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angelofthequeers · 4 years

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Salt-Kissed Lips

Disclaimer: I don't own ML.

My contribution to the Leap of Faith zine by @ladrienzine now that we’re allowed to publish our works! It was so awesome to work with everyone involved and it really solidified my love for these blushing dorks!

“Isn’t it fascinating?”

“Father!” Adrien’s heart nearly leaps out of his body through his throat. But when he whirls around, Gabriel Agreste is far from angry.

“I always knew they existed,” the older man says in a hushed voice. His grey-streaked blond hair, madly gleaming cold grey eyes, and pale skin tinged a sickly blue by the light of the gigantic tank are more than enough to give him the look of a mad scientist without the need for some cliché white lab coat. “Everyone called me crazy. But I always knew my Emilie was taken by one of them!”

Adrien’s not exactly sure what to say. Oh, he’s not surprised to see a real mermaid in the flesh; his father’s been obsessed with “the blue tail in the moonlight” that he’d seen just after Emilie’s disappearance for so long that Adrien would’ve been more surprised to find that they didn’t exist. It’s just that he’s never seen Gabriel quite so…unhinged before now.

“They want to take my Emilie?” Gabriel says. “I’ll take one of them! I need to make some phone calls, Adrien. Soon, the whole world will know that these things are real and I’m not crazy! People will stop avoiding you and thinking of you as the crazy man’s son! Take a good look at that thing and know that it’s the reason your mother is gone!”

Once Gabriel’s gone, Adrien turns back to the massive tank that’s part of the marine park in which Gabriel works. The brilliant blue eyes that glare back at him are so full of venom that it’s a wonder they’re not shooting jellyfish barbs at him – wait, can mermaids even do that? Can they speak human languages? Or breathe air? What can they do?

“I’m sorry,” he says. Whether or not she can hear or understand him, he at least needs to make it clear to himself that he’s not his father. The sight of the girl with long dark hair in pigtails, a vivid scarlet tail dotted with black scales, and matching scales across her chest and face, almost like a mask, is like mild indigestion in his gut.

This is wrong. Okay, so Emilie might have been taken by a merperson, and Gabriel’s got every right to be full of grief. But keeping a mermaid prisoner and turning her into an exhibit to be gawked at for the rest of her life? There’s no way Adrien can justify this to himself. The hatred in her eyes isn’t helping, and neither is the fact that…wow, she’s stunning.

Oh no. Does this make Adrien a scaly?

Snap out of it! That’s not important right now!

The seed of a daring idea suddenly sprouts in his mind. Should he dare –?

Gabriel will be furious.

But this is the right thing to do.

But can he disappoint his father?

It’s not like Gabriel’s been much of a father since Emilie’s disappearance. He’s pretty much been raised by Nathalie, his father’s assistant.

He can’t let this happen. If he sits back and lets Gabriel turn this mermaid into an aquarium animal, he’s just as bad as the man that people associate him with. And if there’s one thing he’s not, it’s Gabriel Agreste.

“Hey.” He lightly taps the glass. The mermaid bares her jagged teeth and recoils, her black pigtails billowing around her like seaweed. “I’m gonna get you out, okay?” When she doesn’t seem to comprehend him, he points at himself, then at her, then up at the top of the tank. The hostility fades from her face, replaced with a puzzled frown. “Just hold on.”

Adrien bolts up the stairs out of the room as fast as humanly possible. He can’t be caught – he just can’t – if he’s caught, Gabriel will totally end him – whatever love the man has for his son can’t be any stronger than his rabid obsession with avenging Emilie.

Once Adrien’s outside and at the edge of the tank, he pauses. Is he really going to do this? Betray his father like this? After all these years of searching for the thing that took Emilie…

But this mermaid isn’t to blame. And she’s not a thing. Besides, will Gabriel really just up and be a better father once he’s turned this mermaid into a freak show? Or will he continue to obsess over her and soak up the glory of such a discovery?

Before he can once again doubt himself, Adrien sticks his hand into the tank and splashes, hoping to attract her attention. Once she’s up here, he can grab her and haul her out, smuggle her through the park somehow, down to the beach nearby –

Something grabs his wrist and yanks him into the tank. He yelps, although this is a bad move as his mouth is instantly full of water – he can’t breathe, the mermaid’s eyes are boring into him, he’s gonna be fish food –

He struggles even harder when the mermaid grabs his face. But rather than try and devour him with her terrifying teeth, she wrenches his mouth open and blows bubbles into it. Adrien reflexively swallows…and whoa, he’s not drowning! He can breathe underwater as effortlessly as in air!

“I’m Adrien. What’s your name?” he says to test this, and his voice rings in his head like echolocation in the marine documentaries he loves watching.

“I don’t trust you enough to give you my name. What do you think I should be called?” The mermaid’s voice is melodic, like she’s singing as she talks. It’s a sound that Adrien would gladly record and hoard for himself to listen to again and again; a sound that’s just as beautiful as the girl to whom it belongs.

“Um…” Two strips of red seaweed woven through her pigtails float above her head, almost like antennae, making her resemble a very fishy insect, especially with her wide eyes behind the red scale mask and her black-spotted red tail. “You kind of look like a – a ladybug…”

“Ladybug…” the mermaid says slowly, as though testing the word. “Ladybug. I am Ladybug.” She tilts her head, examining Adrien as though he’s a particularly interesting specimen. Which is ironic, given their positions. “You’re not like the other one. He’s full of hate.”

“I’m sorry about him,” Adrien says. He instinctively reaches out to take one of Ladybug’s pale, red-webbed hands, but stops himself just in time in case touching a mermaid is offensive or uncomfortable for her or something. “He thinks a merperson took my mother years ago. He’s been obsessed with avenging her ever since.”

“We don’t take humans,” Ladybug growls. “Humans beg to come with us. Many of my kind are humans that we saved from their own lives, whether they hated them or were in danger or simply discontent.”

“You think my mum…hated her life?” Adrien tries to wrap his head around this new information. Would Emilie really have gone freely with the merpeople? Left Gabriel? Left…him? Sure, their lives hadn’t been perfect, but no life is, right?

“I don’t know,” Ladybug says. “But if you help me escape, I will gladly share more information with you. I’ve always been fascinated by humans. My friends warned me not to come too close to shore…I should have listened to them…”

“Right! Yeah!” Adrien says. “If I lift you out, I can carry you out of here. There’s a beach just outside here. You can breathe air, right?”

Ladybug smiles and nods. The sight should be terrifying, what with how her sharp teeth are bared like he’s a tasty morsel, but it’s actually kind of cute and makes her look gorgeous, even if the blue tank light is making her appear rather ghostly. Swallowing, he kicks for the surface and emerges into the warm air with a gasp, then hauls himself out of the tank and leans at the edge to dip his hand back in. Ladybug’s head surfaces just a moment later. Now in the natural light of the late afternoon sun, her skin has a rosy glow to it that just enhances her prettiness, and Adrien’s stomach does a flip-flop as he carefully drags her out of the water.

“Thank you, Adrien,” Ladybug says. Adrien takes a moment to adjust her in his grip, shivering at the way her glittery, slippery tail hooks around his arm for extra support. It doesn’t feel earthly, but it also doesn’t feel like the fish he and Gabriel have caught many times before on the rare occasion that Gabriel would spend father-son time with him. Or maybe that was just a way to keep an eye out for mermaids.

“So…you guys “save” humans, right?” Adrien whispers as he stumbles through the building. Thank god that it’s after closing time, so he’s not bumping into people everywhere he turns.

“Yes,” Ladybug says. “We’re not kidnappers. We only take humans of their own free will.”

“Uh…how exactly do you do that? Just constantly blow bubbles in our mouths?”

Ladybug giggles. The sound nearly makes Adrien fall over and cry at the unfairness. How can one person – mermaid – have such a beautiful voice? Maybe Ariel had been truer to life than he’d thought.

“Our kisses have many effects on humans,” she says. “We can entrance them. We can cure them. We can cause disease in them. We can also turn them into one of us.”

“Whoa. Seriously?” Adrien’s brain wants to implode at this overload of information, though thankfully it doesn’t betray him as he carefully pushes the entrance doors open with his shoulder and sets off down the path to the beach. “You can actually make me one of you?”

Ladybug once again regards him with her curious head-tilt. “Would you like that?” she says. “Your father is not a very nice man, is he?”

“He’s doing the best he can,” Adrien says automatically. “He’s still not over Mum’s disappearance.” But even as he says the words, he knows they’re a lie. When’s the last time Gabriel had hugged him? Spoken to him for a purpose other than to issue an order? Spent time with him outside of obsessing over merpeople and dragging Adrien into his vengeful crusade?

And it’s not like anyone else likes Adrien either. When your father’s loony and mermaid-obsessed, people don’t generally see the point in assuming that you’re any better. Crazy by association, he’s been branded. Either that or other mermaid fanatics pester him for information and access to his father.

“The transformation is reversible,” Ladybug says as though reading his mind. Who knows, maybe she can? “If you ever decide that you’re unhappy, you can return to the land. But I wouldn’t be able to associate with you if you chose that. It would be too dangerous for –”

“Adrien! Come back this instant!”

Adrien gasps and ducks behind a thick clump of bushes, praying to every deity above that there’s no sign of them sticking out for Gabriel to see.

“Son! You know how important this is to me!” Now there’s a plea in Gabriel’s voice. “Bring the mermaid back! Do it for your mother!”

But if Ladybug’s right, Emilie would want him to do the exact opposite: to free Ladybug, not take her back to captivity. Squaring his shoulders, Adrien takes a deep breath and then makes a run for it down the sandy trail to the beach. He doesn’t remain unspotted for long; after a few moments, Gabriel shouts his name.

“Bring my mermaid back or you’ll be in more trouble than you could ever imagine!” his father bellows. Adrien’s lungs are burning – his legs are like jelly – he’s fit, sure, but this could be a literal matter of life or death – just a little further, over the soft sand and down the wet, crunchy layer –

The minute his legs hit the waves lapping the shore, Ladybug wriggles and squirms until he loses his grip on her. Although they’re in the shallows and she can’t swim, she’s able to gracefully roll further into the water until the waves catch her and pull her out. Adrien’s heart stops in his chest at the sight of the beautiful mermaid in the light of the setting sun, her tail such a beautiful, deep red and her blue eyes just as piercing as they’d been in the tank.

“Adrien Agreste!” Gabriel’s emerging from the sandy path now. His eyes are wild behind his glasses, and he’s practically frothing at the mouth. Whoops. Adrien is so grounded.

“Adrien!” Ladybug holds out her hand. “Come with me?”

Stay with his fuming father, who’ll probably lock him away for ten years for letting a mermaid go? Who hasn’t even really raised him while obsessing over Ladybug’s kind? Or go with Ladybug, who’d only shown him hostility out of self-preservation and had given him even just a little closure about his mother?

“How can you steal years of work from me?” Gabriel shouts. “Your mother would be ashamed to even call you her son!”

Time seems to stand still as Adrien makes his decision and sprints out into the crashing waves. His hand closes around Ladybug’s just as Gabriel reaches the ocean, and the mermaid grips him tightly and heaves him out until he can’t even touch the bottom.

“Adrien?” Gabriel says. Adrien looks over his shoulder, directly into Gabriel’s eyes.

“My mother would have been proud of me for doing the right thing,” are his final words to Gabriel Agreste before Ladybug tugs him into the orange ocean. When he tries to breathe and gulps in water, he realises that Ladybug’s bubble magic must have worn off…but then she’s cupping his face and kissing him, and all he can do is inhale seawater and kiss back, his eyes fluttering closed, her lips plump and salty…wait, why can’t he kick anymore, why don’t his legs work, how can he breathe so much better than before…

His eyes fly open when Ladybug pulls away. The first thing that catches his eyes is the glimmering black tail that’s replaced his legs, with brilliant green fins instead of feet and green fins up the sides of the tail. Then he looks at his hands and finds green webbing between his fingers, and there are black scales going up his torso diagonally – and there are gills on his neck –

Holy. Heck. He’s a merman. Ladybug had been telling the truth! A melodic giggle escapes the mermaid beside him, and it’s a trip to realise that he can see her clearly despite the growing lack of light.

“You make a very handsome merman, Adrien,” Ladybug says, kissing his cheek. She takes his hand and interlinks their fingers. “Are you ready to go now?”

Adrien looks back towards the shore, where Gabriel’s face can be seen above, twisted in fury and distorted through the water. Then he looks at Ladybug and her shining eyes and pretty smile, and his decision is made.

“Let’s go, Ladybug,” he says.

#miraculous ladybug #ml fic #aotq fic #aotq oneshot #ladybug #adrien agreste #ladrien #gabriel agreste #mermaid marinette #mermaid au #kisses #leap of faith

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