Chapter Text
He cannot sleep.
This is not unusual. He has been a light sleeper since Copenhagen, since the first winter of learning to be a person without a schedule, when the nights were sixteen hours long and his body could not decide what it was supposed to do with all of them. He has techniques. He has the breathing thing and the practice of listing cities in alphabetical order and the general strategy of lying very still and waiting for his brain to run out of material.
Tonight his brain has a great deal of material.
Specifically: a thin cropped top. A specific sound. The exact temperature of skin above a waistband. “I’ll know when I see him.” The way she had pressed back into him with her whole body like she had forgotten to decide not to. Her eyes doing the thing. The lip. The wine making her honest.
He stares at the ceiling.
The ceiling remains unhelpful.
At two in the morning he gets up. He does not turn on the main light. He goes to the desk and opens the drawer and takes out the old laptop — the one from before he left, the one that has been sitting in this drawer for six years in the specific way that objects sit when they contain things you have been not-opening. He opens it. He connects to the Mansion’s WiFi and his email starts pinging him.
One hundred and twelve unread.
He sits down.
—
He starts at the beginning.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: (no subject) 3:47am — six years ago
Adrien.
I don't know if this reaches you. I don't know if you check this. I don't know anything right now except that you're gone and nobody will tell me where and I keep thinking that maybe if I just write it somewhere it will stop sitting in my chest like this.
Please come back. I know that's not fair. I know you had reasons. I just — please come back.
Love, Marinette.
He sits with that one for a while.
Then he scrolls forward.
—
The second wave of emails starts a month later. The tone shifts. She is still writing into a void she does not expect to answer, but something in her has reorganised — she has decided, it seems, that if she cannot reach him, she can at least keep him informed. Keep him close in the only way available to her.
She writes about the people around him.
All of them. Carefully. Consistently. Like she has appointed herself the keeper of a life he left behind.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: update (chloe) 2 months after
I've been going to events with Chloe. Fashion things, mostly. She asked me once, very casually, in the way Chloe asks things she actually cares about, if I had heard from you. I said no. She said "typical" and changed the subject. I go with her anyway. I think she needs someone to stand next to at things since she misses you in her ways and I think I needed something to do on Saturdays. It's a fair arrangement. She's not as terrible as she used to be. Don't tell her I said that.
Love, Marinette.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: update (kagami) 3 months after
Kagami has been teaching me fencing. When I offered to join her, it was more to keep her company than to learn anything! Spoiler Alert: I am not good at it. She is ruthlessly honest about this and somehow, I don't mind, which I think says something about her. She has this way of correcting you that doesn't feel like an insult, just — information. You'd like it, actually. Very efficient. No wasted words.
She doesn't mention you. I don't mention you. We both know that we miss you.
Love, Marinette.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: update (nathalie + gorilla) 4 months after
So, I tried to reach your side of the family and — I had coffee with Nathalie! I know, I know. But she’s been… she’s kind, in her way. Very contained but kind. I showed her this scheduling software that syncs across devices and she looked at me like I had handed her a tool she had been missing for twenty years. She said, and I quote: "This is extremely useful." From Nathalie that is approximately equivalent to someone else crying with gratitude. I felt useful. I needed that.
Also, I have been teaching Gorilla to read. He wanted to. He asked me quietly one afternoon when no one was around and I said yes immediately and we've been meeting twice a week. He is doing very well. He finished his first full chapter last Tuesday and said nothing but there was something in his face that I am going to carry for a long time.
Maybe once he is done with reading, I start teaching him writing? I think I am getting ahead of myself.
Love, Marinette.
He stops reading. He stares at the screen.
He thinks about Gorilla in an arrivals hall with a cardboard sign. He thinks about a box of Camembert and a man whose eyes went red at the corners. He thinks about the specific kind of thing you do for someone when the person you actually want to reach is gone.
He keeps reading.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: update (the others) 5 months after
Nino has started DJing properly. Not just parties — actual sets, actual venues. He’s good. He’s been working with Luka Couffaine on some of the production, which I think surprised him because he didn't expect Luka to be as collaborative as he is. But that's Luka. He just helps. It’s what he does.
Juleka and Rose are together now. Officially. It happened quietly, the way things happen with Juleka, and Rose came to tell me in person and she was so happy she was almost vibrating. Ivan and Mylene too. Everyone is pairing up. It's very sweet and slightly embarrassing for those of us who are not.
Love, Marinette.
—
A run of emails about her work. These are different in texture — more alive, more specific, less careful. She is talking about something she loves.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: question (color help?) 8 months after
Okay I need a second opinion and you are the only person I can send this to without it being a whole thing. I am trying to decide between a dusty sage and a warm ivory for the lining of the coat I'm working on. The exterior is charcoal. I keep changing my mind. Attaching swatches and references. Ignore that I sent this to a void. Just answer in your head.
Love, Marinette.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: re: question (color help?): update (I went with the ivory) three days later
I went with the ivory. It was right. The sage was too safe. Just so you know.
Love, Marinette.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: re: the show 1 year after
I got a placement assisting on a proper show. Not a big name yet but a real one. The designer is very precise and a bit terrifying and he makes me re-do things four times and I am learning so much I can barely sleep. I think I am exactly where I am supposed to be. I wish you could see the studio. I think you have been there before!
I helped Audrey Bourgeois with something small a few months ago and I think it opened this door for me. I also — I can't say too much but I've been doing some work for a major Parisian label. I'm not allowed to say which yet. But it's real. It’s happening.
Love, Marinette.
He notes she does not name the label. He notes which major Parisian label she has been working with for the last two years.
He notes the specific way she does not say the word Gabriel.
—
Somewhere around the one-year mark, the emails change again.
They get slower. Less structured. More like she has stopped performing a report and started simply… talking. To the void. To him. The distinction, at this point, has perhaps stopped mattering to her.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: (no subject) 13 months after
Do you ever feel like you are managing everyone's feelings at the cost of your own? I keep catching myself doing it. Someone is upset and I immediately restructure myself around that. Like I have no fixed shape. I just become whatever the room needs.
I don't think that’s healthy. I’m just noting it. I don't know what to do about it yet.
Love, Marinette.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: (no subject) 18 months after
Luka has been very kind lately. He always is, but lately especially. He shows up when things are heavy without me asking, which I have come to understand is just a thing he does and not something I should read into. He brought me food once when I was in the middle of a very bad week and sat in the studio while I worked without saying anything, just — being there. I didn't know how much I needed that until he did it.
I don’t know what I would do without him, honestly.
Love, Marinette.
He stops.
He reads that one twice.
“I don’t know what I would do without him.”
He thinks about Luka on the wall this afternoon. The warmth of him, the ease of him, the way he looked at Adrien like he was something he had been waiting to see. He thinks about “it’s not Mari” said with complete certainty, and he thinks about this email, and something in him cannot quite reconcile the two things.
He scrolls forward. He does not resolve this.
—
Three years in. He almost misses it.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: (no subject) 3 years after — sent 11:43pm
Okay so I need to tell someone this and I literally cannot tell anyone so I am telling you, which is technically the same as telling no one, but here it is:
I think C.N. is you.
I know. I know how that sounds. I was watching a BTS video from this editorial I loved — the Nakamura Textiles one, the series with the night market — and there is a moment in the video, maybe two seconds, where you can see the photographer in the background adjusting his shot, and the way he stands, the way he holds the camera, the angle of his head — I know that. I know that shape. I grew up watching that shape across a classroom.
And then I looked up C.N.'s interviews and there was this quote about photography being the act of "seeing the world rather than being seen by it" and I just — I knew. I knew immediately. In the way you know something in your body before your brain has processed it.
I have not told anyone. I am choosing not to tell anyone. Because what if I'm wrong? And also, because — what if I'm right? What does that mean? That you've been out there this whole time and you just…
I baked too many cookies about this. An embarrassing number. I ended up at Luka’s because I didn’t know what else to do with myself and he let me take over his kitchen without asking a single question, which is either very trusting or very Luka. I ate half the cookies. He ate the other half. He didn't ask. I didn't explain. It was somehow the right thing.
I think I’m going mad. I’m not going to say this to anyone. I’m going to go to sleep. You probably won't even see this.
However, on an off chance that this is you, I am proud of you.
Love, Marinette.
He reads it three times.
She did not tell anyone.
“I didn’t argue with her,” Luka had said, this afternoon on the wall, with the ease of a man offering a true thing.
But she just said she told no one.
He sits with this for a long time. The laptop screen is the only light in the room and the Mansion is completely silent and he is trying to hold two things simultaneously: the email in front of him, which is specific and consistent and clearly the voice of someone who genuinely has not told anyone, and what Luka said, which was the warm plausible cover of someone who did not want to be caught.
He does not know what to do with the gap between them.
He does not know what to do with Luka and Marinette baking cookies together at midnight and him not asking and her not explaining. He does not know what to do with “I don’t know what I would do without him” sitting a few dozen emails before the C.N. revelation.
He puts it in the file he is not examining. The file is very full.
—
He scrolls. He reads. She keeps writing.
Alya getting a journalism placement. Kagami dropping fencing and getting into dancing, which Marinette supports passionately. Nino’s first paid DJ set. Kim winning something athletic that she describes with affectionate bewilderment. Max doing something with robotics that she admits she only partially understood. Alix doing something chaotic that she describes with complete amusement and evident fondness. Lila apparently disappearing, which Marinette mentions only once with a two-sentence update that contains more relief than she appears to know.
All of them. Updated, maintained, kept.
He thinks about what Luka said: “she stayed close to the edges of your world.” He had not understood, at the time, the full extent of the word “stayed.” He understands it now. She had not simply stayed. She had tended.
—
He finds it near the end of the archive. Sent at 3:17am on a night fourteen months ago. No subject line. Just the body.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: (no subject) 3:17am — 14 months ago
I miss Chat Noir.
I know that's not — I know. But I do. I miss him specifically, the way he used to show up, the way he always showed up, no matter what. I miss the charm with which he brightened my day. He stopped coming around the same time you left, more or less. A couple of months either side, maybe. I never could work out if that was a coincidence. I keep thinking there has to be a way to —
Actually, maybe there is something that could be done about that. I don't know. It's 3am and I'm not thinking clearly and maybe this is just grief and I should go to sleep.
Ignore this one.
Love, Marinette.
He stares at this email for a long time.
3:17am. She had been lying awake thinking about Chat Noir and had sent it to the only person she thought might understand why, which was also, in a way she did not know, the person most capable of doing something about it.
“Ignore this one,” she had written.
He is not ignoring it.
—
He finds them at the end of the inbox. Every year, like clockwork. Five of them.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: annual gathering — Luka's boat Year 1 after
We're doing a gathering. Luka's boat, Saturday, 7pm. Everyone will be there. Nino, Alya, Chloe, Kagami, the whole group. You won't come. I know you won't come. I'm sending this anyway.
Love, Marinette.
Year two. Year three. Year four. The same email, small variations. The same list of names, growing slightly each year as new people joined the edges of it. The same 7pm. The same boat.
From: marinette.dupaincheng@— Subject: annual gathering — this year sent four days ago
Luka's boat and Île aux Cygnes this year. He has a set. It's going to be a good night. Everyone is coming.
Tomorrow at 7. You probably won't come. You never do.
I'm sending this anyway.
Love, Marinette.
Tomorrow at 7.
He checks the time in the corner of the laptop screen. 4:52am.
The invitation for tomorrow is the one Luka told him about this afternoon. The one he had mentioned with the ease of someone who already knew Adrien had been invited and had simply not looked yet. “Come, although you just haven’t accepted the invite.”
He thinks about Luka saying: “you haven’t looked at the signs.”
He has been looking at the signs for the last three hours.
They are everywhere.
—
He closes the laptop.
He sits in the dark of his childhood room at five in the morning and thinks about a girl who has been writing to him for six years and sending him invitations he never opened and teaching Gorilla to read and write and learning fencing and standing in the edges of his world keeping the edges neat.
He thinks about the Chat Noir email. 3am. “maybe there is something that could be done about that.” The incomplete thought of someone who had almost let herself want something and then talked herself back from it.
He thinks about last night. The crop top. The sound. His thumb. The way she had said “I’ll know when I see him” about the boy who has been standing on her balcony every night for almost two weeks. The way she had said “it assumes I stopped talking to him” about a man she has been emailing since he was seventeen.
He thinks about Luka on the wall, warm and unhurried, saying: “you haven’t looked at the signs.”
And then, because he is twenty-three years old and has not slept and there is a thin crop top living rent-free in the part of his brain that should be responsible for other things — he thinks about last night in a different way.
The specific way.
He reaches over and puts away the laptop.
He lies back.
He is thorough about it, the way he is thorough about everything. He does not close his eyes. He thinks about a specific sound and a specific warmth and a specific thumb and he does not forgive himself for a single moment of it.
He does not regret a single moment of it either.
Afterward, in the grey early light, he looks at his hand.
“Shit,” he says.
He means all of it.
—
He showers. He dresses. He goes downstairs at half past seven looking like someone who has not slept, which he has not, and Nathalie is in the kitchen with her coffee and her expression.
“Two coffees,” he says. “Please.”
Nathalie looks at him. She looks at the circles under his eyes and the state of his hair and the fact that he is wearing an outfit he will never pair together, and she says nothing, and she makes two coffees, and she puts them both in front of him.
This is why he has been carrying her note in his breast pocket for two weeks.
He picks up the first coffee. He wraps both hands around it. He thinks about tonight at seven and Île aux Cygnes and Luka’s boat and whether he is going to go, and about the email that said “you probably won’t come. You never do.”
He picks up the second coffee.
And then —
The frequency.
It hits him mid-sip, the specific wrongness of the city’s signal, the channel Paris broadcasts that his body has been receiving since he was thirteen and has not been able to turn off in six years of trying. Not subtle. Not the low background hum of a city going about its business. Something active. Something wrong. Something that is, right now, in the 3rd arrondissement, which is the arrondissement that contains a bakery he has been visiting every evening for two weeks.
He puts down both coffees.
He looks at Nathalie.
She is looking at him with the expression of someone who has been watching him look like this since he was thirteen and has always known what it means.
“Go,” she says.
He goes.