Chapter Text
Paris’ miseries end by dumping a set of different ones into Tom Dupain’s lap.
Very metaphorically speaking. “Misery” cannot end in a city of twelve million souls any more than the ocean can stop being salt, and the new ones aren’t dumped into his lap, but dragged down from his fifteen-year-old daughter’s bedroom at five eighteen on a Thursday morning.
Twenty months of supernatural terror has ended with the arrest of the most scandalous suspect; there’s been live coverage of the last desperate battle and the villain’s defeat ever since he got up at three. Place de la Concorde is wrecked. It’ll take hours for the authorities to open the roads that were barricaded; there must already be commuters stuck in traffic and waiting on stops for public transport that can’t run.
It is a cold day in hell when Marinette is up before seven fifty, yet her footsteps are audible through the ceiling, and so is her babbling, a monologue bordering an edge of hysteria.
“Breakfast, right, breakfast is good, we can do this. Breakfast! Yeah, that’s a... place to - um, start. Right - “
It takes her maybe a few seconds too long to discover her parents in front of the muted TV, because by the time she does, it is also undeniably evident that she’s awake at an unheard-of hour of the morning, and there’s a teenage boy in her room.
“Dad?!” she shrieks, and then registering the rest of the scene, “Mum?! Why aren’t you working?!”
“Marinette,” Sabine says nothing more, evidently as deprived of words as Tom himself is in this utterly incongruous morning. The city has been on lockdown since sometime after midnight. A celebrity has been arrested for crimes so beyond logic that laws had to be written specifically for his actions. A secret base in one of the most expensive properties of the city, a body found in the basement of his home. Their daughter clearly hasn’t been to bed, and she’s still clutching the wrist of a boy who Tom after a second pins as a classmate. Hawkmoth unmasked, and it was Gabriel Agreste. His son went to Marinette’s collegé.
“I - “ Marinette starts, eyes shifting in panic between her dumbfounded parents and the exhausted, catatonic boy, “I - we - oooh - I’M LADYBUG!”
As far as excuses for sneaking boys into her room go, claiming to be the superheroine who has spent the night battling a supervillain would certainly be something. But her eyes widen in terror at her own words, and she yanks at the boy’s hand to display a silver ring, “And, and he’s Cat Noir!”
“Marinette - “ the boy says with a look of alarm, lifting his other hand to cradle it, as if to hide it (as if he’s had to protect it countless times before - )
“Well they - they should - it’s not - “
“Whatever,” he mutters at his shoes, “you’ll probably wanna find a new Cat Noir anyway.”
“What?! I can’t just find a new Cat Noir, that’s not how it works!”
“That’s exactly how it works with all the others.”
“But you are Cat Noir,” she begs, but he won’t meet her imploring eyes, “and, and this isn’t the time to be talking about this because BREAKFAST, right?! How come you guys aren’t baking. The show’s over, they locked him up,” the boy flinches, “go work. It’s fine. We’re fine. We’re, we’re gonna have breakfast and - “
“Phone,” they boy mumbles.
“And phone, yes!” She gestures aggressively at Tom until he takes the hint and hands her his unlocked phone. She yanks it out of his hands and thrusts it at the boy, who almost drops it but tightens his limp fingers just in time.
Marinette shoves him against one of the chairs, and starts pulling food out of cabinets and drawers, roots through the fridge as he sluggishly dials a number from memory and lifts the phone to his ear.
"It's me," he says softly, "I'm with a friend. Marinette, from school, the girl at the bakery." He is quiet for a little while, though he doesn't seem to be listening. "Marinette," he finally says, and she stumbles to a halt as he holds the phone out, "please say that I'm fine.”
"Yeah, Adrien's sure is fine! We're at my place and we're gonna have breakfast!" a look is exchanged between the two teenagers, "and he's definitely been with me all night so he wasn't at home for - all that." Adrien doesn't react to what she doesn't say, and it takes Marinette a full five seconds to realise the other implication. "HOMEWORK!" she bellows, face dark red, "we were working on this super important thing for school, not, not, not -"
"This is her dad's phone," Adrien is still quiet, "her parents know about it. I just wanted to let you know, since I guess people are looking for me."
Whoever it is that cares where he might be, it is clearly not a person from whom he is expecting any personal worry. He ends the conversation with that, and slides off the chair to hand Tom his phone back.
"I'm sorry about all this," he says with downcast eyes and slinks back to hunch over the table. The horrible thing is, Tom cannot in good conscience say whether Adrien Agreste is apologising for borrowing Tom’s phone and roping him into a lie about his knowledge about whatever it is that he has been up to tonight, or if he is apologising for the looming elephant in the room for which he cannot possibly have any responsibility.
The mute TV beams live images of police milling about his home. There are frequent re-runs of his father's arrest. The ticker runs on a loop of breaking news. There are still shots of his mother, disappeared and presumed dead, broadcast to all the nation, to every person he knows. He's a boy whose face has been plastered on billboards all over the city. Nevermind all the people he knows; the issue is rather all the people who know him.
Whether he really has been moonlighting as a superhero or if that was an outrageous lie to explain why he's spent the night in Marinette's room; the only thing that is at all relevant is that he's a boy whose life has fallen in ruin over the course of the last five hours. And he's in Tom's home, and whatever it is that makes Marinette the person he turns to, she is also little more than a sixteen-year-old girl who hasn't lost as much as a pet in her life.
A cereal bowl clatters as it is tossed carelessly onto the table; his daughter catches in just in time, and stares helplessly at Adrien Agreste’s bowed head for a moment. She then looks up, glares at her parents and jerks her head in the direction of the door, and Sabine pulls him along.
Paris might never look the same, and Tom Dupain knows for certain that his life won’t either as he leaves his daughter alone with a boy whose losses he cannot even begin to comprehend.
“That Christmas, three years ago – “ Sabine says as they enter the bakery kitchen.
“That time they thought he’d been kidnapped,” Tom supplies, hauling a sack of flour over to the mixer.
“He said he’d only stepped out for a bit,” says Sabine, “but why wouldn’t he tell his father that he’s leaving? And why would his father assume something criminal had happened to a fourteen-year-old who leaves the house for twenty minutes?”
“Rich people,” Tom mutters, recalling the marble-floored rooms of the mansion and the carefully prepared delicacies being brought to the table where they’d been seated as guests; the hand-painted family portrait looming on the wall across him.
“His father never sat down with us,” Sabine pulls the croissant dough from the fridge, “greeted us all politely, stayed to see the meal put out, then disappeared.”
“He was a recluse.”
“A recluse who won’t even celebrate Christmas with the son who lost his mother not a year before? Something wasn’t right,” she bites, slamming twenty kilos of layered dough onto the worktop “It felt wrong. And I thought it’s just how rich people are, but that house – no family, a couple of domestic workers – and then the man won’t even stay for Christmas – “
“The city is full of neglecting fathers,” Tom reminds her, a bit too quick.
“Misplaced pride and stubbornness is something else. Roland always cared too much. He’d never, you know he’d never do that. Leave you alone if you had no-one else. And he’d never - ”
His wife aborts her sentence as she starts feeding the dough through the sheeter.
“I just wonder,” she continues, quiet now, “who will he go to? Because it didn’t seem like he had any other family nearby then.”
Tom has no answer. He measures out eggs and yeast and starts dicing butter while the dough is mixing.
“Ladybug, huh,” he says, and Sabine makes a pained sigh as she turns off the machine and starts cutting the croissants from the sheet of dough.
“We’ll sit her down about that later.”
At an hour still uncharacteristically early, but early within the reasonably expected, Marinette slinks into the bakery to collect a pain suisse from a batch that had to suffer some dirty tricks with the fermentation to be ready for the bakery opening.
“Oh, honey, have you slept at all?“ Sabine starts, but Marinette shakes her head.
“It’s okay. I’ve pulled all-nighters before, you know, what with – “ she cuts off her sentence, waves her hand in an indecipherable gesture, and continues, “Besides, I’m not sure I could. It’s not like it’s going to be better sitting at home worrying.”
“I imagine there won’t a be a of talk about the usual subjects,” Tom contributes.
“Yeah. And I bet – I mean, Adrien – it’s not like he said but – people are going to talk. And I’d rather be there to know what they’re saying. I know what kind of things people can write on the internet, and none of this is his fault, he’s been working so hard against every bad thing Hawkmoth did. He doesn’t deserve to be talked about like that.”
Tom has met Ladybug before, in brief moments when battles have come too close to the bakery. He’s seen her on the news, in interviews and your occasional chat show. He’d noticed the pigtails in particular, reassured that Marinette shared that somewhat childish style choice with someone else her age. Never once had there been a spark of recognition, even the slightest prickling of familiarity. But for how little Tom apparently knows his daughter, he is at least confident in this: that it is far more likely that Marinette is Ladybug than that Marinette would lie about being Ladybug to hide a boy in her room.
Still, the images do not overlap; the girl standing in his bakery in the bright autumn morning doesn’t look at all like the superhero he watched on TV just a few hours ago. She’s tired and sad and anxious, but maybe this is where Tom can see it, after all: because above all that is the determination to charge straight into the battle against public gossip. It’s just Marinette being herself, and here stands the hero of Paris, announcing her intention of going to school to defend a friend’s honour after having spent the night in battle against a grown man with super powers.
He has never loved her more, and she melts into him when he hugs her, flings her arms around him and presses close. Of course, she would to nothing else, his brave and determined daughter with a heart so big and a sense of justice so strong that she has never been one to turn away if she could do something to make things better. Of course, of course that would include being a literal super hero and carrying a responsibility far beyond what any sixteen year old should.
“You’re a true heroine.”
Marinette stiffens in his arms for a heartbeat before she pulls back and turns away with a tight frown, shoves a macaron into her backpack with little ceremony before she makes for the door without a word.
“How is Adrien?” Sabine interrupts her stride, and Marinette stops and wilts again.
“I don’t know. He didn’t really say much. He didn’t eat much either. He fell asleep, that’s probably good. I didn’t think he would.”
“We’ll look after him,” Sabine promises, and Marinette’s shoulders sink at little, at that.
“Thank you,” she says. “Adrien, he’s – you know he’s very important to me. I just wish there was something I could do about all this.”
“I know that feeling,” Tom tells her, remembering her first heartbreak at the hands of none but Cat Noir, who – but that story is rapidly falling apart, and he shakes the memory off and moves on. “But there is always going to be things that we can’t do something about. Sometimes we lose things that can’t be replaced. It’s never easy. And it’s hard when we have to watch it happen to the people we care about. But even if we can’t fix it for them, we can make their lives easier in other ways.”
He fills a bag to brimming with croissants, and hands it to her with a smile. “Go to school and make sure nobody there blames him for what his father did wrong.”
His daughter’s smile is small and watery, but still full of warmth and confidence as she nods, and shoulders the door open.
Sales are not normal. The breakfast rush is slower, but there’s a steady trickle of people in for sweets and cakes; Hawkmoth’s arrest seems to be cause for some tentative celebration. Towards mid-morning, Tom arranges a small tray of pastries and a glass of milk, and carefully opens the hatch that makes up Marinette’s bedroom door.
The room is cast in pink shadow from the heavy curtains muting the sun outside, and Gabriel Agreste’s son is asleep. He’s curled up in a tight ball on Marinette’s chaise lounge, and the only thing visible under the blanket is the top of his head and a sock-clad foot poking out on the other end. Tom puts the tray down on the floor, but as he moves to close the hatch, a tiny, black something pokes out from the blanket.
“Have you got any cheese?”
After everything else Paris has suffered under Hawkmoth’s terror, a talking, levitating cat creature asking for food is not particularly threatening.
“Preferably camembert,” it continues.
“I’ll see what I can find,” Tom says.
“He likes raspberry jam.”
The creature has gone back into hiding when he returns with a small bowl of jam and a wedge of brie, and Tom leaves the boy to what he at least hopes are peaceful dreams.
An hour and half later, the cheese is disappeared, the bowl of jam is empty, the milk half gone along with half a croissant. The atmosphere in the room has shifted, and Tom knows that the boy is no longer sleeping when he sits down at his feet and gives his shoulder a light squeeze.
“Hey,” he says gently, “I got a call from a lawyer working for your father. The police want to talk to you about last night. Probably just about your whereabouts and to make sure you knew nothing about what was going on. It won’t take long. Is that okay?”
“Sure,” says the boy from beneath the blanket.
“Good. I’ll tell them the story Marinette did earlier. That you came over to do schoolwork with her and slept over and didn’t know anything about what was happening until we saw it on the news this morning.”
“Thank you.”
“It’s the least I could do,” says Tom and squeezes his shoulder again, “after everything Cat Noir has done for Paris.”
There is a small stretch of silence, and Tom strokes his arm. “I’ll tell them to come here and talk to you. If you want to sleep more after, you can stay here. Don’t worry about going home. You can stay here for as long as you want.”
He doesn’t get a reply to that, but gives Gabriel Agreste’s son a final stroke down his shoulder. He’s about to stand up to make the call, already composing the message, when he hears a small, wet breath from somewhere in the blanket.
“Oh, Adrien,” he says and lets his hand rest, and Adrien’s head disappears even further as his body jerks in a sob, and then the metaphorical floodgates burst open. It seems like he’s trying to stem it at first, but the effort is fruitless. He gives up on choking his sobs, and they grow in violence as his voice gets in on it, lacing them with aching bawls.
He is little more than a quivering jar of pain, and Tom follows what little advice he could give his daughter, and continues stroking the arm and the shoulder within his reach as Adrien Agreste cries out his grief and his loss under Marinette’s blanket.
Tom can’t say how long it lasts until the boy exhausts himself, grows quieter, relaxes minutely beneath Tom’s hand. “It’s okay,” Tom offers for companionship, “it’s okay now. You fixed it, you saved everyone. You helped so many people. Everyone is happy now.”
“Ladybug is the one who fixes things,” Adrien disagrees thinly.
“Where would Ladybug be if Cat Noir hadn’t been by her side?” Tom says, and runs his hand through blond hair. “Are you hungry?”
“No.”
“I meant what I said earlier. You can stay here as long as you want to. I’m sure Marinette would like that – she worries about you.”
“I’m sorry,” the boy says, again.
“You’ve got nothing to be sorry about,” Tom says gently. “Please remember that. Whatever choices your father made, it wasn’t you who made them for him.”
“I know,” Adrien says, and an arm is shifted to probably wipe his eyes.
“Do you think you’re ready to talk to the police? I can tell them to be here in thirty minutes.”
“Yeah, I’ll be fine.”
“You know, no-one is expecting you to be fine right now.”
“I know,” and the blanket is pulled down as Adrien Agreste twists a little and meets Tom’s eyes for the first time that day, with a small and bitter smile, “but there’s no helping anything right now. I might as well get started with cleaning up this mess.”
“You’re a very brave boy,” Tom says, and Adrien Agreste wipes away fresh tears at that.
Thirty-two minutes later, Tom leads a posse consisting of one M. Autain, one lieutenant Roger Raincomprix, and a taciturn man the size of a yeti up to the flat. The lawyer wants a word with the boy before the police, and lieutenant Raincomprix makes no protest as the other two men disappear into Marinette’s room.
“Nasty business,” he says after he has taken Tom’s perfunctory statement about Adrien’s whereabouts the last fifteen hours, “I’m not usually involved in investigation, but they asked me to talk the kid, seeing as I sortof know him and all.”
“They talked about a dead body in his home,” Tom says vaguely, and lieutenant Raincomprix caps his pen.
“I can’t say anything about that,” he says, and casts Tom a sideways look, “but I reckon that’s why the lawyer’s here.”
Tom is fairly certain that Cat Noir would know better than most what it was they discovered beneath Gabriel Agreste’s mansion, but his heart still sinks at what is being said in the room over his head right this moment.
Another twenty minutes pass before the three men troop down again.
“I’ll see about arranging boarding for him,” says M. Autain to lieutenant Raincomprix, “if the public has any procedures for minors of that age, I’d like it noted that he has family in the United Kingdom that will certainly come here, the nature of the case considered. His current next of kin – “
“He can stay here,” Tom says before he has finished thinking the thought. The lawyer raises a brow in question. “He and my daughter – it isn’t like that, but they’re close friends.” Cat Noir and Ladybug unquestionably are, whatever he never knew about what Adrien Agreste might or might not have thought about Marinette. “I think it would be best for him to stay around people he knows. We would all sleep better at night knowing he’s in good hands.”
“That is a very generous offer, considering his situation,” says the lawyer.
“I just feel bad for him. He’s a very sweet boy, and so important to my daughter.”
M. Autain scratches his head, looks at lieutenant Raincomprix, then back at Tom. “I expect there will be some legal regulations about his official care. Given that he’s a minor and his only close family lives abroad, but old enough that his wishes should weigh heavily –“
The yeti catches his attention with a hand on his shoulder, stares into his eyes and nods. The lawyer stops dithering. “For the time being, it is a satisfactory solution if he agrees. I’ll be in contact whenever the long-term options are clear.”
They all shake Tom’s hand before leaving. No noise is heard from Marinette’s loft as he prepares two mugs of hot chocolate.
(“I think they think she’s dead? That’s the way he’s talked about it, at least. Like he knows she’s not coming back,” Marinette once said, uncharacteristically subdued for a conversation on the topic of the famed Adrien. “I guess it made me realise how lucky I am. I can’t imagine one of you not being here.”)
He tells the boy to drink it all up and strokes his back as he obediently does so, weeping with Marinette’s blanket over his shoulders. When the mug is empty and Adrien is loose-limbed and drowsy, Tom gently pushes him down and shifts the blanket over him, and strokes his hair until he’s certain he’s sleeping.
“That one’s without brandy,” he announces to the room as he leaves, the second mug lukewarm and untouched by the foot of the bed. He doesn’t know if magical cat creatures like hot chocolate, but there’s no harm in making the offer.
There are no magical ladybug creatures introduced when Marinette is home for lunch, and getting answers about Ladybug from Ladybug is like pulling teeth.
“I mean, you’ve already seen it all on TV and all,” Marinette says to her lap, small on the sofa opposite her parents, “and it’s turned out fine so please don’t worry.”
“Marinette, it’s been three years of things being not fine, and to suddenly learn that it’s your own daughter – “ Sabine protests. Marinette’s shoulders rise even taller around her ears.
“I’d have to do it anyway. I mean, obviously, someone had to and I tried to not do it at first but that went bad real fast.”
“Who was it that made you do it?” Tom asks.
“He didn’t force us or anything – more like chose us for it and it turned out we were really good at it. He’s not around anymore anyway so you can’t yell at him.”
“Is there someone in charge of the… superhero things?” Sabine asks.
Marinette shrugs without lifting her eyes.
There are so many things to ask, and so many things that Marinette clearly won’t say. Neither of them say anything to prompt their daughter, but the silence that follows speaks for them. Marinette squirms for a good two minutes.
“I couldn’t tell anyone, and it’s not like I don’t trust you, but – it’s not the kind of thing you think is going to happen, right? And it was important. And I couldn’t risk you guys making me stop. Because I wouldn’t have, and I didn’t want you to worry.”
“Marinette, you’re only sixteen.”
“I’ve been doing this for years now. And I’m not alone. There’s Cat Noir, and – and others. You know. And now that Hawkmoth and Mayura are gone, there’s nothing dangerous – the magical kind of dangerous that the police can’t deal with, I mean.”
“It’s more dangerous if you know.”
Adrien Agreste is much too good at going unheard in houses. He doesn’t look much like the boy in all the ads, hair pressed into a bed head held in place by remnants of whatever product had kept it carefully coiffed the day before. His clothing is slept-in, his face is drawn from grief and exhaustion, but he’s lucid as he stands by the stairs he has ascended without a sound at some point during the conversation.
“With the kind of power the miraculous have, there’ll always be people trying to take them. Mine and Ladybug’s in particular. So you shouldn’t ask, because if someone like - if someone - if someone who wants to use them for bad things knows that you know about it, it would be dangerous. It’s safer for you if you don’t know, so you shouldn’t ask.”
No part of Tom’s family know how to reply to the house guest, and Adrien Agreste turns his heavy eyes away, lifts a hand to uncomfortably clutch the opposite forearm. “I didn’t mean to listen in or anything. I just - bathroom?”
Marinette shoots to her feet, but Tom follows with a slightly more effort and steps forward. “Down the hallway, the first door. Your… driver, I think, came by with clothing for you. There are towels in the drawer.”
The boy looks like he might cry again as he accepts the duffel bag, but what comes out is a soft thank you before he slinks towards the door.
Sabine minds the bakery during lunchtime. Marinette mutely helps him prepare the food, and he makes no attempts at starting conversation. There is no reason to try and pretend like anything is normal, and it isn’t Tom who can steer the stalemate anywhere ahead. The grieving son of their resident super-villain is in his home, and that is somehow the comprehensible part of this entire mess. The fact that the boy is also the superhero who has been unknowingly fighting his father alongside Marinette since they were thirteen is something he won’t touch until Marinette opens for it. And Marinette, hysterical spilling of secrets earlier aside, appears to be determined to keep that box shut.
Lunch is usually a lively affair in their home; today, he turns on the radio to fill the cloying silence and then turns it off after fifteen seconds, because of course every programme is discussing the events of last night. He tries for conversation instead.
“Do you have plans after school today?”
Marinette shrugs. “I don’t think so. Alya might - nevermind. I’ll text you if - crap. Oh god.”
“What is it?”
“Lost my phone,” she mumbles from where she’s buried her face in arms crossed on the table. “Sometime, sometime last night. Had to - it took a long time. And he was - so I dropped my purse somewhere. Dunno where.”
“We’ll get you a new one,” he tells her. It’s the least I can give the hero of Paris, he doesn’t.
“I could go look for it.”
Their house-guest looks ironically less like a drowned cat after the shower, even though his towel-dried hair crowns him in a look of unusual mess, makes him look more like a certain always grinning, perpetually cheerful superhero who until five thirty this morning had been a strictly hypothetical in Tom’s life. He still looks exhausted, in a way Cat Noir never did.
“Since I’m not at school or anything, I mean,” he continues at Marinette’s equally exhausted look.
“I think you’ll be mobbed if you go out.”
“No, I meant,” he raises the hand wearing a silver ring, “me and - “ a shifted look at Tom and the sentence cut short, “as Cat Noir, I meant.”
Marinette stiffens at his words, shifts an unreadable look at Tom, and her voice is steel-sharp when she replies. “No.”
The word seems to shock the both of them; Marinette’s shoulders have risen, her eyes are wide, her cheeks pale. “I mean, you should. Uh. Relax! There’s a lot going on, and with your dad and your mum and all, and that was a big deal yesterday! So Cat Noir is probably also gonna be mobbed. It’s not important anyway, it’s just a phone. Don’t worry.”
“Sure,” says Adrien, with a look of defeat. “But what about the purse? Didn’t you make it yourself? That’s a lot of work lost if you don’t get it back. And that was your grandma’s birthday present, and all.”
“It’s fine,” Marinette says and slumps back on the table, turning away from the defeated look on Adrien’s face.
The first time Adrien Agreste ate in Tom’s home, he’d been overflowing with praise for the spinach pie, all bright eyes as he told him how delicious it was.
The second time Adrien Agreste ate in Tom’s home, he’d swallowed vol-au-vents without chewing and told him that this was the nicest meal he had had in a long time.
Today, he stares at his plate without a word, shoves peas around and eats a few of them. Cuts off a polite piece of sausage, relegates the potatoes to the other side of the plate.
Marinette has no words to spare either of them as she chews and swallows at a utilitarian speed, and then puts down her cutlery and gets down from the chair.
“I’ll go by Place de la Concorde, I’ve got time for it,” she announces to no-one in particular before striding over to the door without looking back or saying goodbye.
“Thanks for the food,” says Adrien Agreste, picks up his bag and climbs the stairs to Marinette’s bedroom.
Tom’s food isn’t even half-eaten.
Three thirty in the morning is a familiar silence. It’s an hour and half until Sabine will be down to start the viennoiseries, and it is a piece of time that is Tom’s alone. The city of lights is asleep as he starts his day by heaving dough onto the work table by the trays. It’s still night for Paris as Tom Dupain cuts his dough into even pieces, pulls them into taut balls to rest so that when he has finished the final, the first is ready for shaping.
In three hours, M. Debay will be in for the pastries for his wife. The lunch rush might be busier than usual, with the schools soon to be out. Tourists will start crowding some time after nine; fewer now than during summer. After twenty-three years and a lifetime before that, Tom knows the beats of each day of the week, each season passing, each neighbor moving in or away. Yesterday saw Mme. Sylvain four years older and so happy to see him, asking for croissants for her entire family because nobody in Caen, she confided, could rival Sabine’s.
Tom had asked her about Paul, and Mme. Sylvain had tittered behind her hand and said something about being the chaser on his team and a whole string of girlfriends. And Marinette?
Marinette, Tom supposes, had a thing for musicians after all, but it didn’t last.
She’s that age, huh, said Mme. Sylvain who probably wouldn’t have become Tom’s in-law even if she hadn’t upped and moved the family across the country. The way Marinette had been holding Paul’s hand after school for six weeks had been emblematic of being twelve and the first in her class to have a boyfriend. Not the girl swooning over pictures of a classmate professionally pretty, not the girl desperately confessing her love to a superhero outside her bedroom window, not the girl forgetting every date with a boy who carried around a guitar and might well have written her love songs if he’d only been given more time.
There had been no tears between the star-crossed lovers; Tom in fact suspected Marinette had been secretly relieved when Paul’s mother announced the move. Mme. Sylvain had said something about the luck of just missing all that business, how awful, and that was when it occurred to Tom that Marinette’s first-ever boyfriend must’ve left the city a scant few months before the super-villains and superheroes came in.
Piecing together the timeline of Marinette’s boyfriends, it occurs to him that he hasn’t known his daughter since she was thirteen, and that is when the superhero who never was her boyfriend slips into the bakery kitchen.
He is still disturbingly adept at going unheard in houses, but the silence of the morning so early that to most it’s still night leaves nothing to hide behind; the door is heavy, and the effort it takes to open it is not lost on Tom. Adrien shrinks back at being met head-on.
“Sorry,” he says softly, “I forgot that you’re up this early. I heard noises, and I thought - after everything going on in my house and all - “
“No need to apologise,” says Tom, “its reassuring to know that the heroes of Paris are looking after me! Help yourself to any day-olds.”
Adrien shakes his head. “Can I sit here? I don’t want to disturb Marinette by going in and out of her room, and I don’t think I’ll sleep more anyway.”
“Of course,” says Tom, and doesn’t add that it takes considerably more than the creaking of a door to wake Marinette. He focuses instead of shaping the rustiques, losing himself once again to the familiarity of motions he has carried out every day of his life since he was a thirteen. Shelves and shelves of bannetons are filled and covered for proofing. The dough is supple and malleable in his hands, the mindless action leaving his thoughts the space to roam.
Missed all that awful business indeed. There had been a time, just a couple of years ago, when he never had to wonder if some villain driven magically mad would destroy his home or endanger his family. His days will go back to that comfort now, the one where the bakery, at least, sees every day the same, and where the things changing is the world outside.
The last time something truly had changed in his kitchen was the day when his father had thrown up his hands and stomped out, swearing up and down that he wouldn’t be back until Tom started doing things right. He didn’t come back that day, or the next day, or the day after that. When it had been a week, Tom called and his father slammed the receiver once he heard his voice. Through Sabine, he’d made it clear that he wouldn’t be back until Tom stopped his nonsense. And Tom had scoffed at his stubborn, silly father and continued baking to the pulse of the day and the beat of the seasons, and just like that it had been twenty years. Updates on his life had passed through Sabine, through his mother, had become a part of the everyday that Tom had stopped counting. Until the day the akuma victim was an old-fashioned baker who had holed himself up in his house for two decades.
How little it took for that to be the best birthday of Tom’s life, all thanks to Marinette, who’d gone there trying to fix things and ended up setting his father off. All thanks to Ladybug and Cat Noir, who had saved his father just like they saved everyone.
He has worked the last loaf and moves to roll them over to the back room for proofing, and only then does he remember the boy still sitting very quietly in the corner.
Tom’s father had never been revealed as the supervillain terrorising the city because his mother hadn’t been quite dead after all; Tom has never had every national and international news network play compilation clips of his father sending magical monsters after him. Adrien Agreste is very quiet and has made himself very small, but he’s still a piece of unsolved outside in Tom’s kitchen.
“Is it difficult?” he asks when Tom meets his intent eyes, “making the bread, I mean? You make it look so easy.”
“That’s all experience,” Tom shrugs as the cart with the rustiques clatters to rest. “When you do it every day, your hands start remembering how it goes.”
“Muscle memory,” says Adrien, “like piano.”
“You play the piano?”
“Yeah, I’ve had classes since I was five!”
“You must be pretty good, then!”
“Not really,” Adrien says modestly, “my dad always - “ the sentence aborts, and he looks at the floor, swallows. “But I’m not sure it counts, anyway. You know our friend Juleka, and Luka?”
“Of course,” Tom accepts the change of topic, something nagging in the back of his head about Adrien bringing up Luka, something else than the miserable fact that Marinette had been very, very bad at concealing the way she looked at Adrien’s pictures in her room for the three weeks that relationship had lasted.
“I play in their band. Keyboard. I mean, whenever my dad - “
The pause is shorter this time.
“I don’t know if I can do that any longer. I bet it’s going to be a bother to them to have someone like me there. But I hope I can. I really like that, to play music with others. It’s completely different than playing by myself. What I was gonna say - “ he shakes his head as if to clear his mind, straightens his back, meets Tom’s eyes again, “I’m really not as good as any of the others. They’d been playing together for years before I joined, and I couldn’t make it to half their practices anyway. But it’s really fun, even though I’m no good at it.”
“I’m sure they wouldn’t make you stop playing with them! They’re Marinette’s friends, after all. If they did that, she’d set them straight.”
A tiny smile blooms at the words, and Adrien looks at his feet once again, but with a warmth to his voice that hadn’t been there before. “Yeah,” he agrees, “of course she would.”
All the while, pieces of baguette dough have been tossed onto the scale and then to the workspace beside it, and Tom didn’t even realise he’d started. “I suppose it’s like piano,” he says, “I never learned to play any instruments, but I’ve made a lot of bread.”
Rows and rows of baguettes are shaped and rolled and set aside for fermentation. He starts the oven for the rustiques, gets the mixer ready for the brioche.
“That’s a lot of flour,” Adrien remarks as Tom upends twenty five kilos into the mixer.
“It’s gonna be a lot of dough,” Tom replies as he crumbles in the yeast, measures salt into the other side of the bowl, empties the first bag of sugar and tears open the next one. Milk and egg by litres, butter by kilos set to wait as he starts the machine.
Adrien watches in rapt attention.
“I wish I could do something like that.”
Tom barely hears it above the drone of the motor. He’s not even sure the words were meant for him. Before he has decided whether to reply or not, Adrien continues.
“Was it your dad who taught you baking?”
“I helped him out ever since I was little. He showed me how to do things right, and I’ve been doing them like that ever since.”
“Did you become a baker because he wanted you to?”
Tom starts putting the first loaves into the oven.
“Not really. I love baking, and I love that I can spend my days doing it! What my father wanted didn’t really have anything to do with it.”
Not doing what his father wanted had cost them both twenty years, but that is of little relevance to Adrien.
“My dad only had me learn things for my brand image. And he didn’t have the time to teach me himself,” Adrien says, wistful. “We never talked about it, but I’m pretty sure he had me learn Chinese and Italian because he wanted me to start helping Nathalie out, eventually. I mean, not like I’d ever be able to do designing or anything.”
“Did you want to?” Tom asks as he closes the oven and sets the steam and the timer.
“I don’t know,” Adrien says, staring at something beyond the kitchen wall. “He never asked me. It’s weird, but I never thought designing fashion was something people did until I met Marinette.”
Silence lingers.
“This bakery has been in your family for generations, right?”
“Very far back, according to my father.”
“Marinette isn’t going to take over, is she.”
Itisn’t a question.
“I’ve always told Marinette that she should do what makes her happy. We’ve taught her to bake, but there were always so many other things she was passionate about.”
“I remember,” says Adrien, very softly, “back when Chloé’s mum wanted to take her to New York. She was just fourteen and you guys said that you’d support whatever decisions she made.”
“It would have been hard, of course. But if it could help Marinette live the life she was dreaming about, it would be worth missing her.”
“She wouldn’t have left anyway,” says Adrien, “Ladybug can’t just - “ he cuts his own sentence short and stares at Tom in panic.
Tom only smiles, before he checks the temperature gauge and starts lining up the next tray of loaves.
“My dad wouldn’t even let me go to the movies alone. I had to sneak out behind his back if I wanted to do things on my own.”
a fourteen year old boy leaving the house for twenty minutes echos between his ears, but the freedom Adrien Agreste has suddenly won will never be worth the price.
“Sometimes people get overprotective of their children,” Tom replies, uncertain if the words will have any value.
“I used to think so, too,” says Adrien in a very small voice.
Tom turns around to start adding the butter to the brioche as he grapples for a way to steer the conversation out of this corner.
“Have to decided what you want to do for a living?” he asks instead as he holds down a scraper along the side of the mixer to quicken the process.
“I don’t know. I’ve been doing modeling jobs but you can’t do that for your entire life, and I wouldn’t want to anyway. Marinette is so lucky knowing what she wants to do. Me, I guess I was just going along with whatever would make my dad happy. Say - “ his voice brightens, and Tom looks up as he raises the speed of the mixer on decades-old instinct, “how’d you know that you didn’t want to do something else than baking?”
“Huh,” says Tom, honestly puzzled, “I don’t think I’ve even thought about that before. I guess it was just the only thing I knew, and I enjoy it, and I get to make people happy doing it.”
“You’re right,” says Adrien. “It’s like being Cat Noir! I get to have fun and help out people and do an important job!”
“Well, there you have it, then!”
Adrien, however, deflates. “But Cat Noir isn’t needed around here anymore. And besides, it’s not like anyone pays us for it. I’d have to have a real job anyway.”
“Well, the position in the bakery is still open,” Tom smiles, and is gratified to see Adrien smile back at the memory of a brunch that had ended in disaster and then in perhaps a better reconciliation than anyone could have hoped, Marinette’s lies considered.
“But isn’t it super hard to get up in the middle of the night?”
“It has its charm. The world is different when everyone else is asleep. I like that. And it’s peaceful, you know?”
The kitchen fills with the fragrance of fresh bread as Tom opens the oven and starts pulling out the first batch of rustiques. He doesn’t need to check the watch on the wall to know that Sabine’s alarm is going off in five minutes; he has seen enough October mornings outside his kitchen to tell the time by the frequency of bikes by the window, of cars going by. Adéle Joffroy has walked her dog. M. Delarue has left for work. Adrien Agreste closes his eyes and breathes in the air of the bakery with a happy sigh.
“I don’t think I’d mind making things smell this good for a living.”
When he goes up to the flat later, the sound of the TV greets him. He is in half a mind to lecture Marinette about leaving it running, particularly as he hears Mme. Chamaq’s voice discussing the absolute scandal about Hawkmoth’s identity.
But when he moves to fetch the remote, he notices the very still boy intently staring at the TV screen, eyes empty as three prominent political commentators debate the consequences of his father’s arrest and the people whose reputation might be tarnished from the association with the Agreste brand.
He leaves it at muting the TV.
“Have you had breakfast yet?”
It takes Adrien three seconds to move, and there is something far away and distraught in him; his answer is a silent headshake.
“I’ll fetch you something from the bakery. What would you like?”
He wonders for a second if Adrien even understood the question.
“Oh,” he says after a too long silence, “anything is fine.”
“Come now, don’t be modest. We’ve got a selection! What’s your favourite?”
“It’s really not important,” says Adrien softly. He casts a glance at the TV and collapses further onto himself.
“Do you like pastries?”
A nod.
“May I have a pain aux raisins?”
“I’m sorry,” says Tom, well practiced, “we don’t have that.”
Adrien doesn’t look surprised at the admission. “I’m sorry,” he says instead, as if asking for a common pastry at a bakery was somehow a transgression.
“You know what,” Tom says and navigates him out of the couch, taking the chance to turn the TV off behind the boy’s back, “I’ll get you a croissant. What would you like to drink?”
“I usually have tea for breakfast.”
“Do you know how to brew it? Sabine always does it herself. I think she might’ve taught Marinette, but I never learned,” says Tom as he starts rooting through the cupboard containing the china and the tea tin.
“It’s not very complicated, is it? You boil water and add it to the leaves.”
“There’s something about the temperature. She says it doesn’t taste right if the water is too hot or not hot enough. She listens to it to know that the temperature is right and my ears aren’t fine enough, apparently. Here,” he places the tin and the tea pot in front of Adrien.
Adrien pries off the lid. “This is green tea.”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Oh, no! It’s fine! I just usually have black. But green is totally fine, too! But it’s kind of finicky. I have a friend from Japan and she’s super particular about it. Her mother had her train for the tea ceremony and everything. She’d never let me close to the tea. Do you think this is expensive?”
Tom leans over to stare at the tin.
“I really have no idea. I thought tea was just tea.”
Adrien shakes his head and sniffs the leaves. “No, there’s a lot more to it. Not that I ever minded! But I don’t want to ruin Mme. Cheng’s tea.”
“Well, I’ve never been such a bad host before,” Tom sighs as Adrien closes the tin, “first I can’t offer you your choice of breakfast, then I can’t give you the tea that you like!”
“I like anything!” Adrien insists, “everything I’ve had from your bakery has been really great, and it’s not like I can’t drink something else.”
“Food is my job,” Tom proclaims, “and giving people the food they like best is my mission! But if you’ll forgive me the slip today, I’ll at least make sure you won’t go hungry.”
When he goes down to get a couple of croissants, Sabine informs him that her tea is, indeed, premium quality and not to be meddled with by a Frenchman’s hands.
He drinks coffee as Adrien eats, not attempting to make more conversation as he observes how the boy primly breaks off pieces of the pastry and adds well-bred dollops of raspberry jam before chewing politely. He wonders if he should offer cheese, or if that presumption would set off another episode like Marinette the previous day. No ladybug creatures, no more talking cats. He decides to buy some camembert anyway, even if someone else ends up eating it.
He is half a mind to pull Adrien back into the bakery just to be sure he stays away from the TV. He leaves it at suggesting the boy look at their bookshelf if he’s bored.
As he spreads the creme patissiere on the dough for a fresh batch of chinois, Adrien’s request lingers. Pain aux raisin is a staple. He’s got the dough waiting in the fridge, the pastry cream, the raisins. The boy who is alone and torturing himself with his father’s sins.
“Tom!” Sabine insists, and only then does he register the beeping of the oven behind him.
He hasn’t burned bread since he was twelve.
Burned bread is laughably negligible next to what Adrien is wrestling upstairs, and Tom is struck by a sudden resolve.
He saves his bread and finishes the chinois, sets them up for the rise and tells Sabine he won’t be long.
This time, he finds the TV dead and Adrien with a book in his hands. He gets the kettle boiling and navigates the pastry onto a plate.
“If you get hungry,” he says, and puts it down on their dining table.
Adrien looks at him in surprise. “You didn’t need to make some just for me!” he protests.
“Oh, I didn’t, I just went down the street to Gerard. He is almost as good as I am, and here -“
He puts down the box of tea bags. “It probably isn’t as good as whatever you’re used to, but maybe we can look into that later. For the time being, this is something both you and I should be able to figure out.”
Adrien is peeling the cellophane off the box. “You really didn’t need to go through the trouble for my sake,” he says, opening the lid and sniffing.
“Of course I did,” says Tom. “Adrien, your life is very difficult right now. And when someone’s life is difficult, you should do your part to help them. Isn’t that what being a superhero is about? I might not be able to save people from monsters, but I can do this.”
“Thank you.” Adrien climbs onto the stool. He doesn’t touch the pastry, but pulls out a tea bag when Tom puts a mug of hot water in front of him. “I don’t want to be a bother,” he says softly, eyes set on where the tea blooms rusty-red in the water.
“Helping people who need it isn’t a bother. And you’re Marinette’s precious friend, and she worries about you. If I can make sure you’re well taken care of, that’s doing her a favour as well.”
Adrien breaks off a piece of the outer layer of the pastry. He shoves the plate towards Tom, who shakes his head.
“Do you not like raisins?”
“It’s a long story.” When Adrien pulls the tea bag out of the mug, he procures a small saucer for him to drop it on. “My parents used to make me favourite food whenever something bad happened. My father is a baker, of course. My mother isn’t much of a homemaker at all, but her mother taught her to cook. So if something happened and I was upset for good reason, they’d show me that they were there for me. It’s not fair that you don’t have a father and mother to do that. There’s nothing I can do to fix that, but I can at least make food that you like.”
October is stark outside the windows, sun diluted by drifting clouds that have pelted rain on and off all morning. Tom feels suddenly old, struck by an alien notion that while he was stuck in his bakery, the world marched him by. As if things would somehow have been different if he had pursued something greater, as if that would have given him the power to change things, to offer more healing than pastries. His mother hasn’t been around to ease any pains in person for nearly as long as his father has been gone, yet the view out his window has remained unchanged; buildings that have stood longer than Tom has lived, and will stand even longer after he’s gone.
Food might be the most transient thing there is.
When he looks back, he meets a pair of green eyes that are wide and brimming.
He reaches out to run a hand through the hair of Hawkmoth’s son.
“So even if your life is hard, I hope I can make it a little easier. And please don’t be afraid to ask, or to answer honestly when I do. Because you’ve saved me and my family and my bakery and this city, and you’re the reason Marinette is still here with us. You have never been a bother.”
This time, he turns away out of some sense of sympathy, cataloging the sun and shadows over Place des Vosges as Adrien pulls in a very wet breath.
“I think that’s very good,” Adrien says very quietly, “to do something so that the people you care about hurt less. I just wish I could do something like that. But we never made food - there was a cook who came in every morning.”
“If you want,” says Tom, “I can show you. It’s not hard.”
“Really?” says Adrien in wonder, and Tom climbs down from the stool.
“Let’s start by making the salad for lunch.”
They have to wait fifteen minutes for Marinette, who runs in winded and lost. She dumps into the chair next to Tom with only a muttered greeting and starts eating sullenly.
“Marinette, you know when mealtimes are,” Tom chastises her.
“I was looking for my phone,” she replies tersely, “couldn’t message you without it, now could I.”
“I told you, we’ll get a new one.“
“There’s important stuff on that one.”
“Have you looked into cloud storage?” Adrien tries, and Marinette slams her cutlery down as she reaches for her water and stares intently at her plate.
“What, and let it be accessible to even more people?!”
Adrien says nothing in reply, only becomes smaller in his seat as the sound of his knife and fork against the china becomes distressingly more careful.
“You know,” Tom tries at an attempt at peace in Marinette’s uncharacteristic anger, “if this is about Ladybug - “
“No,” Marinette snaps and barely puts down her cutlery before shoving away from the table, plate still half-full, “it’s not because that’s not important and you guys shouldn’t be getting involved in it anyway, so just leave it be, okay?! I need to go look for it now.”
The door slams behind her, and the serenity between him and Adrien as they cut the vegetables half an hour ago has turned into a silence that is hard and pressing.
“I think,” says Adrien, eyes still on his food, “don’t talk about Ladybug stuff. She wasn’t going to tell you in the first place.” He makes no excuses as to why, no attempts at explaining why Tom should remain in the dark about a side of his daughter that is bigger than anything he knew.
Tom doesn’t attempt to argue, not with the only person who can understand what Marinette has been living these last three years. They continue the meal in that silence, the half-full plate a testament to the girl who is no longer there. It must have been years ago that Tom lost his daughter, and he never knew it before it was all over.
It hasn’t even been ten minutes before Adrien comes down to join him that night.
“Are you doing nighttime deliveries?”
“This is preparations for tomorrow. The dough develops more flavour as it rests, and I can start tomorrow morning getting it ready for the ovens.”
The evening is different from the morning; the traffic outside heavier, the lightening in the kitchen ozone-sharp after a day’s work and exhaustion setting in. He pulls out the mixing bowl in earthenware and measures the flour by hand and instinct, pours in the water, mixes, leaves it to rest as he starts the work for the next morning. The routine is different, but familiar still. Start the autolyse. Feed the machines, set the timers, load the trays and cover them for the night.
As he sets the last batch, he pulls the earthenware bowl back and tips the dough onto the worktop as he starts working in the yeast, and then the salt.
“Why don’t you use the mixer for that one?”
“This is just for fun. Or practice, I guess,” Tom replies as he starts working it. “It’s always good to remember your roots, my father always said. He condescended to an industrial mixer, of course. I just like to remind myself about how the dough works in your hands.”
“It does?”
“Yes, that’s why we knead it. The stress makes the proteins grow into chains, which traps the air while keeping the bread together. Bread that’s not kneaded gets dense and crumbly.”
“So baking is just science?”
“I think a lot of people would be very angry to hear that! It’s art, too - but also science. And experience, that’s the most important part.”
Adrien leaves his seat and comes to stand next to him.
“So what’s the difference in structure of kneaded dough and dough that hasn’t been?”
Tom forms a boule and sets his dough aside to ferment. “Why don’t you find out?”
He gives his young scientist instructions that are as precise as measurements can get, discounting humidity and temperature and the quality of the grain deliveries, and Adrien carefully watches the scale as he measures his flour and water in grammes. Tom gives him the yeast.
“Now you mix it,” Tom says, and when Adrien looks helpless, Tom gets out a second bowl to start the third dough of the night. “Just use your hands.”
Adrien plunges both hands into the flour and water, and the mash squeezes between his fingers like play-dough. His hands are soon covered in wet and sticky glue; he inefficiently tries to scrape them free. In an action he hasn’t had to do since Marinette was very young, Tom takes a hold of one hand and carefully uses the bench scraper to get the worst of the mess off of it before he hands the utensil to Adrien so that he can clean the other on his own.
“Are you sure that’s enough flour?”
“Absolutely - I have the exact same measurements, remember?” He tips his own dough onto the table, and sets his hands to work. “It becomes less sticky once you start developing the protein chains.”
Adrien’s dough is floury in places, sticks to the metal in others; still he perseveres, gathers it together in imitation of Tom, presses it down and forward, has to scrape off with his fingers before repeating the motion.
“This is a mess,” he mutters, dejected.
“It’s your first time. Of course it won’t be perfect!”
Tom continues working his dough. Adrien observes him in silence, and then he pulls his dough back together and once again starts moving.
“What are you doing?!”
The back door shuts the autumn night out as it slams shut behind Roland Dupain, who is standing in his old bakery kitchen and looking at Tom and Adrien in aggravation.
“Baking bread,” Tom says, helplessly, as his father shoves past him and points to Adrien’s first attempt at setting a dough.
“That’s not how it’s done!” his father belts, and shoves Adrien aside with little gentleness. “You can’t just take after that big lug there, you haven’t got the muscle for it yet! Not for years. You, you’ll have to put your back into it. The dough isn’t your pet cat, you need to use force, force! Like this.”
Adrien stares, wide eyed, as Tom’s father surges to the tips of his toes to press the dough down with the weight of his upper body, lets up, gathers the dough back with expert hands, repeats the motions and in less than a minute, the pitiful lump of water and flour into smooth dough.
His father’s fingers are clean as he steps back and motions for Adrien to take over.
And Adrien Agreste mimics his father’s motions with an almost uncanny precision. His face is set in a determined frown as he continues the work, hands pushing and pulling, gathering and forming the dough.
Tom’s father says nothing as he observes with a keen eye.
“How long do I have to knead it for?” Adrien eventually asks, eyes still set on the dough in his hands.
“How long you knead? Have you taught him nothing?!” his father bellows at Tom. “You can’t take in an apprentice with not thought to teach him!”
“Dad - “ Tom tries.
“You knead until it’s finished.”
“How do I know that?”
Tom’s father makes a sound of deep exasperation, and slams a hand down on the worktable.
“Give me a piece of your dough.”
Adrien obeys, and Tom’s father pulls it in two without mercy. “It needs to be flexible. You’ll have to stretch it more than this. You knead until you can pull it so thin you see light through it.”
“I see.”
Tom goes back to his dough, suddenly aware that his motions are entirely different from Adrien’s. He’d been built different already at Adrien’s age; there had been a number of arguments about that, about how ineffectively he used his strength, as if they didn’t have mixers, as if that mattered. This probably isn’t the best time to set his father loose at Adrien, but his father seems content to blame Tom for the boy’s perceived deficiencies for now.
“What are you baking?”
“I’m just showing him how to make a simple dough for now,” Tom explains. “It’s not for the bakery.”
His father merely grunts.
“What are you doing here, dad?” This is the third time his father has condescended to visit their home since his birthday.
“Guiseppe mixed up deliveries. Gave me barley in place of rye. I complained, of course, but nothing doing until Monday!”
“Let me get it for you,” Tom says, giving his dough a rough shape before leaving it on the table.
When he returns, his father has taken over the work, kneading the dough in his place next to Adrien. The image of the lanky teenage boy and his rotund, balding father is a symphony of contradictions, yet they’re moving in an almost perfect unison, Adrien lagging only a fraction behind.
“Once you’ve finished your training, you should look into developing your own yeast,” his father sermonises, “of course, I use the yeast that has been passed down in the Dupain family for generations, ever since Loafamix the Gaul fell with Vercingetorix - “
“That’s a long time ago!”
“And the Dupain family has been bakers ever since! I hope you appreciate the honour it is to be taught in this tradition.”
“Absolutely,” and Tom could swear that Adrien Agreste, who is a superhero with private tutors in piano and Chinese and fencing, says the word with absolute sincerity rather than humouring a cranky old man.
“Good,” says father, and then, “what’s your name?”
“Adrien.”
“Adrien what now?”
There is no denying the five seconds of silence, of repeated motions as Adrien stares at the table in front of him and doesn’t answer. Tom’s father turns to stare at the boy, but just as he opens his mouth to speak, Adrien beats him to it.
“De Vanilly. I’m Adrien De Vanilly.”
“Like that woman on the news? The one that that Hawkmoth fellow was hiding in his basement.”
“Yes.”
“She family of yours?”
Tom needs to interrupts this, but there is no hesitation this time.
“She was my mother.”
Adrien stubbornly continues the work even as his father stops for a second, looks at him with a sudden sympathy - and turns back and continues kneading.
“I’m sorry to hear that. It’s hard to loose a parent that young.”
Adrien makes a sound of acceptance.
“You’re taking to this very quickly.”
“Oh.”
Another tense silence.
“I was thirteen,” his father says.
“I’m sorry?” Adrien says when no explanation comes.
“When my mother died. But I had my work. That’s important, to have something you need to do. So it’s good that you’re working.”
“Right,” says Adrien listlessly. And after another silence, “I was thirteen too. We had a funeral and everything. I didn’t know that it was all fake until we - until my father was arrested.”
“Then you know already, that it gets better.”
“About my mum, yeah,” says Adrien, and Tom finally finds it in himself to intervene.
“I found the rye!”
“About time!” his father complains, and then reaches over to pat Adrien’s hands away to give his dough a solid squeeze. “Try stretching it now.”
The dough tears between Adrien’s fingers on his first attempt. When he mimics the gentler motions of Tom’s father, it’s pulled thinner.
“All science, huh,” says Adrien as he holds his hands up towards the humming ceiling lights.
“No,” says Tom’s father, “that’s all instinct. You’ll get there with practice. Keep up the baking, and remember what I told you. Body weight and the heels of your hands.”
And with those words he picks up the sack of flour and hauls it over his shoulder before leaving.
“The dough needs to rest now,” says Tom. “And so do you. Tomorrow morning, I’ll show you how to shape it.”
“I guess there’s a lot I don’t know, huh,” says Adrien and absently peels a shell of dried dough from a knuckle.
“You’ll have the time to learn,” says Tom.
He doesn’t remember his father ever teaching him - making dough has been in his hands since before memory. He wonders if his father ever did teach him, or if he learned from watching and mimicking, the mime of every child watching their parent live their life. He can’t remember Marinette making a mess of a dough like Adrien had; can’t remember her being told how to use her entire body to work a dough.
Looking at the teenage boy who on some miserable coincidence ended up in his kitchen, Tom can’t help but think that it might have been a blessing, after all, that Gabriel Agreste apparently had so little time to spare him.
“Thanks for showing me,” says Adrien, and he smiles, “You know, I always loved it when you used to come to school and show us how you made pastries. This has been the best private lesson of my life.”
Fencing and Chinese and piano and a million extracurriculars decided by his father, a father who has left Adrien afloat. He’s not going to school, the people talking to him are lawyers charging by the hour. Tom’s home has become his life buoy, and Tom wonders, now, where Adrien will float next.
Adrien shapes an uneven loaf that bakes well enough even though it doesn’t rise as prettily as one might have hoped. By the time the bakery opens its doors he has once more gone back to the flat. It’s Saturday morning.
Tom is refilling the baguettes when Luka Couffaine comes in and greets him with a half-hearted smile.
Tom returns it with far more gusto. “Luka! Are you here for Marinette?”
“Yes,” says Luka with a glance over Tom’s shoulder, “I’ve been trying to get a hold of her, but she’s not answering her phone. Juleka said she’d heard she lost it.”
“You know that girl,” says Tom, “dropped her purse somewhere. In fact, she’s gone out to look for it - you just missed her.”
“Oh. But actually, that’s okay. I just wanted to ask her - is Adrien here?”
There was always something old about Luka Couffaine, something beyond the measly year he had on Marinette. There was some wisdom too ancient for his age; something about how he sees more than anyone maybe should. Luka Couffaine had seen Marinette’s eyes as well as her father had, those three weeks, enough of it to be akumatised over it. Luka is kind, as far as Tom knows him. Patient and understanding, and Adrien spoke fondly of him. Surely, he means no ill with the question, but this isn’t Tom’s secret to share.
Tom must take too long to answer, because understanding grows in Luka Couffaine’s eyes, and then he smiles. “It’s okay - I won’t tell anyone. But maybe, if you can - could you tell him that we’re worried about him, since no-one’s heard from him?”
“I’ll tell him,” Tom promises.
“And if it’s okay - could you not tell Marinette that I came by?”
“Why not?”
Luka Couffaine merely smiles, and turns around with a little wave.
Tom does mention Luka’s words to Adrien when they make lunch, and the same afternoon sees Alya dragged into Marinette’s room, and Nino later yet.
Three after that sees Chloé Bourgeois eat macarons in his living room while Marinette guards the stairs to her bedroom with tightly crossed arms.
“It’s good to see you, Chloé,” says Adrien from his seat across from the mayor’s daughter.
“Of course I’d come to see you, Adrikins!”
“Of course you did,” Marinette mimics, which Chloé ignores but Chloé’s sister overhears with a giggle smothered under a hand from her spot at Marinette’s side.
“I couldn’t leave you alone here after everything. Why are you even staying at this place?”
“Oh, it was coincidence - “
“After everything that happened, you have to put up with this on top of it all? It’s unthinkable!”
“Well, Marinette’s parents are really nice - “
“I suppose the food is good, if nothing else. These are de-lish. Remind me to take some home.”
“Yeah, dad,” says Marinette without taking her eyes off her old classmate, “why don’t you go box up some for Chloé, some of the good ones.”
“But where are you going to stay, Adrikins? You can’t be here forever. Never mind the hideous decor, how do you even breathe under these ceilings?”
“You know, some of us don’t need a car park’s worth of space just to thrive,” Marinette snaps, and the mayor’s daughter finally turns around.
“This isn’t about you, Dupain-Cheng. Adrikins can’t slum it here forever. He’ll have to go somewhere and I at least have the means to help him sort that out!”
“There really isn’t any hurry,” Adrien says, “I’m really happy to know you’re concerned for me, Chloé. But right now, this is fine, and I’m really grateful for Marinette and her parents putting up with me. Whenever I know where I’ll be, I’ll be sure to let you all know, of course.”
“Adrikins, you know that you can ask anything of me, right? Just say the word, and I’ll get daddy to fix something, like so!”
Adrien’s smile grows melancholy.
“That’s great,” he says, a bit stiffly.
Later that night, he watches Tom set the poolish for traditions after having the process explained.
“Chloé’s kind of horrible to her dad,” he says, out of nowhere. “She demands anything and throws terrible tantrums until he gives in. It’s so weird. My father just had Nathalie buy me anything if I mentioned I liked to have it. He just wouldn’t let me do stuff.”
“Parenting is a balancing act,” Tom sagely tells him as he puts the lid on the plastic bucket and sets it aside, “this’ll rest until tomorrow, when I’ll set the dough.”
“That means it takes three days to make them? That’s a long time!”
“Not compared to other things. Imagine being a cheesemaker - that takes months and years.”
Adrien laughs a little. “Someone once suggested that,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s quite my thing.”
“Well, do you have any plans for what to do once you’ve finished school?”
Adrien shakes his head. “I never used to think about that. It was kind of stressful, you know, not knowing what you want to do! I guess I just don’t know enough about the world to know what I’d like to do for the rest of my life.”
“Surely there must have been something you wanted!”
“Of course there was - I wanted to go to school, for one! And go out and meet other people and make friends. And I guess -“ Adrien drifts off - “maybe I was just so hung up on being a family again. I didn’t think about the future, just about how it used to be.”
Tom pulls the whole grain away from the mixer and focuses on cutting and lifting the dough into trays for fermenting instead of commenting on the elephant that suddenly took up every corner of air in the room.
“You know,” he says after the mixer is empty and he hauls up the bag of wheat for the rustiques, “that time Cat Noir came over for brunch, I’m very certain he mentioned a girl.”
He turns around to wink at the morose boy. But Adrien doesn’t rise to the tease, instead falling further into himself. “That’s not use. You know that, right? I told you that Ladybug is in love with someone else. And now - “ he looks forlornly at the window, “well, maybe they can be together again, for real? Now that - now that it’s going to be calmer. She won’t be so busy and she won’t have to keep lying to him.”
There are a hundred things Tom could say. Why would he bring up a boy that Marinette had dated for three weeks when she was fourteen? Did you know that Luka Couffaine just assumed you’d be with Marinette? Did you never see the way she looked at you? Did you never hear how she talked about you?
“That was a long time ago,” he says as he empties the rye and weighs out the second bag, “maybe she’s changed her mind?”
“If she did, it wouldn’t be to me. She knows how I feel. If she’d changed her mind to me, she’d have told me.”
“Have you asked her lately?”
Adrien shakes his head. “It made her upset when I brought it up, so I quit it. She shouldn’t have to feel bad about that, too.”
“If it were me,” says Tom sagely while he peels the paper off the block of yeast, “I’d at least mention it. Just to be sure.”
“No,” says Adrien, “if she wants me, she knows I’m here. And since she doesn’t, I won’t be pushy. Being her friend is enough. A girl like Ladybug deserves to be with whoever it is she loves the most.”
The smile he sends Tom is achingly sincere.
There are a hundred things lying in shatters at Adrien Agreste’s feet, and an old and unrequited love must be the least significant of them all, were it not for Marinette. Because Adrien’s photos might have disappeared from Marinette’s bedroom at some point, but the yearning looks, the ruddy cheeks, the hopeless stuttering had always lingered just around the corner of every conversation Tom had witnessed his daughter have with Adrien.
But there are so many shards to step on, and wherever it is that Adrien will go next, Tom is not at all sure that Marinette can follow. Tom has seen enough people coming and going to know that a teenage love can be ephemeral; there and gone in a blink, leaving a pain that in the hindsight of adulthood becomes little more than silly nostalgia. Cat Noir always loved Ladybug, and Marinette always loved Adrien, and Tom has no business stepping into that.
Instead, he explains Adrien why he sets the autolyse.
Adrien’s second bread might not be for the bakery, but the crumb is even, if not as light as might’ve been in the hands of a trained baker, and fresh bread is a hard order to beat. Tom decides for soup that evening, and he cuts Adrien’s loaf up in thick slices where no-one could possibly care that it lost some of its shape as its maker was a bit quick getting it ready for the oven.
Marinette seems exhausted as she comes home that same hours later as she has all week, but Adrien perks up at her entrance.
“Hey!” he says. It’s still kind of listless, but undeniably there is that affection that Adrien always has seemed to possess for anyone willing to have it. He climbs out of the sofa where the book he picked up has been turned nearly to its end, and then he hands Marinette a bundle of beige and black.
Marinette’s tired eyes widen as she opens the unmistakable purse and pulls out her phone to try and awaken the dead screen. “Where’d you findit?”
“Roof by Pont des Arts. It was after he - with the bus - I remembered that you were. That sentimonster with the.” Every sentence has Adrien shrink more and more into himself until he finishes with a low, “so I thought I might check there.”
Maybe it’s been long enough, now, for Marinette to talk about it. Maybe it is the clear discomfort into which Adrien’s enthusiasm so quickly faded. Maybe it’s just that Marinette in the end is Marinette, and Marinette has loved Adrien Agreste for a very long time. Whichever it is, all or none, the anger doesn’t come. Instead, a warm smile blooms and Marinette simply says, “Thank you. I didn’t want to go about in places I can’t reach as myself.”
For the first time in a week, Tom feels at home in his kitchen once again. Adrien’s soft politeness has founds its rest in the nooks and corners of the room.It’s no longer crowded with four people around the table; setting the plates and cutlery for that extra chair has become instinct, now. Sabine has stopped with the superfluous reminders to make extra.
Marinette asks about the bread, and praises it maybe too much once its origins are revealed. Sabine lets slip a sly comment at that, and Tom laughs, and Adrien doesn’t hear the joke but marvels that he has made something so tasty. The evening is soft and safe around them, and Tom wonders, for the first time, if this is how it will be from now. If whatever fate that brought Ladybug and Cat Noir together will keep them there, and if this boy who is persevering through the ruins of his life will remain in this place in Tom’s, at his daughter’s side.
It’ll take no more than one sentence, one truth shared, and until that is done, then Tom will be satisfied keeping them safe in the only way he can offer shelter to the superheroes who have been saving the city since they were thirteen.
Sabine is telling Adrien about her sister when the doorbell tears through the room.
The woman at the door is barely taller than Marinette, even with the knife-thin heels keeping her aloft.
“Is this where Adrien is?”
Tom is no connoisseur of fashion and high-end cosmetics, but be the best bakery in Paris and you’ll see your share of them. There is something like Chloé Bourgeois in the shine of her hair, in the cut of her blazer, in the sharp shape of her lipstick.
“Aunt Amelié?”
She melts at that, and shoves past Tom to meet Adrien halfway through the room, pulling him into a tight embrace.
“Oh, this is horrible,” she cries into his hair as she rocks him, “I wanted to come for Emilié, but they wouldn’t let me see her. And when I asked about you, they said they couldn’t tell me! Do you know that I had to threaten to sue your father?”
“I’m sure it wasn’t he who decided,” says Adrien as he pulls back, “M. Autain told me, they’re just being super careful about my name and all.”
“But refusing your family, after everything your father has done? Oh, but never mind that, I’m here now and I’ve found you. It’ll be fine now. We’ll sort it out, and then you can come stay with us. I’ve got your room all ready for you, there’s just the matter of sorting out the visa and the -“
“But I can’t leave Paris!”
It’s the most animated Tom has heard Adrien ever since a week ago. It might be the most animated his aunt has heard him too, going by the expression on her face.
“But Adrien, you can’t stay! You’re only sixteen, and with all of this going on I can’t leave you here alone!”
“Isn’t there any other family at all in Paris?” says Sabine.
Aunt and nephew exchange a look, and Adrien shakes his head. “I think my father has a cousin, but…”
“Don’t be silly, Adrien,” says his aunt, “Gabriel never once spoke about his family, there was only that old uncle at the wedding. I and Félix have always been there. I’m sure it’s scary to leave Paris, but discounting the weather, England isn’t so bad. And you’ll go to school there and make friends like you. You won’t be alone.”
Adrien seems to struggle for a while, until he finally says, “There’s someone depending on me here. I have to be in Paris.”
His aunt’s face softens even further. “Your father can’t be helped. The only thing he can hope for now is whatever aid his defence council can give him.”
“No, it’s… someone else,” and what Adrien doesn’t specify is said plain enough in the way his eyes find Marinette, who is still sitting at the dinner table.
“I see,” says his aunt, and shakes her head, “well, I understand. But you can’t impose on these kind people forever, Adrien,” she rubs his upper arm in a gesture meant for comfort. “You know what, we’ll talk more later, and figure everything out. You stay with your girlfriend for now, until I’ve got your migration papers sorted.”
And without giving her nephew the chance to argue or to correct her with whatever correction could be made, she kisses his forehead and waltzes out of Tom’s home to the same gale with with she’d entered.