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In the dulling February light, Adrien watches the Seine flow past him. Its shallow waves crash against each other in their rush to the sea, leaving a fine mist in the air. It’s cold. A deep cold that goes past the faux fur coat he wears; it’s polluting plastic not providing the warmth he craves. It goes past his skin, pierces his muscles, until it sinks into his bone marrow like a stone thrown in the river.
It calls out to him, water against the retaining wall almost singing, rough waves colliding into a chaotic melody. It calls out to him, and he can understand it. It tells him how warm it is, in the water, hidden between rocks, in craggy caves. That it is wrong for him to stay out, away from the tides and whirlpools, the places he belonged. Its siren song whispers to him about jumping in, that there he would find his home, where he belonged.
Days like these, when it was cold, when even wrapping the jacket tight around him didn’t help, when he had spent too long away from the sea, the river almost convinced him. He would unconsciously remove the fake jacket, or his shoes, and find himself standing at the edge, on the precipice, and stumble back to dry land. He knew that, if he did jump in, there would be no warmth awaiting him. Without his skin, the water would catch his clothes, weigh them down. His lungs would burn and then give out; humans couldn’t hold their breaths for long.
Still, even after so many close calls, he couldn’t stop himself from sitting at the edge of the river, or watching it as Kitty Section practiced, or getting distracted by it on patrol. It called out to him, and he wanted desperately to answer it but, as always, he was called back to land.
Before his mom got sick, they would spend the summers in Brighton. His grandparent’s manor was big enough to house him, his mom and dad, along with Félix and his aunt, so even though his grandparents weren’t there, the house was never really quiet. Except at night. When it was dark, a blue film covering the world, and when everyone was supposed to be asleep, his mom would wake him and buckle him in his car seat. His father would drive them down to the English Channel, to a rocky outcrop, hidden from the human world.
There, his mother gave him his skin, wrapping it around him, and the warmth of it would envelope him. She would smile at him, kiss his now furry head, and go to sit at the edge of the beach on a blanket she had brought with them. Adrien would watch, making sure she had nothing more to tell him, then turn to follow his father into the water, flippers clumsy and unfamiliar on the rocky shore.
He and his father would swim for hours, enjoying the freedom of the water, exploring the undersea caves. Adrien would go off to chase fish, but never catch them; hunting was undignified, his father told him; too animalistic. Unhuman. He didn’t exactly understand why his father was so against it, but he listened to him.
When the dawn began to lighten the sky in pinks and oranges, they would return to the shore, where his mother waited, a breakfast picnic laid out before her. Crispy bread and soft cheese, dates and warm honey. Fresh pastries she had gotten from one of the nearby bakeries. There he would remove his skin and place it beside her, neatly folded and silky smooth.
They would have breakfast, then head back to the manor, letting Adrien sleep on the way, and tucking him in when they got home.
Sometimes, when the call was so strong it felt like the air was drowning him, he would transform into Chat Noir.
Being him was the closest he had ever come to that feeling he had when wearing his skin. The tough leather was nothing like the soft fur, and it didn’t stop the longing for the sea that ran deep, but its warmth was similar. The strength it gave him. The freedom.
He avoided being Aqua Noir, though, unless it was strictly necessary. It was, in his mind, far too great a risk to use it casually. A step too far, too deep into the current, risking getting pulled under.
Even in the most dire situations, when he couldn’t avoid using the power up, while fighting for his life, he would get the call, strong as ever, pulling him. He was scared that, one day, he would answer it and never come back. That he would abandon the friends he worked so hard to obtain, would lose himself to instincts.
So, as Aqua Noir he tried to focus on the akuma, ignore the soft sing-song of waves lapping at the base of his brain, the undertow in his veins, pulling him like a riptide into the ocean.
And when he removed the transformation, he tried to not think about the part of himself that was ripped away at the same time.
When he was younger, he would always go to his parent’s room after a bad nightmare. He would knock on the door, then soon after enter. His mother, the lighter sleeper, would flick the light on, and the yellow light would cast dark shadows around him. He would scramble into bed, his mom helping him up the plush mattress, and wiggle in-between the two. His father, still half asleep, would cover him in his own coat. It was far less silky then his own. Scars and bald spots from years roaming the sea, before he met his mother. The warmth soothed him, made the nightmares melt away into safety.
As Adrein fell back asleep, he would always ask the story of their first meeting, and always they would tell it, his father’s voice, deep with sleep, would say how he saw her once on a film set. How he instantly fell in love. How he had shed his coat and went to her.
A whirlwind romance, giving her his coat on a cold winter day. How she gave it back. Occasionally his mother would give her own perspective, voice light, laughing airily at some of his father’s attempts to woo her.
Some nights he would sleepwalk. Never far, just to his closet. When he woke up, he often found himself buried under piles of clothes, torn from their hangers to create a warm blanket that never really did the trick. Sometimes the clothes were strewn about like his dreaming self had been searching for something. He didn’t have to wonder about what he was looking for. It was already something he knew deep in his heart. A want that he couldn’t fulfil.
The first time he transformed in his sleep he began to lock his doors.
His father’s coat was growing cold.
He didn’t notice it at first, his father didn’t tend to offer it to him as comfort like he used to. His only contacted with it was tangential, brushes against it when passing through the halls, mostly. Even as his father was opening up to him, becoming more like the man he remembered from his childhood, he still was not given the warm coat that held so many good memories.
Adrien didn’t push, though. He had learned that a coat should be given willingly, not forced. Still, his father’s more consistent presence meant more frequent brushes, and as the days passed, he noticed that each time he would feel less of the warmth than he remembered, until his trip to London.
Maybe, it was his way of apologizing. The cloak, folded neatly and placed on the bed, the only colour in the blank white room. It wasn’t silky smooth, but the hairs were coarse. When he ran his hand across it, the hair dug into it, stinging. It was cold, too. Nearly frozen, with only the barest amount of heat.
The months avoiding him, the sudden attempts to be his father, sending him to London, where Félix and Amélie, the only family he had left, lived. And now, giving him his coat. Suddenly, everything made sense. His father was dying.
He curled himself up, hiding underneath the rapidly fading coat, and tried to cover the hitch in his breath, the tears that he could feel welling up. Anger clawed at his heart, its razor-sharp claws tearing at his arteries. Why hadn’t his father told him? How long had he known? First his mother, then Nathalie, and now him? Anger and sorrow mixed in his heart, whirling around each other, until he wasn’t sure what to feel at all. It was just… nothing. Like sitting at the edge of the ocean in the middle of winter.
He curled further into the coat, and listened to the faint heartbeat.
He knew his father had died long before Ladybug, or Bugnoir, told him what happened. He had felt the fur going cold, the heartbeat, after a burst of speed, giving out.
She said that his father was a hero, that he died to defeat Monarch. He didn’t bother to refute her, to tell her that he was going to die anyway. There was no use diminishing his sacrifice. It didn’t change anything.
Even so, he still found himself sobbing into the old, cold coat.
When he was nine, he nearly gave away their secret. As he sat drawing beside Félix, he had asked him why him and his mom never came with them to the beach. Félix had looked at him funny and asked why they went to the beach. Adrien had said that they went swimming, but before he could go on his father had come in and scooped him up, carrying him to his mom, where they both made him promise to never tell anyone. That, if anyone found out about him being able to change his form, he would be in danger. That if the world knew about his skin, they would try to steal it for themselves. Would hurt him. The only way to keep himself safe was to keep it a secret from everyone. From his cousin, his aunt, Nathalie. No one could know, not even those he trusted the most.
A couple days after the funeral, Nathalie was helping him go through his father’s old things. She had insisted, and he didn’t want to take the option away from her. Nathalie and his father had become close, and he didn’t want to block her out from the grieving process. Even if a voice in his head, one that sounded a lot like his father’s, told him to watch out. That the papers Nathalie was subtly putting away looked a lot more like letters than bills.
As he was looking through a box of his own baby pictures, he heard a confused sound coming from Nathalie. He turned around, and his heart leaped.
In her hands was his skin. Brown-blond and shiny, just as he remembered it. In her hands, the fur fell like a cascade of velvet, moving ever so slightly, like it was alive. And, technically, it was. For a moment, Adrien sat on the floor, entranced. It was the first time he had seen it in years, and the instinctual call of it was suddenly overwhelming, but he couldn’t move. His muscles felt drawn tight, like a strung bow.
“Do you know what this is?” Nathalie asked, breaking him out of the trance. Her eyebrows were furrowed, and it felt like she was trying to figure him out, “It looks like the one you brought home from London.”
Suddenly feeling like he couldn’t breath, he tried to catch his breath, mind whirring, trying to figure out an excuse. “Yes,” he found himself saying, “It was a gift from father. He said it was from his old home, before he moved to Paris. I thought I lost mine, so he gave me his.” He was unconsciously reaching out for it, but just about stopped himself from grabbing it. He was surprised when, just a moment later, she handed it over.
Now in his arms, he was amazed that he was able to breath before. It was like he had been living on canned oxygen for his whole life, but now had been brought to the seashore and told to take a deep breath. Like his lungs were finally being filled, after so long at half capacity. Bringing his nose up to the fur, it had a familiar scent. Salt and fish and fur mingled, not exactly pleasant, but comforting. The strands brushed against his face, and he could feel the sand trapped in it sprinkling out onto his fingers. Tears pricked at his eyes.
Clutching it to his chest, like someone might try to take it away again, he excused himself to his bedroom.
Adrien understood his father’s concerns about being found out. It wasn’t a secret that humans could be cruel, that they wanted to control or destroy anything they didn’t understand. His father never told him much about his life before meeting his mom, but the scars etched into his coat were enough to know it wasn’t a safe life. He knew his father wanted to leave that life behind, to become fully human, even when the sea was so desperate to take her children home.
It was his father’s wish to be human, to hide himself from the rest of the world. Who was Adrien to give away that secret?
That is how he found himself on an island not far from the coast of France, his skin in one hand, and his father’s in the other. Kneeling on the rough, rocky shore, he placed his father’s coat on a make-shift pyre. Taking a deep breath, he lit it, then took a couple steps back, careful to keep his own coat away from the flames, quickly licking up the dead, brittle fur. In the darkness of night, the orange-red flames against the black sky and reflected in the waves looked almost picturesque, a fitting end for a man so focused on aesthetics. Even his cremation had to be perfect.
He stood there for a long time, watching as the fur turned to ash, then was carried off on a light breeze, out to the waves. His coat returning to the sea, while he stayed buried on the land, among humans.
As the dawn began to stretch her rosy fingers through the sky, Adrien wrapped his skin around himself. The transformation welcomed him like an embrace, like coming home. When it was done, he stumbled to the water like a newborn foal, trying to relearn the graceless flop to the sea.