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Adrien’s third attempt to call Nino goes to voicemail. With ugly desperation crawling up the back of his throat, he listens to Nino’s cheerful voicemail message.
“--I’ll give you a call back when I can! Talk to you soon.”
His hands buzz with a strange kind of detachment. He can sense the remnants of the adrenaline that had fueled his escape from his bedroom, but his brain doesn’t connect with the way his heart pounds in the tips of his fingers. Instead, Adrien’s mind fixates on his phone screen, which responds slowly to his cold fingers.
Nino’s not answering his phone. That’s probably because he, like any sane person, is asleep at this ungodly hour. Adrien really, really doesn’t want to bother him, but Nino promised Adrien that Adrien could come crash at his place if Adrien ever needed a place to stay, and, well…
All he needs is a roof over his head before the chilly wind whipping through the street makes him sick, but what he wants is to be at Nino’s. He wants the soft security of being next to Nino, even if all Nino does is let Adrien crash on his floor close enough to hear Nino when he starts saying nonsense in his sleep.
“Ring the front door,” Plagg says, and pokes the side of Adrien’s face. Plagg, always a proponent of Adrien getting as far away from his house as possible, is the only reason that Adrien hadn’t crawled into a sewer somewhere and had a breakdown.
Adrien shakes his head, not having the words to respond verbally.
Another call attempt goes to voicemail, and so Adrien leaves the front gate of the building and trudges through the alley until he stands below Nino’s bedroom window.
“Where are you going?” Plagg demands.
Adrien glances over at him, and blinks slowly before looking up at the path to Nino’s window.
It’s two balconies and then a lip jutting out to accentuate the third floor, which isn’t too bad. Many of his friends would be alarmed with the degree of nonchalance Adrien has when he decides that he’s going to climb up the side of Nino’s building, but Adrien himself decides that this is the right course of action.
The street is small enough to keep cars out, but someone could walk by any minute. Adrien hanging off of the side of a building will be incriminating no matter what excuse he comes up with. He’ll need to move quickly.
Plagg yanks at a small tuft of Adrien’s hair. “Hey. Kid! Just tell me to transform you.”
If Adrien had the capacity to think ahead, he would be free to transform into Chat Noir and vault up the side of the apartment building with ease, risking far less life and limb. But Chat Noir, in his infinite lack of wisdom, has loudly and pointedly despised Adrien Agreste for years. As a result, Nino has made a point of talking shit about Chat Noir to Adrien, in a surprisingly touching show of solidarity.
Adrien’s already unsure whether or not Nino will be pleased with Adrien attempting to invite himself in through his bedroom window, so he doubts that the odds will tip in his favor if he shows up as an irritating vigilante instead.
“No,” Adrien says, the single word ringing hoarse and hardly audible. He leaves Plagg hovering, and walks purposefully forward.
Here goes nothing.
Adrien moves to the row of trash cans pushed up against the wall. From on top of them, he will push off a decorative lip of stone to hoist himself up to a second-floor windowsill, and the journey after that will rely on the second-floor resident not looking out and seeing a strange kid outside their window.
His arms ache from the day of fighting off akumas. Adrien swears that the akuma victims’ powers get more powerful even as they get more stupid--Hawkmoth is running out of ideas fast, and he’s only getting more desperate to murder Adrien and Ladybug. Today, Adrien had spent three hours fighting to peel himself off pavement after some random eight-year-old had gotten the power to increase gravity on Adrien until it felt like Adrien’s lungs were going to collapse on themselves.
Now, every muscle in his arms wobbles and trembles at the strain of pulling himself up onto the ledge underneath the second-story window. Adrien grits his teeth and breathes as evenly as he can, willing his fingers to hold strong and not buckle under his weight, and with too much effort he manages to hoist himself up enough to carefully rest his knees on the same ledge and find his way to a precarious standing position.
He’s going to fall to his death. Adrien carefully steadies his breath again, trying to suppress the panicked laugh that bubbles up his chest.
“You’re so stupid!” Plagg hisses. “Jump down! I’ll transform you before you land.”
Adrien imagines his father hearing the news of Adrien falling off the second story of a building and breaking some unimportant number of bones on impact. After the forty-five minute screaming match between him and Gabriel, Adrien doubts his father will have much sympathy even if he manages to break his neck.
Ignoring Plagg again, he looks upward to his next climbing target. Climbers keep their strength in their legs so that they don’t tire their arms out, he thinks, so he should focus on footholds. Or is it the other way around? Adrien’s thoughts get lost in a tangled mess of yarn and dust and dangerous, self-destructive ideas.
“You want me to go get Ladybug? Do you need attention? Is that what this is?”
“Plagg,” Adrien says through a breath full of exertion as he drags himself up halfway to Nino’s window, “if you keep distracting me I’m gonna fall off this building.”
“Is that what you want?” Plagg asks, in a tone that’s suddenly much too insightful for Adrien to bear. “Is that why you’re being so risky for no reason?”
Adrien keeps his mouth shut and kicks his way upward, hoping to the universe’s higher powers that the walls of this building are thick enough that the second-floor resident doesn’t hear his feet hit the exterior wall. Plagg, grumbling, follows him up.
When he can finally reach the glass of Nino’s window, Adrien wastes no time in tapping frantically on it with two of his fingernails, rapping as loudly as he can without losing his grip on the stone ledge.
“What if he’s not home?” Plagg demands.
“I’ll die, I guess,” Adrien shoots back, irritated.
Plagg bites his ear.
After thirty horrible, terrifying seconds of dangling there, the window wrenches open, and Adrien looks up to find Nino’s sleepy face. Plagg disappears, presumably into the hood of Adrien’s sweatshirt.
“Adrien?” Nino mumbles, and rubs his eyes. His glasses are missing, and his voice is slurred from sleep and Adrien has to physically fight back the urge to leap through the window and press his face into the soft juncture between Nino’s jaw and his shoulder. Because that would be fucking weird of him to do, even if nothing would make Adrien feel more secure right now.
“Yeah, it’s me,” Adrien confirms. “Can I stay over?”
Nino seems to wake up more with the cold outside air hitting his face. He lowers his fists from his eyes, and squints at Adrien, then around the room, then back at Adrien with dawning horror on his face.
Nino says, half-statement and half-question, “Did you climb up here.”
Adrien flutter-kicks his feet, creating enough momentum to slide up and hook his elbow over the windowsill, giving his exhausted arms a little bit of a rest. He looks over his shoulder at the street, far below, and his stomach flip-flops at the sight. “Um…”
“Come inside,” Nino says, his tired brain catching up with the situation. He reaches out and takes hold of Adrien’s upper arms, helping to haul Adrien up over the sill and into a heap on the carpet. Adrien helps as much as he can with the process, but his arms have been dangerously close to giving out for almost a full minute now and all he can do is feebly kick his way up the outside of the building and then slither to the floor.
Nino shuts the window with a snap, and then asks, bewildered, “Why did you...?”
“I dunno.” Adrien’s hands shake as he sets them on the carpet to push himself up, back into a sitting position. He hopes that Nino can’t see--the only lights in the room come from the streetlamps outside and the small night light over by Nino’s door. “I’m sorry. You didn’t answer your phone, and I didn’t want to wake up Chris or your mom.”
“I still don’t...I mean. Thanks for not waking them up, but that was crazy dangerous,” Nino says. He holds out a hand to help Adrien up. “Are you okay?”
Adrien accepts the hand, and finds himself yanked to his feet. He staggers a step forward, and Nino does too, steadying himself on Adrien’s shoulder.
There, the two of them stop. The air feels heavy, but in a down-comforter way and not in a cold-empty way like Adrien’s room at home. Nino’s hand is warm through the thin layer of Adrien’s hoodie.
“I’m okay,” Adrien eventually says. It’s not the truth, but he tries to make it sound like it is. He forces a smile onto his face, painting it on like a wheatpaste poster on the side of a store. “I’m really sorry for waking you up--I shouldn’t’ve, I shouldn’t have, like, broken in here, I’m sorry--”
“Woah.” Nino finally lets go of Adrien’s hand, and it feels like a loss. “Let’s...here, I just need to wake up a little bit, and then we can talk about it.”
Powering through his sleepiness, Nino stumbles around his room to the closet to pull out a sweatshirt and some sleep pants, which he tosses onto the bed and vaguely points at to indicate that Adrien should change, before choosing a free spot on the bed to climb back onto and curl up. He pulls a pillow over from the head of his bed to hug, and yawns, letting his eyes fall back shut. While Nino settles, Adrien switches his hoodie out for Nino’s much softer one, and peels his jeans off to change into the proffered sweats.
It takes him a moment to change, and at the end of the process, he fully expects Nino to have drifted off to sleep again. Adrien wavers, considering the pros and cons of sleeping on the floor so as not to cause more of a fuss.
Before Adrien can decide, Nino mumbles, “Bro, come sit here.”
Adrien sits on the edge of the bed.
Nino cracks his eyes open a little bit and gives Adrien a subdued smile. “Maybe I could feature you on my parkour channel. I have no idea how you got up to my window like that.”
Adrien wants to laugh at that, but he can’t find the energy to. He loosens some of the tension in his spine, though, and scoots back until his back hits the wall of Nino’s room so that he can see his friend without twisting his torso.
“Do you wanna talk?” Nino asks. His voice falls gently on the darkened bedroom.
“I got in a fight with my dad,” Adrien says. Nobody else could prompt that direct explanation from him, but here in the violet dark of his best friend’s room, he feels like it’s okay.
Nino frowns, and sits up a little bit. “Did he…?”
“No, he didn’t hurt me. We just yelled at each other.”
“You yelled back?”
“Kind of.” Not enough to make the fight equal, but enough to get Adrien in deeper and deeper trouble.
Nino’s mouth twists into a dissatisfied line.
Adrien shrugs. He lets his head fall back, bonking into the wall behind him so that his eyes look up at the ceiling instead of on Nino’s empathetic expression. Right now, Adrien is too worn-out and full of nervous static to really get into this discussion, because Nino always says very, very earnest things like you don’t deserve this and it’s okay to be mad at him after what he does to you and I’m proud of you.
“Did you eat?” Nino asks, which is dangerously close to another affirmation that Adrien’s friends tell him over and over: you deserve to eat as much as you need. “We could go find food.”
“I ate,” Adrien says, still not looking over. Nino hums acknowledgement. “Thanks, though.”
An impulse surges in Adrien’s chest, surprising him and drowning out Adrien’s fear of emotional comfort. It reminds Adrien that he wants to hug Nino more than anything. Adrien wants to reach out and not have his hand smacked away. Adrien wants to relax with his head on Nino’s shoulder.
Adrien’s ears ring with the echoes of the wind outside and the overwhelming thoughts circling through his head. Slowly wading through the silence, Adrien eases himself down onto his side, resting his head on one bent arm and sinking into the soft folds of Nino’s sweatshirt.
He looks up, and finds Nino looking back at him.
“What made today different?” Nino asks.
Adrien raises an eyebrow.
“Like, you’ve never Spider-man’d into my room before. Did something else happen?”
For a long moment, all Adrien can do is stare at Nino, who has still invited more conversation even though it’s late, even though Nino could have taken this chance to go to sleep and ignore Adrien until morning. Though Adrien is irritating, and not living up to expectations, and too exhausted to keep up with the obligations that haunt every second of his schedule, Nino is still his friend.
Nino reaches out and places a gentle hand on the back of Adrien’s neck, a reassuring touch and not a threatening one, even though Adrien hasn’t done anything to earn it.
Adrien cracks. In an instant, his eyes well with tears, and he feels his face crumple.
“Oh, my bad,” Nino apologizes, startling away.
Adrien squeezes his eyes shut and pushes himself forward into Nino’s arms. Finally, his resolve has broken enough to let him bury his nose in the side of Nino’s neck and for him to push his arm into the mattress, creating space to slide it under Nino to hug him.
Nino’s hands land on Adrien’s back, warm and comforting despite the awkward angle. While Adrien does his best to stop crying, Nino asks, “Did you just want a hug?”
Adrien can’t tell if Nino is bemused or touched. He sniffles, embarrassed, and refuses to answer.
“ Aw ,” Nino says, and shifts around to get into a better hugging position when all Adrien can do is hiccup at him. “You could’ve just asked, bro. It’s no problem.”
Adrien usually tells Nino everything, with some notable vigilantism-related exceptions, but he cannot imagine ever reaching a point where he feels self-important enough to tell Nino to hug him. It doesn’t help that Nino feels like more than just a best friend, somehow. Nino almost feels like home.
Thankfully, Adrien’s brief bout of tears doesn’t last too long. Maybe that’s because Adrien’s body is too tired to make him keep crying, but either way, he calms down soon enough with the help of the hug he’s enveloped in. He doesn’t remember a time when he felt this safe, or a time where he didn’t have to fight himself to calm down so that nobody would see him having a bit of a breakdown.
Nino lets out a wide yawn, bringing Adrien back to semi-awareness. Adrien echoes him a few seconds later, and the feeling of Nino’s resulting soft smile against the side of Adrien’s head makes him want to dissolve into a puddle on the ground.
“Is this okay?” Adrien mumbles. He doesn’t want to move, but he will if he has to.
“To sleep?” Nino asks. “Yeah. You’re like a weighted blanket.”
“Okay.” Adrien tightens his grip on Nino and shuts his eyes, intent not to open them again until morning. He can hear Nino’s breath whistling through his nose, near inaudible. “Thanks.”
“It’s nothing,” Nino assures him.
Though Adrien’s seventy different insecurities about this situation try their best to find malice in Nino’s words, they all fail. His sore muscles are glad to no longer be holding his body up, too.
Nino shifts, just slightly, to hook his foot over Adrien’s ankle, and Adrien’s mind slows, slows, and then rests.