it's finally here...
Gabriel Agreste: the Character (and fumble) Ever, a Rewrite: Part I.
A character who deserved better... from the writers.
Seen in Canon (S1~S4)
i. Current Gabriel/Hawk Moth
This essay by @doozyfloozy is soo sick, so go read it. I won’t go into much detail since i want to expand on my rewrite, but basically, he’s a humiliated and insecure man that subconsciously hides it by putting up the legend, the myth, the celebrity act, shaped by idols, the 20th century fashion, and the culture that arrives with the elite. He’s cold —though often explodes at subordinates—, reserved, and neglectful of his son. In the show, Adrien says he wasn’t always like this, that his closed-off and aloof demeanor came as a colateral of his grief.
However, the only flashback we get about pre-Émilie’s death (when Adrien was about 10?) shows another neglectful Gabriel, deep in his search for a cure, who doesn’t even greet Adrien when he comes back from a search, possibly having taken days or weeks. We do know about Papa Corn, though, so we know Gabriel had a cheesy/good-father side, at least with baby/toddler Adrien.
As Hawk Moth, even though his goal is to bring back his wife from the dead, he’s exceptionally stupid, losing for almost a year straight to a couple teenagers in ways one could never imagine, and he seems to enjoy his little villain-time, always reciting soliloquies/monologues about his victim/win/whatever.
His past, unknown, shapes the way he goes around the world. façade or not, we know he acts as The Man (who calls the shots)*, the one who has the most power over everyone, whose time is more valuable than everybody’s, whose presence is a luxury, and whose word is to be obeyed. He works all day long (with no indicatives of a regular sleep schedule; we haven’t seen his room, or bed, or him in pajamas or just-got-up or about-to-sleep; actually, we get late-night Gabriel still in his office/Nathalie’s room and suit), doesn’t care about anybody, sees his son fifteen minutes per day (if he’s lucky), and refers to his employees not respectfully but curtly and politely if his wrath isn’t unleashed by the day’s events. He “attends” most of his compromises via videocall with a tablet that is always carried by Nathalie, who walks him around. he hasn’t been outside his house since his wife di(sappear)ed. He’s admired, feared, and very respected. This post suggests his net worth is 16.6 billion USD dollars.
In short, he’s a fashion mogul taken over by grief and his own mind, who transforms into Paris’ supervillain to bring back his wife and restore his family.
i.i. Nathalie, a.k.a. The only person he showed affection apart (and more?) from his son, as both civilian and villain
At first, she’s just his secretary, whom he treats just as badly (maybe a little better) as Adrien’s bodyguard.
Then, she’s her confidante (the collector)/partner in crime(heroe's day)/person of comfort (starting in s2, ep queen wasp with that little hug).
Then, she gets sick, and he starts caring for her more and more with each passing day, leading him to be physically and verbally affectionate with her, which leads to Adrien believing they’re together, or at least very obviously in love with each other. This belief, Gabriel vehemently and angrily denies since he’s still in love with Émilie.
However, after this interaction with Adrien (in Félix, S3, ep. 23), he only gets more loving with her, going as far as to cancel/abort very winning akumas/fights for her sake (though you could argue it was just plot armor for Ladybug; giving Hawk Moth a reason —any reason— to leave the battlefield and lose).
Eventually, she gets so sick she’s bedridden. He lets her stay in a room of her own, which presumably was hers from before because it's cluttered with her books and other things that are hers. He regularly checks on her and stays by her side, either villainy-ing or working regularly, maintaining her monitors and other technology keeping her alive.
She’s the only person we know of (aside from Émilie and Adrien) that he genuinely, non-villainously smiled to, and not only allowed physical touch but often started/continued/deepened it himself. He also is very comfortable by her side, as he often gets too close to her for a man who cringes/recoils from people passing by him. He lets her stay in his manor, has a room for her, and spends most of his time with her...
Though, even when he shows care/arguably-love for her by saying he doesn’t want her to be Mayura/Catalyst/working anymore, he: 1) does allow her to be Mayura/Catalyst more, and 2) keeps her working even when bedridden. One can argue he switches between rest/work demands from her, since we’ve seen him say/action upon only one (rest), but seen actually happen both, if not just the latter.
We don’t know exactly how they met, but that, with Émilie, they traveled to the Tibet in the successful search of the miraculous; then, that they traveled alone in the unsuccessful search of a cure for Émilie’s illness...
Concept that was introduced in very late season 4 through season five and season six, not foreshadowed and almost as if it wasn’t planned beforehand.
The nail in the coffin comes in the season 5 finale, when it turns out all of his love and care was fake, and that he had been using her this whole time. He sees her dying, in her deathbed, and plainly says he knew she’d be loyal to him until the end. He turns on her Alliance-mind-manipulation, and leaves her to die.
i.ii. Gabriel Agreste/Hawk Moth overall arc
Our first impression of him as Gabriel Agreste in Season 1 is a stupidly overprotective but absent father and aloof fashion mogul, but outside from that, a good (?) guy that’s grieving his recently-lost wife, and does care about his son, letting him go to hang-outs with his friends and hugging him every once in a while.
Our first impression of Hawk Moth is your classic main antagonist with a brain smooth enough to lose every single episode and keep the series going, a format in which he releases the villain of the day and loses every time. We don’t know about his motivations, but given that he seems to enjoy his time as Hawk Daddy, we can assume he’s evil just because it’s fun. Motivation: Plot Device.
By Season 2, these two characters merge and we get a complex villain, driven by grief and sadness and the inability to move on. We know that his motivation is to genuinely bring his wife back and get his family together and happy again, and that he wouldn’t risk his son’s life at all... Though, well. Maybe, you know? As seen in Gorizilla and Queen Wasp, he does care about him, but since the finale of Season 1, he isn’t letting Adrien hang out at all, and keeps him in his room or school/fencing. In the finale, we see him worried about Nathalie since she risks herself so he doesn’t get his identity revealed and his Miraculous taken by the Squad. Motivation: Family, but still Plot Device because he’s very smooth brained.
By Season 3, his resolve gets slightly confusing. As mentioned in the Nathalie section, he sacrifices winning schemes for her/her health/wellbeing and is overly and overtly affectionate with her (even romantic, as in those scenes in the finale). In the episode 24, Ladybug, he states (and I quote), «I’m not so sure anymore», when talking about the Miraculous with Nathalie after their scheme fails (because he aborted it to save her), while holding her hand and crouching to her eye-level and leaning into her.
Aside from that, episode Chat Blanc starts to hint at Gabriel abusing Adrien, both physically and psychologically, though timeline gets erased. It basically tells us that Gabriel doesn’t really care about Adrien.
Alliances with Chloé and Lila.
Motivation: Ruling the world + Plot Device.
In Season 4, he’s still smooth brained and gets outsmarted by Félix. He’s still affectionate with Nathalie, and we even get to see a chessboard by the foot of her bed, having been left mid-game or wasn’t put away after they finished playing, which tells us this is a regular occurrence. (Okay, it doesn’t, I’m just GabeNath trash). We also see Nathalie asking Gabriel if he had had breakfast, and offering part of hers to him, which he accepts. We don’t get to see if he actually eats it or not, so there’s a chance he gave it back, though I highly doubt it.
Ephemeral. No comments.
He gets increasingly more desperate for the Miraculous, and he seems crazy. Beginning of his descent into insanity.
In the finale, he gets every Miraculous except the main ones, including the time-controlling and space-controlling ones. Best Finale until now in terms of win-lose, since Maribug was left in a very bad position.
Motivation: Catching Ladybug and Chat Noir and Ruling The Universe + (you guessed it) Plot Device.
In Season Five, he goes fucking batshit crazy. We get GabeNath divorce, alliance with Tomoe, he goes bananas, blunders the easiest, easiest way to win and save his wife only because he absolutely needed to fight Ladybug and Chat Noir. He gets his arm cataclysmed, is a jerk to Marinette, tries to break Marinette and Adrien up in favour of Kagami and Adrien, is a “good father” to Adrien during the beginning by making horrid pancakes, and plays happy family with Nathalie in front of him.
Then, he ships Adrien off to London and keeps him in a Sensory-Deprivation padded room with a mini football. By this point, he’s lost his every marble.
The Finale is the worst one ever, in my opinion. He fights with Maribugnoire instead of Adrien, leaves Nathalie to die, doesn’t give up when Mari gives him the opportunity to and betrays her in favour of suicide and saving Nathalie instead of searching for a solution, and tells her to remind Adrien of the times he tried to be a “good father”.
He dies a “hero”, and even though he tells Mari what he did, he leaves a letter for Adrien telling him to continue his mission. Tf
Honorific Mentions: Grooming Chloé and Lila, bullying Marinette, selling Adrien, forcing him to be in a relationship with Kagami, sexualising and exploiting his image, and attempting necrofilia.
what. The. Fuck
ii. Past Gabriel
Emo or punk, sporting spiky collars, leather jackets and dyed black mohawk hair. Works in his parent’s fast food, fries-exclusive chain. Low-middle class. starts as a dressmaker/seamstress. Is at least friends with Harry Clown, relationship that later dies/they grow distant, though Harry’s still quite fond of him. Then André Bourgeois, in that moment as "pennyless" as him. Then Émilie, who later becomes his wife. Then Audrey, who helps him become the renowned, famous fashion mogul we know. Then Nathalie.
We know Gabriel is embarrassed, mortified even, about the person he once was, going as far as to trying to burn all of the evidence of his past, or trying to pretend it didn't exist/burying it all under the rug (as in the Fried Potato Superhero costume). Nathalie keeps said evidence in a safe.
His parents are apparently very chill people, very jolly, the type to gush on their child until they become slightly love-spoiled, which, granted, he isn’t. We don’t know if they were always like this, or why Gabriel went as far as to never even mention them to Adrien or let them see him, or why he even is the way he is. It’s like it doesn’t even make sense for Gabriel’s parents, or Gabriel himself, to be the way they are due to the way they seem so, so different from each other; almost as if unrelated. Was it that his parents were batshit insane as young parents and are now chill? Was it that money changed his life and felt that his parents, for all their love and care, are now gross to him because of their social class? Was it that he was just a jerk? We’ll never know.
now:
My Rewrite: Part I: Backstory.
if you saw this post before, you surely noticed it was meant to cover 5 topics, but My Yappabilities proved it too much for a single post. so, i’ll add my thanks, then the main part of this post.
a. My Super Duper Thanks
@talesofgabrielandnathalie ’s Gabriel. essentially just a good father to his 4 children and a good husband to Nathalie and has a dad bod. 10/10.
@dishwater-blondie ’s Gabriel in Misopaterism and The Worst and Best Thing. soooo complex and interesting. shaped my view of him permanently. would make posters about those fics and hang them all across my walls. dish I hope you know you’re the best Gabriel writer ever. also the best Nathalie writer ever. also the best writer ever in general shduhsud i eat up your fics like a starved rat
@myladynoire ’s Gabriel in Smalltown Boy. God just. he’s a gay douchebag and then a bi douchebag. perfect. 10/10. if I didn’t have my backstory this would definitely be it. plagues my mind.
@rwsdarw ’s Gabriel, which isn’t written because he’s a drawer (/j) but you can see something across his art. best artist ever JJ I love you i’ll eat, steal, and hang your artstyle and art in my walls. also his “““basic””” and underfleshedout future au is the best ever and I love it.
thank u you all shaped my view of gabriel forever and ever and i very much admire you all <3
b. Backstory: Childhood/Teen Years (0~19 y/o)
Gabriel Agreste is born on the 23rd of April in 1972 as the third of six born of the couple Edmond Agreste, an organist of the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Lisieux, and Madeleine Agreste, a seamstress. When they married, she was eighteen and he was thirty-three.
His oldest sister, Hélène, was born when Madeleine was nineteen, four years older than Gabriel. Safe to say Madeleine doesn't exactly want to have children, or marry Edmond, or marry at all, but thinks it's what's best for her. That lack of want for her children is easily read by them, as she also thinks they shouldn't get very coddled. She sees them as rather exotic creatures that the only link to her they have is that she gave birth to them, and thus has to feed them and make sure they don't die.
Honestly, Edmond doesn't want children either. He thinks kids are a nuisance and sees them as an extension of himself that should continue his path on life. He ignores his female children at all costs since in his mind they don't have any future except the one Madeleine has and has to teach them: marry young, keep quiet, have babies, and be a good wife to their husbands.
Since his children are an extension of himself, Edmond also sees them as a vessel, a someone that will be what he wanted to be instead of a filthy little musician: a priest. Edmond (Edmond's oldest son) will become a priest. Or not, but for his father, he will. As priests have to commit to celibacy and being his father's favourite, Edmond rarely does anything apart from studying Latin, Greek, theology and philosophy. He doesn't help with his younger siblings, or around the house, he just studies.
Unsurprisingly, Hélène is the one to be in charge of her siblings, and though Gabriel is one of them, he does help her. Or tries to. Or thinks about it while looking at her and their mother desperately trying to put the babies to sleep. He usually helps her cook, run errands, play with his younger siblings, and, the first time he gets a hole in his clothes (around three or four years old), to sew.
Edmond (father) doesn't think much about it at first, but over time, it nags at him that one of his sons is getting into such a feminine activity. So, he prohibits Gabriel from sewing... and sends him to his room to read the Bible, where, instead of doing that, he sews, but since he's locked up in his room, no one can see that.
Gabriel’s four. He has brown hair and unruly curls and a knack for grabbing his sister’s Bible and his father’s leather bag.
Ever since Gabriel can remember, his father had described him as a foolish, ungrateful child. One that didn't deserve God's help or mercy or forgiveness or clemency, one that didn't deserve to live in God's world, and one that would undoubtedly end up in Hell. God made no mistake but to make me believe you weren't one, Edmond would say. Foolish child. Every day you get farther away from Him is a day you'll regret your entire life. The weight of sin He can see behind your eyes, and when you finally leave this world, he'll have everything but mercy for you.
He wished his father would stop talking about Him.
I can't even look at you.
Then, he didn't know what was worse.
After biting sobs back through his father's sermon, he made his way to Hélène's room. Her bed was warm and cosy, or maybe it was her arm beneath his beck and her thumb rubbing his shoulder. He sniffed and looked up to her. "Do you think God hates me?" he asked.
She squeezed him closer. "I wouldn't have thought so, no," she murmured. "Father sometimes gets mad, but he isn't God."
Edmond (son) isn't coddled. He just has his father's respect, which, granted, his siblings don't. His youngest siblings (Anne Madeleine and Mathieu Sébastien) deeply admire him, but the others don't, since they can see he's a stuck-up bitch.
The thing about Gabriel is that his inclination for the arts is visible to his family like neurodivergencies to middle school bullies, and since he's the only one that isn't following the blue-collar, manly and religious path his brothers are, they look down on him. Deep down, Edmond (father), no matter how much he thinks Gabriel is a failure (often treating him like he doesn't exist and only paying attention to him when he scolds/punishes him), he subconsciously sees himself in him. He was also the failed priest/pastor/bishop/religious position project that instead walked his path to the organ, and that is exactly what nags him about Gabriel so much. Even their attitudes, explosive and intolerant and hot-headed, are identical.
In short, Edmond hates himself so much he pours it out on the child that resembles him the most.
And some of you may be thinking, shouldn't it be, ironically, Edmond (son)? No, because he's what his father couldn't be. He's precious. He's what his grandparents expected of him, he's exactly what he needs to be, and his father almost thinks of himself as lesser than him. Almost, because in reality he's * The Man, and he’s superior to absolutely everyone.
Now, Gabriel's inclination for the arts doesn't stop at sewing. He also likes Bach. He listens to his father play and he's like, I wanna do that. So his musical inclination starts there. He reads his father’s scores in his free time and sometimes stays behind the door when he’s practicing.
Gabriel meets Harry in école élémentaire, CP, and André in lycée.
Harry's making sand castles, and a classmate of theirs continuously stomps on them. He starts throwing sand at them, and Gabriel joins because he also hates the classmate. They get sand in their ear and scream for the teacher, and when she comes, Gabriel says it's his fault and he was the one throwing sand at the little girl, who's hugging the teacher's leg and doesn't refute his claim. Harry watches him leave. Since then, they were friends.
André's the guy who sat next to him in Maths and helped him after finishing his (first day, no more no less) homework, and Gabriel was still battling with the first question.
Gabriel's five. He presses his head against the pillow as Daniel wails, and wails. He doesn't know much about the baby. Only that babies cry, and that they would be friends once he stopped. But he isn't stopping. He gets hoarse. His mother weeps. Then, he hears a noise, sharp, familiar. Daniel's cries get louder. Madeleine stops crying, because she knows she may be next. She starts singing a little tune, and before he knows, he's asleep, just like Daniel.
Gabriel’s twelve. He’s nearly six feet tall and unable to get over 100 pounds. His clothes hang both loose and short on him, and his dark circles have settled for what seems eternity. His siblings keep wailing, at night, in the morning, at 4 in the morning, the whole day, three at a time. It's getting to him. His eyes are bloodshot and he gets a churning feeling in his chest when he hears the pleading sob of an infant, even if it's far away, even if it isn't even real.
In lycée (high school), Gabriel's average. He does just fine in most subjects, excellent in Art, and exceptionally horrid in Mathematics. His highest (genuine) grade ever was a 12/20, the median was a depressing failure ranging from 0 to 7, except the few semesters when the new teacher (the one that replaced the freshly-retired professor that hated his guts) turned out to be a twenty-something, graduated-a-week-ago woman whose concept of "stay after class" was very different from what he expected. It helped him graduate and surprisingly, no one batted an eye to his grades suddenly and consistently shooting up to 17. They weren’t caught and never spoke again after his graduation. He only told André and Harry, and promised to knock them out cold if it ever reached somebody else.
His Literature professor is the only one person in his school trajectory that cared about him. Short and always drowning in cardigans too big to her and a color that, though never the same, would never favour her skin undertone. With a smile so kind it surpassed the levels of making him want to punch it out of her face, instead making him want to cry because how come someone is so kind to such a dirty child like him. She’d notice when Gabriel was in a bad mood and would snap at anybody, or when the bruise he has in his arm is very different from the ones he gets fighting, and take him out of class to ask if he was okay. She knew Edmond, not personally, but frequented the Cathédrale and saw him interact with some people. Tall as the stained windows, expression like he’s talked with the Devil himself, and hands (and feet) (a/n: in case you don’t know you play with your feet too when playing the organ) like he’s made a pact with him to play so divinely. She’s never heard him utter a word to anyone, only glaring at them and leaving hastily from every brief interaction he has.
She helps him, sometimes. With assignments he can't get his way around. Gabriel doesn’t know what to say, or how to react, and he doesn’t respond when Mme. Hoffmann (he never learns her first name) asks him if he’s okay and the classic “is everything going okay at home”. He doesn’t know if he even wants to talk about it (especially since "it", in his mind, is not only what he deserves but what's normal), but he isn’t willing to discover that.
He doesn’t let her get very close. He’s fine on his own. He can manage. After all, deep down, he knows there’s no point in trying anyway.
Gabriel’s seventeen. Not a day passes he doesn’t bruise and his sketchbooks, at home, are Anne’s. The tips of his fingers are both bloody and calloused from where his father poked the needle too many times: God doesn't allow his sons to make dresses.
He got sent to detention every week or so, usually due to getting into fights with not only his classmates but every tough guy that felt the absolute need to pick on his friends and acquaitenances. Or him, sometimes, for being lanky or artsy or poor and unable to get himself lunch. His siblings wouldn't do much except for Hélène, that took care of his wounds, and the rest, who would tattle on him to his father.
They also tattle on him when he’s sewing, or as of late, drawing on his sketchbook or (God forbid) reading a fashion magazine he traded with one of Harry’s girl friends for a date with Mathieu.
Actually, not them all, just Daniel.
Daniel is... peculiar. He seems to have it out for Gabriel, despite being younger and actually intimidated by him. He’s Edmond’s (son) little follower. Most of his hand-me-downs are directly from him, instead of passing through Gabriel, since their body types are the most similar. Gabriel’s the lankiest of all. Skin and bone, thin down to bone structure (and often punished in the form of stripping him from a meal or two) and having to adjust his hand-me-downs so they don’t glide over his bony hips and pool around his feet.
Daniel doesn’t actually not like Gabriel, though he’ll never even think about it. Somewhere in his mind he believes that by now liking him, his father favours him more, which is deeply untrue; his father doesn’t favour anybody except from Edmond and even then, it’s by a little.
Edmond (father) (as dish coined it) always made sure everyone knew what was on his mind and who was he mad at. ** «One could only hope you weren’t the one who disappointed him», and Daniel believed that showing compassion for Gabriel was one of the things that made his father think less of him.
That, because he thought of him at all.
Anne-Madeleine and Hélène didn’t quite mind that (i mean, they did mind, but they knew it was futile to) since Edmond didn’t think about them at all, so there was nothing they (especially Hélène) could lose by comforting their brother. Hélène was more direct. He often thought of her as his mother and she almost took up every “motherly” memory he had of a mother figure in his life, since Madeleine somehow managed to be away from them while staying at home the entire day.
Anne-Madeleine on the other hand, barely interacted with Gabriel. Under his amazed gaze, she’d tell their father she was the one threading the needle when he found Gabriel sewing and pretended the sketchbooks were hers, but nothing else. Not a sympathetic glance or a comforting hand or a hug or a get-out from Edmond’s punishment because it wasn’t worth the wrath he’d show if he catched her.
Mathieu was the French, 80’s version of an iPad kid. Bible kid, if you will. I don’t know how to put it but he was annoying as hell except when the Edmonds were around.
Jean-Sébastien is excruciatingly similar to his grandmother on Edmond's side. His cheeks are chubby and his hair curls into glowing specks of light, and when he calls his name, he mumbles "Babiel". His cries aren't as loud as his older siblings’, and Gabriel is thankful for that. On his fifth birthday he asks for his father to play Bach’s Great Fugue, and he refuses.
Edmond (son) is perfect. He's smart and clean and pure and reads the bible to his siblings. Does he want to? Does he know? That he'd disappoint his father just as badly as his brother did? His father never seemed satisfied with his study. Always more. Always room to be better. Never enough. Eventually, somewhere along his mid-to-late twenties, just before getting ordained, he'd see the futility in it. In being his father's almost-perfect son. But in the meantime, he'd keep up the façade. He'd comb his hair back, hold the rosary between his hands, and pray. He didn't know for what, exactly. Or maybe he did, but putting it into words would make it hold actual meaning, and he had no time for that.
Edmond (father) doesn’t like Harry, or how much time he and Gabriel spend together, mainly because of The Rumours (a pathological liar of a child that assured to have seen them kissing) but he didn’t even believe it could be real. From his son, at least. Imagine being gay. He did make sure to drill homophobia into his (bisexual) son.
André’s on the heavier side and picks at his acné until it bleeds. His grades in Maths aren’t worth the beating he gets afterward, though Gabriel saves him every time.
André doesn’t know what the fuck Gabriel’s deal is, though across six years of friendship, he manages to get an idea behind the constantly-angry teenager he seemed to be. He was great to watch Dragon Ball with (at André’s place), not so great to try to teach Maths to, and definitely horrid to say anything about himself. He barely knew his birthday,
And that time that, between his collarbones, a purple bruise with the shape of a cross bloomed poorly hidden by his askew collar for almost a fortnight.
He didn’t know much about him. He never saw him cry. His hair was greasy for no reason and the only reason he knew he had siblings was because he saw him glaring at Edmond across the hallways and asked what was that about. “He’s one of my siblings”, he’d responded, and refused to say anything else.
Harry’s blonde and his smile is the most charming you could ever imagine, telling the funniest jokes you couldn't even come up with. He’s friends with everybody, though it proves useless when Gabriel’s forced to step away and lean against the nearest wall until Harry finishes his interactions.
Harry, contrary to André, had been with a crying Gabriel twice. Once in his own house (Harry’s), and the other, in the school bathroom.
The mattress of Harry's bed is much softer than Gabriel's; the padding is twice as thick. The room smells of laundry soap and his collection of vinyl discs. When Gabriel starts to cry, it seems unprompted. Nothing had happened. He's staring at the plate of cookies Harry's mom had left when she'd passed by his room, and when he asks —"What's wrong?"— he doesn't get anything else than muffled weeping and sniffing and a panicked expression like he can't (or doesn't want to) believe that he's crying, and worse, in front of someone. His head shakes with his hands, pressed snug against his damp face. He wants to say something, anything, say that it was an accident or a mistake or an overreaction or just for not to get looked at like an animal at the zoo.
Harry sits by his side.
Then, it’s January. Early into the month, when snow sets heavily onto the streets and the rosary is cold to his lips. He’d talked back to his father the night before and his right cheek was still sore from the punch he’d received. The left side of his head had hit against a wall, his nose had bleed, and sleep had come too easily.
He can’t handle Catechism today.
The school’s male bathroom holds more than one stall that’s out of service. Gabriel always chooses the same one—when he’s afraid, when he’s enraged, when he doesn’t want to see anybody, when he doesn’t want to make eye contact with the reflection in the mirror that stares back at him and seems to recite his every sin since he was born. He doesn’t like his stall. Sure, it’s ”safe”, but why does he need it in the first place? Why is it comforting, when it shouldn’t? He should be facing the world, or eighty minutes of Catechism, puff his chest but not so much and keep his head high but not enough to dare God to look into his eyes. Not whatever the hell is curling up in a cowardly ball against the very gross tiled wall of the bathroom stall like he isn’t a man.
He doesn’t like that for a variety of reasons, but the first one is that he wants to be a man. He does feel like one; at least, when his closed fist bashes against his classmates’ faces. When it springs back covered in blood that isn’t his, when the so-tough victim recoils in fear, when he pushes himself into his feet beside his win spitting blood and glaring at him because he’s won, he’s a man. He’s a man when he acts like his father. And then, like it never happened. He’s just... what is he? Nothing. That’s the part that he wishes he wouldn’t dwell upon; it’s what his father always preaches. He isn’t yet a man. He’s way too sinful, too ungrateful. Too foolish. It’s almost ingrained into him now that he will never wash the dirt away.
Little by little, his resolve both crumbles and strengthens.
He won’t be a man in the eyes of his father, but he could be one in his own eyes.
At least, he could pretend to.
Then, in the cold school bathroom, he’s crying and hugging his knees because of all this. Harry comes and tries to comfort him by (when Gabriel’s mostly ok) making a hooonk joke. Gabriel is offended but also finds it so endearing they start making out. It’s messy and they don’t know what they’re doing, but whatever it is, Gabriel leaves hastily.
It repeats a couple times. Gabriel sneaks out at night, they find a dark alley, an empty corner, or whatever. Then, Gabriel can’t take the guilt anymore, and stops it, pulling away from Harry. They grow distant, and Harry leaves after graduating.
It all comes down to when Gabriel escapes the house at nineteen with nothing more than some money and a dream in his backpack and his friend, André, and hops on a train with a destination to Paris. He didn't question the bloody lip Gabriel sported for half an hour until he washed it away drinking some water, nor the way he almost crossed himself when a church flew past them. His hand hovers mid-way to his forehead, forefinger already curling, and he stares at it as if it's alien to him. His thumb rests atop the boney joint of his forefinger, warm, strange. Should he do that? May he allow himself the luxury of thinking such a paltry gesture in hope God would forgive him from running away? It's useless.
He's lonelier than ever. Only André sits by his side, and devoid of the Divine, they stare into the fields, where nothing happens except the broadening of the gap between his salvation and his doom. Suddenly, it takes form.
Paris. It awaits for him, and when he steps foot into the unknown, he knows he can't come back.
** from Misopaterism
This was My Yap, Part I. Expect more, and thank you for reading <3
family because i couldn't add it to save my life:
Edmond Agreste, September 17th, 1934. Madeleine Agreste, July 30th, 1949.
Hélène Blanche Agreste, May 22nd, 1968. Edmond Agreste, November 1st, 1970. Gabriel Agreste, April 23rd, 1972. Daniel Agreste, October 12th, 1977. Anne-Madeleine Agreste, September 22nd, 1980. Jean-Sébastien Agreste, March 21st, 1985.
guys i made it. guys. GUYSSSS
Everyone read this beautiful yapping session from my bbg