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Considering Adrien had rented this apartment under the impression he would have no roommates, dropping his keys upon seeing a girl staring at the takeout boxes on his dining table was, in his opinion, a justified reaction.
"Who are you?" he breathed.
The girl, still staring at the takeout boxes, didn’t even flinch. She stood in his kitchen, a finger holding open one of the yellow styrofoam boxes on his dining table, looking down at it with a mix of disgust and dismay.
He recounted the last two hours in his head, all the way back to when he had grabbed his mackintosh and keys and headed out for his first grocery trip since moving out of the Agreste mansion. Had he forgotten to lock the door? No, he couldn't have. Nathalie had all but given him a pop quiz on apartment safety. If Adrien knew the difference between a cylinder lock and a mortice lock, he should have at least known the importance of using one of them before heading out. He wasn't a totally inept adult.
Well. The week-long buildup of styrofoam takeout boxes on his dining table from the nearby kebab shop said otherwise. The girl, who had finally decided to lift her head and fix him with a peculiar expression, seemed to agree.
"Is this all you've been eating?" she asked.
"U-uh, I mean, I hadn't gotten around to buying any groceries— you know, with uni work, and all." He shook the fog out of his head. "Why are you in my house?"
She pulled a wry face. "Well, it's technically our house."
"I— huh?" Adrien's grip loosened on his plastic shopping bags. " Our house? Listen, I don't know who you are, but—"
"Have you eaten anything other than takeout since you got here?"
Adrien blinked.
He had half a mind to reach into his mackintosh, take out his phone, and call the police (or his landlord, to ask whether the girl with blue eyes and dark pigtails was a clause on the rental agreement he had just happened to skip over). But he couldn't bring himself to. Be it his reluctance to let go of his grocery bags in case they tipped over or simply his astonishment at the girl in his kitchen, Adrien called no one.
The girl watched him, expectant. She began stacking the styrofoam boxes up, going as far as tearing open Adrien's brand new kitchen roll and using it to pick at the odd bits of day-old kebab scattered around his placemats.
A caretaker, perhaps? Annoyance buzzed in his chest. Of course his father couldn’t trust him to live by himself. Did Adrien think for a minute he'd ever live a life free of his father’s surveillance?
"Is that food?" the girl asked, not looking up from her ministrations. "Food that isn't doner kebab?"
Adrien looked down at the plastic bags in his grip. He only just realised his hands were shaking. "Uh. Yeah."
The girl threw away the styrofoam boxes (into a black bin liner hung up on the kitchen door handle — he was yet to actually unpack the shiny new bin he had bought from its IKEA box) then held out her hand. "Let me have a look."
Adrien's feet felt heavy when he stepped down the corridor.
A caretaker. Just a caretaker. That was why she was in his apartment.
(Adrien's hands were still shaking).
He got closer, and the daylight from the glass doors to his balcony lit up her face. She was pretty, he realised, but more importantly, young. Quite young, in fact — if he had to hazard a guess, he'd suppose she was his age. Nobody in charge of him ever had that same kind of softness in their faces. Nathalie and her rigid cheekbones, the Gorilla and his mountainous form — it wasn't exactly his father's style to go for someone who could potentially be his friend.
But this girl was pretty. And young. And familiar, too, but that last one was just as lost on him as the first two.
There he was, right in front of her. The polythene handles cut lines through his fingers. The girl still had her hand outstretched. Despite all those scheduled hours at the gym on the lower ground floor of the Gabriel HQ, the muscles in his arms suddenly felt too weak to lift a few bags of provisions.
"Uh, earth to Adrien?" She waved a hand in front of his face. "Could I please have the groceries?"
The little freckles by her eyes shifted when she furrowed her brow at him.
Oh, she was pretty. If she really was his caretaker, Adrien was in big, big trouble.
Dazed, he handed her one plastic bag. When he dropped the other two on the dining table, one of them tipped onto its side. Three loaves of bread tumbled out.
The girl stopped rifling through the bag in her hands to stare at the bread. "Why did you buy so much bread?"
"Toast," he said, his throat dry.
She looked as if she wanted to berate him, but then tutted, rolled her eyes, and unpacked everything from the bag he had handed her.
"Did my father send you?" he blurted out once the numbness faded from his mouth.
"Hm? Oh, no. I live here."
Adrien snapped his eyes back up to her face, in search of some answers in that smattering of freckles or the blue eyes that were narrowed on his groceries.
What he found instead was a blood drop trickling from her temple.
"You're hurt!"
At this, she looked up. "Huh?"
Before he could point at it, the girl lifted a hand, and touched it. It smeared across her cheek, like a watercolour smudge.
She drew back her fingers, and groaned. The girl placed his shopping bag onto the dining table, tore off another piece from his kitchen roll (taking care to rip from the perforations) and used her reflection on the tap to clean it up.
Adrien watched, dumbfounded.
"Ugh, yeah, sorry about that. It happens sometimes." She held the tissue to her temple with one hand, and used the other to twist on the tap and wash the blood off her fingertips. "But, no, your father didn't send me."
The water rushed into his sink and spat droplets back onto her arm. He watched them soak into the sleeve of her grey blazer and scatter over the lip of his counter.
Adrien inhaled deeply.
"Listen," he said. "I don't mean to be rude, but I'd like for you to leave. I don't know who you are nor how you got in here, but I was never told I'd be living with a roommate."
She looked over her shoulder, tap still running, tissue still to her temple. "Oh, you want me to leave?"
"Yes, please."
She shot him a smile. "No problem."
And she was gone.
Gone .
The tap was still running. Water droplets had begun to leap to the linoleum floor. The tissue lay scrunched up on the linoleum, too, one edge sunk into a little puddle of tap water.
The girl was nowhere.
Adrien stared long and Adrien stared hard. The grocery bag was where she had left it. Even the box of tea she had taken out and ripped the cellophane off of was sat at the edge of the dining table, the cellophane left haphazardly beside it from when he had told her she was hurt.
He wanted to check the tissue paper. To turn it over. But the paralytic shock had returned, and Adrien could do nothing but watch the water gush from his kitchen tap.
The air shifted behind him. "Boo."
He shrieked .
Adrien whirled around, and there she was, face clean of blood, and doubled over with laughter.
His own blood congealed in his veins. Adrien fumbled in his mackintosh pocket with unfeeling fingers until he somehow produced his phone. It was 112 for the police, wasn't it? He wasn’t sure. He couldn’t be sure of anything. Ten minutes ago he had been sure he was the only tenant of this apartment, and two minutes ago that people couldn’t vanish into thin air. Who was to say it was 112 for the police — himself? Because he clearly was not a reliable source of information.
She met his eyes — her blue, blue gaze — and the rosiness drawn up by her laughter flickered out of her cheeks. The girl straightened and cleared her throat, the stretch of her smile dying into a sheepish line.
"S-sorry," she said. "I forgot people don't usually find that funny."
Adrien gripped the dining table until he felt he could make impressions in the terracotta. The edges of his phone case were bruising the flesh of his palm. The random appearance in his home, the bleeding, the disappearing— it was all too bizarre. "What the hell are you?"
"Uh, you see…" She rubbed the back of her neck. "It's complicated."
Adrien laughed, though didn't find it funny.
"W-what, are you a ghost, or something?"
He laughed harder, almost hysterical. He eyed the girl. Wouldn't she laugh with him? Wouldn't she take that sheepish, you caught me look off of her pretty face? Wouldn't she tell him she was just a caretaker, that this was just a prank, that his father had actually hired someone to be his companion, for once?
She winced. "I'm a little bit dead," the girl said.
" A little bit," he repeated, breathless.
She pinched her fingers together. "Just a bit."
Adrien sank back against the dining table. "On a scale of one to ten?"
She thought about it. "Nine-point-five."
"Why?"
"Well, I'm pretty dead. Like, completely dead. But not dead enough to get out of this apartment, I guess."
"I see."
He was roommates with a dead girl.
Okay.
He supposed that was marginally worse than being twenty-one years old and living with a caretaker hired by his father.
The girl sighed deeply, and with all the humanity of a not -dead person, opened the box of tea, took out a teabag, then threw the cellophane into the bin liner. She picked up a mug he was still yet to take the price sticker off of and headed for the kettle, twisting off the tap on her way there.
He watched her. Waited for her to disappear again.
Her blazer tightened around her back when she reached into the cabinet for a packet of sugar. Then it loosened again, slack around her hips. Adrien gulped. She was so alive . So real. Despite the absurdity of the last ten minutes, he found it hard to believe she was anything but.
"I never thought I'd see you again," she said, pouring the hot water into the mug. The steam billowed up and into her face. "Well, I never thought you would see me again. You, however, are a little hard to miss."
The girl looked out of his glass doors. Below the balcony was a billboard for the launch of the newest Gabriel fragrance. An airbrushed photograph of Adrien in a sleek black suit towered over a row of street lamps.
"We know each other?" he croaked. Knew , he corrected himself. She was dead, after all.
At this, the girl looked back over at him. Then, she added the milk and sugar to the mug of tea, turned around, and handed it to him.
Adrien stared down at it. The steam made him feel sweatier than he already was under the mackintosh.
The girl raised the mug until it pressed into his mouth. "Drink."
He drank.
Miss Dupain-Cheng .
The name broke through the surface of his memories, and with it pulled up a whole plethora of others from the recesses of his mind.
Sixteen years old — him and her both. A swirl of dark hair clipped up at the back of her head and a fringe she would blow out of her eyes whenever she took his measurements. A grey pantsuit she shyly admitted to having made by herself on the sewing machine she got for her thirteenth birthday, and the sparkle of her eyes whenever he flirted with her while she hemmed his jeans, tightened his shirts, sewed missing buttons onto his jackets.
The tea she would make for herself, but would always let him have a sip of whenever his legs started to hurt from standing up all day. The careful ratio of milk and sugar and tea brought back images of Miss Dupain-Cheng's wind chime laughter, and soft seamstress' hands, and lipgloss-pink crescent moons on the rim of her mugs that Adrien would always put his mouth far enough to not touch, but near enough to send his heart racing in his chest.
Now, his heart wasn't doing much better. He took another huge gulp of tea.
Miss Dupain-Cheng. He searched his brain for a first name, and was shocked to come back with nothing. It had been five years since he had last heard from her. Five years since her informal week of unpaid work at the Gabriel HQ — the week she spent almost every hour of the working day tailoring Adrien's clothes while he flirted with her. Five years was a long time, and a week was a short encounter. But it was still a surprise to find he couldn't remember her as anything other than Miss Dupain-Cheng, considering he had a vivid memory of watching her wrap pink measuring tape around his waist while he planned how he would use that in their future wedding vows.
Yeah. He'd had a bit of a crush.
Adrien looked up at the girl. At her dark hair. Her blue eyes. At the mug of tea she had made him.
"Oh my God," he said, his hands around the freshly-brewed tea and yet at a loss of all warmth. "Miss Dupain-Cheng?"
She snorted. "Adrien, please. You're twenty-one and I'm dead. I think we've grown past that, now. You can just call me Marinette."
Marinette. Of course. How could he have forgotten? It used to ring out back and forth across the headquarters so much that he would hear phantom calls of her name whenever he had a quiet moment. All staff members were called by their surnames, but everyone bent that rule with Marinette. All the models and assistants and interns would greet her with a smiley, hi, Marinette! but she always refused to call anyone by anything other than Miss or Mrs or Mr.
He remembered the first time they met, when she had burst into the fitting room with her hair tumbling out of its clip and her face flushed with exertion, spilling apologies upon her entrance for being three minutes late. She blushed when he had told her to call him Adrien instead of Mr Agreste , and blushed harder at his insistence on calling her Miss Dupain-Cheng .
"Marinette," he said with a smile. Then, a welling of sorrow wiped it off his face. "Oh. You're… oh."
"Dead?" She shrugged. "Yeah. It's been a year."
He swallowed another gulp of tea, this one going down harder than the rest. "A year?"
She hummed. Marinette rubbed her arm, at the water droplets soaked into her blazer sleeve, then busied herself with arranging the apples from the plastic shopping bags in his fruit bowl. She picked the label off each one, and stuck them absentmindedly onto one of his placemats.
"How did you…? I mean…" Adrien looked down at his tea.
"Oh, uh, it's really stupid." She flushed hard. Adrien took in a deep breath. He never thought ghosts could blush. Nor that anyone could find their own death embarrassing. Nor that anyone would ever be able to recount the story of their own death, because, well, he had always thought ghosts weren't real. Marinette placed the last apple on top of the arrangement. "I was trying on one of my designs. I was still riding on that just moved out of my family home excitement, and was especially excited since the design was a ball gown — I'd always wanted to make one, and this was my first one ever! But…"
She winced. Picked out an orange, next, and gave it the same treatment as the apples.
"The material was too long. I walked out onto the balcony to take pictures of myself, but the dress got caught on the deck chair, and when I went to pull it out…"
Adrien's stomach lurched. "Oh my God."
"I don't remember the pain," she assured him. "Just falling. I hit my head on the ground."
"Is that why… the blood…?"
"Oh, yeah." She dug around the bag, and, finding nothing else, scrunched it up. "Sometimes my old injuries like to come back up. I'm used to it, though. They go away pretty quickly, too."
Adrien couldn't meet her eyes, but with the way she was occupying herself with his groceries, it seemed she couldn't meet his, either. Instead, he watched her hands. Her seamstress' hands. It was like he was sixteen again, watching Miss Dupain-Cheng scribble something in her notepad and having the urge to beg her to smooth down his suit jacket again, just to satisfy those furious teenage hormones that ran amok at the sight of a pretty girl with pretty eyes and a nice smile.
"I was sort of in love with you, back then," he said without thinking.
She giggled. "I know. You weren't great at hiding it."
"Oh no. Wasn't I?"
"Well, you would've been. But the hand-kissing was a little much."
He groaned. "I'm so sorry. I was a wreck of a teenager."
"Please, you weren't the only one. Didn't you ever wonder why I'd always hide my sketchbook? Filled with doodles of you."
"Oh, no way." Adrien laughed. Not hysterically, this time, but an actual, normal laugh. "You should've let me see them! We could've started dating."
"Haha, imagine that! Your father would have killed me." Marinette stopped in the middle of scrunching up the last plastic bag. "Well. Not that it would have made much of a difference to my current situation, anyway."
She gestured to herself, which was explanation enough.
He finished off the mug of tea and placed it in the sink. "So, what, are you gonna haunt me, or something?"
" Haunt is such a negative word. I prefer the term roommates ."
Adrien laughed again.
"But, if you'd be more comfortable without me, I can make myself scarce," she said. "I’d been doing that for most of the tenants that had come after me, but that never really made them feel any less uneasy."
No , Adrien wanted to cry out. Please stay.
Instead, he turned to face her. " Most ?"
Her sheepish smile returned. With the adrenaline in him levelled out, now, Adrien could appreciate how cute it was.
"There was this woman," she said, leaning back against the dining table. They were standing like old friends — him by the sink, she by the dining table, face-to-face and sharing years-old memories. The only oddity was that she was dead. "This woman — I think her name was Sara — she was a single mother, and the first tenant since I'd died. She moved in here just before her baby was born — a little baby girl called Isabelle. She was adorable .
"Sara hadn't been doing too good after the birth. She was really sick, and I watched her stay up for three days straight just to take care of Isabelle. Well… after a while… I started taking care of Isabelle, too.
"Sara didn't know, at first. Actually, you were the first person I’d ever properly spoken to about, well, you know. But whenever Isabelle would start crying during the night, I'd go over to her crib and sing her lullabies, or carry her up to the window so she could watch the cars to calm down. And there was this chart — it was like a timetable of when to feed Isabelle — and I'd feed her with the milk Sara kept for her in the fridge and cross off the times in the chart so she would think she had just fed her before and didn’t realise it. It was helping. I could tell it was." Marinette smiled. "Sara was finally sleeping at least five hours a night, and she didn’t look as sick, anymore.
"But… God, I'm so stupid, I didn't realise there was a baby monitor in Isabelle's room." Marinette rubbed her forehead. "One day, I hadn't realised it was already morning, and went to comfort Isabelle when I heard her crying. Sara must have heard me on the baby monitor, because she burst in, and, well, let's just say she wasn't too pleased to find a random girl in her house, let alone with her baby."
Adrien's eyebrows shot up. Part of him wondered why he had never heard about any of that before moving into the apartment, but he had also been desperate enough to escape his father's jurisdiction that he had taken the best place available to him without second thought.
"I take it she moved out?" he said.
"Packed her bags and left the same afternoon." Marinette shook her head at herself. "I learned my lesson. I usually learn the tenants' schedules and keep away while they're here. When they're out, though, I like to fix up the apartment here and there. Like, washing the dishes for them, or rearranging their desks. Simple stuff."
Adrien smiled at her. "You didn't care much to avoid me?"
She laughed. "Well, I did, but I knew who you were. And knew that if I didn't intervene you'd try and live off of takeout doner kebab for the rest of your life."
"I would not."
"Don't you remember what you said that one time when we were working together? Something about eating 'junk food for days' once you had your own place?"
Adrien flushed. "I was sixteen."
"And clearly, you meant it." She pointed at the yellow styrofoam box peeking out of a hole in the bin liner. "But, my offer still stands. If you'd prefer me gone, we can pretend none of this ever happened."
For a while, Adrien looked at her. At the little freckles by her blue, blue eyes, and the dark hair bunched into pigtails.
He thought of the way she would let him take sips of her mugs of tea, and the way she cared for a newborn baby when her mother wasn't able to.
Adrien smiled. "Well, Miss Dupain-Cheng, a roommate doesn't sound half bad at all."