Chapter Text
It turned out that one’s father being ousted as a supervillain meant a lot of paperwork. No rest for the wicked, and no rest for heroes either, apparently, as Adrien was snatched from the jaws of Chat Noir’s victory by a team of lawyers and publicists who insisted that none of this could wait.
He was grateful his lady, at least, could take some well-earned rest—the fashion world was in mourning, after all, and Marinette was just one of many designers calling in sick due to existential crisis.
For his part, he’d been kept too busy to have any sort of crisis at all, existential or otherwise, shuffling from demand to demand with hardly a second to breathe, let alone process the complete redefinition of his entire childhood and every memory of his parents. He’d been shocked and angry—livid—the moment Hawkmoth’s mask lifted, but he’d had to shove those feelings aside as soon as the reporters swarmed, and he hadn’t been afforded the leisure of letting them out since.
Part of him didn’t want to let them back out. Part of him wanted to keep stuffing those thoughts and feelings down and away, to keep filling his head up with the banalities of legal briefs and news reports.
But a bigger part of him wanted nothing more than to go home to his lady and curl up into her arms and rest, even if resting meant his brain would stop neatly suppressing all the darkness and despair that had tried to consume him the moment he’d looked into his father’s naked eyes.
He knew those feelings were best faced together, after all, and thinking about his father hurt less with the reminder that Adrien had his own family now. The tarnished ghosts of the manor couldn’t follow him to his home, to his wife. There, in her warmth, he’d be able to slowly leak the darkness out, to relieve the pressure without combustion.
So he’d made his weary way home sometime between noon and twilight, letting the sounds of the city’s celebration wash over him as he rode the metro. And he’d smiled in the bright sunshine at the children carrying red-and-black-spotted balloons in front of the entrance to their flat. And he’d turned the key and opened the door quietly, expecting an exhausted Marinette to have fallen asleep on the cleanest flat surface she could find.
He didn’t expect to find Marinette wide awake, sitting on the floor, with dozens of photos scattered around her and a pair of scissors in her hands, their blades glinting furiously.
There was a sketchbook laying closed amidst the photos, and on her other side, Adrien could make out the corners of an opened photo album.
They kept most of their pictures digitally or in frames. As far as Adrien knew, there was only one photo album in their flat.
Their wedding album.
It was their wedding photos encircling her like a battalion of akumas.
And Marinette sat in the center, wielding shears like a Lucky Charm.
The valve holding the darkness back shattered, and Adrien was consumed.
Every painful thought, every lonely doubt, every furious memory rose up around him like steam; a cloud of it so hot and thick that it stuck to his lungs and condensed over his eyes. He stumbled at the force of it; his bag and keys falling to the floor.
Marinette startled at the sound, her head whipping towards him. Even as his vision fogged, he could make out the angry tear tracks cutting rivulets down her face.
“Adrien!” she cried across the hills and vales between them, her voice carried and twisted by the tempest of smoke.
The smoke need not have bothered; he could barely hear her over the no, no, no drumming on his heart.
How could he be so stupid?
How could he have thought she’d still want him, that’d she’d welcome him home with open arms and let him share her bed?
He was tainted.
The darkness was part of him, after all, and he could not cut it out.
But she could.
She could cut him out.
And she had.
She was still talking, but all he could hear was the scissors in her hands and their marriage tossed out on the floor, with his own image removed with painstaking precision, leaving nothing but a hollow ghost beside his bride.
Adrien was dizzy with the sound of it, the roaring of silent pictures in his ears and the churning steam he’d swallowed rebelling in his gut.
His stomach roiled, and he bolted.
Adrien barely made it down the stairs before he started heaving. The steam rolled up his body, burning its way through his throat, and he ducked under the stairwell just in time to release the contents of his empty stomach.
He probably should’ve eaten something today.
Instead, he retched hot bile onto the tiled flooring, his stomach convulsing painfully as his vision blurred. Desperate and dizzy, his hands hit the floor, grappling for something sturdy to ground him. When his fingers failed to find purchase, his head followed them down, his fevered cheeks seeking out the cold relief of limestone.
He’s not sure how long he crouched there before he felt the thumping of footsteps reverberate through his temple. They started from somewhere above him, moving closer and closer until suddenly, they stopped.
Through a haze, he could make out the figures of his neighbors. At first, he thought they'd noticed him—that they’d stopped to stare; the man they’d borrowed sugar from last week now just a spectacle to be gawked at.
But when he squinted, he could see they weren’t turned towards where he crouched under the stairs, and their faces were lit by the glow of a phone in the woman’s hand. It’s evident they haven’t seen him.
He made sure they didn’t—keeping his body still as a statue even as his knees started to ache.
When they finally left, Adrien followed suit. They might not have noticed him, but it’s only a matter of time before someone else passes through and finds him.
He doesn’t want to be found like this.