It was her.

It wasn't her.

It was.

It wasn't.

He was at war in his own mind, while the rest of him drowned in her. She was everything he had lost, everything he missed, she was purely intoxicating and his instincts were revelling in it. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't have stopped, it was like he'd been drowning for years and she was the air he so desperately needed. His hand held her cheek, her skin soft and familiar, and her lips fit perfectly against his as if they were made for each other.

They were.

They weren't.

Her body was warm, warmer than it should have been, but it bled through his thick skin where they touched and reminded him of colorful fish and pink coral. Her clothes bothered him, the rough fabric and jagged buckles digging into him, but he didn't dare invade her space any more than he already was. His instincts were screaming, pushing him down, but he wouldn't let them take over completely. Instead, though, he couldn't stop from giving in to the urge to thread his fingers in her hair, or to press her harder against the floorboards. The sound she made when he did sent a shudder down his spine, and the growl that escaped his throat was purely feral.

When did she end up under him? He didn't care.

He did care. It wasn't her.

It didn't matter.

Her hands were on his shoulders, her grip tight, but otherwise she was slack and pliant beneath him. It was like she belonged there, or felt like she did, and he was okay with that. Only a day ago she'd been glancing at him with looks that were only marginally less afraid than those of Natalie's crew, and now here she was, perfectly welcoming to have him so much closer to her than should have ever been appropriate, and it definitely wasn't, and he didn't care. It shouldn't have, she wasn't her, but seeing her look at him with fear had hurt. It tore at his heart, jostling the open wounds already there, and made the dark depths of his ravine sound appealing again just to escape his mistakes yet again.

But she was here now. She wasn't afraid. She was never meant to be afraid, she was his other half, and he would always protect her.

Was she afraid because he had failed?

She's not her.

Confusion bounces around the inside of his head, fighting with the way his body was practically doing whatever the hell it wanted, and he pulled away enough to shake his head. It didn't help, didn't fix the rattling thoughts, and she pulled him closer and erased the distance he'd created in doing so.

Looking at her face was a mistake, because all he could see was her.

Expression smooth, worry and fear forgotten, she gazed up at him so warmly he wasn't sure if it burned his heart or soothed it. The beautiful crystal blue of her eyes was darker than usual, but that, too, was so familiar. He knew that look, he'd seen it enough times before, even if it had been so long ago. Why was that, again? She was right here. Her cheeks were flushed pink, rushed breaths escaping her parted lips.

Her legs wrapped around him, pulling him well and fully flush against her. He barely registered, no, he didn't take notice at all that she had legs and not a tail. The rational part of his mind was slipping under a fog, his coherent thoughts going with it. All that was left was her, warm and wonderful and so very alive.

Of course. Why wouldn't she be?

She made a pitiful noise, and soon he was back, nuzzling her cheek. Was he purring? Maybe. His hand fell from her other cheek, trailing down until he could wrap his arm around her waist and hug her close as if she would vanish at any second, disappear into the void and leave him alone again. The contact made her sigh, and he nuzzled down her neck, purring louder.

Her hands found their way to his hair, gently scratching through it and petting his fins, and if he wasn't already a mess, he'd have probably melted under her touch right then. She was warmth, and safety, and everything was okay, and it felt like he was whole. He'd felt so empty for so long, why had he ever let her go?

Ever so gently, giving her plenty of time to react, his hand slid from her back and found its way under the end of her shirt. When a startled squeak escaped her, he stilled, but she only shook her head and mumbled something incoherent. Her fingers tightened in his hair, pulling just enough, and he continued. The skin on her back was just as soft and smooth as her face, of course, he knew that. He wanted to melt away into this moment, surrounded in nothing but the softness that was her, and forget the world around them. His touch trailed up, around her side, brushing so gently to her front.

The softness ended. Her skin was rough here, textured, scarred. A testament to regrets past.

He was so glad she was okay.

Under him, she wasn't much less of a mess than he was. So warm and so flushed red, she was still breathing heavily, and she was clinging harder to him again. She buried her face in his hair, trembling, and he just kept purring, content to stay right where they were forever.

But despite everything, though, she managed to pull free of her own dreamy state, and nudged him gently.

"Hey, uh…"

"Yes, Marinette?"

He'd never know what she was going to ask.

She froze.

"How did… how do you… Chat, how do you know my name?"

And in an instant, everything shattered, reality raining down on him like shards of glass. He wrenched back, out of her space, guilt flooding his conscience, and stared down in abject horror.

There were no white fins, no tiny patches of pink scales hiding at the edges of her face. The legs wrapped around him were decidedly not a familiar pink tail, their owner decidedly not a mermaid, and not her because she was dead.

What was he doing here? He didn't belong here. She wasn't his mate. This wasn't okay. He was bound to only one, and this wasn't her, and he was cruel to take advantage and depraved to forget where his loyalty was.

No matter how much she looked like her.

No matter how much she sounded like her.

No matter how much her soul felt like hers.

This wasn't her.

"I'm so sorry." Chat scrambled back, away from her, away from her touch and the mistakes he was making, not registering how she reached for him. His back met the railing, and without a doubt, he knew a choice had been made, whether he liked it or not. "I'm sorry."

He was gone before she could say anything, disappearing from her without a trace into the black ocean.

The water was cold, colder than it had ever been.

At least, that's how it felt.

The chill of the dark, sunless ocean pressed in on all sides, feeling as if it could surge right through his thick marine skin. It was so dark, pitch black and empty in every direction, the previously comforting blanket of shadow now feeling like an oppressive cage, smothering him in its icy grip. And though the sea was always much more silent than the land above, its sounds much more peaceful, tonight it was just as if everything had been snuffed out. There were no distant bellows of large sea creatures, or the excited chatter of dolphins, or the tiny murmur from schools of fish, everything that normally converged together and created the voice of his home.

Worst of all, he was well and truly alone. There was no one here to reassure him, to save him from himself, to be there when he needed it most.

And he'd done it to himself, this time.

How far the mermaid swims, aimlessly into the black, he doesn't know. Maybe he'll venture so far off from where he knows that he'll never be able to find his way back, never have to face his regrets. And what is he so regretful of, really? Is it the shame of feeling like he had betrayed the one person who had been, and was still, the most important thing in his existence?

Or did he regret stripping himself of something that reminded him so much of what happiness once was? Did he regret choosing to plunge himself back into the icy loneliness he'd come to know as his only companion?

Or… did he regret abandoning Ladybug, without so much as a warning or a why? Was it because he didn't want her to feel upset about it, or was he only convincing himself for his own sake that she cared enough to miss him?

Was he still seeing her as someone she wasn't? Did he know her at all?

Did it matter?

Now, he guessed, it really didn't. He'd run away now, the choice had been made. He couldn't go back now and even if he backtracked entirely and convinced himself he could, by the time he grew sick of this aimless wandering, he may never find his way back to exactly where she was.

He didn't have a soul connection to lead him this time, not anymore.

At least, not with her.

Maybe it was better this way.

In all his circling, following random currents, and halfhearted meandering, he didn't pay any attention to where he was going. He didn't make the connection that his body was following familiar paths, warm currents leading somewhere, not even as the previously too deep to see scenery became shallower, lighter, coming into sight, bringing with it colorful rocks and coral.

The water became lighter, bluer, brightening in the dazzling brilliance of the rising sun. The water here was so different from further north, more crisp and so inviting, along with the beautiful array of every imaginable color of coral painting the soft, sandy floor. Unlike the pressing silence of the night, the fish here were flitting in and out of crevices, going about their tiny little lives without a care in the world, fully unaware of their larger cousin's distress. Chat himself barely realized the change, or where he was, the passage of time lost on him until he'd drifted so off course that he collided with some of the taller coral.

It shook him back to his senses. For just a moment, he forgot the darker waters, the cold. He forgot the pirate who was so cruelly identical to what he wished so desperately for.

All he could see, for miles in all directions, was a forest of beautiful pink coral. The same pink that haunted his dreams, always just so barely out of his reach, now pouring into every edge of his vision.

As if he were in a dream, or even a nightmare, his body moved of its own accord. Chat was left frozen in absolute dread for where his fins were taking him, an anguished cry gathering in his throat but unable to escape. He didn't want to be here, he didn't want to see this place.

He was trying to run from his problems, not face them head on.

His tail wouldn't listen. It kept pushing him forward, weaving in and around the coral with the muscle memory he'd thought would be long, long gone. The bright fish, of all colors of the rainbow, watched him go with more curiosity than they had fear, and started to follow along with him. Though the spike of despair was growing larger and larger in his chest with each passing moment, the colorful little friends he'd long forgotten nibbled at the edges of his loneliness with the way they clung to him like enamoured children.

He was torn between feeling like this was a mystical experience, revisiting such a beautiful and important place with a school of rainbow fish following him, and feeling absolute horror at where this trip would lead. Still, his course did not waver, and at this point he didn't know if he was doing it himself or not.

The path he took led them patiently around the scenery, enough to show him old signs of the past. The occasional gouge carved into some of the pink material, each with a memory attached firmly to it, or an impossibly distinct appearance of rocks or objects left in such a specific pattern or place that he could not be mistaken as to their origin. In one place, even, a patch of plant life from another area that had most definitely not wandered here all on its own, its journey another close held memory in his mind.

And after what felt like both an eternity and a mere split second, his path curved and dipped, taking him down within the steadfast cover of lovely pink and into the hollowed sand below, shells and objects and beautiful plants of all kind dotting the nest floor.

But most important of all, among everything that held memories and emotions he'd long tried to bury and hide from, right in the center of it all and bathed in a ray of the glittering sun above, rested a single pink sphere, its occupant forever sealed away from the world of the living.

When Chat rested his eyes on the indestructible barrier wedged into the sand, he expected to be overcome with negative emotion. To suddenly feel his repressed feelings of so many years overflow and spill out, to leave him as much of a broken, screaming wreck as the day she'd been taken away. But as his gaze focused on the translucent pink sphere, its size large enough that even he would have fit inside, none of that happened. His mounting terror fizzled away with his breath as he looked at it, and all those emotions he'd expected did nothing more than drift idly in the back of his mind, no heavier than mist.

The thing he felt most of all, in place of them, was a sense almost like nostalgia. Peaceful and longing, wishing for what once was, but accepting that it was gone.

It was easy to approach, entirely of his own volition, with that emotion instead of dread. It was easy to press his hands on the glass-like surface, letting the rest of his body fall to rest languidly on the sand. And, most of all, it was so much easier than he ever would have guessed, to peer inside and witness the source of his nightmares for decades.

Curled in among the sand and seaweed inside of the sphere, as peaceful as if she was just sleeping and still just as vibrant and beautiful as the day she stopped moving forever, his other half laid in her final resting place. The only part of her that gave away her true condition was the wound on her stomach, the bleeding long since unable to continue and the raw flesh grey with the lack of life.

The turmoil within him slowly relaxed, the raging sea of his emotions lulling to a tranquil state as he gazed at her. He truly did expect, that if he ever came back to this place, his grief would kill him. But in the end, even in death, she could not do that to him.

"Marinette." He sighed, resting his head against the translucent surface, and wishing that it was her. In a way, it was. The pink bubble encasing her body the last of her magic, the last mark she could leave on this world, its purpose purely to keep her powerful body from falling into the wrong hands. But though it, too, was entirely her, he still wished she was closer.

All the same, he shifted, curling his tail around the sphere, and allowing his body to relax into the sand while his mind wandered. Unclouded, for the moment, his thoughts scattered, sifting through everything it could, with a clarity that only breaking free from grief could provide. It was there, resting in the hollow they'd called home together, alongside what was left of her, that he realized two things.

Ladybug hadn't just been shocked he'd called her by the wrong name. It was because he'd accidentally said her true name.

And the other thing he realized?

The faint and decayed, but unbreakable connection to his soulmate, the tug that led him always back to her side, the thing he'd come to learn to ignore leading back to this one place, was coming from somewhere else.

A/N: just a quick note, it was hard to explain properly from Chat's perspective of already knowing this, but my mermaid lore basically says that their tails are indestructible and when they die, they don't really decay very fast at all. to prevent humans from scavenging them for bad uses (like hunting more mermaids, with indestructible scale armor) the last of their power manifests in a magic bubble coffin after death. after a century or two, the whole thing turns to dust.