Chapter Text
Night pressed gently on the windows, and Adrien stared at the ceiling. His lights were off, each one of the lamps and candles extinguished, but even if they were on, it wouldn’t make much of a difference. The light would be gray, and the ceiling would be gray, and the stars would be gray, and he would be gray, too.
When he was little, he didn’t know that gray was a bad thing. It was just the way the world was - he didn’t really get it when people would give him strange looks for grabbing the wrong gray paint to color with, and that was fine. His mother would stroke her fingers through his hair and say “that’s a lovely picture, Adrien; I’ll put it in a frame and hang it up in the parlor.” And she would. The parlor was filled with his paintings, childish and gray, back then.
It wasn’t until the tutors came with all their textbooks and rules that Adrien realized that gray was bad. They told him about soulmates, and about how they were so rare, now. He’d probably never find his. He’d never be given the chance to - inheriting the company was too important. And so he’d see gray for the rest of his life while the whole rest of the world lived on in color.
His art tutor put labels on the paint. He tried to describe colors to Adrien - blue is like water, soft and smooth, red is like fire, warm and striking - but it was just paint. Adrien didn’t get it. And he never would.
Sleep was far away. It was late - the sky was black, and every window on the street was that same black - but Adrien got out of his bed, padding over to the large windows on the other side of his room. He pushed the curtains aside, unlatching one of the windows and swinging it open. A hot summer breeze came up and brushed across his face, ruffling his hair, and he closed his eyes.
Soulmate.
What a strange word.
The very nature of it implied that he was only half of a whole, only one part of something bigger. And he could feel it - feel that emptiness gnawing at him in his chest. He didn’t use to feel this way.
When the tutors told him about soulmates and about how he would always only be half of a whole, he didn’t get it. He felt whole already. He didn’t need anyone else, not even someone who was supposedly tied to his soul. But now was different.
He wasn’t as whole as he used to be.
Most people didn’t even believe in soulmates anymore. They were so common a couple centuries ago, but now, they were just folklore. Legend. If you saw in black and white, in gray, then your eyes were just wrong. People three hundred years ago would travel around the world until their world became just one person and a whole lot of color, but now you stayed in one place and only traveled if you had money and hope, which most people didn’t.
Adrien did have money, but he had responsibility. That was the same as not having money. And Adrien wasn’t really sure what hope felt like. Maybe something like happiness.
He opened his eyes, looking up at the pinpricks of white on black up in the sky. It was hard to see the stars now, what with all the factories and machines popping up around the city, but the smoke wasn’t as thick at night, what with the new laws requiring all of the gears to stop running. Adrien liked the new laws. He liked the stars.
Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he wondered if his soulmate was looking up at the stars now, too.
“Oh, they’re looking,” his mother used to say when he’d asked her, before he found out that going out to look for his soulmate would never happen, “and if they’re not, the stars are still in their eyes.”
That aching hole in him pushed up against his ribs, and he left the windowsill, although he left the window itself open. It would air out his room while he was out.
He pushed open his bedroom door, slowly and quietly so that the old wood wouldn’t creak so loudly, and he crept down the grand staircase, skipping over the steps that creaked the loudest. He walked through the parlor, decorated no longer with his childish drawings but with sophisticated paintings in large, mahogany frames. His footsteps were soft on the empty ballroom floor, and he crossed through the space where people normally danced to get to the door of the music room.
That was where he’d always gone when he had felt too much. It was something about the purposeful quiet in a room full of objects made to make noise. He’d been going there more often in the past few months.
When he pushed open the door to the music room, he froze.
There was a person.
Standing in the music room, right by the piano.
At first, Adrien thought it was a man - it was dark in the room, and the curtains were drawn tightly shut - but the silhouette was all wrong. Yes, he could see that the figure standing by the piano was wearing men’s trousers, loose around the thighs before wrapping tight around calves adorned in- in polka-dotted socks? And the figure was wearing a waistcoat, too - not tailored, but tied neatly at the back so that it was fitted.
But as Adrien’s eyes trailed over the figure’s arms, where the sleeves of the figure’s blouse gave way to the coat draped across their back, Adrien realized that it was not a man in front of him. The coat, he could tell even draped as it was, was a woman’s. And the figure’s waist was small, and her hair was long, braided neatly down her back.
She had a scarf tied around the bottom half of her face and a satchel slung across her shoulders. He could see, even across the room, that the satchel was filled with gold trinkets from his father’s office. The chain of his father’s pocket watch was hanging out from the lip of the bag.
The figure still hadn’t noticed him - her back was turned to him, and she seemed to be looking through the drawers where all the music was kept for something more to stuff in her bag. Adrien’s mind raced.
The papers had been talking about a thief. A woman who dressed in men’s clothes, who stole from the rich and liked wearing polka-dots. They said she dressed in red, too, but Adrien didn’t know much about that.
The woman turned around, frowning down at something she was holding in her gloved hands. It was a ring. Adrien’s stomach leaped up to his throat.
“Hey!” he called out, and the woman’s head snapped up.
Their eyes caught on each other.
And the world exploded.
Adrien staggered back, shielding his eyes, and he heard the clatter of the ring dropping to the floor.
His back hit the wall, and he took heaving breaths in, his lungs aching, his head pounding.
When he finally uncovered his eyes, the world was far from gray.
It was-
It was full of something, full of everything.
The woman was crouched down on the floor, her hands pressed flat on the rug, the hair that wasn’t tucked neatly into her braid hanging around her face. He could see her chest move rapidly as she took ragged breaths in and out.
“Hey,” Adrien said again, but his voice was softer now. He stepped away from the wall, although he still felt dizzy, and he reached his hand out for his-
For his-
“Don’t come any closer,” the woman snapped, scrambling to her feet. He saw her fingers close around the ring as she stood up. She reached behind her back, unsheathing a short knife and holding it out in front of her. “If you yell, if you shout, if you signal to anyone that I’m here, I’ll…” She trailed off, her voice breaking.
She was looking at him now, and he could see it in her eyes that she felt it too.
The colors.
The wholeness.
The desire to fall to her knees. To reach for each other.
But she held the knife in her shaking hand, pointing the tip at Adrien. Her eyes were breaking across him, taking him in.
And Adrien didn’t know the name for the color of her eyes, but they were gentle and deep, even as she tried to glare at him. They were beautiful.
“I’m not,” Adrien said, finally managing to find his voice after the heavy silence that had stretched between them, “going to call anyone. It’s their fault for not being able to catch you before you got in.”
Her eyes narrowed.
“That was a joke,” Adrien said quickly, trying to show her a smile.
Slowly, she lowered the knife, pushing back her coat to sheath it behind her back. “You’ve got a weird taste in jokes,” she said, and it wasn’t much, but it was something more than a knife pointed at him.
“My taste in jokes is impeccable - that was just a slip up,” he said, taking a step closer to her. She tensed, but didn’t back away. “Let’s just start over, okay? Give us a chance to say cello to each other.” He gestured to the cello propped up in the corner of the room, and she looked over at it.
Her eyes sparkled, and Adrien thought about the stars.
“I don’t know,” she said, crossing her arms and leaning against the wall next to the bust of one of the ancient Greek muses - Euterpe, the muse of music. “That still wasn’t very a- muse- ing.”
Adrien blinked.
They stared at each other.
Their laughter crashed through the silence, and Adrien felt it again - that connection, that wholeness.
And when he opened his eyes, the evidence of it was all around him, in the nameless colors of the carpet and the curtains and her coat and her eyes.
When their laughter died down, he looked at her, wanting to reach out and touch her, but restraining himself. He reached out to her instead with his voice. “Who are you?” he asked, and she tilted her head at him.
“They call me Ladybug.” She gestured down to her socks. A bright color dotted with black spots. Adrien supposed that was what ladybugs looked like. Her waistcoat, her coat, and the scarf covering her nose and mouth were the same color, too; that bright color - saturated and alluring. Adrien decided he loved that color - same with the color of her eyes, although it was far different from the bright color of her clothes. It was soft and gentle and smooth, and Adrien decided that he loved that color the most.
“What do you call you?” Adrien asked, and she tapped her gloved finger once against her bicep.
“Ladybug,” she replied, voice stiff, and Adrien’s shoulders sank.
“You won’t tell me your name,” he said, and something like a laugh fell from her.
“In case you haven’t noticed, I have a bag full of your family’s valuables. And I’m not planning on giving them up.” As she said this, she opened her fist, revealing the ring she’d taken from the music drawers. She moved it so that she was holding it between her thumb and forefinger, watching it glitter in the low light. “Can’t have you knowing the name of a thief - especially since I am the thief.”
She moved to drop the ring into the bag.
“Wait!” Adrien said, and she stopped, raising her eyebrows at him. “You can’t take that.”
“Why not? I’m taking all of this.” She gestured to the bag.
“None of those other things matter,” Adrien said, shaking his head. “But that is-” He stopped. “That was my mother’s.”
Something in her expression softened. She looked down at the ring in her hand, and then tossed it across the piano to Adrien. He caught it, just barely, and held it close to his chest.
“I have to get going now,” she said, and she turned to the window, pushing back the curtains and peering through the glass, presumably for the patrol that Adrien’s father kept around the place. When she didn’t see any, she opened up the window.
“Wait,” Adrien said again.
“I’m not giving anything else back,” she said, but she still stopped, turning toward him and letting the summer breeze come in and fall across their cheeks.
“Didn’t you-” He broke off, gesturing to all around them - to all the color and life. “Didn’t you feel it?”
She stared at him, the color of her eyes digging and piercing and stabbing through him. “No,” she said softly, her voice pushing through the quiet until it reached him and held him. “I didn’t.”
Her eyes fell away from him, and she closed the satchel, jumping through the window. He saw her pause on the soft grass, her shoulders tense, and for a moment Adrien thought she might look back.
But she didn’t.
He watched her run away, slipping her arms further into her bright coat as she ran so that it was snug across her shoulders and shielding the bag, and he watched her jump up onto the wall surrounding the mansion and climb it with ease.
When she had reached the crest of the wall, Adrien saw her pause again.
Look back, he begged, feeling the words push through his heart, his ribs, the air between them.
She looked back.
And then she was gone.
---
Adrien opened his eyes, gasping for air like with that one breath he could somehow take in all the new colors of the world inside himself. He’d half expected to wake up and for it all to have been a dream - the woman in the music room, his soulmate made of all the colors that Adrien now loved.
But when he opened in his eyes, the ceiling wasn’t gray. And neither was the light or the blankets or even his skin - they were all different colors. So different and so dizzying that he almost felt like he was going to throw up.
His head was pounding, too. Which was not helping his queasy stomach in any way at all.
After staring at the ceiling in nauseated wonder for a solid ten minutes, he finally felt okay enough to get out of bed. His body moved slowly, like he was full of jelly, and each movement made his brain throb right where his eyes were. And then he was standing.
And then he was running to the bathroom, making it just in time to throw up in the toilet.
He felt awful.
He’d never felt more alive.
There was nothing on his schedule for the day, so he locked himself up in his room, pulling out his paint set from underneath his bed. He would look around the mansion and the grounds later - first he had to put names to the awe-inspiring colors assaulting his eyes.
Instead of pulling out his stool and his easel like he normally would’ve if his art tudor was here, he placed the spare canvas straight on the ground, scattering his brushes on the floor and spreading the jars of paint all out in front of him.
The labels were still on them, and he opened up the lids to each jar, staring at the color and the labels and feeling, once again, like he was going to throw up. But in the best kind of way.
Because now he knew that the color of the handles of his paint brushes was orange.
The sunlight streaming through his window was yellow - a softer, lighter version of what was in the jar. The color of the grass outside was green. The color of the suit he’d worn to a party a few days ago and left draped over the chair by his desk was purple.
The color of his soulmate’s coat had been red.
The color of her eyes had been blue.
He dipped his orange paint brushes into the paints that now had names that meant something, painting with two paint brushes in each hand across the canvas. He painted with abandon, with fervor - with something that felt like love.
Painting had never felt this way before - or maybe it had, back before he knew about colors. But in the past few years, he’d always dreaded when his art tudor would come. The sessions were always so strict and disheartening, each one a reminder that he was different and wrong. And the things his tudor made him paint - fruit bowls and landscapes and draping fabric - they were all beautiful in their own right, but his tudor was always so focused on the color of things, like he was trying his hardest to train Adrien to somehow know the difference between different shades of gray. To assign names to them, like they weren’t just gray. To hide the fact that he was only one part of something else.
But now he was just painting, throwing color after color onto the canvas. He was still in his nightgown, and his mouth tasted like morning breath and acid, and paint was getting onto his hands and face and floors, and it was better than it had ever been.
When he had filled up the canvas, he set it to the side and found a finished landscape painting that he’d done a few weeks before. It looked amazing in a way that Adrien hadn’t been able to appreciate before, and technically, it was very impressive. He had a good tudor, after all.
But it could be better.
He smeared orange and purple over the plain white clouds; he made the gray shadows under the buildings bright blue; he drove lines of red down the cobblestone roads. And then he moved onto the next painting.
And the next, and the next after that.
Each one of his old paintings that had been left in his room, he made filled with vibrant and dancing colors. They were nice before, but Adrien loved them so much more after he’d run colors through all the grays and whites.
When he was finished with the ones in his room, he finally flung open his door, determined to grab all of his other boorish landscapes and fruit bowls and whatever else from the guest rooms where they’d been hung and make them better, but stopped short when he saw his father’s assistant, Nathalie, standing in his doorway with her dark eyebrows raised in surprise.
For a moment, they said nothing.
Her eyes - they were blue, a beautiful shade, but so cold - moved to look behind Adrien, taking in the paint on the floors and all of the paintings scattered around the room. She looked back at Adrien, her eyes flicking up and down.
Adrien looked down at himself. He was covered in every single color he owned in his jars.
Nathalie cleared her throat. “You didn’t come down for breakfast,” she finally said, and Adrien laughed.
“I forgot,” he said, and his stomach rumbled.
She blinked. “How about you… get dressed and I’ll have the chefs make something light for you before lunch.”
“That sounds amazing,” Adrien replied. Her dress was navy blue. She was wearing red lipstick. “You look great today, Nathalie.”
Her eyes squinted up, and she tilted her head to the side. “I’ll…go tell the chefs now. Ring the servants if you want your room to be.” She stopped, glancing again at the mess of paints around the room. “Cleaned up.”
She left quickly after that.
Adrien went over to his closet, throwing it open and laughing at all of the colors that resided there. He had shirts, waistcoats, ties, and socks from every color in the rainbow, and almost every color in between. His trouser and slacks options were considerably more limited, but still amazing nonetheless.
He had heard some people say that brown was their least favorite color. Adrien didn’t get it. All of his brown slacks looked lovely.
Although his world had just changed in such a marvelous way, Adrien did his best to act normal around Nathalie for the rest of the day. If she noticed anything strange with him, she would immediately report it to his father - and, although the disorganized and messy painting was odd, it could easily be explained away.
He’d heard the upper servants - the ones who knew that he had a soulmate and saw only in gray (at least, up until last night) - whispering about rebellious young adult behavior. That was a good excuse.
But he couldn’t actually betray the fact that he could see colors now. That would only bring questions about who he’d met and where and how and when.
Those questions wouldn’t be fun to answer.
And he wanted to keep his soulmate - the woman who calls herself Ladybug - a secret for a little longer. It was wonderful, but it was also personal. Intimate. He wanted to keep it as close to himself as he possibly could.
And he did.
---
He came back from a walk in the gardens late in the evening a full week after his world changed. He’d taken to walking outside a lot, in between lessons and his other responsibilities. The air was warm - summer was close by - and all of the gardens were in full bloom.
His mother had loved the gardens dearly. She was the one who planted the rose bushes - by hand, even though his father had pointed out that they had servants that could do it for them. But she had done it herself, and Adrien sat on the bench next to them often now - almost as much as he used to sit in the music room, although he still did that some nights.
But the garden and the rose bushes were different from the music room and the piano. The music room was colorful, too, now, but it wasn’t about the color, really. He’d gone to the gardens at first because of all the bursting greens and vibrant pinks and splashes of orange, but he’d stayed because of all the life tucked into each individual leaf and petal, each blade of grass and thorn.
She loved the roses - and she’d loved the piano, too, but her life wasn’t in the keys like it was in the roses. They keys only held her when they were played, when they were paired with the marked up sheet music she’d used and the fingers of gentle and skilled hands. The roses held her every second they opened their faces to the sun because she was there, at the roots. She was there in each petal.
The roses were a striking red, the shade that was so deep and alluring.
As Adrien walked into his room, he lifted a rose he’d cut from the bush up to his nose. It smelled sweet and watery. It smelled red.
His window was open. He could feel the warm breeze coming in and ruffling the petals of the rose, and he frowned. He could’ve sworn that his window had been closed.
When he looked up, he froze.
Ladybug was sitting on the ledge of his windowsill, one leg pulled up to her chest, the other hanging down toward the ground below. Her face was turned away from him - she was looking up at the sky - but he could still tell it was her.
Because of her striking red coat. Because of her polka-dotted socks.
Because of-
There was this- energy buzzing through his skin, racing over his bones from his fingertips to his heart and back down again.
He knew it was her because of her clothes, and he knew it was her because he could feel it. He just knew.
As if she could feel the same buzzing as he did, she bristled, her fingers flexing and her head tilting to the side.
Finally she looked away from the stars, turning her face to him. But he could still see them there - each one she’d looked at. Little pinpricks of starlight dancing in her sky-colored eyes.
“You,” he said, his voice merely a whisper, and he quickly closed the door behind him. It was late, so the chances of any of the servants wandering the halls now was low, but he didn’t want to take the chance that someone would find her.
“Hello to you, too,” she replied, voice soft and smooth. The intricacies of her expression were hidden behind that same scarlet scarf tied over the bottom half of her face, and Adrien wondered if seeing her lips would help him identify what the squinting of her eyes and the tilting of her head meant.
He thought it naive to hope she was smiling.
“How did you get up here?” he asked, running a hand through his hair and shaking his head. His room was on the second floor, which didn’t sound like much, but the ceilings were tall. His room was directly above the ballroom.
Ladybug moved her legs so that her feet were planted on the wood floor of his room, drumming her fingertips on the windowsill. There was a twinkle in her eyes, and Adrien knew that now she was smiling. “A girl has her ways.”
Adrien shook his head again, and he laughed. That feeling - that buzzing underneath his skin - was still there, and somehow he knew that it would only disappear once he could be close to her. But he was afraid to take another step toward her, lest she pull a knife like she did last time or simply… run away. He didn’t want her to go.
“Interesting choice of decor,” she said, breaking the silence and nodding her chin at the paintings strewn across the room.
The servants cleaned up the paint from that first day, and since then, Adrien had been more careful with the colors, but he was still painting over his old landscapes with brighter colors, more life. His half-finished projects were propped up all around the room. Adrien suddenly felt self conscious.
“I’m sorry it’s a mess,” he said, standing helplessly. It’s not like he could stack the paintings into a neat pile - some of them were still drying. “I’ve been on a painting spree as of late, so…” He trailed off, gesturing vaguely around the room.
“I don’t mind,” she said with a shrug of her shoulders. She pushed herself off from the windowsill, walking with silent feet around the room and examining each painting. If he closed his eyes, it would be like she wasn’t there at all. Except for the buzzing. The insistent itch to be closer. “You painted all of these?”
“Some of them are pretty old - a couple of years at least,” Adrien said, gesturing to the older paintings of single apples or other random objects. “And I’ve just been painting over them because I…” He trailed off, gave her a smile. “Yeah. I painted all of these.” He stopped, looked at her walk over to his desk, where the first painting he’d made after his world burst into color was propped up and still drying. She stared at it for a long while. “Do you… like them?”
For a moment, she didn’t reply, her eyes still caught on the painting.
And then she turned back to him, and there was something new in her eyes. Something warmer.
“They’re all so… lively,” she said, and that’s exactly what his art tudor had said before proceeding to yell at him for a solid half hour about the importance of preserving your work and not painting over your old works like some sort of degenerate, but she said it like it was the best compliment she could’ve given to anyone about anything.
Adrien felt his smile come all the way up from his toes, moving through his legs and his heart and his lips.
“Thank you,” he said, and her eyes were still so warm on him. He took a deep breath. “I started painting them when I started to see colors for the first time.” He paused. “When I met you.”
Ladybug turned away from him. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do.”
“I told you that night that I didn’t feel anything.” She crossed her arms, turning back to him and throwing him a glare with her warm blue eyes.
“You lied,” he said, and it was almost like he was begging her.
“What do you want me to say, Adrien?” she asked, throwing her hands up in the air and beginning to pace, her figure moving back and forth across the shape of the window. Wherever she turned, the stars seemed to follow. “That I broke into your house, stole countless valuable items, and found out that the person I was stealing from was actually my soulmate? That I used to see gray, but now, because of you, I see color and life in even the littlest things? That my favorite color is green because I remembered that it’s the color of your eyes, that every part of me wants so badly to be close to you, that I feel all of these things and don’t hate that I feel them?” She shook her head, a scoff of something that was only half a laugh escaping her mouth. “Not happening. I’m not your soulmate, Adrien. I can’t be.”
Adrien sat back on the edge of his bed. He stared at her.
“Well?” she asked, her smooth voice, the color of her eyes, trying its best to be sharp. “Are you going to say something?”
“You know my name,” he said, and she stilled. She fixed the cuffs of her coat. Adrien leaned forward. “I never told you my name.”
She crossed her arms. She wasn’t looking at him. “A thief has to know her mark.”
“You get to know my name, but I can’t know yours,” he said.
“I told you - they call me Ladybug,” she said, but Adrien shook his head.
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
She sighed. “I can’t tell you. If one person knows, then everyone knows.”
“I wouldn’t tell anyone,” he said, but she shook her head.
“I stole from you. I can’t take the chance of you changing your mind.”
“But you didn’t take anything from me, not really, and not anything I cared about.” He thought of all the stupid trinkets that his father had barely missed. He thought about the pocket watch his father hadn’t even noticed was gone. He thought of his mother’s ring, still in its place by the piano. “And I wouldn’t change my mind.”
“I can’t know that for sure,” she said.
“You can.” He stood up, walking over so that he was standing only a foot in front of her. And still, that distance felt like the width of a canyon. If anything, the buzzing in his skin got worse. She seemed to feel it, too, but they both pushed it aside for the time being. “Did you know? I picked my favorite colors, too.”
Her eyebrows furrowed, sky blue eyes confused.
“I have two,” he continued. “Red” - he held up the rose from the garden, offering it to her; it was the same shade as her clothes - “and blue.”
Realization seemed to dawn on her, as her fingers wrapped around the stem of the rose. Something seemed to fracture, deep within her, and she stepped away from him.
“I have to go,” she said, her voice shaking, and she started to back toward the window.
“Wait,” Adrien said, reaching out but not quite grasping her gloved hand. She stopped, one leg already out of the window.
“What is it?” she asked, and it looked like she was at once yearning for and dreading his next words.
“Will you come back?”
She looked up at the deep blue sky, as if she could somehow find the answer there. “I shouldn’t,” she said, shaking her head and looking back at him. But the stars were still there, caught in her eyes, and Adrien persisted.
“But will you?”
“I…” She looked down at the rose in her hand. Then back at him. He could almost hear the fight happening in her head and in her heart.
Instead of saying anything, she simply gazed at him, all the sky in her eyes, and she held the rose close to her chest.
“Goodnight, Adrien,” she said, and then she jumped down from his windowsill.
Adrien nearly cried out, but he clamped his hands over his mouth, not wanting to alert the patrol. He watched her fall, tucking into a roll as she hit the ground. Once she was on her feet, she ran to the wall as if she hadn’t just jumped out of a window.
And, just like the first night she’d come, she had no trouble climbing up the wall. She looked back, there at the top of the wall, for just a brief second before jumping down to the outside of the wall.
But in that brief second, he could see her silhouette, gloved fingers holding the rose he’d given her close to her face, like she was taking that small moment to appreciate it’s scent.
“Goodnight,” Adrien said, softly. He leaned on the windowsill, closing his eyes to the warm breeze.
It smelled like roses.