#post-s5

It felt eerily familiar, kneeling ghost-like beneath a vermillion sky. Doom crept though Antichat's chest, as thick as the acrid smoke scorching his lungs. He couldn't move, couldn't breathe. There was a weight in his arms—an inexplicable solace. And yet…  Suddenly it didn’t weigh as much as it should. No.  His eyes flicked downwards. No, no, no, no— All he held was a pile of ashes, moulded into the shape of a girl.

Please, no.

Chat squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head to rid himself of a sudden, blinding panic pounding through his skull. But it was too late. Ladybug’s slate-stained image was seared into his mind, her face frozen in pain, devoid of everything that had once painted comfort across his soul. 

Her mask was half-torn, such that Marinette's bare cheek was cradled closest to his chest. Like maybe he'd tried in vain to protect her from the blast.

From his own destruction.

A choked sound ripped itself from his throat, a painful lump following in its wake. He had no way to fix this, nothing to do but pull her in closer. To tighten his arms around her precious, fragile remains.

Another mistake. 

She crumbled in his grip; ashes floated up like a mosaic, blinding his vision. Frantically, he pawed at the air—trying to gather her fragments, to force her back together. If he caught enough, perhaps he could papier-mâché her likeness. He could use his tears as glue.

But there was no time for that before a fiery breeze tore through the street. Marinette’s remains were swept away, and only Chat’s strangled cries could follow. 

The further away they fled, the more he came undone. There was nothing left to tie his mind together, to keep his pain from exploding like a supernova.

Nothing to keep the world from collapsing in on him.

“What did you expect?” Nightormentor’s voice sliced through the smoke. “You’ve always been poison to the ones you loved most.”

NO!

With a frigid gasp—one that curdled his tar-slicked insides—Adrien awoke. Once again, there was a darling weight in his arms. Only this Marinette was warm and solid. Her limbs were tangled in the blankets she'd pulled to her side of his bed, and one of her hands curled slightly into his T-shirt as her breath tickled the fabric.

She was alive.

Adrien just wasn't sure his heart still knew how to beat.

He was too hot and too cold all at once, both drenched in sweat and trembling. His chest felt like someone had trampled it, and every attempt to breathe sliced further into the wound. 

When he closed his eyes, the world was still on fire.

Stomach lurching, he carefully rolled Marinette’s weight off his chest. He couldn’t stay here, couldn’t listen to the even sounds of her breath without hearing echoes of his own sobs slip between them. 

The room spun around him as he stumbled to the bathroom; the world still appeared as though through smoke—muted and unreliable, the air too thick to breathe. He collapsed to his knees in front of the toilet, his empty stomach convulsing, only to realize the sickness inside him wasn’t the kind he could expel.

He remained there, braced against the toilet seat, until his limbs eased their shaking enough for him to crawl away. Even so, he barely made it to the wall beside the sink before one of his arms gave out, and his cheek slammed a little too hard into the handle of one of the cupboards he twisted into a seated position. Hissing in pain, he let his face press against the wood there, shuddering at the way the cold surface shocked some life inside of him.

Time ceased to make sense after that. One moment, his chest was burning, pain reverberating through his back as he struggled to fill his lungs. The next, it seemed he’d become a giant cloud. A numb expanse of icy droplets, ready to fall at a moment’s notice.

Light gradually awakened the room, a subtle warmth flickering near the edge of his awareness. He only fully realized the day had come when, somewhere beyond the door he’d left ajar, the bed creaked.

“Adrien?” Marinette called. Her voice was gentle, but pierced through him all the same. “Everything okay?”

No.

Panic set in anew as footsteps approached. He swore he could somehow taste the blood pounding in his ears, and he clamped his mouth shut to keep from crying out. To keep from breathing, even.

He didn’t want to be found. Maybe, if he held his breath until his lungs screamed again, he’d remain concealed in his lifeless fog.

But ironically, it was harder to keep from breathing when that was his actual goal. He sucked in sharp breaths, timed to his heartbeats, and hid his face in his hands.

“Oh, Chaton...” Marinette’s slippers scraped across the bathroom tiles, coming to a stop within his sight. Too close. “Did it happen again?”

He managed a nod, bottom lip quivering as he bit back a sob.

A long exhale piqued his attention; it started as a noise from above and ended as a warm breath against his cheek. Kneeling at his side, Marinette rubbed her hands against her thighs.

“Why didn’t you wake me?”

Adrien shifted his jaw from side to side, guilt hooking its talons into his gut. “I didn’t want to bother you.”

It wasn’t a lie; he felt plenty bad about inadvertently dragging her here every night. She deserved the comfort of her own bed, regardless of whether he could actually get any sleep without her. So the least he could do was actually let her get enough rest.

But it wasn’t the truth, either.

And as she took his hand, carefully smoothing his fingers over hers, he had a feeling she knew it.

“Adrien…” She tugged his arm upwards, pressing a kiss to his fingertips. “You’re not going to hurt me.”

Biting his lip to keep from disagreeing, Adrien squeezed his eyes shut. With one less sense at his disposal, he was all too aware of the way she lifted his hand further, unfolding his fingers to press against her cheek.

“See?” she whispered, breath tickling the inside of his wrist. Her head twisted to the side, lips planting a kiss on the heel of his palm. “Everything’s fine.”

He swore he could feel the remnants of destruction prickling against her cheek. It took everything he had not to jerk his hand away.

Nothing was fine.

No matter how he’d come into this world, and no matter how much he despised the fact, Adrien would always be—in some way or another—his father’s son. Sometimes he swore he saw a glimpse of the man when he turned too fast in the mirror. Other times, a flash of fury would seize him; with a sickening sense of satisfaction, he’d know what it might felt like to be a villain.

Even worse, he was his mother’s son. His very existence had killed her.

He’d killed both his parents, in the end. 

So no matter how much Marinette tried to console him, Adrien knew the voice of his nightmares had a point. He was a danger to her, to himself, to the world.

It might not even end up being his choice. All it would take was someone finding out what he was, and stealing the two rings he still couldn’t stand the sight of.

He was, at most, a liability. And Marinette deserved more than that.

She never agreed with him on that point.

“Look at me,” she said now. An edge crept into her voice, one that shocked him into listening.

His heart jumped at the blue of her eyes—filled with all the warmth that the fiery world of his nightmares had failed to hold. 

“I’m sorry,” he said, voice cracking. 

“No, no, no. I don’t want you to be sorry. I just…” Tears filled her eyes. “I love you, okay?”

Adrien couldn’t say it back. He couldn’t find enough truth to shove into the sentiment—not when that was all buried beneath his own misery. It was like he’d returned to his nightmare, with smoke charring his throat and one all-consuming fear.

Just the tiniest wrong movement could ruin everything.

But if he didn’t give some kind of response, Marinette would only worry. So he tugged on her hand—maybe a little too hard considering her yelp of surprise—and guided her to sit between his legs. She moved readily into place, and Adrien forced himself to ignore the fear spiking through his veins, hugging her back to his chest.

Once settled, she twisted around and tried to crane her neck upwards, reaching a hand half-blindly up to his cheek. Heart squeezing in his chest, he tightened his grip around and pressed a kiss to her head. 

She remained tense for a moment too long, but finally sighed and melted back against his chest. Her hand trailed lazily back down to her side, and her breath spilled into a hum of contentment. With her gaze fixed firmly ahead, Adrien could finally breathe again.

He didn’t want her to see the few tears he’d finally let slip down his cheeks—even if she’d no doubt hear his sniffles or feel the way the cries rumbled in his chest. And he didn't want her to examine him to deeply, to discover what he already knew.