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Plagg swiftly returned from his usual adventures around the Agreste manor. He was careful not to be spotted anywhere, Adrien’s father and Nathalie being occupied in their offices helped. Although, lately, he’s been having fun making changes to Nathalie’s desk (she’s a huge perfectionist) and Gabriel’s designs (swiping on his tablet was honestly so fun!). The thunder from tonight’s rainstorm clapped as he hid a snicker, leaving them grunting in annoyance.
When he came back to Adrien’s room, he expected the boy to have fallen asleep. He did his daily roams at night for extra precaution. Instead, he found his kid weeping on his bed, trying his best not to make any loud noises with his ragged breaths.
“Are you okay?” Plagg carefully asked, flying over Adrien with a paw on his shoulders. Adrien was hidden away in his blankets, his shaking shoulders obvious underneath. The teen didn’t answer. “I mean you’re obviously not okay, but is there a chance those are happy tears?”
“I went t-to Marinette’s earlier….” the boy managed a whisper in between his sobs. However, Plagg can’t recall any memory of him going there at all.
“Uhh… when?” Plagg let out a nervous chuckle.
“J-just a few m-minutes ago..?” Adrien revealed his head from underneath the sheets. Instantly, his gaze fell onto his eyes. Those green eyes that always gleamed with pure joy were so red and swollen and so…gloomy, they weren’t supposed to be like that. His nose was red, too, and his cheeks contained tracks of his fallen tears.
Adrien also looked like a burrito, Plagg noted. “Y-you didn’t come with me?” he sniffed.
“We’ll…talk about that later. What happened at Marinette’s?” right, Adrien didn’t know he roamed around the mansion when he didn’t notice. He had made a sock replacement for himself and stored it in various places so Adrien wouldn’t question his absence.
Adrien wiped his tears and sniffed. He sat upright on his bed, leaning on the frame, and surrounded himself with pillows and blankets. “I told him about dinner. How father got disappointed because I-I got a low score in Math-”
“Okay, how is 44/50 a low score?” Plagg demanded.
Adrien continued. “You know how he is,” he hiccuped. “So we decided to go to Tom and Sabine’s bakery to get macarons,”
‘We decided’? Has he been actually talking to his sock replacement? What did the sock replacement know that he didn’t?
“And Tom instantly recognized that I was - that I was down and he asked me what was wrong and I told him and-” his voice broke and another round of sobs came. Plagg held him closer and patted his blonde locks.
“What’d he say?”
"H-He said that ‘as long as you tried, you can never d-disappoint me’," his face crinkled up and a loud sob escaped his mouth. “I want that.” he hugged his knees. “I wanted Dad to tell me that,”
“You know that you can marry into Marinette’s family, right?” Plagg joked.
Adrien chuckled, tears still brimming in his eyes. "A-and while I was walking back home, it rained. I had no one to ask for help because if I called Father, h-he wouldn’t answer…”
“Damn him!”
“...I realized that my friends always called their parents first whenever they had a problem; it could be because of an akuma attack or something personal or really anything. I never experienced that. Because I always had to call Nathalie first," he wiped his tears using his hands. “And I’m glad it rained because, well, I basically walked the entire way crying,”
“I’m sorry, kid. But like a cheese-”
“Where were you though?” Adrien shot a pointed glare at the kwami.
“Uhh, well…”
Adrien gave him extra camembert after Plagg told him what he was up to every night.