#it takes a village and a tub's worth of introspection to raise an adrien because gabriel did a shite job

[19thsentry-blog]

New Beat

Miraculous Ladybug Fanfic (Companion Story to Worlds Not Our Own, Friendship Fic)

Chapters

In The Shadows | Chp 1 | Chp 2 | Chp 3 | Chp 4 | Chp 5 | Chp 6 | Chp 7 | Chp 8 | Chp 9 |  Epilogue | Timeline

Chapter One: Love That Should Have Lasted Years (AO3 Link)  

Chapter Snapshot

Adrien clicked the answer button. "Hey, Juleka, it's Adrien."

A moment's silence, and then, "…Adrien… Where's Rose?" she asked, suspicion layering her voice.

Something clattered from the kitchen. Adrien frowned. "Uh, she's here, with me at my place. She didn't tell you?"

"No," Juleka sighed, voice heavy over the phone. "Why is she over there? Dammit, is she trying to snoop?"

"No! Well, not exactly, er, she's helping me learn how to cook--"

There were a lot of scrapping sounds coming from the kitchen now, and the smell seemed to be getting worse. He heard Juleka sigh over the phone. "Adrien, look--you got fleeced. Rose can't cook for shit."

"Uh--" 

Adrien wrangled his keys out of his pocket and frowned when the lock fought against the key. Rose put a hand on his. "I think that's the mail key, dear," she said, a laugh swimming in her blue eyes even if she didn't laugh at him out loud. 

"Oops," he said, trying to flip to the other key between his fingers. It still fought him, but after turning the teeth side up and down a few times he finally got the door to unlock. Why did everything have to be so hard? He pushed the door open. "Welcome to Fort Bachelor," he said with a crooked grin, trying not to be too embarrassed at the boxes half unpacked and clothes and packing paper lying everywhere. They still didn't have any real furniture, but they'd bought two chairs from a thrift store that now sat dovetailed in front of Kamdyn's entertainment center. Nino gave him one of his older TVs, and the lone gaming console he'd taken from his room was plugged dolefully into the outlet a few feet away, the cords reaching across the room so it could sit on the black entertainment center's surface. 

Rose weaved around the boxes, neon pink shopping bags dotted with kittens and puppies swinging by her side. "Well, I think this is just lovely!" she said warmly. "And the view from the kitchen window is darling." 

It really wasn't much, just a view of the little park behind the apartment complex with a lone tree, a flower bed, and a couple of swing sets. He could be pessimistic and think she was just humoring him, but Rose was nothing if not earnest in seeing the lovely side of even the drabbest object. That being said, she was absolutely using this opportunity to snoop, and was trying very carefully not to show it. 

"Kam said we can use any of his kitchen stuff, no problem." 

She clapped her hands twice out of excitement and set the bags on the kitchen counter that split the kitchen from the small living room/dining room area. "Thank you so much for letting me do this! I think this is just what we all need," she said, unpacking the ingredients they had just picked up from the grocery store. 

Adrien walked into the kitchen with her, helping her as she unpacked. "It's no problem! And you're helping me, too, so I should be the one thanking you," he said, taking out a packet of chicken tenderloins from the bag. He prodded the still cool chicken with his thumbs on top of the thin plastic covering it. It felt weird. Squishy. He smiled to himself and set it on the counter.

Nino had taught him a lot in the weeks he was crashing at his place, and it had felt like a wild vacation for a while. He was out of school, and not thinking about all of the university acceptance letters waiting for him back at the Agreste mansion ran him through with a rebellious thrill. Now that Adrien had a job, he would probably end up rejecting the lot of them. His father would probably tell him he was ruining his life--but there was more than one way to live, and he was determined to find the one that suited him. 

And that was why Rose was here, because while he enjoyed the wild abandon he and Nino had blazed through those first couple of weeks, Nino's life lessons seemed slightly skewed on occasion. Their diet consisted of imported American cheese puffs, take-out, and peanut butter sandwiches, and Nino's guidance in navigating a grocery store was "whatever's cheap and looks good". But Adrien wanted to learn how to cook, so when Rose offered to teach him, he jumped on the opportunity. 

"When will Alix get here?" he asked, watching with a bemused smile when Rose pulled a lacy white apron out of her bag and looped it around her neck. It had a purple cracked skull emblazoned on the front.

She frowned for a moment, thinking as she poked her lower lip with her finger. "Probably 15 or so minutes. The shopping trip took a bit longer than we expected." 

Oops. That would be his fault. He had asked a lot of questions, and all of them had been in dire need of answers. Rose had started really taking him seriously when he suggested they cook Salmon for dinner, and the fresh slab of fish he'd slung in the cart without thinking about it had been a whopping 40 euros. Hence the chicken. 

"What got her so upset?" he asked, ducking his head when Rose threw a black apron with some ruffles and pink lace on the ends over his head. 

Her lip wavered a bit. "I don't know! Well--I do, but I don't know why she got so upset about it. But this will fix it right up. A homecooked meal makes everything better. Now, where's a skillet?" 

Adrien started to swing a few cupboards open, looking for something suitable. Rose went to go fiddle with the buttons on the stove. He found a heavy, red skillet, pulled it out of the back of the cabinet where Kam had shoved it, and set it up on the counter. The Cat Miraculous caught his eye, and not for the first time today (or this week), he gave it a good long stare. 

Plagg was, probably understandably, a little upset at him. All of his unrestricted access to the finest and choicest cheese would be a lot harder to come across now that he wasn't living in the lap of luxury. Plagg complained about it endlessly of course, but he knew deep down he didn't mean it all that much--his Kwami had a heart of gold beneath the stubborn exterior. 

He had thought about returning the ring to Marinette with the rest of the Miraculous, but she beat him to the chase and insisted he kept it. The longer he thought about Marinette, the more Adrien felt like he was losing. It wasn't about loving her and not being able to have her (although that was usually the launch point for these kinds of thoughts); he'd had a few months to himself to work out that tangled mess of emotions. The truth was, ever since Adrien was a kid, the only thing he had ever wanted was to be the son his parents wanted him to be, and it came at a sharp cost. It was one he was paying for now. 

He felt Rose's hand on his back and looked up at her sympathetic smile. "Sorry. What do you need me to do next?" he asked. 

Rose took the skillet and set it on the warming stove top, and then she ignored his question, using one fingernail to pierce the thin plastic of the chicken packet and rip it open. "How are you doing, Adrien?" 

This was their spot. It meant a lot to him, this little rooftop with a view, one that he had once decorated with flower petals and candles and told her exactly how he felt about her. He had invited her here that night with such high hopes, so much love in his starved heart, and tonight he somehow felt worse than he had when she told him she loved someone else. 

Adrien held the ring in his palm, turning it over and over, feeling the warm metal roll in his hand. Unlike last time, Ladybug showed up right on the dot, and God, she looked just as beautiful as the first time he saw her. She gave him an awkward smile and, for the first time ever, de-transformed in front of him. 

It all made sense, and that made it worse. 

Marinette sat beside him on the rooftop, staring out into the night sky. He didn't know what to say, so he said nothing at all. Marinette was the first to speak. 

"I guess I never really knew you," she said softly, staring at her hands curled in her lap. 

Those words were the ones that cut him the most. How many times had he wanted her to know exactly who he was? To see the real him, the one beneath the surface? But Ladybug had never loved Chat Noir. She had loved Adrien, the façade he put on. "No," he said, no malice in his voice, "I guess not." Because who was he to be so hurt, when he was the same? 

But…that wasn't right, was it? He hadn't let himself love Marinette because he didn't want to hurt her (Félix had been right about his dad--what Gabriel would have done), but he had loved her. He'd loved them both, her and Ladybug. 'You're our everyday Ladybug,' he'd told her once. How had she felt about that? 

"I want you to keep the Cat Miraculous," she said, lifting her head. Her black hair shined white under the moon's light.

He swallowed, feeling the ring he held in his palm. Had she known he wanted to give it back?

Marinette bit her lip a bit. "I mean, the…the reason we became Chat Noir and Ladybug, that's all buttoned up, I get it. But Miraculouses aren't just given out to get back ones that aren't used properly. We still have a job to do, making Paris…better. I mean, you don't have to stay in Paris; you can go wherever you--" she stopped, taking a deep breath in. "You can do whatever you want, now." 

Those words would have excited him before; now he just felt queasy at them. What he wanted was for his dad not to have been Hawk Moth, and he wanted Marinette. Both were firmly off the table, so what was left? Just him. Just Adrien--whoever that was. "What are we going to do about…" Why was it so hard to say it out loud? He forced himself. "My dad? Hawk Moth? It doesn't seem right to just say all is forgiven and forgotten. I mean, he did so much hurting." 

Marinette turned to look at him, big blue eyes full of sympathy. "I think for now, we kind of have to. It's not really right, but I don't think he's a threat anymore. Luka said, um, there's a passage about it in the Guardian's Precepts--this book they put all their rules and secrets in. It mentions something about a council or whatever in The Order. They used to get together to figure out how to deal with people who misused the Miraculouses, judge their fate and all that. They mention something about sending those people to this place, shunya or shinyi or something, I don't know. But there aren't any details about said place, and there's no Order anymore, so it's just…us. Figuring it out." Marinette began to rub between her eyebrows with her fingertips. 

Adrien looked down at his palms, at the ring that lay in them. He knew he needed to start building something new, that now that everything he had known was up in the air, it was up to him to right the ship. The only question was, how? Adrien slipped the ring back on his finger, feeling the familiar weight of it against his knuckle. Marinette put her hand on his. He felt himself choke at the warmth. 

"Adrien? How are you doing?" 

The chicken Rose put in the skillet started to sizzle. "I'm…" Adrien swallowed. "I'm trying." 

"We're all proud of you, you know," she said, ducking into a cupboard next to the sink to dig around for a cutting board, leaving the chicken unattended. "Sometimes when I think back on everything that happened, it almost feels like a dream. What you're going through can't be easy." 

Having to attend your mother's funeral twice wasn't easy, and it definitely wasn't normal. When he had been Chat Noir and Marinette had been Ladybug, he always felt left out that she hadn't trusted him with the secret identities of the heroes she chose--finding out they were his friends at least made this part easier. No one else but the other Miraculous holders would ever know Hawk Moth had been Gabriel Agreste, but at least he had people to talk to about it.

Adrien cleared his throat, taking the knife Rose handed him as an implicit direction to start cutting the potatoes she had washed in the sink. "I feel like, for a long time, I was always waiting for my life to really begin. Like it hadn't actually started yet, and then I got the Cat Miraculous and I thought maybe…maybe this is it, this is my sign that I get to start living." For a while, that had been true. When he was Chat Noir, he thought he could finally be himself. "But after everything that happened last Fall, I don't know, I feel like I was still just playing a part in a play." 

Rose hummed sympathetically, moving the chopped potatoes into a bowl to throw some olive oil on them. He was going to say something else, because Rose really was one of the best listeners there was, but he smelled something off and he wasn't sure what. "Rose, do you smell--?" 

Her phone started ringing, some screeching death metal sound that made him jump. "Oh, would you be a dear and grab that? My hands are all oily," she said, wrist deep in tossing the potatoes. 

"Uh, sure," he said, leaving the knife on the counter to go into the living room to start riffling through her purse. He finally found her phone in the inner pocket. "It's Juleka!" he said, staring at the dark-haired beauty's picture on the screen. 

"Go ahead and answer it!" she yelled back from the kitchen over the sizzle of the chicken. 

Adrien clicked the answer button. "Hey, Juleka, it's Adrien." 

A moment's silence, and then, "…Adrien… Where's Rose?" she asked, suspicion layering her voice. 

Something clattered from the kitchen. Adrien frowned. "Uh, she's here, with me at my place. She didn't tell you?" 

"No," Juleka sighed, voice heavy over the phone. "Why is she over there? Dammit, is she trying to snoop?" 

"No! Well, not exactly, er, she's helping me learn how to cook--" 

There were a lot of scrapping sounds coming from the kitchen now, and the smell seemed to be getting worse. He heard Juleka sigh over the phone. "Adrien, look--you got fleeced. Rose can't cook for shit." 

"Uh--" The smoke alarm in the apartment began to screech, and both he and Rose turned to each other, wide-eyed and fearful. He heard Juleka shout through the phone but couldn't make out what she was saying, and that was when the door to his apartment slammed open and Alix burst in. 

"What the hell are you two doing?" she asked, jumping over boxes into the corner of the room where the smoke detector was blaring like a police siren. Her hat fell off as she leapt up on a box, balancing precariously as she slapped at the sensor to try to get it to stop. 

"I don't know what went wrong--it doesn't do this when Juleka does it!" Rose said over the noise, hands over her ears. 

Alix pressed a couple of buttons on the smoke detector, but it kept blaring. "Oh, fuck this!" Alix muttered, mouth screwed up in concentration. She twisted the detector with one brutal motion and the white circular disk came free from its attachment to the wall, dangling from a few colored cords. Alix ripped the yowling detector out and jumped off the box, fingernails grappling with the battery compartment on the detector and failing while it screamed back. She ran with it to the kitchen, slamming the window open and throwing it outside like an Olympian competing at the discus toss. It finally stopped chirping when it hit the ground. 

Adrien and Rose flanked Alix by the window, staring down at the mangled smoke detector where it lay at the feet of some pimply youth it had nearly clocked in the head. The kid stared back. 

"Well," Alix said, clearing her throat. "That takes care of that." The chicken was still burning, and she spun around to get it off the burner and flick the stove off. Alix grabbed a fork from the counter and poked it. "Wow, you really messed this up good, pinky." 

Rose pouted. "I would have had it; I just got…distracted." 

"Right." Alix laughed and shook her head. "Adrien, get me another fork," she said. 

Adrien riffled through the drawers while Rose went to sit on a box on the other side of the counter with as much dignity as she could spare. He handed Alix a fork and watched her pull apart the chicken, checking for any raw parts. "Normal people use a meat thermometer," Alix said, "But this baby's gonna have to get shredded anyway to be edible, so this works too. Just make sure it's not pink. If it's still a bit pink but the outside looks too charred to put it back on the stove, a minute or two in the microwave cures most culinary ills." 

Alix shredded the rest of the chicken between the fork tines, dispensing other valuable information. "Normal people also season it first--" 

"Oh, fiddle sticks, I knew I forgot something…" 

"God, I wish you were kidding," Alix said with a fond laugh, digging through the cupboards to find a big bowl. "You got salad in this joint?" 

Alix directed Adrien around the kitchen with practiced ease, fixing up what she said was something like a Mexican salad, with black beans and corn to go over it with the shredded chicken. Rose was allowed to stick her potatoes in the oven but was otherwise left to entertain them with whatever stories she had from working at the animal shelter. It felt good. It felt normal, and he needed as much of normal as he could get.

Several hours later, full of the meal Alix had somehow managed to salvage (and hey, he had learned some things about cooking today after all), Juleka had come to pick up her girlfriend, muttering apologies at the mangled wires coming from the ceiling. Then it was just Adrien and Alix, sitting in front of the TV. 

"So, besides Rose inviting me here for…I don't know what that was, honestly," she said with a huff that was mostly a laugh, "but I had another reason for being here." Alix started digging into the pocket on the calf of her cargo pants. 

Adrien leaned forward, taking the white and pink polka-dotted envelope from her. "This is…" he started, the words 'from Marinette' not said but implied. 

"Yeah," Alix nodded. "It's tickets--or, no, invitations. Sorry, not used to fancy shindig words." As well-off as Alix's father was, he'd never made her attend the same functions that Adrien's father had imposed on him. Alix was left to a world of roller skates and street art, and it was one Adrien wished he'd been brave enough to carve out for himself sooner. 

Adrien frowned, opening the back of the envelope to pull out two invitations to fashion week. He didn't say anything when he looked at them, so Alix filled the space. 

"It's, uh, for her apprenticeship thing. For that brand. I guess they're letting her premiere one of her designs there." 

"That's huge," he said, genuinely amazed. He shouldn't have been surprised. Marinette was incredible, but still, that was a giant leap for her career. He should know, after all. His father was going to be showing his new line there.

"Yeah," Alix agreed. "It's a hell of a design. Rose and I have been working our asses off helping. Grunt work, you know, the simple shit. She uh…she wants you to be there, if you want to be. But you don't have to, what with you-know-who maybe being there too."

Adrien tucked the tickets back into the envelope. "Right." 

Alix stood, grabbing her hat off the floor and sticking it on her head. "But I'll get out of your hair. Don't feel pressured or anything." 

Alix was halfway to the door when it occurred to Adrien to try to ask again. "Alix?" 

She turned, one pierced eyebrow raised. "What's up?" 

"What were you and Rose fighting about anyway?" 

Alix swung open the apartment door, a pained grin on her face. "You know me, Adrien. Just another feral stray needing a good home to go to." 

Adrien sat there for several minutes more, starting when the door jangled open again. Kamdyn came in, holding the pathetic hunk of plastic that used to be their smoke detector in one hand, the other hand readjusting the beanie on his head. "Alright," he said, holding it up to Adrien with a bemused look as his gaze flicked between his roommate and the frayed cords on the ceiling. "I've got some questions."  

Adrien forgot he was still wearing Rose's apron.

Worlds Not Our Own: Chapter Three, A New Career in a New Town