Chapter Text
Adrien’s eyes opened sometime in the middle of the night. He had no idea what time it was. His phone was somewhere on his desk—he couldn’t bring it with him when he was Chat Noir and had taken to leaving it behind. He remembered that it was a little past midnight when he came home. He didn’t know how long he’d been lying there, sprawled on the floor. It could have been five minutes, or five hours.
Head heavy, as if someone had removed his skull and replaced it with stones, Adrien sat up and looked around. The room was dark except for the orange bubble of space where lights from the streets below filtered in. Outside, he could sense that it was cold. His room had its own heating unit, and it rattled quietly in the far corner.
Adrien brought a hand to his forehead. Pressure built along his hairline and behind his right eye; the remnants of a migraine. Is that what knocked me out? He brought his hand up to his nose, scrubbed, and inspected it. Dried blood marked his pale, trembling fingers, but at least it wasn’t wet. He stole a glance at the pile of shirts he’d collapsed into; sure enough, a few pools of blood had dried there. He’d need to have them washed again.
The entire house was silent, except for something fluttering on the edge of his vision. He looked over and saw a patch of black hovering about in front of his face, and after a few seconds, he realized the patch of blackness was talking to him.
“Adrien, Adrien, are you OK? Your nose started bleeding and you passed out and I didn’t know what to do—”
“‘m fine,” Adrien mumbled, pushing himself up off the ground. His head swam as he stood; his knees shook, but he managed to stay upright. He turned and headed toward the large private bathroom. “How long was I out?”
“Ten minutes.” Plagg followed him into the bathroom and perched on the edge of the sink. Adrien turned on the tap, wet a cloth, and scrubbed at the dried blood beneath his nose. It had streaked down to his lips.
“Ten minutes, huh,” said Adrien. He stared at his reflection. He looked...exhausted. He felt even worse. His head felt fuzzy, and there was an odd sort of warmth shooting through him. And, when he closed his eyes and took in a deep breath, he could feel something else. Like a sort of pull.
And if he tuned out Plagg’s chattering and focused on the creaks and thuds echoing through the place he’d called home, he could hear...something. It wasn’t a sound, exactly, so much as the wisp of a thought. It reminded him of the nightmares he’d been plagued with before he’d become Chat Noir; and, like them, when he tried to focus on them, he couldn’t. Like a name on the tip of your tongue—he just couldn’t place it.
Adrien turned and looked out the bathroom door and into his dark bedroom. Shadows danced over the comforter draped across his bed. They were the result of the streetlights. His brow furrowed. At least, he thought they were. There was no way the shadows were little...things...moving about in the darkness of his room—were they?
Turning the tap off, Adrien hurried out of the bathroom. Plagg zipped behind him. The kwami wrung his small black paws. “Maybe you should sit down.”
“No, I’m fine.” If he was being honest, he wanted nothing more than to flop down face-first on his bed and go to bed. After a long night of patrols, he loved nothing more than coming home to his nice warm bedroom.
But now, he felt something tugging him toward his bedroom door. Something that wrapped around his heart like a leash. Marinette would understand what I mean, he thought, and he recalled the way her fingers had affectionately brushed against her Miraculous as she told him her origin.
“Maybe you should call Marinette,” suggested Plagg, perching on the edge of the desk.
Adrien’s fingertips were frigid. He shifted them back and forth, slowly, feeling for the string wrapped around his heart. It led to the closed bedroom door, and beyond that, it pulled him somewhere. He wanted to call Marinette.
He thought about wandering to the desk, picking up his cell phone, and laying out all his concerns to Marinette. And yet, as he continued to stand there, thinking about his next move, the pulling sensation grew harder to ignore.
It was late. She would probably be in bed by now. Adrien glanced at his bedroom door. He needed to get to the bottom of this. If he just went to bed, forgetting about the pulling, then he was certain he would lose his one opportunity.
Clad in his boxers and a plain black tee shirt, Adrien wandered over to the door. Plagg’s luminous green eyes watched him intently. The kwami stared at him as Adrien moved slowly over the discarded pants, shoes, books, and junk strewn across his bedroom floor.
Taking one last look around the room, he opened his bedroom door as silently as he could and let himself out. Plagg made a brief choking sound.
Adrien stood in the darkness of the hallway. Goosebumps prickled up his arms. Standing in his boxers and tee shirt, Adrien felt like an idiot. As his eyes adjusted—remarkably quick, though he suspected this was a side-effect of his Miraculous—he took in the familiar shapes of pictures hanging on the walls. Adrien’s eyes watched the darting black shapes dancing in the dim shadows.
The strange pull was back, tugging him down the hall. Adrien drifted down the hall toward the source of the tugging. The thick, expensive carpets covering the floors muffled his footsteps.
Lining the walls of the hallway was an elegant arrangement of statues. Adrien knew each of them as well as he knew his own bedroom—women in silken dresses, some cradling flowers and others twirling. His father did not particularly care for them, but they had been his mother’s creations. She’d worked night and day for months on each one; some had come before Adrien was born, and the rest were in the years of his childhood.
Adrien fought back the sudden punch of emotion that came with thinking about his mother. The night she disappeared was a blur to him—he thought he remembered a smile, a brief goodnight kiss pressed to his cheek, and then screaming and a crash that rocked the huge mansion’s foundation.
He wanted to remember more. Maybe, if he did, he would uncover some vital clue as to what had become of his mother. He’d tried many times to ask his father about that night. And yet, when he found the courage to stand in the door of his father’s study and ask, the questions died in his throat. No matter how hard he tried, he just...couldn’t find the strength to ask his father about that night.
Adrien glanced to regard the statues as he passed them. The arrangement of women stood like pillars on both sides of him. Their hands were curved into clawed talons, faces twisted in horrific snarls.
Adrien paused and stared at them. Had they always looked like that? Standing in front of his mother’s favorite—the tallest one, holding a bouquet of roses—he struggled to search for any memory of the sharp teeth and furious eyes that now glared down at him.
He took a quick step back, bumping into another of the statues. He spun to view it—and caught sight of another twisted gremlin where his mother’s beautiful statues had once been.
The tugging sensation on his heart tightened. Adrien took in a trembling breath. Something called to him from the end of the hall, where his father’s study waited, untouched and forbidden.
Even though it was midnight, Adrien wondered if his father would be awake. Was Gabriel Agreste even home tonight, or did he have another overnight business trip? The thought that his father could possibly be home—could possibly be awake, working in his study—gave Adrien a rush of courage.
Whatever had changed the statues...it was most likely the work of an akuma. Or, he decided, it could even be that he was exhausted and seeing things. He closed his eyes, shook his head to clear the fog, and hurried down the hallway without a glance back. Chat Noir couldn’t allow himself to be terrified of such things—not even in his civilian form.
Steeling his nerves and tapping into the strength that he gained whenever Plagg vanished into the ring, heavy on his finger, Adrien walked forward forcefully, as if it were his choice to go to his father’s study at half-past midnight. He would pretend he wanted to ask his father a question. He would not admit that he was just some lonely, terrified child who followed an odd tugging sensation. That thought also gave him some courage; he was Adrien Agreste, the boy who’d been chosen to be Chat Noir, and he would not be afraid.
The pressure of being a superhero was getting to him. Something about the creeping shadows made it feel as though he walked down a cavern instead of a hallway. He should have brought a flashlight with him. He could see in the dark without Chat Noir’s uniform, but having something to clutch—something to remind him that he was still human—would have helped still his pounding heart.
If his father wasn’t home, then Adrien would go back to bed. He’d walk back through the hall, laugh at himself for being an idiot, climb into bed, and let exhaustion take him away. Then he’d tell Marinette all about it in the morning. They’d laugh, and he’d feel better. As long as he had her by his side, he would always feel better.
He felt something behind him, then—the presence of something there. Adrien glanced over his shoulder, expecting to see someone looming there. An akuma—here to attack him, or to hunt down Gabriel Agreste? An intruder? He would have sensed something like that, or the security system outside would have stopped them.
But there was nothing but the hallway, and farther behind him the arrangement of statues. He squinted. Had they returned to normal? So it was just his imagination. Adrien let out a shaking breath. Maybe I should have brought Plagg with me. The little cat wouldn’t have been able to say anything, unless Adrien wanted to risk him being discovered by whoever else was nearby, but another presence he recognized would have been comforting.
He paused, toes buried in the soft carpets. Nothing stopped him from turning around and picking Plagg up. It was only a short distance back to his room. He could pretend that he intended to bring Plagg to get some camembert from the kitchen. He turned around.
There, in the middle of the hallway, as if it had always been there, loomed an imposing figure shrouded in darkness.
Adrien was too horrified to scream. He put a hand over his mouth and bit down on his knuckles, drawing blood. If he removed them, he was positive, certain, absolutely sure, he would crumple to the ground and transform into a shrieking mess.
The dark figure could have been anything—a human being or an animal or even a monster. Akumas could take on many forms.
Adrien stumbled backwards away from the thing, eyes locked on it. It didn’t move. Shaking and too afraid to make a sound, Adrien kept moving backward, backing down the hall. His foot came down hard on the carpet without a sound, but the movement sent a shivering jolt through his ankle and up his spine. He let out a surprised gasp and stumbled, slapping his right hand on the wall to stop himself.
Realizing he had taken his eye off the figure, Adrien looked back up.
It was gone.
He took a deep breath, and then sprinted the last thirty feet to the study. He reached out to grab the heavy brass handles that opened the door to his father—forgetting that he was always supposed to knock—and paused when something cold and sharp seized his heart.
The tugging sensation had vanished, but Adrien couldn’t move. He slowly raised his head to stare at the heavy doors. It was hard to tell in the dim light exactly what the intricate patterns etched into the wood looked like, but even so, Adrien felt something ominous about them. Trembling, his hands moved of their own accord and landed, palms down, on a set of grooves above the door handles.
Images flashed in front of his face—too many to catch all at once. A young woman with silky black hair twirling around a field in a crimson dress. A man with white-streaked blond hair smiling at her from the porch of a beautiful house. The woman clutching her throat, the skin turning gray and cracking beneath her palms. A cackling figure in black standing over a red-and-black clad corpse.
Adrien realized with a start that these images were of Ladybug and Chat Noir—not him and Marinette, but others who had possessed the titles. He couldn’t put names to either of them, since he’d never known them, but there was something familiar about the whole thing. The blond man with gray streaks—Chat Noir, he was certain of it—Adrien had seen him somewhere before.
The pictures were still coming: Ladybug darting across rooftops while the other Chat Noir stood in the distance, eyes narrowed; Chat Noir cradling an infant swaddled in an expensive blue blanket with a gold-embroidered “A”; The other Chat Noir chasing after a tall, hulking man, laughing. Adrien didn’t understand what he was seeing. It was like fragments of a greater story, something he thought he recognized. The clenching sensation on his heart, filling him from head to toe with ice, grew painful. His breath came out in a silent puff.
Marinette. He needed Marinette. He wouldn’t be afraid if she stood beside him. Ladybug and Chat Noir had always been together. He protected her. She protected him. There had never been a time when Ladybug and Chat Noir weren’t together. Adrien tried to pull his hands from the doorframe. He needed to call Marinette, now.
And then something seized his hair and yanked his head back. Sharp claws wrapped around his throat. His Adam’s apple throbbed against the feeling of a heavy hand.
betrayed her murdered her liar monster bastard you hurt her you abandoned her you need to be punished you don’t deserve to live—
The claws raked across his throat. Ice tore through his flesh, burning and frigid at once, and blood poured down his shirt collar. Adrien’s hands flew to his ruined throat and he stumbled back, screaming. He couldn’t stop screaming. His hands were sticky and burning and the ice crept over him and he stood in the center of the pitch black hallway screaming.
The doors to the study banged open, and suddenly the Gorilla was there. Dark shadows marked beneath his eyes, the collar of his shirt unbuttoned. He looked down at Adrien, face a foreign mask of shock, and then grasped him by the shoulders. Adrien twisted in his hold and continued to scream. How could he still manage to do that? Hadn’t his throat been destroyed by claws?
The Gorilla picked him up without effort and hurried him down the hall, away from his room. Adrien kicked and flailed and removed his hands from his neck. If he hadn’t bled out now, when would he? Would he bleed to death in the Gorilla’s arms? Had the claws somehow missed anything vital, and he would survive?
“PUT ME DOWN,” Adrien bellowed. “Let me go! I deserve to die!”
The Gorilla paused for a moment, then continued to usher Adrien down the hall, quicker than before. Adrien gave up flailing—trying to escape the Gorilla was much like trying to shove his way through a brick wall without his Cataclysm. Adrien collapsed against his chest, heaving with choked sobs, hands clutching uselessly at the front of his bodyguard’s shirt.
The Gorilla marched down the stairs without a sound, holding Adrien tightly around the waist, and moved through the pitch black foyer into the living room.
If any of the staff had heard Adrien’s screaming, they didn’t come running. The Gorilla set Adrien down on the beige couch set dead-center in the room—Adrien’s hands flew back to his throat without his bodyguard to cling to—and flicked on the small lamp beside him.
The sudden flood of light made Adrien wince. He tore his hands away from his throat and looked down to see how bad the bleeding was—and found nothing. His hands were pale and shaking. He felt his neck, taking in several deep breaths, but the flesh below his hands felt smooth and warm. Adrien tried to calm his pounding heart. Had it all just been an illusion?
The Gorilla pointed at him, and Adrien had just enough sense to realize that it was an order for him to stay put.
“Wait—,” Adrien gasped, voice raspy, but the Gorilla disappeared. He sunk back into the couch. The familiar crush of expensive leather beneath him gave him something to ground himself. He was home. There hadn’t been anything chasing him through the halls. His throat wasn’t cut open. He noticed, distractedly, that all the curtains had been left open; he could see the arrangement of streetlamps, outside the gates. Moths fluttered outside the glass.
Nathalie stepped into the living room, looking exhausted. Her dark hair hung in coiled tangles around her shoulders, glasses perched delicately on the bridge of her nose. She wore a light pink silken bathrobe, and Adrien had never seen her like this. She took one look at him—the tears streaming down his cheeks, the lack of color in his face, his trembling lips—and hurried over to his side. Her hands fluttered to his face, cupping his chin and turning him until their eyes locked. “Are you all right, Adrien? What happened?” Her voice was low and raspy with sleep.
“I—” Adrien gasped.
The Gorilla wandered back into the room. He clutched a small, steaming mug in between his huge hands. He took one look at Nathalie, who whirled to gawk at him. “What happened?” she demanded. “Has he been hurt? Should I call—?”
Whatever she was going to say, an ambulance or his father, the Gorilla cut her off with a sharp shake of the head. His eyes flashed, and something passed between them. Nathalie’s shoulders dropped. She nodded her head. “Yes. Very good.” Slowly, rising to her feet, Nathalie placed her hand on Adrien’s cheek and brushed the tears away. She said nothing, but the calm look on her face stilled the tremors rocking through Adrien’s thin shoulders.
Without another word, Nathalie wandered out of the living room. Her shoulder brushed against the Gorilla’s as they passed one another.
The Gorilla came to stand over him, and thrust the mug into Adrien’s trembling hands. He looked down and gave the cup a quick sniff, wrinkling his nose. The concoction within was not tea or even warm milk; it was a thick, dark liquid that burned his nostrils and sent shivers down his spine.
He cast a brief look at the Gorilla, who nodded. Adrien shuddered, taking a deep breath, and downed the cup in one swift gulp. It didn’t taste...awful, but it wasn’t great. He shivered the same way he would if it had been a tablespoon of cough syrup. The explosion of warmth in the pit of his stomach was a blast of comfort; his shoulders dropped.
The Gorilla took the mug back as it began to slip out of his fingertips. “W—what…” Adrien folded his hands on his lap, the sensation in the tips of his fingers slowly returning. “What were you doing...in the study?”
His bodyguard shook his head, clearly emphasizing that it wasn’t important now. Adrien wanted to protest that it was important—no one was allowed inside his father’s study without knocking, and if Gabriel Agreste wasn’t home, there would be no reason for the Gorilla to go inside. But sleep began to call to him, tugging at the backs of his eyes and forcing him to relax into the thick leather of the couch.
The low tick-tock of the expensive grandfather clock set in the corner of the room allowed him to slow his pounding heart and time his breathing. His eyelids began to close, and he could see the Gorilla wandering to the other end of the room with the empty mug.
“Plagg,” Adrien whispered, just as he finally began to fall asleep sitting on the couch. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Gorilla step out of the living room, and something small and black darted across the floor toward the couch. The tension in his body vanished with the arrival of his kwami; Adrien collapsed against the couch, head tipped back, and fell asleep.