When Nathalie joined Adrien in the dining room during breakfast, she told him Gabriel had already left for work.
That was a lie. If Gabriel had left for work, he had done so from an entirely different location. The boy knew that because he had seen his father leave the house at midnight, right as Chat Noir slipped away for patrol. He sure had not gone to Pat Messmer's office, and the list of likely destinations was short.
"I see," Adrien replied, with a smug grin.
Nathalie scowled.
His smile grew wider.
She huffed, squaring her shoulders and straightening her back.
"When you are done eating, please join me in the conference room. We need to discuss some recent revisions to your schedule."
"What about my Dutch lesson?" he asked. "I'll be late."
"It was cancelled. I'll explain everything."
Five minutes later, Adrien walked into the upstairs conference room and found her busy unrolling the projector screen, with poorly concealed enjoyment. The lights had not been turned off, but the projector was already on. Nathalie's shadow cut through the neat grid of a calendar. She took a step away, fidgeting, then pressed a remote to turn the lights off.
She breathed in.
One had to admit she was excellent at keeping a poker face, but Adrien could tell she was giddy. A schedule, a laser pointer and a projector. To Nathalie, it was Christmas.
The teenager sat down and looked at the screen.
Nathalie cleared her throat, then pointed at the first day of the calendar with a glowing red dot.
"Let me start by saying this is not only your schedule, but a combination of yours and your father's," she explained. "It is color coded. You are lime green."
The green boxes were few and far between. Well, not 'few and far between' per se, but definitely more spaced out than Adrien was used to. There were gaps of at least two hours in the middle of his days. Every single second of the day up to 10 pm was taken, however. Orange, yellow and grey boxes were piled on top of each other without a single break.
"Some, ah, unfortunate events 'forced' me to rearrange your days. As you can see, your Chinese lessons have been suspended until further notice, just like your basketball training sessions."
"What?" he exclaimed, worried. "What unfortunate events?"
"Your basketball coach seems to have broken his leg, and will be staying home for a few weeks to… recover."
"How did that happen? Is he alright?"
"From what I heard, he tripped. Over a large sum of money. How very regrettable."
Adrien processed that and slowly turned to Nathalie, eyes wide.
"What about my Chinese teacher?" he asked, with the careful tone he would have used in the presence of a feral animal.
"He is travelling to China for at least a month. Familial emergency."
"Familial emergency."
"Yes. I believe he had to urgently discuss how he stumbled upon an 'all expenses paid' trip to Beijing."
Adrien opened and closed his mouth. He stared at his father's assistant with awe.
"You bribed them."
"Please do not entertain such ridiculous theories. I absolutely deny being involved in whatever highly suspicious circumstances caused the two men to drop their work obligations," Nathalie replied, deadpan.
The teenager gasped, nose tickling and eyes going wet with a beginning of laughter. He pursed his lips and chuckled in perfect silence.
She had bribed them.
Nathalie huffed and picked her tablet up. She swiped to the left. The calendar slid to the left, to be replaced by a nearly identical calendar.
It was a powerpoint presentation. A powerpoint presentation made of screenshots of a schedule. The assistant had added arrows pointing to some of the calendar events. There was a legend . A color-coded legend. With neat little colored rectangles accompanied by neat Arial 10 text.
Blue boxes had appeared between the lime green boxes.
"Now," Nathalie said, "you might think that your activities being suspended means you have more free time. That is not strictly true."
She turned the laser pointer to the legend.
"The yellow boxes represent the appointments your father has outside ," she explained (even though it was written on her legend next to the yellow rectangle). "Grey means he is at the office. Orange means he is at home."
Adrien peeked at the blue rectangle's legend, but it merely said 'available'.
"What does blue stand for?" he asked.
"I'll get to that." - She clicked her tongue. - "It might not be self-evident but I have significantly modified your father's schedule. I did not include breaks - that never goes over well - but I took the liberty of making his every activity fifteen to thirty minutes longer than it should be."
The boy gaped.
"Which means that," Nathalie continued, moving the laser dot in a quick zigzag between every orange box, "for at least ten minutes at the end of every event, your father will be doing nothing . Or that he will keeping himself busy with whatever work he can find. You will be 'on call'. Your job will be to go and disturb him."
"W-what?"
"'Disturb him'. Wait for him to be available and force him to spend time with you."
"I, uh, that doesn't sound like the best idea," Adrien replied, hesitant. "He really wouldn't want me to do that."
Nathalie made her laser pointer roll between her fingers. She was still staring at the screen. After a moment, she turned to Adrien.
"What your father wants from you and what your father needs from you are two vastly different things."
That was true, the boy mused. Every single thing he had discovered over the last month converged and led to that conclusion. Strangely enough, everyone seemed to come to it at the same time. Marinette, Nathalie, Adrien himself...
Nathalie mistook his failure to answer for doubt. She joined him.
"Permission to be frank?" she asked.
"Oooof course?"
She took the seat next to his, but kept looking at the screen. She did not like to have tells. She did not like to show her feelings. He knew that.
She took a moment to find her words.
"For years, I watched your mother push him, and drag him out of his office, and bully him into interacting with people. And I would ask myself… Why? I would think 'you married a loner, Alice. You knew that. You made your bed, now lie in it'. I… did not give your mother much credit. I did not understand why she pushed him, and why she was right to do so. Now, I do."
"Being alone is not good for him," Adrien said.
"Being alone is not good for him," Nathalie confirmed. "He is an introvert and, left to his own devices, he will withdraw further and further away. The more distance he puts between himself and the rest of the world, the more he forgets what he likes about having people in his life. But… he is not as much of a loner as he would like to be. He does not need many people in his life, but he needs them. He needs you," she added, tousling Adrien's hair.
He was on the receiving end of a lot of tousling, lately. He did not mind at all, especially when it came from Gabriel and Nathalie.
"I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person he needs," he mumbled.
His father's assistant pretended not to hear that. She turned the lights on with the remote instead.
Adrien smiled to her.
"You are doing him a lot of good, you know that? Think of how he acted just a month ago, and the way he is doing now. It's amazing."
"You are giving me too much credit. He is doing better. I might be helping a little by being present and by… guiding him along the way," she replied, pointing at the agenda on the wall. "But the real change happened inside him. He is willing to move on."
The teenager lowered his head, nodding.
Willing to move on.
"I'm sorry," Nathalie said. "I know that it's… not necessarily easy to hear."
"N-no. It's good that he is moving on. I-I wanted to believe Mom was alive, I did, but holding on to that hope was killing him from the inside. A-and it's not like he will stop looking for her, even if he starts building something else, right?"
Nathalie took a deep breath.
"He will never stop searching for her, Adrien. He will never stop loving her, he will never forget her. She is the love of his life. Wherever he goes from here, whomever he decides to share his life with in the future… they will never replace her. But he might find someone he'll love just as much as her, at some point, and I wish him that. Alice would have wished him that too. She would never have wanted him to be miserable in her absence. She would not have wanted him to wait."
At some point. Did Nathalie not include herself in the list of possibilities?
She needed better glasses.
Adrien nodded. There was more to discuss. Regardless of her not including herself in Gabriel's future romance prospects, Nathalie was present now , and she wanted to keep him on the right track. Which meant she could help with the darkest problems.
"I… I'm worried," he said, averting his eyes. "He's doing better but sometimes, I get the feeling he is doing worse too. I don't know if you noticed, but he doesn't sleep. Sometimes, he vanishes for hours. He leaves the house in the middle of the night, he just… I'm afraid there's something going on we don't know about, something-"
Nathalie stared at him while he spoke, and raised a hand to silence him.
"Don't worry about that."
She did not look surprised at all. He blinked. What did she know?
"I'm aware of all of those issues," she declared. "I will take care of it."
Adrien's eyes went wide.
"Do you know where he vanishes to?"
There was no way. Gabriel would never have told her.
"Yes," Nathalie affirmed. "Don't worry. It is nothing you should be concerned about. I will handle it. I am handling it."
"I really think it's something I should be concerned about!" Adrien retorted. "Are you sure you know everything? What do you know, anyway?"
She took a deep breath.
"I know enough, and I know him. Sometimes… Sometimes, when you have not been doing well for a long time… Things start getting better, and you get that influx of energy… You get back into motion, but you cannot think straight yet . So, for a little while, you might do things that make sense to no one else, and you might not see how nonsensical those things are. But as long as you have people watching out for that, people who can help you out of that mindset… It's alright."
Adrien remembered his own words to Ladybug. 'He won't do it. I'm sure he believes he will. It won't matter in the end'. His breath caught in his throat.
"You really get him," he murmured, feeling a weight fall off his shoulders.
Someone else was trying to help Gabriel out of the darkness he was in. Adrien was not alone . He had no idea what Nathalie knew - his father was too set on covering his tracks and past to have casually revealed them to his girlfriend - but she understood the core of the problem. She knew the way Gabriel's mind worked.
Nathalie ever so slightly rolled her eyes.
"Your father is many things. Difficult, infuriating, stubborn… but he is not a complicated man. Don't tell him I said that."
Adrien hugged her.
She nearly fell off her chair.
After a moment and then some, she awkwardly patted his back. That hand stayed there for a second more, as Nathalie hesitated, then the woman wrapped both arms around Adrien and hugged him tight.
###
"Alright," Marinette exclaimed after Nino and Alya sat down in her bedroom. "Before we head over to Adrien's, we need to discuss the Plan."
Alya raised her eyebrows. Ninon who was sitting on the floor with his back to Alya's legs, frowned, looking around with a moody expression. He had been cold since Marinette had confessed to quitting her internship and to giving Gabriel Agreste a piece of her mind. Nino's anger had not abated. He had accused her of making things worse for Adrien, and that discussion had not gone so well.
She had reconciled with Adrien, though. Nino had no reason to sulk anymore.
"What plan ?" he asked, finally looking in her general direction (somewhere around her shoes).
"The 'Deal with Gabriel Agreste' plan," she retorted, crossing her arms.
"Yeah, right. We saw how your plans go. Also, why do you have Adrien's full schedule on a roll-up screen in your bedroom? That's just creepy."
Marinette squeaked and rolled the roll-up screen up. She huffed and tried to compose herself.
"And the pictures on the walls," Nino added.
She groaned.
" Ignore the pictures on the walls. I'm over Adrien. Done. Over. I just haven't redecorated yet."
"You are ?" Alya exclaimed.
"Are you sure?" Nino commented.
"What happened? How did it happen? Did you confess? Did he turn you down? Did you meet someone else? Marinette, you need to tell me!"
The young designer groaned.
"I've been told he likes someone else. I can't compete." - She neglected to mention that the 'someone else' was her superhero persona, whom Adrien had wanted to kiss. - "Page turned! Can we focus on the Plan, here?"
"What do you mean, someone else?" her two friends asked in the same voice.
"THE. PLAN."
Nino and Alya looked at each other, puzzled. Marinette breathed in.
"The. Plan," she repeated. "It's not a long one. Just listen to me for five minutes and then you can discuss Adrien's love life as much as you want."
Her best friend turned to her with a nervous yet encouraging smile.
"Marinette, I don't think we need a plan to deal with mister Agreste," she said. "I'm sure we can just go there and act civilized and that everything will go just fine."
"Wrooooooooooong!" Marinette exclaimed. "Totally. Absolutely. Wrong."
Her friends stared at her.
She nearly rolled the roll-up screen down, before remembering that she had forgotten to replace it by her ten points plan of action. She would have to talk them through it.
"Mister Agreste is a bully ," she explained. "A. Bully. We can't just go in there and be nice and polite, because he would steamroll us. He would judge us, and decide something stupid and possibly medieval about the way Adrien should behave, and then order us around. Or out. Most likely out. We can't let him."
Alya and Nino's eyes were growing wider and wider.
Marinette put her hands on her hips.
"We have to present an united front. He will want it to be his way or the highway. We have to stand firm until he backs down."
"He's not a 'back down' guy," Nino pointed out.
"Who got the three of us invited this afternoon?" Marinette retorted.
"I'm starting to wonder if that's not a trap to get rid of us all in one go, because mister Agreste can't be pleased about the way you go about things."
She sighed. Her eyes strayed to the corner of the room. She scowled, crossing her arms
"For some reason, he is , actually. He likes me , he told me as much."
Not that she was happy about it.
"Could it be because you are a talented and forceful young stylist who reminds him of himself?" Alya mused.
Marinette gaped in horror.
"I can see it," Nino commented, tilting his head back to look at Alya.
"I CAN'T!" their friend shrieked.
Her classmates exchanged a knowing look. Marinette turned away with a snort.
"Think what you want. I don't care. The important thing here is to go there and be good friends to Adrien. Which means we have to meet mister Agreste's standards…" - She walked to Nino and snatched his cap. - "So no hats in the house, no talk about superheroes because the man hates them," she added with a pointed look at Alya, before taping her own chest. "And no yelling at him."
Her two friends glared at her, definitely offended.
"What?" Marinette exclaimed. "I'm just saying we can't give him ammunition against us. We make efforts to meet his standards so we can stand firm."
Nino sighed.
"I swear if I turn into an Akuma over this again , it won't be mister Agreste's fault," he mumbled.
"Marinette, you are making a mountain out of a molehill," Alya commented with a smile. "We'll be fine. We don't need to read the Art of War before we go."
Her friend held her breath and counted to ten.
"Alright," she said. "Alright."
###
"They are here!" Adrien exclaimed even before his friends could ring the doorbell. "Nathalie, please open the doors!"
He had been standing at the window for half an hour, waiting with growing nervousness and impatience. He grinned when his father's assistant opened the gates with a bored press of a button. Not thirty seconds later, he had raced to the courtyard to greet everyone.
He froze when he saw Nino. His best friend's outfit was… new. Different. The teenager was wearing ironed black pants and a black shirt, clothes Adrien had no idea his friend owned and that had probably been bought for a funeral three years before (judging by the large gap between the hem of his pants and his ankles). Nino's cap was gone, and so were his headphones. He was still wearing sneakers.
"I don't want to hear it, dude," the boy mumbled.
Adrien chuckled.
"Hear what? Welcome! I'm so glad you're all here."
He turned to Alya, who was wearing her usual plaid shirt and blue jeans. She waved and smiled, totally at ease and totally herself. As for Marinette… It was hard to say if she was wearing different clothes, because you could not see her behind all the bags and boxes she was carrying. She was swaying from one side to the other under the weight. She couldn't see in front of her either: there was a Pictionnary box in front of her face.
Adrien hurried to catch that box before the whole pile could come crashing down.
"No no no!" Alya snapped. "Don't help her! This is a learning experience. "
"A what ?" the model exclaimed.
"A learning experience. Marinette insisted to be in charge of everything, so she is in charge of everything."
"I'm fine!" the other girl mumbled from behind the boxes.
He blinked, looking at Alya, then at Nino. The two of them had crossed their arms and snorted with smug expressions. They were insane. Everyone was insane. Adrien took five of the game boxes to carry them himself. Maybe his friends had been overenthusiastic, he thought when he had to hold that pile of games in place with his chin. Even if they stayed the entire afternoon, there was no way they could play and Monopoly and Pictionary and Clue and Labyrinth and Trivial Pursuit in one visit. And Uno, and Werewolf, and whatever was in all the tinier boxes Marinette was carrying in her two plastic bags.
He stumbled back.
"Glad to see you didn't go overboard… games," he joked.
That fell flat. Admittedly, it was not the best of puns.
Marinette tried to readjust the weight of everything else she was carrying. Nino and Alya took one bag each and left her with three boxes.
"We didn't know what kind of games you liked," Marinette explained. "So we all brought something."
Adrien stared at her. He did not know how to answer that. The truth was he had no idea of what he liked. He had only ever played board games with his mother, and never games meant for larger groups. He liked checkers. He liked Mouse Trap. He liked video games.
"I, uh. All of them, really. Come on, let's get all of this upstairs!"
Five minutes later, his friends were discovering his bedroom.
"You have a zipline," Alya commented as she put her bag down. "In your room."
He placed the games he was carrying on his desk.
"Ah, I, y-yes?"
"A ZIPLINE. In your room. And a skateboard ramp, and climbing walls."
Adrien cleared his throat.
"It's, like, the most amazing room ever, don't get me wrong," the blogger said. "But I'm kind of questioning the point of having a bodyguard when you have ten ways to accidentally kill yourself right in your bedroom."
"That's… You have a point," the boy replied, looking around.
Walls three time the size of a man, cameras everywhere, the best security system money could provide. A house that was basically a fortress. Gabriel had gone about keeping their home safe in the most obvious and clinical of ways, turning it into a prison. At the same time, he had allowed Adrien to turn his room into a substitute for 'outside'. At no point had Gabriel stopped to consider that allowing a preteen to decorate his room with whatever struck his fancy was not necessarily wise. On top of that, Adrien's internal Chat Noir was still looking at the walls and thinking 'What? It's not such a big fall'. Did his father also look at all of it with the eyes of someone who had climbed Paris' highest towers?
"Who cares?" Nino said. "It's a kickass r-"
At that point, Marinette tripped, shrieked and fell flat on her face, crushing the boxes she was carrying under her full weight. Adrien ran to help her up. He caught Alya holding Nino back when the rapper tried to do the same.
More matchmaking. How had he not seen it before? He added 'have a chat with Alya' to his mental todo list.
"Are you okay?" he murmured, flushing, when Marinette was back on her feet.
"Yes, yes, AAAAAH!" - She kneeled to inspect the crushed boxes. - "I broke everything."
He crouched, that blush spreading from his cheeks to his ears.
"Hey, it's nothing tape can't fix. More tape," he added, realizing that the Uno and Werewolf boxes were already kept in one piece by strips of brown and transparent tape (and what looked like dried snot and strawberry jam).
"I… It's… Agh!" Marinette exclaimed.
Alya joined them, leaning down and putting a hand on her best friend's shoulder.
"Now that I think about it, those are card games . Why do they come in shoe boxes?" she asked, getting the cards out of their packages. "Let's just throw the boxes away. My sisters destroyed them a loooong time ago."
She grabbed the boxes and looked around for a trash can.
Marinette, still on her knees, was staring at the floor. Clearly, the problem was not the damage to the boxes. She looked dejected and angry at herself. It was the same Marinette who had kicked her phone into a wall just the previous day, and commented that it happened 'all the time'. She was ashamed of her clumsiness.
It hit him straight in the gut. Before he knew it, his hand was on her shoulder and squeezing. That gesture was a lot less than what he felt the urge to do. He averted his eyes, wondering once again where those impulses came from.
She cleared her throat and got back to her feet.
"So what are we playing?" she asked, hands on her hips and looking at nobody in particular.
"What about we let Adrien decide?" Alya suggested. "What do you feel like playing?"
The boy gave her a deer in headlights look. How was he supposed to decide? His eyes darted around and stopped on the pile of boxes on his desk.
"Pictionary?" he replied, because that box was on top of the pile.
Nino and Alya blanched. They turned to each other, horrified, and gaped for five seconds or so before whirling to Adrien.
"I'M IN MARINETTE'S TEAM!" they both shouted.
"I SAID IT FIRST!" Alya exclaimed.
"NO, I SAID IT FIRST!"
The young stylist cracked her knuckles, giving them a shark's grin.
"Adrien," she said, her voice dripping with dark glee. "Do you want to be in my team?"
He took a step away.
"Uh."
"Great!" she said, running to get the Pictionary box.
Judging by the look on Nino and Alya's faces, Adrien knew he had opened the gates to hell.
In the next hour, he discovered a few things about Marinette.
For a start, she was even more talented an artist than Adrien thought. It took her four strokes at most to draw something recognizable. If Adrien had not faked idiocy and lost on purpose whenever he could get away with it, their team would have destroyed Alya and Nino's. Adrien could not draw, but that did not matter much when the only person in the room who could was Marinette.
Another thing he discovered was that she was extremely competitive. Scary-grade competitive. It was a bit unexpected, a bit baffling, and a bit amusing. All in one, he liked it, even if it drove everyone including himself crazy.
A last thing was that she would make little victory dances, complete with arm wriggling and tongue clicking, whenever she was happy with her team's performance. It was endearingly annoying.
"You should have seen the day she played against Nathanaël," Alya whispered during one of her best friend's oblivious dances. " This is hell, but we don't talk about that day anymore. It was a dark time."
Adrien, who was watching Marinette's butt wiggle - why was he looking at her butt? - turned to Alya and opened wide eyes.
Nino leaned over the table.
"We finish this," he whispered, "then we get her away from the board games. Trust me, you don't want a Marinette on a winning streak."
Adrien turned to the aspiring stylist. He caught himself chuckling.
###
They had drawn circles on the courtyard's walls.
Adrien had a zipline in his room. He had a skateboard ramp, climbing walls, arcade games, a complete apartment's worth of furniture and enough books to last two lifetimes. But they had to draw chalk circles on the courtyard's walls to play basketball, because there was nothing meant for Adrien anywhere in his home, except in that bedroom.
Marinette was so angry she had given a quadruple outline to the chalk circle she had drawn, and nearly crushed the chalk on the brick while doing so. She did not want it to wash away easily.
Let Gabriel Agreste see just how little he had given his son who had 'everything'.
Adrien had drawn another circle on the opposite wall, and it was so faint you barely noticed it.
"I'll clean it up!" he had promised when Nathalie Sancoeur had walked out of the house and stared at the chalk ring. "I promise."
Mister Agreste's assistant had not commented. She had not told Adrien it was fine, that it was just chalk, that he did not have to panic about it. No. She had merely said "your father is working in his study. Try not to make too much noise". Then she had returned to her office. Every now and then, Marinette saw her peeking at them through the window, when one of them shouted or laughed too loudly.
In time, even Adrien forgot they were being watched, however. He relaxed. He stopped wincing and peeking at the upstairs windows, then started having fun.
It took Marinette's breath away.
He was different. She had never seen him at ease before, she realized with a pang to the heart. She had never seen him carefree. She had never seen him happy . It was hard to reconcile that beautiful boy with a grin on his face with shy, reserved Adrien, whose smile was always soft and kind. Stunted. Restrained.
'This is not me. I'm not perfect and warm and kind.'
The Adrien who dribbled and raced between Alya and Nino was breaking out of that facade. His smile shone brighter than the sun. He teased them, taunted them, whirled and danced in a way that reminded Marinette of Chat Noir of all people. Not that Adrien joked. Not that he flirted. Not that he made puns. It was in the grin, really.
He turned to her with that amazing smile, eyes sparkling.
"Catch!" Alya shouted, throwing the ball at her.
Marinette did. With her face.
She tripped, fell, landed on her back, banged her head against the ground and saw stars. She heard the ball thump away. Everyone ran to her.
"Oh my god, Marinette, are you okay?" Alya squeaked, dropping to her knees next to her.
Adrien wrapped his arm around Marinette's shoulders and helped her sit.
"Ow," she moaned. "Ow."
"MarinetteI'msosorry," her best friend said.
"I'mokay."
"Are you sure?" Adrien exclaimed, his smile gone, his expression worried. "That was a nasty blow."
She liked his smiles better, and she was not about to ruin a perfectly fine day because of a tiny bump on the head. Or two.
"I'm fine, I've seen worse," she replied, getting to her feet.
"But…"
"I'm fine!" she insisted, putting her hands on her hips. "Now where did that ball go?"
"Marinette!" Alya snapped. "Don't be ridiculous, you…"
The black haired girl raced to the ball and picked it up. Alya groaned.
"Mari-"
She went silent. Everyone did. Marinette turned to her friends, frowning.
"Miss Dupain-Cheng," Gabriel Agreste called from a window upstairs. "Kindly drop that ball and rest until we are all reasonably sure you don't have a concussion, will you?"
He was leaning down, eyebrows raised in consternation.
Nino went stiff as a pole, clapping his feet together and straightening his spine in a near military salute. Adrien withered a little. Alya just looked up.
Marinette glared and let go of the ball. It dropped on her foot (she pretended not to feel that), then bounced away.
Mister Agreste nodded and returned to his work, closing the window behind him. Not two minutes later, Nathalie Sancoeur brought them drinks and ice cream.
No one mentioned Gabriel's intervention, not even his not bothering to say 'hello'.
Only after fifteen minutes of sitting (and the emptying of every ice cream bowl) did Marinette's friends concede that she was in perfect health. By that point, she was so done with the fussing that she decided to prove exactly how fine she was by destroying them all. So Nino was a pretty good player and Adrien was brilliant? She was dedicated.
Thirty minutes later, the game was a tie between Adrien and her, with Nino far behind. Alya had stopped playing entirely and was sitting on the stairs instead, filming them. Adrien was smiling again.
Marinette was so busy trying to get the upper hand that she did not notice mister Agreste's arrival. She bumped into Adrien, who had spotted his father and frozen into place, then she turned to the stairs.
Gabriel was standing at the top of them (from what she gathered, that was his thing), with his hands behind his back and an inscrutable expression.
"F-father," Adrien said. "Are we making too much noise?"
The designer shook his head, walking down the stairs and joining his son.
"I said I'd meet your friends, didn't I?"
"You… did," Adrien replied. "Well, you already met Nino and Marinette…"
Gabriel acquiesced, turning to Nino and giving him a polite nod. The teenager stuttered a 'mister Agreste'. The man then looked at Marinette.
"Feeling better already?"
"Yes, sir, thank you for your concern," she ground out from behind a frozen smile.
Mister Agreste did not quite chuckle, but there was a sparkle in his eyes, and she heard the slightest hint of a snort. Gabriel took a step back to look at Alya, who had gotten to her feet and was smiling at them from the bottom of the stairs.
Adrien opened his mouth to introduce her.
Alya waved.
"Alya Césaire, sir. Pleased to meet you."
Marinette watched Adrien's shoulders tense.
"Likewise," mister Agreste replied with a pleasant smile.
Relief washed over his son, whose every muscle relaxed. He brightened up. A tentative smile curled the corners of his lips.
"Say!" Alya exclaimed. "Want to join the game, mister Agreste? I believe the boys need help against Marinette."
Gabriel snorted, amused.
"I'm afraid a tailored suit is not appropriate attire for outdoor sports, miss Césaire."
"Well then take it off?"
Adrien's father raised his eyebrows well before the penny dropped for everyone else. Then Alya's jaw dropped. Adrien's eyes went wide, just like his best friend's. Nino was the first to laugh. He held it in, of course, choking instead of chuckling, but he still had to press both hands to his face to hide the nervous smile that was spreading on his face. Adrien was making strange snorting noises. Marinette was willing to bet no one had ever accidentally asked his father to undress before.
"OH COME ON!" Alya shouted, shooting daggers at Nino. "I didn't mean it like that!"
The boy started coughing and had to turn away. Alya huffed and mumbled a 'this is not funny'. Adrien… giggled. It was faint and strangled at first, but it quickly devolved into a quiet kind of laughter.
Nino was staring at his feet, and Alya was staring at Nino, and Adrien was staring at Alya's indignant expression. Marinette was looking at Mister Agreste, who had turned to his son. She saw the man's expression shatter as he watched Adrien laugh. He swallowed, sucking his lips in, then collected himself.
"Very well," he said, unbuttoning his vest and smirking at Alya. "I can give it a shot."
He removed the garment and handed it to the blogger, before undoing his tie and the first button of his shirt.
His son stared at him in disbelief. It took a few seconds for the boy to fully understand what was going on, then he grinned. Not just grinned: beamed like he had never beamed before. It startled them all. Marinette saw pain flicker on Gabriel's face, but the man hid it well, collecting the ball from the corner it had rolled to.
He threw it at Adrien.
###
Gabriel played for the best part of an hour, old bones or not, because it made Adrien laugh and grin. How long had it been since the boy had last laughed ? Or smiled at all? Gabriel could not remember, not for the life of him.
And who do you have to blame for that?
The best part of an hour was the best he could manage without a break, however. He still trained, he still climbed roofs, he still raced from building to building if he needed to, but he was old. He spent his days at a drawing table or in an office chair. He did not sleep. It took a toll on one's stamina.
He joined miss Césaire on the stairs and sat next to her. She had folded his vest and placed it on the stairs railing, to be free to film the game of basketball.
She tapped the screen of her phone to stop the recording.
"You're pretty good," she commented. "You gave them all a run for their money."
"Thank you, miss," Gabriel replied.
He did not like her. Really, it was more that he could not. She was smart enough, and confident enough, and nice enough, and polite enough. She did not call him dude. There was nothing wrong with her outfit (except maybe the plaid shirt, but who was he to judge?). But she had liveblogged her own abduction by the Pharaoh. She routinely ran into danger to get a scoop on Chat Noir and his partner. It made Gabriel want to grab her by the shoulders and to shake sense into her.
She grinned.
"D'you want me to send you the footage?" she asked.
"I'd love that. Ask Nathalie for her email and send the videos to her, please. I don't really have a public email."
"What about gabriel at gabriel dot co dot fr?"
"That would be 'miserable intern' at gabriel dot co dot fr," he replied.
"I guess that makes sense," the girl commented, tapping her screen to start filming again. He saw her turn the sound recording off.
They sat there for a while. Gabriel watched his son dance around miss Dupain-Cheng, the way they moved together clear as day for anyone equipped with eyes, and the way they smiled at each other even more blatant. Not that they saw it.
"I'm going to have to ask," Gabriel said, "because it is absolutely baffling. How are those two not an item?"
Miss Césaire nearly dropped her phone.
"What? I, uh. I mean I beg your pardon?"
He gave her a pointed look.
"I doubt an aspiring journalist would be devoid of observation skills."
She groaned.
"I, well, sir, I don't think it's any of your business."
"I'm merely curious. She clearly fancies him, he clearly fancies her, and if he does not, he urgently has to learn how not to send girls the wrong signals."
The teenager grimaced.
"Still none of your business, with all due respect."
He looked at her in silence and waited. It did not take long for her to start squirming. For a while, she attempted to ignore him, going as far as to look the other way. She started getting annoyed, then angry.
"Okay!" she snapped after a solid five minutes. She immediately lowered her tone to a whisper. "Marinette has bad luck, alright? She tried, but things always go awry. Like… She sent him a love letter to confess and he didn't get it. She knitted him a scarf and dropped it here for his birthday, and when he showed up wearing it, he thought was a gift from…"
She swallowed her tongue and paled.
Gabriel frowned.
"From?" he inquired.
"Uh. From you , actually," miss Césaire murmured, clearing her throat.
He had to run the sentence over through his mind. His frown deepened.
"From me," he repeated.
###