So many people angry. So many people broken. So many people screaming inside their heads.
Nathalie closed her eyes and covered her ears to shut the darkness out. Instead of touching skin and hair, her fingers - her gloved fingers - hit fabric. But she could not focus on the costume. Despite her best efforts, the waves of emotions wouldn't go away. Rage and pain kept exploding around her like fireworks, from everywhere at once, weaker the farther they came from but still present.
"Miss Sancoeur?" she heard from the phone she had discarded. "Miss Sancoeur? Is everything alright?"
She did not answer. She lowered her head to her knees and tried to wall herself shut.
How was she supposed to locate Adrien and Kubdel like this?
Plagg hopped next to the phone.
"She's looking for another way to track Adrien down," he said, lowering his head to the microphone. "We'll call you back if we find something."
Nathalie heard a swat. She felt Plagg fly closer to her. He was a faint, blurry shape hovering at the edge of her mind. She could tell he was on her left, above the table, unmoving. He didn't register as anything else than 'alive'. His aura was nothing like the ones of the people of Paris. Plagg did not feel human. He barely felt 'present'.
Around them, however. Around them. So many people, so many. She had known Hawk Moth could sense people's emotions, that he used that power to send his Akuma out. From Nathalie's perspective, it had sounded like the ideal skill to solve their predicament. Alim Kubdel would have been furious, considering his current position. Adrien would have been distressed.
Nathalie had not imagined how difficult the task would be.
She was right when she said that she did not feel much. Did people have to wear their broken hearts on their sleeves? How did they make it through their days being that fragile?
And the city kept moving. People kept hurting each other and rage kept bursting out in dark waves, pulsating and growing, and Nathalie could not shut them out. It was overwhelming.
When a pool of darkness appeared right next to her and engulfed her, she threw herself off her chair, crawling on the floor to get away from it.
"Nathalie," she heard, and the pitch black darkness moved closer.
She rolled under the table.
"Nathalie," the voice repeated, in a gentler tone.
She finally recognized it. She blinked, panting, and looked up at Gabriel. He was crouching next to the table, extending a hand. His worry was clear on his face. Nathalie felt him more than she saw him, all rage and bitterness and pain coalescing in a mass of darkness as thick as tar. It receded a little when she took his hand.
"Come here," he murmured, helping her to crawl out from under the table.
He was clumsier than she was, wobbling on his feet, skin covered in sweat. They did not manage to get up. Instead, they found themselves sitting on the floor. Gabriel wrapped his arms around Nathalie, pulling her against him.
Nathalie was torn between two opposing reactions. She wanted to run away from that tangible, suffocating darkness that seeped into her skin. She had known he was damaged, she had known that, but knowing and feeling were two different things entirely. That bottled rage made her ill.
But he was still Gabriel. Pressed against him like she was, Nathalie could smell the familiar scent of his cologne ( his cologne, the one that had been created at his request, to please his tastes, because he could afford it and because he hated everything else on the market). She felt comfortable in his arms, even if he was too tall and too full of angles. So she stayed there. She anchored herself. The waves of emotions coming from around them stopped crashing into her: with some calm and focus, she could deflect them, push them away with barely a thought.
In a few minutes, her world stopped shaking and she was left sitting in the middle of constellation of minds.
"Better?" Gabriel asked.
"I. Yes. How long have you been awake?"
"Since your transformation," he replied. "What happened?"
"They abandoned Adrien's phone," Nathalie explained. She felt him tense. "I needed a w-way to… f-find him. I don't know if I can , though. There are thousands of people around us."
Plagg landed in front of them.
"Kubdel kept Candy Warper's fetish, he is travelling with a fragment of Bella's magic," he said. "That's not much, but you might be able to sense it from a close enough location. And you know who you are looking for. Maybe Adrien will feel familiar."
Nathalie nodded. She squeezed Gabriel's shoulder and used it to pull herself to her feet, then leaned against the table and composed herself.
She closed her eyes.
Dots. Dots, everywhere around them, of feelings burning low or exploding. Some areas were more crowded, others entirely deserted.
"Give me my tablet," she said. "I need a map of Paris."
Gabriel did as asked, staying next to her to look at the screen as she let the GPS determine the hotel's location. She had no idea where they were - they had dragged miss Dupain-Cheng to the first place they had found, sneaking her into the bedroom they had rented while the hotel's staff was distracted - and at no point had Nathalie considered looking at the street names. She didn't know the area. She rarely ventured in the less savory parts of town.
Finding out where they were did not help her much. She turned to face north, focused on the emotions she was feeling from everywhere, but she could not place them. While she had a general idea of the direction to turn to to 'look' at a specific person, she could not figure out the distance between them.
She frowned and dragged the map up and down, trying to match the clusters of minds with the more populated areas of Paris. Would she be able to jump from person to person to read their thoughts and see where they were? Hawk Moth had been able to.
Gabriel moved away. She let him, trying not to lose focus.
The distance issue could be solved later. She had to find Adrien first.
Paris was wide, and Hawk Moth could teleport. There was no way to know if he had remained in town, except - obviously - checking every single spark of emotion that she could perceive. She covered her eyes, stopping halfway to stare at her new black gloves and the violet sleeves that reminded her of her favorite work outfit. Then, eyes closed, she started scanning a triangular area.
Gabriel came back to her and placed something on the table. It was a cane that had to go with the costume, considering its colors. She took it. Her powers grew stronger. All of a sudden, the sources of the waves of emotions she perceived became easier to pinpoint. Their numbers grew.
"It will take hours," she muttered.
There was magic in words like that. Whenever you lost your car keys, you only had to stop searching for them for the bloody things to reappear. Something pink flickered to the north. Something black spread and shrunk next to it.
She frowned and gave those oddities her full attention. They were far. She thought she could distinguish rage - violet and black, pulsating - and something she had no words for yet. The feelings were muted, subtle, and she would have missed them without that brief spark of pink.
"I think I have something," she said.
Lightning crackled behind her, filling the room with blinding yellow light. She jumped to her feet and turned to Gabriel.
A grey-haired Chat Noir turned to her, pulling on one of his gloves and flexing clawed fingers.
"Where?" he asked.
##
Perched on the Louvre's roof, Ladybug anxiously stared at her communicator, just like she had been doing for the last fifteen minutes, while waiting for miss Sancoeur's call. The longer she waited, the more terrified she grew.
She was powerless. There was nothing she could do to find Adrien, nothing . She had checked Alix's home, to see if mister Kubdel had risked going back there. As the Louvre was not that far from the apartment, Ladybug had gone there too, to ask the security team to keep an eye out for the historian. If they spotted him on the museum's security feed, they would warn her. Not that she thought they would have to.
She was looking up Kubdel's family - Did he have parents? Siblings? Close friends? - when someone landed next to her.
Marinette nearly jumped out of her bones.
She had not heard anything. She had not noticed anything. Yet a Chat Noir she did not know was crouching next to her.
The young heroine gaped at him. He was much older than Adrien. His hair was grey and messy, with an undercut. His eyes had the same green glow, but his irises were blue. The costume was different too: in one glance, she noticed a belt buckle. His belt 'tail' was longer. He kept his collar unzipped. More importantly, it was not an escrima stick he wore attached to his belt, but a black dagger.
Her eyes went wide.
"Mister Agreste? "
"This way," he told her, racing away and jumping from the edge of the roof.
She followed, attaching her yoyo to her hip before diving into the courtyard.
"Where are we going?" she asked when she caught up with him.
"Straight ahead. Nathalie found a way to track them down, but all she has is a direction, not a distance. So she is tracking me , and she will warn us when we get close."
Ladybug nodded, throwing her yoyo at the chimney of the building directly facing them and zipping to the roof. She quickly realized that Gabriel could not match her speed. He did not have a staff to use as an elevator. He would have to climb and run.
Or teleport, she thought when he vanished from the Louvre's courtyard to reappear next to her. He was holding the cursed letter opener.
He only stayed there for the split-second it took him to find a suitable landing place on the next building and teleport there. Marinette dashed after him.
They were halfway across town when her communicator rang. She paused, startled, as it was not the same ringtone as the one she had obtained when Nathalie had attempted to call the strange, magical number her Miraculous had generated. They had spent a solid twenty minutes setting up their only way to communicate. Marinette had jumped in and out of her transformation several times so Tikki could phase through Nathalie's smartphone and figure out how it worked. The superheroine had called miss Sancoeur's phone a dozen times, until the woman had managed to return the call, and the ringtone they had heard then had been the one Nathalie used on her phone. But who else could be calling? Adrien was being held hostage and 'Chat Noir' was right beside her.
She picked up.
"Ladybug, can you hear me?" Nathalie asked.
"Yes. Are we getting close?"
"I think you are."
The teenager looked around. They were still in a populated area where buildings were squeezed together like sardines. All of them had two floors at least. All of them looked inhabited. Figuring out in which Hawk Moth was hidden would be tedious, not to mention it would be easy for the man to escape if he noticed their presence. So many fire escapes and tiny stores and back alleys.
"Please stay right where you are," miss Sancoeur commanded. "Gabriel, can you hear me?"
Mister Agreste, who had detached his dagger's pommel from the blade and was now using it as a phone, clicked his tongue when he heard his real name. Marinette could hardly blame Nathalie for not calling him 'Chat Noir', however. That would require a long, long, long period of adaptation. Hopefully, they would not have to see that period elapse.
"Yes," the man replied.
Ladybug frowned.
How had this become a conference call?
"Keep heading east," miss Sancoeur instructed.
Gabriel did as asked, wordlessly. On his feet, he was as quick as Chat Noir… As Adrien's Chat Noir, but he lacked the tools that would have allowed him to travel faster. He was also old . You could see it in the way he moved, in his winces when he had to take a hard landing or to scale a wall. Still, for a man who had not worn the costume in fifteen years, he was good at this. You could tell he had once been great.
He jumped from roof to roof until he reached the end of the street, then teleported to the other side. From there, he kept vanishing and reappearing farther away, marking a pause between each teleportation.
"Now turn left," Nathalie said when all Ladybug could see of the man was a black dot in the distance.
His assistant had him run in a straight line until he got out of Marinette's line of view altogether. The teenager frowned and waited.
"Stop," Miss Sancoeur ordered. She went silent for a moment, then breathed in. "They are right between the two of you. Can you see each other?"
"No," Ladybug and Gabriel replied in one voice.
"But we have trackers," the young heroine amended. She opened her communicator and looked for Chat Noir's symbol on the map. "Found him."
"I'm coming your way," mister Agreste said.
She started running towards him. Not thirty seconds later, Nathalie gasped a 'stop'.
"Gabriel. You just passed over them," she said. "Go back."
Ladybug scowled. She could see the man, now, but far into the distance. 'Right between the two of you' was a relative notion when one of the two could teleport. She ran faster, using her yoyo to propel herself forward when at all possible. As she did so, she saw him land on a building, that Nathalie flagged as their target with a 'yes, right there'.
Marinette was still two streets away when Gabriel opened the attic window and slipped inside.
###
You did not teleport in a place you could not see, Adrien realized. You just didn't. He wished he had been given a choice in the matter, because the gash on his leg would not heal any time soon.
He was lucky, he supposed. He had reappeared next (through) a coffee table, but only a superficial layer of his skin had tried to occupy the same space as the wooden leg of said table. It was not like it had ripped a hole through a muscle or an artery. It still hurt and it still bled, but Adrien would probably manage to run on that leg if he somehow managed to free himself.
Not that 'somehow managing to free himself' sounded like a likely possibility. At the moment, he was lying on his side on the floor and his hands were bound tighter than the corset Chloé pretended not to wear.
It gave him plenty of time to survey his surroundings, really. One side of them. Mostly the floor of it.
As far as he could tell, he was in a house, maybe an apartment. He could see a window but, from his position down at carpet level, there was not much he could see out of said window, save from an electric cable and a bit of sky. As for the room itself, it was a living room, with old fashioned, dusty sofas arranged around a coffee table. They faced a black CRT television that was covered in just as much dust as the stand it was on. That was the extent of the furniture the room contained.
The walls were lined with cardboard boxes labeled 'books', 'records', 'decoration' and 'books', 'books' and 'books'. The cardboard itself had paled from light exposure. It looked like they had been there for years.
There were paler rectangles on the wallpaper, from pictures that had long been removed. There was a pale circle too, from a clock.
"So this doesn't look like a hideout," Adrien commented, tilting his head up to look at mister Kubdel, who had collapsed on one of the sofas and was staring at his open watch.
"Please stop talking," Hawk Moth murmured.
In daylight, he looked distinctly paler. Whatever injuries Anne-Laure had inflicted, they were draining him. He needed help, and he needed it quickly, but Adrien could not get him to admit that.
"I'm just asking," Adrien continued. "My father has hideouts but they are gloomy places full of magical paraphernalia and secret passages. I just saw, what, your storage area and… a house."
"That would be because I had the one 'hideout', and your father found me in it," Kubdel sighed. "Is there a point to this conversation?"
"No. This is just me being me. I have been called 'inquisitive' before."
"Have you ever heard the term 'obnoxious'?"
"Oh, yes. So. What's this place?"
"This is my mother's house," Kubdel replied.
Adrien rolled onto his back, crushing his hands in the process. Pain flared up his thigh.
"Is it?"
"Yes. She passed away when I was around your age. The place has been empty since then."
The casual conversation was beyond strange, but the teenager prefered it to getting sliced into cubes. There was not much he could do except appeal to mister Kubdel's good side and hope for Ladybug to find him quickly.
"I'm sorry," he said.
He tried not to frown. He could not help but wonder about the story the man had told him. A cage with a jailor who was your caretaker. An abuser no one would believe could hurt you. He stared at the boxes and read the labels one by one, as if they could give him a glimpse of mister Kubdel's past.
He wanted to know what kind of boy Bella had preyed upon. He would never get answers.
"You are not going to find a way to escape in twenty years worth of Harlequin novels," his captor commented.
Adrien sighed.
"Say."
He got no answer. Grimacing, he rolled onto his side again.
"You should call your family," he suggested. "You should, I don't know, say…" - He thought about it. He thought about the difference between having one's father die in a car crash on his way to a business meeting, or last hearing of him as a supervillain on the run, possibly dying of internal injuries. He couldn't figure out which option was the right one. Probably neither. - "Nothing," he finished.
Hawk Moth scoffed.
"I have shattered ribs, Chat Noir," he drawled, eyes still riveted to the peacock hologram. "I'll get care for them as soon as this business with your father is resolved. I have seen worse."
"You look a lot worse than you would with just shattered ribs."
Hawk Moth clasped his watch shut. For a few seconds, he remained silent.
"I was on the receiving end of a Cataclysm," he pointed out. "I spent three years in a wheelchair. I can endure a few kicks to the stomach."
Adrien's eyes went wide.
"I thought Father hit your armor."
"Mostly. He pierced it. But then again, you know how your attack works."
"Err."
Kubdel groaned and stood, doubling over then straightening up. He leaned forward to pick his weapon up, keeping an arm wrapped around his belly. The khopesh started glowing as soon as he touched it.
"Looks like your father does not value your life much," he commented. "And you can hardly say I did not give him plenty of time to release Bella."
Despite his injury, Adrien managed a backward roll, ending up on his knees two steps away from the madman.
"What are you doing?" he exclaimed.
"I am going to send your body to your father," Hawk Moth replied, shrugging. "He did not leave me much of a choice."
"You don't have to!" Adrien protested, going for delaying tactics. "You can still use me as a hostage! Maybe if I talk to him..."
"No."
"I can convince him, I-"
"No," Kubdel repeated, with indifference. "Men like Gabriel do not change their minds, not without being forced to." - He tapped the side of Adrien's neck with the tip of his blade. - "Which means I have to kill you so, when I get my hands on Nathalie Sancoeur, a few weeks from now, he won't have the will to refuse my demands. It's nothing personal."
Adrien rolled again, wishing he could free his hands. Hawk Moth followed him without difficulty and grabbed him by the shoulder to keep him still.
Just as he raised his khopesh to strike, the window shattered. Ladybug dropped into the room, rolling on the floor and jumping back to her feet. In a split second, her partner went from 'imminent murder victim' to 'human shield'.
"Let him go, Hawk Moth!" Ladybug shouted, yoyo spinning in front of her.
"Or maybe I'll keep him a little longer," the man retorted, pressing the hooked blade of the khopesh against his hostage's throat.
He couldn't both keep Adrien immobilized and reach for the candy cane, the boy realized. Not with one hand holding the sword and the other pressed to Adrien's chest. The teenager tried to headbutt him and leaned back with his full weight, in vain. He slipped. Kubdel only moved back against the wall and stayed upright.
Congratulations, the blond chided himself. Now Ladybug can't even wrap her yoyo around the two of you.
She didn't seem worried by that prospect. She gave the quickest peek at Adrien's shoes.
It wasn't the kind of hint her boyfriend could have missed. He looked down and saw something flicker on the black butterfly logo of his right sneaker. Wings. Black wings. The black wings of an Akuma. But if Hawk Moth no longer had his Miraculous, who…
His eyes went wide.
Yes, yes, yesyesyesYES , he thought as loud as he could.
The Akuma sank into his shoe and black magic spread from there over his own body.
He did not get to see what he had turned into: the floor exploded and collapsed. Hawk Moth tried to slit his throat, but the magical blade was deflected when it hit metal. Adrien heard a bell jingle around his throat. Grinning, he thrust himself forward, clawing at the ropes around his wrists. He tore them apart easily.
"Down!" Ladybug shouted, having jumped back to the window to fall along with the remains of the floor.
Adrien rolled on a collapsing beam, avoiding the yoyo when she threw it at their nemesis. The boy grabbed the staff attached to his belt and stretched it from one side of the room to the other until it stuck to both walls. In a quick flip, he landed on it and watched his Lady lower mister Kubdel down to the ground floor. The yoyo was wrapped around the man's shoulders, too tightly for him to escape.
"Bye bye, little butterfly," Ladybug murmured.
Adrien chuckled, looking down at his clawed hand and patting his pointed ears.
"I think I still have to give the butterfly back, Bugaboo. Though I'm not sure if I should give it to you or send it back to my father."
Then he heard the beep. It did not come from his hand - he had not used Cataclysm, anyway - but from the ravaged room under them. He looked down.
He had thought Gabriel was using Bella's powers. He had been wrong.
Another Chat Noir was standing under the doorframe that had protected him from the collapsing ceiling. He stepped over plaster debris, joining mister Kubdel in slow, measured steps. He stopped a few feet from the supervillain and picked the magical sword up.
The teenager blanched.
"Dad!"
Gabriel did not react to the call. He merely inspected the khopesh, staring at Kubdel with an expressionless face. Their enemy sneered.
"DAD!" Adrien insisted.
Once again, Gabriel ignored him. A moment passed in tense silence. Then Gabriel dropped the khopesh and climbed up one floor, effortlessly hopping from a broken beam to a cracked square of subfloor, to finally land right next to Adrien on his staff.
Then he grabbed the teenager and pulled him into a crushing hug.
###
Ladybug dropped from her perch, landing among the debris of the room mister Agreste had destroyed. She did not want to disturb the man and his son during a rare and much needed hug, so she figured she could check on Hawk Moth instead.
The man was looking down, jaw clenched. He turned away when she crouched near him.
She did not know what to say to him so she said nothing. The fact that he was Hawk Moth - Alix's father, a man she had met , a man who had seemed so normal - did not register yet. She took the candy cane from him. She pulled on the yoyo string to make sure it was wrapped tight, but not too much. As mister Kubdel looked like death warmed over, she checked for injuries. Broken ribs, at least, but she did not like the swelling she felt when she touched his abdomen.
Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed motion, so she looked up. Adrien was shoving his father away. Her partner jumped down from his staff and joined her.
He was wearing a nearly perfect replica of his Chat Noir costume. The shape of his mask was different and silver butterflies were sewed to the sides of his shoes, but the rest of the outfit matched the real one in every way. For her first day as a Miraculous holder, miss Sancoeur had done well.
Ladybug shivered when she remembered how Adrien had transformed into 'Chat Noir' just in time to avoid death. She could still hear the jingling of the bell on his collar.
"He needs an ambulance," Adrien said, looking at mister Kubdel. "He needed it two hours ago, really, but he 'declined' the option."
"There's one on the way," Marinette replied. "I also called the police."
She looked at her partner as she said those words. She had no idea what Hawk Moth would tell the police. He could accuse Gabriel of kidnapping and miss Lenoir of assault (and, really, the two of them would have it coming). Not to mention the whole 'fake death' trick, that would certainly be investigated as a murder.
For all she knew, Adrien would be losing his father over this.
"Good," he replied, jaw clenched. He crouched in front of Hawk Moth. "I feel like you should know your family thinks you are dead. Your 'body' was found hours ago. They are planning your funeral."
Mister Kubdel, who had so far refused to look at them, turned to Gabriel with wide eyes. He composed himself quickly.
"I see," he told Adrien.
"I'm going to ask again if you'd prefer to lose your memories and return to them. It would be easy to pretend your car was stolen and that you were left for dead. You would be confused, but you would have a future."
They could hear sirens into the distance and voices just outside. The collapse of half the building had attracted a crowd.
"No, thank you," Hawk Moth replied. "I'd rather remain myself."
"That was a mercy , Kubdel," mister Agreste snapped.
Their prisoner narrowed his eyes and glared at him, but did not grace that comment with an answer. A moment later, he looked down at Adrien's shoes and the butterflies on them.
He mouthed something Marinette didn't catch. The sirens were getting closer.
Chat Noir's ring beeped again.
Adrien jumped back, startled, raising his hands to count paws that weren't there.
"Oh. Right. Not me. I… I should still go, Ladybug. I don't know how long this…" - He gestured at his costume. - "... will last."
There was a burst of yellow light next to them, and they whirled to find mister Agreste standing there in his socks and crumpled clothes, with Plagg spiraling around him. He had taken the Miraculous off and handed it to Adrien, who took it by reflex. The teenager blinked once, then looked down at the silvery ring in his hand.
"I should definitely make myself scarce," his father declared. "I'll be checking on Nathalie."
His son remained silent, turning the ring between his fingers. Plagg landed on his shoulder.
"So, are you putting it on or what? It's yours!"
Adrien did.
By that point, the ambulances and cop cars had reached the building. Ladybug heard them park. Footsteps hurried to the door.
"Go!" she told her partner, realizing as she turned to him that mister Agreste had already vanished. "I'll deal with the police. Go."
The boy stared at her with obvious guilt, but ended up nodding and scampering, escaping through the window she had shattered earlier.
The front door would not open, so she helped the EMT and the cops break it, then led them to mister Kubdel.
"He's dangerous," she murmured, gesturing at the magical sword laying amid wood and plaster debris. "Be careful. Be careful."
She couldn't quite bring herself to tell them who he was. She could still picture Alix, sitting on her building's roof. She could still hear her classmate's words. 'Prolly went to buy smokes'. Alix who was so set on never being hurt.
Ladybug ran her hands over her face. She let the EMT take care of Kubdel and get him into the ambulance. She deflected the police's questions. It was only when she heard what Hawk Moth was saying to the police that she snapped out of her trance.
"I-I… don't remember," he was telling them. "I… was at work, and… I think I was… attacked? There was that voice… No, just… flashes, I suppose? Someone was talking to me, I… I'm sorry. It's all so very foggy."
Ladybug clenched her jaw and stormed to the ambulance, stopping next to the cops who were questioning the supervillain. She took a short breath to compose herself then gave the two policemen her most confident look.
I'm sorry, Alix.
"That man is Hawk Moth," she told them. "His memory is flawless. He is merely trying to get away with what he did. Earlier today, after he was defeated, he managed to escape and to abduct Chat Noir. I arrived just in time to rescue my partner."
She opened her communicator and displayed the muted footage of the scene she had recorded right before her intervention, as mister Agreste was preparing to take the floor out with a Cataclysm. The images were shaky - filming through the window while hanging upside down from the roof had not been simple - but you could still see mister Kubdel holding an enchanted blade and threatening the blond boy he held hostage. Adrien's face was hard to distinguish, but the bloody stain on the side of his leg was not.
"Is that convincing enough?" she asked.
###
It said a lot that, instead of returning to the mansion after the morning's events, Adrien had gone straight to Nathalie's place. Plagg was too weary for a real transformation, so the Kwami had spent the entire trip perched on Adrien's head, between the pointy black ears of 'Chakuma Noir'. Nathalie kept Adrien transformed until he slipped through the window to her living room, then the black butterfly flew out of his shoes and the costume vanished.
Adrien blinked, memories running away from him like the remnants of a dream. Plagg hissed and whacked his chosen's ear with his tail.
"Aouch," the teenager gasped. "Ow!"
"Focus," Plagg snapped, leaning forward from his spot on the top of Adrien's head.
"Alright, alright!" the boy replied, wincing. " Aouch. "
That complaining about the faint stinging of his ear reminded him of much more painful injuries, namely the cut on his throat and the gash on his leg. He cringed and limped to the bathroom, followed by the black butterfly. The Akuma circled him while he was opening every drawer to look for gauze, then it landed on the sink and turned white.
The phone rang.
Adrien hopped back to the living room to pick up.
"You need stitches," Nathalie told him before he could say 'allo'. "Please call your bodyguard and get yourself driven to the hospital."
"Nathalie! Are you okay? Where are you?"
"I am safe, I will come back soon. And do not deflect. Go to the hospital. Now."
"I swear it looks worse than it actually is," the teenager lied. He was not sure stitches were warranted, but the cuts were nasty. That being said, he was not bleeding out and he wanted to sink into the sofa to never move again. He tried to distract Nathalie. "Father is on his way to you."
"I know. Adrien, for the last time…"
"I'm fine," he swore. "I'll wait for you and if you still think I need stitches when you see the cut, then we'll go to the hospital. Is that okay?"
" No , it is not okay!"
Plagg scoffed.
"It's not that bad!" the black cat shouted so Nathalie would hear him. "Let the boy rest for a minute."
"You are not qualified to give medical opinions!" she retorted, at which point Adrien put the receiver down on the table and walked away.
They kept bickering.
He returned to the bathroom and cleaned his wounds, covering them with bandaids, then dragged himself to the sofa and laid down. He didn't think he would manage to fall asleep - not after that day, not with his father risking arrest, not with miss Lenoir in the hospital, not after everything with Hawk Moth - but he went out like a light.
He halfway woke a few times. A phone buzzed. He heard voices in the background. The wound on his leg stang all of a sudden, but Nathalie told him to go back to sleep in a whisper. Someone covered him with blankets. Someone started playing with his hair, pushing them to one side then to the other, brushing them away from his forehead.
He slept through it.
When he finally woke, his head was resting on Nathalie's knees. Her hand was pressed to his cheek. She had fallen asleep sitting next to him, with her head tilted to the side. As she looked exhausted, he tried not to move.
Of course, she did not get to rest for long. Not five minutes later, her phone rang. Adrien had to move when her eyes snapped open, and sighed when she ran across the room to get her charging phone from the counter. He sighed again when he realized she was getting a call from the company's HR department, about her recent termination.
She snorted after hanging up.
"I have to deal with this," she announced, as if it was entirely normal for her to deal with paperwork in their situation. "How is your leg?"
Adrien looked down to discover he was wearing blue flannel pajamas with floral patterns.
"It stings a little. Are we going to the hospital?"
"Plagg assures me, as 'a god of destruction with claws and fangs who knows better than puny human doctors', that your wounds are healing properly. Your days as a swimsuit model, however, are a thing of the past"
The teenager faked a grin at that, perking up.
"Now that's good news. I'm more of a pants guy anyway."
"Please go take a shower and make sure to keep the bandages dry," she muttered. "I'll go and buy you some fresh clothes."
"I… Alright, thank you." - He took two steps towards the bathroom then stopped. - "Nathalie, did you see my father?"
"He'll drop by later," she replied, collecting her purse and coat. "I ordered him to rest before anything else."
Adrien acquiesced and walked into the bathroom, closing the door behind him. He sat on the edge of the tub and mulled over the situation until Plagg phased through the window to join him.
"There is a pizzeria at the end of the street!" he informed his chosen. "You know what? Gorgonzola is not that bad after all."
"There is a cheese you don't like?"
"Yes. That cheese. Or so I thought."
Adrien chuckled, appreciating the Kwami's efforts to bring some levity to their day.
"I really should shower," he ended up saying, looking at his bloodstained hands.
It was clear that Nathalie had attempted to clean him up. You could see smeared, diluted blood in places and his hands were mostly clean, but there was only so much she could do with whatever she had used. His nails, instead of being perfectly manicured, were crusty with blood.
He turned the fauncet on and washed his hands first, then undressed and slipped into the bathtub, where he showered sitting, over and over again. In the end, he just let the water run over his chest, leaned back, and let the bathtub fill.
"What happened to Bella?" he asked, raising his hand to stare at his ring.
"Back in her brooch," Plagg replied. "For a little while."
Adrien chewed the inside of his cheeks. He mulled over that.
"Plagg," he asked after a moment. "Do you remember being in the box?"
"What box?"
"The magician's box."
The Kwami's eyes went wide. He stared at his chosen in silence for a minute or so.
"Not really," he replied. "It was a long time ago."
"And being bound to the ring?"
"If I wasn't given cheese, I do not remember," Plagg commented, yawning. "Are you going to splash around forever? All of that water is making me nervous."
Adrien sighed and dropped the topic. He would ask again later. Maybe he would go to Tikki instead.
"Warm water is nice ," he joked, turning the shower pommel towards his horrified Kwami, who dashed from one side of the room to the other to avoid getting wet.
"You brat!"
The boy laughed.
In the end, he had to clean up after himself, having doused everything in water. He found clothes waiting just outside the door when he tried to leave, ten minutes later, and spend five minutes more changing from Nathalie's pyjamas to a pair of jeans and a grey t-shirt.
He returned to the living room to find his father sitting at the table, with Nathalie by his side. They both stood. Adrien tensed.
Gabriel looked hesitant, more hesitant than his son had ever seen him. He was fidgeting, hiding his hands behind his back and turning his tongue in his mouth.
"Adrien," he said, voice trembling with emotion.
He immediately swallowed and wet his lips, his nerves getting the better of him. As for Nathalie, she was perfectly composed. Her shoulders were squared, her spine straight, her chin raised. She was observing Gabriel with a harsh expression, and you could see him squirm under her scrutiny.
The man still tried to keep his facade up, but he had unravelled. He was transparent.
"I feel like we should discuss the recent events," he continued, nearly managing a businesslike tone. "And my actions over the last few days. I am aware that the way I-"
Adrien glared at him and had the pleasure to see him lose his nerve. His father went silent. He sucked his lower lip in.
"That is, if you accept to," he said.
The teenager stared at him for a moment more. He let the silence grow heavy. He watched Gabriel shatter.
Then, he spoke.
"I'm not going to shut you out," he told his father. "That's what you do. If you want to talk to me, I will listen. In time . But I'm done bending over backwards to fix this family. I'm done being the only one who tries. "
And, on that, he grabbed his phone and jacket and walked out of the apartment.
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