Work Text:
Adrien wonders if love is like death, a tender thought at the tender age of eleven.
Away from the black cityline of adults, warped and curved towards the wooden box his mother has decided to call her new home, he sits on the outskirts, breathing easy when the sky isn’t cut with the sharp corners of their mourning faces. Despite the occasion, the sky is a perfect dome of summer blue, ranging from the pale egg white edges to a deep saturated cerulean center. He and his mother might have flown a kite on a day like today.
He cradles that thought and waits for the rain that should be on its way, but nothing.
Today, he feels much like the sky.
Out of place.
Displaced.
He hears Marinette first before he sees her, hiccuping sobs like grief has stoppered her lungs and it’s only by sheer will she forces air in and out. She stops before him, her hands charged with the impossible task of keeping tears from her eyes. “Adrien, are you okay?” she sobs, “I’m sorry. I loved her, too. Are you okay?”
He had once heard that your life flashes before your eyes when you die. It’s as she hold her hand out to help him up that he sees her, the ghosts of her previous selves - ten, eight, five, three - overlapping her until her hand looks like an old black and white photo that sits on his mother’s bedside table, a long exposure photo of an juniper branch blooming. Strange at first, but comforting when he looks to her eyes. Her eyes have never changed, a bright summer day, now glassy and welling with a paradoxical rain.
Oh, he swallows, this is what I was waiting for.
Even as his eyes water - the world sharpening and blurring in cycles, awashed in her refreshing blue - he takes her offered hand, unable to say anything with grief and realization lodged firmly in his throat.
He wonders if love is like death. Gradual and then suddenly there.