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Five years.
It was five years they’ve been together, Adrien and Marinette. They had been partners for longer, of course, and it took them a very long time before finally gathering the courage to ask each other out.
(Okay, so Marinette asked Adrien first. Big deal. He wouldn’t have had it any other way.)
Five years.
It was five years they’ve spent in bliss after finally learning of each other’s identities. Five years spent in laughter over how stupid they were for not realizing sooner. Five years spent learning even more about each other. Each year spent learning different sides and learning secrets about each other. Each year spent happier than the last, despite all the ups, downs, and sideways, with a couple sprinkles of self-doubt and fighting. Each year spent with someone they both loved: Each other.
(Okay, so maybe Marinette and Adrien had a little break in between year one and two. Big deal. They were just getting used to each other, is all.)
Five years.
It was five years they’ve been together, five years depending on each other, five years spent with each other, five years full of love for one another.
And it remained that way for the longest time. All Adrien had to hold onto was five measly years for something that should have been a lifetime, a dream come true, a fairy tale ending for two.
After five years, time stood still.
Adrien walked into their apartment after the incident. After he had managed to grasp what in the world had just happened, he had garnered enough strength to walk on two feet and stumble towards their place, weak-kneed and hollow.
Everything looked empty, he observed. The light blush of pink across the walls now looked like a faded gray tinged with red, almost as if the walls themselves were being drained of their life. White leather couches grew paler, if it were possible, and the coffee table looked lonesome even if it was surrounded by the living room furniture. There was a cup of tea left on the dining room table, right where she left it in the morning. It was cold now, Adrien knew, and it would stay that way.
After all, she wouldn’t be there to make tea in the morning. Not anymore.
Adrien laughed, cold and hollow, as he remembered all the times he made fun of her. ‘Coffee is way better,’ he had teased, laughing at her as he poured himself a cup of the hot beverage in question.
She had stuck her tongue out at him when he told her that. ‘Your coffee is just like you,’ she had replied. ‘Bitter and in desperate need of sugar.’
‘Hey! That wasn’t very nice of you! I thought you love me!’
‘Just because I love you doesn’t mean I have to love your poor choice of hot morning beverages.’ Marinette had grinned at him then, wide and brilliant. ‘You’re just jealous because you can’t manage to make yourself a cup of tea without messing it up.’
‘It was one time! How was I supposed to know you have to take the teabag out?’
Marinette laughed at him then, lighthearted and lovely, an adorable sound that was music to his ears.
Adrien was laughing, too. Adrien remembered laughing. He remembered how his laughter sounded whole, full of life and love for the girl he so admired. She was always fun to be around. His life never grew boring when she was there for him every step of the way. His love for her never tired and only grew stronger every single day.
And now? Now, love was a numb feeling in his chest. Now, love was a painful thought in his brain. Now, love was an emotion that shook in his fists when tears finally streamed down his face that day.
Before Adrien knew it, he was violently sobbing. His fell to his knees and buried his face in his hands as the sound of his ugly sobbing rang in his ears. His tears burned a path down his face, full of anger and anguish, despair and heartache. It didn’t take long before his entire body collapsed on the floor, still wailing loudly. Snot was smeared on the wooden floors, but Adrien could care less.
Marinette isn’t here anymore, his thoughts reminded. She isn’t here. She isn’t here. She isn’t coming back. She isn’t here. She isn’t here.
His sobs only grew louder from there.
Plagg had chosen this moment to fly out of his jacket pocket. The kwami also wore a tired face, stricken with grief, whiskers pointed downwards in an obvious show of dolor. Through Adrien’s blurred peripherals, he could somewhat tell that Plagg was trying to hold back his own tears.
Plagg loved Marinette, after all. Adrien knew that. Plagg loved Marinette, loved having her around, loved how she fit into his life with Adrien so perfectly. He loved that she loved cheese nearly as much as he did. He loved that she was able to make him smile. He loved that she always made him snacks with different, creative ways of working Camembert in. Plagg loved that she did so out of the kindness of her heart and not just to get him out of the way or merely recharge him after an akuma attack. Marinette cared just as much as Adrien did, and she cared for Plagg like he was her very own kwami. He loved that about her. Plagg loved that about Marinette.
Using past tense, however, seemed stupid. Plagg still loves Marinette. He does. Adrien knew this well. Love, as he came to realize, never went away. It stuck to your memory, heart, brain like super glue. One cannot simply be rid of an emotion that grew this strong with the time that had passed.
Love is a ghost that will haunt you for a long time.
“P-Plagg,” Adrien stuttered, speaking at last. “M-Marinette… S-She’s really g-gone n-n-now, i-isn’t she?” He furiously swiped at the tears on his face and the snot dripping out of his nose. He finally sat up, but he didn’t quite face Plagg yet. His gaze was focused on the snot stain he left on the floor.
(In the very back of his mind, he told himself to clean that up later. Right now, he was grief-stricken, and he doubted that he would get to it too soon. Give it a couple days.)
The little black kwami sighed in reply. “Yeah,” he said. His voice was laden with sadness. He sounded broken. “She’s dead.”
Ah. Adrien had yet to taste that word on his lips and even think of relating it to Marinette. Hearing it now, from Plagg, of all people, eased him into the finality of the event. Marinette is dead.
“She’s dead,” Adrien repeated, aloud this time. “She’s dead.”
Plagg closed his eyes and nodded. “She’s dead.”
“She’s really dead.” Adrien was slowly coming around to it, and his brain finally realized the utter resolution of Marinette’s demise. “She’s not here. She’s gone. She stopped breathing. She’s not alive anymore. She…” Adrien’s voice cracked, and his eyes began to water again. “She’s really gone. She can’t be here anymore, Plagg.”
“Yeah.”
“Marinette’s dead. Marinette is dead.” Connecting her name to the word truly brought him out of denial. He was painfully aware that someone he loved, someone he held so dear to his heart, his partner, his best friend, the love of his life is dead. Marinette ceased to exist. Marinette wasn’t alive.
“Marinette is dead,” Plagg agreed. His voice was hoarse.
They sat in the middle of the living room in silence. Both Adrien and Plagg were still; Adrien sat unmoving while Plagg hovered around by his head, completely motionless. They stayed like this for goodness knows how long.
They were static for hours. They hadn’t moved until it was dark out.
And by then, Adrien was the first to break the silence.
“Plagg?” he asked. His voice began to sound clearer, less hoarse.
“Hmm?”
“What do we do now?”
The little kwami heaved another sigh and floated onto Adrien’s blonde hair to rest his tiny body. “I’ll let you in on a little secret, kid,” Plagg said. “You just gotta move on with your life. Time can’t stand still— Time’ll move, whether you like it or not. Life just rolls like that.”
“What do you do then?”
“Whaddya mean?”
“How do you deal with it?” Adrien straightened, stretching out his back for a second, before leaning his elbows on his knees and resting his head on his hands. “I know that there’s been plenty of Cat Noirs before me, just like there’s been plenty of L-Ladybugs before…” He paused to swallow. “… Marinette. How do you deal with losing one of them?”
Plagg nestled himself further into Adrien’s fluffy do. “The same way I’m dealing with Marinette’s loss right now,” he admitted. “It… It’s hard, you know? It never gets easier through the years. We kwami get attached to you knuckleheads. You feed us, you talk to us, and most of you treat us like we’re your best friends, you know?” Plagg’s voice began to crack again. “It really gets to me, too. Sure, I like to be lazy and bother you all the time, but I don’t hate you, Adrien. You’re a good kid. You’re a good friend. You’re one of the best Cat Noirs I’ve ever trained.” The black kwami sighed. “And, you know… Even though Marinette wasn’t my miraculous holder… She still means a lot. She means a lot to you, so she’s gonna end up meaning a lot to me too.”
“You love her.” Adrien wasn’t asking. He said it like it was the truth, and it really was.
“I sure do, kid. You lot, you know… You’re like kids to us kwami. We watch you grow up and mess up all the time.” Although Adrien couldn’t quite see Plagg, it felt like he wrapped his tiny hands around his head in some sort of hug. “She was kinda like a daughter to me, too, you know? Not the same as you, of course, but sort of like… See, she’s a good piece of cheese. My favorite kinda cheese. She’s like Camembert, except I don’t eat her.” Perhaps, it was Plagg’s intention to sound more lighthearted, but he sounded melancholy instead. “She’s a good kid. She’s got a big heart, that Marinette. She cared a lot. She cared for me the same way she would care for Tikki. How could I not love her, you know?”
“I know.” Adrien laid down on the floor and stared up at the ceiling. There were stars up there, little ceiling stickers Marinette had gotten during their second year of living together.
Another brief memory put the smallest of smiles on Adrien’s face.
‘Light pollution,’ Marinette was saying, wrinkling her nose at him as she stood on a ladder, plastering stars on their ceiling. ‘This way, we can stare up at the stars all the time. It’s not the same, but there’s always something charming about the stars, don’t you think?’
And the night after she had said that, Marinette and Adrien laid side-by-side on a blanket spread out on their living room floor. They had pushed the furniture out of the way to make room for ‘stargazing’ that evening. They made up fake constellations and made up stories behind those fake constellations and talked and talked all night long until they fell asleep.
It was one of Adrien’s best memories of her.
Looking up at the stars of their ceiling sky, Adrien couldn’t help but draw out a new constellation. He raised a hand in the air and traced this new constellation, outlining Marinette’s face and hair and eyes and nose and freckles with as much detail as a couple ceiling stickers allowed. Adrien saw her face smiling at him through the little glow-in-the-dark stars.
“Hey, Plagg?”
“Hmm?”
“You don’t think I’ll ever stop loving Marinette, do you?”
Plagg pinched his scalp, and Adrien yelped in pain.
“What was that for?!”
“Asking a stupid question like that.” Plagg harrumphed. “Of course you’ll still love her. You spent—what?—a little more than a decade of your life being her partner, and some five years of that being her boyfriend. You genuinely loved her, Adrien. Even death won’t stop you from loving her; she was a part of you, and she always will be.”
“Do you think I’ll ever move on then?”
“Just give it a couple years, kid. It’s not wrong to move on in the future.” Plagg cuddled his hair again. “Don’t you think Marinette would want you to do that? She’d want you to be happy, right?”
“I’m not so happy now.”
“But you will be. In the future.” Plagg paused. “For now, it’s okay to be sad, Adrien. Some ten years of partnership can’t go down the drain that easy, you know.”
“I know.”
“You wanna go to sleep now, kid? It’s been a long day.”
Adrien sighed and got up for the first time in hours. “I hear you,” he muttered. “Let’s get to bed, Plagg.”
Five months.
It had been five months since Marinette died. His heart was still heavy from her loss, but he managed to continue on in life. Everyday, he would stop by her grave and give her a status update. He would always bring her a bouquet of her favorite flowers, white carnations, and rest them on top of her tombstone.
(The conversations tended to be a little one-sided, but Adrien managed to deal. It helped the healing process.)
Five months.
Of course he’s still not over it. He missed her. A lot. There were nights where he would cry himself to sleep in a lonely bed that was a little too big for just a single person and a tiny kwami. But there were also nights where he would dream about memories, good memories, and somehow he would feel whole again.
(The memories tended to be the only thing keeping him going sometimes, but he’s having less and less nights of crying. It helped the healing process.)
Five months.
It took five months for Adrien to fully get back on his feet. It took Adrien five months before he actively sought to get out with friends, to hang out with Nino and Alya, and to pay a visit to Mr. and Mrs. Dupain-Cheng.
(Adrien always felt better when they missed Marinette together.)
It had been five months before Adrien was ready to step into Marinette’s room. Of course, she would always sleep in his bed, but nonetheless, Marinette had her own room where she worked on designs and all sorts of ideas.
Her room was very pink. The walls were painted a light, rosy pink, and the furnishings she had chosen had to have a little bit of pink in there somewhere. The white chaise by the window? Pink polka dots. The glass side table by a white armchair? The wood framing was painted pink. Her once dark leather work desk was now covered in hot pink leather that Marinette had customized herself.
From the pink to the polka dots to the unfinished fashion designs— The room screamed Marinette Dupain-Cheng at the top of its lungs.
Adrien smiled as he sat down at her desk, flipping through pages of her sketchbook.
She had gotten better and better at designing as the years passed. After Jagged Stone had credited her with his album cover, rockin’ shades, and a leather jacket she made for him in a later show, Marinette slowly began to get more and more commissions from other artists and celebrities. That kept her busy on most days, but she always somehow managed to make time for Adrien.
At the same time, it was great seeing Marinette do what she loved. She wasn’t one to do anything halfheartedly; she put her entire heart and soul into every piece of work she made for every celebrity that asked her for a favor. Marinette was anything but lackluster. She was brilliant and shining, always there to brighten up people’s days.
Ah. There it was again. The ebbing feeling of pain appeared in his chest again, but this time, it was a softer, duller pain. It was nostalgia, he realized with a ghost of a smile on his face. He missed having her around, but by this time, he was well aware that it was time to move on.
He stood up and looked around her room, fully soaking in Marinette’s memory.
His eyes landed on the analog clock that hung above her desk. Its hands were stuck at three o’clock sharp, despite it being four thirty in the afternoon.
With a smile, Adrien reached over and carefully took it from its place on the wall.
“I should probably get a new battery for this,” he said to no one in particular. “Time’s gotta move on somehow.”