In the ruins of everything, her son is in her arms. Grown, somehow, through his magical sleep; gangly and bony, naked feet larger than the last shoes she got him. Eyes still behind the lids, but breathing, healthy and whole, unbroken and blessedly free.
Emilie Agreste sobs in relief as she clutches her world to her as her life lies in shambles around her. Her Adrien doesn't wake, but that's good. Let him sleep yet; let him wake to a lighter morning and to secret doors locked and welded close so that he'll never have to find them. Her precious boy should never have to know what darkness his parents descended out of love for him.
She pulls back to cradle his face and take him in, all over. A couple of years older, if she's guessing. Looking up at the motley crowd of teenagers, with and without miraculous transformations, she fastens her gaze at the boy with the turtle and demands, "What day is it?"
His eyes snap up to hers, wide behind the goggles covering half his face.
"Tuesday," he says dumbly, and then, "who's that?"
"The date. The year. This is my son, Adrien."
"That's not Adrien!" he protests, "Adrien, he - when, when his dad, he -"
There's no peacock among them and no fake boy, and a strange guilt presses into Emilie's belly at the realisation of what these children must've seen exchanged for her life.
"That wasn't real," she soothes as she absently strokes her son's hair, "it was just a replacement, until we got him back. This is the real Adrien."
"No he's not!" the boy cries and his transformation dissolves, leaving a teenager in off-brand clothing and ill-fitted glasses quickly displaced as he wipes away tears, "Adrien wasn't some replacement, he was my friend, he was - "
"You have miraculous, don't you?" she snaps, "you know about the peacock's powers, don't you? It was a puppet with a voice. This is Adrien."
Behind him, a girl breaks into loud weeping at the words; the fox hero takes a hold of the boy's arm to hold him back. "Do even hear yourself?! Adrien wasn't a puppet! He was a hero! He spent a year saving Paris from your husband, he went to school and he made friends!"
"Young lady, I know perfectly well what he was. I was the one who made him."
She gives Adrien one last feather-light caress, before she carefully lays him down and stands, facing the children with superpowers. "I don't know how Gabriel got the ladybird and the black cat, and I don't care to know the details of it. I don't care for the magic; do what you will with Nooroo and Duusu. I'll have the entrance to this place walled up and forget everything about it, and I'll advice you to do so, too. Whatever business you imagine you have with my husband, you'll have to take with his ghost."
The chamber is intact around them, despite reality being unwound and made anew. The children seem unharmed, except for a girl passed out in the arms of the boy with the bull. Emilie nods at the one with the snake, who probably isn't any older but looks taller, at least.
"I'll appreciate the help getting Adrien back out. Will your friend need medical attention?"
A shudder runs through the girl with the fox. "No," she whispers, "she will not."
"Good," says Emilie, and stands next to her son as the boy with the snake picks him up, carefully cradling his limp head. A blink of metal catches her eye; the remains of her wedding bands lie scattered at the foot of the coffin of her own princess sleep.
The boy with the turtle darts forward before she can react, picks them up and cradles them to his chest with a furious mien.
"Those aren't yours," she tells him.
"They're they only bits left of, of him and - "
"It's a family heirloom."
"What do you want them for, they're broken anyway!"
"What I do with my own inheritance is no business of yours."
"You didn't even care about him," he wipes away more tears.
"After everything my husband and I did for Adrien, you should know better than saying that."
"That's not Adrien!"
"That is the only Adrien there ever was! Flesh and blood and bone, carried in my womb, no magic and no kwamis and no having to tell him how to be! You're crying over a make-believe illusion that was just there until we got him back!"
That truth leaves the boy weeping too hard to speak; he offers no resistance as she gently pries his fist open. The broken rings are still warm from his body.
The boy holding Adrien frowns when she steps up to him, but says nothing. She leads him down towards the lift and the children part before them.
"Viperion!"
It's the girl with the fox; the name is demanding. The boy with the snake stops, but never turns around.
"He's got nothing to do with this. He can't have been any more involved than Adrien was, and he doesn't belong down here."
Emilie takes him up to daylight coming in through the windows of the atrium, steps through the remains of battle without hesitance; only as she stands before the stairs and sees the painting greeting her, does she pause.
It is Gabriel, with the boy who looks so much like her Adrien. Gabriel looks stern; the boy grieving. She tears her eyes away and makes the note to have it taken down.
"I always wondered why it was his true song was buried beneath someone else's melody."
"Pardon?"
"Adrien," says Viperion, eyes set on the boy in the portrait, "he was always honest, nothing two-faced about him even though he kept so many secrets. But the melody I heard in him was never his own."
"You're awfully upset about a sentimonster."
"He was our friend."
Emilie lets her fingers glide through Adrien's fine, golden fringe. She sighs.
"He was a wind-up toy who looked like our son, but with no mind of his own. He only did whatever people wanted him to do."
The sharp movement of the boy's head makes her look up, and she finds him staring at her in shock. "Is that what you think?"
"He was at my side every waking minute for three months," she says, shuddering at the memory of her body growing weaker by the day as the boy who wasn't Adrien ran around, with the same happy bounce to his step, the same peeling laughter, the same worry about his mouth when he remembered her illness.
"I knew him for a year," says Viperion to the portrait in front of them. "He was my sister's classmate. He played in our band, whenever his dad would let him come to practice. He had a miraculous - he was chosen to fight Hawkmoth. They were only two at first. He must have had to sneak out of the house every time there was an attack. A mindless puppet couldn't have done that."
"Oh, he could learn to do simple things without being told to," Emilie says, though she suspects the boy won't leave this vein of discussion so easily. She turns right and starts for Adrien's room. The wild relief is slowly bleeding out, leaving a pressing anxiety about all the things she doesn't yet know. Adrien's room is as she remembers it, though the decor is slightly shifted. The wallpaper of his computer is a photo of she and him together; several more trophies crowd his shelves. Posed on his nightstand are two action figures - a girl with the ladybird, a boy with the black cat.
Adrien lies limp like a baby where Viperion gently puts him down, and Emilie shifts the duvet over him before sitting down at his side. It is late afternoon; late spring, she's guessing from the breeze slipping through the open window.
"Will you let your son be free?"
"Of course," she answer, running a finger down a nose that has grown just slightly too pointed for the babyface look Gabriel so adored in him, once, "he'll be whatever he wants to be. The world is his and I'll never let him forget it."
Reminding herself about all the good things waiting for Adrien drives away the nagging doubts. She doesn't know what to tell him when he wakes, but he's slept for so long, and so much in this world must have shifted, anyway. No-one will remember clearly, except possibly the children with the miraculous, and Adrien will be free, and healthy, and alive.
"Thank you."
The sincerity is incongruous with everything else that has been said these last ten minutes, and before she has the mind to stop herself, the reply slips out.
"Why do you care?"
She knows it's a mistake before she's finished speaking, and stops before something damning slips out to escalate it.
"Because Adrien never was," says the boy, but he's looking at the action figures, "and if your son will have what he never did, then it makes me feel better."
"He'll have everything," she whispers, and hopes the boy hears the truth in every word, "because he's everything I have, and I know what life is like without him."
"You'll let him go to school? And be with his friends whenever he wants to? And play the music he wants to play?"
"Of course."
Adrien's breath is a gossamer whisper against her fingers, and every nerve in her body sparkles with the knowledge that everything wrong has been set right.
"Are you gonna tell him what happened to his dad?"
She shakes her head. "He'll know as much and as little as everyone else. The wish would've changed things, right? I don't know what became of Gabriel, but I'm sure there'll be some explanation. The rest of it is useless. He's always been such a happy boy."
"He was sad pretty often. His dad mostly didn't care about him, and he almost never got to do the things he wanted to do. He missed you, a lot."
"He was made to miss me."
"He loved a girl."
"Don't be stupid."
"If this world still remembers Cat Noir, you can judge for yourself. Ladybug loved him back."
"What a waste," Emilie mutters, and sunlight catches in the shrapnel of her rings dropped on the desk. Viperion is biting his lip, and then his face crumbles for a second.
"Yes," he agrees.
"He didn't know happiness or sadness. He had no heart."
The boy shakes his head.
"You know that's not true."
Emilie sighs.
"I know exactly how little there was. He was an empty shell that only did what we made him do."
"Maybe he was in the beginning," the boy agrees, deeply unhappy, "but that wasn't what he was in the end."
The silence of the room is restless, and Emilie hates how it disturbs Adrien's slumber.
"You don't know him like I do," she whispers.
"And you'll never know him like I knew him." Viperion says. He's silent for a while, before he opens his mouth again. "He had the biggest heart I've known. Please, don't forget him."
Those are his last words before he leaves.
Emilie has never been more alone. Adrien's tall ceilings allow too much air for two souls; her son is breathing soundlessly, and the faint din of the city outside does little to fill every corner of things that are gone. She'd guessed Gabriel's fate the moment she saw the broken rings; Nathalie is no-where around, and she doubts the children will come here. Adrien and her are the only ones left, and neither of them know this new world that Gabriel has made them.
Her beautiful boy is still resting, pure and innocent to the cruelty of life. He'll have to face it, she knows; one can never fully savour the sweetness of joy until you've had to swallow the bitterness of loss. But some things are too cruel for a boy like him to know, and her Adrien will only know the victories and defeats that are his own. He'll be happy, and free, and no ancient magic will ever reach him.
She climbs into bed next to him and rests against the headboard. Turns her face to the ceiling, and remembers the months of bed rest, and the boy who'd sit next to her, day in and out. Her ring warm on her hand, and Adrien - not her Adrien - fidgeting, restless, because her Adrien would have been. There had been nothing false in the sympathy in the boy on her bedside, save the fact that it had been all her own making.
She takes Adrien's hand, and remembers the boy who had held hers. Remembers waking from her slumber as he pulled away in boyish boredom; remembers wishing him back, and the sweet gratitude to see his obeisance. Love unconditional and unquestionable, soft and soothing, but underneath: hatefully empty, because a tin man boy can give nothing, only pass her own feelings back to her.
Emilie Agreste exhales, closes her eyes and basks in the solid shape of her sleeping son as she starts piecing her world back together. Joy and grief are blending together in the days she sees coming; things destroyed all around her to create a better world, truths that will be forgotten and unspoken until they can never hurt anyone. It isn't a happy ending, but as a beginning, it is sufficiently hopeful.
Whatever haunted the world enough for all those children to have miraculous is gone with Gabriel. Their life is safe and peaceful, but when she turns to take in Adrien once more, something black catches in the corner of her eye. Forgotten on the floor is a sock puppet with button eyes and cat ears, and Emilie feels a shudder run up her spine at the realisation that neither Gabriel nor Nathalie would ever condescend to that level of childishness. And on the bedside table: the miraculous dolls, the boy with the black cat blond and green-eyed. Their friend indeed, the boy who'd smile on command and agree with every word she'd said.
The memories are foggy, towards the end, muddled by pain and delirium and fear and declining cognitive functions. Gabriel had been there, whenever he could. Adrien had been there always, sitting at her bedside or sleeping at her side. Someone had helped her swallow chalky nutrient drinks. A lucid moment of a plate with a half-eaten sandwich on the nightstand, next to an empty glass of milk, and the boy slumped over her bed. The faint remembrance of short fingers in her hair as her body was wracked in an agony that rendered her senseless and conscious of nothing but the hurt.
But the puppet boy had learned the simple things without being told, hadn't he?
He must have learned the tears, too, because Emilie knows in her heart of hearts that his had been empty of everything but what she'd filled it with. His tears would have been as hollow as everything else. Adrien's fingers are firm in her hand, warm from the blood of his beating heart.
If hot tears are running down his mother's cheeks, then it's not over anyone who she loved, because his having had a loving heart is unbearable.