Living with the kwami's was kind of like living with nineteen toddlers, each with their own food preferences and ridiculously high levels of energy.
But it also felt like slipping into a warm bath after a rainy day, with a similar warmth that was slowly filling his core.
The kwami's were slowly giving him back that spark that had left him after discovering Hawkmoth's identity, the spark that was so easy to lose but so hard to rekindle.
Each day, Adrien found himself feeling more like...himself.
But not the version of him that the public saw when he modelled, the version of him that Ladybug saw, the real him. The one that cracked bad jokes and protected those he loved fiercely.
The kwamis were becoming unexpected therapists too.
Adrien and Nooroo had bonded over their shared experiences of bending to Gabriel's will, with Duusoo sometimes piping in with light hearted anecdotes that made the rest of the kwami's within hearing distance do a double take.
Plagg and Tikki were in the process of helping him - and themselves - compartmentalise the events of the final battle, as well as the aftermath.
Some of the more energetic kwamis like Trixx or Xuppu made sure he did at least a little bit of excersise everyday, quite often organising games that left him puffy and red-faced.
It was exhausting in the best way possible.
If he was busy sharing trauma stories or having quality time or getting his ass kicked in games he'd never heard of, then he couldn't think about how much he missed Marinette or how guilty he felt for avoiding his other friends or how much he blamed himself for what happened.
As much as he knew that avoiding it wasn't the healthiest tactic, it was working.
During the day at least.
Most nights Adrien still woke screaming from a nightmare after having collapsed into an exhausted sleep, dreaming that Marinette was alive only to be killed more and more brutally as the nightmares went on. Some nights he just dreamed of his father. Not good dreams though, nightmares of the horrors he'd laid unto Paris, onto his own son, all to get his mother back.
What was strange was that even as his mental health improved, the nightmares didn't. They came almost every night, ending with him being woken by worried kwamis or a sleep delirious Nathalie. Once even the gorilla was woken up, Adriens screams penetrating the soundproof headphones the surly bodyguard always wore to bed.
Adrien had a few theories why.
The first was that he wasn't really healing, he was just getting better at pretending. But the thought of that scared him, made him feel as though he would never heal.
So he focused on the second one.
Which was that his dreams were channelling the helplessness he felt and directed it onto the one thing that terrified him the most.
Losing Marinette.
He got the idea from Tikki, who mentioned that your subconscious tended to react to whatever you were feeling the strongest.
Both of the theories were a bit of a stretch, but Adrien had made up his mind that there was one thing that would help in either case. No matter how much he loathed to do it and how unlikely it seemed.
"I need to be Chat Noir again."
~♡~flashback~♡~
"Wait so you know who Hawkmoth is?" Marinette had to say, she thought she was doing an incredibly believable clueless act.
YOU ARE READING
Without his Lady
FanficHawkmoth was defeated. But at what cost? After the battle in which Adrien lost both his father and his Lady, he stops. He stops smiling, he stops trying, he stops living. He's an empty shell of a human being. But when vivid flashbacks and a masoch...
