猫マリ♡

~*~

When it starts to get bad—when he’s dropping his staff, when he’s missing keys, when he’s turned from the news and has stepped up to the window but is struggling to remember that there’s an akuma and he needs to go—Plagg tells him that they have to stop.

“You have to, kid,” Plagg pleads. Anger and fear make his voice tight and quiet under the booming thunder from the akuma blocks away. “Just… try and go back to Chat Noir. To who you were. You can’t stay like this—it’s destroying you.”

But Adrien’s looking back out the window, at the darkness of the sky beyond. “I have to transform,” he says quietly. When he clenches his hand around his ring, Plagg notices the trembling there.

“As Chat Noir, right?” Plagg asks.

Adrien smiles at him and nods, but there’s a blankness in his gaze. “Plagg, claws out,” he says.

The person who stands in his place is Cat Walker. (It’s the only thing he could remember how to do.)

~*~

“Minou,” Loveybug says, smiling over at him one evening. “What’s your favorite pastry flavor?”

After a long moment of silence—in which Cat Walker simply stares into the distance, his mask shifting and his eyes narrowing, a frown deepening across his face—he says, “Apricot, I think.”

Loveybug stares at him a little, something questioning but amused in her gaze. “You… think?”

Cat Walker shifts and pulls his hands behind his back, pushes his shoulders out straight beside him with considerable effort, and tries not to shake as he smiles at Loveybug. “No, I—I know. Apricot is my favorite.”

The amusement drops from her expression. As Loveybug continues to stare, still looking at him as if she still has questions, Cat Walker’s smile begins to thin and his shoulders shudder and the muscles in his back tighten, tighten, tighten, and then something in him—it snaps. He steps back to cover the movement, to cover the fast drop of his shoulders, the way his hands have curled up but aren’t grabbing at each other (because they’re ablaze, there’s spiderwebs of pain lighting themselves aflame at the effort it’s taking him to hold himself together—) and he shrugs, still trying to cover up the misstep he can’t remember, and he turns the focus back on her.

“And… yours? What’s your favorite pastry flavor?”

And unlike the other people Adrien’s had to deal with, unlike everyone else (except, of course, his friends) who welcomes the change in focus, the shift towards them, unlike everyone else who jumps at the chance to talk about themselves, Loveybug is still looking at him like she can see through him. She’s still focused on him. She’s still—she hasn’t—she’s—

“Strawberry. Are you okay, minou?”

We’re talking about you, here, not me, he wants to say, his heart stuttering in his chest. For a moment, he can’t breathe. She didn’t take the bait, he thinks.

“W-what do you like about the strawberry ones? I’ve… never tried them,” he says with his thin smile and his trembling form. Please, can we just focus on you? he wants to ask.

“I’ll bring you some next time,” she says, and she takes a step closer. “Are you okay?”

He draws himself up tightly, clenches everything within him together, holds himself up despite the pain that’s radiating from the joints in his fingers, up through his wrists, elbows, shoulders; he continues to smile, too, even as the thing shakes and is as paper-thin as he feels right now. “Yes,” he says, and nods, just a little, as if to reassure her all the more. “I’m plenty fine. How—how are you?” he asks.

Loveybug takes a step closer to him. “I’m a little sad.”

“How come?” he asks, latching onto this with the force of a drowning man to land and oxygen. He softens his expression into one of concern, feeling the measure appropriate and doing so with the practiced ease of a machine. But he still takes a small, stuttering step away from her.

“A friend of mine isn’t doing well,” she says softly, and when he meets her gaze for a brief moment, he feels the weight of her devotion and care for this person. She takes another step forward, tilts her head at him. There’s—there really is, he realizes with a start, he isn’t just imagining it—tears in her eyes.

There’s a hand at his throat, Cat Walker feels. He can’t speak, thinking about how much she’s hurting over her friend’s wellbeing. He just nods and locks his limbs into a ramrod straight position, as if this will hold him up beneath the weight of her feelings.

“He… isn’t doing well, and it’s quite apparent. But he still insists on telling me he’s fine,” Loveybug says softly, clasping her hands before her. She takes another step closer to him and smiles a little, although it’s wobbly. “Do you have any advice?”

Cat Walker takes a halting breath and shakes his head. “I-I don’t know,” he manages, taking another step back. “M-maybe he’s afraid.”

“Of what?” Loveybug asks, her smile slipping into an expression so wholly, so deeply concerned. “Of… me?”

He stumbles. “No!” he says. “No,” he repeats, quieter, smaller. “I can’t imagine anyone would be afraid of… you. You’re you.”

“Then what’s he afraid of?” Loveybug asks, taking that last step into his bubble and leaning forward so that her face is two, three inches from his. Her expression is still one of concern, but it’s also one that seems to almost ask him… what he’s afraid of.

Cat Walker stops. His whole body begins to tremble, to shake, and his expression slips away and all he can feel is a sort of cavity he can’t explain, opening up within his chest. Inwardly, he searches for the word—it’s almost empty, to him, this cavity, but it’s heavy, too. He can’t call it understanding, because he still—he doesn’t think he understands what she means, what she’s not quite saying. He must be wrong. He—he must be interpreting things incorrectly. He’s overthinking it, reading too much into her expression, he’s sure. He must be. (But the cavity stays there, opening his chest up wide. The girl before him is a doctor, examining the black ash dusting his organs, his ribs, the very husk that he has become.)

Tears well up in his eyes. “I… don’t know. Maybe he… maybe he can’t… remember,” he whispers. “Maybe he doesn’t know, not anymore.”

Loveybug reaches out and puts one hand on his chest (right over the opening in his chest—if she looks at her fingers when she pulls away, she’ll find ash on them (he’s always bleeding, always leaking, always getting himself on everyone else (he’s an open wound, he’s marking every place he’s ever been with remains of who he’s been (but even if he could retrace his steps, he doesn’t think he’d find himself again) and takes her other hand, ghosting her fingertips along his shoulder, turning her hand around the shape of his arm and pulling, ever so gently, at his arm, until his shaking hand is right out there between them for them both to see.

“You’re not fine,” she whispers. The hand on his chest slides up over his suit, over his neck, to tilt his head so he’s looking at her. “You’re not okay, minou,” she says, and there’s tears in her eyes. His own tears are a reflection of hers—they’re mirrors of each other, him and her. He’s only seeing this now.

“I’m fine,” he says, like a last ditch effort to keep himself together, to hold himself in one piece.

Loveybug doesn’t say anything, but she puts both her hands around his and presses her thumbs along each of his fingers, rubbing back and forth and up and down and around and around in circles. She then presses kisses there—to each of his knuckles, to the joints in his fingers, and there’s a warmth to it that’s soothing, that has him hunching over their hands, that has the tears in his eyes slipping over his mask, that has him shaking in her grasp once more, but not because of the pain and not because of the instability. He’s not been cared for quite like this, not in a long time.

At least, not that he can remember.

~*~

When Adrien plays the piano, now, after months of being Cat Walker, there’s a lot of pausing. He plays a few notes, starts off strong, and then he misses one—either because his finger didn’t come up from the previous note or it did but it won’t come back down, or because he forgets which note is next. Sometimes he’s playing and he stops—he looks up, he’s scanning the page, looking for the note he’s on, that he missed, that he has to play next, but he’s suddenly not sure where exactly he stopped, and when he looks back down at the keys, he starts to wonder what he’s even playing. And then, by the time he’s figured out what he’s playing and he’s ready to start, he’s trying to figure out why he’s even attempting to play this song, but there’s—there’s no answer to that. He can’t find the answer anywhere around him. And his chest opens a little wider at this. And some ash falls onto the keys and his fingers as he shakes his head and frowns, and then there’s tears in his eyes and he’s suddenly grabbing at his head, pulling at his hair, just wanting to remember what he’s doing, why he’s doing it, and how to do it right. The only thing he can remember is that he had wanted to finish the song, make it perfect. The only thing he can remember is that he could, before—he could have made it perfect, before he was like this. But he can’t hold a thought for long enough to try and remember what it is, exactly, that caused this, that made him so forgetful and afraid and sad and in so much pain.

And he’s crying, crying, sobbing into his hands and the ashy piano keys, wondering if he’ll ever get another chance to make the song perfect again. He’s crying, wondering if he’ll remember how to make it perfect. He’s crying, wondering if he’ll remember why he’d even wanted it perfect in the first place, if he’ll remember why he’s always telling Loveybug he’s fine when he’s not, if he’ll ever remember who he was before this and what he had to feel to be able to transform into himself—Chat Noir, Adrien—again.