genevrier | 💀 pour oublier ma peine immense

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💀 pour oublier ma peine immense

It had been a long and hard three years.

Ladybug had run out of fingers with which to count the sticky situations she and Chat Noir had been in because of Hawkmoth. But finally, finally, she and her partner had him dead to rights. As time went on, they had grown desperate, and they'd made mistakes - but nothing they hadn't been able to fix. He'd made mistakes, too, and that was how the two of them had managed to track him down.

Heart pounding, she cast her gaze down at the man that had been their adversary for so long. Hawkmoth stared back at the both of them with a dark glare full of loathing. There were a lot of things she had wanted to ask him when she finally caught up to him, but there was only one question she was actually able to form.

"How could you?" She whispered, her voice ragged. She was breathing heavily - the fight had taken a lot out of her. Out of her partner, and out of their enemy, too; had it gone on much longer, they all might have dropped dead out of exhaustion. "You hurt so many people."

Hawkmoth's eyes glittered, and he pressed his lips together into a thin line. Ladybug felt something roll down her cheek - sweat, she hoped, and not blood or tears, but she'd taken a hit to the temple earlier and she couldn't be certain that it wasn't bleeding (and in fact it was). But she was in better shape than him, at least. He was beaten down, he had lost.

All that remained was to take his Miraculous and make sure that Nooroo's power never, ever fell int the hands of someone like him ever again.

His refusal to answer stirred anger in her where there had once been pity.

"Men. Women. Children. You used them all - and for what? What on earth could have been worth it? I don't understand. Explain yourself, Hawkmoth."

He didn't answer. He looked between the two of them, seething. Ladybug scowled and knelt down in front of him, curled her fingers around his brooch, and yanked it away from his suit.

The magic holding his transformation together fell apart, and Nooroo emerged from the butterfly Miraculous at long last. Ladybug cradled him in the crook of her arm and watched as the facial features of their nemesis became clear.

A well-dressed man, middle-aged. Nobody she recognized. Without his Miraculous, he should have been powerless. Defeated. Done for.

She didn't catch his smirk until it was too late.

His hand darted into the suit jacket that hadn't been there before, and his fingers closed around something she couldn't see. "I'll make you understand," He snarled, and the next thing she knew his hand emerged from the jacket and the crack of a gunshot split the air. "Perhaps now we'll share the same wish."

There was a gun in his hand, Ladybug realized, as a dull roar and the man's twisted, bitter laughter filled her ears. He hadn't aimed at her. She turned toward her partner with dread.

He had aimed at him, and his laughter was not the laughter of a man who had missed his mark.

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"Rib injuries are the worst," she said quietly, easing the bin back down as he seemed to improve. She kept her distance, because, well...

She didn't want him to get hurt again.

"There's nothing that can really heal them except for time."

Time, and in this case, distance. Because if she kept cuddling up to him like this, if he kept re-injuring himself, he was never going to get fully better. "...but we've got time. We've got a lot of time, and when your ribs aren't hurting you anymore, we can be as close as you want."

The comment made Adrien pause, stare at her. Of course, she was a superhero, she must have had injuries...

He barely heard the rest of what she said because it was noticing what he hadn't before- the bruising the the mask mostly hid, the way she was holding herself-

"Did it hurt for me to hold you like that?" he asked, horrified.

"Huh?"

She blinked rapidly, then shook her head as it slowly dawned on her that he must have put two and two together about her involvement in the fight, must have seen some of the signs of bruising.

"No, I... I'm okay. When I'm in the suit, it's... it doesn't hurt."

...

Of course, when she was Marinette... but she wasn't admitting who she was, so. It was fine.

It made him feel only marginally better, because he'd had Marinette up here too-

His heart sank.

"I'm sorry. I didn't realize." God, no wonder. She knew all of his injuries, but had he bothered to find out hers?

"Have you been to the doctor...?"

"...Adrien, I'm okay. Really."

So, that was a no.

The day he'd been taken to the hospital, the focus had been on him. The worst of her injuries had been hidden under her clothing, and nobody had seen them. Even the police officer who had looked her over hadn't.

...and she'd been here with him ever since.

"You don't need to worry about me."

She'd gone this long without being treated. Adrien pulled a face. He was in no position to make her, unable to get up from his bed as he was, but he still worried.

"And if I said that to you, how would you feel?" he asked, then sighed softly, leaning back into the pillows, crossing his arms over his chest.

He could only imagine what was hiding under her suit.

"I'm not the one who almost died."

As soon as the words were out, her eyes went wide, and she pulled back. That... had come out so many different levels of wrong, and she wished she could take them back immediately.

"...I - I mean..."

God. Why couldn't she get this right?

Adrien had to catch his breath again. He pressed his lips together, looking at anything but hurt, made himself wait before answering.

She hadn't meant it that way and she knew it.

"That doesn't mean you don't matter. You don't deserve that."

Never mind what she'd seen in his x-rays, of course. He was a giant hypocrite and didn't even realize it.

Look who's talking.

She managed to keep from saying it by biting her lip, but only just barely. A moment or two passed as she tried to figure something else out instead, and then she sighed.

"...can we talk about something else? We just... seem to keep getting upset. I don't want it to be like that."

When in doubt, don't bother with subtlety, just blatantly change the subject.

Problem was, being utterly dismissed upset him far more than the rest of it. He didn't have any right to tell her to do anything, all told, but being shut down hurt.

Adrien closed his mouth, broke eye contact, and stared hard at the corner of the room, torn between wanting her to leave, and wanting desperately for her to stay.

He already felt useless and powerless, and it didn't matter than she'd said it gently, that she clearly didn't mean it that way. It felt that way.

...nothing that came out of her mouth today was right, was it?

As he turned his head to look away, she did the same thing, redirecting her gaze to the opposite corner.

She'd told him that she would stay as long as he wanted her to, so she couldn't just get up and go, but part of her wondered if it would be better if she weren't here - if he was thinking the same thing. ...she'd just have to wait and see, and if he told her to go, she would go.

The silence stretched on, and Adrien shifted uncomfortably, knowing he was making her uncomfortable too, not sure how to stop it.

"I'm sorry for nagging you about it," he said softly.

"I care about you a lot. I don't have a box to fit it into. I don't have a reason or anything to back me up. I just want you to be safe, and there's not a lot I can do to help with that, so..."

He trailed off. "It came out sounding controlling. That's the last thing I want to be. I'm sorry."

Hearing him apologize just made her feel worse, and she flinched, her hands balling into fists as her fingers dug into the material of her suit covering her palms.

"That's not..."

She took a breath, tried to think it through before she spoke, because she didn't want to hurt him again.

"You don't need to apologize to me. I'm the one that's out of line, and I'm the one that keeps saying and doing things that are hurting you." Her gaze stayed resolutely on her hands, on that corner of the room, anywhere but on his face. "...I just... don't want it to be like that. You don't remember a lot right now, and I want us to be able to make new memories, good memories, but we just keep... arguing. I'm sorry."

Adrien's throat closed again, and he immediately wanted to argue the point, but-

She'd just said it, didn't she? She didn't want to argue. She didn't want to upset him. But the more they danced around what they wanted to say, the more upset he felt, and he didn't know how to express it.

If he dropped it now, he didn't know how to fix it. They could just forget it ever happened, could they? Leave it all unresolved when he wanted to work it out? But if she wanted to leave it alone...

He was used to people leaving it alone. He was used to silence in order to keep the peace. He was used to not talking about things, in order to pretend everything was fine.

He didn't want that with her. But he also didn't want things to explode because he kept pushing. So he swallowed it.

"You don't need to be sorry," he said softly, utterly truthful. "I'm not angry, and I'm not upset with you."

"You should be-"

...and there she was, arguing with him. Again.

Ladybug pressed her lips together, and for good measure, she brought her hands up to cover her mouth, as if she could physically keep herself from saying anything else stupid or thoughtless that might hurt him.

When it came down to it, she... just didn't know how to handle a situation like this.

She would learn, one step at a time, but there were sure to be missteps while they figured it out. She just wished that there wouldn't be - that she could get it right the first time, that she could come up with a solution to this as easily as she'd come up with solutions for dealing with akuma attacks. Being a superhero was easy enough when you were facing supervillains, she supposed, but being a superhero who was powerless to help the person she cared about most in the world...

Awful. It was awful.

"...sorry. I'm not very good at taking my own advice."

As upset as she was with herself, he could see a touch of that stubborn streak come out, wanting to talk, even if she said otherwise.

He smiled before he could stop himself, a small glimpse of teeth before he covered his mouth, too.

"Me either," he responded, then paused, looking up at her over his hand. His eyes had softened, the tension leaking away from his shoulders as he understood.

It wasn't that she was dodging a fight, or that she didn't want to talk, after all.

"I charge in a lot without thinking things through," he added, leaving off his mouth to grip the blankets, looking thoughtfully at her.

Then, he smiled, a touch hopeful.

"I... think with my heart instead of my head."

Ladybug looked up, just briefly, and her smile was faint, but there.

He thought with his heart, not his head. For most of their partnership, she'd thought with her head, not her heart, despite how difficult that was - because they were two halves of the same whole. One of them had always been there to cover what the other couldn't.

That had been how they'd worked - and it had all gone to hell when she'd let her heart get the better of her in the battle with Hawkmoth.

"I try to do the opposite," she said softly. "Think with my head, I mean. It was always my job to have a plan, or if I didn't have one to start with, to... come up with one. ...but recently I've been speaking and acting without thinking a lot."

She drew one of her hands away from her mouth so that she could rest it over her heart.

"...you make it very easy for me to think with my heart."

And very difficult for her to think with her head.

Adrien watched her, watched her eyes, her hands, and felt a flutter in his chest.

Was this how she normally spoke with him? What had happened in that fight? What had she seen to so thoroughly change her mind about her feelings?

"Maybe you should let me help you more," he suggested, and immediately wondered if he was overstepping, realized he didn't feel like he was.

Adrien smiled a little, hopefully.

"So you don't have to carry everything alone."

Another breath. Something else was on the tip of his tongue, something softer, warmer, but he didn't know the words to express it quite yet. He'd just have to feel it, let it flow when it came.

Adrien had so easily called Marinette Princess, but hadn't yet found any of his names for Ladybug.

"...you've always helped me," she said quietly.

From the very beginning, he had made sure that she didn't have to carry the weight of the burdens of a superhero alone. He'd coached her through her first failure, been right at her side through the others, and even now...

Even now, when he was suffering because of her biggest failure yet, he still wanted to help her.

"I mean it. I've never had to carry this all alone."

Adrien's eyes widened, as understanding flickered on the edge of memory.

... he'd been there. He'd been there for her while she had the mask on. Consistently. For over three years.

The headache pressed back, but it wasn't too much this time.

"I have?" he asked quietly, all hushed excitement, as if they might be overheard.

Was that too much?

She searched his face, clearly a little anxious, but... he seemed alright. He wasn't having the same kind of reaction that hearing the word superhero had given him before, wasn't doubling over in pain, so... maybe this was okay.

"You have," she answered with a small nod of her head. "I can't even begin to count the number of times I've relied on you over the years." Then she hesitated. "...I was just... an idiot. And I didn't realize it until it was almost too late."

It felt heavy. Like something laying over his mind, leaning into it, and he took a deep, slower breath, not reaching for it, not fighting it. Adding it to the clues that were adding up.

It wasn't overwhelming, and that was because the penny hadn't dropped. Not yet.

"You're blaming yourself for me getting hurt, aren't you?" he asked.

The long silence before she answered spoke volumes.

Yes, she was blaming herself. How could she not? No matter how many times she replayed that night's events in her mind, there was no way she could imagine that it was anyone's fault beside hers.

"...you will too," she mumbled. "Once you remember it all."

Adrien gave her a flat look back, pressed his lips together in a pout, considering. He couldn't very well argue what he couldn't remember, but-

"Even if it's completely, 100% your fault," he asked, keeping his voice soft, his expression gentling, "I would never believe that you meant for this to happen."

He reached out for her, holding out his hand for hers. It wasn't his usual position, it wasn't his usual expression, but the gesture was still the same.

"It's okay."

Her eyes went wide as he held his hand out to her.

...how could he just forgive her? She was responsible for him missing three years of his memories, he couldn't even clearly remember her, but he still believed in her.

Ladybug's hand was shaking as she reached for his.

"I really hope you still think that when you remember."

Edited 2017-04-06 04:58 (UTC)

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