Gabriel Agreste and the Plague of Misfortune

These days, it seemed that bad luck dogged Gabriel Agreste's footsteps, and he was fairly certain that he wasn't even being (that) dramatic in saying that.

First it had been his eye injury and that strange kwami in the house. Then the roof of his lair sprung a leak, right over where he always stood. One of the buttons for his elevator broke, and he wasted an entire day trying to fix it before discovering that one of the pieces had gone missing. The window shutters jammed partway open, letting more than a few butterflies escape while he tried to fix it (but at least no one in the streets below seemed to notice anything). His phone battery suddenly stopped charging properly. A fabric order didn't submit properly. Money had mysteriously gone missing from his wallet while he was out at a doctor's appointment to check on his still-healing eye. His elevator broke down with him on it, trapping him in a very tight place for several hours, and after he was finally freed Gabriel discovered that he had somehow gotten a virus on his computer and it had completely wiped out all of his files with the high-definition scans of the scrolls and the Miraculous book and deleted his bookmarks of the sites he had found with legends of what he thought might be past Miraculous holders. That wouldn't have been a huge deal, but somehow he had misplaced the flash drive with all of his backup scans.

At least he still had the hard copies to work with. He had been doing most of his (failed) translation attempts with one of the scrolls, and at least he still had that, not that he had really been focusing on that for a while.

Still, he had raged, fed up by the entire day. In a fit of paranoia, he demanded that Nathalie review the security camera footage. He found it hard to believe that all of his trouble was just a coincidence. He couldn't be that unlucky.

There was nothing on any of the security camera tapes. The motion detector that Nathalie had turned on when she left had not gone off. Gabriel had been forced to admit that the virus that had wiped all of the files on his Miraculous account (though thankfully not his design account, though he had that thoroughly backed up just in case something like this happened) was apparently real and was entirely his own fault thanks to him looking at somewhat dodgy websites during the course of his Miraculous research without first ensuring that his anti-malware program was actually on and up-to-date.

In the end, it didn't really matter, Gabriel reminded himself as he unlocked his safe and triple-checked that the books and scrolls were still there. There wasn't a ton of material that had been on the computer that he didn't have elsewhere, so all he had lost was his bookmarks and PDFs of assorted legends that he had found that he had thought might help him recover his wife. Even that wasn't a big deal anymore. He had long since given up the idea of trying to get Emilie back in any way except with the Ladybug and Chat Noir Miraculous, and he had memorized all of the information that he would need to know about that. Besides, he could more or less remember the few bookmarks that he was interested in that were about potential past Miraculous holders and what their powers might be, and if not he could just look them up again.

(With the anti-malware program on, of course. He wasn't going to repeat his past mistakes again.)

Of course, he had to get his computer back first before he could do that.

"Have you gotten the computer cleaned yet?" Gabriel demanded impatiently as he watched Nathalie hover over his computer, frown on her face. As far as he could tell, the virus hadn't affected his design account, but he didn't want to risk it by using his computer again until that virus was wiped from it.

"I've run six different highly-rated anti-malware programs on your computer, and none of them have found anything," Nathalie reported.

Gabriel strode over to her to peer over her shoulder. "So it's clear?"

"Not at all. Whatever virus you got is so new that the programs haven't updates to recognize it yet." Nathalie let out a huff as yet another top-of-the-line computer scan came up empty. "I might need to call in a pro to get your virus cleaned off so you can use the computer again."

Gabriel scowled. Several more hours of work lost, and he couldn't even make good use of his time because the elevator was still not in working condition, since his contractor had several other jobs to work on first.

On top of everything else, Gabriel was still puzzled by the fact that he hadn't been attacked yet. He spent every waking hour of the day (and some non-waking hours as well) paranoid and on edge, waiting for the superheroes to attack.

Nothing. It had been weeks, and still nothing had happened.

By now, Gabriel was fully convinced that Nooroo's assumption was right and it had been the turtle kwami investigating him rather than the cat kwami. He thought that maybe the Turtle holder just hadn't been able to contact Ladybug and Chat Noir, though that didn't exactly make sense considering that he must have given them their Miraculous and should have known where to find them. Perhaps he wanted to investigate Gabriel more first.

Perhaps the Turtle kwami was roaming the halls of the mansion even now, figuring out Gabriel's strengths and weaknesses. The thought made Gabriel uneasy.

Spied on, in his own home. And cameras didn't even record kwamis, which meant that he couldn't try to spot and trap the turtle kwami like that.

"Or perhaps there's been something keeping this Turtle person from contacting the superheroes," Gabriel mused that night before bed as he sipped from a glass of wine. It helped calm his jittery nerves enough for him to sleep, though he didn't drink so much that it might affect his response time should he get attacked. "If he was ill- but unless he was old, he would have recovered by now."

Nooroo swallowed the mouthful of orange he had been chewing on. "Well, if it's still the same person, which it may very well be, he'd be in his...180s, I think?"

Gabriel choked, sending red wine flying out his nose and spraying from his mouth.

"A hundred and eighty? Are you sur- wait, no, humans can't live that long. You've forgotten about the human life span. Surely it's been passed down once or twice since when you remember last."

"Turtles have the gift of longevity," Nooroo said, ignoring the way the wine Gabriel had spat out was dripping off of his face and onto the bed sheets. The kwami had (naturally) managed to dodge every last drop. "And yes, one hundred eighty is old even for a turtle, but that perhaps is because in the olden days, people became suspicious of those who lived too long, so the Turtle miraculous holders tended to pass it on long before they would have died had they kept it."

Gabriel had practically stopped listening now. "So it's possible that he's fallen seriously ill and can't talk to those pests," he mused, even as he wiped his face. "Or perhaps he died, and his bracelet and that pesky kwami was buried with him. But there's no way for me to know for sure, I suppose." Nooroo wouldn't tell him who the Turtle was (or who it had been), Gabriel knew that. His kwami occasionally passed on information when he felt like it, but that information now rarely lined up with what Gabriel really wanted to know, and no amount of bribes or threats would change that.

Perhaps all of his worries were for naught. Perhaps the only person who knew about his supervillain side activities besides Nathalie was far under the ground now, and their kwami unclaimed and inactive. But Gabriel wasn't going to let down his guard, not for one moment.

After all, his enemy could very well be lying in wait, watching for Gabriel to let his guard down so he could attack.

And Gabriel could not- would not- let him win.

A/N: A bit of a slow piece here, but this was mostly to show what Mr. Agreste was (or wasn't) noticing.

Okay, so about the money for Max's gift cards thing- I ended up coming up with a little bit more of a backstory for that, and I'm so annoyed that I couldn't find a way to work that into any of the last few chapters. So Plagg grabbed the money from Mr. Agreste's wallet when it was in his desk, and he couldn't just phase through stuff with the money if he was just carrying it like normal (and the floating money would show up on the security cameras), so he stuffed it in his mouth and brought it back to Adrien that way. Adrien had to air out the money before using it to buy gift cards, but it still smelled faintly of Camembert when he handed the bills over to some very confused cashiers. And thanks to the timing/nothing showing up on the security cameras, Mr. Agreste just assumed that he had somehow gotten pickpocketed when he went to his doctor's appointment. He didn't end up reporting the loss to the police because he didn't think that amount was worth it.

Another quick note- I'm going to Canada tomorrow for a bird-banding gig for a month and a half. There's no internet (...or running water) on site, and while we go into town fairly regularly there will be other things that take priority over posting. I'll try to finish up PatBC in a fairly timely manner, but posting will entirely depend on if my ride is willing to stay in town long enough for me to get everything formatted and up.

(also pls send well-wishes that my flight will go normally. I do not have a fabulous track record with getting across the boarder without incident. I swear it isn't my fault 95% of the time.)

As always, reviews make my day! :)