Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

September 1st, 1989

Dear Diary,

I would like to believe I'm a good person—that goodness is something immutable, merely hidden by defects and callouses rather than ever lost in people. But as I look around, this first day of my last year here in this hellhole, I can only ask myself: How much shit should one have to fucking sift through?

Adrien was not unusual by any standards when it came to the middle-bottom of the social hierarchy. A good (if effeminate) face hidden behind foggy glasses, thin features underneath knit cardigans, textbooks held close to his chest. There was an art to never being seen enough to be brought under scrutiny, and Adrien had perfected it. At Ville de l’Ouest High School, the only best bet of surviving was to cling to calculated normalcy. Raise one’s hand but not too often, get good grades but nothing remarkable. There was a reason behind the word remarkable, after all—It left a mark, a target on you, no matter if you were remarkably good or remarkably bad. 

Through it all, Marianne Dupain-Cheng had been the one friend that never changed. She had been wearing pink sweaters and large overalls for as long as Adrien had known her, and probably would long after they’d inevitably go their separate ways post-graduation. While she had attracted much more of the scorn of the school’s idiot congregation—‘Rubenesque’ was not a word Adrien felt most of the student body could pronounce, much less use in lieu of what they did say to her—there was a respectable idealism Marinette had. She liked to speak of fantasy, of movies filled with triumphant knights and slain dragons and crystal jewelry of untold power.

“We’re having movie night again, right?” 

Adrien wiped a smudge off of the lens of his glasses and pushed them up his nose. He surveyed the lot of the cafeteria around them—Bursts of rowdiness and yelling breaking through the buzz of lunchroom chatter. It was nothing he’d care to be more acquainted with, so he assumed, not when there was a comfort to being isolated with Marinette.

“Mhm. You’re on Jiffy pop detail.”

Marinette smiled again, the round apples of her cheeks pushing up and making her squint. “I rented The Princess Bride.”

“Don’t you have that memorized by now? Don’t we both have that memorized by now?”

“What can I say, Adrien? I’ve always been a sucker for a happy ending.”

On the other side of the cafeteria, linebacker and notorious douchebag Kim Le Chien was busy sliding lunch trays of innocents off of their tables. Howling laughter exploded from the scene as the victim du jour (whoever he was, maybe some sophomore) bent over to pick up the mess. He had visible suspenders and pants an inch too short, which was no doubt the beacon that had led Kim Le Chein and his partner in crime Luka Couffaine to go in for the kill: If jocks didn’t already have a sixth sense for insecurity, that is. An endless game of sharks shoving minnows into lockers and disgusting toilets, one that could only be escaped by constantly keeping yourself too plain to be picked on.

Of course, there were three people who floated above it all. The only exception to the rule, or perhaps conversely the bedrock which kept the system in place. Teflons. Bulletproof: never bothered nor harassed. 

The third was a redhead by the name of Sabrina Raincomprix. She’d been inducted junior year, given a hair straightener and freed from rather awful braces, and her large blue eyes and fair skin had made it seem like she’d never been anything less than gorgeous to begin with. —Perhaps it helped that her father was an officer and her mother was loaded, but there was merit to her head cheerleader status giving her enough social credit on its own.

The second was Kagami Tsurugi, iron-fisted head of the newspaper committee, with a personality that Adrien can only guess she kept indiscernible on purpose. Whether her implants were to make her hotter or to make herself more interesting was likely up for debate, one that Adrien had no desire to engage in. 

And then there was the Almighty. A femme fatale so great in her power and so ruthless in its wielding that to place Sabrina and Kagami on the same level felt almost degrading. An influence so wide-spread and so intangibly present that the bricks on the walls may as well have been stamped with her fingerprints, every vein in each wooden desk drawn personally by her with a single red nail. She who, by some force unknown to Adrien, within these halls commanded more reverence than any boss, any autocrat, or any God: To give the definition of “all-powerful” without referencing her would be to give it incorrectly.

Chloe Bourgeois. The mythic bitch herself.

“Kagami, grow up, bulimia is so ’86.”

Adrien nearly turned on his heels the minute he heard Chloe’s voice in the bathroom, only to see a quite displeased Mme. Mendeleev approaching. He moved out of the way just enough to escape the line of fire, sticking a hand into his pocket to fish for a scrap of paper.

“Ah, Sabrina and Chloe,” Mme. Mendeleev sighed, leaning against the doorframe. “Why am I not surprised?”

The lack of response from them was filled by the sound of Kagami’s lunch spilling out of her mouth.Chloe continued to file her nails, not even doing so much as to glance over at Mme. Mendeleev. “Our friend is sick. We’re helping her.”

“And that’s lovely, but if you three don’t have a hall pass you’ll need to help her some other time. Perhaps you didn’t hear the bell over the vomiting, but you’re all late for class. It’ll be a week’s detention—“

“Actually, Madame, we have a hall pass.”

Mme. Mendeleev turned around to find Adrien behind her, a signed slip of paper in his hand. She creased her brows for a moment to scan him over, as if to ask him if he knew who he was helping. Her hand snatched the paper from him like the strike of a hawk, grasping the pass within her talons. On it read the script: Hall Pass for Chloe B., Kagami T., Sabrina R., Adrien A., Yearbook Committee, capped by a scribbled signature. Mme. Mendeleev pursed her lips, then shrugged in a tired resignation as she handed the pass back to Adrien.

“Don’t take this as any excuse to dawdle, you four,” she warned, before leaving. Just as Adrien was about to go himself, he was pulled further in by Sabrina and Chloe. Chloe’s thick mascaraed lashes fluttered as she took her own look at the hall pass, her lips moving as she read out each name.

“Who are you, and how the hell can you pull off forgery like that?”

Adrien’s shoulders stiffened, and he adjusted his glasses. “I- Adrien Agreste. It’s nothing, really. ...I-It comes down to the way one grasps the pen, really, if we have to—"

Chloe swatted Adrien with the hall pass, forcing him to step back so his shoe was no longer on the doorframe into the girl's bathroom. There was an odd sense of security to him—With all men, jocks and nerds alike, the more one fell on an extreme the more likely they were to be a creep. It was either just the sense that Adrien had only been passing by or those ridiculously long eyelashes of his... Chloe didn't care to distinguish which.

"What the hell do you want?"

"U-uh, It's not— I just didn't see the sign-"

"No. I mean, what the hell are you trying to get out of us by helping us? You're a nobody, clearly you're holding us ransom."

"None of us are going to have sex with you with those Poindexter glasses on," Kagami called, only half paying attention to the conversation.

"Or if you're not paying for dinner," Sabrina added.

"God, no! -Just, uhm... Maybe just tell people you saw me save a cat from a tree or something, I don't know. Anything to at least make me seem like you know I exist."

The three girls broke out into titters like a flock of birds.

"Yeah, save a cat from a tree, sure."

Then Chloe stopped. And she took off Adrien's glasses.

"Hold on." She pressed her tongue to her teeth, eyeing Adrien over. "Maybe we can make something out of this."

Chapter Text

It had been three weeks since the Teflons had taken him in. In that time he had been given multiple assignments: Forging hall passes and prescriptions, signatures and love letters. What first seemed like a temporary convenience (until report cards were forged) became a long-term asset to the Teflons—Chloe Bourgeois had been right. Something could be made out of Adrien Agreste. And that something looked good.

It had taken him a while to be sold on all of the blue tartan, but Adrien supposed it wasn’t the worst concession he’d felt compelled to make. The stares in the hallway began and then continued to follow, trailing after him like wide-eyed awestruck vultures. Adrien had grown, in some small and awful part, a sympathy for the Teflons. They’d learned to twist the attention in their power, sure, but that first meant having to endure it.

“I don’t want to get out of the car,” Sabrina whined, pouting her glossed lips. “I nominate Kagami.”

“No.” Kagami neglected to even look Sabrina’s way. “Chloe?”

“Do I have to do everything around here?” Chloe scoffed, leaning on the steering wheel of Kagami's car. “Agreste, we don't pay you to sit there and be hot! Be useful for once, you’re on snack duty.”

Adrien sat up, nodding and already unbuckling himself. 

Within the confines of the town’s 7/11, Adrien stopped himself as he saw a familiar figure in the candy isle. He could’ve recognized the large overcoat and its rolled sleeves, the dark flannel, and those blue jeans anywhere. -Not that he had a name for the face, that is. Only a sinking feeling in his stomach and a quickening of his heart when she, like a nymph in the dark, would pass by in the halls.  

For about nine days, all he had the courage to dub the stranger was Her.

The first meeting had occurred during lunch, when he’d been sent on yet another lackey’s mission to collect the lunchtime poll. Nothing particularly interesting ever happened with the polls, since it’d been enacted into law (also known as Chloe Bourgeois giving her personal opinion) that no political query was to touch the clipboard until she graduated lest she spew. Everyone tended to give the same answers: What would one do if they inherited five million dollars the same minute aliens threatened to blow the Earth up in two days? Fuck all. Often “Fuck all.” What would one do if they were given an amulet with the ability to grant them a wish, in exchange for rewriting the world? Wish for infinite riches and a string of hotties on each arm. When Adrien questioned someone who was trying to pretend to be nice, they would at least give platitudes of charity in exchange for the basal answers of hedonism and greed. -Either way, it had always been predictable.

“A wish in exchange for everyone dying?” Some country-club girl had sighed, baby-blue eyes more focused on his own than her tater tots or the question he’d posed. “Love that question, Adrien. How very. -Uh, let’s see, I guess I’d wish for everyone to not die first—“

“Hands off, you fucking schizo!”

Adrien had dropped his clipboard on the table, turning back expecting to see Kim and Luka tag-teaming another nerd. But no, it had been Her. Her. 

“The fuck is wrong with you, bitch?” Kim had jeered, almost breathlessly, as he backed away from Her. A swarm of students corralled the group, forming a boxing ring of bodies. In a swoop that sent dark curls falling back, She brushed the locks of hair from her face and cracked her knuckles. “Doesn’t this cafeteria have a No Dykes allowed rule?”

“Seems to have an open policy for assholes.”

Kim looked to Luka, who had taken a position behind him. Their eyes grew wide, smiles bewildered and almost giddy.

“Am I gonna have to hit a woman today, Luka?” Kim had asked him, loud enough for the crowd to hear.

“No. But you might have to hit a bitch—“

God, the sight had been electric. With a strike no less decisive than a thunderbolt hitting the earth, She had thrown a roundhouse kick right into Kim’s jaw, leaving him staggering. A roar ripped through the mob of onlookers, watching as She drew up her sleeves to her elbows and took a stance as Luka watched Kim prop himself up against a lunch table. She had simply been too fast for Luka’s charge and the first few punches he pulled, weaving around their trajectories as her sneakers skid against the linoleum—When Luka had taken the chance to grab her by the shirt, he’d let go just as fast when She had kicked him in the balls. The two jocks had been left temporarily stunned, yet not defeated, a maelstrom of James-Deanesque black still standing tall.

“I’ll fucking kill you, you cow.”

“Will you?”

The cafeteria had quickly evacuated when She had taken a .357 Magnum out of her waistband, firing a blank into the ground. 

“They should expel her,” Kagami had commented later that day, during a game of croquet with the other Teflons. “Or arrest her.”

Adrien had, of course, kept his mouth shut then, and upon seeing Her approach he found himself equally speechless.

“Greetings and salutations.”

“Uh- Adrien. Agreste,” he added, a sweat already breaking out on his palms. “Do you know where the corn nuts are?”

“Claudia. Perreault,” she quipped back, in the exact same tone. “Were you born yesterday?”

Adrien took a step backwards, chewing on his lower lip as his eyes lost the courage to look at her. “Uhm, sorry, it’s-“

Claudia’s smile was warm, if tellingly jaded, in a way that matched the sultry rasp of her voice. “Don’t sweat it. It’s always Aisle 4, no matter the state, city, or county. I’m sure I could find my way around one of them blindfolded even in Canada.”

A glance was shot over to Aisle 4 and its rack of corn nuts, in a variety of packages and flavors. Yet, rather than move towards them, Adrien watched Claudia turn around and thumb through an assortment of snack cakes detachedly, silently observing her.

“You’re uh- familiar with 7/11s?”

“They’re the one thing that never changes on me. I’ve been to nine high schools across the country previously. This one’s the tenth,” Claudia explained. There was a tinge to her voice that seemed to imply she had no idea why she was telling Adrien anything, and was simply letting the words fall out of her mouth to see what happened. “SoCal, Dallas, Baton Rouge, Vegas. It doesn’t really bother me anymore. My mom runs a demolition company, and she always keeps two suitcases packed just as a reminder that we’ll always leave a city just as quickly as we came.”

Adrien fell silent for a moment, his shoulders relaxing as he imagined it.

“-My mother's taught me a lot of things, don't get me wrong. I can make a decent lasagna, change a tire, fix a hinge—But more than anything, I know it's not my place to dream big. Cause there ain't nothing this world will do to get you there if it can help it. -Well, unless I marry rich," Claudia posited, clicking her tongue. "But you and I both know I'm not nearly pretty enough for that."

"I, uhm, I think you're quite pretty—"

Claudia turned on her heels, sauntering further to the back of the 7-11. "Point is, cupcake: You're the Teflons’ lapdog, and that makes you lucky. You're a decent man, and if you play your cards right, you'll be smooth sailing for the rest of your life without even having to spare a thought about people like me. You'll go off to some fancy college and all your little hopes and dreams will come true." As she reached the slushie machines, her elbow came down to rest on one of the few unslushied patches of countertop. "'Course, that’s the hope. Sky hurts when it falls, doesn't it?"

"...I suppose it does," Adrien stammered in reply.

"You're gonna have to find some way to reel yourself in, won't you? One of these days?”

"...I suppose it wouldn't hurt."

"Hm. Smart kid."

Claudia snatched a styrofoam cup and plastic straw from their displays, sticking the straw in her mouth the way a cowboy would a stalk of grain or a mobster would a thick cigar. As she fiddled with the slushie machine, there was a rehearsedness, a mechanical nature to her movements that made it seem like she'd done it a thousand, million times before—As if she'd been making herself slushies all her life. The flavor she chose was blue raspberry, the color immediately staining her lips from the first draw of crushed ice and syrup. She took in a long sip of her drink, with Adrien being unsure of what else to do but watch her.

"Not the slushie type?" Claudia asked. "You can get one yourself, you know. It's a free country."

Adrien rubbed the back of his head, his eyes askance and drifting over the aisles of junk food and soda pop, never lingering too long on one particular thing.

 "I'm alright."

As his eyes drew back, Adrien found himself focused on where the azuline tip of Claudia's tongue met the plastic red straw. There was a horrid, almost perverse intensity to the way he watched it swirl around the circumference of the thin plastic, filling him with an immediate shame only magnified by the scheming look in Claudia's eyes as they met his.

Claudia extended her hand to offer him the half-drunken slushie. A sheen of watered-down blue syrup and her own spit shimmered on the edge of the red straw.

"Go on," she grinned. There was an oddly devious look in her eyes, a way that they sparkled as she squinted them. "Try it."

"Uh- You know, my parents are really conscientious about my sugar intake—"  

"What, dollface, isn't not like I'm making you do heroin, am I?" She leaned in closer. "Come on, be a big boy and have a sip. It won't hurt you."

Adrien swallowed hard.

The Herculean effort of her demand was not entirely in getting the courage to do it, but in equal measure the restraint to do so politely. The conscientious hesitation made Adrien’s head spin, slowly bending down and reaching for her styrofoam cup to let his lips contact the plastic straw. Adrien could admit he felt particularly, well, humiliated by the whole ordeal. Something about the tips of his fingers touching hers as he took a sip that never seemed to end from her slushie, something about the feeling of invisible eyes on his back. And yet, it was her that did him in, that taunting look in her dark and gloomy eyes, not just as if he’d fallen into some trap but as if he couldn’t even begin to imagine what she had planned for him next.

Adrien coughed when he finally pulled away, face flushed and a hand tugging aimlessly at the hem of his blazer.

“Uh- haha! Yeah, uh, that’s- Wow. Sugary.”

Claudia snorted from his reaction, the sound breaking into bright and raucous laughter. Looking over and watching her laugh didn’t help the tinge of blush on Adrien’s cheeks, that was for sure.

“Oh my god, did you eat a brain tumor for breakfast? Utterly ridiculous, my grandma can get corn nuts faster!”  

Chloe Bourgeois stopped where she stood, her face dropped in shock as she stared at Adrien and the girl next to him as if finding a walrus in the 7/11 would have been more believable. Chloe stepped forward, an airiness to her walk as if she didn’t feel comfortable letting her heels hit the floors the 7/11. Looking over to Adrien derisively, she snatched a bag of corn nuts from their rack, her nose scrunched.

“Fuck her later, playboy. We’re going.”

Chapter Text

As soon as he had escaped, Adrien had booked it to his house, Chloe’s screaming still ringing in his ears like tinnitus. He’d be kissing her aerobicized ass the next day, but for that night—for that short and fleeting night— he dreamt of a world without Teflons. A world where he was free. Free of cokeheads and moronic parties and drinking himself impotent and, finally, free from puking all over Chloe Bourgeois’s shoes. He was a laughingstock in the making, a dead man walking and he knew it. 

It was classified information that, in research for his forgery duties, he’d figured out addresses for most of the student body. Most had been forgotten as soon as they had been learned, save one particular address: Claudia Cardoso Perreault. 

After grabbing a ladder from his house and throwing it in his car, he’d sped off in search of it. 

…It was indecorous to refer to it all as his last meal, wasn’t it? He’d refrain.

Placing the ladder up against Claudia’s window, Adrien slowly scaled it like Rapunzel’s prince climbing her tower. There was no real way of knowing what she was up to at that hour or if she’d be open to having him, but desperate men in desperate times were oft to do desperate, desperate things. Shuddering as the ladder shook beneath him, Adrien slowly raised a hand to knock on Claudia’s window.

She opened it before he could.

“Could’ve used the door, smart guy.”

Adrien plastered an awkward grimace over his face to apologize. “I know, dreadful etiquette,” he replied, resting an elbow on the ledge of Claudia’s window. “Really, I apologize.”

Claudia quirked an eyebrow, stepping back to let Adrien swing his legs over the lip of the window and step inside her room. 

“Is your mommy going to cry if she hears her precious baby boy is sneaking into girls’ bedrooms this late at night?”

“…Not particularly,” he sighed, rubbing the back of his neck. “Look, I hate to come to you on such short notice, but I wanted to ask a favor of you.”

He sat down on the edge of Claudia’s bed and began.

“In short, my life as I know it is over, and the second I show my face in school again Chloe Bourgeois will mount my head on a pike,” Adrien admitted, fidgeting with his hands as he looked somewhere between the middle distance and the floor. “And I mean, sure, what the hell is she going to do to me, but—“

“You were nothing before you met me, Agreste!” Chloe had said. “Monday morning, you're history. I'll tell everyone about tonight. Transfer to Washington. Transfer to Jefferson. No one here is going to let you play their reindeer games, you little sissy.”

“—Being a social pariah isn’t exactly on my bucket list. If the plan is for me to hightail it to another city and get my GED while working at McDonald’s, I wanted to, y’know, say goodbye. I thought it was the least I could d– OH MY STARS, GOODNESS GRACIOUS, YOU'RE NAKED!”

In his sudden, flushed panic, Adrien tumbled off of Claudia’s bed in a manner that caused his head to hit the floor. He scrambled to sit up, red in the face, bewildered that Claudia had used his self-distraction as a method of taking her top off without fanfare. The brasserie in her hands (recently unclipped, assumedly) was hung unceremoniously on a bedpost, Claudia taking Adrien’s previous seat on her bed. Adrien stared for a moment, bringing his knees together, painfully aware that his face was the warmest thing in the room.

“Are we fucking or what?”

“No! I- I mean, yes! Well, I mean– This was, haha, I didn’t say all that with any intent to, uhm, pressure you, but I suppose it’d be untruthful to—“ Adrien swallowed deeply, looking everywhere in the room that happened to not be Claudia’s naked chest. “-Say it wasn’t something that crossed my mind, I just- Coming in here and crying that I didn’t want to die a virgin when there was no way in hell she would literally kill me felt a touch, uh, dramatic, you know? It’s… gosh, you’re.. Uhm. Woah.”

Claudia bent over from the hips towards Adrien, outstretching a single hand. When it was clear she was reaching for his tie (blue, a gift from Chloe), Adrien leaned in to match, allowing Claudia to grasp the end of it and slowly—like a dog on a leash—pull him closer until he kneeled in front of her, his hands moving to rest on her knees. There was an unusual reverence in his gaze, lips sealed shut as he waited for the glowing flush on his face to burn out.

“Take your clothes off, okay? We’ll figure it out from there. Like Adam and Eve.”

Adrien nodded, chewing on his lower lip. Slowly, sheepishly, he obliged her.

It was some time in middle school, on a day Adrien couldn’t particularly remember, that him and Marinette had made a promise to each other. It had all begun when Marinette recounted her particular woes over Luka Couffaine—her boyfriend, if only briefly, in kindergarten. Luka and Marinette, while not particularly close, had once had something in kindergarten that only children could have: A fleeting and entirely innocent bond. Luka Couffaine had shared a mat with her at naptime, picked a scab off her knee; Marinette had shared crackers with him at lunch and always grabbed the kickball for him first at recess. Back then, in the benevolence of their youth, it hadn’t mattered to Luka what Marinette looked like or what anyone else thought of her, and to her credit Marinette had thought largely the same. Of course, that benevolence had been shot through the heart and died violently as early as September of first grade. 

The idea, then, in middle school, was that Adrien and Marinette would be haplessly lonely for the rest of their lives. It was only the cruel principles of  fate that some were born to be below others, and the most some would ever reach was an unremarkable mediocrity. Upon coming to that agreement, Marinette and Adrien had promised each other with a pinky swear that, should the two of them both be lonely virgins by thirty, they’d find each other again and get married, and a lifetime of Princess Bride movie nights would follow.

Whatever it said about him to break the promise, Adrien allowed himself to ignore.

“I’m surprised Miss Teflon Supreme didn’t bring you to all of those keggers for the purpose of getting laid,” Claudia gasped, her hands around Adrien’s neck. “You were at college parties, right?”

“None of the college girls really took a liking to me,” Adrien muttered out, fighting for his words to stay intelligible amid ragged breathing. “I was as useful to them as a designer purse.”

Chloe’s talons in the local college social circle only extended as far as her boyfriend, Ray, and his fraternity. While Adrien had a slew of memories involving forcing alcohol into his system to acclimate to sorority girls fondling him, it had led to little else. His sentimentality did little more than give him the mien of a wet rag, and the “speeches” he had were allegedly better saved for Malcolm X than any sorority bottle-blonde hoping for a screw. Such was the way it went. 

“Well, I think I like you,” she suggested, smirking. Claudia threw her head back, adding “Fuck, I think I really like you.”

“Uhm- I, uh– Good, I’m glad.”

Adrien then decided it was best to leave the talking until both of them had finished. 

Chloe had a habit of skipping the Bourgeois family’s trip to Grandma’s regardless of whether or not she was hungover. Once Mr. Bourgeois and his Cadillac had left the driveway, Claudia and Adrien jimmied the lock to the back door open, slinking inside the kitchen.

“If any bitch deserves to die, it’s Chloe Bourgeois,” Claudia muttered to herself, opening the fridge. “But in lieu of that, we should at least get her to puke her guts out.”

Adrien leaned over Claudia, putting his hands on her shoulders to inspect the fridge.

“What’s the upchuck factor on orange juice and milk?”

“What are you, twelve? Why not add sprinkles to it while you’re at it.” Claudia eyed the cabinets below the kitchen sink, raising an eyebrow. Casting a short gaze to Adrien (catlike and teasing), she gave him full reign over the fridge, beginning to mix a concoctions of No Rust Build-Up, detergent, and scouring powder into a ceramic mug.

“Wouldn’t that kill her?”

“Relax, I’m joking. If we really want to make it hurt, we just put in a spoonful. Maybe just, uh, put some Cream of Mushroom soup in a Coke bottle or something.” Claudia swirled her electric blue mixture around in a mug, watching as Adrien picked out an identical mug and set it down on the counter, along with orange juice and milk. He began to cough violently, earning him a side-eye. “What are you doing now?”

“Trying to cough up a glob of phlegm. Gotta be slightly better.”

“Whatever. Good luck getting her to drink that.”

A rustling could be heard upstairs, causing Claudia to hide the various bottles of chemicals. She blinked, her breath stalled as she heard the noise of Chloe waking herself and trotting down the stairs, and fished out a spoon to put in her mug before going after Chloe.

“Just grab it and go!” She whispered to Adrien.

As Claudia went to get Chloe, Adrien eyed both mugs silently, his face slack and devoid of all emotion. With an inappropriate flippancy, his hand came up and moved between the two cups as if he was playing a game, mulling over the options of both in his head. He swallowed, looking around for a witness, and then chose the cup on the right.

A spoon laid discarded in the sink.

Chapter Text

“We know it’ll be fine. I’ve been talking to Luka lately and he’s been so very,” Sabrina said, walking with Kagami and Adrien through the parking lot. “So I doubt we’ll have problems on the double date. We just… thought we’d ask you for moral support, you know?” Sabrina smiled to accentuate her point, her blue eyes sparkling. “This is you saving the cat from the tree.”

“Oh, uh- Sure! I’ll make sure you guys don’t get hurt or anything.” Adrien pursed his lips, thinking over what exactly that would entail. “I guess as long as Luka and Kim’s idea of a date isn’t, I don’t know, getting shitfaced and going out to a pasture to tip cows.”

Kagami’s car had been taken, again, to the venue of choice. Adrien walked behind the two remaining Teflons slowly, always checking back behind them and then checking below to not step in cow shit. The pasture around them was dark, something whipping through the long grass and whistling as the Teflons marched through to find Kagami’s Jeep, a lone pillar of salvation standing free in the night.

Luka and Kim could be heard, drunk and cheering, as they counted each other off and shoved another sleeping cow to the ground. Adrien was suspect that the practice of cow tipping was even physically possible, and yet those two had somehow pulled it off, finding the one pasture in the entire world where cows slept standing.

“I have decided I will slit my wrists once I get home,” Kagami mumbled under her breath, glowering. 

Sabrina groaned, clutching herself by the elbows and shivering. “Save a knife for me.”

Some loud and plastered wailing echoed throughout the pasture like a yodel, indistinguishable from animal cries but obvious enough to be Kim and Luka calling for the girls' attention. Their ridiculous whines and "Awwcommon Gebbackere"s practically made the three escapees sigh in unison, Kagami already fiddling for her car keys.

"Adrien. Tell them we forfeit the date," Kagami spoke, only turning back to him halfway. "I refuse to be bothered."

"Yeah, please?"

Never one to not capitulate to their pleas, Adrien nodded, staying back a few paces as Sabrina and Kagami made it the last leg to climb inside her Jeep. The two jocks slowly approached, swaying about in the dark as they walked. Kim struggled to carry a case of beers that only him and Luka had drunk from, with Luka holding a bottle in his own hand. 

"What's the rush?" Luka slurred, pouting.

"Yeah, where'd the chicks run off to?"

Adrien began to walk backward, facing the jocks as they approached the car, Adrien's eyes always checking the ground to avoid any piles of shit. The three of them all hopped the fence eventually regardless of Adrien's efforts to physically separate Kim and Luka from Sabrina and Kagami with his body, standing right outside her Jeep.

"Uh, they told me they were going home, Kim."

Kim groaned, dropping his case of beer on the dirt. "Come on, there's gotta be a clear patch of pasture out somewhere... They gotta put ouut."

Their bumbling insistence sparked something awful to crawl up his back. Adrien's hand went to the handle of the car door, expecting to climb in like Sabrina and Kagami had and for the three of them to leave together.

Adrien heard a click as the door locked. 

"Uh, Kagami?" he stammered. "...Sabrina?"

Adrien jiggled the handle of the car door once, then twice. 

"Sabrina! Sabrina, let me in!" 

Her head picked up at the sound of Adrien's open palm hitting the side of the car, but she was unmoved regardless. Sabrina leaned back into the opposite side of the car, touching shoulders with Kagami. 

"You have to let me in, please! Open the door!" Adrien shouted. "Open the fucking door!"

"Oh Adrien~♪"

His blood ran cold as he felt both of them stare through the back of his head, their eyes half-lidded and unfocused.

"So, the Teflon's little purse dog," Kim slurred. "I just gotta know, Rover—Did they ever let you screw, or did you join their clique just to watch?"

Adrien let out a nervous laugh, almost a wheeze, as his hand continued to jiggled the locked handle.

"Aha- I beg your pardon, but I don't really know what you're talking about—"

A graceless hand landed itself on Adrien’s shoulder, and he stopped moving.

“Yeah, fag,” Luka breathed, the stench of alcohol sticking to the back of Adrien’s neck. “My buddy over here asked you a question.”

Slowly and with the anxious calculated ease of a rabbit maneuvering itself away from a trap, Adrien slipped out from under Luka's hold and away from the car, abandoning all hope of the girls letting him in. In some fruitless attempt for clemency, he held both hands up, speaking to the jocks clearly.

"I, uh. Haven't been with any of the Teflons that way," Adrien answered, something sick awash on his tongue as he grappled with the idea that that was exactly what Kim and Luka wanted to hear. "If you're hoping to get something interesting from me, you're not."

What Adrien got in return was only more drunk and hiccuping snickers.

"-Now, gentlemen," Adrien spoke, straightening his blazer and taking in a breath to puff out his chest, "I really think if you two are hoping to get laid tonight, you two should look elsewhere." He glanced back to Sabrina and Kagami, still in the car, and scowled at them for a split second. "Your dates clearly aren't interested."

There was something sinister about the way Adrien's interlocutors stared at him. Kim lumbered over, raising his brows.

"Uhm, excuse me-"

Kim pulled Adrien’s face in, his forefinger and thumb digging into his cheeks. “He looks close enough to a girl, right?” He drawled.

Luka only shrugged, his grip on his bottle of beer loosening and the bottle clanking on the ground. He took a minute to genuinely think it over, and Adrien could watch each individual braincell (less than the fingers on Luka’s hands, no doubt) struggle to fire off. 

“We were promised a piece of Telfon ass. If it works, it works.”

The girls hadn't invited him with the intention of acting as a bodyguard. 

He had been invited as a sacrifice.

Adrenaline kicking in, Adrien pushed his back up against Kagami's Jeep, sputtering for a moment as the jocks pursued him. His eyes couldn't find a place to land—Kim, the ground, Luka, the car, Luka, the fence, Kim, Luka. Driving his heel into Kim's chest, the linebacker staggered drunkenly, and has his own weight was too much for him to handle he hit the pasture's fence and tipped over it, stumbling back-first into a pile of manure.

Luka took a moment to process it, struggling to narrow his eyes at Adrien.

"...You fucking kicked him!"

Adrien took off running in the direction of the road, sure Kagami and Sabrina would have no trouble getting out of there alive. 

And yet despite his efforts to protect himself, the next day's rumors were, allegedly, that Adrien had eagerly taken both the school's linebacker and quarterback at once. It was almost comical how little effort it took for Kim and Luka to get the school body to latch onto the narrative.

Fuck.

Chapter Text

“Did I ever tell you two that I was kicked out of my last three schools for being a slut?”

Kim's voice stalled over the phone.

"Who the hell is this?"

"The bitch that kicked your asses just two weeks ago," Claudia smiled. Adrien watched her lean back on the bed slowly, twirling the phone’s cord; Her voice dropped into something sultry, slowly building to a half-moan as she said “I heard about Agreste, by the way, and I’m kind of jealous. I don’t know about my boyfriend, but I should tell you it’s always been my dream to take two guys at once…”

The line went dead again. Claudia and Adrien exchanged anxious glances, before something finally came through the phone.

“I was thinking the cemetery. If you’re man enough,” she sighed in response, chest heaving as if she needed to put her body into the performance, too. (Naturally, Adrien began to avert his eyes.) “Dawn, obviously. And don’t forget Luka.”

While temporarily awestruck by the way she’d draped herself over her bed, Adrien was thrown headfirst back into reality by Claudia ditching the kayfabe. She slumped back when she was sure Kim had hung up, practically throwing the phone back into its receiver. She looked to Adrien with apathetic, calculating eyes, which turned to something cunning when she broke out a smirk.

“Alright, sugarsnap, here’s the plan. You and I are gonna forge some suicide notes for those two losers. Making you their bitch is one thing, but it'll be entirely different if we say they go beyond just being spitroast buddies."

Adrien faltered for a moment. “…Is it supposed to be less humiliating if I'm not the only one people think is a homosexual?"

Claudia scrunched her nose. "It's close. The more important point is that people will always focus on whatever they heard last. If we make a spectacle out of them, nobody will even remember," she posited. "It'll be like your little run-in with them never happened to begin with.”

Adrien grabbed a composition notebook from off Claudia’s bed, opening it and flipping past scrawled chemistry notes and other writing, his fingers passing over each stroke of pen. His own pen was quickly unsheathed like a duelist’s rapier, and with a decisive and sudden strike he let it hit the first sheet of pristine white paper.

“Kim and I died the day we realized we could never reveal our forbidden love to an uncaring and ununderstanding world,” he muttered as he wrote. “The joy we shared in each other's arms was greater than any touchdown. Yet we were forced to live the lie of Sexist-Beer Guzzling-Jock-Asshole.”

“Ununderstanding?”

“I can’t have them come off as too eloquent,” Adrien grimaced, tilting his head like a puppy. “What do we plan to even fake their suicide with, anyway?”

“We shoot ‘em.”

Adrien’s expression dropped, his shoulder relaxing for a moment as he processed Claudia’s words and all they entailed. It was odd how out-of-place he looked this second time in her room—His knees jutting out as he sat cross-legged, his frame hunched over to write in his lap. Claudia found it cute, in a way, but she supposed it had to be something else since she wouldn’t also find a pile of sticks the same sort of ‘cute’. -It was definitely the look in his eyes, wide as if he was still trying to stare through glasses no longer on his face.

“-Okay, don’t lose your head on me,” she laughed sarcastically. “I don’t mean literally. I have something we can shoot them with that won’t kill them. They’re dumb enough to just look like they fucked up killing themselves.”

Claudia’s nightstand squeaked from the pull of wood against wood as she yanked open its drawer. Inside laid her .357 Magnum and a Ziplock bag full of oddly segmented bullets. She grabbed both, quickly loading the revolver.

"These, sweetcheeks, are tranquilizer bullets," Claudia explained, spinning the .357 Magnum’s chamber around with her finger. "We'll need to aim for the leg or the stomach—something non lethal. If that doesn't work, it'll at least slow them down enough to use chloroform." 

Adrien gripped the handle of the revolver as the two of them exited Claudia’s car, en route to the cemetery. She hadn’t done much besides eschew her shirt, folding it over her arm as they made their way up to the gate. Claudia shot back a glance to Adrien as her hand touched the wrought iron fence.

“They could be here any moment now. I’ll start talking when I see them—Just find a spot to hide when you do.”

Adrien nodded, the revolver behind his back to hide the way his pointer finger was tracing the trigger guard. 

“You seem awfully calm for someone who’s never held a gun in their life.”

He blinked, snapping out of some trance before pulling his face into an awkward, dorky smile. “Did I tell you that?”

“No. Just had a feeling.”

Claudia walked back over the cemetery’s threshold, pulling Adrien down by the collar to kiss him on the lips. He melted slightly from the contact, like chocolate in an August heat. Soft and pliable and warm. When the kiss broke, as did Claudia’s hold, the two of them let out a breath in tandem, nothing more in their shared gaze other than a mutual understanding of “I trust you”.

Claudia walked through the cemetery gates and up the hill, and Adrien—sticking the gun in his waistband—followed.  

. . . 

Shucking her jacket on a random stone cross, Claudia made her way into a clearing in the cemetery, the sky just beginning to break into oranges in wait of a rising sun. Fidgeting with her hair and sitting on a gun of her own (Well, Adrien’s. The two had switched), she kept herself perched on a headstone. Claudia passed her hand over the grit of the rock, shifting her knees to figure out if there was any particular way to come off as sexy while also balancing on a fucking grave. Nothing really seemed to hit the spot—Whatever. Spreading her legs for a moment to look through them, Claudia noticed a familiar name. 

Emilie Agreste

Beloved Wife and Mother

1939-1973

Oops. Funny how that turned out.

Before long, the squeal of rubber against asphalt and unintelligible rowdy noises signaled the arrival of her targets. Somewhere, behind some mausoleum or headstone, Adrien sat crouched with Claudia’s revolver. Claudia passed her own fingers over the pistol she’d been lent one last time, biting the side of her tongue to repress any moronic heart-fluttering sentimentality she felt from each having a piece of the other. It wasn’t like she didn’t care about him in some odd, protective way, or she wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to fake another suicide to begin with. He was cute, but she’d been right about him since the beginning: Adrien was too innocent for the world. It would only fuck him over.

A wolf whistle tore through the jungle of marble and limestone, two large and bulky shadows approaching.

“Hey, Warrior Princess!” Luka jeered. “Getting undressed without us?”

Claudia held in an unamused breath, only fluttering her lashes and lowering a bra strap down her shoulder.

“I was waiting for the two of you to rip the rest off of me, sport.”

Taking that alone as invitation, the two started to approach, only to be stopped by Claudia clicking her teeth and sticking a foot out to halt them. Once they had stopped in their tracks, she crossed one leg over the other.

“Strip first,” she grinned. “Boss’s orders.”

The two of them chuckled obscenely, eschewing their clothes as they stood on opposite ends of Claudia and her morbid throne until nothing but tighty-whities remained. Claudia felt her stomach turn over as she traded her gaze between each jock, their smiles wide and their stances almost predatory.

She bent over, hunching her shoulders and giving them one final seductive look, almost out of pity. “Count of three, boys~”

“One… Two…”

“Three.”

Claudia pulled out Adrien’s gun and fired a bullet straight at Kim’s leg, causing him to howl and take off running. Dismounting the tombstone, she prepared to chase after him—Her laughter cut off like a faucet as she heard a third gunshot, Kim collapsing like a deflated tube man at a car dealership.

Claudia dropped the gun, looking over to Luka, who had fallen first. A hand flew up to cover her mouth. She turned back. 

Adrien hovered over the bodies, the revolver discarded a few feet away and nestled in a patch of weeds. Claudia was no stranger to blood and the occasional dislodged tooth: Getting in so many fights in schools across the country meant you kind of had to. But something about brains (pinkish, grayish, blobbish brains) strewn across the blades of grass sickened her, made it hard to get herself to even move. 

"My father used to take me hunting every summer," Adrien began. Was he talking to her, or to the body that was once Kim? “I’d always been shy since my mother passed, and he was hoping it would make me more of a man. It was easier than football or baseball or what have you—didn't require much more strength than it took to hold up a rifle. I couldn't tell you how many pheasants and deer I shot as a kid." 

The red of the varsity jackets seemed pallid and almost phoney compared to the fresh blood staining the bloomed-open face of Luka. 

"Starting out, you have to shoot for the center of mass," Adrien went on, his heels firm against the ground of the cemetery. He stuck his hands in the pockets of Claudia's jacket—His jacket. The one she'd taken off to "not get dirty", and the one now covered in dirt anyways. "But after years and years of doing it, I found my accuracy getting sharper and sharper..." 

He looked up, with this wondrous look on his face: The kind you'd see from a kid on Christmas Day. Innocent, sickeningly so. 

"...And then it just became second nature to shoot for the head."

"I..." 

Claudia couldn't balance speaking and repressing the urge to vomit, the overwhelming stench of fresh bodies assaulting her face. Chloe weighed barely anything, so there wasn't much in her to die. These two were like brick shithouses of muscle, and you could tell that all of it was itching to rot. "...You realize the plan wasn't to actually kill them, don't you? I told you that?”

Adrien feigned a pout as if he hadn't pondered that yet. "We got rid of Chloe. I thought this was just standard fare for you." 

"I don't want to be the bitch known for staging suicides, Adrien. This is nuts." 

“We weren’t the last time,” he protested, “and if we're good enough at it, we won't be. Please, Claudia..." 

Adrien stepped over the bodies with an uncomfortable ease, approaching Claudia to wrap an arm around her waist. As the sun was just peeking over the horizon, the air still had a bitter cold to it that found its way through his sleeve and arm to Claudia's back, perhaps even passing through her body entirely. Maybe if she’d been dead the whole time, it'd be easier to justify things. 

"If anyone is going to understand any of this, I know it would be you. I've known this town my entire life and I assure you, the only place for people like Chloe and Kim and Luka is hell. For a while, I thought that was out of my control. That I just had to stay in my lane. But you changed that for me." He caressed her cheek with his thumb, adding "There is something better to fill in the gaps, and it's us."

"I need a cigarette."

Claudia tried to pull away. 

"We can plant this suicide note, we can go home, and I'll give you... every cigarette in the world if that's what you ask of me."

What if what she had asked was to not fucking shoot people in the head? What then? Would he have listened, would that have taken precedence over this fucked up sense of justice that had gotten into his head? 

Did... she do this to him?

Claudia swallowed hard, holding Adrien by the hand for no better reason than she didn't know what to do anymore.

"Sure," she sighed. "Let's just get this over with."

Adrien pulled Claudia into a tighter hug, and through the faintest breath on his lips Claudia heard Adrien whisper “My angel”, soft and personal like a prayer.