Author's Notes
Based on a prompt from Miss Noodles posted to the Miraculous Fanworks Discord... over a year ago. I finally sat down last night, the first line having flashed through my mind, and pounded out the entire very short story.
For She Has Clothed Me...
Adrien Agreste has been expected and required to don some really rather unflattering and unusual attire over his sixteen years on this planet. He's modelled it all from tuxedos and top hats to the Avant-Garde styling of Audrey Bourgeois, whose team slathered gold-flake paint over his features and mimicked whiskers by smearing lines of clean flesh on his cheeks to complement some kind of airy and ethereal silk body wrap.
Learning to accept the busy and careless hands of design teams and rotating casts of stylists, all of whom eventually quit because his father is impossible to work with, even through a tablet, was just part of the process. No complaints from the mannequin of flesh for the cloth that they wrapped around his body, the canvass painted up with myriad creams and concealers and highlighters to create the proper contrast for whatever light was being used in a particular shoot.
He had long since ceased to be surprised what he could live through. Just shut your eyes and don't watch as the person in the mirror takes shape.
Designs flowed through his changing rooms and makeup trailers and backstage preparation areas like water; after the first few years as a child model, he got used to it. His opinion was never solicited, never mattered regardless of just how hideous or stifling the designs proved to be, no matter how much they cut into his throat and chaffed or itched.
The clothes were always the important thing, just like the audience, or the investors, or the managers of whatever magazine in which his spread of airbrushed and photo-shopped modelling shots – they had to tuck in his waist and remove the blemishes that even concealer couldn't fix because you've been spending too much time in the sun, Adrien; I'm disappointed by your carelessness - were scheduled to appear.
Nothing spoke to him, when he had his ears stopped up. They all just passed in a blur, a hodgepodge of sound and fury and colour, signifying nothing to him, which was fitting since, if he didn't matter to the designers, then why should their clothing matter to him.
Sometimes, he thought back to the literature that he'd read: famous quotations, snippets of dialogue that moved him, scenes that resounded in his mind and were built up, brick by brick, line by line, until they coalesced into a crystalline gem that drew in all his mental eyes and ears. Just a spirit inside a body, almost severed.
A breath hisses through his teeth, and he realizes only now that he needed it badly, lungs expanding like he's gulping down acidic air, or something acrid like smoke in the midst of a tenement fire.
Clearly, he had been holding his breath.
Forgotten how to breathe.
Amazing the things you could forget.
He's been left to his own devices in his changing room for a few minutes, under orders not to disturb the new outfit that has been assigned to him by an unfamiliar design team. From her sickbed, still orchestrating his life, Nathalie must have told him the name of the company Gabriel has partnered with for this shoot, but he can't recall.
The attiring process was unspectacular. Nothing had been unusual about the hands tucking and folding and wrapping up, fingers stiff and cold whenever they accidentally brushed his skin and the many-forked lightning that splintered all the way into the striations of his muscle. By this point, he had no reason to even watch the process unfold. Just shut his eyes and run through cord progressions in his head, or mathematical formulae, or those beautiful, shining gems of others' experiences in stories, tragedy and comedy and cartoons. Best of all was imagining Marinette dressing him with one of her designs. Her smile, or the little hint of her tongue poking out from between her lips in concentration as she tested the fit and cut of the outfit that she had tailored for him. That could consume his world, the random humming of snippets from her favorite show tunes or Jagged Stone recordings just sandblasting away his thoughts, letting him get lost in the smooth warbling that bubbled up and reminded him of his mother singing him to sleep.
And by the time that his makeup artists were done, and he was back, and they had stopped touching him, he was all wrapped up and ready to go, the memory or dream chased away to cower in the shadows like a beaten dog.
A robotic jerk of his arm and his hand stutters towards the enchantingly sheer fabric on his arms as he looks away from the full-length mirror and the strange person he doesn't recognize but feels like he should.
The outfit is breezy, tight and loose in all the right places because this team was competent – more than competent.
Seen out of the corner of his eye, the person he doesn't know in the mirror is now staring at the immaculate white and grey shards, like some impressionist's vision of feathers, that cascade down his shoulders and low collar, and then run down his biceps until they fade to black through the rest of the ensemble.
Every inch of skin - arms, legs, chest - is shaved and exfoliated, a part of his regular routine for shoots wherein he'll be showing off a little bit more of himself.
Despite ventilation and the base whine of air-conditioning that's meant to ensure that he doesn't sweat – even though he wears copious antiperspirant - and ruin the outfit, the room is too hot and he can't quite breathe.
Each one stabs into his lungs, and the shards of unidentifiable electric ... pain? Is it pain?
The shards are everywhere.
He smiles Adrien Agreste's smile, and that's all he sees.
The shoot goes well.
Adrien Agreste is a professional.
He has to go where he can think - where he's safe to think and be and do.
There's only one place.
Smelling of vanilla perfume but tasteful and restrained, Marinette ducks and bobs around him in the middle of her bedroom.
Like a syringe piercing his numbed gum-line in the dentist chair, she slips in with sewing thread and starts weaving her way around each blisteringly hot sliver still lodged deep, extracting them so that only the lingering heat remains. Cascading through his body, right down to the tips of his fingers, that energy leaves his flesh tingling, sensitive like he's been rubbed raw.
He'd had his eyes closed against the sight of himself through most of the process, even though it had been torturous not to watch her. This time, witnessing her work somehow seemed like a violation of a compact that he'd signed with himself. Hell was keeping his eyes shut, regulating his breathing under her ministrations. His Lady was touching him, and all that he could do was wait and burn, immolated in strange fire.
Gentle hands had stroked through his hair all to a thick and lustrous purr as she styled it, and all the culminated finishing touches on the piece that she'd had on hand, but had to adjust for him, left his skin itching. It was like being dumped into chemical solvent, dead skin eaten away, and then a rosemary bath at the spa.
Slowing, increasingly precise movements cause him to crack open his eyes just a sliver, but he doesn't look down.
She pulls the last needle from her mouth, sticking it into a pink pincushion on her desk. The bulbous, gnarled old thing is being used as a back rest for Tikki and Plagg, both of whom have been uncharacteristically silent throughout this entire affair; Plagg hasn't kvetched about cheese or all of this being a stupid waste of time even once, and Tikki, normally a wellspring of support and fount of energy during Marinette's attempts to design a new piece, only offered a few murmurs that felt judgmental.
Marinette gives him a critical once-over, but, just like the girl herself, a brilliant disaster, a leader and a spastic mess all rolled up into one, there are two looks.
One for the clothing, analytical, calculating, cutting and measuring with her eyes as she parses out her work and herself, vivisecting.
One for him, and it's always accompanied by a smile, even when she's mad or disappointed.
Not even a lingering hint of dissatisfaction is discernible in the second glance.
"I think that's it." She puts a thumb to her chin, and the digit slowly sweeps up to her mouth as if she's on the verge of sucking it. "You can turn around now and take a look."
When he turns, he sees the person in the mirror.
Just a blonde, hair coiffed expertly and makeup immaculate with a hint of eyeliner and something glossy on full lips that straddled a line – what line, Adrien isn't sure.
And the outfit...
It's the same feeling- the one that he had in the dressing room.
"My Lady?" he asks in a voice that's almost like something that he'd expect in a movie from someone dying of blood loss, too weak to be heard.
"Yes?"
He can't look at her as he fingers the hem-line on his airy sleeve. The person in the mirror seems like someone he wants to know.
"I- I like wearing a dress," he says, and then looks up at her. She's gazing at him like he's a toddler lost in a crowded market, too afraid to cry out for a parent. "What does that mean?"
Ladybug inside Marinette's room smiles at him, putting a hand to his cheek. Her face is so gentle that he can hardly stand to look at it. "It means that you like wearing a dress, Adrien. It doesn't have to mean anything more than that."
Why does that hurt?
Finger underneath his cheek bone, calluses rough, she keeps going, and it hurts worse and it hurts good. "But if it does, you're surrounded by people who love you, and are here to help you because you have all the time in the world to figure it out."
Sickness bubbles up in his gut and wants to tear off the dress, plunge his hands right into his stomach so that he can tear out the wrong feeling. Clothing has never made him feel before, and he wishes that he could just go back to being insensate, being a mannequin, being... nonbeing.
"It's not... a sex thing, is it?"
It's a relief, and a release, his shoulders slumping like he's been bearing a weight and only now is cognizant of the pressure, that she takes her time in answering. She pulls back, trailing a hand down his arm, the press of soft material against his shoulder causing him to shiver. When she reaches his hand, she interlocks their fingers.
"How do you feel, Adrien?"
Sick and stable and relieved and afraid and-
"I, uh-"
"Take your time," she says with a slow nod, and though the words could be said to a small boy in his room, snotty and sobbing and utterly incapable of expressing himself because there was no one to listen and he was such a disgusting mess of a child, it's not patronizing. She doesn't make him feel like a child. "Really think about it. There's no rush."
He looks to her and truly sees the way his Lady's watching him.
That's enough.
"I feel." Mulling over the person in the mirror, he swallows. There's a stirring, but it's not lurid. "Good."
She envelops him in a hug, all compressed power and arms like iron locked around his waist, enough so that even as he sags into her, there isn't even a hint that she could buckle under his weight.
"That's enough for me."
Author's Notes
Not exactly an articulation of my perspective on Adrien Agreste and, I hope, a work with sufficient ambiguity to allow for a multiplicity of interpretations.
Thank you for taking the time to read.
