mutual balance as they picked a meandering path through slippery rockweed and across algae-slimed stones, toes and ankles and calves each numbing in turn from cold as they ventured further. He learned to hum a periwinkle out of its shell, and watched a green sea urchin ponderously transit the breadth of his hands. Hunched over, his damp linen trousers rolled well above his knees, and her sun-warmed shoulder, bare from her bandeaux swimsuit top, pressed to his; four hands palm up beneath the surface, side by side by side by side, to facilitate the travel of the urchin she had borrowed. He hazarded a sideways glance and found her grinning at him. For a long moment, the honeyed fall of her hair over her far shoulder seemed to curtain the rest of the world away.

That was, of course, just the moment that Gabriel found himself off his feet, on his backside, spluttering salt water, with droplets clinging to the lenses of his glasses. He had been sent staggering backwards, and was now sitting chest-deep, completely soaked. He was also somehow still holding the sea urchin, arms stretched above him like it was an offering to a sun god.

She had stifled a snort, and leaned towards him to carefully pluck the creature from his hands. His refracted vision blurred her backlit silhouette into an undulating corona.

"They say to never take your eyes off the ocean," she had told him then, "because you'll have no warning for the wave that will knock you sideways."

(There is also a saying about moths and flames - and oh, how brightly she burned.)

In the years since, she had been the swell that buoyed him ever upwards as they built a partnership and a life and a family together. Work was always demanding, but they acted to counterbalance each other. During the run-up to fashion week, Emma would distract young Adrien with outings to museums and gardens when Papa was barely holding on to his sanity. In turn, Gabriel would bring Adrien to the atelier with him when Maman was off shooting a new campaign. As Adrien grew towards the end of childhood and started modeling for the company, and as Gabriel succeeded past its namesake's most fevered imaginings, her solid presence in his life was always the ballast that kept him on an even keel, and one he did not need to look for to know it would be there.

He had learned to navigate the eddies and currents, knew the prevailing winds and where they were likely to run aground, but he had forgotten her first lesson.

Never take your eyes off the ocean.

And now she was gone.

The slack tide of her absence laid bare the scoured shoreline of his heart, and he foundered. Retreated, no, drowned himself in his work, until he had barely the time to come up for air. Never mind their son. Her son. Dieu, Adrien looked so much like her - the only piece of her remaining within his grasp.

Sometimes it was too much to see Adrien, with Emma shining through his eyes and nowhere else to be found. For all the exquisite pangs that Gabriel would subject himself to at the mansion, shrouded by her phantom as it was, he had removed every personal photograph from his workroom and banished her editorials to the archives. As weeks turned to months, he perfected the ability to redirect questions and sympathies regarding his wife on to more business-appropriate topics. The turn of the season waits not for the grieving, and the long shadow of Fashion Week looms always.

He always promised to himself that after the next deadline, the next free twenty minutes altogether, he would finally sit down with his son. Their son. But then came the next meeting or distributor opening or design signoff or hem-length crisis, and that sharp pang would be delayed a little longer. Perhaps, was the thought hunkering in the very back of his brain. Perhaps if he kept his focus long enough, distanced himself far enough, the splintered edges of his hurt would be ground smooth by repetitive motion, like seaglass washed ashore.

(With the water retreated, the underlying stink of rot in the baking sun closes in, and no near hope of respite. And yet, even here, life survives: hard, hardy things with soft insides that carry the sea with them until it returns once more.)

I know what my heart is like
 Since your love died:
It is like a hollow ledge
Holding a little pool
 Left there by the tide,
 A shallow, tepid pool,
Drying inward from the edge

Edna St Vincent Millay, "Ebb"

This wouldn't leave me alone, so I endeavored to finish it before it is (most likely) explicitly jossed by the Christmas Special. The Millay poem at the end is obviously where the title comes from, and was the driving inspiration for the fic. "Never turn your back on the ocean," is the actual saying, which I believe is Hawai`ian in origin.

And despite what is implied here, don't go tidepooling barefoot. Doing so will be painful at best and potentially quite dangerous, so wear old, sacrificial sneakers instead.

Hope you enjoyed!