Geek Fashionista

*walks into ML Angst Week three days late with zero chill* Angst Week Day 1: Mistakes/Aftermath.

~*~

After hugging and kissing Emma, Hugo, and Louis good night, Marinette and Adrien transformed and made their way to the Eiffel Tower.

It had been an exhausting week. Paperwork, meetings, more paperwork and more meetings, long discussions with Alya over how the Ladyblog’s official statement would read. At one point, Marinette laughed and told Adrien she regretted not having tried writing sooner—she wasn’t half bad at it.

Now Adrien released his transformation as he sat on a steel beam with his wife’s head resting on his lap, their fingers intertwined. It wasn’t the most comfortable place, but it was their place. They’d watched countless sunrises and sunsets from that same beam, spent so many nights trying to find stars in the Parisian sky that Adrien couldn’t remember them all. 

But he remembered the love, and that was all that really mattered.

Marinette’s grip on his hand tightened. Tightened. Tightened. Then loosened. They’d done this before, too, when she’d given birth to their children.

She wasn’t pregnant this time.

“That one was a doozy,” she said with a hint of humor.

Adrien stared resolutely ahead. He didn’t find it very funny.

“Adrien. Talk to me, please.”

He wanted to. Really, he did. But his words were trapped behind a knot of memories: 

His father, unmasked, kneeling before him. Adrien running at him with tears in his eyes and a cataclysm in his hand. A flash of red as Ladybug threw herself between them.

Master Fu had given her ten years at best.

“Adrien.”

“Sure is a nice view,” he said, and he felt her shift in his lap so she could admire it as well.

A minute passed. Her grip tightened. She curled in on herself. Tightened. She whimpered. Tightened. If she’d broken his fingers, he wouldn’t have cared. And then she relaxed.

Adrien was almost too afraid to look. But she was still breathing, still gazing upon the city she loved, and the skin below her neck remained that same hideous purple. A tear slid down Adrien’s cheek and dripped onto hers.

“Don’t cry, chaton,” Marinette murmured. “It’s going to be okay. You and the kids, mama and papa, our friends, Paris… you’re all going to be okay.”

“But you won’t be,” Adrien whispered.

Marinette smiled. “I will be more than okay.” She turned her head to look at him. Her eyes shone in tower’s light. “I got everything I ever wanted,” she said. “Every single one of my dreams came true. What’s there to be sad about?”

Adrien was beyond the power of speech. Now it was his grip on her hand that tightened, tightened, tightened. He’d killed the love of his life in the slowest, most painful way possible. That’s what there was to be sad about. “I’m s-sorry,” he whimpered.

Marinette reached up and wiped his tears as they fell. “I told you to stop saying that already,” she chided him.

He clasped her hand and held it to his cheek as he cried. Beyond the tower, the night went on peacefully, quietly. For once, all was well in the city of Paris.

“Adrien,” Marinette said after some time, “I need you to do me a favor.”

And then she gasped, her face contorted in agony, her grip on his hand tightening.

“Marinette!”

Tightening.

“Marinette!”

Tightening.

She looked into his eyes. Her lips parted.

“Forgive your father,” she whispered.

And her fingers slipped out of his.

In the weeks that followed, Paris would mourn Ladybug. The fashion world would mourn the loss of a promising designer. Classmates would mourn the loss of their friend. Two bakers would mourn the loss of their daughter. Three little children would mourn the loss of their mother. And a grieving husband would take the first painful steps towards fulfilling the love of his life’s last wish.

But that night, it was just one lonely cat, howling at the moon.