Chapter Text
Fingers rap on petaled walls: walls colored like time-stained ivory met by splashes of life, walls decorated by delicate lilies.
Marinette doesn't feel her heart shatter whatsoever. In fact, she runs around with a grin crinkling her eyes, not paying any mind to thoughts of the weakness behind fragility but rather the beauty in front of delicateness. She feels everything inside her emptying out in rewarding rejuvenation. What she feels is nothing like breaking but something more akin to evolution.
Creation? Birth? Life, maybe.
She sees Adrien run past what the two of them decided to dub "The Good Wall of Ivy"— dubbed this as "great" denoted a larger sense of excellence than what they were going for; though, Marinette would personally say titling the wall a "great" one would have been fitting, given the fact the entire garden they were at was called an ivy garden because of ivy-covered walls.
Adrien playfully moves his fingers and sticks his tongue out in an overly mocking gesture, and at that moment, Marinette sees it as a declaration of war.
Evil. She dashes away from sun-soaked lilies. Everything she sees as she chases Adrien whips past her in flashes of ephemerality, and she zeroes in on him entirely. The sky darkens, and wind coalesces to prove itself as especially irritating and loud, but Marinette chooses not to care in that moment because she hears Adrien laugh.
She doesn't know why he's laughing— but she laughs too. Wind blows through her hair, and she finds herself speeding up. He turns around to check how far behind she is before widening his eyes at the sight of how close she is.
Reckless and not looking ahead, Adrien trips. At an instant, Marinette's competitive spirit wanes and makes way for concern as she lowers herself to his level— until she realizes the ruse. The realization is almost too late.
He starts making a move to get up (from the patch of grass they'd landed in) and takes a sharp breath when she grabs him by the hood of his top, meeting him with a disapproving look. They fall into eye contact.
He pauses and watches her expression. They stare at one another, analyzing. For a second, it's almost as if they're strangers. Then, they both break when Marinette finally snorts; Adrien's mouth opens up widely when he laughs, and while Marinette giggles, she watches for the gaps in his teeth.
She still remembers arguing with him about the Tooth Fairy's existence. Fondly, she weirdly finds herself wanting to reminisce over faux arguments about euros, fairies, pillows, sheets, and teeth, but before she has a chance to do that and a chance to create some inner commentary for her awake childish mind over Adrien's real laugh, Adrien stops laughing.
And she simply blinks. Nothing runs through her mind at that moment, but an undercurrent of room-temperature affection steadily makes itself known to her. She tilts her head at him.
"I destroyed it," Adrien says, fully sitting up. Marinette's eyes rush to make the connection when they follow his: more lilies; actually on the ground, actually real and alive. Well. Previously real and alive, anyhow.
She looks at his face— genuinely sad and somewhat distraught— before her eyes begin to dart everywhere. She observes his gilded crown of hair, the crushed flowers, and how the sun hasn't fully set yet, before nodding to herself and coming to a conclusion.
Marinette crawls closer to the mourned flowers' site and gently pulls on each of them by the stem. Adrien's mouth opens and closes in silence, as he tries to understand what on earth she could possibly be trying to do to salvage this complete and utter travesty— but he says nothing ultimately, wistfully and with trust watching her do her magic.
More purples display themselves in the sky over the yellows at this point as a sunset gradates. He watches the slow transition of day to night while listening to the quieted rustling of whatever Marinette is doing. He thinks:
This is why, he thinks, your papa has a lot of reasons to hate you. You ruin everything. You are going to, forever.
"Ta-da!" Mari's voice rings out, and Adrien gives her a wide-eyed look.
Wrapped around her fingers hangs a— clumsily made— flower crown, created using destroyed flora. Before he gathers enough of his brain to formulate a response or a single concrete thought, she plops it on his head. It, of course, does not fit and sits awkwardly atop his head. It's far from perfect, and they definitely have to remove it from Adrien's head before Gabriel comes back to fetch them, but—
But.
His vision blurs as he begins to tear up.
Marinette panics. "Hey! No! No crying! I did this so you would stop being upset! Raaagh, I don't know what to do now." Her eyes begin to dart all over the place again. "Adri, my nails are all dirty and clunky now. I did my best. Hey. Hey—!"
Arms wrap around her. Wordlessly, he pushes her and brings her down to earth— to "icky" wet grass and soil—and lands on top of her gently. Her hair meshes with dewy textures and his tears, but she doesn't have the heart to complain about it even internally when he presses his forehead to her neck in a touching gesture.
"I have you," she tells him. "I have you," she repeats.
They drift in and out of consciousness listlessly: to the point wherein sleep isn't exactly what is going on. The world surrounds itself in a haze-like mist, in a plane of semi-consciousness, but Adrien still hears Marinette's breathing: awake and full of conscience. He knows she isn't asleep, and he just knows that she's aware he's up too.
It feels impossible to fall asleep.
It's incredibly unfair, in a way; why can't they sleep and have a moment when they finally have just the tiniest bit of time? The rarely earned slices of time the two of them have learned to fight for, learned to either cherish or despise, was finally bought through shaky hands and flittering butterflies, but here they are, squandering it entirely. All they are doing is being weak.
Adrien stares— without his eyes. He doesn't exactly actually look, but he feels and he listens. After years and a generally unquantifiable length of time of forcing himself to be ignorant and willfully twisting the things he's heard, Adrien keeps his eyelids weak and low and listens to Marinette breathe. She, oddly enough, breathes calmly. After the tears, the shakiness, and dehydration, her body rescinds and relaxes.
It's odd, isn't it? Somehow, Chat expected her to tense up entirely at the idea of— not only staying at their old treehouse and sleeping there but — sleeping in his arms.
Maybe it's because it's different. They're resting, rather than really sleeping, and whether or not they're succeeding at resting is really anyone's guess; Marinette isn't in Adrien's arms like she has been in the past.
Before, when he'd hold her, he would hold her tightly and ensure that she could never slip out of his grip. He'd grasp onto her so closely that, in the worst of nightmares, she could barely breathe. He could barely hear her. It was as if she'd be a visage of Marinette Dupain-Cheng, some falsified doll within his grip, like a plush with only her likeness and none of her life.
This midnight, Marinette simply lays in his arms. They aren't necessarily… wrapped around her— and he's quite certain he can feel his left arm going numb, but there is no way in hell he is moving it and disturbing the peace— but they are grazing her, and her allowance of that is something Adrien cannot begin to wrap his head around.
And yet, he is tempted. He's so tempted to do so many things that he knows he isn't allowed to be doing. He can't rest his head on top of hers, he can't really hold her, he can't wrap his legs around hers, and he can't snuggle closer. All he does is hold her— metaphorically— close to his chest, like he holds every day she's alive close to his chest. It's never close enough to his heart to necessarily mean anything, but it's close enough to his ribs to feel fatal.
It's all fatal. It's all complex and stupid.
He wants her to turn to face him and for her to shake him and hurt him. He wants her to hurt him. He wants her to leave bruises, bruises so bad he won't remember what it's like not to be bruised.
Adrien exhales. Wants to say her name. He doesn't know why.
(He does. The taste of her name on his tongue feels deeply unfamiliar now. Her name is a luxury; saying it is a luxury he isn't allowed anymore. He hasn't been allowed it for years now. Nothing could describe how beautiful she is, how wonderful and convoluted she is, how stupidly stubborn and complex she is, but her own name always comes close. He hasn't been allowed the privilege of holding the weight of that name for a long, long time now. He'd always been berated for murmuring her name in his sleep.)
("I am not your lady.")
He inhales. Works on the breathing-normally and thinking-rationally thing. He knows.
He knows that it's all his fault: that she also hates it when he tries to bear the weight of things that are "not his fault". But how could Adrien not blame himself? Everything died or screamed in lurid extremes; everything that wasn't supposed to be warm burned in flames; everything that couldn't survive in subzero temperatures froze glacially. The eyes he'd become so fond of seeing be so vivaciously bright were monotonous. Sparks flew and touched things that were never to be messed with.
He created this mess. Adrien feels the subconscious Marinette in his mind, knows she isn't real, that she isn't real anymore, and that what lies in his arms is somebody else. The Marinette in his mind is still youthful and bright, still holding on, still pure and untainted, still soft.
Maybe the one in his arms that he tries to listen to right now is all those things. But she is not only all those things, and she has stopped being only six years old for a long time now. She is sixteen. She was also fifteen. He remembers his father akumatizing a stranger on her fifteenth birthday. Despite the numbness and dissociation, that day still hit particularly hard— especially when her fourteenth was another akumatization.
It was stupid, but he wanted to give her something. The wound was still fresh, but he wanted to give her something on that day. Even when he was being lectured, he thought of her. He dreamed of her. It was real enough.
(Ladybug, with her hands between her thighs, underneath sunglow; Ladybug looking ethereal under the stars; Ladybug ugly crying; Ladybug weeping gently in his arms; Ladybug holding him in her arms; Ladybug yelling at Hawkmoth; Ladybug yelling at Chat Noir—)
(She's by his side in no time, immediately grasping his hand with one of her hands and gently grazing the back of his neck with the other.
His eyes flick up to meet hers, and she's staring at him with such unbridled affection that he seriously cannot comprehend how she exists.
Marinette's presence is enough for Adrien's discomfort to wash away, and he suddenly feels a rumbling in his chest.
"I love you," she whispers, and his eyes widen, "and I want you," her thumb rubs his wrist, and her other hand's fingers graze the lower part of his neck, "in every way I can have you.")
She shifts in his arms a little. He feels the texture of magic latex run against his skin before pushing up— just a little, in such tiny pressure it's almost nonexistent— against it. She inhales deeply and exhales in a bit of a sigh, but they both don't say anything. Saying anything would shatter the air, break it apart into a million little glass fragments, break the halves of the heart they both owned respectively, and kill their shared roots.
It's not six year-old Marinette, who pouts at the sight of his father and is convinced he's secretly a monster. It also isn't thirteen year-old Marinette, mischievous and willing to challenge the world for Adrien. It also isn't newly-debuted Ladybug, braver than he could ever hope to be, more scared than he could ever imagine being. It's not his superhero partner, frozen at his silhouette at an Agreste function. And this isn't the stranger incidentally enemies with his own stranger-self.
It's her.
And it being her is the most relieving and terrifying thing ever. How do you break what's already broken? Adrien is going to be wondering this for the rest of his life when the answer is so clearly apparent. He's already done it. He's destroyed the one thing he's held precious. He is his worst fears.
He was responsible for the fire. How could he ever blame her for freezing everything over?
The sun had risen.
Through a half-lidded gaze and a flurry of eyelashes, Marinette saw the beginnings and beckonings of dawn before she was attempting to extract herself from the bed. Adrien seemed to get the message— a little too quickly, if you had asked her then— that she was moving, and in a rush, also tried to get up. This, of course, resulted in the two of them falling off the way-too-small bed (seriously, it was from when they were kids — barely in their double-digit years) and tumbling across the hard, cruel wooden floor of the treehouse.
The two of them got up and recovered from this frighteningly fast before staring at each other dead-on, serious gazes in tow.
Adrien's hair was comically intact and perfect while Marinette's was… decent. They looked at each other as if they were seeing one another for the first time in the day: as if they both were not awake and hyperaware of the other through the whole three, four hours they awkwardly laid in that small bed.
Marinette doesn't know how she has ever been seen as dignified. But she shoves aside her reservations and her embarrassment— wow, she can still be embarrassed?— in favor of survival. In favor of attempting to coexist with the boy she knows and doesn't know, the stranger she could recognize anywhere: the one person whose ignorance she appreciates and berates the most.
Stop, Marinette, she thinks. He isn't allowed tickets to the miserable viewing party of her thoughts— especially after the… events of tonight. Last night? There's something gnawing at her gut that she can't completely understand; is it telling her to run or to stay as long as she possibly can? Can she even trust her gut after everything? She hasn't listened to it in years.
A wave of hysteria hits her.
Figures being inside their treehouse unlocks her ridiculous childishness and unnecessary thoughts. She thought she knew how to shut her emotions down at this point. She's fairly certain she won't be able to function much longer running off of pure adrenaline, especially if she indulges in emotionality now.
You, Marinette, have not been doing enough feeling, the irking voice in her mind (Tikki) tells her. She's not sure if Tikki has been quiet this whole time or if she's been ignoring her subconsciously, but she hears her now, and doesn't exactly do anything to acknowledge it.
She's fairly certain that Tikki knows she was heard. It doesn't matter anyway. Tikki is quite accustomed to her ridiculousness.
While she stares pensively at Adrien, she wonders if he is. Gods, she wonders if he ever was. Do you know me? A question tingles like pinpricks in the walls of her mouth. Did you ever know me? Can you remember what I've forgotten? I held onto it all for you — or did I? If I'm being honest, I can't tell whether it's all been for you or not.
"Shadowmoth," she starts, instead. The word is indicting, but she isn't sure how. She doesn't hold onto the odd feelings in her chest.
("Choose a topic," Chat began, all attention on her. Something about the way he looked at her sparked an invisible kind of desire inside of her. She wasn't certain how, but she knew if anyone was going to make her selfish, it would either be him or Adrien Agreste.
Marinette paused. "Pastries."
Could she be blamed, really? There were pastries downstairs, waiting for Chat.
She'd grown fond of his once-in-a-blue-moon visits. She cherished being able to speak to someone she loved as a stranger, no matter how odd that sounded. It reframed much of her perspective.
She was probably in love with Chat Noir. She couldn't be sure. Loving Adrien Agreste was easy to accept; it was her whole entire life, after all. Chat Noir was an entirely different ballpark. How could she not love him? He was temptation hidden behind superficial easy smiles and contentment. He was a road down a winding landscape that Ladybug was already terrified of looking at; she couldn't actually see it.
She definitely loved him. She already knew that as a fact. It didn't matter to her whether it was love or not or if she loved him especially romantically or simply platonically — but she supposed thinking that was hinting enough to probably seeing him at least a little romantically. It didn't matter. When she saw him on his knees, she didn't feel like she was seven years old and forced to make a decision.
She didn't feel too small. She also did not feel too big. There was this calm middle ground the two of them had found; she guessed they were teenagers or whatever. But she found peace in some ageless existence with him, and could almost forget that they met because they were tossed carelessly into a battle with a nefarious butterfly man.
Chat looked at her — and whether or not he saw all the thoughts whirling in her mind, he never let on. Instead, he simply said: "Buttercream."
"Cinnamon."
"Macaron."
"Cheese," Marinette threw back.
He tilted his head and raised his eyebrows. "Does that count?")
Adrien breaks eye contact, quietly flexes his fingers on wooden floorboards, and fixates on one of the spots of her suit. He nods after a decade's worth of heartbeats — it's long enough for them both to feel something die.
She doesn't break. This is stupid, she feels.
But they can win. Maybe. Her strategist self kicks into gear somewhat, quietly attempting to calculate their odds in the recedes of her mind. It's dead silence in the areas of her emotional parts. She feels small. She feels larger than life. She feels nothing.
You've got this. I know you do.
She doesn't know which voice says that, but she hears it. She shakes her head. "Why do you think Shadowmoth—" and she says Shadowmoth, god forbid she calls him his father here, "is attempting to emotionally infiltrate every bit of you?" she asks.
Obviously, she knows to a degree that poor excuse of a man derives some type of fulfilment from pure assholery and the degradation of those he deems dispensable, but she doesn't understand what he's doing, strategically, tactically, in the context of Adrien. What good will causing your emotionally inept son to explode do? He hasn't truly exploded in a very, very long time. She can say now that she feels like he was only really mad in a past life. Maybe he was sincerely unemotional in another life.
Maybe he wasn't a fake and an absolute liar.
It didn't matter to her anyway.
"I abstain," Adrien says, giving him the power to change the topic.
("Don't be a coward!" Chat cackled.)
Marinette sighs. She then jots notes down in her mind. There are things going on that she is (of course, of course) not clued into, and once again, there are inter-Agreste problems, but then again, how could there not be with Gabriel Agreste around? The main benefit —her eye twitches randomly, deciding to inform her just how sleep-deprived she really is — of, uh, fucking akumatizing your son is probably being able to use him however you see fit.
But it doesn't make sense, she thinks, and fuck, she thinks, she thinks, and she thinks, and Adrien watches her, and she knows he watches her, god help. It doesn't make sense — because then what would the point of abusing Adrien all this time into doing his bidding without an akumatization be?
Was it to coax him into being akumatized? That doesn't make sense to her. Adrien would do anything for his father; even without this point, he'd be easy because he's laughably easy to hurt. All his blades are double-edged, sharp, and weak.
No, that doesn't make sense, a thought that isn't hers voices.
She wrinkles her nose. It does make sense. Adrien is emotional and easy to pry at psychologically. He isn't difficult.
Adrien stops her mad, sleep-deprived rabbit hole deep dive. "Survival," his voice intonates.
"Oh, how I know survival," Marinette says dryly. She barely recognizes her voice. What else is new? "What is there to say? I might abstain myself here on this topic. We're alive, aren't we? We're breathing."
His eyes aren't on her. They're on an old stain on some carpet she forgot about. "Well, I need to get some actual sleep in." His tone is sarcastic like it always is when they're fighting, (arguing? is fighting appropriate? it's when they're not themselves: Ladybug, dead-eyed city savior, and Chat Noir, Shadowmoth's pawn) (well, maybe that is the real them) but there is less bite. There's much less bite. It's almost… humorous.
"You don't need to," she says, her eyes locked on a lonely tuft of his hair. "You can go longer without sleep. What we need is to get moving."
He looks at her, finally.
If she could admit one thing: it would be that she would kill for that smile. She already has.
His look is wry and exhausted.
Marinette doesn't empathize. "You're tired?" he never said that. "I'm tired! I want to hibernate just as long as you do, believe me, but that is not happening. He's going to know that you're gone, and he's going to guess that we're conspiring — and he would be correct!"
Shockingly, even Gabriel Agreste was right sometimes — even he wasn't stupid enough to be ignorant of the predictable.
He smiles sadly. She forgot what that looked like. It was a little more crooked than she remembered. There were more apparent frown lines.
She remembers when the expression plastered on his face was always a faker-than-life smile. Now, it was absolute neutrality.
It's still fake. He doesn't grace her with more of a response for a minute before speaking; "Okay," he tells her. "Okay."
Her emotions swing back and forth and get all tangled up before she can even muster the strength to reply. There is nothing in there: not even a fizzling substance washing over her brain. There is simply nothing.
"You'd be able to take him," Adrien tells her, peridot eyes illuminated in the dimness of the room. "I'm pretty sure, anyway. I mean, it's been a bit since he's tried to get me, but I was almost able to hold my own against him, and you manage very well against me. And you know your way around words."
She snorts, "I don't. You're just… easy." It's not like that. "You think I could hold my own against someone whose entire Miraculous is centered around emotionality and the breaking of hearts or whatever? I don't think so. I probably could take him in a fight. I have killed the human embodiment of the sun," and what a fun akuma that was, "so it's…whatever."
She ignores the heartache, and she ignores what she tries to deem as unnecessary.
'I know you're lying,' Adrien's look tells her. It isn't immediately obvious to her, but she's able to read him still, kind of. What is obvious to her is that he still feels for her. It doesn't make sense, but he still hurts when she does. She doesn't know what to do with that. Should she drown herself in mercury?
He doesn't say anything related to that. He's on topic; "Our current place is in Belgium."
Marinette does something like a recoil.
"What?"
"How do you still have money for that?"
He gives her another look. Somehow, he's gotten very good at that over the years, and she's never noticed. For reasons and feelings she respectively does not know and understand, another part of her dies at the idea that her stupid Adrien Agreste Facts Encyclopedia is now outdated, and has been.
That's a sentiment not related, relevant, nor justifiably reasonable enough to entertain. Marinette holds the thought in her hands before she pries her fingers apart, letting it fall through like water.
It's inconsequential. It doesn't matter. It's whatever.
"Okay, I guess I won't ask," she lifts her hands in a placating gesture. "Are you telling me that you make the travel here every single akuma?"
He stares. "Yes."
That's kind of fucking insane, but fine, whatever, I won't say that. Whatever, whatever, whatever.
I miss you.
What?
Fine. Whatever.
"Okay." Ladybug breathes in deeply. "Tell me, what is stopping us from storming in there during the middle of the night and nabbing his Miraculous before he has the chance to gather his wits?"
"His unpredictably insufferable sleep schedule."
"We camp outside his window until we notice him going to sleep."
"No windows."
She tries giving him a look.
He gives her one in exchange.
"Really? There're no damned windows?"
"Survival," he reminds her of the topic, like that doesn't stir her competitive heart and piss her off mildly. "And no, there aren't. You seriously think we want people seeing Gabriel Agreste sleeping on shitty mattresses? Never mind the supervillain activities. We're already risking it booking nights in hotels, even with quantum masking and fake identities and all the—"
"Survival," she smiles at him bitterly, and he stops talking. His gaze meets her again, but it isn't even sarcastic or dry. It's just tired. She's tired too.
Ladybug sighs. "Okay. Tell me, then, why you can't just go back and wait for a time to steal it from him and run off before meeting up with me to properly… do whatever we should."
Never mind the fact that your father is abusive and I've barely coaxed you into being on my side again.
Peridot meets sapphire. "Would you even trust me with that?"
"No."
'Of course not,' his eyes reply, and again, it isn't dry. There is no overt hurt. Actually, there might be, Marinette thinks, but it's the kind of hurt that is only a dull ache: something old and aged, aged to be something almost beautiful. In that, it's uglier than anything.
Her eyes try to communicate. She tells him something. She doesn't know what. But he looks the other way.
She has never been able to understand herself, truthfully, but now it hits her in the face: she can't read him either. There's nothing left. Everything was hanging on by a thread; whatever "love" meant for either of them was on life support; she supposes it has been for a while, but it's emptier and more drained than anything. There is only so much true compassion behind obsession and resentment. There is only so much to be felt before you both break and forget.
Relationships go two ways, but theirs went and branched off into an entirely new timeline, reminiscent of skeletons inside closets. Marinette has forgotten and misremembered the sincerity of that misshaped smile. And he misses all of her, she knows that. She can't remember herself. God knows how he'd be able to.
How pathetic it is that they both yearn for something untouchable, something that neither of them have ever been able to remember. What is it like to remember what's missing? What's it like to miss what you can't remember?
"Stop thinking about what you don't need to think about," Adrien says.
Ladybug glares at him before relenting. "Okay. Belgium," she starts.
("Happy birthday. You've become so old now. I don't even know what to call you anymore. You aren't six anymore. How odd that is. Hahaha. Has Gabriel been as wicked as ever? Oh, what the hell, I'd know the answer to that much better than you. He's been horrid. There's a kind of ache inside you that hurts me. I don't know how that could stop. Are you lonely? I know you are alone. You're probably lonely. I'm sorry. I'll do better."
"Happy birthday. I miss you. I couldn't miss this. Maybe I'm just selfish like that. You already know. I couldn't. This is stupid and emotional and I'm being a fucking idiot right now. But when haven't I been?"
"I think I miss you. I'm sorry for loving too much. I'm so sorry I took up the space you were supposed to live in. I'm sorry all your life was all me. I'm sorry there was nothing more. I hate you. Does that help? Will it help?"
"It's dead. It's dead, and it's old, and there's nothing more. Mari, I still want more though. I'm so mad about it. It's so dumb. It's not anything. But it isn't nothing. It's just some pathetic kind of something. It exists, but what purpose does it serve? It's getting late."
"I've run out of cinnamon-scented stuff. You still smell the same. But you're not you anymore. Whose fault was that again?")