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“Dad?”
“Hm?”
“Can I have some champagne?”
“Adrien, you’re too young to drink.”
“It’s the end of the world, Dad. Who cares about the legal drinking age?”
Gabriel sighs, swirling the alcohol around his glass in a hypnotizing white-gold whirlpool. It’s a 1969 Dom Perignon P3 Plenitude Brut, and he’d thought when he dug it out of the cellar that this, of all times, would be a good evening to drink it. Now he’s not so sure he wants to spend their last few hours drunk.
He looks at Adrien, flopped next to him on the couch, their socked feet propped side by side on the coffee table, giving him the most sardonic puppy eyes he’s ever seen. Gabriel’s heart shudders. My son’s last hours. Oh God.
“Besides,” Adrien continues. “It’s not like I’ve never snuck some during all those fancy parties you sent me to. Give us a sip.” He reaches for the glass, practically crawling into Gabriel’s lap.
Gabriel lifts it above his head, trying not to spill while fending off his son. His attempted chuckle gets blocked in his throat. “Careful, you’ll wake the kwamis.”
Adrein glances at the miniature pillow fort Plagg and Nooroo built, perched unsteadily on the couch’s far end. Quiet snoring emanates from inside. Still, Adrien’s gentle as he settles back. “Is this ‘cuz I destroyed you earlier?” He tilts his head at the Ultimate Mecha Strike III console and the tangled controller cables atop it. “You’ve barely drunk any. At least don’t let it go to waste.”
Gabriel stretches his arm over the back cushions in a show of casual consideration. His drink refracts the blue-grey light of the TV, whose static buzz replaces their previous soundtrack of marathon reruns and doomsday headlines. Gabriel thought he’d appreciate the lack of noise, but the silence is stifling.
He glances into the sky. A few stars peer between the sparse clouds. Is he imagining one getting closer? Is the sky growing too dark? The news said to expect it later, but he can’t help but check—as if he could spot a meteor, five times the size of Earth and traveling at lightspeed, before it hit and he and his son became dust and a brief smear on the end of history…
“Dad.” Adrien pokes his arm. “Seriously, I can handle some alcohol. I’ve built up a pretty good tolerance.”
Gabriel blinks. “How much have you been sneaking?”
Adrien grins the toothy, wild grin he gets when they’re sabotaging police raids or reducing the Supreme’s “research” facilities to ash. “Wouldn’t you like to know. I bet I could outlast you in a drinking contest.”
A startled laugh escapes Gabriel. It sounds like a sob. “What? Seriously?”
“That’s what you get for not paying attention to me.” Adrien gives a breezy shrug.
Gabriel’s smile collapses: goodness knows he deserves that. “I’m sorry, Adrien. Truly.”
“It’s fine, Dad; I didn’t mean it that way.”
“Oh.” Gabriel swirls his glass, watching bubbles spin in the current. He swallows the lump in his throat. “Why are you so interested in drinking?”
He can’t imagine it’s the taste: he didn’t like it himself at first. The buzz is nice sometimes. Maybe Adrien tried to kill the days after Emilie’s death with a little alcohol. Not that I was around to notice.
“Why not? What better time to live it up?” Resting his head next to Gabriel’s arm, Adrien gazes out the window. The screen’s light hits his face, heart-shaped and not quite free of baby fat, and catches in his green eyes. As he scans the darkening sky, tension seeps into his jaw, the lively teen with whom Gabriel’s spent the day crumpling into a boy dealing with an unbearable fate. One tiny life form waiting for the universe to wipe him out.
When he speaks, he’s fighting to keep his voice casual. It wobbles anyway. “Besides…when it happens…I’d rather be too hammered to notice.”
Gabriel stills. The words punch through his heart.
Adrien is scared of dying.
Both of them are no strangers to peril. Adrien’s shown him scars from the Supreme’s abuse and sworn he’s not afraid of their mission’s likely end. That’s how he usually is: cavalier nonchalance and swaggering confidence and bombastic shows of strength. He’s been learning to let his guard down; this week, he wept over the coming end in Gabriel’s arms. But today he teased his dad about video games and suggested movies to watch and goofed off like this was any other weekend. Gabriel assumed Adrien had made his peace with death.
As if he could find peace with the extinction of his family, his friends,everything he loves. As if he could simply accept being smashed into pulp, snuffed like a wick. As if he isn’t staving off despair with distractions, as if the countdown isn’t ticking in the back of his mind. Of course he’s afraid—he’s fucking terrified.
Oh, my boy. I’ve been such a fool.
Gabriel can’t help but recall the months after Emilie’s funeral. He’d interpreted Adrien’s silence as resentment, his distance as setting boundaries—and let Adrien’s need for comfort pass over his head. He’s lost count of the galas and photoshoots and fashion shows he sent Adrien to, alone. While the photo albums they read today had dozens of pictures of him, Emilie, and little Adrien, there hadn't been enough family pictures in the last two years to fill a single page. So much time they spent apart: Gabriel as Betterfly, Adrien as Claw Noir, neither able to reach out and talk until they’d nearly killed each other.
His gaze drifts to the DVD screensaver gliding from side to side, never hitting the corner no matter how long he stares. If I can’t take care of my son, how could I expect to help anyone else?
He'd fought so hard to stop the meteor. For three days in the world’s week of forewarning, he’d tried. But the meteor is too fast. It’s light-years of travel away; even if they could reach it, it’d be kilometers past them in a heartbeat. No clever plan, no brute force, no well-worded wish, no combination of his and Ladybug’s and Paw Noir’s Miraulous can stop it. (For what would have to be destroyed so their world could be spared?) He can’t save the people of Earth. He can’t save anyone. Including his own son.
“I see,” he murmurs, sinking into the watery depths of his glass. “I suppose, after all my mistakes, it is the least you deserve.”
Adrien sits up, eyes drilling holes in Gabriel’s skull. The motion knocks the photo album off the coffee table; its spine cracks, and photos scatter like dead leaves. TV static buzzes in Gabriel’s ears.
Then Adrien scooches over and flops onto his chest. “Hey. It’s okay, you know. You were just one guy.” He tucks his head under Gabriel’s chin, a warm weight on his father’s heart. “You can’t do everything. Sometimes shit just happens.”
“I know.” Gabriel brushes his fingers through Adrien’s hair, silky and golden and smelling of coconut shampoo. His little boy has grown so much. “It’s just… if only I had been more…”
“Dad. Stop.”
“No, I’m sorry, I should have—”
“Stop.” Adrien puts his arms around his dad. “Really, I mean it. It’s okay.” Burying his face in the crook of Gabriel’s neck, he squeezes to press the reassurance into Gabriel’s heart, to pull him from the cloying tendrils inside his mind. It doesn’t hurt, but its solidity startles Gabriel. It feels like waking from a dream, like feeling sunlight on his skin after only seeing it through a distant window. How many times has he not felt Adrien’s touch, though they’ve spent the day side by side?
Putting down the glass, Gabriel carefully encloses Adrien in an embrace, running his hand down the smooth plane of his son’s shoulders, up the knobs of his spine. Adrien leans on him in turn, resting and anchoring him in one motion. And Gabriel finally understands what this gesture is: a shield from the painful past and the unthinkable future, an unspoken I forgive you, I love you, now please let it go.
It’s hard to believe him. But Gabriel will try.
With one more squeeze, Adrien sits up. “Come on. If we don’t start Mom’s movie soon, the meteor will hit before we finish it.”
“Okay.” Gabriel rummages in the cushions for the remote, trying not to disturb the kwamis’ fort. They’re definitely asleep now, stuffed as they are, Nooroo with fruit and Plagg with cheese. And while they’ve assured their holders they will live on in other universes, Gabriel aches to know he won’t see them again. Or his parents, or Alya, Nino, and Marinette, to whom the Agrestes have said their goodbyes and who are now with their own families.
At least they haven’t had to say farewells in secret. The Supreme’s search for the resistance had flared violently and died; now he and his allies are scrambling to build a compound to withstand the meteor. Everything else—his propaganda, his surveillance, his machines of profit—no longer matter. The relative freedom is bizarre, like entering a sealed room to find the windows open to the morning breeze. It affects how people walk and speak and interact. It weakens their fear, kindles their hope. It draws them into strongholds of community. Even now, Gabriel can sense kindness like drops of balm raining across the city. At least Paris has this taste, this sweet shadow of the future he’d longed for. At least, though the end is coming, they have love.
“Here.” He hands Adrien his glass. “Once this is gone, no more for either of us until the movie is over. But afterward, I’ll go get another Dom Perignon or two. You can have as much as you like. You can even skip the glass and drink out of the bottle. Sound good?”
Adrien blinks, and then tears fill his eyes. Putting down the glass, he throws his arms around his father’s neck. Gabriel holds him close, feeling him shake with understanding, with gratitude, with the knowledge his father will protect him. “I love you, Dad,” Adrien sobs.
Kissing his cheek, Gabriel rocks him like a child. The ache remains, but it’s softened, opened up to allow Adrien in. How strangely sweet, this reassurance the end of the world can’t part them. Breathing deeply, he absorbs the warmth of their embrace, the kwamis’ quiet snores, the sparkling sky. It is good to be here with his son. And though their time is cut short, he is so blessed to exist in this world as Adrien’s father, Johnny and Gabrielle’s son, Marinette, Nino, and Alya’s mentor, Nooroo’s holder. It is good to have been. And it is good to be.
“I love you too, Adrien,” he whispers.
After a minute, Adrien wipes his face. He takes a gulp, coughs as too much liquor hits the back of his throat, then grins. Chuckling, Gabriel hits play.
The music begins before the logos: contemplative piano over a misty background of strings. The screen lightens to show Notre Dame stretching to a rainy sky, which melts into a wide shot of a figure under an umbrella, strolling beside the Seine. For a moment, the word “SOLITUDE” draws their eye. Then the camera focuses on the woman, the familiar slope of her shoulders, the soft curl of her hair.
Adrien snuggles into him. “She’s amazing, isn’t she, Dad?”
Onscreen, one slender hand reaches from beneath the umbrella to catch raindrops. “Yes. She is.”
The movie plays. Of course, Adrien will finish the champagne in the first five minutes, so they’ll eat what remains of the giant bag of choucettes Marinette gave them. Gabriel will cry three times during the movie. Once when they see Emilie’s face for the first time, once when the final credits roll, and once in the middle, because he is with his son, watching their Emilie shine, and knowing they’ll soon see her again.
Afterward, Adrien will put on music and drink Dom Perignon like it’s water. And when he collapses, half-drunk and half-asleep into Gabriel’s arms, Gabriel will tuck a blanket over them both and hum lullabies to soothe his son into slumber. He will resolve to spend his last breaths telling Adrien he loves him.
If they look up at the right time, maybe they’ll see the fireball hitting the atmosphere, the sky’s erasure heralding the impact. Maybe they won’t. For now, there is only the couch, another warm, breathing body, the grayscale picture and the gentle music. There is only now, forever.
“Dad?”
“Hm?”
“Thanks for the champagne.”
“Of course, Adrien. Of course.”