Summary: Marinette contemplates marriage and life expectations; few experiences live up to imagination. The mind is a powerful thing.
There is some deliberate temporal confusion throughout this chapter, a muddle of feelings and tangle of thoughts that can make parsing out the order of actions and occurrences unclear as a reflection of Marinette's mental and emotional state.
Warnings: implied domestic abuse, co-dependency, depression, anxiety, PTSD, temporary child-death.
Marriage has only ever been an abstract concept for Marinette; as a teen, she'd envisioned it as a simple step in the progression of a stock romantic relationship with Adrien, an idealization that led naturally to three children – rounded up from the old trope national average of 2.5. A tidy apartment, everything set in just the right place despite the little giggling mob of children, all innocent eyes that were hers, Adrien's, and her mother's, each in turn. Dinners, ready for Adrien the very moment he walked in through the door to scoop their children into his arms. Raspberry kisses to bellies and indulgent grins over the drawings of hamsters they'd made in school, while she was in the middle of stirring the contents of a saucepan, flushed from the heat of the stove and the warmth of the sight when she turned to see her family. A balanced workload at home and at Gabriel easily managed. More than enough time for him, her, and them.
After the disastrous failure of a romance with Luka, Ladybug and lies splitting them both apart, though she held out for years when he could only stand the pressure for a month, there had been men, flings, casual things that plastered over the hole while really only reaming it wider. Marriage was out of the question for Ladybug, and thus Marinette was a confirmed bachelorette despite her youthful aspirations of "having it all" – dream career and family.
What she hadn't understood is what she now experiences, the slow tangle of feeling and thought, the interweaving of threads, the other person getting lashed around the propellers of your life.
Or maybe it's the hedgehog dilemma. Desperate for tenderness and warmth, you press closer and closer, driving the spines in deep, blood frothing up around each quill, but pulling away only threatens to sheer out flesh now that all those barbed hooks are inside of you.
A relationship.
Marriage.
It's also about devotion, being so committed to another person's well-being and happiness that you put them ahead of yourself.
In a way, Chat Noir- Adrien had married her when they were fifteen years old.
Engagement ring or not, she can never truly marry Adrien.
Ladybug's first priority can never be him.
Because she's his, he accepts that.
Don't be unequally yoked. Who said that? Someone smarter than her or Adrien, surely.
They've just started dating, officially, are living in separate apartments, but it's a marriage in all the ways that matter.
Marinette is just an unfaithful bitch .
However baffled she may be by the speed of their relationship's progression, Alya preens over the fact that her ship has sailed, and she's utterly insufferable in the most delightfully normal of ways.
Good friends see things. Alya does.
She must. Her lips smile, showing teeth, but her eyes are on the white-knuckled hands underneath the table at their long-awaited double date. She can follow Adrien's eye-movements though - throughout the night - the way his gaze flits about the room as he slouches in his chair and laughs, but still assesses everyone and everything.
Is it something that can be ignored, or something that's a threat? That's what he's thinking.
She's taken the last of the innocence from him.
That sloppy-debauchery that they shared is still fresh in her mind, the sting of salt and alcohol that lingers on her tongue and wafts inside of her sinuses, even though she can't remember, and neither can he. As lurid as their intimate mouth-work might have been, it was anodyne, playful, the form of juvenile young-adult mucky emotional mess that would be so easy, and she longs to fall back into it, to let them both be innocently degenerate again.
Now, he's hyper-aware as Alya tries with all her fire and will to resurrect the mood that they'd shared, inviting them to another booze-soaked college party where maybe, just maybe, they could only get buzzed before they started to make out this time, right?
They smile, but she's spiraling because alcohol means a loss of control and she already has none, and his spine is an iron rod. He has to watch for threats from within and without, half his attention on the external world and the other half on the groping, sticky-slick tendrils that paw and ooze and fester – the ones that only they can really see, even though Alya knows that there's something wrong.
The only distraction comes when they discuss work and school, and he gushes about his father's interest in her; without even a word from Adrien himself, Gabriel has been following her career since she was a young teen. There may be a position for her as soon as she graduates.
Of course, marriage is out of the question. Commitment to each other breeds weakness, conjures specters, but the thin spider-web is being spun, looping, coiling, razor-sharp thread invisible but slicking with blood as it tightens, layer upon layer, and carves out chunks of flesh. She tries to put her fingers to the strings, pulling, writhing like a ladybug caught in the web, about to be eaten alive from the inside out, but her hands come away bloody and the cord cuts off her air.
That's her life, and he's there with her, because of course he is.
There's a surprise party, and Alya beams with pride for her girl who's finally living that dream they discussed on all those slumber parties and girls' nights: she's got her man, her nightmare dream guy and is working on her degree!
Kim sulks in the corner the entire night, downing drink after drink, too arrogant and image-conscious to go to a doctor after Adrien set his dislocated shoulder.
The shoulder that the blond himself had torn out of its socket.
When Marinette and Adrien had slunk into her apartment, blasted out because he'd died again, so... so slowly this time and that's all that the akumas seem to be doing now, the only respite that they could envision was curling up under the comforter of her bed, still in their tight jeans and sweat-stained shirts, too tired to change.
They had to not exist for a while.
Crossing the threshold, they reeled back when the ceiling lights burst on, accompanying a cacophony of screaming voices that were a busload of Parisians who had been crushed underfoot in the latest battle.
Too late, Ladybug had lanced out with her yo-yo to propel herself towards one mother, scrabbling towards the exit with a bundle in her arms. She knew it was too late, but maybe – maybe she had convinced herself that it wasn't.
Maybe she hadn't, and tried anyway.
Either way, Chat Noir body slammed her to the ground seconds before the screams stopped, and the cry of tortured metal and shattered glass was all that she could hear, ash and tear-smudged face to the ground, but all that she could see was that woman's resignation.
A surprise party.
Apparently, she'd forgotten her birthday, and was late to her own party, orchestrated by Alya to raise her spirits while also congratulating her for... whatever it was that she had with Adrien. Obviously, he was staying the night, on occasion. That was enough.
Ever one to push too far and too fast, Kim was at the doorway, the closest target and loudest cheerer, and Adrien was always watching her for signs that she was losing herself.
The cheers and the confetti poppers and the wave of emotion that washed over her and dragged her under was the bus and the woman and the baby, sending her recoiling through the entryway door. Driven by her murmur of terror, an instinctive lunge at the closest target had Kim's now-bloodied nose cracking against the wall and a scream cutting off the other revelers as bone, tendons, and joints all shifted.
The explosion of violence had been laughed off awkwardly.
Adrien apologized. He was still gentle, after all, and hated more than anything seeing others hurt. If Fu hadn't pressed him into service, would he ever have learnt how to kill that part of himself, press it down so deep into his gut that he could ignore the child that screamed and raged in self-loathing at his sudden indiscriminate capacity for controlled and measured violence, how he could calculate it and deploy it?
The party didn't last very long, but this time, she drank more than anyone.
So far as she could remember, Adrien didn't drink at all.
Vomit and an ashtray.
That was what her mouth tasted like when she awoke, someone having stripped her down to her bra and panties before tucking her into bed.
From her chaise, pretending to read, Adrien's watching her now as she slips on one of his tee-shirts that hangs loose on her wiry frame, and smells like him . She settles in at her computer; she can't be here, and can't sleep, so she's going to log into youtube or hunt down cute cat pictures on twitter.
After running through a few of her favourite twitter accounts, taking a minute to send off the image of a dog, side-eyeing his master from the vet's office and a pair of kittens tumbling over the floor, mock-wrestling and nibbling, she wonders if she's gotten any more kudos on her old fan fiction. Maybe a kind word.
She needs a kind word, even if Adrien would be willing to ply her with them for hours on end until his voice gives out.
There's no need to bother him, though; she bothers him enough, and he's on the verge of napping. His book is laying crumpled on his chest, his eyelids fluttering. Slow and even breaths expand his robust chest, a few tempting inches of hairless skin exposed by his unbuttoned collar.
No. She can't bother him.
Reader feedback will give her what she needs. Just a quick check. A few minutes.
From the bookmark bar folder that holds links to her favourite stories, even though she has them bookmarked on her account, she tries to navigate to An Archive of Our Own.
Blocked.
A frown curled her lip. Fingers chilled-stiff, partially numb as if puffed up with an infection, can't type out the address in Microsoft Edge, which she's never used.
When she gets the right url punched into the browser window-
Blocked.
Blood slams into her head, throbbing, racing through her throat so that it bulges, swells as if it's going to burst. Why can't she log in? What did she do? What mistake did she make?
"I installed a site blocker," Adrien slurs, rising from the chaise, seen from the corner of her eye.
"You what?" Her bony fingers bear down on the mouse, crushing tight so that she's squeezing its buttons, which pop and creak with the pressure.
"I have the code," he offers as he glides across the room, "so, if you want to upload a story, or sit down to read something together, we can do that, but-"
"What the fuck , Adrien?! I'm not a child," she spits like a child, slapping her mouse to the side and wheeling on him. "You don't do that without talking to me about it."
"We did talk about it."
"When?"
"Lots of times." He's standing next to her, towering over her seat, the press of his body so hot and achingly real once again. It radiates and oozes and penetrates deep into her skin. Now, he's smothering her. "You just never do anything about it, and- and I don't think that you can, so I did."
"You don't have the right to make decisions for me." A finger jab towards his distant face, mouth set into a placid, faint smile, has him wincing, but he's trying not to show it. With that expression of his, so indulgent and patronizing, he's like his father, waiting for Adrien himself to wail and whine his way through a tantrum.
"No." Steady and soft, without the disorderly irregularities of emotional excess, the wide variances of boyish excitement and deep, wounded melancholy. He nods. "I don't, but I did."
"Turn it off." The command is punctuated with a thrust of her chin towards the computer screen. Its error message and the flashing icon in the right corner of her browser window throb and taunt and stab, and she blinks on instinct.
"Milady," he begins, and it's the tender softness of their youths even if it's like salted metal wool scraping over a wound. "You're on there all the time – for hours. I hear you. I see you, and – and I can't see that any more."
"Well then leave." Please don't leave. She gestures towards the apartment door. "The door's right there."
"I don't think that either of us can do that, just like you can't stop reading, or – or doing other things that make it worse." His voice and his hands are pleading now, held out so that his chest and gut are fully exposed, vulnerable. "That's not your fault, but something has to be done about it."
"I didn't ask you to do that." All the power has been taken away from her.. Even the insignificant things are too much for him to lay on her shoulders. "I never agreed to it, so where do you get off?!"
"Look, I - this is beyond us."
"What does that even mean ?" she snorts, rising to her feet to force him to several unsteady steps backwards.
"This isn't something that we were ever trained to deal with." He tries to pull her close, reaching out a thick hand to her shoulder, because Adrien- Adrien is physical and always has been, needs that to confirm that she's still there, but she doesn't want to give him the satisfaction or the comfort.
She shrugs off his hand, and hates that she loves the sight of his face falling. "Adrien, I'm too tired for your bullshit. Just say it."
His hand falls limp at his side, swaying as if all the ligaments and tendons had been shorn apart by a hunk of shrapnel. She knows what that looks like. It's happened.
Standing there before him, just inches apart, she smells him more clearly now, or she should. The melange of musk and skin, leather and cologne, should be there, but there's only snot that gunks up her nose. Is she- is she crying ?!
So fucking weak.
"You need therapy, and you- you're getting worse." The helpless child that's real, even under the muscle and the leather, and the designer shirts, begs her to listen. "I'm not helping."
"Oh, yeah," she scoffs, a guttural staccato note to drive in the nail, the wedge, and the point. "You just have to get that in there, don't you?"
"What?"
"I'm not helping . It has to come back to you, doesn't it? Adrien Agreste is so pitiful. Everything's about you and how sorry people should feel for you. I'm such a failure – pity poor little me," she sneers, hands between her breasts, clutching at her flaming, palpitating heart. "So hurt because daddy didn't love you enough."
He smears a sweaty palm across his chin, and when he speaks, his tone is even, despite the glistening agony in his eyes, tears forming that he won't allow to fall because – because he's trying to focus on what he thinks is best for her.
"You're trying to hurt me because you feel powerless and don't want to talk about what's really wrong."
It's fucking repugnant for him to be so arrogant, 'just doing what's best for her' like she's the stupid child that she is.
"Is it working?" she sneers up at him, the cruelty palpable as it carves ugly lines into her cheeks.
He swallows, looking towards the window where the glittering host of Parisian lights lie. "... yes."
Now she needs the distraction from that. Why doesn't he leave? He should.
She deserves it if he dies.
Before she can contemplate the thought, an objection bursts forth, bubbling up from the stinking white pitch in her brain. It's a hideous thought, twisted, if she really considers the argument that she's making and the multifaceted condemnation that's implied in her reply. Don't think about agreeing with Gabriel Agreste, that therapy would endanger the brand of Ladybug and Chat Noir, them, the city, and all the lives they can't sacrifice.
"What am I supposed to do, Adrien?" She throws her arms into the air in a gesture of surrender. "Go to therapy? Talk to someone? Tell some overpaid adult nanny that I was on patrol today and I saw Hawkmoth crush... crush a bus-full of people to death, and I should have saved them with my superpowers, but I didn't ?"
It's all the crash and the crush, the mangled sound that won't get out of her head which is worse because it's not the sound of – of the mother and her bundle but the wet smack-splatter of his skull and the words are coming even though she has no sense of space or position or her numb hands, and there's nothing that she can see except a blizzard of white and a rain of red powerless against both with her eyes clenched shut.
"You can tell her that you saw that." His voice comes out muffled, sloppy. He sniffs like he has a cold.
"And when I fuck up and I say too much, just like I did with you?"
"Then what's your plan, huh?! What's Ladybug's plan if you've got everything figured out?" There are tears in his voice. Pain throbs in her clenched fist, fingers spasming as if with the rush of adrenaline. A vise of hot pressure holds her wrist and she can't move.
"I- I can-"
"You don't even have one!" The pressure is building, popping, straining. She can't move. Why can't she move? Open her eyes? Fix things. "You never had one! It was always just spur-of-the-moment decisions and blind luck."
"That's all that I've got, so what the fuck do you want from me?!" she screams like that child in the dark, and the deepest dark behind her tight-shut eyelids, calling for her mommy and daddy as if they, by their presence, can fix everything.
"I want you to stop fighting me!"
"I don't know how!" she screeches, and she can move her hands again, flailing, slapping against something hard – her desktop table – the sound reverberating into adjacent apartments, being echoed along with a shout for her to shut up and keep it down! The recriminating cry is enough to force open her eyes, rapid blinks clearing the stars that burst and stab, all that white light digging in so his face is a blurred mess even as she screams into it. "I don't know how to stop fighting! I don't know how to stop anything, and I hate it!"
Great bursts of air flair his nostrils, while he catches his breath. He's so much larger than her, and it may be the first time that she truly realizes it, now that those heavy paws are to her wrists. When had he grabbed on? Again?
His nose is bleeding. Those heaving breaths are splattering droplets of blood.
The fingers that held her so gently for so long curve around her entire forearm, and she's almost lost feeling as the bones creak so loudly that the pressure and noise rattles up to her skull. All the fiery rage and recrimination between them bleeds and cracks away like a building giving way, collapsing now that the fire had gotten to the critical support struts.
Her wrists are bruised.
"Adrien?" she whispers, going limp.
"Yeah."
"I – I think that we should leave the site blocker on."
"Okay." He releases, but he doesn't let go.
Folding into his chest, she's safe, but she's not well. "And- and I need help."
"You'll always have it," he assures, stroking her hair and it's possible that they both feel human again, like partners. "Always."
She does, of course.
Always.
Them against the world, forever.
Chat dies again the next day.
This time, with a crack and rend. No breath or words; only air.
She finishes the akuma battle alone.
It's actually easy, as if, in killing Chat, the akuma had done its job.
Maybe because it had done all the damage it could ever do.