Chapter Text
There’s an emptiness to the Agreste mansion. A quiet vastness that encapsulates the entire residence, existing separate from the dazzling lights of the city just outside its towering iron gates.
Adrien despises it, how it feasts on him.
He can’t escape its wide, gaping maw. There’s no place to hide here, and he can’t outrun the teeth that glint under the light of crystal chandeliers, or the sharpened claws that dig into his chest and leave him hollowed out and empty.
There’s no limit to its hunger. He’s going to be snuffed out like a candle.
Adrien is silent as he turns the knob of his bedroom door and swiftly pulls it towards himself. With one hand braced against the doorway, he leans out into the corridor. He turns his head, gazing down the deserted hallways on either side. They’re long and empty and decorated without a hint of warmth – with nothing but black and white and cold polished stone.
He steps forward and peers down below at the grand marble entrance. His bodyguard had already been dismissed for the night and his father’s assistant had left soon after.
And as always, his father is nowhere to be found.
The silence is unsettling. It makes him restless, like he needs to peel back his own skin to escape the marrow that fills his bones.
Adrien pulls himself away and quickly retreats back into the safety of his bedroom and shuts the door as quickly as he can. One hand clasps the doorknob and the other guides it shut. It closes without so much as a creak.
He waits a moment, back pressed against the solid wood door, his breathing even and measured. With his head leaning back against the dark stained wood, he listens to the quiet. He’s waiting for something to drop, for a pinprick that will send ripples across the steely silence. When he’s certain that it won't be disturbed, he pushes himself away from the door and lets his eyes search the dimly lit corners of his room. There – in the shadows – two gleaming eyes stare back at him.
A weak smile tugs at the corners of his lips as he stares back at them. It has always amazed him – how Plagg can meld with the shadows, become one with the shifting dark. The creature floats towards him, the shadows still clinging to it like a mist. Adrien has wondered more than once if Plagg was nothing more than a shadow itself. A remnant of something greater and long forgotten. The Kwami stops barely a whisker away from his face. He can see the way the shadows around it try to conform to its body – the way the rippling haze tries to imitate strands of inky black fur. He can smell the dust that still clings to it. Adrien leans away in an effort to not sneeze.
“So, you wanna ditch this place or what?”
There isn’t a single trace of grace nor tact when it speaks.
Adrien smiles a little wider with his lips still pressed tightly together and nods his head. Plagg was brusque and impatient at the best of times, but even the usually insensitive Kwami could sense when Adrien was beginning to grow restless with the length of his leash. And so Plagg, being the ever-terrible influence, gleefully ushers him towards the edges of his gilded cage.
The floor-to-ceiling windows that take up an entire wall of his bedroom were permanently sealed and completely Akuma-proof. His father hadn't wasted a cent in ensuring the safety and confinement of his only child.
Too bad it wasn't Kwami-proof.
Plagg darts through the hinges of the window furthest to the left and it lurches open with a lazy creak. On the other side, the Kwami disappears for a moment before reappearing and smoothly gliding back through the glass and into the room. For such a minuscule display of its powers, Plagg drifts back towards Adrien, looking incredibly smug. “What would you possibly do without me?”. Adrien can’t help the way his chest swells with tepid affection as Plagg comes to settle in the palm of his outstretched hand. The troublesome creature bumps its forehead against the miraculous that sits snugly around his ring finger and gazes up at him with glinting eyes and a cloying smile.
Adrien needs not breathe a word before electricity is crackling through his veins and his transformation is crashing over him. It’s almost violent, like being struck by lightning while standing beneath a pounding waterfall trying not to drown. A bubbling anticipation rises in his chest as the churning current drags him down into a roaring chasm.
Chat Noir emerges, standing at the edge of the Agreste mansion with his body still humming with the power of the miraculous and the presence of a godling curled in slumber, nestled at the cusp of his waking consciousness.
Adrien inhales heaving lungfuls of freezing air and turns to look back. There’s a part of him that wishes he would stay. A childish, confused part of himself that wishes he could be happy in the place he calls home.
But there is no heart within this house – it had long since shrivelled up and died.
He wishes he could exist here, but the ceiling is closing in on him and the emptiness is filling his lungs and turning him blue. This place will devour him whole if he stays - as if he were to crack open his own ribs and offer himself raw.
Even lambs sent to slaughter are given more mercy than this.
He balances himself on the edge of the window and catapults himself across the side garden and onto the surrounding wall. The dozens of cameras that monitor the boundaries of the residence won’t see him – they never do. Whether it’s the magic that’s imbued into the very fibres of his transformation or simply an overflow of Plagg’s abilities onto him, Chat Noir is nothing but a shifting shadow that stands under a moonlit sky.