When The Morning Comes

by Eevee

Gabriel Agreste has been unmasked as Hawkmoth, and the girl who was fighting him all these years turns out to be Tom Dupain's daughter. And standing between them is Adrien Agreste with his life in shatters that Tom Dupain has no way of piecing together. But baking is at least a place to start.

2. Wandering Women

CHAPTER 2

Amélie Graham de Vanilly talks to lawyers with the ease with which Tom talks to his customers. It's not entirely clear what her business is, and Tom has no need to ask. It's money in a way that Gabriel Agreste and André Bourgeois would go about money, not Tom Dupain. Adrien mostly nods. There is a great deal of paperwork about the business of a teenage boy's life; questions about custodianship and where a piece of law is regulated, which demands are to be made, what expectations Adrien can expect from his father, and who it is that speaks on Gabriel Agreste's behalf and who on his son's when the father's stipulations prior to his arrest were clear that funds for both would be carried by his funding. News reports are broadcast about interviews, accusations, admissions of guilt, the legal framework of charging someone with a crime that wasn't a crime at the first offense. Tom only turns on the TV for Ultimate Mecha Strike III, a game at which Adrien is a delightful challenge. It is absurdly a blessing that the police is still keeping the boy's phone for investigative purposes.

It's on Wednesday after closing that he walks into the flat to the familiar sound of Sabine's chatter in Mandarin and to the unfamiliar sound of replies.

Tom speaks eight words Chinese and he speaks them poorly. Even to his ears, Adrien is no native speaker, betrayed by stumbling stress in syllables where Sabine's speech flows like song. But there is a conversation, and they both carry it. His wife is peeling potatoes and their house-guest is chopping them into pieces, and the beat of the knife and the hum of the peeler accompany their intent voices.

Sabine turns with a smile when Tom closes the door behind him, and continues in French. "Your grammar is perfect."

"But my tones need work, I know," Adrien says in mild resignation. "That's what all my tutors told me, too."

"Language is difficult. If you want to speak it perfectly, you'll have to speak it every day. And you should always have a reason for speaking."

"I know," says Adrien, "Italian was a lot easier."

"Have you been to Italy a lot?" she hands him the last potato and moves on to preparing the fish.

"Yeah, we used to go there a lot back when - before my mum died. My father did exhibits and shows."

"I like Italy," Sabine says, "I haven't been able to spend a lot of time there, but Marinette's grandmother is Italian and we've visited her family home a couple of times. It's difficult to close the bakery, though, and she travels a lot."

"She was at Marinette's birthday that time, right? And she was - "Adrien puts down the knife as his face twists in a comical expression of dismay, "she was the one who wanted to turn me into an angel, wasn't she."

"My mother has her opinions on what a good child is," Tom says and drains the soaking potatoes, covers them in fresh water and sets them to boil. "Not to worry, though. She's always traveling and rarely in Paris. You won't need to be afraid of her!"

"Isn't that lonely, though?"

"She always made sure I knew how to take care of myself. She was always around when I was a boy. The moment she thought I was old enough to live well without her, though, she was up and away. I know she'd be unhappy remaining here in Paris, and that she stayed so long for my sake. But I was my own person and I could do perfectly fine without her. Showing her that she'd raised me to live well on my own was the least I could do. Besides, she's very good at sending postcards!"

Adrien finishes washing the cutting board and rinses his hands before drying it. "I never even thought about moving away from Paris."

Tom finds Sabine giving him a look and a headshake, and then she takes the cutting board from Adrien's hands as he closes the third wrong drawer. "For my part, I always wanted to leave Shanghai. It wasn't because of the city, and it wasn't because of my family. But I wanted to see something else - to know what it was like to live a different life."

"And then you came to Paris?"

"Oh, it wasn't my first stop! I lived in London for two years - my sister still does, in fact. I liked it there - but I like Paris better. It's here that I found the people who became important to me."

"What about your family?"

Her smile is all nostalgia. "We were always such a small family - just my sister and I, our uncle and our grandparents. It was sad to leave my uncle, but he insisted we go. He had his restaurant to run. It won't be the same for you, I'm sure - after all, you have your aunt and your cousin in Britain already, and there's no-one you need to worry about back here."

A boy with a heart the size of Adrien's will be leaving loved ones behind no matter where he goes, but Tom doesn't disrupt Sabine's line of argument. Adrien stares at the ring on his finger.

"It feels like so much of me is still tied to Paris, though."

"Of course there is," says Sabine, "I'm the same. There's a piece of my heart that's still pulled to Shanghai. I think it's like that for everyone who has to leave their home behind to find a new one. But you know, there's so much to be found by going away and living a different life. When you meet new people and do thinks you've never done before, you'll discover things about yourself that you might have never guessed. Even with my heart the same old, I think I became a new person when I came to Paris. And I don't regret that."

Her words should make Tom happy. He knows exactly what she found, he knows exactly who it is she speaks about. His life and his home and the people he loves the most would never have happened if Sabine Cheng hadn't one day walked through the doors and asked for a croissant in barely understandable phrasebook French.

Tom's father hadn't understood her at all, in fact, but Tom understands what she's saying to Adrien now, and he swallows nauseating jealousy at that little spark of joy, that kindling of hope that Adrien never before carried. Where would they even put him up? He can't live the rest of his life on Marinette's lounge, and keeping him there on the presumption he'll eventually be dragged into her bed is daydream romanticism.

And Sabine's story is already painting a different future before Adrien's eyes. "Starting all over and becoming someone else, huh?"

"A better person, too. My uncle always says so, that he's glad I found the things that make me happy."

"Your uncle is Wang Shifu, right? Did he teach you to cook?"

"Nothing like the way he cooks," says Sabine with a little laugh as the change in topic drives out the pale spirit of unasked-for chances, "but he taught me the way around the kitchen."

"When I met Marinette in Shanghai for his birthday, I got to help me prepare the food! It was really fun, even if it was mostly just putting things away and doing washing-up. I got to help him make dumplings! Of course, he did all the folding. I just put in the filling."

"But you still helped him out a lot by doing that – take it from someone who's been making dumpling her entire life! If you like, we can make some one day," says Sabine as she puts on the kettle.

Tom keeps an eye on the potatoes. After twenty years of sharing a kitchen with Sabine, he needs not be told that this will be potato salad for lunch tomorrow, which likely has to do with Marinette's moping around the house today. Sabine spoons tea into the porcelain pot that Tom has touched only eight times, turns off the kettle as the wheeze of the heating water reaches a pitch Tom can't discern. She speaks another sentence in Mandarin as she pours hot water into the pot, swirls it around, and then empties it before filling it anew and letting it steep.

Adrien readily replies as he's watching her ministrations of the tea, and she smiles at him, says something more, and gets out another fragile porcelain cup.

Twenty minutes later sees Adrien gone to another meeting with another lawyer with a briefcase and a tight smile. Tom washes the cup he left behind and the pot used for the potatoes.

Sabine hands him her cup as well, and then sits down. "It's hard when you can't do anything to help someone."

"He takes it well."

"He shouldn't be so used to taking things like that well. When my mother died, I had my family all around me. I wasn't alone. I was allowed to cry. I didn't always have to be happy so that others wouldn't worry."

"He might feel more comfortable opening up to his aunt," Tom suggests, though Amélie Graham de Vanilly's visits with her nephew have been brief, volatile, unannounced and focused on lecturing him about how much better it will be once he's safe in the UK.

"I hope you're right," says Sabine, and shakes her head. "Of all the ways I imagined this whole story with Hawkmoth would end, it wasn't like this. Poor Marinette. I hope he won't feel too bad, going away. It's true you'll find yourself a different person in a different country, but you can't know before it that's good or not. Wouldn't it solve so much if he could've stayed like you offered back then? For him and Marinette both."

Tom wipes his hands on the kitchen towel, and stares at his own reflection in the dark window. He doesn't look much like either of his parents, having inherited the face of an uncle in Milan. But his body is built all from his father's side of the family, with roots like a mountain cemented in Paris and bread dough, grown on yeast and handcraft passed down through generations. Tom isn't like Sabine, or his mother, or this boy who speaks four foreign languages. What he knows, he learned from watching his father work, and he never finished that training, never truly learned the old skills like his father only began imparting on him. Welcoming the new coming to him is the best he can do.

"I never was much of a teacher," he finds his hands restless as he remembers, yearning for the reassurance that his bread will turn out like he wants it to. He's been baking since before he can remember, he's got daily deliveries to celebrities and politicians and people with enough money to buy his bakery thrice over. His mind knows but his hands can't accept it, and their what-if what-if doubt send in itch traveling through his entire nervous system that only a well-set dough can cool. "I'll be down in the bakery."

It shouldn't surprise him, he supposes, to see Sabine pull Adrien over for a Skype call with her uncle the next day.

#

His mother stands at the door at seven that evening with a bag of Swiss chocolate in one hand and a phone in the other.

"I'm just here for three days, since Yvette is out of the hospital for now. We're going to the new exhibit at the Centre Pompadou," she announces, "but I had to see you, of course! Look here, these are from Arash. He sends his greetings to you all!"

Tom has no idea who Arash is, but accepts the chocolates and sits his mother down for coffee. She's introduced to Adrien with no more given than his name. The chocolate is delightful and his mother needs no help to keep the conversation running. She asks Marinette about school and Sabine about her flowers, and her experiences since the last time they met in person is enough to keep her from asking anything about the teenage boy with the famous face who listens with big eyes.

Only when Marinette announces that she's going to bed and Adrien says goodnight and follows into her room does she even seem to notice. When the trapdoor has closed behind the teenagers, she leans forward and gives Tom and Sabine a look.

"I hope you've talked with her about that," she says meaningfully. "I never heard anything about any boys before. Isn't this very sudden?"

Tom can't well tell his mother the real reason Adrien is staying in Marinette's room, or even reassure her that if anyone's virtue is in danger of being unwillingly spoiled then it is highly unlikely that Marinette will be the victim.

"I trust them to be responsible," Sabine says diplomatically, "Adrien is a very nice boy. I'm confident they're not doing anything stupid."

His mother does not look satisfied at the non-answer, but is notably more interested in Adrien when she drops in for lunch the next day. Tom tries his best to steer the conversation back onto Yvette and the exhibit and Arash and that market in Shiraz, and his mother tries her best to learn something about Adrien beyond vague replies about school and hobbies. He is right in the middle of another skillfull deflection when a familiar series of knocks sound on their door and Amélie Graham de Vanilly waltzes in without waiting.

"Adrien," she says, paying no heed to the rest of the family around the table, "M. Autain suddenly had an hour free. Come along so we won't have to do this on Tuesday after all."

"Of course," Adrien obeys with what is badly concealed relief, and gives a polite wave to the family. "I'm sorry I have to leave so suddenly - the soup smells wonderful!"

"I have a table at Le Relais Plaza," says his aunt without missing a beat, "we'll eat there after. Come along now - bye-bye!"

Her farewell are the only words acknowledging Tom's family as Adrien barely has the time to put on his coat before she whisks me away.

This is where his mother finally drops all pretences of coyness.

"What was that about?" she demands. Tom looks at Sabine, and then at Marinette, and there are a number of uncomfortable seconds before Sabine finally takes that plunge.

"He's Gabriel Agreste's son."

"What?" his mother says, brow wrinkled, and then, "oh no, not that sweet boy. That man was his father? And he killed his mother?"

"He didn't kill her!" Marinette cries, "that's all speculation, and it's not true! He did it all because she died and he hid her body and all, but he didn't kill her."

His mother looks at Marinette in sympathy, but says nothing to her claims. "But that poor boy. And that father. Tom," she turns to him, "never mind the veal. We have to make pizza." And when Adrien comes back three hours later, that is exactly what she does.

After watching Tom work his loaves, Adrien almost flinches back watching Tom's mother lifts the dough only to hurl it against the table from thirty-five centimetres, pull it back and repeat the aggression.

"This is how my own nonna made it," she very earnestly tells him, breathing heavy from handling a kilo and half of water and wheat, "you have to be angry. You'll have to be really angry with someone to make a good pizza dough."

"Okay," Adrien accepts.

"It's a good method for wet dough," Tom supplies, "if you're doing it by hand, at least."

"Tom, you know we always make it by hand when we're angry. That's the point," his mother admonishes in Italian.

"Why do you need to be angry to make pizza?" Adrien asks.

His mother turns to stare at the boy before declaring, still in her native tongue, "because there is nothing his father hates more than pizza."

"I see," says Adrien, clearly hearing the words but not understanding.

"Where'd you learn Italian?" his mother continues, and this time Adrien replies in the same language.

"My family spent a lot of time there when I was little. I had classes later."

"That's good. Knowing languages is important. Traveling is important, too. I might have stayed in Paris for a while, but that got boring. I stalled. That's why I love traveling – every time I get to live in a different place and meet people who live different lives, I become a bit different, too!"

"That's what Sabine said," Adrien eagerly agrees, "that going to Paris made her a different person."

His mother has taken to kneading the dough with quick, effective force. "Marinette says you might be moving to England."

Adrien nods.

"That's good, going elsewhere. It's good that you'll have the chance to do so. You don't need to travel as much as I do in order to see the same things from it, as long as you're paying attention to the world around you and not just to yourself. And it's good to know that you're free to do so, right?"

That thin, green light from three days ago wakes in Adrien's melancholy eyes, and Tom keeps his mum, reminds himself that there's no family, there's no home, only a grave and a prison and a ravenous public ready to devour everything that is his life and his name the moment he steps outside the front door without hiding. Adrien, raised into money and every comfort that money could buy, to friends like Chloé Bourgeois and a family name that can call national diplomats and tell them to dictate their bureaucrats. Adrien, the boy who talks about family dinners and playing piano with his friends, and who wears a ring and a small, black, talking cat and has been a super-hero since he was thirteen. It's so little, and it's so big, and Tom thinks that Adrien is too young, still, to see through the comfort his wife and mother are piling around him in words and stories.

No bread in the world can compare with the dream of a life that is bright and happy, and Adrien slips a little further out of Tom's hands at his mother's encouraging smile, and Tom knows that this is good.

"Yes," he says quietly, "I am free to do so."

Since Tom and Adrien helped prepare the food, his mother orders Marinette to join her in cleanup duty and ignores Marinette's insistence to leave it to her. Tom takes the dough resting in the earthenware bowl into the front shop to leave them their time together, but the topic of conversation bleeding through the din of washing-up and the door between the rooms quickly turns to something a father can't hardly ignore once he starts hearing the thin despair in Marinette's replies as the dishwasher finishes its job.

"Grandma!" she cries in scandal.

"It's nothing to be ashamed of!" his mother insists.

"We don't need to talk about that!"

"It's entirely natural, Marinette. Everyone does it, and I remember being your age. You need to know that boys - "

"You don't need to tell me about boys! And, and that stuff - "

"Now, Adrien is a very nice and polite young man and obviously he is living through some very difficult things right now - "

"We're not like that!"

There is a minute of respite as one of them moves the tray to the drying shelf.

"Marinette, you don't need to be embarrassed. We all know what's going on when a boy spends the night in your room."

"We're not," Marinette's voice is terse, "it's just that he's got no-where else to stay."

"Well then. Be that as it may. But when you're like that - "

"We're not gonna be like that." Marinette's voice is clipped and final. "He just a friend who doesn't care for me that way and he's going to move to England and probably stay because it's not like everybody knows his face there. So you don't need to be this stuff because I'll never need it."

Tom finds his hands have stilled on his dough as he waits for his mother's reply.

"That's what's difficult about caring for others - that you can never keep them. Everyone needs to do what is right for them, and sometimes people need to leave us in order to be happy. That is what they say. 'If you love someone, set them free. If they come back, you'll know it's meant to be'. I always come back, right? And if Adrien doesn't, then you'll have to give all your love to someone else and trust that he'll at least be happy."

"How is he ever going to be happy after all this," Marinette snaps, and the conversation ends with the rattle of utensil drawer being shut with unnecessary force and the door to the hallways being dragged shut with a speed powered by anger, indeed.

The next morning, his mother leaves for Samarkand.

#

That love takes more than love to flourish – that it takes luck and effort and circumstance and giving the things you can give – that Tom Dupain could've told you already before witnessing his daughter's first great romance wilt in its budding for reasons nobody can change. Tom doesn't know for certain if he's a child of divorce or not; he knows that his parents are civil but nothing about what more or less they could be. He never got it clear whether his mother stayed with Yvette or at a hotel or with the man she'd once married; for certain is only that it the hat his mother had in fact bought his father in Iran had been forgotten at Yvette's and Yvette dutifully brought it to Tom. This is how Tom finds himself in front of the unkempt yard like a grassy moat behind the pallisades guarding the stubborn anachronism wherein his father lives. Never mind being invited, never mind just popping by just to say hello. Marinette has been in and out of here ever since that time she'd snuck in and gotten him akumatised for it, but Tom hasn't yet unlocked that level. He rings the bell, and at his father's barked "What?!", patiently reports his mission and is admitted without argument.

The only times he were here before, he was a little boy and it wasn't his father who was the old person living there. Tom never knew how much of his aunt had been left when his father took it over; there is minimally changed, down to the smell of dust and old women's perfume. The décor is as outdated as his father himself is; the only modification is the kitchen, where his father is setting dough. All by hand, Tom idly notes; not even a normal kitchen mixer, but sacks and sacks of flour by the wall. Mice, good god, running around the counters.

"Shouldn't you be setting traps?" he remarks and instantly regrets it, but the lambasting about telling other people what to do in their own homes doesn't come.

"These little guys aren't doing anything wrong. Isn't that right, Hamlet?" his father smiles at one of them, stroking its head with a finger that he does not wash before plunging it back into the dough.

"The health and food safety authorities will shut you down over that!"

"Nonsense! Do you think there were government inspections over the Dupain bakeries back in the good old days – and have our bread ever been bad for that? Let them come if they've got problems with the way I do things!"

Tom realises with instant resignation that his father has likely been selling bread out-of-house without permit for twenty years and is only a loose-lipped neighbor away from a taxation fraud nightmare. Don't go into it, don't bring it up, it won't matter, they won't tattle, he's old and you've only been on speaking terms for two years. It's been twenty years since he last could just watch his father bake. He sits down in the only chair at the table and closes his eyes, breathes in the fruity odour of rising bread, the dry scent of wheat, the faint whift of decades of cigarettes impregnating the walls. His father is humming the words to some opera whose name Tom never learned. The melody is a well-worn memory between them, of months and years making up that lifetime he'd once spent baking at his father's side. It had been easy, once, when it was just them.

"Here," he eventually says, interrupting his father to hold up the hand-felted hat before putting it down on the table.

His father eyes it with mild curiosity, hands still in his dough, before his eyes finally shift to Tom's other hand. "What's that you got there?"

"Brioche," Tom says, putting the bag with the pastry down. "I've been developing a new recipe, with fruit - "

"That's not new," his father interrupts, slapping his dough into a bowl and covering it with a towel before marching over to pick up the bag.

"I know, but I've been trying it out with fresh fruit – well, relatively fresh - "

"Too much juice, it'll just turn out soggy."

"I know that," Tom says patiently, "so I've been testing it with pureeing it and reducing it - "

"What, you're making jam?"

"No – with less added sugar. Healthy items are in great demand these days," he tries to explain, but his father isn't listening, having fished out the round bread to hold it up against his humming kitchen light.

"Use more milk in the eggwash."

"Of course," Tom sighs, not sure what he'd even expected. His father sniffs the pastry before breaking off a piece which he carefully chews before setting it down.

"Raspberries need more sugar."

"I know, but I've been experimenting with mixing it with - "

"What's up with the butter? The crumb should be softer!"

"I've replaced some of it with whey, for the health - "

"Brioche needs the fat! If people don't want to eat good food for the taste, tell them to stick to crispbread! You can't sell that, it's an insult to the art of baking!"

His father is an old man, and he's wrong. There are plenty of brioche recipes that call for milk, there are plenty of bakers preparing enriched dough with compotes and jams, and the only thing wrong with Tom's attempts is finding the right level of sweetness without adding more sugar, while keeping the acidity down. There is nothing else Tom can give, though; everything that he has, his father knows already. Every bread he bakes, every pastry recipe. Marinette, even if her grandfather doesn't know even half of how miraculous she truly is. Tom himself is nothing more than he'd been the day his father walked out on him for baking his bread wrong.

"Right," he says, and wonders if it is circumstance, if it is choice that failed the two of them. His father is old and stubborn, and Tom suddenly wonders if it's only for nostalgia's sake that he's even making this effort at finding his way back to the time when they still were a family.

#

Teenagers teeming in and out of Tom's home has not been anything out of the ordinary. Chloé Bourgeois being one of them is absolutely out of track, but all the time Marinette tolerates it, Tom supposes that is the new normal.

The mayor's daughter still isn't allowed into Marinette's room and holds her court on Tom's sofa.

"You know that all the mattresses were changed last year, right? Best Bulgarian springwork, daddy made sure of that personally. And if they're too hard, we can get you a different on, no problem!"

"Thank you, Chloé," says Adrien politely, "but I really am doing fine here."

The look Chloé Bourgeois shoots him is dryer than biscotti. Adrien sighs. "Chloé, I told you. My lawyer gets dozens of calls every day asking for interviews with me. If I were at the hotel, I couldn't even leave my room."

Chloé Bourgeois puts down her pain aux chocolat with great deliberation before she speaks again. "Adrikins, do you think you're gonna stay holed up in Marinette's room for the rest of your life?"

Adrien's face falls. "It's just for a little while, until aunt Amélie gets everything sorted."

When Tom casts a glance at Marinette cutting carrots for supper, he finds that her hands have stilled on the chopping board.

Chloé Bourgeois only rolls her eyes. "Don't be ridiculous, Adrikins. Why would you go with your aunt when you have the best hotel in Paris right there?"

There is something horrible in the hope that suddenly sparks in Adrien's eyes as the words sink in.

"You mean your parents would let me stay there full-time?"

"You know my parents always do what I tell them to!"

The knife clatters to the floor at Marinette's feet.

"Stupid," she hisses as Chloé Bourgeois paints high-flying plans for everything she and Adrien can do once he has moved in at the hotel.

"Ridiculous," she says later, taking the plate with the half-eaten pastry from Adrien's hand after Chloé has left.

"But isn't it great if I can stay with Chloé? If I can stay in Paris then I won't have to quit being - "

The plate clatters against the metal of the sink with a noise betraying its near breaking as Marinette whirls around and stops the sentence with a glare that has Adrien shrinking back.

Marinette says nothing as she shoves past him to pick up her phone from the counter, but the agitation in the motion brushes her fingers against it without gripping. It lands on the floor with an ominously flat noise; Marinette stoops to pick it up.

"Fuck."

She's Ladybug, and she has been secretly saving the city for years. She's battled monsters and villains, she's flown across the world, she's been to space. She's sixteen. Of course she knows bad words. Out of everything the last week has taught Tom about his daughter's life when he can't see, this shouldn't have been the one to gut him the deepest. But her being Ladybug never came with such a vein of anger, and of whatever buried fear that anger has grown from.

"Is it bad?" Adrien asks with anxiety sending a quiver into his voice, "that crack looked like - "

"It's fine," Marinette cuts him off without giving neither him nor the phone another look as she stomps into her rooms and throws the door shut.

Tom picks up the plate and registers that unlike Marinette's phone screen, it survived the ordeal.

"Maybe she just needs time," he says to fill the silence she left in her wake. "I imagine it can't be easy suddenly keeping such a big secret and then suddenly having to talk about it with people."

But when he looks up at Adrien, Marinette clearly shattered something in him, too.

#

"Good day, Aunt."

The girl's French is near flawless, with only the barest hint of an accent. She looks bashful with a bag over one shoulder.

Sabine blinks in clear surprise, before carefully returning. "Welcome. Are you Fei?"

Their guest nods with a hesitant smile, and Sabine's face warms s she returns it. "I'm sorry, this is a bit surprising. Marinette said that you wanted to visit, but I thought it would be a while yet!"

"Oh no," Fei says, distressed, "I didn't tell her that. Shoot. I'm so sorry - I travel quickly, you know?" she fiddles with her necklace, "no planes or anything. It's like Ladybug - you know Ladybug? Stupid, of course you know Ladybug, she's probably saved you like ten times or something. I met her in Shanghai, actually she was there when I first, uh. I was hoping to meet her, actually that was part of why I wanted to com here now - but to meet you, too! Finally. Marinette's talked about you, and Uncle Wang too - "

Sabine interrupts her babble with a trill of Mandarin, stepping in front of the counter and taking the bag. "Let me show you upstairs. You'll always be welcome here."

Marinette is happier than Tom has seen her in days at Fei's arrival, though the enthusiasm dims at Fei's equally joyous hopes of meeting Ladybug again.

"She's probably super busy," Marinette says with an awkward shrug.

"I'm sure she'll have the time. After all, she could come to Shanghai to help look for you even when Hawkmoth was still around! But I guess that was why she was there in the first place. Funny that it happened just as you were visiting."

"Yeah," says Marinette, and she slants her parents a quick look that she turns away the moment she realises she's being observed, "funny coincidence."

Trays of dough and buckets of pastry filling won't wait for a surprise guest, though Sabine handles them with a hectic smile and an almost giddy chatter about how her uncle has talked about his protege. When Adrien comes back after another lunch with his aunt, Tom sends her upstairs and instructs Adrien in how to load and empty the ovens. Be it a lifetime of strict obedience or just a natural aptness, he takes to it like a fish to water. Tom shapes his loaves and fills his pastries while keeping an ear out for customers, and there is little time talk.

It doesn't even occur to him that that time when Hawkmoth had been in Shanghai and Marinette had been in Shanghai, so had Adrien Agreste. Only after he's locked the front door and turned off the lights in the kitchen does he realise, as Adrien follows him upstairs and Fei clearly recognises him.

Recognises him enough to address him in Mandarin, even, while slanting a meaningful look at Marinette who is clearly as left out of this conversation as Tom is.

Wherever it might be going it is stopped by Sabine, who turns away from the steaming pots to speak over her shoulder.

"Adrien, I'm afraid Fei will have to stay in Marinette's room. I know your aunt and Chloé Bourgeois both have offered you to stay with them, but I also talked to Marinette's grandfather. It might be more discreet than a hotel where people come and go all the time."

Adrien's face is briefly unreadable, but then he answers on a polite smile. "Of course, I understand. I really appreciate that. I'll go pack my things."

"You don't have to leave right away!" Sabine says, "stay for dinner, there's enough for everyone."

The teenagers disappear upstairs, and Tom starts pondering the logistics of setting their table for a fifth person as Sabine returns to a dinner that smells like Shanghai.

"Dad really agreed to have him there?"

"I almost didn't have to ask. Not too impressed with the idea that you have an apprentice, is he?" she smiles, "he even said he could use the extra hands around the kitchen."

"Well, he might get some use of that for real," Tom muses, "he was good help this afternoon."

"He praised the croissants I sent over with Marinette last month, too."

"Did he say anything about the brioche?"

She shakes her head. Tom finds a stool whose shorter legs won't be too noticeable if he takes it himself.

"You know you can't measure your skills by whether he says its good or not."

"Oh, I know. I hardly ever heard him say a good thing about something someone else baked. Or himself, for that matter. It always had to be like grandpa's, that was the only thing good enough."

"Well, I guess I understand him that way," says Sabine with a little smile as she turns off the back burner and puts a lid on the pot set on it, "I miss my grandma's cooking, too. Uncle Wang can make some dishes that are exactly like she did, but I never managed to imitate him exactly."

A memory of pastry cream and succulent raisins wells up in Tom's senses. He couldn't articulate the nuances of the taste if he'd tried, but he knows that no-one else made it the same; no-one else could do it like that. The secret ingredient, that's the trick, but he never got around to asking and now it's been twenty years and a canyon of silence. Of course his father had always been difficult, fueling his work on ideas about tradition so fragile that anything less than perfect imitation would break the chain, and maybe Tom gets it, now. There is so much comfort in the familiar.

Sabine asks him to call the kids down.

Fei's nerves have clearly been soothed during the hours spent with Sabine; she's comfortable at their dinner table. When Tom asks about how she got to their doorstep, she fingers her necklace. "Have you heard about Ladydragon?"

"The Chinese superhero, right?" Adrien says.

Fei nods. "I'm Ladydragon. It's not really a secret - some people know. Not a whole lot. Ladybug and Cat Noir, and Uncle. When I'm Ladydragon, I can turn into a dragon. Flying over here is real quick that way. My bag got a bit wet, haha."

She lets go of the necklace, smile uncertain. "I'm still not used to telling people, but you're family and you should know important things like that. I'm still not sure I'm the one who should be Ladydragon, but I have to do it as good as I can. There's always something they need my help with back home, that's why it's difficult to get away, and why I can't stay for long."

"That's a big responsibility for someone so young," says Sabine, and doesn't look at Marinette, and Marinette is all big eyes and small mouth with her attention all set on Fei.

"I guess," says Fei, "but I'm really happy like this. Wu Shifu, my father, left me with this responsibility, and I know he meant for me to take it on. And I wasn't even really his, like really-really - someone left me at his doorstep when I was just born. But he chose me as his daughter and raised me into everything he knew. Someone killed him because he was the one who kept the secrets of the Dragon, and then I had to keep it. But knowing that he thought of me like so close that I could have the family secrets - that's precious to me. Besides - it's a lot of fun, too! Being a superhero and helping people, it's great to see them be happy, and to get rid of bad guys."

"Right! It is, isn't it?" Adrien chimes in, and instantly backtracks, "that's what I thought, anyway. I thought it'd be super cool to be like Cat Noir."

"WELL!" Marinette interrupts in a voice with an edge of steel beneath the false cheer, "that's great, of course! Was it Wu Shifu who taught you kung fu?"

The rest of the evening is spent with scattered stories about martial arts and cooking and accordions and French tutoring and petty crime. Wu Fei is a young woman who takes command of the room without even trying, with a life too full of losses and responsibilities for someone barely eighteen. Sabine asks questions in every silence, and Marinette listens and says little more than expected acknowledgments of Fei's tales.

It's nearly ten when Tom remembers that he hasn't yet prepared the dough for tomorrow, and only when he gets up does it seem like Adrien remembers that he won't be staying there tonight.

Tom takes his bag, and they leave the women behind in the flat.

"I'll walk you over to him," Tom offers.

"Thank you," says Adrien, and pulls the hood up over his head as they step into the street. Light pollution haunts the Paris skies, but LED and neon cast sharp and ersatz shadows, and no-one looks twice on a teenage boy in a hoodie. It's not Tom's privilege to insist that he put on a coat in the damp October evening. "I was at his house one time, but I'm not really used to finding my way on foot."

"When on earth did you go there? And he let you in?"

"I brought him home that first time he was akumatised. He had a baking contest with Marinette and they wanted me to judge."

"A baking contest?"

"Yeah, I don't know what that was about. Both breads were really delicious, but I probably wasn't much of a judge. They both yelled at me when I asked for jam! I'm sure I'd do better now."

Tom chuckles. "That sounds like him. I hope you're prepared for him, though. He can be a bit much at times."

"I'm sure it'll be fine," says Adrien, "I'd rather have someone like that than someone who - someone like my father."

There is absolutely nothing Tom can say to disagree with that.

"Marinette said he was only doing it to help your mother."

"That doesn't excuse it," Adrien's voice is hard, "what he did was terrible. And you know, Wu Shifu? Well, did you know - I guess you wouldn't have heard, it was only on the news over there, and even then I had to ask my tutor to help translate - the man who killed him was extorting him over a family heirloom that a foreigner was paying him to get. And do you know who had it? Hawkmoth had it. Fei-" his voice grows thick, "Fei doesn't realise, I think. That her father was killed because of my father."

His head is downcast and his face is hidden behind heavy cotton and flyaway hair.

"Well," Tom says at length, "I can't argue that even my father is better than that."

His father, who greets him with a grunt and Adrien with some complaining about his son's inadequate housing, as well as instructions about when he'll be expected in the kitchen come morning.

Adrien accepts that with nothing but a curt "I appreciate your hospitality."

Tom leaves him behind with his father's grumbles, and walks home to his kitchen in the restless streets. Different crowds populate the city now, the nightlife shift before Tom and his fellow midnight workers will take over in a few hours. This last week has been all icy autumn, and the solitude drives up a melancholy he hasn't felt in years. In his home is his wife and his daughter and this new addition to the family who he can tell already will be a permanent fixture to the edges of his life from here on. Paris is filled to bursting and Tom's home has always been small, and if it got crowded when his mother or some neighbors or Marinette's friends were around, then that only served to push people even closer. It has never before burst at the seams, and he wonders - for the first time - what he would have done if Marinette ever had gotten that little brother she wanted.

Three kids and a hamster will never fit into Marinette's childhood home, he's always known that, and he was never one who wanted for Marinette to continue in his footsteps anyway. Sabine's uncle could take in a teenage girl just like so. Tom, he can't even keep a boy who has spent his entire life making himself small.

It's strange, he later thinks, how quickly he's grown used to having company around as he bakes in the evening. He'd long since gotten used to baking alone, humming to himself in his father's absence. Tonight his voice is lonely and pitiful, incapable of filling the room without the harmony of Adrien supplying lyrics in Italian and German and English when Tom didn't know. Adrien knew from listening, truly listening to opera – not just picking up the half-remembered melodies like half-remembered recipes. It's probably just as well that he won't be around to pick up too many of Tom's bad habits.

The next day, his living room is full of noise and people as Wu Fei and Adrien Agreste each are following Sabine's lines with their own deficiencies. Adrien with sounds his tongue can't quite wrap around; Fei with an inability to carry a tune.

"Cheng family songs," Marinette informs him, "Uncle Wang never got around to teaching me. I didn't know mum knew them."

"I'm sure she'll teach you if you ask her to."

"Not much use if I can't even speak, is it," says Marinette.

#

Fei stays for a full four days of keeping an eagle-sharp watch of news alerts on her phone. On the third day, she enthusiasticlaly recounts her meeting with Ladybug. She's somewhat downtrodden that night, but cheers up at Sabine's suggestion that they have a feast the next day.

"Uncle has taught me cooking - I can do hong shao rou!"

"That's wonderful," says Sabine, "Marinette, won't you make dumplings?"

"You know how to cook Chinese food too, Marinette?" Adrien asks, "that's amazing!"

"You'll have to be here too, Adrien," says Sabine. "And Tom - do you think Roland would like to come?"

"I'm sure he would!" Adrien eagerly replies before Tom can, "he's always talking about Marinette, of course he will!"

"Does grandpa like Chinese food?"

"He's not picky about food. Just about quality," Tom tells her, "he always liked Sabine's cooking."

At least he had, back before that had involved rice flour used for more than dusting bannetons.

"Do you think your aunt would like to come, Adrien?"

Adrien brightens even more at the suggestion. "I'll ask!"

Amélie Graham de Vanilly is catching up with the Finnish cultural attache with whom she went to school, but his father agrees to show. Fei and Marinette occupy the kitchen that day, and Sabine takes over the reign after closing time.

Tom shows Adrien how to make portion-sized tarts down in the bakery.

There's something different in Adrien's hands as they work the pastry dough, and it takes Tom a minute to recognise that it's his father that he sees in Adrien's motions. His fingers are confident with the dough, now; inefficient at cutting in the butter, but not hesitant, not unsure.

"Have you been helping my dad bake?"

"Yeah, I have! After he's done with the deliveries, he's been giving me tips. Most of it was pretty much like you've shown me. He's super strict about how I do things, but I'm getting better!"

"He always was particular about doing things exactly like you're told to," says Tom, "you don't need to work this any more. Tart shells should be brittle, not chewy."

"So we want less gluten development," Adrien finishes for him with a proud smile.

"Very good! Now we'll let it rest in the fridge so that the butter hardens again."

Pastry dough is labourous, but simple. Preparing the filling takes rather more finesse; shaping the final pastries even more so.

Adrien looks at his attempt with glum dismay.

"I guess I'll take this one," he mutters.

"It's your first try! Do you know how long I had to train before I could make pastries looking like these?" Tom comforts him as he sets the last one on the tray; he did it with less time than Adrien needed for his single pastry. "Months! And I was doing it for hours every day."

Adrien smiles in resignation. "Well, it was for your job. I guess I'll just have to settle for buying pastries from other people."

"Sure, it was for my job, but that wasn't what made it worth it. I always wanted to make pretty cakes like the ones the partisseries had on exhibit - my father's just all bread. I love bread, but I love pastries even more. And the firsts time I made a tray of perfect pastries? Now that was when I felt good at it!"

"But you bake amazing bread too!" Adrien protests.

"Not as great as my father. I don't think I ever could be. So being really great at something that I can do better than him, that wasn't so bad either."

Adrien looks dissatisfied. "I can't tell the difference," he finally says, "when I eat his bread, and when I eat yours. Maybe it's just that I'm not a gourmand, but it seems the same to me."

Tom feels something thaw at those words, something hard and chafing that he must've carried for so long that he no longer noticed the ache. "I don't care if gourmands like my food. As long as someone is happy eating it, that's enough."

"Well, then I say your bread is at least as good as your father's," says Adrien firmly, "the taste is just as good and you're a lot less grumpy. Even if you don't do home deliveries for custom orders without charging extra."

Leaving the kitchen to the girls still, he makes pralines and lets Adrien glaze the tarts with marmalade while he secretly wallows in the boy's ignorant praise.

Once his father shows up (complaining about the traffic and the blasted motorless cars you can't hear coming from half a kilometer off), they venture back into the flat, which feels downright bustling just with the addition of Fei and her busy chatter. The conversation in the kitchen is an amalgate of Chinese and French, while Marinette is proudly putting the finishing touches on the table setting. It is crowded even with the smaller breakfast plates instead of dinner ones; chopsticks set out to four plates, cutlery for two, a borrowed chair and slightly wilting flowers she must've begged off a florist closing for the day. The room is fragrant with spice and exotic herbs, warmed by a day of cooking, softened by candles, brightened by Sabine's joy.

Sabine has always been bright in Tom's eyes, but he knows that tonight, everyone else must see it, too. Her usual calm has been lit by something Tom has only seen at some particular reminders about her childhood home; she welcomes his father with an exuberance that has the old man is comically incapable of answering, leaving him to awkwardly pat her back as she hugs him.

Fei greets him with respectful reservation. His father is embarrassingly satisfied to hear that foreigners are still making the effort of picking French over English, and that's all it takes for Fei to clearly be a new favourite.

They crowd the table and serving plates gets passed around. Conversation dims as they eat, brightens somewhat as more food is brought out or previous dishes handed back for a second. Dishes sweet and savoury, spicy and fragrant and tart and soft. This is more than Fei's stewed pork and Marinette's dumplings, though he knows that Sabine can't have had the time to make them all. When the origins of the fried rice is inquired, it is Fei who blushes at the praise.

"Uncle Wang has been teaching me," she confides, "one day, I want open my father's school again, when I can afford it. But until then, I need some other work. And cooking isn't so bad!"

"What kind of school is that?" his father asks, clearly skeptic about whatever could be more important than food.

"Kung fu," Fei promptly replies. "He taught me everything he knew. And he entrusted the heritage to me. He took me in, you know? The people who gave birth to me, they left me at his doorstep."

A silence descends on the table, as Fei swallows. "I don't know if they didn't want me, or couldn't keep me, or just thought he'd do better than them. It doesn't matter. It was Wu Shifu who taught me everything I needed to be who I am today. It was he who chose me to be what I am. And thanks to the Prodigious - now I've found that the school wasn't the most important thing after all. The important thing was what I would become. And now I know that I am what my father wanted me to be."

The silence is different now; blooming in anticipation of something, and Fei fills it.

"The important thing is to know that someone loves you. After Wu Shifu died, I was all alone, and that the only thing I could do for my father was to get revenge for his death. But thanks to Ladybug, I found that that wasn't what he wanted at all - there was something else he wanted me to do. Thanks to her, I could truly become who my father wanted me to be. And thanks to you, Marinette -" she turns and gives Tom's daughter a smile so brimming in affection that the room feels like an ache - "because I met you that day, Marinette, I'm here now. And that's no less important than being Ladydragon is."

Marinette smiles back, and then she leans over and hugs Fei to her.

"I'm so happy, too," she says, "to have a big sister like you. Who's not only a super-cool superhero and a kung fu expert but knows how to cook my mum's favourite dishes too."

And then Sabine hugs them both and tells them something in Mandarin, which makes Fei's arms tighten visibly around her. This nucleus of women was the source of the warmth infusing his kitchen tonight; it has radiated from each of them during their seamless weaving about each other while preparing and serving the food, and it's resonating from this cluster of things foreign that have each in turn wandered into his home.

But it doesn't belong to him, not yet; Fei is still a half-known, and he's still an outsider to this, to her language and to her family and to her superhero business that she speaks about so openly, that's not a secret leading to angrily slammed doors. He watches them for a moment before turning away, and finds that his father does have that decency; the old man is staring at them, eyes wide but otherwise unreadable.

Adrien helps pile the dishes into the sink while Tom puts away the food which will be leftovers for days to come. Sabine makes tea and coffee and finds a can of coke for Marinette, and the tarts and the pralines are brought out. The evening carries on in a din of family talk and old stories and discussions about food and cities and new technology and ancient traditions. His father eagerly recounts his heritage and explains family recipes. Fei counters with the story of the Wu school of martial arts. Sabine talks about her parents and her grandmother. Even Marinette is eventually nagged into recounting some story about how she met Ladybug, and she tells it with less hesitance and more of a smug satisfaction than Tom would have expected. And then, seemingly for good measure, she brings up that time half the company present got akumatised over her scooter.

It is closer to Tom's normal alarm than it is to his bedtime when his father finally announces that it's time to leave. He says his goodbyes to Fei and announces he hopes to see her again soon, promising that he'll teach her to bake baguettes the next time she comes. Adrien follows with a small wave.

Sabine sends the girls to bed, and starts tidying the kitchen.

"Tom, go to bed," she says gently when he makes motions to help her, and twenty years of marriage has long since taught him that command is a request to let her be alone.

"I have to check on the temperature in the proofing cabinet first."

But when he gets to the kitchen, he startles to discover that someone else is there. He never finishes the age-old motion of reaching to the light switch, because in the cone of light cast from the hallway is Adrien who startles back with a yelp.

"Sorry! I'm sorry, I'll be leaving, I didn't realise - "

"It's fine," says Tom, holding the heavy door open as he steps inside. "What are you doing here? Did you need something?"

"Oh, no," says Adrien, voice thick, "I just wanted to be on my own for a bit. I'll be going now."

It's only as he rubs a hand over his face that Tom realises.

"Adrien, what's wrong?" he asks.

"Nothing," says Adrien, whose smile would be distressingly convincing if you couldn't see his swollen eyes.

"Are you hurt?"

"No! No, it's just stupid. Please don't worry."

Tom lets the door slip closed with a heavy snick, and the kitchen is lit only by the streetlights from outside.

"If it was just stupid, it wouldn't be hurting you."

"But it is," Adrien says, and even though his face is mostly hidden in the dark, the tears are audible in his voice now. "It's really stupid. I'm lucky, right? I got to have my mum around for many years, and my dad - at least he's not dead. And Nathalie was there, and there's aunt Amélie and even my cousin. Fei was all alone and her only family was killed. And she was talking about that and about how happy she's now, and I feel like she's lucky even though all those horrible things happened."

There is a sniffle.

"It's great to know that aunt Amélie is around. And even though Chloé's family is a bit weird and they live in a hotel and all, I can still stay here in Paris. And my dad's got money - oh my god, I should just have them send her the money to fix Wu Shifu's school - it's so stupid. I'm jealous. All those terrible things happened to her because of my dad, and I'm here feeling jealous because her dad loved her so much and she loved him, too, and now she's Ladydragon, and she's got Uncle Wang, and Marinette and everything. Her dad died and I'm jealous because he'd want her to be Ladydragon. Being Cat Noir was the only thing that ever felt like I was needed and that people wanted me around. I used to think that if I could tell my dad about it, he'd be so proud of me. But he, he hated Cat Noir."

Tom takes him in his arms. There really is very little else he can give him that Amélie Graham de Vanilly or Chloé Bourgeois couldn't give in more abundance, but it's not in their kitchen Adrien Agreste has found the respite for his tears in the middle of the night.

"For what it's worth," he says, stroking Adrien's shaking shoulders, "I always thought Cat Noir was just as amazing as Ladybug was. And Ladybug, she turned out to be my daughter, and I have never been prouder of her."

The crying boy makes a sound at those words that Tom has no idea how to interpret.

#

"And that's how it is," says Chloé Bourgeois in the tone of someone too wealthy to even consider a refusal. "Clearly Adrikins needs to stay in Paris."

"I see," says Amélie Graham de Vanilly with an unreadable expression, hands folded in her lap and shoulders raised with the same tension she's always carried whenever she's been made to sit down in Tom's home, "and your parents, do they agree that Adrien might stay with you?"

"Of course!" Chloé Bourgeois says, "you know them, right? They were friends with Adrikins' rotten dad and all."

"Well - " Adrien's aunt hesitates, "still, I'd like to hear it from them, too."

Chloé Bourgeois makes a sound of abject dissatisfaction, but whips out her phone, presses a button, and within five seconds starts a conversation with "Daddy, I need you to come to the Dupain-Cheng bakery and talk to Adrien's aunt. Yes, that aunt, she's here. And mother, too."

And within another fifteen minutes and a hastily prepared plate of pastries, the mayor of Paris and the world's foremost fashion critic are in Tom's living room too. André Bourgeois greets him heartily, praising his catering. Audrey Bourgeois sniffs and struts over to where Amélie Graham de Vanilly has risen to greet her, Adrien silent and close to her side.

"So what's all this about?" she demands, not even sparing a glance to the boy who has recently lost his mother all over and been rendered effectively homeless.

"Adrikins has to come live with us," Chloé declares. "Obviously, if he can't stay with us he'll have to go to England with his aunt and leave all his friends behind."

"Don't be ridiculous," Audrey Bourgeois says, and then turns back to Amélie Graham de Vanilly. "Don't mind that girl. Clearly that boy should be taken from the city, the sooner the better."

"But Audrey - "

"Mother!"

Audrey Bourgeois turns to her daughter at the shriek. "I thought you'd stopped being stupid, Chloé. Have our hotel associated with Hawkmoth's son, what do you think would happen? Our name is too good for that."

"But Adrikins is my friend, he has to stay in Paris!"

"Friends," Audrey Bourgeois snorts, "you know better than that. Friends are people worthy of you, and he is worth no more than his father's crimes. Think about your useless sister and her useless friends, do you want to be like her?"

The girl wearing the haute couture fashion, in her expensive sunglasses and expert manicure, clutching a phone worth more than the combined furniture of Tom's home, stares at her mother, gaping.

"This is ridiculous. I'm sorry this dumb girl and her ridiculous ideas has been wasting your time, Amélie. You'll have to deal with him on your own."

And then she strides out of the room with her husband following as he casts frantic, apologetic glances back them, and the door shuts and the room is plunged into silence.

It is Adrien's aunt who breaks it.

"Well, that's too bad," she says with a shrug, "but Adrien, your migration papers are still in the works. I wanted to tell you, you're officially checked out of the investigation now. They'll need to call you in for more statements, probably, but the migration authorities have you in the clear now. We can leave within a week. Thank you for the coffee, Mr. Dupain, and for taking care of him. It's a comfort for me to know that he's among people who care for him."

And the door shuts behind her, too, leaving Tom with four dumbfounded teenagers in varying degrees of distress. Adrien has sunk back down on the sofa, staring at his hands. Chloé is standing where she was, still clutching her phone. Zoé is looking back and forth between them, and then she turns and Tom follows her look to where Marinette is sitting on the stairs, her arms wrapped tight around herself.

"Stupid," Chloé finally says, "of course, it was stupid."

"Oh Chloé -" Zoé starts, and her sister turns to her.

"What do you know?!" she snaps, but the other girl doesn't even flinch at the tone, "you and your stupid friends. Of course it was stupid to think - "

"It's not stupid to want to help someone," Adrien says, voice flat. "Maybe it was stupid to hope it could work out. But you weren't stupid for trying, Chloé."

"No, it was stupid. I was stupid to forget that, that I didn't think that - but she didn't have to be so mean to you and say it like that but obviously she's right - "

"Chloé, she wasn't being mean to me. She didn't even talk to me. She was being mean to you. She called you stupid and useless just because you wanted to help me. And you know, this entire thing - I thought my dad was just busy and that I wasn't important, but you know what? He was just a horrible person who didn't care about anyone else. I didn't deserve for him to ignore me all the time, and you and Zoé don't deserve your mum calling you names."

"Mother's not a bad person!"

"Yes she is!"

Tom has never before heard Adrien Agreste raise his voice.

"She's a horrible person! She shouldn't be talking about anyone the way she's talking about me and you and Zoé and even your dad! I'm not worth less because of my father's name and you're not worth more because of yours, and you need to stop listening to her! She's never done anything for you, she left you and she takes you for granted and she acts as if you should love her just because you're her daughter! She abandoned you for years and you cling to others because of it, but that's selfish! That's so selfish! You can't stop people leaving, you have to care for those who are still there instead! Look at my dad, look what he did just because he thought he couldn't ever care for anyone else than mum! And you, you're not doing this to help me, you're doing this because you would feel bad if I'm not here."

There is another terrible silence, and then Adrien looks away, and then he strides out of the room, slamming the door behind.

Marinette stands up and disappears into her room without a word, and Zoé follows her.

Chloé Bourgeois remains standing, clutching her phone.

Tom holds out the untouched plate of pastries.

"You know, one time you posted about our macarons on Instagram. We tripled the sales of those for months after that. Do you still like the strawberry cream ones?"

Fat tears drip down her cheeks as she eats one in two bites and wordlessly reaches for another.

#

When Adrien asks him about macarons the next evening, he thinks that it's an apology. But not so; though Adrien looks ragged and stressed once more, it's someone else.

"Maybe Chloé's mum had a point," he concedes, "there's another friend of mine who's leaving too, because of my dad. She didn't say it but I think she thinks it's because her mother worked real close with him. Apparently some of their family business seems to be tied to the things he were doing as Hawkmoth. So now she's going back to Japan tomorrow and she didn't even know until today."

"I'm sorry to hear that."

"I can't do much to help her, but I'd like to give her something special at least. And she likes sweets. So I thought macarons, maybe. If it's not too difficult."

"It's not too difficult," Tom smiles, "I was going to show your class how to make them back in college, remember?"

Adrien doesn't talk about the episode with Audrey Bourgeois, but his hands are agitated as he measures powdered sugar and almond flour, and Tom doesn't even bother making him practice separating the eggs, instead doing it for him while Adrien watches in tense silence.

"Which flavour would you like to make?"

"She likes orange."

Red and yellow food colouring is dripped into the meringue, and Tom leaves Adrien to the work with only the instructions needed. Adrien pipes the batter inexpertly, but earnestly.

"I know she'd rather stay here, with her friends and all, but at least she's got family in Japan. She hasn't seen her dad in years, I know she's missed him. And her mother's family is huge, and that's important to her. But I'm gonna miss her. She always understood what it's like, having parents like my dad."

He puts down the empty piping bag. Tom takes the tray and taps it one-two-three times.

"To make sure there won't be any air bubbles," he explains, "now they'll need to rest for half an hour or so. We want the surface to get a bit of skin, that's how they'll keep their shape."

They make buttercream filling, and Adrien finally smiles as the scent of orange blossom water fills the air around the mixer.

"I guess I'll just need to take my own advice, huh? Yelling at Chloé for wanting me around, but now I feel like I'd do anything if Kagami could stay."

"Kagami?"

"Oh," Adrien blinks, "I guess you know her, huh? Since she and Marinette are friends, too."

"Marinette will be so sad."

"She was."

The words are uncharacteristically bitter.

"Did something happen?"

There is a while of silence as Adrien leans back against the counter, staring into the air in front of him with something like frustration. When he speaks, the words are carefully measured.

"Way back when, Kagami and me, we used to date. Except I was Cat Noir and I had to keep running off and I had to lie to her all the time, and she knew I was lying and she thought - I don't know. That I didn't like her or that I was just goofing off or that there was someone else I was running off to be with. And I couldn't tell her anything, and she was really hurt. So now that she's leaving, and I'm gonna have to quit being Cat Noir anyway, I wanted to tell her the truth. So that she'll know that it wasn't her, at least. And Marinette got super angry when I said that."

"Quit being Cat Noir?" Tom asks, ignoring the soap opera of teenage romance that he can practically hear boiling over between his daughter's ears.

"Cat Noir has to be with Ladybug. And when I can't be with Marinette, then someone else has to."

His fingers are tight around the edge of the table.

"That's just how it's got to be. We can't change that. And Kagami is always honest, and in a week it won't matter anyway, so I could just tell her, right? But I guess the macarons will have to do since Ladybug says no."

"It seems to me like Ladybug doesn't want to talk about being Ladybug," Tom says, and is saved by the bell of the oven announcing the temperature. "Set the the timer to seventeen minutes," he deflects, and then he spends an inordinate amount of time explaining the differences between French and Italian and Swiss meringue.

#

When Marinette rushes out to meet Kagami with a neatly wrapped present, she and Adrien cross paths at the door. There is a frozen look exchanged for a second until Adrien smoothly steps aside.

"So what did she say?" Marinette finally greets him.

"Upset with her mother."

"And Ryuko?"

"I don't know what you're talking about."

Something drops in Marinette's shoulders.

"Good," she bites, and that's all the farewell anyone gets. Adrien doesn't look after her.

"Aunt Amélie says I'm allowed back in my room. If you have the time, could you come help me pick up some things?"

And so Tom enters the Agreste mansion for the second time of his life. The first time, he'd been perhaps too busy marveling at the kind of money it takes to make a house look like that. Now, he wonders if the austere architecture was an intentional choice to make visitor feel even smaller. The massive portrait of father and son looms like an omen as they enter; Adrien ducks his head as he walks past that younger, grieving image of himself kept in place by his father's hand on his shoulder. Their steps echo between the marble walls; the air is chill, and Tom doesn't even want to imagine the money it must take to heat the space.

Adrien's room is better, in that regard; a wall of glass displays the nighttime lights of Paris in their full radiance, and shelves of books and games and the kind of technology any boy would dream of. There's a display case full of trophies and medals, a basketball hoop, a grand piano.

Adrien pulls a suitcase out from a closet and leaves it open on his bed, and stars digging through drawers. Tom absolutely does not see a fuzzy black ball phase through the door of a low cabinet.

"They're probably gonna try and sell the house. The property alone would be worth it; of course, with the home improvements my father did to the ground beneath it, it'll probably be a freakshow museum or something. I can't take everything with me - my clothes and my computer and stuff, they can just have boxed up - but aunt Amélie wanted me to go through the smaller things and just leave anything I don't want to keep."

"I never had to leave my childhood home," says Tom as he sits down on the bed, leaving Adrien to the packing. "My dad inherited that house from his mother's side of the family, and left me with the bakery."

"I can't imagine missing this place," Adrien says as he pulls out an armful of papers and drops them on the floor, sitting down to look through them. "After mum died, I just wanted to go out and meet people. And my father kept me locked up in my room like a rat in a cage."

"Don't you mean a cat in a cage?"

Adrien smiles, wry and bitter.

"Cats are classy. Rats, they run around in the garbage. Like my dad was. And he wanted me to be the same way."

He trails off as he flips over the paper and finds a workbook, and then he carefully places it in the suitcase. Whatever its contents are, they're announced with Chinese characters in a blue ballpoint pen. Tom flips the cover open, and finds a polaroid selfie of a younger Adrien - it must've been around the time he first met Marinette - and an old, Asian man in a Hawaiian shirt. It looks to be taken in his room.

"Is this your tutor?" he asks.

Adrien nods. "One of them. He had to leave, though. He moved to London."

"It'll be good to have a friendly face there, right?"

"He wouldn't remember me."

"I can't imagine anyone forgetting you. Or a room like this!"

Adrien's hands have stilled the paper flipping, and then he pulls the pile back together and sets it on his desk.

"He was the one who gave us our miraculous - Ladybug and me. When Hawkmoth figured out who he was, he tried to force him into revealing our names. Instead of doing that, he used this magic to make himself forget. Not just us - everything, his entire life. Because of my dad. He had to start all over again," a framed photo of Adrien's mother is carefully placed into the suitcase. "I guess some good came of it, though. I can't imagine what he'd feel like if he knew who he'd give the miraculous to. It was only dumb luck that Hawkmoth didn't get what he wanted that very first day."

"I'm sure there was a reason he chose you, though," Tom says, "I mean, I know Marinette is amazing. Just how amazing is surprising, I'll admit - but he wouldn't just be handing them out to anyone."

Adrien stops rummaging through the cabinet, and he sits back.

"He should've chosen anyone else - it'd be better, for everyone. If someone else was Cat Noir, then it wouldn't have been dangerous, and maybe he wouldn't have been blind to what Gabriel Agreste was up to, and even though I'd still have to leave, at least Ladybug would've been spared the trouble of finding a replacement.

"I called Chloé selfish, but I'm the selfish one. Because I'm still happy that he made that terrible call, and that I got to meet Ladybug and save the city and be a superhero. I got to do so many cool things," he snorts, "thanks to my dad, right? No Hawkmoth, no Ladybug and Cat Noir."

"For what it's worth," Tom says, and sits down next to him, "I can't even being to imagine Cat Noir not being Cat Noir. And I don't think Marinette can, either. And I'm very happy that you're her friend, and I know that she is, too."

Adrien smiles as he wipes a tear, and then he pulls out a thick book announcing Chopin. He opens it on a random page, then sets it down in a different pile.

"Aunt Amélie will have the piano transported over if I ask her," he says and climbs to his feet, before sitting down at it and opening the dust lid hiding the keys, "but that's just a waste of money and fuel. This isn't a special instrument, and I'm not good enough for that to matter anyway."

The melody he starts playing is simple; a slow-medium tempo, no advanced techniques or sensational runs; just a series of chords in an easy chain. Melancholy, nostalgic. Mawkish, maybe, for someone who needs art to be more than pretty. But it is pretty in its simplicity, and Adrien Agreste plays it with a pathos that gives it a call of something far more than the singular notes and harmonies.

"I've never heard that song before," he says as the timbre of the last note fades into all the open space in Adrien's bedroom.

"It's from an anime. A boy used to play it with his mother. After she died, he kept playing the song to remember her. I always thought it was pretty, and after mum died - I mean, I was twelve. It felt really meaningful, back then. And the boy in the anime, he's got an amazing dad who makes breakfast and dinner for his kids every day, and comes to all their school festivals, and is always happy even though he lost his wife. And his sister is a superhero and the boy, he got all kinds of part time jobs to watch over his sister. But - I didn't want that. Until I got my miraculous, I never want to be a hero. I wanted my dad to be happy again. I wanted us to be family even though mum was gone. Twelve years old and the things you daydream about is your dad making you breakfast and eating it together."

He lifts his hands back into position, but lets them fall to his lap. Looks at the keys for a long while, and closes the lid.

"But that kind of thing only happens in stories. And my father, he played the piano but he was too busy to teach me himself. Not too busy to decide what kind of music I was supposed to learn, though. Sometimes he'd listen to me play but it was only ever to check if I was good enough, or to tell me that I wasn't. He was never satisfied with what I did, he was never impressed by anything. And that kind of music, the kind that I liked to play? He didn't care about that at all."

"I thought that song was beautiful."

"I do, too."

And closes his eyes for a long while, breathes the lonely air of his childhood bedroom, and finally exhales a sigh that is like an age turning. When he opens his eyes again, there is something old and fractured in them that wasn't there before.

"I really do think that song is beautiful, and it can't matter what my father ever thought. None of it'll matter, ever again."

He is silent for another while yet, before shaking his head. "I guess this is what it means to grow up, huh? That nothing my father does or says or thinks will ever matter for my life."

The rest of the packing he does in silence; he fills the suitcase with knick-knacks and keepsakes, and then a box with some choice books and smaller items. The last storage he goes through is a cabinet with baskets of accessories which he roots through seemingly on autopilot, before he stiffens and pulls out a sky blue scarf.

"My dad got me this on my fourteenth birthday," he says. "He wouldn't let me have a party and when Nino tried to convince him, he forbid him ever coming over and he probably only did that to upset him to akumatise him. But he got me this pretty scarf, even though he always was horrible at gifts - he usually gave me pens. I was eleven and he gave me a pen for my birthday, oh my god. And then after he ruined the day, he still got me this. I wore it to school every day for a month."

He makes a motion as if to put it back in the basket, but pulls the hand back and stares at it, caressing the fabric.

"Your father did a lot of bad things," Tom says walks over to him, takes the scarf and puts it in the box, "and maybe that makes him a bad person. But he did it because he wanted the same thing that you did - to eat breakfast together as a family. I don't think anyone should think less of you for wanting to remember that."

He carries the box and Adrien pulls the suitcase. As they start to leave, Adrien's eyes linger on a pair of action figures artfully posed on a shelf next to his computer. He makes no motion to reach for them; instead turning off the lights as Tom takes the lead as Adrien leaves his old bedroom behind, where Ladybug and Cat Noir hold hands in the dark.

#

If Adrien's home had been an adventure experience dungeon, his father's house is a museum to 1973. Like a particularly persnickety cat, it took a new and foreign object for Roland to call Tom over. A memory stick is easily put away in places forgotten, and during the time it takes his father to find it, he has unleashed his opinions on both newfangled devices and TVs that won't work and computers and the newspapers and the mail and the municipality and the crime that he cannot have experience first-hand holed up in his home. By the time he finally has located "the boy's plastic doodad", he's reached the inevitable topic du jour.

"I said to him, I said that having work is the important part. With his father and everything, as long as he can work he can make it fine. Well, he has money I suppose, but that's not what it's about. Purpose, that's what I meant. Find work that gives purpose. If you have that, you'll always have something to go home to."

Something sore has lingered in Tom's veins since Adrien's anime piano music last evening, and his father's relentless talk finally tears into it. "Do you realise that his father hardly even spoke to him, because he was so busy with work?" he says, and he knows that this is a fragile thread to tug, that his father left him over a trivial disagreement once already, over work that was more important than him. "He didn't celebrate Christmas. He hardly acknowledged his birthdays, because he thought his work was more important than his son."

His fathers brow's furrow at the tone.

"Yes, but he was a supervillain! You know what he did to people."

"I know that what he did to his son had nothing to do with that. He knew that his son was hurting and he didn't care."

"Exactly!" his father pokes a finger into his palm, "that's exactly the point! If he'd had work to go to, he wouldn't have had to sit at home and wait for some useless know-nothing!"

"I think after his father teaching him that work is more important than family, Adrien wouldn't want to hear from someone else that his father was right!"

"I never said that! I said that he needed work - "

"Work isn't going to help him! He's a minor, he's under the legal guardianship of his aunt, he can't even choose where he lives! What he needs is a family!" and something old and festering breaks loose, and his father is an old man, and Tom shouldn't but a wound decades old suddenly aches like when he'd first discovered it, as if it hadn't long since healed into a bumpy scar. "But you wouldn't understand that, would you."

"What do you mean," his father intones.

"I mean that you're no different, are you? After all, family wasn't as important to you as bread was. You didn't speak to me for twenty years, over what? Changing a recipe?"

"You weren't doing it properly!" his father bellows, "and I told you! I told you, that's not how it's done!"

"But the bread is good! We made it better, but you didn't even taste it, did you, until Marinette made you! You just decided that because I didn't do as you said, you didn't want me around!"

His father stares, wide-eyed, at Tom's accusation, before his eyes narrow in anger again.

"Family was the important part! The recipe has been passed down since - "

"Family isn't for forcing people to become like you! Look at Marinette, she won't be a baker but she's happy! And you should've just been happy that I wanted to take over! If you wanted someone to follow your every intruction without question you should've taken in an official apprentice, not just assume that I would do that just because I'm your son!"

"If you were so unhappy about it, you should've just found someone else to teach you!"

"But I didn't want anyone else! I wanted you to teach me but you're no different than Adrien's father! Nothing could ever satisfy you except total obedience!"

His father gapes for a second, and then he points a finger at the door behind Tom's back.

"If I'm no better than a supervillain, then you won't need any business here any more! Get out of here, and tell your apprentice and the rest of the lot to stay away, too!"

And this time it is Tom who leaves, and he walks on the relief of a newly punctured boil aching in every step. This time, there won't be begging to Sabine to pass the phone only have it hung up. This time, there will be no waiting on birthdays and Christmases. This time, there will be getting up after going to bed to set a dough, to feel it in his hands, to wonder and wonder and wonder, would he approve of this.

This time, his father can crawl back himself, if he cares more about Tom than about his pride. Leave him that choice, and see how much comfort tradition can give.

When he comes home, he finds Sabine sitting on the sofa with her chin in her hands.

"What's up?" he asks, sitting down beside her.

She sighs and leans over to rest against his side. "It was so much fun to have Fei here. And Adrien, even though he's been going through so much. It'll take some time to get used to it just being the three of us again."

Tom thinks back to a week ago, to Fei and Adrien and his father there; the food, the stories, the warmth bursting from every corner between elbows and knees crowding their small dinner table.

Growing up is letting go of your parents, Adrien had realised, and Tom had been tossed away ever since he was twenty, hasn't he? He's been carrying his father along every dough he sets and every bread he shapes, and it's enough, it's enough now. Roland Dupain is no Gabriel Agreste, but it's not on Tom to fix him.

You can't keep people, his mother had told Marinette. If you love them, let them go.

But sometimes, people just cannot come back, and sometimes they won't, but Tom finally knows to the marrow of his bones that he's no less good to the people around him just because his father is a fool.

He pulls Sabine closer and doesn't tell her that he's broken their family again, and this time it was by choice.