Summary: Adrien returns home from his meeting with Ladybug, ruminating over the revelations. Plagg is a petulant, caring little shit, and while Adrien suffers from the multifaceted trauma inflicted by his father
After Lad- Marinette's revelation, Adrien had stormed home in a snit, stewing.
As he tossed in his bed all night, Plagg bellyaching continually about 'needing his beauty sleep,' Adrien had made up his mind to discuss the entire muddled mess of everything with Marinette. The cavernous and distant ceiling pressed down on him, causing him to squirm his way out of his comforter, the thick blanket kicked to the floor inch by inch over sweaty and stifling hours as the room grew small and tight because it was just too vast. He could have burst out of the window as Chat Noir, and the mere existence of that escape route had become a release in itself over the past months.
But he didn't want to be Chat Noir right now. He didn't want to be Adrien, either.
At the very least he could offer Marinette just a few words – something, on Kagami's insistence from last evening, to let her know that they would talk about this, whatever 'this' was.
Maybe it would take a few days, he reasoned as he stared up at the pattern of lights splashed on his ceiling from the window, but the time for a rational conversation would arrive; they'd hold fast to that promise they made after learning just how deep the scars of her anxiety ran.
After having cradled her between his body and their girlfriend, their combined mass pressing her down in a way that she realized calmed her like a warm, weighted blanket on a chilly winter morning; after drying a hundred stressed tears from her eyes and promising – promising – that everything would be okay because they would be there for her; and after watching her be so strong every day, the good and the bad, how could he do anything else?
Maybe... maybe he couldn't have forgiven Ladybug for sending Kagami into a pained emotional spiral, but Marinette?
Marinette, he could forgive of anything.
The anger was already bleeding away, leaving behind something else – somewhere between hurt and numbness.
If he could forgive his father day after day and year after year when he didn't even love Adrien, how could he do any less for Marinette who did?
His father had apparently been embroiled in some corporate nonsense that arose over the last few days, which meant that he was out of the mansion and, for all Adrien knew, might have been out of the country. Thus, when he departed for school that morning, only Nathalie was there to chastise him as he shovelled down his unsalted poached eggs and a smattering of fruits.
It was a cool and frank series of rebukes, but they never hurt like those delivered by his father. Nathalie merely reminded him of his schedule and suggested a few specific brands of concealer and makeup products that might be useful if his condition hadn't improved by his next photo-shoot, implying that she would have his stylists and makeup artists prepare to accommodate him properly.
The Gorilla ushered him out the door and into his waiting car to be chauffeured to school.
He couldn't even be bothered to keep up appearances today. As he slid into the classroom, shoulders slumped and stooped in a way that would send his father into a fit, he surveyed the assembled students.
Alix and Kim were arm-wrestling which was ridiculous because he had around a hundred pounds on her. There was as much chance of her winning that as there was of Kim beating her in a race while she was on her skates.
Whatever worked for them, though.
Nathaniel was sorting through a wide array of coloured pencils, Marc cooing over some of his latest work, which had the artist's face looking just about as red as his hair.
And Alya.
Glasses in her hand, the other one running slow circles over Marinette's shoulders, Alya was staring at him helplessly.
Desperately.
His girlfriend's gaze didn't even rise from the table, but beneath her bangs he saw the bruises around her eyes.
It was like she pretended not to see him.
Like she was ignoring him.
In that moment, beset by memories of all those thousands of time that Gabriel had dismissed him without listening, letting him know that he wasn't even worthy of being looked at while derided and chastised for being the failure that he was, he loosed a strange gravelly snarl in the back of his throat and just kept walking.
The searing glare of Marinette's best friend was hot on his back. He ignored it as he put on his model's smile, for once grateful that his father had expected him to perfect this ugly, fake, pristine facade, and politely asked Nathaniel to change seats for the day.
Both boys had acquiesced, Marc leaving for his own class shortly thereafter with a little peck to Nathaniel's cheek.
The rest of class was a nightmarish struggle, the hot stab of betrayal and jealousy plunging into his heart again and again as if Marinette was using his chest for a pin cushion during a sewing marathon, a desperate rush before a forgotten deadline. To keep from loosing another savagely inhuman noise that might have drawn attention or shown just how much he hurt for no reason, he crossed his legs, foot on his knee, and dug his fingers into the tender flesh above his ankle.
She laughed and joked and smiled at Nath, the boy who'd once had a crush on her. Strangely, as Alya shifted her narrowed eyes between Adrien, who just shrugged it off, and her best friend, the reporter only seemed more outraged than she had been before Marinette's mood had picked up, if only superficially.
That was how the day progressed, Adrien operating on the kind of mechanical autopilot that allowed him to survive in the years before he had finally broken out of his prison and gone to school – before he learnt that you could actually live.
There was no lunch with Marinette, and Alya ignored him before taking off with barely a word to her best friend, probably following up a lead of some kind. Even Nino looked uncharacteristically dispirited, curled up into his own world, the heavy electronic bass of his preferred playlist reverberating through the classroom despite his headphones' thick padding.
Adrien envied how he could escape like that, but he couldn't flee from his own mind or from the girl who was sitting there, sharing her lunch with Nath because she'd brought enough for Alya too.
Interactions with his Kwami during his free period and a few trips to the bathroom had only made the entire day worse. He'd had to put up with the incessant whining and whimpering about being 'mistreated' by a cruel master who 'starved him.' When offered the smelliest Camembert imaginable just to shut up, Plagg had refused and just kept on kvetching about dying alone and hungry in the dark confines of Adrien's jacket, forgotten and abused.
While in the bathroom, Adrien had tried to coax the little guy into eating. Coax! Had that ever happened before?
Even waggling the odoriferous hunk of goo, rind oozing stinky cream, under the little cat's nose hadn't been enough, though it did get covered in copious amounts of drool as Plagg salivated. Plagg had been a spiteful little ogre and told him that he wasn't hungry for Camembert right now.
He wanted cheese bread.
The best cheese bread in the city produced by its finest bakers who knew how to get the twisting line of cheddar just thick enough so that it balanced the savour of buttery bread, all warm and melty from the oven.
So get it for him. Now.
They did not get cheese bread on the way home.
The palatial Agreste estate hadn't felt this dead and silent in months as he trudged through the front door, his bodyguard's frown chasing him to his room. His father and Nathalie were both gone to ... wherever they went, and while that normally rendered the building far more inviting and less oppressively empty and sterile, today, it did nothing.
He made his way up the winding stairwell, heading for the gilded prison, like a zoo enclosure that had been tailored, designed, to best match a teenager's natural habitat.
God, he was being melodramatic.
When he opened the door to his room, bag already sliding off his shoulder to the floor, he nearly screamed in shock and leapt back into the hallway. Pausing to check in both directions outside his room for his bodyguard, he was relieved to find himself alone. No scrabbling steps echoed along the stairwell to suggest that the Gorilla – no, his friend was coming to check on him.
With a sigh, he entered the room and smiled awkwardly at Mitsubachi's slightly perturbed glare.
"Are you alright, Adrien?" the girl asked as she resettled herself on his bed, propping herself up on her elbows.
"Uh. Yeah," he mumbled the reply, closing the distance between them with slow steps while trying to cool that weird and definitely misplaced hormonal feeling that welled up at the sight of her lithe form curled up there, waiting for him, however expected the intrusion should have been. "I just was a little surprised to see a superhero in my bed."
There was that little sardonic grin of hers, but it was more like the fake, forced ones that she'd given him when she didn't know how to smile. When she didn't exactly know what happiness was supposed to feel like.
"You see a superhero in your bed every night," she snarked at him.
A touch. Point to his girlfriend, he acknowledged as he settled his rump on the bed and reached out a hand to her.
The fine web-work of elevated honeycombs on her palms that were like the rubber grips that interlaced winter gloves was rough against his hand, the plasticy fabric itself cool and slick. There was a slender proportionality to her fingers, a balance and nimbleness as they locked around his and a little warbling drone, like the hum of a well-tuned engine that was so subtle and smooth you just forgot it was there, raced through his hand into his arm. It was a comforting rumble that arced through both of them, echoed by his purr that was half pleased and half self-comforting.
Kagami had beautiful hands.
He turned their interlocked hands over so that his was on top, staring at her muddied brown eyes and faux-smoothed features, belied by the tight pinching of her forehead.
"I presume that you know why I'm here," she offered with a squeeze.
He shrugged, the muscles in his shoulders and upper back bunching up tight. "To talk, I guess."
"I'm shocked." She winked in a parody of playfulness. "You do actually know what that is."
The grin he offered carried the same tone. "It's one of my top five favourite things to do with my mouth."
Her hand twitched in his as her eyes blew open just as wide as his own.
Oh, God...
"Uh-" he fumbled, feeling his face heat along with hers, the blush obvious under her mask. If that had been intentional, it might have been smoothly seductive and/or dorky at the same time. He wasn't sure. "Erg, that came out really wrong. I- I meant, like, eating pastries and – and kissing, and I- uh-"
A finger to his lip, hexagonal pattern dragging over the soft, moist flesh just inside his mouth in a tingly way that had him sucking down a gulp of air, silenced him.
"I understand, Adrien. Don't worry. We all slip up now and again."
And just like that, the mood crashed into the ground, even as she kept smiling at him, slightly more genuine now. Did she have to make this moment about Marinette – about reality? Ruin it? It was like he was being ignored again because the focus was being taken off of him and how he felt, the embarrassment that was kind of nice and silly.
"Is that what you're here to talk about?"
"One would think that to be the obvious subject of conversation, yes."
"Well, one would think," he sneered releasing her hand so that he could trudge off to his computer desk and boot up the system just to make it seem like he had been planning on doing something, "that I obviously don't want to talk about it right now."
She had come in here to take the choice away from him, and she had.
"Oftentimes, it's the things that we don't want to talk about that we need to talk about most of all." Her voice prickled the hairs on the back of his neck, like terror – anticipatory dread – and it sent that irrational anger rolling again.
"She hurt you," Adrien retorted without turning because he ... he didn't want to see her react, "and she wouldn't have even done anything about it if you hadn't forced the issue."
"Adrien, you're hurting me, and you're better than this."
That was a foul, to be sure. It was like getting kicked in the groin when the referee wasn't looking, stumbling while blinding agony surged into your gut and made you vomit.
"What do you want from me, Kagami?"
"I want you to talk with Marinette so that we can fix this."
"I don't even know what we're trying to fix!" His mouse groaned in his hand, trembling, as his foot lashed out to clatter against the edge of his desk. What had to be fixed? Why was he like this? He didn't want to think about the answer, so please, Kagami, don't make me.
"I don't know what's broken." The rush of blood was in his ears, and he felt like a child, laying in his bed, staring out at the darkness.
"Us," she said, hands before her in a gesture that was almost pleading, one that he'd never seen from her.
"I just – I just don't even know what I'm supposed to do here." The mouse went clattering along his desk as he whipped it furiously in a hot burst of the anger that he tried to convince himself wasn't within him – that only bled out in those dark moments when he was Chat Noir and could bully an artist or contemplate ... using Cataclysm on a person.
"I'm furious and I don't even know why!"
"Think," Kagami begged and commanded. Her soft footfalls sounded out behind him until he could smell her. It was the heady mix of flowers that Pollen created and suddenly the odour had him wrinkling his nose in disgust because it was saccharine. Her hand pressed between his shoulder blades.
"There must be a reason for all of this. I've forgiven her for what she made me feel. It was – it was all just a confused mess. A mistake. Marinette is ... terrified. She's hurt, and whatever you feel, I know you hate that as much as I do. Please help me to ... save her."
That was it.
It was because he didn't want to admit the real feeling, suppressing that one moment of apocalyptic, earth-rending revelation when Marinette's eyes went from staring at Chat Noir to staring at Adrien wearing a mask.
Terror was no stranger to his life or the eyes of Ladybug, which far too often shone with anxieties and pains. To lose once was to lose everything; Ladybug had to be perfect, and Adrien knew that fear. She feared the deaths, but more the suffering that couldn't be brushed under the rug by magic, the trauma and the pain that lingered even when you looked like you had been made whole.
Adrien likewise knew that pain.
Ladybug was full of fears.
Marinette was too, but ...
Kagami was stroking his back, tracing the heaving lines of muscle around his neck, fingers moving under the edge of the butterfly wings of bone that were his shoulder blades, catching on the vertebrae of his spine, trailing down, down.
It felt so ... good.
But he didn't deserve that.
In that little dingy shed, Marinette had been afraid.
Marinette, her eyes wet with tears and cracking with pained horror, had been afraid of him.
He saw, in those eyes, himself on those worst days when he was afraid of his father – the man who would, if he learnt of Kagami and Marinette, tear Adrien away from what – who – he loved.
That was the look that still haunted him, an aching pain like tinfoil on a filling but a thousand times worse because there was no end to it.
How to tell that to Kagami? If she hadn't seen it, he... he didn't want her to know because if Marinette had been afraid of him, then ... then maybe people should be afraid of him.
Why not? He was Gabriel Agreste's son.
"I'm sorry," he offered, head drooping low to stare at Plagg, his head butting up against the side of the hand that Adrien had to his desk, keeping himself steady. "I can't – I just can't, okay?"
Her hand fell away; the heat of her body and the gentle play of her fingers over his spine was gone – a loss like his own skin had been torn off.
"Adrien, I... I wish that you would speak to me about this."
That was what they had promised.
All three of them against the world.
How could he waste the time, all those precious few days that they had together before who knew what happened and they lost everything?
"I will. I will, okay? It's just that I need a little bit more time to figure things out."
When her lingering silence became too much like the echoing mute absence of his wider home, he turned, only to find her at the edge of his window, poised to leave.
"Adrien, the longer your father waits to speak to you, the worse the silence grows. The harder it is for either of you to care enough to break it." She smacked her fist to the edge of his window, trembling and buzzing like a guttural gas-powered lawn-mower. "You and Marinette are the best people I know, so ... You once said that your father was more afraid than anyone else you knew. Please don't be like your father."
And she was gone.
He tried to do his homework, to complete his Mandarin lessons, to practice the piano – anything – but in the end, all he could do was lay in bed and wait for tomorrow to come.
Author's Notes
One chapter left, along with two snippets, to be considered epilogues.