IV
.
Ever since he was little, he was to marry a beautiful girl. Someone that his mother could bake with, and someone his father would approve of enough to care for children. Someone gentle, kind, someone compliant and motherly. The perfect woman, as his father put it after his mother died, was a woman who would do anything the husband asked.
“Mother?” Bright emerald eyes look up at the soft features of his mom. Adrien had always felt a deep connection with her, no matter her being his mother, it was as if she was a part of his core. Therefore, Adrien trusted his mother with…everything.
Emilie flashes her son a smile, “Hm? Do you need help with your piano my love?”
Adrien shakes his head, his golden hair glinting in the afternoon sun. His face tinted a light shade of pink almost as if bashful, as bashful a 7 year old could look at least. “How did you know you were in love with Father?”
Now, one could explain love in many ways. “A fluttering of the stomach and the fast beating of your heart every time you locked eyes.” They could say that it was just a feeling. Even reaching out and going in depth to the science of love, and the chemicals that make it up.
Instead she answers, “I knew I was in love… when it felt like the whole world was brighter… when my eyes became glossy with the color of roses…” She gazes into the distance. Her thumb and index finger fiddling with the ring on her left hand. “Though… I don’t expect you to understand just yet.” Her eyes turn into crescents when she grins, like small moons in the midst of the light freckles that dotted her face like morning stars.
Adrien laughs, bright and happy. He doesn’t know why. Maybe it’s because the idea of the world coming out rose was a silly idea… or maybe love was just an icky concept to a young boy… either way, it was as if he was filled to the brim with bubbles, threatening to float him into the sky, taking his joy with him.
Out of the corner of his eye and through the tears forming, he could see his mother smiling sadly. Why she was so sad, he also doesn’t know. At age 7, Adrien didn’t know a lot of things.
It was at age 11, that he knew what it meant for his world to get dimmer. He hasn’t found what it meant to see in rose and bright rays of sun. He is stuck in an isolated inky shadow.
When he went to his mother’s funeral that day, he didn’t cry. Indeed, happiness and sadness come at the most inopportune moments.
Adrien knows now why his father is always so angry. At the ripe age of 11, he understands that sometimes anger is far easier than anything else.
It’s when he asks to go to school at the age of 14, that some of the black ink that was consuming him from the inside out, washed away. Adrien met Nino, he reunited with Chloe, became enemies then friends with Marinette…
It was a week later that the ink washed away completely and his vision was cleared. In front of him was a beautiful girl, suited in red and black, with hair like the night sky and eyes like bluebells. His breath was knocked out of him as he watched her declare war with the man who threatened the very existence of Paris. Red certainly glazed his eyes, her every move, a blur of red.
Not until 17 does Adrien realize that the rose fogging his vision was more of a curse than a blessing. His love that he held onto for so long, nothing but a pair of goggles, taking him from his responsibility of seeing who she was. Beautiful, confident Ladybug to shy but responsible Marinette. He was obligated to love her now. She’d already given so much. Even if now, he saw more flaws than perfection.
Now here he sits, at age 19, in front of a boy, eyes blue, matching the tips of his hair, a soft smile but worried eyes facing him, and Adrien doesn’t know what to do with himself. Luka looks at him as if he knows the answers to everything, but when Adrien asks about what he should do, the other just shrugs.
“I’m not you Adrien… I wish I could tell you what you should do, if only to help you. I can help you with what you’re feeling though? Maybe, um, explain some things?”
Adrien remembers most of their earlier interactions all being through Marinette, but as Adrien became more involved in their band, Luka and him had formed a small friendship as well. If only he’d known then the dilemma that’d plague him.
Adrien shifts where he sits and tugs off the white and black plaid button up he’d had thrown over his black t-shirt, setting it on his lap like a small blanket. His hands move to rub the fabric in a nervous gesture. “What is there to talk about?”
If seven(7) year old Adrien didn’t know anything, sometimes Nineteen(19) year old Adrien feels like he knows even less. Especially since once Luka was done explaining what LGBTQ meant and going into some of the bigger sub-categories of things, Adrien's brain felt like mush.
“Uh…” He laughs sheepishly to himself and rubs the back of his head, tousling his hair in such an undignified way that it was hard to believe this awkward young man used to be a model. “I guess that makes sense… I mean I do still find girls pretty and… um that one person…”
As if Adrien’s hair wasn’t already starting to look like a bird had their way with it, Luka places a warm palm to his head and pats it. “It may never make sense… but the best way to figure out what you want from someone else, is to figure out what you want from yourself.”
Adrien’s heart feels like it is wrapped in a metal vice as a cold feeling washes over him. “What do I want for myself? I don’t know.”
Luka stands and brushes the non-existent dirt from the back of his jeans. “Good thing you have the rest of your life ahead of you to figure it out.”
“What if I never do?”
“Then one thing’s for certain. You won’t be alone, even if you don’t.”