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He'd thought he wouldn’t remember.
No. That’s a lie.
He'd hoped he wouldn’t remember.
Maybe that’s how he justified it all.
Deep down he'd known there was a possibility he would even if he didn't want to admit it. Perhaps he’d even known he deserved to know. His list of sins are long enough to deserve punishment and knowing what he did is a punishment in its own way. Everything is this world is contaminated by what happened there.
“Father?” Adrien pokes his head in the door. “You said we could practice our duet now, did you forget?”
His son's eyes are guileless and concerned, but he can’t meet them without remembering the betrayal and disgust in them when he’d put on Black Cat Miraculous.
Adrien is standing in the Atelier door looking whole and healthy as if he’d never been tied up in the floor of the lair above, as if blood had never dripped down the side of his face from a wound his own father had inflicted, as if he’d never screamed out in pain.
Because none of that happened.
Gabriel remembers it anyway.
The idea of sitting down next to his son at the piano when Adrien should be recoiling away from him is impossible. The safest place for Adrien is as far away from Gabriel as possible.
He turns him down. “I’m sorry Adrien. I’m busy. Perhaps another time.”
Adrien's face falls, and this at least is familiar, unlike the discordant differences between what he expects and what happens here that make up the rest of this life as if he's touching cotton and feeling velvet.
Still the small part of him that has some courage wants to call him back and tell Adrien that he's not rejecting him, he's protecting him. That it’s him who doesn’t deserve a relationship with his son, not Adrien who doesn’t deserve his attention.
Maybe then Adrien will stop seeking him out, and Gabriel will be able to stop having to disappoint him again and again. Disappointing Adrien feels like the only constant point in his life these days.
He’s too much of a coward to say any of this to Adrien.
His eyes are pulled to Nathalie’s desk expecting her to say something, but he only just about catches the disappointed frown on her face before she realises he's looking at her, and her face slips back into practiced neutrality.
Emilie and Adrien make conversation at dinner, and Gabriel sits there in silence like an interloper.
Sometimes watching them it’s easy to justify everything he did.
Seeing Emilie alive still sends a thrill through him every time. It’s ironic but back before he’d made the wish he had started to forget what she’d looked like awake and in motion. Yet now he can’t forget what she’d looked like cold and still in that casket.
It means that everything’s a surprise. The warmth of her skin. The flashes of emotions in her eyes. How much space she seems to occupy despite how small she is. It feels like he’s rediscovering something new about her every minute of the day.
That he no longer has any idea what to say to her is nothing in comparison.
Emilie says something and Adrien laughs and for one bright shining moment he doesn’t regret anything.
Then Adrien tries to catch his breath before replying to her and all Gabriel can hear is Chat Noir doing the same when trying to fight him.
His appetite deserts him and he finds himself getting up and pushing his chair in.
“Gabriel?” asks Emilie, annoyance and concern at war in her tone.
None of this is fair to her either. It must seem like her husband’s been replaced by another man. He wants to explain. He wants to tell her what he did and tell her he did it for her. He wants to tell her that he’d fought their son just to do what she’d asked him to.
Instead he just says, “Sorry, I’ve a call from a client in the States. I’d forgotten.”
Irritation flashes through her eyes, but all she says is, “I see.”
He takes the chance and flees the room.
It's funny how much easier it had been to hide being Hawkmoth than it is to hide remembering being Hawkmoth.
He thinks Emilie had liked him more before.
Then again he hadn’t stopped her from killing herself before.
Strange how that works.
The lift from his atelier to the top and the bottom of the house is still here.
Of course it is.
It had pre-existed them finding any Miraculous.
Emilie had found the idea of making the entrance hidden amusing. After all they didn’t really need the space though they’d considering putting a swimming pool in the basement semi-seriously for a while.
Or at least she’d said she’d thought it would be fun. Sometimes when he’d keyed in the code before going to akumatise someone or to visit her he’d wondered if it’s a coincidence that she’d suggested hiding the entrance just as they’d been planning that fatal trip to Tibet.
He finds himself watching her. Trying to work out whether she’d have deceived him then.
As he keys in the code he can feel Nathalie trying not to watch him.
It feels too soon to go down again. As if maybe he’ll go down there and find Emilie effectively dead in her casket, find Nathalie collapsed on the floor not far from death herself, and Adrien looking like he’d want nothing more than for Gabriel to be dead too.
He goes up instead.
It’s eerie how unchanged it is. Looking out through the rose window he could be Hawkmoth again. Except there’s no Miraculous on his chest. The tumult of emotions he’s feeling is purely his own.
How long he stays there for he has no idea.
The sound of the lift going reaches his ear, but his mind pays little attention to it. It doesn’t matter if anyone finds him here anymore.
“Sir?” Nathalie’s voice cuts through the silence.
He doesn’t turn around.
Her footsteps announce her movement towards him, and he waits for her to reach his side, but they stop without her doing so.
“Sir,” She says again, plaintive this time, “They need you to approve the pieces we’re sending Style Queen for their editorial shoot.”
This time he turns around. She’s standing well over a metre away from him, and for a moment he thinks she looks frightened, but that’s impossible. Nathalie had never flinched from Hawkmoth, not until that final confrontation with Adrien, she can’t be frightened of just Gabriel.
“I’ll be down in a minute.” He says.
The air next to him feels cold without her presence there.
His company seems meaningless these days.
Once upon a time climbing the heights of the fashion world had been a passion exceeded in importance to him by Emilie alone.
That had dwindled when Emilie did.
It hasn’t come back with her.
Designing though is easier than it had been for years.
He draws and draws that final confrontation again in the clothes. Black and Red. Tight and fitted outfits. Leather. Artistic tears. Youthful, but all with an undercurrent threat of violence too.
Hawkmoth and Mayura themselves are absent for now. He think they’ll be the next season.
If the fashion shows he imagines in his head to show them off seem more early Alexander McQueen than Gabriel, well, reinvention is supposed to be the name of the game in fashion.
No one questions him when he vetoes Adrien as a model for any of it. None of it would suit his image anyway.
Nathalie coughs and he panics.
There’s no water, or tissues on her desk, like there used to be and he feels even more useless than before when he reaches her.
It’s not a long coughing fit. It’s nothing like what she used to have.
In the moment that doesn’t register with him, and when she stops he finds himself repeating their old argument, saying “You should rest. You don’t have to work like this”
Only she doesn’t know her part anymore, and she looks at him as if he’s speaking gibberish. “Sir? What are you talking about?”
He doesn’t have an answer for her.
She looks down at where his hand is on her arm ready to support her to a bed, or at very least an armchair, and he doesn’t know how to interpret the look on her face. Then she says, “Please let go of me.”
He does immediately. He doesn’t know what he’s hearing in her voice but he knows he doesn’t like it.
Straightening up he says, “I’m sorry. I overreacted.”
He's passing a window noise from the garden catches his attention.
Adrien’s sat outside having a picnic with Chloé Bourgeois.
Strange. Despite how work doesn’t stop, he’d almost forgotten that life goes on outside this house. That there are people in this world other than he, Emilie, Adrien, and Nathalie. That there’s plenty of other victims of his out there.
Something must catch their attention because the children notice him at the window and wave.
For once the girl is smiling naturally instead of her usual ridiculous looking attempts to mimic her mother, and he feels an utterly unexpected sense of guilt.
He doesn’t like Chloé. She’s a spoiled brat and he’s not sure why Emilie persists in the opinion that she’s the most appropriate candidate for Adrien’s friend. He allows it because it’s useful for keeping her mother close, and because Adrien actually seems to like the girl, but he has always found it amusing to pretend to forget her name and pierce through her sense of self-importance.
None of that is why he’d akumatised her. Why he’d worked for months on akumatising her. That had been because he’d seen a chance, and he’d taken it.
Still looking at her now he feels uncomfortable. She hadn’t deserved what he’d done to her, and that she’d been his son’s friend, and a child he’d watched grow up, only made it worse that he’d looked at her and seen a tool to be used. That he’d preyed on the very insecurities he's seen her develop.
He wonders for a moment about Adrien’s other classmates. Whether Bubbler misses Adrien, what Lady Wifi’s desperate to uncover in a world without Ladybug and Chat Noir, about who Volpina hates here.
Once he starts on that train of thought it’s impossible not to think about Ladybug, and then to that last final confrontation.
He has Nathalie drive him to the Dupain-Cheng bakery to order a cake for Adrien’s Confirmation.
If she finds anything odd in him going in person rather than making a phone call, or having her sort it she doesn’t say anything.
They go in the late afternoon when Ladybug should be home from school.
She’s not in the shop when he enters, but her mother excuses herself with a twinkle in her eye, and sends her husband out to discuss the cake in her stead.
Gabriel knows very little about cakes, but the baker speaks so knowledgeably it sets him at ease. Thankfully the man doesn’t seem judgemental about his own lack of knowledge of his son’s favourites, though he is able to assure him Adrien has a very sweet tooth.
Ladybug trips over the door threshold. It almost makes him want to believe he’s got the wrong girl, but no, the face that had looked at him in despair and with pure unadulterated hatred is unmistakable.
“My daughter’s a big fan.” Her mother says. “You’re her favourite designer.”
He manages not to laugh. How wonderful to discover that he might have disappointed the girl in her own right, rather than only on Adrien’s behalf.
“Interested in fashion are you?” He asks, as if he doesn’t know she’s at least interested enough to be entering design competitions.
She looks at back her mother before answering and he realises suddenly that she’s nervous. It’s strange indeed to imagine Ladybug being shy. She had always been so full of righteous determination when they fought.
“Yes.” The girl manages, “I want to go to ESMOD, after I get my baccalaureate.”
She’s serious about her chosen career path too. Given that and how Audrey had been impressed by her it’s quite possible she’ll be one of the few that could make it.
“I’m sure you will.” He manages.
They look at him as if they’re expecting something more from him.
“Um, I know you only came here to order a cake, but could you sign my poster?” She says putting the rolled up piece of paper she’s holding on the counter.
As she moves her hair shifts showing her empty earlobe.
The last time he’d seen that it had been torn where Mayura had ripped her earring out.
He wants to run out of the shop but they’re all looking at him so eagerly that he can’t help but take a pen out of his pocket, and move to sign her poster.
It’s one of Adrien from a recent campaign. He wonders if perhaps somehow inexplicably she does still know Adrien after all but it’s impossible.
“I feel like my son should be the one signing this.” He attempts to joke.
Ladybug goes bright red, and that suspicion raises its head again before the more prosaic explanation that here she must be one of Adrien’s fans comes to him. It's rather a step down from being his superhero partner.
“I can get him to, if you’d like?” He finds himself offering as if that’s any real apology.
She gives a single nod, so he rolls it back up to take with him.
Adrien had been fond of this girl. Loved her even despite their youth. Perhaps sending him down with the poster to meet her again is the very least he can do for his son.
He finds himself studying Nathalie’s face in the rearview mirror on the drive back. Trying to find the traces of a women who’d rip the earrings off a teenage girl.
Mayura seems completely absent from her.
He doesn’t know if he’s relieved or disappointed.
Still he’s glad Adrien’s bodyguard can drive him there.
The idea of Nathalie and Ladybug in the same vicinity is almost as uncomfortable as the idea of him spending time with Adrien.
If Adrien had asked any other night there’s a good chance that he wouldn’t have been there at dinner. He’s started eating in his office and leaving Adrien and Emilie alone where he can’t poison them with his darkness.
Emilie had put her foot down when it came to eating with them on Sundays though, and though he’s been feeling the strangest temptation to not do what she wants whenever she asks recently he’s yet to actually act on it.
So he’s there, when Adrien goes, “Can I ask you for something?”
“Of course.” Emilie says smiling. “You shouldn’t hesitate to ask us for anything Adrien.”
Even though Emilie’s the one who understands Adrien better, and Gabriel’s the one who blunders along screwing things up, right now Gabriel can’t help but think she’s reading Adrien wrong. She’s answered as if he’s about to ask for a video game or something, but Adrien hardly ever asks for anything. If he did it might make buying presents for him easier. Whatever this is it’s something Adrien thinks is important.
“I was talking to Chloé.” Adrien starts, “And I was wondering, that is I think,” he hesitates but regains his nerve, “I’d like to go to her school.”
Emilie starts, and Gabriel wonders at her surprise until he realises that it was only in that other world that Adrien had made a concerted campaign to go to collège. Not that Adrien had never brought up the idea before but it was only after Emilie’s disappearance that he’d committed to it, and here his mother’s never disappeared.
“Why?” Emilie asks, “Are you unhappy with your curriculum? You just have to say what you want you know. We can be much more flexible a school should be.”
“I don’t dislike my classes.” Says Adrien.
“Then why bring up school?”
“Because I like what Chloé tells me about it. I want to meet other kids my age. I want to learn with other people, in a class, like normal people do.”
Emilie blinks. “Don’t you like your basketball team? I suppose we could try another sport if that isn’t working out socially. You said you wanted to try fencing a while back didn’t you?”
“My basketball team is fine, and I mean I wouldn’t mind starting fencing, but it’s not the same as going to school.” Adrian responds.
“I just don’t understand where this is coming from. Whatever stories Chloé’s telling you I’m sure she’s just boasting. School wouldn’t suit you. Tell him Gabriel.”
With them both looking at him he can’t get away with not saying anything, but he doesn’t know what he should say. After all Adrien’s grades hadn’t suffered when he’d gone to school, and while he hadn’t been keen on the friends he’d chosen, none of them had been anywhere near as much of a danger to Adrien as he himself had been.
“You shouldn’t idealise school.” He starts, and is rewarded by a blinding smile from Emilie, and it almost makes him waver but he pushes on, “We can’t keep you safe there, there’s a lot out there in the world you can’t imagine, and it’s almost of the end of term anyway, it would be stupid to start anywhere now.
Adrien leaps on the implication, “It would be stupid to start now? So it wouldn’t be stupid to start lycée in September?”
“We could look into schools in the summer maybe.” He concedes. Adrien lights up just like he had before, and it feels wrong for him to be the source of this positive emotion, and he scrambles to cut it down. “This isn’t a definite yes, Adrien.”
Apart from anything there's the fact that In truth he has no idea where most students from Françoise Dupont go onto lycée, and it feels important that Adrien should get to join the classmates he’d known before.
“What was that in there?” Emilie yells, “We agreed together that homeschooling was the best thing for Adrien. You don’t get to turnaround now and try to make me the bad guy,”
Ironic for her to say that when she’d made him that.
Emilie’s still talking, “it’s not fair Gabriel. Not when this was all as much your idea as mine.”
It’s true. They had decided together. It had been the obvious choice then. Neither of them looked back on their own schooldays with much nostalgia, and back then they’d thought all dangers to Adrien lurked outside the house. Emilie still thinks that. Emilie doesn’t know what he’d done.
She also doesn’t know that if they refuse Adrien he’ll just try and run off to school anyway. He’s older here than he was when he did it then, but Gabriel doesn’t hold any illusions that age has made Adrien any less rebellious.
He’d tried to cataclysm the house down around them at this age after all.
“We decided when Adrien was a toddler.” He resists the temptation to take his glasses off so he can pinch the bridge of his nose. He needs to see Emilie if they’re going to talk. “Its different now, he’s old to start making decisions for himself. What’s the harm in letting him try in September? We can always pull him out if it doesn’t work out.”
She looks betrayed. “What’s the harm? Only to his entire education. He’s coming up to baccalaureate years, that’s not the time to be playing around with his schooling. Look at his Chinese and his piano, and all the other extras we make time for, do you think a school is going to make time for that?”
“I’m not suggesting we give up on all his tutoring.” He starts.
She interrupts, “You’re not? That’s funny because last I saw that’s entirely what you seem to doing. I know you’ve had your assistant do lessons with Adrien that you’re supposed to. This is all your fault Gabriel. Adrien can tell you’re pushing him away, and that’s where this sudden desire for school is coming from-because his needs aren’t being met at home. I know your work takes up more of your time than mine. I made the choice to work less for his sake, but I can’t do it all alone. He needs his father.”
He’s not sure that Adrien does. A father maybe but not Gabriel. Not the father who fought him for years, and who didn’t stop when he found that out.
Emilie doesn't pause. “Aren’t you even going to deny it? I don’t know where all of this is coming from but there’s clearly something going on with you. What’s Adrien supposed to think when you never spend time with him? When you go from making him the face of the brand to excluding him completely from the current campaign?”
“The current collection isn’t appropriate for Adrien.”
“That’s what you're focusing on?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“An explanation might be nice.”
He pretends to misunderstand her. “Look, I can’t tell you why he wants to go to school, but I can tell he's serious about it. He never asks for things. I think we should let him try this one. Better to let his first experience of the outside world be in a controlled setting like lycée while he's living here, than letting him out into the world for university with no experience.”
It works well enough as a distraction. Emilie bristles, “How long have you been thinking about this? You didn’t consider mentioning it to me first instead undermining me in front of Adrien?”
He sighs. “I wasn't trying to undermine you.’
“I don’t know why I’m surprised, it’s what you do isn’t it? God forbid I get to have any ambitions of my own, no everything in this house has to be about what you want, doesn't it?”
She’s right. Except she’s not. Adrien has the right to make that complaint at him. Nathalie has the right to make that complaint at him. Emilie doesn’t. Not after the years he spent following her whims.
“This is about what Adrien wants.” He says.
“Oh hide behind Adrien again. That’s what you said when you stole my Miraculous too. Adrien needs his mother you said then, as if that justified going behind my back and giving it to the Guardian.”
“I saved your life.” He snaps.
“You keep saying that. We could have found another way.”
“We did.” The words come out of his mouth before he can realise what he’s admitting.
“What?”
Now he’s made that first admission he can’t stop himself.
“You want an explanation? You kept using it and you died Emilie. You left me alone, and tasked me to bring you back using the two major Miraculous and I did. Even though Adrien turned out to be one of the wielders I still did it and this is the world it gave us. This is our other way. So don’t try to make me the selfish one when all of this could have been avoided if you could have just used the Butterfly.”
She’d made so many grand speeches about that. About how she might endanger herself but she wasn’t going to do that to others. How she wouldn’t hide behind champions like the Butterfly Miraculous wielder did. How her amoks were different because they helped people, they didn’t use them.
“Gabriel?” She almost whispers. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
She reaches out to him but he pulls away. “No. You wouldn’t would you.”
She doesn’t stop him when she leaves the room.
He’s glad Emilie doesn’t follow him. Their argument feels like it’s used up the small amount of energy he has these days. There’s nothing left for the usual apologies they used to make to each other.
Shutting himself in a room alone is easier. It’s safer.
Yet he finds himself missing something. He’s not meant to be alone now. This is usually where Nathalie would come in and help him through it.
He misses being able to lean into her arms around him and forget all the demands the world made on him for once.
She won’t come now. She isn’t working today and she wouldn’t come even if she were. The shift in their relationship never happened until he lost Emilie.
The knock on the door of the bedroom he's using is unexpected.
“Gabriel?”
It's Emilie.
He lets her in. It’s not as if refusing her this is really an option.
Neither of them say anything but he lets her when she takes his hand and pulls him to the bed to sit down.
They both look straight at wall rather than at each other and he misses the natural understanding they used to have before she started using the Peacock Miraculous.
She the one to break the silence. “How bad was it?”
“Bad.”
She sighs. “I’ve been asking myself again and again if I’d really have asked you to do that, but I must have. It sounds like me, not you. You never even liked either Miraculous. That was part of what shocked me so much when you stole them, I couldn’t believe you’d studied them enough to find the Guardian.”
“I didn’t.” His memories are all of before the wish, but he does know what happened in this world during those years, he just doesn’t remember it. “That was just pure luck. I just wanted the wretched things out of the house. I ran into the Guardian on the street if you can believe it. His Kwami realised what I had.”
She shifts, and turns to look at him. “You never told me that.”
He shrugs. He doesn’t know why he didn’t. “I suppose I didn’t think it mattered.”
“Maybe not.” She reaches out to take his hand, “What you said earlier, about Adrien, you don’t think that’s true here too?”
For a moment Gabriel can’t remember what exactly he’d said and he’s about to tell her that of course he hasn’t attacked Adrien here, then it comes to him that she’s only asking if Adrien has a Miraculous.
“No, he doesn’t have the Black Cat here. It was a ring he wore all the time.”
He takes an unexpected vicious pleasure at the slight disappointment painted across her features.
“I suppose he’s unlikely to get it here.” She concedes.
“Thank goodness,” he says with what must be far too much relief because Emilie looks at him oddly.
She frowns, “Did you fight him?”
He almost laughs. Calling it fighting minimised everything he’d done. He’d thrown him off a building. He’d almost strangled him. He’d stabbed him. If it wasn’t for the power of the Ladybug Miraculous his sins would include filicide.
“That’s one way of putting it yes.”
“But you can’t have known who you were fighting, otherwise there wouldn’t have been a fight surely?”
“I didn’t know,” he starts.
Emilie brightens at his words, and smiles saying, “Then you can’t blame yourself Gabriel. I know you wouldn’t have done it if you did.”
“But I did.”
The smile drops off her face.
“I didn’t know at first,” he continues, “but I didn’t stop when I did. I brought you back over our son’s bruised and bloodied body.” Ladybug’s too. And Nathalie’s. But he doesn’t know if Emilie would care about any of them.
That finally seems to get the severity of it through to her and she releases his hand, and almost springs off the bed.
“Did you kill him?”
Despite everything else he's admitted he still doesn’t want to tell her how many times Chat Noir was saved by Ladybug’s power.
“He was alive at the end.” He says instead. “And you think I’m a failure of a father here.”
“Christ.” Murmurs Emilie, but she sits back down by him anyway, apparently over her fear. “I don’t know where this leaves us.”
Gabriel doesn’t either. If he could see a way a way forward then he’d have done something more than the small inconsequential gestures he’s made.
“Do you hate me?” She asks. “I don’t think I’d blame you if you did.”
“I don’t know.” He admits. “I’m happy you’re alive, so I suppose not.”
“I’m not sure that follows.” She says. “Perhaps Adrien and I should go and visit my sister for a while. Felix will be off school soon. It’d be nice for the boys to get to know each other better.”
“That sounds like a good idea.” No doubt Amelie will be delighted. She’s never liked him. Maybe she could see who he was underneath the whole time. “I’ll have Nathalie make arrangements for it.”
Nathalie looks discomforted when he tells her of their summer plans, and even more so when he has to clarify he’s unlikely to be visiting.
He’s not sure why, unless it’s on Adrien’s behalf. He knows she cares for his son, after all unlike him, she’d stopped in that final fight when she’d realised just whom she’d been fighting.
Adrien doesn’t seem to find anything odd in their announcement that he and Emilie are going to Amélie’s for the summer. He even seems strangely excited to go although maybe that's not surprising when Adrien and Felix’s fall out is one of those many things that never happened.
Emilie’s told him that Gabriel’s busy with work. That they need to leave him alone for now, and that that’s why he’s not coming with them this summer. Gabriel’s grateful to her. She’s always been able to manage Adrien’s emotions better than he could. If their positions were reversed she’d probably have been able to convince Adrien to give her the ring.
He’d like to think she’s doing it as a service to him, and she’s not not doing that, but he can’t pretend that she isn’t keeping Adrien away from him because she doesn’t trust him around Adrien either.
He doesn’t blame her.
The lift behind him makes a noise as someone exits it.
“Here.” Emilie shoves a glass of cognac in his face. “Have a drink.”
“I don’t know if that’s good idea.” He says as she sits down on the floor next to him.
“I’d prefer that you drank than for you to jump out that window.”
He wants to deny it but he can’t pretend the idea hasn’t gone through his head. Sometimes he’s got very close to seeing if the rose window still opens the way it did once.
She takes a sip of her own glass. “Adrien asked me if we’re separating earlier today.”
That makes him take a drink. “I thought he wasn’t bothered by the London trip.”
“He wasn’t. Until he asked if I knew what weekends you were coming to visit and I had to tell him that you weren’t.”
“Ah.” He supposes hiding everything from Adrien was impossible. His success hiding Hawkmoth was luck as much as anything. “What did you tell him?”
“I was honest. I said I didn’t know.”
He’s surprised that he’s surprised at her answer. He’s not sure what he’d expected her to say. “How’d he take it?”
Emilie looks down at her glass, swirling the liquid around like it has the answers, “He didn’t say much. He didn’t seem surprised. Things have been strained since you took my miraculous.”
“You can make me the bad guy to him if you want. It’s not untrue.” He tells her. Adrien deserves a proper relationship with one of his parents, and Emilie’s the only candidate.
“I don’t know if that’s fair. It sounds like it’s my fault too.” She takes a larger gulp, and puts her glass down, “How long was I gone before you slept with Nathalie?”
“What?” Where she’s got that idea from, or how it relates to their conversation at all he doesn’t understand. “I didn’t.” Not in the sense she means anyway. He’d literally slept beside her when he thought he was losing her too, but that’s not what Emilie’s asking. “Why would you think that?”
“I see how you look at her Gabriel. I can recognise the yearning in your eyes when they follow her around the Atelier. You looked at me like that once upon a time”
“I miss her-what I had with her.” He admits. “But we weren’t like that, we were,” he falters flailing around for an adequate description of their relationship, “friends I suppose.”
Friends doesn’t seem like the right word. It’s insufficient for how he’d come to rely on her, for what she’d done for him, but there isn’t a better one. He’d always refused to consider her in the light that Emilie’s implying.
Emilie tilts her head and looks oddly pitying. “That’s not how you look at a friend. You look at her like you want to hold her close and never let go.”
“She used the Peacock Miraculous too. I spent a lot of time thinking I was going to lose her like I lost you. If I look at her like that then that’s why. Not because we slept together. Nathalie wouldn’t do that to you.”
Emilie huffs. “Do you even hear yourself? Nathalie wouldn’t. What about you?”
He doesn’t know why he said it like that. Perhaps he did want more from Nathalie. Or perhaps he just misspoke. It doesn’t matter anyway. Not now. “I didn’t. Isn’t that the important thing?”
Emilie downs her glass in response. “Well, you might want to figure that out. She can see how you look at her too, it’s making her uncomfortable.”
The truth of Emilie’s words slam into him. He’d noticed the distance Nathalie was holding between herself and him but he’d thought that was just how they were in a world with Emilie. Emilie’s right though; it’s not how they’re been before her not-death, it’s a new barrier Nathalie is carefully trying to construct between them.
Emilie stands up to leave, but she surprises him by pressing a kiss to his hairline. “Will you be up to see us off in the morning?”
“Do you want me to be?” He asks, unsure as he’s ever been about the right thing to do.
“Adrien would appreciate it.” She says.
“I will be then.” He sighs. “What do we do if this time apart doesn’t fix anything?”
Emilie looks as exhausted as he does. “I think deciding that is what it’s supposed to give us time to do.”
Adrien clings to him when the time comes to say goodbye. Gabriel knows he should hug him back but when he moves his arms to do so all he can see are Hawkmoth’s restraining Chat Noir.
Then Adrien looks up and his imploring eyes are just the same as when he’d begged him to stop before, and it takes all his effort not to pull away.
“I’m going to miss you.” Adrien says.
He considers saying “You shouldn’t”, or “It’s for the best”, but he doesn’t.
“I’ll phone.” He says instead.
Adrien bestows on him a sunny smile he doesn’t deserve at all.
He stares out the window after them long after they’re gone.
Nathalie’s voice breaks the silence of the atelier. “They’re gone then sir?”
“Yes.” He acknowledges. “They’re gone.”
She doesn’t say anything more heading to her desk in silence, but for some reason he isn’t able to let that stand. “I said I’d call him.” He finds himself saying.
Nathalie looks up from her screen and smiles. “Good.”
He stares back at her.
She blushes. “I mean that’s a good idea sir. Did you want me to pencil it into his schedule?”
“I don’t know.” He responds. “Maybe you could ask Emilie when would be suitable.”
She purses her lips in what he can only read as disapproval but all she says is, “I can do that if that’s what you want sir.”
“Is there something more you’d like to say Nathalie?” He finds herself asking.
She somewhat over frantically shakes her head. “No, nothing sir.”
He wants to slump down over his screen. To leave it and collapse into any of the cushions at the windows. Anything that would provoke the comfort he’d got used to from her.
Instead he just says, “Are you sure?”
Nathalie visibly tenses but all she says is, “Yes, that’s all I can say.”
He leaves his screen to meet her at her desk, and says, "I do value your insight Nathalie. If you've something to say, then I want to hear it."
She inhales and he can see her attempting to gather her courage. He wonders if that’s what it had looked like when she decided to be Mayura. She looks back up at him, “It’s not my place, I know that, but I think, if you could video call him rather than just make a voice call then Adrien would appreciate that.”
It’s the least she’s ever asked of him. It’s as safe for Adrien as what he'd already agreed to do. "I can do that.”
Nathalie smiles but it looks fake.
“You wanted to say something more.” He presses.
“It’s nothing.” She says. “It’s just, you and Madame, I always thought you were true love. I’d thought you’d go the distance.”
Whatever face he makes she panics. “I’m sorry Sir. That was highly inappropriate.”
“No it wasn’t.” He said. “I thought that too.”
He waits for her to come to commiserate with him.
She doesn't.