Chapter Text
“It’s coffee,” Adrien said, offering the cup of dark, steaming liquid to a yawning Marinette.
The baker’s daughter glanced uncertainly between him and the cup.
“Cough-y?” she repeated. “As in, a drink that makes you cough? Or is it to cure a cough?”
Adrien laughed for a little too long at that, and when he recovered he found her smiling at him with an unusually open fondness. His heart skipped eagerly.
“C-O-F-F-E-E,” he spelled out, grinning. “It’s made from beans that are grown in the Americas, like chocolate. My father had some imported. It’s supposed to help inspire him and keep him alert, although I wouldn’t be surprised if it had other properties.”
He was still holding the cup and saucer out to her, and her hands came up hesitantly to take them from him. They were surprisingly soft.
“Wouldn’t he be - cross, if he found out you gave me some?” she asked.
Adrien’s mouth twisted as he glanced behind him. “He won’t find out,” he said, lowering his voice all the same. “And if he does, it’s me he’ll be cross with, not you. You can say I insisted,” he added with determination. “And I do. Insist, that is.”
Marinette flashed him one of her rare smirks, the ones that made him feel like they were proper friends, with no barriers of class or gender between them. He smiled back eagerly, and she raised the cup to her lips - only to grimace as she nearly spat it all over her pinafore. She swallowed with apparent difficulty, and stuck out her tongue.
“Ugh - so bitter!” she choked, and Adrien burst out laughing. “It wants at least three spoonfuls of sugar, and even then - you did this on purpose, didn’t you?”
“I did not,” Adrien said between giggles. “It already has sugar in it!”
“Well, it needs more,” Marinette retorted, wrinkling her nose at the offending beverage.
“It woke you up, didn’t it?”
The look she gave him sent him into another fit of giggles, and she was opening her mouth to retort, when she glanced towards the kitchen door behind him and snapped it shut again, suddenly pale under her freckles.
Adrien’s laughter died before he even turned his head. Nathalie, his mother’s maid, was standing in the doorway.
“Master Adrien, your father wishes to see you,” she said, her tone as clipped and cold as usual. “I’m sure Mademoiselle Dupain has other deliveries to make. You oughtn’t detain her.”
Adrien’s heart dropped into his stomach like a stone into hot water.
“Th-thank you, Adrien,” Marinette stammered, pushing the cup and saucer back into his hands. “I-I’ll be - I’ll - see you tomorrow!”
She was out the door before the end of her sentence, and Adrien sighed. Marinette always stammered when she was nervous, and Adrien’s father - and by extension, Nathalie - terrified her. It had taken Adrien years of effort to get her to come around to him.
Nathalie eyed the cup as he put it down. There was a good deal of coffee in the saucer, and some had landed on his hands - it was no longer hot enough to burn him, thankfully, but a few drops of brown stained the cuff of his shirt.
“Should I change first?” he asked.
“No,” Nathalie replied. “He wants to see you now.”
—
“…an investment and an expense that we can barely afford, and you go giving it out to the baker’s girl, of all people. Why not the scullery maid while you’re at it?”
Adrien bit back a hard laugh. They hadn’t had a scullery maid in years.
“I cannot abide this habit of talking to commoners as you would your peers. Your mother’s influence, despite her upbringing. Your grandfather, God rest his soul, would be horrified.”
Adrien had never met any of his grandparents, but from what he’d heard of his maternal grandfather, whose austere portrait loomed behind his father’s desk like a ghost of the past, it was probably better that way.
“Which is why, as of tomorrow, I shall be canceling house deliveries from the Dupain-Cheng bakery and asking Monsieur Gorri to go instead.”
The urge to laugh, even sarcastically, faded. Adrien blinked, swallowed, and nodded. He could probably ask Nino to sneak Marinette into the kitchen occasionally, or bring her notes. Perhaps she’d send back sweets. She’d done that once, when he was sick.
His father was still speaking, however.
“I called you here to discuss your engagement proposal to Mademoiselle Bourgeois, but now I wonder if she’ll even take you.”
He spoke disdainfully, as though expecting Adrien to be dismayed. Adrien was dismayed, but for a different reason.
“Chloé is practically my sister,” he pointed out. “I doubt she feels that way about me. We grew up together.”
“And why do you think that is?” Gabriel asked, his voice scathing.
Because Borbois is a lost little town in the back end of nowhere and theirs is the only other family of any social consequence between here and Paris? Adrien almost replied, but didn’t.
Gabriel began to pace. “André and I made an agreement when you were both mere babes in arms, but I can sense his reluctance to follow through, after our recent difficulties. I’ve all but lost his wife’s favour. Mademoiselle Bourgeois’ obvious affection for you is the only thing keeping his word true. You will return that affection, or at least make a good impression of it, at tea this Thursday. We cannot afford to wait any longer. I’ve already had to sack the gardener this week for lack of funds -”
“Nino?” Adrien interrupted before he could stop himself. His father glared at him, but Adrien didn’t care. “You sacked Nino?”
“I sacked Monsieur Lahiffe, yes,” Gabriel corrected him. “We can no longer afford to keep your mother’s rose garden, and Gorri has agreed to maintain the kitchen garden himself. You must have heard the commotion when he was taking down the bushes.”
Adrien was not a violent boy, but sometimes he the urge to hit his father was overwhelming. He had been posing for his father two days ago when they’d heard his mother’s cries. He’d wanted to go and see what was happening, but Gabriel had pointed his paint brush at him ordered him to keep his position while Nathalie hurried away. Upon her return, he’d been sent to his room. Only much later had Adrien been told, vaguely, that his mother had had another one of her “fits”. He had not been informed as to why.
His father often did this - deprived Adrien of information only to mention later in a way that implied that he ought to have known it somehow. It was one the things Adrien disliked the most about him.
“I was unaware of the reason,” Adrien replied stiffly.
“Of course you were,” Gabriel sneered, as Adrien had known he would. He clenched his teeth as his father went on: “Your blithe ignorance holds no charm, Adrien. You are no longer a child. Let us hope that it does not put Mademoiselle Bourgeois off you. Although,” he added distastefully, “she does seem the type to lead her husband by the nose, so perhaps it shall be a blessing after all.”
—
Adrien stared into the mirror in his bedroom. His reflection stared darkly back, its eyes almost glowing in the light of the sun setting through the window behind him. His hair stood out in tufts where he’d pulled at it in his frustration. He looked like a wraith, small and pallid and not quite real, his tear-streaked cheeks the only spots of colour on him.
Despite his father’s earlier insistence that Adrien was no longer a child, Adrien had never been allowed to move out of the nursery, even when he’d begged. There had been a time when all Adrien had wanted was to grow up, emancipate himself from his father’s shadow, study and find a cure for what ailed his mother. The first step to doing that, he’d decided, would be to have his own room. Chloe had a whole suite of rooms. There were several unused bedrooms in the house. Surely he should have moved into one already. His father couldn’t keep him in the nursery forever.
All of these arguments had fallen on deaf ears. Gabriel had retorted than Adrien would be allowed to leave the nursery when he stopped behaving like a child, and that was the end of it. Adrien’s protests had been taken as proof of his immaturity, and he had been sent back to the nursery and kept locked in there without meals until the next day. Like so many other things he had given up on since his mother’s illness, Adrien had come to accept the nursery as his home until he left his father’s house. Today, he was thankful to have been kept there.
“You were right,” he whispered into the empty room.
The other reason Adrien had wanted to leave the nursery flickered behind his reflection like a shadow.
“Of course I was right,” it said. “I’m always right. I never lie, remember?”
The shadow’s eyes could have been the emeralds on his mother’s broach, pinned to a china doll on a chest behind him, except that emeralds did not glow that way.
“You manipulate,” Adrien countered.
The shadow - it looked vaguely like a cat - blinked innocently at him, and said nothing.
Adrien sighed. “I still don’t see how running away will solve anything,” he said.
“Parents sometimes need reminding of the love they hold for their children,” the shadow-cat replied. “Or, at least, how doomed they might be without them.”
“What do you get out of it?” Adrien asked for the first time.
Tiny fangs flashed white in the twilight. “Redemption,” it said. “You play a role. You’re used to that, aren’t you? And it won’t last long. Just long enough for your father to fret.”
“What role?”
“The role of my brother,” the thing said. “A lost boy stuck in Cat’s Court for long enough to forget who he was. A fae boy.”
Adrien frowned. “But I look nothing like you. Or any sort of fairy.”
Pointed ears flicked back and forth, considering. “That can be arranged. I’m not the best at that sort of glamour, but I’ll figure something out.”
Adrien squinted, trying to see who he was talking to. His eyes darted from one detail to the next, but each one slipped from his memory as soon as he stopped looking at it. All he knew was that it was cat-like.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
“We’ve been through this,” the fae thing replied, impatience slipping into its voice. “No lies, remember?”
“Then tell me your name,” Adrien said, remembering the old stories. He watched green eyes grow wide, and his heart beat erratically in his chest. Those tales rarely ended well for the humans in them.
“You can call me Plagg,” it finally replied.
“No,” said Adrien. “Your true name. The one I can use to command you, if I need to.”
“And how will I know you won’t abuse it?” the thing snapped.
“How do I know you’re not trying to tempt me to my doom?” Adrien retorted with a humourless smirk.
Slit pupils made for a very effective eye roll, Adrien remarked to himself. “Ask me anything but that,” said the cat-fae.
Adrien considered for a moment, then said: “Tell me you won’t harm me, or willingly allow me to be harmed.”
There was a pause.
“I shall not harm you,” the cat said, enunciating each word carefully. “Nor shall I willingly allow you to be harmed.”
Adrien stared into its eyes, unable to remember any other detail of it. The cat had never lied to him as far as he knew. Indeed, aside from his mother, it seemed as though the cat fairy - Plagg - was the only person in Adrien’s life who systematically told him the truth.
“Alright,” Adrien said. “I’ll go with you. Tell me where to go.”