Chapter Text
That night, Marinette had the same dream she always had:
Her mother was in a hospital bed, narrow with a thin, stiff mattress. Built for purpose, not comfort. Her third bed in as many months, beginning in the large bed she’d shared with her husband for two decades; before moving into a smaller bed tucked into the spare room once designated for guests but then hers, as though she too were no more than a visitor. And visitors always left. It was only a matter of time. And now, the hospital bed. Where Sabine had always said she didn’t want to end her days.
She looked smaller than ever, with the thin sterile ghost-white sheets pulled up to her chin and a weak blanket on top, each doing a pitiful job of keeping her warm. She moaned – the only sound Marinette had heard from her in days, other than laboured breathing. Her skin was sallow and grey, the blood fighting its way through its prescribed circuit. Pain was etched into every line of her skin, wrinkled from losing an ungodly amount of weight.
Marinette sat beside the bed, gripping Sabine’s hand with the desperation of a child convinced she could keep her mother in the world, if only she never let her go. But no matter how many times this scene played in Marinette’s mind, the outcome never changed.
She felt her father take her other hand, holding it so tightly that his nails dug into the skin of her palm. But she took the pain – took it because it was real, anchoring her to the world and keeping her from flying off, in a moment when it had never been clearer that she was on a ball of mud, whirling through a vacuum no one could explain.
Together, father and daughter watched the light go out of Sabine’s eyes. Together they remained in disbelief. Together they broke.
Marinette shot up in her bed, drenched in sweat and panting heavily, her chest heaving. Her pyjamas felt too close, and she ripped her top off, up over her head, throwing it to the floor and pressing her palm to her bare chest.
When would this nightmare stop haunting her?
That dark voice in the back of her mind supplied the answer:
When she recovers – or when she doesn’t.
A year ago, if anyone had asked her the hardest part of living with a mother with a terminal illness, she never would have expected to say it was the not knowing. She would not have predicted that twelve months on, she would catch herself thinking that even if Sabine died, it would be somehow better than the rollercoaster Marinette was currently trapped on, never knowing what the next day held or how she should feel.
And sometimes it felt like whoever had put her on that coaster hadn’t done the safety straps securely. She was slipping from her seat just as she was thrown upside down, screaming, ‘I don’t want to be here – I’m scared of heights!’ – the track bending and twisting in ways impossible to see until she was already on the ride, with no way off but to stay on until the end. Whatever the end might look like.
She picked up her phone, from where it lay on her pillow, and checked the time. It was already nearly time to wake up anyway.
Do you want to turn off your alarm for today? her phone asked – communicative in a way her mother hadn’t been for days.
Marinette pressed yes and set her phone aside, crawling out of bed with the shadow of expectant grief at her back.
She collected her pyjama top from the floor and tossed it onto the chaise that took up half her room, almost sleepwalking into the small adjoining bathroom and staring blankly at herself in the mirror above the sink. Studying her eyes for traces of madness. Then she undressed and stepped into the shower, turning the water on cold to shock herself awake.
It was more than she could stand, and she was out in minutes, dressing hurriedly in the first clothes she could find in her tall wooden wardrobe – a pair of pale pink jeans and a flowered top.
As she brushed her dark hair into its usual pigtails, and applied a few coats of mascara, she wondered vaguely about stimulants. Not full-on drugs, but something – caffeine tablets, maybe – to keep her from sleeping.
That’s crazy, Marinette. You need to sleep. People can’t function without sleep.
Okay…but maybe something to keep me up long enough that I’m so exhausted that I just fall unconscious and I’m too tired to dream.
She popped open the hatch on the floor of her loft bedroom and crept down the narrow staircase to the floor below – hesitating outside the door to her mother’s sickroom.
Lately, the door had taken on anthropomorphic features. One evening, she’d stared at the grain of the wood and seen eyes in there. Logic told her it was just knots from the trees used to make the door – but logic had not been her friend for a long time. And the eyes stared back at her, large and hungry, daring her to cross the threshold and face what lay inside that terrible room.
Her fingers were trembling, and she slapped her own face to calm down. She wanted to leave, but her feet had other ideas, stepping her towards the door until she had pressed her ear to it, listening for the sounds of her mother’s ragged, shallow breaths within, as she struggled to hold onto the brief life she’d been granted by her own mother, dead some ten years now herself.
The trembling returned. Marinette’s whole body shook, making the wood rattle, and she leapt away.
I might have disturbed her. What if I woke her when she’s most in need of rest? What if she has one of her episodes and starts crying out across the house, and Papa has to spend all morning helping calm her down, and I have to call the nurse and –
Her thoughts were racing with her heart, seeing which could be faster.
All Sabine did these days was sleep. The latest chemo treatment had visibly sucked the life out of her, killing good cells with the bad. You couldn’t fight fire with fire, but modern medicine had learned to treat poison with poison.
In the hall, Marinette listened, hearing nothing but her own blood rushing through her veins – then hurried down the remaining steps of the narrow staircase that wound down their end-of-terrace. Running the way she used to run from the boogie man when she needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, before her little ensuite had been installed.
She slowed her steps when she reached the living room, crossing to the open plan kitchen and dining area, thinking Sabine should have been there. For years, morning after morning she could be found in the kitchen, making breakfast for them to share. On weekdays, they would talk before Marinette left for school – about nothing yet everything. She would get so lost in those little conversations that she’d forget the time, until her mother reminded her, and she went racing out the door, pigtails flying behind her.
It had never seemed like much at the time, but now those memories were some of Marinette’s most treasured possessions – bottled up in the fragile glass of love and stored within the quarters of her heart, to be opened again when she needed warming.
She thought of that Tears for Fears song, ‘Head Over Heels’, which sometimes played on the retro radio station her dad played while he made the morning pastries. The line about wanting to be together, talking about the weather. It had never made sense before, but now….
I would give anything to be back to normal, having a totally mundane conversation about the weather or something.
She stared blankly at the empty kitchen – at the space her mother should have occupied, instead of being trapped in that sickbed upstairs – and wished her father were there. But he rarely joined her for breakfast, instead occupying himself in the bakery downstairs. He was working for two, now that Sabine could no longer help. And he had more bills to pay than ever.
More than that, keeping busy took his mind off his life. He buried his pains in work, kneading his sorrows into the loaves of bread and trays of pastries.
Marinette poured herself a pitiful bowl of cereal and wondered if it was possible for croissants to taste of grief.
She shook her head at the notion – not because it was absurd but because the bakery would have gone out of business by now. She was certain that grief didn’t taste good. It wasn’t sweet like chocolate. It was bitter and full of salt, like tears.
She looked down at her bowl. She’d finished eating without noticing she’d taken a first bite. Worse – when she checked the time on her phone, she found that even though she’d woken early, she was now late. Again.
She hurriedly put her bowl and spoon into the dishwasher, then threw some food into her lunch bag sitting on the counter. Taking it with her, back up the stairs, she held her breath as she passed the door and tiptoed quickly up to her room, to brush her teeth and collect her schoolbag from where it hung off her desk chair.
Then she was on her way to school and another day pretending she was just a normal girl with a normal life.
Being late was not unusual for Marinette – but she dreaded to think what Ms Mendeleiev would make of today’s explanation.
Sorry, I was busy trying to work out the flavour of grief, if it were baked into pastries. What do you think that would taste like?
It was easily her worst excuse yet – despite being the truth.
Her school was built like a stately home, with a tall set of steps leading up to a pair of grand wooden doors at the main entrance. She was halfway up the stairs when she heard an unfamiliar voice behind her:
‘I know, I know!’ It was a boy, probably around her age – exasperated, from the sound of it.
At first, Marinette thought he was talking to her, but when she turned, she saw him at the bottom of the steps, speaking to someone inside the silver car he was climbing out of.
No, not a car. A limousine.
Why is someone being dropped off at this school in a limo?
The boy shut the door behind him and slung a messenger bag over his shoulder. The car lingered a moment, as if it were having second thoughts about dropping him off. Then it pulled away, leaving the boy alone on the pavement, looking down at his feet. Maybe talking to them.
Then he looked up and found Marinette watching him.
She stumbled backwards, hitting the step behind her and wobbling, throwing her arms out to keep her balance before she fell down the stairs and spent the rest of the week in hospital.
Her nightmare flashed behind her eyes, and she squeezed them shut, to stop the vision.
Then somehow, he was there – his hands on her wrists, steadying her, so that she was looking up at him, into his face for the first time.
On paper, he was nothing out of the ordinary – maybe six inches taller than her, with iconic golden curls like a film cliché. Simple jeans and a black long-sleeved t-shirt, but with the Gabriel brand logo letting you know that, as plain as they were, those clothes cost more than Marinette could afford after a whole month’s worth of babysitting. Two months, even.
What wasn’t ordinary was his smile, and the way it moved right into his moss-green eyes. Or the openness on his face, not just inviting but demanding that she know and understand him. Especially with the early-autumn sunshine hanging over the skyline, haloing his face and making the tips of his hair glow, like he was on fire and had been delivered into the world just for her.
That’s…too much poetry for this time of day.
Marinette licked her lips. She knew who this boy was, after all. They’d all been prepped about him for weeks – how they were supposed to treat him like just another student, ignoring how famous he was. He’d recently moved from London and wanted to keep as low a profile as possible.
She’d told herself this would be easy. Never mind that she had a collection of clippings of this boy’s modelling shots from magazines, or that his father was her favourite fashion designer in the world. He was just a normal person underneath the make-up and expensive hair…right?
But standing there, face to face, she saw that she was wrong. And it had nothing to do with him being famous.
‘You’re…you’re…,’ she made out, wondering when she had lost the ability to form sentences.
He rolled his eyes, releasing her wrists and taking a step away from her to give her space. ‘Adrien Agreste.’ He said this like it was a brand rather than a personal name. ‘But seeing as it’s my first day here, maybe we could…pretend I’m someone else?’
She wanted to smack herself but couldn’t move. I’ve already messed this up.
‘Like…like who?’ she stammered.
He ran a hand through his shining hair and looked up, squinting in the sunlight before meeting her eyes again. ‘You know, I’ve been trying to work that one out for a while. Maybe you should make something up for me.’
She adjusted the shoulder strap of her bag before it could slide off her arm. ‘You…you want me to make up an identity for you?’
Adrien laughed. ‘Is that too weird? I mean, you don’t even know me yet.’
Somehow, she recovered herself. ‘Sure, I know you. You’re Adrien Agreste, the mad scientist who trains hamsters to howl at full moons. There was a whole article about it in the paper the other week.’
He laughed again, this time louder than before, and shook his head. ‘I bet you thought that was a pretty crazy thing to do. I lost a lot of funding for that stunt. No one will invite me to the scientist parties anymore.’
‘The scientist parties,’ she echoed, a strange feeling coming over her face. It had been so long since she’d smiled like this that she didn’t immediately recognise it.
‘We use technical language in the science circle.’ Adrien grinned at her, his eyes sparkling wickedly. ‘And who are you…’
‘Marinette Dupain-Cheng. I’m a baker. I knead emotions into pastries.’
‘Emotions?’
‘You know, sadness and anger….’ She trailed off, belatedly saying, ‘Um…joy.’
Ugh, Marinette, what are you saying?
Adrien nodded and rubbed his chin as if taking this matter deeply seriously. ‘What does a sadness croissant taste like?’
Her eyes grew large. ‘That’s what I was wondering!’
‘I bet it’s salty.’
‘Like tears!’ she exclaimed, then gripped her lunch bag hard, to stop herself from hugging this total stranger.
They both fell silent. She wanted to look away but couldn’t. Something about his stare was like a fist, holding her heart and in no hurry to let her go. She was caught in his gaze as long as he wanted.
She cleared her throat, hoping something like real words would come out of her mouth. ‘We’re…we’re going to be really late to class.’
Adrien blinked, releasing her, and Marinette let out a breath, like a balloon that had suddenly been untied.
‘About that – maybe you can…help me find my way?’ He pulled a rumpled piece of paper out of his bag and handed it to her. It was his schedule.
‘You’re in the same class as me,’ she realised.
He flashed her another of those smiles, warmer than the morning sun. ‘It must be fate.’
She felt her cheeks warm and ducked her head. ‘I’ll take you there.’
Before she could get caught in another staring contest with this boy, she turned abruptly and proceeded up the final few steps, listening to his expensive shoes tap their way after her. She led him through the double-doors, and across the open-air courtyard, up another flight of stairs and to their classroom.
She stopped outside the door and turned, daring to look at him again. He was still uncommonly beautiful, even in the artificial light of the school. ‘Now, be warned. Ms Mendeleiev isn’t exactly known for her sweetness and charm. She’ll probably be furious when we go in there.’
Adrien nodded and furrowed his brow tightly. ‘This is me bracing myself.’
She put her hand to her mouth, stifling a giggle, then turned back around, pushing open the door.
The teacher stared hard at them both. ‘Ah, so you’ve finally decided to join us, Marinette.’ It was not her rudest of greetings.
The rest of the class had their eyes not on Marinette but her companion. Even the teacher’s eyes found their way to him, and Marinette found her own head pivoting in his direction.
Adrien waved at the room, a look of childlike naivety on his face. ‘Hello. I’m Adrien,’ he introduced himself in a voice that knew nothing of the meanness of the world. ‘I’m so sorry we’re late. It’s entirely my fault. This is my first day – not just here but in any kind of school. I was a bit lost, and Marinette here kindly made herself late going through my schedule and helping me find my way.’
Again, there was that smile, this time beamed right at the teacher. A laser finding its helpless target.
Marinette blinked at him, taking in his words – his admission sprinkled into the half-lie, like the pinch of salt added to pancake batter.
His first day…at any school?
She shuddered when she saw Ms Mendeleiev’s face relax into a smile. It was unnatural on her.
‘Marinette, that was very good of you,’ the teacher rasped out in her reedy voice. ‘Adrien, I hope that’s been a positive introduction to this school.’
‘Oh, absolutely,’ he said, his eyes trained on Marinette, locking her in his stare once more. ‘I can’t tell you how happy I am to be here.’