"Would you...do you think you can show me her room?" Adrien asked. He had no idea why he wanted to see it, but he had a sudden surge of sadness that craved her.
Tom and Sabine exchanged a look.
"You can go up if you like," Sabine said, "it hasn't been touched..."
Adrien took that to mean they hadn't been inside since. So, he excused himself from the table, which was littered with empty tea cups and pastry flakes, and hesitantly made his way up to her bedroom.
Alone.
This is a bad idea.
Why am I doing this?
This is going to hurt...
All too soon, he had made it to the base of the steps leading up to her room, pausing only a fraction of a second before forcing himself up the stairs and ignoring his clamouring thoughts.
Three steps left.
Two steps left.
One step left.
Adrien's head brushed the trapdoor, but his eyes remained trained on the floor, far beneath him.
Did he really want to do this?
Yes. Of course he did.
But...why?
...He knew why.
He just didn't want to admit it.
Adrien tentatively lifted his hand...pushing up the trapdoor and hoisting himself into the room.
He twisted around and sat on the edge of the door, staring out at the room, that wasn't messy or clean but simply...lived in.
A swath of fabric hung off the table, pink with white swirls, with its corner pinched beneath the needle of the sewing machine, as though she had rushed off somewhere mid-project.
Her chair was pushed out, facing the daybed instead of the desk. The daybed had pillows scattered on its pink surface and a couple that had fallen to the floor.
From his position on the floor, Adrien could see her rumpled duvet lumped at the foot of her bed, as well as the cat pillow.
And finally, what was perhaps Adrien's favourite part of her room, her photo collage.
Just above her desk, was a collection of images, depicting everything from outfits she'd designed to shots of friends to magazine clippings.
He couldn't help but notice he was in a lot of them.
Alya had told him that Marinette had liked him right from that first day, so it wasn't a surprise she had pictures of his modelling on her wall. It was still hard to believe though.
This whole time, if he could've just seen that Marinette was Ladybug, they could have been saved a whole lot of heartbreak.
Carefully picking himself up off the floor, Adrien wandered dazedly around the room, his fingers grazing the desk, the sewing machine, her computer, the ladder leading to her loft...
Most times his hands came back with a thin layer of dust that had been wiped off the surfaces, another reminder of how long it had been since the room had been used.
It looked so...lived in. As though Marinette would come bursting out of the trapdoor, stuttering and blushing and bursting with so much energy.
He wished she would.
Tears pricked at his eyes, still wandering the room, taking in everything that reminded him of her, that she liked, that she did, that she used; picking up pillows and placing them back on the day bed, pushing her chair back under her desk, even crawling up the ladder to make her bed.
YOU ARE READING
Without his Lady
FanfictionHawkmoth 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...
