Chapter Text
The alarm went off at 05:30 the way it always did.
Felix fumbled for it before sitting up in bed and turning it off properly. He was not looking forward to today.
Felix rarely did.
He had once thought that, when he was considered a full adult—for Felix had never thought of himself as a child—then things would be different. He had thought that once he was free of his father’s control, once Adrien was free of Gabriel, that they both would be free. Or freer at any rate. Free to grow and change, to challenge the world on their own terms.
But walls would not topple overnight and the walls he and his cousin had had built had all the strength of diamonds and the endurance of proper Roman engineering. Adrien’s were easier to work around. Friendship and ease of schedule had worked wonders on his cousin, but Felix’s walls had never been as simple as restriction and isolation. But then, Adrien hadn’t built his walls which made them easier to chip away at.
Felix had built his own. Each painful conversation, each manipulative action, each fawning sycophant, every social climber, every false friend had been a stone added to his emotional ramparts. They were so tall now that he couldn’t see passed them and, even though the origin point was dead, Felix found he had never built a way out.
Enough, he thought. There is work to be done.
There always was.
He sighed and threw off the covers.
He ran through his morning routine: thirty minutes on the treadmill, a quick shower, a simple breakfast of a poached egg, avocado toast, and black coffee, then reviewing the day’s schedule as his driver took him to the office.
As he exited the town car, Felix glanced up at the office building with its imposing “G” denoting the Gabriel brand - or rather what was left of it. Gabriel had died six months before of a heart attack. The doctors had claimed it was overwork and not taking proper care of himself. Felix had been rather surprised. He had always assumed his uncle didn’t have a heart and had been surviving out of pure spite ever since his wife had died. Adrien, of course, had been devastated and Felix’s mother had suggested he move to Paris and help his cousin rebuild the family business. Felix had agreed. He owed his cousin for so many misunderstandings that he couldn’t have said no even if he had wanted to. But that left him as the acting CFO of a floundering international fashion house. For Gabriel Fashions had been struggling for years and the loss of its founder merely sent it into its death throes.
Felix huffed in frustration as he turned his eyes back downward.
The frustration followed him like his shadow throughout the day like it always did. The morning meeting was boring and predictable. Adrien, in a bout of trauma-induced cronyism, had called on his friends for help. They had responded with an uncomfortable level of encouragement and enthusiasm. At first, Felix thought that just another sign of the cultured weakness and compliance Gabriel had driven into his cousin since their early days. But, over the last few months, he had come to realize that Adrien was either radically blessed with good luck or he had better taste in companions than anyone, including Felix, had ever given him credit for.
Take Lahiffe and Cesaire, for example. Despite his slacker, skater bum wardrobe and a collection of truly unmemorable caps, Lahiffe proved to be a competent organizer and someone who performed the motions of caring for others with an impressive semblance of sincerity. Cesaire, on the other hand was a terror in heels, but she was extremely effective as a marketing manager, pushing her team to come up with a rebranding program in less than six weeks.
And then there was Dupain-Cheng. That was the one choice Felix had never been able to question his cousin about because she had arrived six minutes late on the second day carrying two backpacks full of sketchbooks and binders and, as far as Felix could tell, hadn’t stopped since.
Dupain-Cheng was revitalizing the fashion side of things into a more casual line. Nothing avant-garde, but designs that were softer and had far more personality than anything Gabriel had churned out in the last decade of his life. If Felix was being complimentary—which he never was if he could help it—he would have called her designs elegant simplicity. The fact that she was also doing it nearly singlehandedly would have been even more impressive if she wasn’t so exhausting to watch. Dupain-Cheng had the drive of a professional, the bubbly infectiousness of teenage girl, and enough enthusiasm to motivate an entire department of cynical old timers into starting over midlife.
Being frighteningly talented and irrationally dedicated certainly doesn’t hurt either, Felix thought as he trudged his way back to the office floor they all used.
Neither Adrien nor Felix had had any interest in taking over Gabriel’s office on the top floor. For Adrien, it probably held too many memories of the man who had run his life like a glorified dog-and-pony show. For Felix, it had more to do with his uncle’s painfully monochromatic office decor. Instead, they had all chosen cubicles in a hither-to empty corner of the open-plan secretarial offices. Felix was really the only one who spent significant time in his, so he was left to do his own work in relative peace.
He set his briefcase down on his desk and collapsed into the desk chair, glancing at his watch.
It is only 10:30! Felix thought, swallowing down an annoyed groan. I slept a full eight hours last night. How can I still be tired?
He closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath, hoping it would clear his head of annoying distractions and ease the tension that had taken up permanent residence in his shoulders.
Someone set something down on his desk.
“For the thousandth time,” he said through gritted teeth. “Urgent goes in the red inbox. Time sensitive goes in yellow, and “it can wait” goes in green. If it isn’t in one of those, then it goes in the trash.”
“I would have set this down in the red one, but it is already full and I wouldn’t want to waste it,” came the familiar cheeky voice of Ms. Dupain-Cheng.
Felix opened his eyes. There she was—Miss Sunshine herself—standing in front of his desk, one soft pink fingernail tapping the lid of a to-go cup. His sense of smell caught up with him then and the aroma of the Italian roast coffee from Ricco’s sparked his synapses. He reached for the cup, one eyebrow raised.
Ms. Dupain-Cheng gave a one sided shrug at his unasked question. “You’ve been looking tired,” she said simply. “And I was picking up something anyway.”
She waggled her own cup at him with the other hand.
Felix took a sip, letting the rich, hot liquid roll down his throat with a pleasant jolt. He had expected sugar and cream at the very least, considering her habit of bringing in pastries from her parents’ bakery at least once a week. However, it was black, which surprised him. Not because he didn’t like it—he always took it black—but he was unsure of how she would have known his coffee preferences.
Let alone that I have been tired lately, he thought, the slightest bit miffed at her intrusive, if accurate, observation.
Something of his annoyance must have shown on his face for the corner of her mouth twitched up in a grin.
“If you don’t want people to know you’re human, Felix,” she said, “then you might want to cover those dark circles under your eyes. You and Adrien have the same skin tone. I bet he’d loan you some concealer if you asked.”
That left a bitter taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with the coffee. Still, the gift of the beverage had been given and, if his mother had taught him anything, he must acknowledge it somehow or it would be a breach of etiquette.
“Thank you,” he said stiffly, unused to such exchanges except with his cousin. He saw her grin widen and he hastened to clarify. “For the coffee.”
She nodded once and turned away, thankfully sparing Felix from having to make more small talk.
If he was honest, he didn’t know how to communicate with these friends of Adrien’s. Felix could provide small talk on a wide variety of subjects in four different languages, but the people with whom he had been trained in such discussions had been either stiff with an overwhelming sense of their own perceived importance or had been fawning over him in vain attempts to gain his attention or the use of his connections. He didn’t know how to relate to true sincerity. He was prepared for the false kind, could spot it a mile away, and, yet, the true, disinterested affection of Adrien and his cohorts always left Felix feeling unsettled.
Felix glanced over the top of his cubicle wall to see where Ms. Dupain-Cheng had gone, but if she was in her own cube, he couldn’t tell.
He sat back down and stared, unblinking at the to-go cup.
Well, it’s just coffee, after all, he thought and took another sip.