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If Adrien is being honest, he genuinely forgot they did this. It isn’t really at the forefront of his mind, he has other more…pressing matters to be thinking about. Shopping is not one of them.
Chloé, on the other hand, never forgets. Adrien swears she has all their tiny traditions and ticks written down somewhere, because he’s not entirely sure how she remembers all of them. This one, though— This one he’s embarrassed he forgot about.
He’s just relieved Chloé had texted him — ‘give me 15 adri and i’ll be on my way~ ;*’ — so he had time to actually get dressed and look mildly presentable.
Of course, that doesn’t stop him from being completely unable to find a winter jacket. Which is completely ridiculous, because with the amount of clothing he owns and the fact that his father is a fashion designer , there really should be random coats lying around.
Adrien skids into the dining room as he pulls his coat on.
Chloé looks up from her magazine, arching an eyebrow. “Sleeping beauty forgot to set his alarm, huh?” she taunts with a smirk.
He rolls his eyes and brushes his hair out of his face. “I think you’re early.”
She scoffs. “I’m never early.” She tosses her magazine down the table and it slides toward the center. “Ready?”
“Am I ever?” Adrien asks.
Chloé smiles coyly. “Prepare yourself, Monsieur Agreste, because I have a battle plan.”
What Adrien long ago dubbed ‘Operation Holiday Shopping’ is one of the few times he’s allowed to go wherever he wishes without any supervision and without any scheduling built in by Nathalie. When him and Chloé first started doing this years ago, an adult had to tag along for safety reasons, but the second Chloé turned thirteen, she pleaded and begged and puppy-dog eyed until she got her way. That Christmas, her and Adrien shopped alone.
Chloé loops her arm through Adrien’s and drags him down the sidewalk. She’s almost always the more enthusiastic of the two about this, but usually by the end of the day, that excitement will have rubbed off on Adrien.
Today, he’s not exactly feeling it.
He lets Chloé pull him into different stores, he lets her shove gifts into his arms, lets her push him into dressing rooms, lets her carry most of the conversation. He plasters on a smile and pretends he’s enjoying himself.
It’s rich of him to think that he could fool her.
Chloé drops down into the seat across from him in the café, handing him his drink.
“Where to next?” Adrien asks before carefully taking a sip.
“Hm…” She taps a manicured nail against her lip. She shrugs and closes her eyes, sinking back into the seat with her hands wrapped around her cup. “I’m done.”
He frowns and checks his phone for the time. They’ve only been out for a few hours. Usually, their holiday shopping day is an entire event . There have been years where they skip dinner and buy random snacks whenever they start feeling hungry. They never shop for less than six hours, Chloé has it all down to a science . No one can say that she doesn’t know time management and planning. Adrien’s seen her at work, he’s seen her schedule for this in years past. Large blocks of color coding with careful notes, how to get to and from which stores the fast, the quickest routes, all the research for what’s being sold where— This is their one day where they get all of their shopping done. There’s no way Chloé has finished in a few measly hours.
“You’re done?” he asks.
Chloé nods. “I’m done.”
“Oh. Uh…”
She opens an eye. “Do you want to go somewhere?”
“Um…” No, no he does not. “Not particularly.”
“Great. I have food at home and we can start wrapping.” Chloé puts down her cup and gathers all the bags she can before picking it back up. “Let’s go.”
“N-now?”
“You can drink and walk.” She jerks her head toward the door. “Let’s go, I’m hungry.”
Adrien stops himself from saying that they’re in a café . There’s food right here that they can buy.
She gives him a flat look. “Are you coming or are you going to sit here alone all day?”
“I’m coming.” He scoops up his bags — for once in his life he has almost the same amount as Chloé — and juggles them around as he tries to figure out how to hold them and his drink.
Chloé opens the door with her back, letting Adrien out before she steps out of the café herself.
“Do you know what you’re going to write yet?” Adrien asks as they start toward the hotel.
She tosses her hair over her shoulder. “Do I ever?”
He thinks back. No. “Well, when was the last time you wrote?”
Chloé purses her lips. “Hm… It’s been a while. Months . Haven’t really had time. The last one? Probably the first akuma attack.” She shrugs. “Seemed important enough for a letter, I guess.”
Adrien is amazed how nonchalant Chloé is. He supposes that it’s been long enough for most of the sting to wear off but— He ducks his chin into the collar of his coat. Chloé bounced back quickly. He can too.
Chloé sighs when they entire the warm hotel lobby. “Finally,” she murmurs. She tosses her empty cup in the nearest trash. “I swear I was getting frost bite.”
Adrien rolls his eyes. At least Chloé’s dramatics are familiar. “We were outside for like twenty minutes,” he points out.
She shoots a glare at him. “You think this skin is made for cold weather?” She gestures to her face and poses dramatically. “Cold, dry air, Adrien.”
“Nothing a little moisturizer won’t fix.” He presses the up button for the elevator. “Not like it’s not part of your skincare routine anyway.”
She scoffs. “But it’s easier if the problem isn’t there to begin with.” She turns up her nose at him as the elevator doors open. They squeeze in with their bags. “Think logically , Adri.”
“I am thinking logically. Cold air won’t kill you.”
“Cold air can kill you.”
“You love winter.”
Chloé smiles distantly. “Yeah, I do.”
They dump their bags on the floor of Chloé’s room. Adrien digs through her closet looking for last year’s wrapping paper as Chloé calls down for food.
“Are you sure it’s in here?” he calls out.
“No,” she admits. She flops on her bed. “But we didn’t use all of it last year and it’s usually in the closet.”
Adrien leans out of her closet, hanging onto the doorframe. “Didn’t you reorganize like, everything during the summer? Remember? When Kat—”
Chloé jumps up from her bed. “I did,” she interrupts. She shoves Adrien in the chest, pushing him back into the closet. “But the wrapping paper stayed in the same place. You’re in the wrong closet, doofus.”
“‘The wrong closet’,” he mutters under his breath. “Of course, why didn’t I think about that?”
“Because I’m the smart one, obviously.” Chloé winks at him as she pulls open the closet door. “You’re oblivious as hell and can’t find something even when it’s staring you in the face.” She disappears into the closet. “Told you!” she shouts, not even ten seconds later. She walks out of the closet with an armful of wrapping paper and closes the door with her foot.
Adrien sighs. “Fine, you win. This time.”
“This time?” Chloé drops the wrapping paper on the floor by the bags. “Don’t you mean every time?”
He sticks his tongue out at her as she answers the door to grab their food.
Adrien sits down next to their bags, digging through them to sort out what’s his and what’s Chloé’s. He finds what he bought her when she wasn’t looking and quickly stuffs it into a bag’s he’s emptied and slides it under her bed to grab before he leaves.
“Eat up, stick boy,” Chloé says, sitting down next to him with a plate piled high with cheese and crackers and a bowl full of chips. “I asked for actual food but it’s still being made.”
Adrien dutifully takes a cracker. He’ll need to slip Plagg some cheese when she turns around. “Do you want to write first or wrap?” he asks with a mouth full of cracker.
Chloé make a face and pushes his face away. “Don’t be gross. And write.”
He covers his mouth with his hand and stares at her as he continues to chew. “Okay,” he says after he’s swallowed, keeping his hand up. “Are your scissors still in your desk?” His voice is muffled by his hand.
Chloé rolls her eyes and pushes his hand down away from his mouth. “Duh. My desk is still the disaster it always is. Not every part of my life can be perfect.”
Adrien shakes his head at her as he gets up to find scissors and tape. He’s not sure where either of them are in her desk, but he’ll find them eventually. Unless the same thing that steals just one of his socks also takes Chloé’s schools supplies. (He’s about 99% sure that ‘thing’ is Plagg.) He finds the scissors in the first drawer he opens and finds the tape under four old notebooks and a stack of index cards in the fifth drawer. When he sits back down, Chloé is hunched over a piece of lined paper, writing a letter in swooping cursive.
As he pulls out the first present to wrap, Chloé nudges his knee. He glances over to her. She’s still bent over her letter, but there’s a shoe box touching his knee. There’s a piece of paper, an envelope, and a pen on top of it.
Adrien hesitates.
Chloé’s shoebox is to her left. It’s old and battered and is the third of its kind. The first two are carefully hidden away in one of her closets, wrapped in a blanket and away from prying eyes. The first year her mother was gone, she wrote letters almost weekly. Now, she saves them for holidays and birthdays and more special events.
Adrien had been wondering if she was going to suggest he write his own letter this year.
He’s been trying not to think about it. He’s been trying as hard as he can. His first Christmas without his mother—
His hands are shaking when he picks up the pen and paper. He takes a deep breath.
This helps. Chloé says it helps.
He hasn’t read any of her letters. They aren’t for his eyes, or anyone other than her mother’s. He doesn’t even think Chloé has reread them. But he knows that the first weeks she wrote letters at a constant, whenever her emotions got high. He knows she cried while she was writing them. He knows she’s poured everything she can into them so she doesn’t have to express those feelings to anyone else.
Adrien starts to write.