Would you like fries with that angst?

Part One

For Adrien, the sparkle of intrigue the city of Paris provided as it lit up in defiance of the dying summer light had never gone away, and never would. Maybe, being a young man so desperately in love, he was biased. But he really did agree with whoever had named Paris the most romantic city in the world.

"You are incorrigible," Ladybug laughed as he appeared beside her on the lofty roof of the Gate sure Nord train station where she sat in wait. But despite her show of disapproval, he saw enchantment in her eyes as she accepted the small pot of flowers he had brought for her. "What's the occasion?"

Adrien bowed to the waist before rising again. "Does man really need an occasion to buy a woman flowers?"

"Yes," she scoffed.

The flowers tickled her face as she inhaled their scent deeply. The petals were the same violet-blue as the current sky where the sunset was fading, so that the whole world around them highlighted the range of fractured blues in Ladybug's eyes. It was as if the universe had set the stage for this. His love for her was so intense it was a magnetic force, and it struck to him in that moment that even if he was never to be with her in the way he wanted, in all his life he would never love another as much as he loved her.

"You got me. There's an occasion," Adrien relented when her skepticism finally overpowered his playful flirting. "We've both just graduated lycée. I'd say that's occasion enough, wouldn't you?"

"A week and a half ago," Ladybug sassed, though it was obvious she was the tiniest bit pleased by the attention. "You're late, Monsieur."

"Well, if I'm being honest, the flowers are less for graduation and more for the future. Do you know what kind of flowers those are?" She had mentioned a love of gardening before (which was why he bought her a potted plant and not a cut bouquet ) so he was banking on her knowledge of flowers for the full impact of his gift.

She pulled them away from her face to observe them again, and he could tell when she recognized them because she turned to him with hesitance. "Forget-me-nots?"

He flushed, but persisted. "I… don't know what your plans are, for university or for your career. I know I can't expect this hero thing to last our whole lives, and I can't expect you to stay here in Paris your whole life either. I don't know," he said hopefully, watching as the train directly below them began to move, departing from the station with steadily increasing speed. With graduation behind them now, the whole world seemed unset and uncertain, and the fact that he didn't know her life plans was terrifying to him. "Maybe by the time our jobs as Lady and Chat are done we'll have learned each other's identities. But if… if we never do, or if one of us has to go far away, or if something ever happens to me…"

"Chat Noir," Ladybug whispered, and he looked up into the eyes that filled his every waking daydream when her hand came to rest firmly on his shoulder. "Listen to me. I can't believe I even have to say this. No matter what happens or what the future has in store for us, I will never, ever forget you. How could I?"

The train whistled below them, echoing for miles around. He'd never been as close to confessing the true depth of his feelings for her as he was in that moment.

But even though he couldn't find the words, she seemed to read them on his face anyway. Her whole demeanor softened and the kind smile she gave him sent his heart into mad flight.

"Here," she said, her voice all light and loving. "This one is for you, from me." Plucking a single flower from the center of the plant, she tore the bottom half of the stem off and then brushed back part of his flyaway mess of hair to tuck the flower behind his ear. The gobsmacked look on his face brought a giggle bursting from her lips. "I don't want you forgetting me either."

It was all he could do to keep from melting into a puddle. "Not a chance, little bug."

"I can't exactly take these on patrol," she mused. "I think I'm going to take them home and plant them in my garden." The mental image of her planting his flowers in her personal garden thrilled him. "Shall we meet up tomorrow night instead? Now that it's summer I think we should really put a lot of effort into finding Hawkmoth's hideout. I think we're a lot closer than we were last summer. So I was thinking four nights a week until we start school again in the fall. Is that okay?"

"I would spend every night with you," he whispered, "forever, if I had it my way…"

Instead of her usual scoff and retort at his unabashed affections, like he was expecting, she paused with one hand almost to the yo-yo on her hip. "Oh, minou," she said softly. So softly that he wondered if he wasn't meant to hear it. After a brief internal struggle of emotion that he watched with quiet interest, she tugged him down with one hand and planted a kiss on his cheek. Then she was gone, zipping away over the tops of the passenger trains into the gathering night.

Adrien stayed there a long while after, pressing his hand to his cheek in an attempt to bottle the happiness and warmth she had left there in a safe memory, for a day in the future where he might need it. After all, the road ahead was unclear. It was certainly possible that a life with her was never to be his. It was possible that their roads would diverge someday, leading them to two different corners of the world, and that there might come a day that mark their last conversation, her last laugh, his last kiss on the hand. But despite all these scary and real and tangible possibilities, Adrien had to hope for a future where he didn't have to wonder or wait or hope. For a future with her.

Because the only thing he knew with an ice cold certainty was that he wouldn't survive any future without her.

.

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Two and a half years later…

.

.

It's over.

A shiver passed through Marinette's whole body as her heart came to terms with reality of it. It's really over.

Slowly, painstakingly, she pushed herself up onto her knees from the place where she had slumped when Hawkmoth threw her to the ground after ripping her miraculous from her ears. In the segmented light of a colossal stained glass window, eerie and gray at this late, late hour, the man who used to be Chat stood over the man who used to be Hawkmoth. The charred remains of their three miraculi still trickled from his clenched fist onto their defeated enemy's chest; the leftover electric sparks of his final cataclysm still lingered on the ground around him. The sparks fizzled, green and white, until finally fading away. The room was now blacker than ever. Their kwamis were goneㅡbanished to some ethereal dimension until the stones could be remade. Ladybug, Chat Noir, and Hawkmoth were gone. It was all over.

Though every muscle in her body screamed for respite, Marinette struggled to her feet. "Chat," she called out. It was a cold shock to her system to see him standing there sans uniform right in front of her, and it helped get her moving when she felt on the verge of unconsciousness. Now in nothing but a green dress shirt and slacks, he stood facing away from her, unmoving over their fallen enemy. Still staring down at him. Frozen in place.

"Chat Noir!" she tried again. Something was wrong with him, but she didn't know what and that scared her. They won. Why wasn't he jumping for joy?

Cautiously, and limping a little, Marinette approached. The heels of her old pink flats echoed in the empty vaulted room all the way into the rafters. She swore she could see Chat's cat ears twitching toward the sound. But it was nothing more than memory. There were no cat ears. Not anymore.

All the while, the man who used to be Hawkmoth remained motionless on the floor below Chat. So silent was he that at first she thought Chat must have knocked him out cold. But when she edged around her frozen partner she saw that the man was wide awake, staring upward in abject horror as Chat Noir fixed him with a steady, unwavering gaze.

"Forgive me," the man whispered. The light of the window glinted off a tear in the corner of his eye. "Forgive me…"

Startled to life by the unexpected plea, Chat Noir stepped backward and almost bumped directly into Marinette where she was approaching. "Minou?" she whispered one last time, and touched his shoulder. He flinched away violently.

"Goodbye," Chat choked out. Without ever turning to see his lady's naked face he took off toward the door and vanished from the observatory.

So it went that he vanished from her world too, that night, for it was the last time they were to meet.

At 2:14am on a cold January morning, the police received a phone call from a payphone from someone who claimed to be Ladybug, to notify them that the hideout of the villain who had terrorized Paris for five long years had at last been discovered. The media landslide that followed the next morningㅡwhen police released a statement alleging that Hawkmoth was none other than the famed fashion mogul Gabriel Agresteㅡwould hang like a shadow over Paris for years to come. There was indignation at first. The public didn't think it could possibly be true. But it was less than a day later when the man confessed to all his crimes, and in the eyes of the public, the case was open and shut.

(The court case itself would take many more years to play out.)

For Marinette Dupain-Cheng, it was like living on past the end of the world.

She hadn't taken a proper look at the man before running out after her fleeing partner, and in all honesty she hadn't expected the man to even still be there when the police arrived at the scene. So when she heard of his capture on the news the next morning, she went into shock. She was still reeling over Chat's abrupt departure from her life and hadn't yet come to terms with the fact that her double life as Ladybug was officially over. That her partnership with Chat Noir was over. When she woke that first morning with less than two hours of sleep under her belt, she was already teetering at the edge of a breakdown. So for the newscaster to announce that Hawkmoth was none other than her biggest role model was to send her over a mental cliffside.

Her parents scarcely had time to ask if she was feeling alright before she lurched toward the kitchen sink to vomit.

Still, even with her life spiraling to pieces around her, the very next thought that struck her as soon as she'd finished coughing up bile was a single word, surging into her already broken heart like the last leaf falling from an autumn tree. Adrien.

Oh, Adrien.

Her concern for him was not unfounded. Suffice it to say that Adrien Agreste did not take the news well. Over the next few weeks his four closest friends offered what consolation they could for the tragic situation, but were met only with stony silence and a glazed-over expression. He wanted to be left alone. So they reluctantly did as he asked, and hoped for his sake that the stages of grief progressed quickly.

Marinette threw herself headlong into her studies to fill all those hours in the week that used to be filled with Ladybugging. She stayed up late into the night working on odd projects and listening to music so loud she couldn't hope to hear herself think, in a vain attempt to quiet the glaring void in her heart left behind by Tikki and Chat Noir, two of her dearest companions. Alya became her lifeline. They did everything together. They studied together, they met up on the university campus between classes to share lunch, they moved in together and painted their apartment green, per Marinette's request. She uprooted all the flowers from her childhood garden and replanted them in the pots hung from the railing on her new balcony, taking extra care with the flowers the Chat had once given her, now blooming with three times as many flowers as it had back then.

Alone at night she could still hear his voice, surfacing from the infinite pockets of memory that grew louder in the silence. When she lay in bed begging for sleep to relieve her from the heartache, she would remember how at this hour a few months ago they'd have been meeting up for their regular patrol.

'Lovely evening,' he'd say, 'though not so lovely as you, my lady.'

My lady. That was one of his favorites. It was one of hers too, though she realized now she had never told him. There were too many things she had never told him. Now she would never get the chance because she didn't know who he was. With the stones currently dispatched they couldn't meet as Ladybug and Chat Noir. At least, not for a very long timeㅡmore likely forever, since they didn't know how to recreate the stones. So without ever having revealed themselves, they were lost to each other. The only place she saw him now was in dreams, so she lost him again every time she woke. She could almost feel his presence there beside her as she tossed restlessly in her bed between the real world and that of dreams. Goodbye, he'd say, and then he'd been gone. Twisted up in her bedsheets, she'd jolt awake, rasping for air and unable to get any to stick in her lungs.

So absorbed was she in coaxing her own sorrow into a fortified box deep within her mind, during this painful transition back to regular civilian life, that she missed all the warning signs.

.

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"Guys," Nino said, "something's wrong with Adrien."

Marinette put a bookmark in her copy of Chinese Fashion through the 17th century and Alya set down her phone. They gave each other a wary, knowing glance before turning to Nino, who was sitting opposite them in the grass. He'd been fidgeting ever since he joined them, on the verge of saying something important. This was apparently it.

"Of course something's wrong," Marinette mumbled, playing with her bookmark. "It's only been six months, Nino, it's going to take some time."

Nino shook his head. "No, I mean, like… dudes, I think he's getting worse. I thought it would get better with time, but it's not. He stopped answering my texts last week. And earlier this morning I went to the College of Physics guidance counselor to see if I could get them to reach out to him, but they said he's stopped showing up for his classes altogether."

Alya blanched. "What? No way. Our Adrien, ditching classes?"

If anything, Nino's expression darkened. "I haven't even gotten to the worst of it yet."

"What's the worst part?" Marinette squeaked.

"They said he stopped showing up back in mid-February."

But that was almost two months ago! If this was true, Adrien was doing far worse than any of them ever thought. Alya put a hand on Marinette's arm; she must have noticed how close she was to tearing her book in half. They were too in-sync these days. "Am I right in understanding that Adrien has dropped out of college without telling anyone?" Alya said carefully.

Nino yanked his cap off and wiped a bit of midday sweat from his brow before replacing it once more. "Yeah. I think so, Al."

"We have to do something." Marinette worried at her lower lip. All of Adrien's troubles were her fault. Maybe she wasn't the one who told his father to abuse a miraculous, but she had directly caused his arrest and therefore the weight of Adrien's depression had hung squarely on her shoulders for these last six months. To say she felt responsible was a dramatic understatement.

"I'm skipping linguistics to go over to his hotel room," Nino told them. "I'll break down his stupid door if I have to. Dude's starting to scare me."

"Keep us updated?" Marinette requested. She wanted to break down his door herself, but knew from past experience that such abrasive intrusions only led to him withdrawing even further. It was best to let Nino do this part alone.

.

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Knock knock.

"I know you're in there."

Knock. Knock. Knock.

"Come on bro, I've been trying to reach you since last week."

Knock knock knock.

"We're all worried about you. Chloe said she tried to bring over some comic books and you wouldn't answer the door."

Knock knock knock knock knock knock knock knockㅡ

"Are you even still in there? You dead? So help me god, Adrien, if you don't answer the damn door I'm going to call the fire department toㅡ"

The door swung open. Adrien glared at him through puffy eyes in a faded Blue Oyster Cult t-shirt, and behind him Nino could see that all the blinds in the hotel room were cinched shut. "I'm not dead," Adrien muttered. "Happy?"

"No."

Nino shoved past him into the hotel room before Adrien could shut the door, and crossed his arms in dismay at the state Adrien had been living in. It wasn't messy. He'd understand if it was messy. It was just… it was empty, to put it lightly. The day of Gabriel's arrest, Adrien had refused to go home and instead rented out a hotel room. Nino thought it was understandable, at first. After all it must have been a rather rude shock to find out your only living relative was committing criminal acts in your very own house right under your nose. But it was six months later now and Adrien was still holed up in this tiny, empty hotel room. It was more than unhealthy. It was damaging his ability to recover from this nightmare.

"You need to get out of this hotel room," Nino said. It was less a suggestion and more a direct order. He wasn't going to take no for an answer this time.

Adrien flushed, lingering in the doorway with his hands shoved in his pockets. "I don't stay in here twenty four seven. I go places."

"Like school?"

Adrien caught his eye first and then his meaning. "Oh. You know about that?"

"This isn't healthy bro. You should have… I don't know, you should have told me it was this bad."

"It's not your problem to deal with."

"Oh shut up. Listen, we are going to go do something fun right now."

Adrien slumped into the sparkly clean recliner that sat next to the hotel tv. "I'm not really in the mood for one of your spontaneous trips, Nino."

"You'll like this one," Nino grinned mischievously, "I promise. Plus, Marinette will be there." He held up a hand when Adrien opened his mouth in embarrassed indignance. "Please, dude, I know she makes you feel better so don't even try. Wash your face or whatever you need to do, 'cause we're leaving in about five minutes." With that Nino started dialing Alya's phone number and walked out of the hotel room, letting the door click shut behind him so Adrien couldn't attempt to argue his way out of it.

.

.

Numbly, Adrien changed and washed his face.

When he finished and looked up, he almost didn't recognize himself. The circles under his eyes were so bad his stylist would have had an aneurysm if he still had one. And his hair… He ran one hand through the flyaway untamed mess and almost laughed. If his father could only see him now. He was an utter mess. He looked more like Chat Noir than Adrien right now, and that was hilarious, all things considered.

For a split second he saw himself smile, but then it was gone.

It was hard to keep a smile on his face for more than a moment these days when he'd lost everything he had. The names flitted through his mind like they always did, without his permission, like a tongue over a missing tooth. Every second of every day like a cold, dead mantra.

Father. (Gabriel consistently tried to call his son from prison but Adrien had yet to answer. He just wasn't ready yet.)

Plagg. (Plagg and Tikki had said the stones could be remade if destroyed, but it happened too early, too soon, before the kwamis were able to fully explain how. In all likelihood Adrien would never see his little black guardian again.)

Chat Noir. (His freedom. His expression. His life.)

Andㅡ (No. No no no, not again, he couldn't think about this. Not with Nino here. He had to stop. He had to get ahold of himself.) For a moment he saw spots, but he realized it was because he had forgotten to breathe for the last minute or so.

Knock knock knock. Adrien jumped out of his skin. "You almost ready?" Nino called through the bathroom door.

"Yeah," he called back. Adrien hastily dried his face and followed Nino out of the hotel room.

On the way to whatever activity Nino had planned, Adrien spaced out, allowing Nino to talk on and on about his latest musical endeavors to fill the silence in the backseat of the taxi. He let the city of Paris fade into a blur in the windows. It all felt so far away. So detached was he from his surroundings that he didn't notice where the driver was taking them until the car came to an abrupt stop. When he saw the Agreste Mansion he almost threw up.

"Nino Lahiffe, you little shit!"

"Christ, Adrien, you can't avoid this place forever!"

He strained against Nino's relentless tugging, refusing to get out of the car. "I can and Iㅡ" grunt, "ㅡwill."

"Dude! Will you just get out of the car?"

But even with all the months of apathy, Adrien was far too strong for Nino, and after one particularly sharp tug failed Nino went stumbling backwards onto the sidewalk. (After all, the only thing to do at the hotel he'd been living at besides watching tv was to utilize the gym.) Nino shot to his feet, ready to try again, but a soft knock on the window behind Adrien's head interrupted the exchange. Adrien turned, only to see Marinette waiting there expectantly.

Sighing, he opened the door and climbed out. "Hi, Marinette. Alya. Chlo." The other two were standing behind the car, looking at a very ruffled Nino with a degree of amusement. "I'll have you three know that I was tricked into coming here."

Alya and Chloe looked uncomfortable at that accusation, but Marinette gave him a shy grin, seeing the joke in the disaster like he always did. He loved that about her.

"About that," Alya ventured with an edge to her voice. "Why are we here, Nino?"

"Jeez, you guys have no faith," Nino grumbled. "We're not here to force Adrien to move back in, okay? We're just gonna do a little… stress relief."

A wicked smile crossed Chloe's face at Nino's suspicious choice of words. "Ooo, I like where this is going already."

But Adrien did not like where it was going. At least, not yet. As he followed them apprehensively up the steps to the house he grew up in, he tried not to look around too much. This place was full of bad memories, and the absolute last thing he needed was to relive any of them with his friends around to bear witness. The interior was eerily empty, like a haunted skeleton of what had once been his life.

"Hey Adrien?" He perked up when Marinette hung back to walk next to him as Nino led them through the labyrinth that was the abandoned Agreste Mansion. "It's okay that you dropped out. Lots of people need time off of school after stuff like this. I just wish you'd told us, y'know?"

Adrien couldn't look her in the eye. Truth was, he'd never made a conscious decision to drop out of school. It just… happened. "I'm sorry." He was. He really, really, was.

A playful punch to his shoulder helped ground him when he felt the floor falling out from under him. "No need to be sorry," she smiled. "Just don't shut us out. We love you."

Adrien smiled back. At least he hadn't lost everyone, that day.

"Here we are!" Nino finally announced, and Adrien, who had been purposefully not focusing on where they were heading, frowned at the door that Nino had stopped in front of.

Of course Chloe was the one to smash the tense silence to pieces. "Gabriel's office? Um... Why though."

"Yes," Adrien agreed, turning his frown on a very evasive Nino. "Why indeed?"

"Two words." Nino threw open the door so hard it ricocheted off the door stop with a crack like lightning. "Stress. Relief."

The other four filed in after their off-the-rails friend with an apprehensive air. "I don't understand," Alya said. "How can Gabriel's office have anything to do with stress relief? Like, at all? This is the most stressful place I can think of."

"Observe," Nino proclaimed, and picked up a glass paperweight from Gabriel's desk where it still held down whatever papers hadn't been taken by detectives during the search months prior. Abruptly, he hurled it across the room, where it fractured into chunks and took out a huge chip from the bookshelf where it struck.

"Nino!" Marinette gasped, eyes flitting towards Adrien, who was absolutely flabbergasted by the turn of events. He didn't know what he'd been expecting from Nino, but that wasn't it.

"Come on," Nino laughed, then shoved the globe off Gabriel's desk too. "Try it. Does wonders for all that pent-up rage!"

A riotous crash came from behind Adrien then, and he turned to see Chloe standing over a fresh pile of upturned books where she had just shoved them from their shelf. "What?" she scoffed in Adrien's general direction. "You're not the only one with pent-up rage."

Adrien couldn't help it. He laughed.

It was the short-lived, raucous kind of laughterㅡnot unlike the kind he used to emit involuntarily after almost dying in battle. Everyone stared at him. From the shocked expressions on their faces he understood that he probably hadn't laughed in their presence in months. "Alright," he relented, and pulled the hanging artwork from its nail by the door. The glass in the frame shattered on impact with the ground, leaving Alya and Marinette to jump away from the scattering shards. "Huh." He nudged the fractured frame with his converse. "That did feel pretty good, actually. I always hated that stupid painting."

"Are we really doing this?" Alya wondered, her fingers ghosting on the artsy ceramic mannequin in the corner, like she was just dying to tip it over.

Adrien hesitated, glancing around his father's office at all the framed awards on the walls. At the ashes leftover in the dark fireplace. The half-finished sketches left on his desktop. The pricy ornaments lacing the shelves in front of rare books. The vaulted ceiling where an iridescent crystal chandelier swayed in the air conditioning spilling from a lofty vent.

"Come on, man," Nino nudged gently. "You'd burn this mansion down if you could. I know you would."

"You're right," Adrien said. "Let's trash this place."

"Fuck yeah!" Alya crowed, and when she shoved over the ceramic mannequin all hell broke loose in the once-office of Gabriel Agreste.

Chloe set about ripping every single book from the shelves while Nino attacked the inner contents of Gabriel's desk. Alya tore around from one corner of the room to the next, cackling with glee and unable to focus on any one thing, just tearing things off shelves and walls left and right, piling them in broken pieces on the floor. Adrien had to admit that he hadn't felt so invested in anything since, well, since before. His adrenaline kicked in like an old familiar friend as he pulled every painting and award off the wall and tossed them one by one into a pile of glass and wood by the door. Only Marinette stood in the center of it all, awkward and uncertain as the office flew to pieces around her amidst cheers and jeers and laughter. Taking notice of her distress, Adrien went to her with a playful smile and pointed up at the chandelier casting flecks of distorted light all around the room.

"You haven't smashed anything yet," he observed. "Care to help me with that one?" Marinette followed his gaze up to the chandelier, then almost laughed at his borderline manic grin. "Climb on," he suggested, and knelt down so she could climb up onto his shoulders. They swayed for a moment as he stood and she swore out of surprise, which sent him back into a laughing fit. He could barely see anything through her panicked grip on his face. Everyone else took notice of them too then, and paused in their destructions to chant Mari's name as she strove for the lowest-hanging crystal strings on the elaborate chandelier.

"It's too high," Marinette groaned. As she said that, Nino lit up with a plan and dragged the ornate guest chair from its place in front of Gabriel's desk over to Adrien, who quickly caught on.

"Do you trust me?" he asked Marinette, who had been too focused on the out-of-reach chandelier to notice this development.

"Duh," she scoffed. "Why? OH my god!" she gasped as he stepped up onto the chair in one swift motion. "Fuck me, oh my god, I'm gonna die! Put me down right now!"

"Don't worry! We got you," Alya called up to her. The other three stood around them to spot them in case Adrien should lose his balance. "Tear that bitch down, Mari!"

"If you let go I'm taking you down with me," Marinette warned, but his grip on her legs was solid and she could reach the lowest tier of the chandelier now with ease, so she started pulling. Three impressive tugs later, the fixture that attached it to the ceiling started to give way. Flecks of paint and drywall littered down. "Stand clear!" she shouted, and everyone leapt out of the way just in time for it to come crashing down with a deafening icy splatter.

Cheers went up among the others, and Nino helped Mari down off Adrien's shoulders, congratulating her on her fine, fine work. Adrien was on cloud nine, and couldn't stop smiling as Chloe and Alya ripped the chandelier to shreds, with Chloe conspicuously pocketing a handful of crystals with a sly wink to Alya, who only rolled her eyes.

"I'd call Operation Stress Relief a rocking success," Nino gloated as he set Marinette on her feet.

"I wholeheartedly agree," Adrien laughed. "Good game, everyone." With that he turned to fist bump his lady andㅡ

ㅡand stopped.

Damn. He'd done it again.

He was standing in his father's destroyed office with his fist held out to Marinette, who was looking at him rather oddly. He'd forgotten. Where he was, what he was doing. He was about to retract his hand altogether when Marinette offered him an uncertain smile and met his fist with her own. "Yeah. Good game," she said, sounding rather far away.

They both jumped when Alya appeared between them. "You know what goes great with wanton destruction?"

"Rice?" Nino butt in.

Alya shoved him away by the face. "Sleepovers!"

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As a person with real live depression, I wanna point out that everyone deals with depression in their own way. Some behaviors are straight unhealthy. Some behaviors seem outwardly healthy when they're really just coping mechanisms for deeper problems that go unaddressed. Adrien is the first. Mari is the latter.

The manifestations of sadness here stem from their personalities and tie in with their powers. When Adrien is sad he destroys things: he cuts ties with his home and belongings, separates himself from his friends, sabotages his schooling. When Marinette is sad she creates things to deal with it: more projects, more work for herself, more time with her friends. As someone who sways between these two extremes, I wanna point out that people who cope Marinette's way are no less depressed than people who cope Adrien's way. They're just better at hiding it.

Not only that, but they're far more likely to fracture all at once…

Also, on another note, I strongly feel that with Nino and Alya dating, they would morph into a solid 4 person friend group. Marinette's crush on him would chill out as she matured and spent more time with him. Likewise, Chloe's poor attitude would chill out as she matured, and got used to ADrien's new friends. I feel her and Marinette's rivarlry would remain, but would be more playful than vengeful. The reason Chloe's here is because she's Adrien's oldest friend. I don't necessarily think she would be a permanent fixture in their friend group, but I'm absolutely sure that Nino would have invited her because the goal in this adventure was to make Adrien feel better, and she's his friend as much as anyone else. Just some thoughts.

Chapter 2 (of 4) to be posted next Friday.