The wait would have been unbearable were it not for Nathalie. Plagg couldn't make his presence known and was forced to hide in his partner's pocket. So having the woman nearby was an unspeakably comforting for the young man. She didn't need to say anything, just standing there, being nearby was enough for him. He would have liked to speak to her but sadly, in the current situation, that would have been construed as being decidedly suspect. After all, he now knew that nobody but he could see her. Nobody had reacted to the woman's presence this far and her presence would most certainly have gotten some raised eyebrows ordinarily.

He sat down nervously, rubbing at the ring on his finger. It was a nervous tick he'd developed from the first week he'd had the miraculous. It unsettled a nearby red haired woman, who fixed him with a certain amount of unease. He gave her an apologetic smile, trying his best to focus on anything else.

The young man was keen to appear relaxed, composed, dignified in the light of what was yet to come. It was a struggle. Even now, after all these years, he felt some true terror sitting here, aware of what he had signed on for. The young man reasoned that he could have run, if he really wanted to. They weren't going to prevent him from leaving. It would have been a disappointment should he flee however. No… He turned to Nathalie, in some ways, he owed this to her. More than once, she'd made the suggestion to him. Later… That's what he'd always told her.

Well later was today.

A tall man with silver hair entered the room, escorted by two officers. He froze upon seeing his visitor's face. Surely, someone must have warned him. No… That wasn't surprise. He tensed up. Anger? Hatred? The man had reason enough to despise Adrien. After all, he was the reason that he found himself in this place, locked away but never forgotten about. Eventually, he was walked over to the table. He sat down. His hands were still handcuffed. The younger of the two forced himself to look the other in the eye.

"You have half an hour." He was informed.

"Thank you." Adrien replied, his mouth dry.

There should have been an awful amount for them to talk about. A decade without meeting or even speaking. They each should have had their own questions to ask regarding how the other had been faring. More than once, Adrien had imagined what he would say.

Part of him wanted to be angry, resentful, to say all of the things he hadn't been able to before when they had last parted ways. Now though, he couldn't quite bring himself to build up that amount of hatred. Instead, he just felt tired, as if all of this was rather pointless. Instead of speaking, he just looked at the man, taking note of the grey hairs and new lines on his face. He seemed smaller, less imposing. There was no fear inside of the young man but oddly perhaps a tiny piece of pity, the last thing he'd ever thought he'd feel fourteen years ago. He should have come sooner.

"You look terrible."

It figured that the first words his father said to him in over ten years would be a criticism.

Adrien couldn't help but scoff at that. He could have said something similar. Prison didn't suit Gabriel Agreste particularly well. That much was made quite clear by his appearance, he'd lost weight and no longer carried that proud demeanour about him. His son imagined that he'd abandoned that rather quickly when he'd first found himself locked away. Thankfully, the young man was determined to live more or less by the oath he had taken a long time ago. Part of that meant not being cruel… He would take a few hits from his father, it wasn't as if the man could hurt him now anyhow.

"I've had a rough few days..." Was all that he could think to answer.

"I heard you went to China." Adrien looked up surprised, wondering how and when his parent could have got such information. "It was on the news… Fancy a new life, did you?"

"After what you did?! I wanted to get as far away from you and your shadow as I could and to try make amends."

His father tensed up momentarily. Adrien didn't look away however, silently challenging his father to contradict him. It was difficult to explain how desperately he'd needed to escape, to flee and find himself anywhere else. Tibet was practically the other end of the world and still at times, it hadn't quite seemed like enough. He didn't inform the man that he was now a Guardian, the only one, the last one… There was no need to expose that part of his life. Gabriel Agreste had proven countless times that he couldn't be trusted.

There was yet another pause. This time marked with a certain amount of mutual dislike. Even after all these years, the teen could tell that his parent still bore a grudge. Perhaps this would be a much briefer trip than he had anticipated…

"So what brings you here today?" The man asked with a slightly cutting tone.

Without saying anything, Adrien found himself turning towards Nathalie. He did so discretely, trying his best not to attract too much unwanted attention. It was the sort of thing which most people would have picked up upon. Perhaps his father was a little more open-minded than most where the supernatural was concerned but even he might find the concept of being able to see a dead woman somewhat odd. Even the young man himself wasn't all that convinced that he wasn't going mad… All the same, she was a comfort and he would take as much of that right now as he possibly could.

The woman gave him a little nod, encouraging him to go ahead. He took a deep breath, readying himself.

"Nathalie's dead."

The words simply slipped out.

The police had been informed. He knew that much. There was a vague memory in the back of his mind of Ladybug warning him that she was going to have to let the authorities know. She'd left out Adrien Agreste's name but they knew that something, something supernatural, had slain Nathalie Sancoeur. The danger was gone now. As was the woman. Announcing that much however took more out of him than he would have assumed. It brought him right back to that terrible evening, with the woman dying in his arms…

He didn't know what the relationship between Nathalie and his father was. She'd never wanted to- No… He remembered Kahn's words. The cruelty behind his intentions as having torn the woman's flesh apart, he tried to target her heart. Not easy for a woman whose name and general demeanour seemed to indicate that she didn't have one. He'd found the way however. Gabriel Agreste was a man whom somehow, it wasn't something Adrien could particularly understand, had managed to capture the woman's affections. Had they ever been returned? It was a question he found himself asking as he turned to face his father.

The man seemed to be shocked. He simply starred at his son for a few moments, blinking. It was as if the words hadn't quite registered. This was news to him, proof that an official announcement was yet to be made. He regretted the bluntness with which he'd delivered the news. It lacked in tact, no doubt coming as a painful shock to Gabriel.

"What?.." His father managed eventually as the colour drained from his face.

"I- She..." He'd wanted to sound brave and dignified, to let him know just what she had done. Instead, his voice was trembling and his limbs followed suit, like a man about to break into tears. "There was this… This monster, it possessed Cat Noir. She saved him, probably the world by swapping places and he- he had to finish it."

Could his father understand? Would he forgive his son for taking the life of a woman whom had, at one point, been his most loyal of assistants and most certainly a friend, perhaps even more. The man shook his head, unable to come to terms with what he was being told. Adrien didn't shy away, as much as he would have wanted to. Nathalie moved round to stand a little closer to him. She placed a hand on his shoulder. It was that same otherworldly warmth, strangely comforting. He allowed a few tears to fall down his cheeks.

"I'm sorry..."

The young man made quick work of wiping the tears off of his cheeks. He didn't want to appear to be weak in front of a man who had considered him too sensitive even when he notionally cared about him. Yet here he was, perhaps proving that whilst his body had grown, the soul inside remained more or less the same. Perhaps, he should have been ashamed of it. He could feel Plagg hiding away inside his coat pocket pressed himself against him, providing as much comfort as he could in the current circumstances.

If they only had half an hour, five minutes of it were spent in silence. There were some things which didn't need to be said. Perhaps Adrien told himself, it would have been best if he'd left and come back at a later date when his father had had the opportunity to process all of this properly. Dumping it on his shoulders was maybe a harsh thing to do. Despite what the world thought about Gabriel Agreste, his son was aware that he still had something resembling a heart.

More than once, he prepared to speak but seemed to think better of it. Adrien didn't push him.

"Cat Noir ended it?" The young man nodded in response to his father's question. "Then at least she didn't suffer."

He didn't bother to correct him. Gabriel didn't need to know exactly what those last few moments had been like. He didn't need to be informed about the blade that had pierced her a few minutes beforehand or that Kahn had been slowly but surely eating away at her sanity and her very soul in an attempt to take control, if only for a few seconds. Cataclysm was, in comparison, a reasonably quick way to go. Adrien didn't want to think back to it regardless. The young man already felt as if he had carried out some of his duty simply by coming here like this.

It was clear that the news had shocked the man. Did he even know that she had been released? Adrien had tried to push those who had betrayed him from his mind to the best of his ability. He hadn't followed any of the court proceedings or sentences, knowing intuitively that his mother was liable to be institutionalized for life and that there was no way that Gabriel was going to ever be let out from behind bars, at least not for a good few decades. Nathalie had been allowed to go free after ten years. Albeit with a tag on her leg and no doubt being kept a very close eye on by the government.

Perhaps he has assumed that she was still locked up and therefore, paradoxically, safe from the outside world. It dawned on Adrien as he thought that that had she still been behind bars or had he refused to give in to his loneliness and fear and approached her in the first place, that she would still be alive… That would haunt him for quite some time as he wondered just what Nathalie Sancoeur might have done with her life had he not entered it.

"She always was too loyal for her own good." Gabriel muttered quietly after a few moments. "-but… Giving her life for Cat Noir, knowing her, that would have been something that made her proud."

"It is..."

Adrien found himself looking to his side. Nathalie was standing there. There was a certain sorrow behind her bright blue eyes but as she turned to face him, she offered him a little smile. He looked to her painfully. It took all of his self-control to avoid addressing her, offering her a sincere apology once more. What else could he possibly say? Part of him was thinking over his father's words. The woman had volunteered to take his place as far as Kahn's possession was concerned. She'd been dying prior to that… Was that really a death that she could have been proud of?

"You're the only thing I had left that was worth anything in my life." She told him in a soft voice.

He looked away, a few tears making their way down his cheeks as he sat there. He would speak with her later about the matters. For the time being, he would concentrate on the present. The news had most clearly shaken his father. He knew that much simply from a look. So close to the man he had spent the past decade cursing from the mountains of Tibet, Adrien finds himself struggling to muster together the same amount of loathing which came so instinctively.

Gabriel seemed to be tired, a bit lethargic. He no longer looked like Hawk Moth, the terrorist who had brought Paris to its knees. Instead, he was a man edging closer to sixty and who had spent the past few years locked up behind bars, likely with no visitors. Whilst Adrien didn't feel any sympathy, he couldn't find it in him to actually hate the man. It felt a bit like kicking someone when they were done. If anything, it just brought back to him the futility of all of this. Had his parents never embarked on their power mad quest then none of this would ever have happened, he wouldn't be the Guardian.

Nathalie would still be alive… Everything seemed to come back to that.

After a few moments, Gabriel turned back to see his only child. The anger and dislike behind his eyes had disappeared as well. It was just father and son, talking for the first time in over a decade, some would argue even longer:

"Have you spoken to your mother?"

"No..." Adrien confessed, his voice trailing off. "Do you think I should?"

"You know as well as I do what sort of reception you're likely to get..." The man paused for an instant or so, looking else where before adding. "I think she's beyond either of our help now."

Adrien didn't comment. There were some things which didn't need to be spoken of. In his mind, he could still picture the madness behind his parent's eyes as she had found herself confronted by her own son, Cat Noir. The laughter and the clear glee that she had taken from inflicting pain on those who stood in her way had been the fuel for his nightmares for a good many years after he had left her. It came as no surprise to him to know that she had ended up in a rather different institution to his father.

He had only a few fond memories of his parent. She's been gentle and kind and loving at one point in the past. Before the miraculous had been thrown into his life, his mother had been the one he had gone to for comfort, when he was afraid. He wouldn't those few pleasant little recollections by adding yet more unpleasant ones to tarnish the mix.

Once more, the young man fixed his father. Gabriel said nothing, eyeing the individual he hadn't seen since he was a teenager with a certain amount of uncertainty. For both of them, this was something of an awkward discussion. So far at least, he was going to say that things were going surprisingly well. They hadn't been fighting. It was however unspeakably awkward. Neither of them were too sure just what to say to one another. They would need weeks, perhaps even months to regain some semblance of a regular discussion flowing between the two of them. Shifting uncomfortably, the teen asked after a while:

"How have things been for you?"

"I'm in prison Adrien." The man reminded him dryly. "Don't ask foolish questions. What about you? What have you been doing with your life?"

Adrien bit his tongue. Even now, despite everything that had happened between him, there was some voice in the back of his mind which demanded that he pay the appropriate respects to his father and did exactly what the man said. The first fourteen years of his life had left a definite mark on his psyche. It took a fair amount of effort for him not to speak a few words which could easily have spelled disaster.

It was imperative that nobody knew that Master Fu was dead, at least not outside of their little circle. It was unlikely that a man who was edging closer to two-hundred at the time he had passed had had any family. It wasn't a question that Adrien had ever dared ask. Now, the last of the real guardians was buried by a young apprentice who bitterly regretted much of what he had done. He should have stayed in the temple. None of the suffering which had befallen his friends would have occurred. The young man shook his head, he had spent long enough dwelling on those matters already.

"I've been fixing the mess that you made, trying to make amends."

"Amends with whom?" There was a somewhat clipped tone to his father's words. "The Guardian? The world?"

"You hurt so many people…" Adrien growled, anger taking over."I had to find some way to make it better."

"And how much have you sacrificed for that?"

The question caused Adrien to tense up suddenly. It wasn't that he hadn't been expecting such a strike from his father but… Somehow it hit home. He'd spent a decade on a mountain side making amends. He'd willingly given up his hopes and dreams, despite his master's protests to make up for what had been done. He's lived for years without the girl he loved or any of his friends. The training had been painful, trying but not once had he complained. Such was the scar that he'd felt his parents had left on the world that somehow needed to be mended. He'd only seen the one way to do that.

"Everything… Or near enough. I sacrificed everything!"

The anger died down almost as soon as it had come. He knew that he'd been forced to give up so much that the chances of him being able to recover from it and live something even beginning to resemble a normal life: he had no qualifications and enough scars physical and mental to make him unsuitable to be anyone's life partner. Even Marinette… He loved her so but how could she even begin to contemplate living with him after everything that had passed between them. Maybe she could but then how could he allow her to make such a sacrifice? He knew how terribly they hurt…

He became aware of his father's gaze resting upon him. This was the closest that he'd ever seen him to being the parent that he had known as a child. There was that same coldness, the silent judgement of a man who thought himself to be just one level above everyone else. He knew what was best for his son.

Adrien fancied that he was a failure in the man's eyes in pretty much every way possible. The only thing that he had really succeeded in was not getting himself killed. Even that he'd required assistance with. The young man was a traitor to the family. He'd seen both of his parents put behind bars and shown comparatively little remorse for it. So as he sat there, he fully expected to receive some harsh words from his father. The man took a breath and then spoke in his usual dry and cold voice:

"Well maybe it's time that you start living for yourself."

Simple words but how many implications did they carry? In truth, Adrien wasn't too sure that he knew just how to respond. It wasn't something that he ever thought that he would ever heard from Gabriel Agreste of all people.

He knew what the man meant. Nathalie had told him much the same. It wasn't an easy prospect however. There was so much uncertainty. He wasn't just Adrien Agreste any more, no matter how much he might want to be, nor was he without responsibility. He was the last Guardian. Kahn's attack had brought that home to him. There was a reason why Master Fu had spent so long in hiding. Adrien paused, contemplating his options in silence. In an odd way, he almost wished that his father could and would tell him just what to do, give him one of the orders as he once had done in the past.

"I'll do what I think is right."

It was the only answer that he could provide the man with. The honest truth. It was what he'd sworn to tell when becoming a Guardian although his current course of action had caused him to be forced to tell a few white lies. Of course, Nathalie had had a role to play in that. He owed her a fair amount. A few seconds later, one of the guards tapped their watch. He had two minutes. Two minutes to say goodbye to Hawk Moth, his father, a man he hadn't seen in some ten years but who, despite everything, he still felt a little something inside of him which reminded him that this person, for all of his wrongdoings was his father.

He didn't know what to say, fixing the table before him, unable to raise his eyes to meet those of his parent. He was lost, afraid of what he knew was to come. Briefly, he glanced towards Nathalie. She was still there, sympathetic, providing silent comfort as was Plagg. He took a few uncertain breaths, trying to make sense of what he had to say. He'd planned it at some point, readied himself for what he would tell his parent when he came to see him again. Now? Nothing would come from him.

"Adrien. You don't need to come back here." Came the surprisingly gentle words from the man. "Some things are best left in the past."

The young man considered his father and his words for a few moments. They weren't exactly the sort he'd ever thought he'd hear from the man. Initially, he assumed that his parent was simply saying it because he no longer wanted to be reminded of – as he saw it – his failure of a son. After a few moments though, he thought it might just conceivably have been something else, a concern for both of them. This might be the best way forwards. There was plenty of water under the bridge but the passage of time had healed some of the wounds.

Not enough though, it never would.

Adrien managed to do something that he never thought would have been able to do again. He smiled. It wasn't much. Just a little gesture. Something to let his parent know that he still thought about him, that despite everything, there was still something there between them. It wasn't much but just enough to remind the two that they were father and son. For a second, just a second, the man returned the gesture. It was that image that his child would chose to keep in his mind whenever he thought of him. Proof that somewhere along the line, there was a little piece of goodness somewhere to be found inside of the man.

He was escorted out of the room and didn't waste any time in leaving the prison. Nathalie continued to accompany him, like the silent wraith that she was. Still, he took some comfort from her presence. For whatever reason, the weight which had been on his chest was just a little bit lighter as he pulled into the drive of the mansion.

Later, he found himself standing by the fireplace aware that there were still things which needed to be tended to. His gaze drifted back down towards Nathalie. She sat there silently, eyes fixed upon him. She offered him a gentle smile, calming him slightly. He was still a little bit uncertain however, knowing what remained to be done. After a few moments, she got back up, taking a few steps closer towards him. He turned to face her fully, trying as best as he could to ready himself as a knot formed in his throat:

"It's time for you to go, isn't it?"

"Well… I can't stay here forever." She replied with a slight shrug of the shoulders. "Are you going to be okay from here on out?"

"I know what I've got to do but I just wish you were here with me." A confession he was no longer afraid to make.

The woman smiled gently. It would have been a rare sight when she was alive but right now, curiously, he was growing accustomed to it. She seemed to understand him. As he felt that the time was coming nearer for them to go their separate ways, he found himself reaching for his kwagatama, feeling some strange form of comfort originating from it. She gave him a few moments, just a little bit longer to come to to terms with what was going on. Strangely, the pain was lesser now that it had been. Although he still found himself wishing that he knew of some way to bring her back permanently.

"I'm here whenever you need me. Just call… Or listen." She smiled softly in response. "Either way, I'm always there."

He nodded a few times but said nothing, silently acknowledging her words. He felt a strange warmth as the woman closed the distance between the two of them. A couple of tears stung at the corner of his eyes, prompting him to close them as he lowered his head. He let out a heavy sigh. It was an otherworldly gentleness which brushed against his cheek, banishing the tears away. He looked up to see the features of the woman. Silently, she bent down and placed a kiss atop his head. A "farewell". He closed his eyes, forgot about himself for a moment.

When he dared to look once more, Nathalie was gone. He was alone once more. Well… Not entirely. By his side was Plagg. The kwami said nothing, floating over to his companion. Adrien's gaze drifted back towards the rest of the city:

"You ready?" The creature asked him eventually.

"Yes… Time to tie up some loose ends."

...

Just wanted to thank everyone for their reviews and say "sorry" for the delay with this chapter.