It started in the most innocuous of ways, almost anodyne, like it numbed her senses or dulled her mind, only a few weeks after they had moved into their shared apartment. The expansive two-bedroom suite was an upgrade from her old flat and his prison cell in the Agreste mansion. Eight years of hell and horror inflicted on Paris had culminated in the public defeat and unmasking of Hawkmoth before an assembled crowd of jeering and hollering civilians, who had thronged the police barricades around the Eiffel tower to witness what everyone had assumed would be the very end of the horror.
What she hadn't realized, didn't realize until it was years too late, was that true horror wasn't to be found amid the plumes of smoke and ash that billowed into the sky above their final battleground, or even in Adrien's guttural sobs in the hours after his father's unmasking, when he finally allowed himself to feel.
No.
True horror was such a slow and quiet thing – a poison that burned away all sensation after the first kiss so you couldn't feel the pin-prick of the syringe or the flow of liquid in your veins or the swelling of flesh.
A deadline for a portfolio submission in one of her modern design classes had been only about twelve hours away, and the professor had already been generous enough to grant the perpetually tardy, but in his words 'supremely gifted,' pupil an extension. Guzzled bottles of Mountain Dew with Red Bull chasers, interspersed with shots of Black Label by Devil Mountain, left her a hyper-focused but jittery mess after already pulling an all-nighter while anticipating another one.
Puttering about the kitchen to make dinner so that she had something to plop into the searing caffeinated sea in her gut, churning with sickening exhaustion and the Macbeth-style witches' cauldron brew she'd concocted, Adrien was putting to use the skills she'd imparted since they moved in together. Nothing fancy would grace their table, or Marinette's work desk. Long gone cold, whatever food he produced was to be pecked away at over roughly an hour when she remembered that it was there and stuffed a few mouthfuls down her gob. A lifetime of being waited on by nurses, nannies, professional chefs, and butlers had left Adrien, with her tutelage, able to boil water for pasta and crack open a jar of pre-made garlic and basil tomato sauce, or slap some slabs of processed meat and cheese between two slices of bread.
He was helpless in lots of ways.
Just like Gabriel wanted.
But, as he meandered around the cramped kitchen, naked feet squealing on the linoleum, he'd started to hum. He did that often, she'd found, just to fill the silence that he couldn't stand. Quiet was like barbed prison bars that he clutched and squeezed in bloodied palms. Noise – any kind of noise from her voice to the chatter of the television, even with the volume set to one bar, or his own recitation of lines from Hamlet or Twelfth night – had to flow. He ached for noise. It was an itch, like hers when she began to mouth something, leaving little gnawed marks in pencils or realizing that she was holding one of her cool metal tools between her lips and teeth.
Understanding the unique slurry of pains and yearnings that seeped through his brain was something that she should have been better at by now. Patience was supposed to be a virtue she had in abundance for Adrien Agreste, but she was exhausted, and wired, and under pressure, so she'd snapped at him – some passive aggressive barb that she couldn't even remember.
But he'd apologized immediately, and stopped humming to himself.
When he came by not with a plate of pasta, but a toasted tomato sandwich, and she'd looked up from her design table in confusion, he shrugged sheepishly and told her that he just didn't want her to make a mess when she was working. He knew how clumsy she got when distracted by responsibility.
Or, rather, how much she could miss when she fixated.
That was when she apologized too, catching his hand as it withdrew to raise it to her lips, curved downward with unabashed shame for having lashed out, and kiss a trail down the lifeline in his palm. Before allowing her to return to work, the former poster child of Paris' fashion scene just shook his head and grinned like a Chat Noir who, after a rooftop race over the city, pinned her up to a wall and, absent any hint of lasciviousness, just danced his claw-tips under her armpits and along the sensitive spans of flesh behind her knee joints, because he wanted nothing more in that moment than to see her lose control, breaking down in giggles and snorts until she dragged him down to the rooftop for a cuddle.
That was his smile, and she stretched out her aching back to lean into him and nuzzle noses, everything forgiven and forgotten, before he took off to eat his own meal in front of the television, muted out of consideration for her.
She would make it up to him.
But he stopped humming just the same.
Completely.
Because it had always frustrated her ever-so-slightly, she didn't notice its absence.
It was incredible just how much you missed when you were being made comfortable.
The next incident transpired during a weekend lull while they were watching television together with their breakfast of eggs and orange juice, having just gone for a jog, Adrien poking and prodding her awake at an ungodly hour of six AM. She'd just had to fall for a morning person. Exercise was a pain in more than one way, her thighs and calves burning and pins and needles fire arching through her lungs, but there were good kinds of pain, some that cleared the cobwebs and helped trim her already lean figure, flesh stretching taut over once-smooth, now rippled, spans.
The post-workout cool shower that they shared, the casual intimacy of touch in a confined space that, were she not there, might have provoked Adrien to begin hyperventilating. When she took up his space, imprisoned him in her arms, and all he could see was her, there was no room for claustrophobia.
A hairbrush in hand, Adrien was attending to her, both of them adoring the languid alternations between his fingers scratching into her scalp and the smooth passes of the tines, real human flesh and plastic tines a strange, flowing counterpoint. Pillow under her butt, she sat on the floor between his knees, facing away from him, luxuriating in the even strokes, timed to perfection.
Playing her like a piano, or something like that. Thinking wasn't Marinette's strong point when Adrien was pampering her, and that was another blessing.
He'd leaned down to her level, flexible spine permitting him to nearly double over, while a hand curled around her chin, perilously close to her throat in a way that had her breath hitching and fingers twitching, so he could tilt her head back.
The film of unshaven stubble was barely noticeable, and completely invisible given its light blonde hue, as fingers caressed from his cheekbone to his jaw.
"It's too bad you don't have a more full beard," she said, flattening her palm to his cheek as his upside-down smile flickered.
"Oh? I could grow it out for you." The offer was so earnest.
"I mean, could you?" she teased because of course he couldn't. Adrien Agreste was a baby-face.
A cocked brow as her answer.
Her first answer.
The second came in about a week when, her beau not having shaved over that span, his prickly chin and full cheeks resting on her sternum as he gazed up the length of her form. Like a massive kitten, eager for her continued attentions, he kneaded at her belly and thighs with soft rolls of his palms, a treat when she was, herself, laying on her back and he offered her a massage that seemed to melt away his tension as much as it did hers.
Bristles that were quickly on their way to becoming a tangled jungle of preternaturally soft spun gold strands scraped over the skin just beneath her breasts, and she giggled at the sensation, tucking a hand under the squirming bulk of him to scratch his belly, a little tease, without fear of kitty clawing at her, and then did the same under his chin, all to coax out his grin like sunshine.
Even in its nascent state with a week of growth, the facial hair was soft under her calloused hands and fingertips, a result of beard oil or some kind of specialty shampoo, obviously. With his impeccable personal care routine and lifetime of conditioning by Gabriel, Adrien embraced certain habits that he'd found no reason to break, from his exercise regimen to the hour that he spent making himself pretty each morning – to great success, not that bedraggled, alluringly messy, just awoken Adrien was any less appealing than his prim and proper presentable public self, the still famed model.
That Adrien was hers and hers alone.
Only she saw him when he was a mess.
No one else did.
No one else could.
One of those habits that he'd now folded into his morning ablutions as he peppered himself with tonics and applied his own subtle makeups and imported cologne, selecting one of a dozen different glass decanters from his third shelf in the bathroom, was clearly beard care, if the results were anything to go by.
Obviously, she just hadn't noticed how rich and thick his beard could be, without even a hint of patchiness, because of the fair colour.
Adrien grew a much more robust and lush beard than she'd ever imagined he could.
She was pregnant the next time it happened. At least it was the next time could recall through the dim and dark abyss of time. Maybe it was all that she could see through the blinding glare of idealization and exhaustion, assignments in her design courses, attentive back-rubs at the end of arduous days, and dinners with her parents wherein Adrien, because he'd never had a family, consumed all of their attentions.
Subtle acquiescence was fundamental to their relationships as they weaved and contorted their lives around one another. Hands trained for fine needlework or a dance over piano keys prodded, unwieldy, at the invisible lesions that festered across their minds, or lanced abscesses to loose the toxic sludge inside.
Such a trifling matter had seemed irrelevant at a time in which she was fretting over her figure daily, breaking out in hormonal tirades and bouts of weeping, or lazing about as a bloated mass on their couch or bed.
Pregnancy wasn't the nightmare that Alya had suggested that it would be; however, the burden on her already unsteady and frenetic mind was a challenge to bear. With steadfast assurances of her beauty and capability, and a recognition that the loss of control was the source of her irrational jealousy towards "Scarabella and Chat Noir" when they partnered day after day to battle the new Hawkmoth's akumas, Adrien was there for her, just as she was for him in those early days when his despondent episodes caused him to secret himself away from the world. Brainless video games and youtube videos, cooking tutorials and walkthroughs and animatic for musicals that he'd never actually care about consumed him for days during which he could barely speak, and probably couldn't live.
When was the last time he'd had one of those days?
It had been months.
Years, perhaps.
She was a bitch for not remembering.
Chat Noir would creep into her bedroom window after an akuma battle, finding her a particularly fatty burrito roll all wrapped up inside her comforter even though it was twenty-five degrees outside and her efforts at self-soothing only rendered her even more disgusting, slick and sloppy with sweat under the covers.
He'd bear in hand her favorite foods, a result of pregnancy cravings that seemed so stereotypical that it was ridiculous, but it wasn't as if she'd had a choice about being a hormonal mess.
Cheeses.
All kinds of cheeses in varying combinations from mild and salty mozzarella to feta and pungent goats' cheese that she ate without any breads or crackers, just spooning a hunk of herbaceous white cream between her lips and letting it melt under the pressure between her tongue and the roof of her mouth.
Even Camembert was on the menu, much to the shock of her mother who'd subsisted on dull and nigh flavorless broths during her pregnancy, anything more substantial or rich coming up in chunks and froth almost immediately. Even the smells from the bakery, nothing more odoriferous or offensive than the warm scent of browning bread or cinnamon still enough to turn her stomach.
With her head tucked to the crux of Adrien's shoulder, she would all too often simply gorge herself on cheese and crackers, Plagg joining in and, between attempting to cram wedges of warm Camembert down his gullet, crooning about pregnancy being an icky and disgusting human thing, part of Tikki's weird fetishes and kinks, but, man, was it worth it!
"Are you sure you're okay with this?" she'd asked him as she dabbed at her lips with a napkin, aware of just how bloated her fingers felt and the vile corpulence of her body that must have disgusted him. Mollified by a full belly, irrational as that might have been considering her self-image issues, she knew that but didn't quite feel the sting.
Despite the foul taste and odour clinging to her lips, he'd leaned in to feather his lips over hers, chaste and light but lingering to let her know that he was far from fazed by her new diet or its effects.
"Of course not, Milady," came his immediate assurance as they broke apart, his breath washing over her cheeks. His gaze made her feel like she was strolling through a warm summer rain, with each droplet a little dollop liquid sunshine as a thumb traced her cheekbone. "You'd be amazed what you can get used to, especially if it's for you."
In affirmation and assurance, alongside his flirtatious wink that did wonders for her self confidence, he smeared a finger through a hunk of warmed Camembert and slid the digit into his mouth, sucking down the biting, rich cream as greedily and sloppily as Plagg, staring her right in the eye.
Despite Adrien's antipathy towards cheese, especially the malodorous stuff that had, when the cravings first materialized, driven him to retching on tasting her lips and smelling the pont l'eveque on her breath, he didn't seem bothered, even though she scanned his features for even a hint of nausea.
"Okay, Kitty." She burrowed down deeper into his side, as if she was the cat and he a terribly large hot water bottle, unfurling the edges of her blanket-burrito just a little bit further. "If you say so."
Camembert on his breath, Adrien kissed her forehead, and she assumed that everything had to be alright.
Emma was as much of a delight as she was a horror, wailing and whimpering at almost all hours as she struggled with colic, the source of which they could never hope to identify even though they visited a dozen clinics with the furious ardour and focus of the heroes of Paris and first-time parents, for whom a sliver or runny nose was tantamount to the plague.
Plagg mocked them mercilessly, since he seen both ends of the spectrum.
They all had their own ways of dealing with loss and fear, and Marinette was only now, years into her relationship with Adrien, coming to understand the way in which Plagg processed and coped.
Between an enhanced exercise regime to help her shed her pregnancy weight, her reclamation of the Ladybug miraculous and renewed stint as the heroine of Paris, and her day job at the re-branded Gabriel fashion house, she barely had energy left to leverage off her shoes and crawl into bed in the evening. Staring at her punchy belly, crisscrossed with stretch marks, and slightly sagging breasts that would probably never firm up properly again, leaving her just an ugly mess compared to her still immaculate six-percent body fat two-twenty pound husband who had female models draping themselves all over him every day, the former might have been a pure waste of time.
Dealing with a midnight crying fit took up so many precious minutes of sleep, but they had seemed to stop roughly four weeks after they'd began, disappearing without any real warning.
She could recall only one night, after the first month, that she'd woken up, and in the hazy minute between sleep and wakefulness, her aching eyes and the cool darkness enticing her back to sleep, a thunderbolt of terror had her heart hammering in her throat at the random thought, the certainty, that Emma needed her, that she was too quiet.
A cold pocket of sheets awaited her when she rolled over, her hand meeting nothing but mattress while she slurred out the question as to whether it was his turn or hers.
Maternal instinct was something that Marinette was only just becoming familiar with at that point; it seemed so fanciful, a product of superstition and hormonal imbalance that, frankly, could just go straight to hell after nine months of pregnancy. Static danced at the base of her neck nonetheless.
Retrieving a burgundy robe from the closet, grateful that she had left her slippers by the bed since the hardwood floors of their new house always carried a chill in the fall nights and evenings, Marinette, fists in her pockets. padded off towards her daughter's room.
Wearing his Chat Noir pawprint tee-shirt, a gift she'd given him to go along with his clashing and faded Ladybug sleep pants after an accident with some bleach ruined the matching top, Adrien sat in the padded rocking chair in the corner of Emma's room. Their slumbering, swaddled daughter slept soundly in his arms.
"How long have you been up?" Marinette had to whisper for fear of waking the little bundle in his arms.
Without looking up as she took up a place beside him, resting an arm on the backrest of the rocking chair, Adrien shrugged. "She started crying about an hour ago."
A long time for Adrien to be up, even though his punishing schedules as a teen had built up a resistance to exhaustion, trained him how to live on only four hours of sleep a night.
"Did you try putting her back down?" She risked peeling back the cloth around Emma's chin to feel her forehead, instinct telling her that her baby was sick, but there was no noticeable difference in her temperature. Still the sensation tugged at her gut, left it churning for no discernible reason. That little face, the little person that they'd crafted together and were shaping day by day, was untroubled in sleep. A little tuft of Adrien-blond hair poked fuzzed the top of her head, and in response to the minor disruption, she stirred, only to nuzzle into her father's chest.
"Every time I do," he explained without regret, his eyes still sharp green in the dark, almost faintly self-luminous as if an after-image of Chat Noir's radiant pupils had been imprinted, "she wakes up and starts to cry again."
Testing for any tension through the bands of muscle that ran along his shoulder, thumb to the tendon on the side of his neck, Marinette stroked the fringe of his hair. "Do you want me to take over so you can get some rest?"
"It's okay." His assurance was punctuated with a nuzzle of his nose to her cheek before he went back to gazing down at their baby girl as if she was a work of art.
She was.
"You're not tired?" While Adrien might have been a stay-at-home dad by choice, he still deserved his rest.
"It's okay. I don't need sleep, Milady, and you have work in the morning," he said with a wistful smile, like some random, half-recalled thought or nostalgic impulse from their early days had just flitted in and out of his mind.
In a playful invocation of their past joys, and a promise of new ones to come, she flicked his nose with a forefinger.
"Thanks, hot stuff."
She slept so very soundly, pacified by the surety offered by Adrien's attentive concern for her and Emma.
She might never have known if she'd not come home early one Friday, intent on surprising him with a trip to see the latest Star Wars movie in theaters and then retire to their home, Emma spending the night at a slumber party with Gramma and Grandpa. Ever eager to dote on their littlest princess, they'd agreed to pick her up from preschool and take her to the bakery.
The hiss of cascading water from the shower and a thin mist of steam poured out from the half-open bathroom door as she crept in on her seriously clean cat, but Adrien wasn't in the shower.
At first, there was only incomprehension, and then the flood, memories and rage that poured out in a torrent, crested every levy and barricade so that their entire world was flooded. All of the recriminations were spat at him, but directed at her, and they only grew worse as he sat there on the rim of the bathtub, the shower turned off and water droplets beading up and trailing down the tile walls behind him.
"Marinette," he said gently, hands clasped between his knees, "you don't understand."
"No, I don't understand how you could think this is what I want." Pacing before the sink because she had to move, and couldn't allow herself to run, she nearly broke a finger when a gout of white hot anger had her slamming a fist into her hip bone. Reverberations up her forearm and the warmth of a bruise forming felt so good. "How you could do this to yourself? To me?"
He played with the edge of his beard, lush and full and sickening, but made no sounds – not a grunt or hum or purr. Just words came. "Because I realized what I am."
"We've known for years."
"But not why ." His voice rose but not in anger while he stood up and gestured towards their room, where the peafowl miraculous was stored alongside all the others. "See they're always made from something. A desire. A wish. A feeling."
"I thought we had our own feelings." They'd laboured together to build them, reconstruct them, understand the intricate ballet dance of thoughts and triggers, motions and counter motions that twined together like a birds' nest of sparking electric wires. All for nothing. "Our own reasons."
"We do," he responded, gazing down at the bath mat under his feet and wiggling his toes. "But I had to know."
"Know what?" Judgment came so easy to her that she almost laughed at herself, some of those tangled fibers in her brain ripping away, synapses shorting out.
"Why I was created," Adrien replied as if it was obvious and simple, like he was telling her about the title of a newspaper article that had caught his eye while they were sharing coffee, Emma spooning cheerios into her mouth in her chair, showing she was a big girl.
"How could you? Gabriel- they're both gone." Concealing the hint of pleasure that she felt at that, however much it wounded Adrien, was impossible in light of all the misery that man had inflicted on Paris and her citizens, his son suffering more than most.
"That's how it started. It just got easier and easier after I forced myself to remember. Then… then it was him."
"What?" she squeezed out. The room, Marinette realized for the first time, was still muggy with the latent steam from his shower, perspiration causing her shirt to stick to her chest and armpits.
"You hated him, and- and I couldn't." The explanation fell so hollow and strained on her ears, an echo when breath became air. "Even though he hurt you."
"He hurt me because he hurt you." She couldn't be certain now if he understood that - if it had ever been possible for him to understand, and there was no possible way for the obscene words that need to be said to form on her tongue - the ones about Gabriel.
Or the ones about Adrien.
What he's done.
"And that's why I couldn't-" He paused, wiping away nothing from his mouth and looking, as if on the verge of crying but not being able to, towards the ceiling she could remember painting with him before she got pregnant newspaper taped down to the floor crunching under foot when she'd guided his hands to show him how to use the roller on an extendable pole and he'd been firm and warm against her chest. "Why I couldn't keep loving him."
"You - you didn't?" Of course he did.
"It was so hard the first time." Red rosettes burst over his knuckles, veins straining in the back of his hand, as he clenched his fist. "Took so long to to just... say the words and mean them, but then, just like that, I realized it was fine. I could hate him."
"Just like that?"
Desperate for her to understand, she could see that from the downward slope of his brow, the forced even intakes of breath, to tell her that it was okay, he pleaded and justified: "How many times have you wished that you could control how you feel? What you feel and why? How many times when – when things are bad?"
"That's not natural!." A parody of their younger days, the words poured forth before she could think to stop them
"Exactly!" His nod was vigorous, but stilted, like a marionette bobbing its head on strings. "I'm not natural."
"But you are human," she insisted though it had no effect on his expression, even when she clasped him by the shoulder and squeezed so hard that it should have bruised
His expression remained placid. "You just said that I'm not."
"That's not what I meant and you know it!" Vicious like the defiant snarl she'd thrown in his cousin's face when he'd told them the truth, her tone still wavered.
"Of course that's not what you meant, but it's okay even if you did." With Adrien just partially leaned over his own lap, the faint tug of his lips lent him a vacuous air, vapidly soulful like one of those modeling shots that he'd done as a child, before he'd learnt how to act properly.
"What?"
"She was so happy, My Lady." The explanation was punctuated by his cupping the hand on his shoulder with his own as he continued almost eagerly. "So excited at the idea of having me. I was lucky because- I mean, look at Chloe. There are so many children in the world who aren't wanted, and I was."
"You're still wanted, Adrien," she insisted, the anger abating as the nerve was struck, and she kissed him furiously over his eyes, his cheeks, his chin before jerking back. "You'll always be wanted, but that doesn't explain … this."
"It does, though. It explains everything." He shook his head, easing her backwards so that he could drop to his knees before her, cushioned by the fluffy blue bathmat on the floor. It was almost like she could block out the sound of his voice, scour away his words and just tumble backwards into the memory of him, in a restaurant with a year-long waiting list, offering her her ring, just as she'd offered him his. Acid was harsh on her lips and scalded tongue.
"She wanted to be happy," he continued. "That's why I was made. For her to be happy. When she left, I couldn't give her that anymore, so – so there was no reason for me to … be."
"That- that's sick." If he were any other man, she'd slap him, throttle him, and, God, did she yearn for that - merely to shatter her problems because this time there was no convoluted masterstroke, no intricate, offbeat plot to be weaved around this foe because she didn't have her partner. He'd been lost, and she had to find him in the dark. "She was sick, Adrien. You don't have a child to – to fix yourself or – or make yourself feel good."
"But that's at the heart of what I am. What I always was meant to be, and now it's all for you."
"How can that not bother you?!" She hated herself when the answer came to her, even as she pushed forward, refusing to see. "How is it not killing you?!"
Broad and fat, his smile was like the one to which she awoke on a lazy Sunday morning when all they had was each other and the thick white comforter swaddling them.
"It did." Laughter called to mind that day in the rain, a boy pure and honest and unrestrained, the genuine Adrien who had so much love to offer pouring out like the sun breaching the clouds.
She nearly vomited right there.
His amok caught between her hand and his, he spoke in the voice of a proud child holding up a songbird whose wings he'd crushed so he could offer it to her as a gift:
"But I fixed myself."
Author's Notes
Hopefully the implications of both subtle and gross alterations to Adrien's nature, physical form, mannerisms, and emotions over the course of his marriage to Marinette through manipulation of the peacock miraculous and his amok, has become clear by the end of the piece.
Given that Gabriel has so warped Adrien's sense of self-worth, preying upon untreated depression, and enforced the belief that not only are relationships transactional, but that Adrien himself is always the debtor, he set about to prove himself worth of her love, shaping and reshaping himself based on her slightest word or whim, without her even becoming aware.
Adrien is, after all, a marvelous liar.
