💗 marinette (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
bonnechance) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
genevrier2016-04-15 05:13 pm
bonnechance) wrote in genevrier2016-04-15 05:13 pm
💀 pour oublier ma peine immense
It had been a long and hard three years.
Ladybug had run out of fingers with which to count the sticky situations she and Chat Noir had been in because of Hawkmoth. But finally, finally, she and her partner had him dead to rights. As time went on, they had grown desperate, and they'd made mistakes - but nothing they hadn't been able to fix. He'd made mistakes, too, and that was how the two of them had managed to track him down.
Heart pounding, she cast her gaze down at the man that had been their adversary for so long. Hawkmoth stared back at the both of them with a dark glare full of loathing. There were a lot of things she had wanted to ask him when she finally caught up to him, but there was only one question she was actually able to form.
"How could you?" She whispered, her voice ragged. She was breathing heavily - the fight had taken a lot out of her. Out of her partner, and out of their enemy, too; had it gone on much longer, they all might have dropped dead out of exhaustion. "You hurt so many people."
Hawkmoth's eyes glittered, and he pressed his lips together into a thin line. Ladybug felt something roll down her cheek - sweat, she hoped, and not blood or tears, but she'd taken a hit to the temple earlier and she couldn't be certain that it wasn't bleeding (and in fact it was). But she was in better shape than him, at least. He was beaten down, he had lost.
All that remained was to take his Miraculous and make sure that Nooroo's power never, ever fell int the hands of someone like him ever again.
His refusal to answer stirred anger in her where there had once been pity.
"Men. Women. Children. You used them all - and for what? What on earth could have been worth it? I don't understand. Explain yourself, Hawkmoth."
He didn't answer. He looked between the two of them, seething. Ladybug scowled and knelt down in front of him, curled her fingers around his brooch, and yanked it away from his suit.
The magic holding his transformation together fell apart, and Nooroo emerged from the butterfly Miraculous at long last. Ladybug cradled him in the crook of her arm and watched as the facial features of their nemesis became clear.
A well-dressed man, middle-aged. Nobody she recognized. Without his Miraculous, he should have been powerless. Defeated. Done for.
She didn't catch his smirk until it was too late.
His hand darted into the suit jacket that hadn't been there before, and his fingers closed around something she couldn't see. "I'll make you understand," He snarled, and the next thing she knew his hand emerged from the jacket and the crack of a gunshot split the air. "Perhaps now we'll share the same wish."
There was a gun in his hand, Ladybug realized, as a dull roar and the man's twisted, bitter laughter filled her ears. He hadn't aimed at her. She turned toward her partner with dread.
He had aimed at him, and his laughter was not the laughter of a man who had missed his mark.
Ladybug had run out of fingers with which to count the sticky situations she and Chat Noir had been in because of Hawkmoth. But finally, finally, she and her partner had him dead to rights. As time went on, they had grown desperate, and they'd made mistakes - but nothing they hadn't been able to fix. He'd made mistakes, too, and that was how the two of them had managed to track him down.
Heart pounding, she cast her gaze down at the man that had been their adversary for so long. Hawkmoth stared back at the both of them with a dark glare full of loathing. There were a lot of things she had wanted to ask him when she finally caught up to him, but there was only one question she was actually able to form.
"How could you?" She whispered, her voice ragged. She was breathing heavily - the fight had taken a lot out of her. Out of her partner, and out of their enemy, too; had it gone on much longer, they all might have dropped dead out of exhaustion. "You hurt so many people."
Hawkmoth's eyes glittered, and he pressed his lips together into a thin line. Ladybug felt something roll down her cheek - sweat, she hoped, and not blood or tears, but she'd taken a hit to the temple earlier and she couldn't be certain that it wasn't bleeding (and in fact it was). But she was in better shape than him, at least. He was beaten down, he had lost.
All that remained was to take his Miraculous and make sure that Nooroo's power never, ever fell int the hands of someone like him ever again.
His refusal to answer stirred anger in her where there had once been pity.
"Men. Women. Children. You used them all - and for what? What on earth could have been worth it? I don't understand. Explain yourself, Hawkmoth."
He didn't answer. He looked between the two of them, seething. Ladybug scowled and knelt down in front of him, curled her fingers around his brooch, and yanked it away from his suit.
The magic holding his transformation together fell apart, and Nooroo emerged from the butterfly Miraculous at long last. Ladybug cradled him in the crook of her arm and watched as the facial features of their nemesis became clear.
A well-dressed man, middle-aged. Nobody she recognized. Without his Miraculous, he should have been powerless. Defeated. Done for.
She didn't catch his smirk until it was too late.
His hand darted into the suit jacket that hadn't been there before, and his fingers closed around something she couldn't see. "I'll make you understand," He snarled, and the next thing she knew his hand emerged from the jacket and the crack of a gunshot split the air. "Perhaps now we'll share the same wish."
There was a gun in his hand, Ladybug realized, as a dull roar and the man's twisted, bitter laughter filled her ears. He hadn't aimed at her. She turned toward her partner with dread.
He had aimed at him, and his laughter was not the laughter of a man who had missed his mark.
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Crack.
Hawkmoth hit the ground and Marinette looked up at Gabriel, barely seeing him through her tears. It registered on her, as she took a ragged breath, that she was still alive, and she started to reach for the earrings, but then they slipped through Gabriel's fingers, and she turned her head to follow the man's horrified gaze.
She didn't realize that the keening, inhuman wail was coming from her until a moment or two after it began. She couldn't believe it. She didn't want to believe it. But she couldn't close her eyes and pretend it wasn't happening. There was no denying the fact that the boy bleeding in her arms was none other than...
"Adrien!"
She felt like she was going to be sick. This was unreal, a nightmare, it couldn't be true. Losing Chat Noir was bad enough, but to lose Adrien too—?
She groped for the earrings, curling her fingers around them and holding them tightly. "Lucky— Lucky Charm ca—..."
No. It couldn't. Lucky Charm couldn't fix this.
His wound wasn't magical.
She bent over him, staring into his eyes, unwilling to believe that it had been him all along and that she was losing him now. It couldn't be. It just couldn't.
She wouldn't let him go.
"Adrien, Chat Noir, look at me, stay with me, you can't go, say something please don't die oh my god no please don't let this be happening, please, please..."
Her tears splashed onto his cheeks, mingling with his blood.
1/2
The world slowed around them, the numb cold creeping in, settling in his nerves, drowning everything out and into a dull roar. Nobody saw the look on his face, the utterly devastated destruction of what was left of his heart.
... his son.
Gabriel had never been a good person. He could barely play at being a decent one. But he loved his son. He loved him completely, unconditionally, despite how terrible he was at showing it.
Pain screamed through his knees as they hit the floor next to Adrien, and his trembling fingers took up his son's hand. Clasped it both of his. Squeezed.
And felt the ring.
There was no conscious thought to his decision. It seemed a self-evident truth. He opened his fingers, watching the dull silver shine of the dormant Miraculous. He pulled the ring roughly from Adrien's finger, slid it onto his own, and stood.
"Plagg," he whispered, cutting, grating, destroyed as the old god shimmered into being. God of misfortune. Of calamity. Of plague. Of destruction. Of death. Plagg appeared as a shadow in the room, a void in the world, inky black with lightning in his eyes.
"Claws out."
The shadow engulfed Gabriel, wrapped around him with a roar of ages, and the building trembled with the power of it.
What emerged was not the Chat Noir Marinette knew.
2/2
Darkness rushed the chamber like a physical thing, blocking out all the light from the window, plunging the room into a chill.
The large, clawed hand closed around the destructive energy, drawing it in.
Mercifully, Marinette's view of what was about to happen was blocked. But nothing would prepare her for the sounds. Hawkmoth was alive and aware. He begged. He pleaded.
He screamed.
He did not stop screaming.
The sound went high and brittle, human before it turned primal, turned animal, degenerated into the purest, most base keening of agony and despair.
The cries died with him.
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She thought, at first, that she had passed out. But then a violent shiver ran up her spine and the rumbling of Chat Noir's power reached her ears, and she couldn't see but she could hear as Hawkmoth fought for - and lost - his life.
A small, vindictive part of her whispered "Good" in the back of her mind. He would never hurt anyone again. No one would ever know what had become of him. He was gone.
...but Hawkmoth being gone didn't mean a thing to her if she didn't have her partner to share a safer world with.
And the man's wailing as he begged for the mercy he hadn't shown her partner and wouldn't have shown her would haunt her dreams for years.
If she had eaten anything, this would have been the point where she lost it. But they'd started this fight early and it had lasted so long that her breakfast was long since digested, and when she doubled over, it was to gag and dry-heave rather than to actually lose her lunch. She was trembling, shaking, and the world seemed like it was spinning beneath her, which was absurd because she was still kneeling and clutching Adrien.
"Adrien," She whispered, feeling around in the dark for his cheek. "Please don't go..."
No amount of begging would stop this, though. Tikki, hovering over the earrings, looked frantically between Marinette, Adrien, and the corrupted version of Chat Noir that Gabriel had become; Nooroo trembled and clung tightly to her.
If it had been her Chat Noir on the rampage, Marinette would have done something - anything - to calm him down, but she was too thrown by the loss of her partner to have the presence of mind for it to occur to her.
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Horrific as his use of the Miraculous had been, he took no pleasure in the murder. He released the transformation with a breath, and a yank of the ring off his finger.
No trace remained of Hawkmoth.
A second later, Gabriel's hand was on Marinette's shoulder, squeezing.
"On your feet," he commanded. His voice wasn't soothing, but it was grounding. Something to hold onto in the madness. Someone who understood. Gabriel leaned down, and with an impressive display of strength for a man his age, drew Adrien into his arms. Marinette's partner gave a faint moan as he was moved, and blood immediately soaked Gabriel's sleeve.
"Tikki. Nooroo. Any luck you might impart, any power you can lend him, do it now."
Gabriel's cool grey-blue eyes turned on Marinette. "Come."
The blood was slippery, and they tracked it out, but Gabriel never faltered. In the late golden glow of the sun, Adrien's blood was dark crimson and sticky, streaked over them both.
A dark car was parked outside, and once they got inside, Gabriel himself got behind the wheel. The hospital was only blocks away, and he set a breakneck pace, screeching around turns, racing against the clock as seconds of Adrien's life ticked away.
In the back, in Marinette's arms, he only grew more limp and pale.
Gabriel said nothing. There was nothing to say.
---
The emergency responders were blindingly fast. Adrien's arrival flooded the ward with activity, stressed but frantic voices, and the screaming of monitors.
They were not allowed in the room. Someone drew the shades on the window.
Gabriel and Marinette were left alone in the hallway, blood-soaked and pale.
"When he was four years old," Gabriel said softly, "He used to climb everything in sight. One day, he felt from the banister in the foyer."
Gabriel pinched the bridge of his nose. "I was standing in the same room. I had my back turned. I heard him cry out. I watched him fall."
When he looked up again, his face was expressionless. "He broke his arm in two places. His mother screamed herself hoarse."
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The whole ride there, she remained bent over Adrien, holding him tightly as if she were afraid he would slip away if she let go, and mentally promising anything and everything to any deity that would listen, that would grant her prayer, that would make him get well again.
An ER nurse had been forced to pry Marinette's fingers from his arm. It was only the fact that he would be less likely to recover if she didn't let the doctors see to him that convinced her to let go, and even then, she didn't like it.
She was jittery and nervous as she waited with his father, unable to stay still, tracking bloodied footsteps back and forth in the hallway as she paced.
"He got better then," Marinette murmured.
What the follow-up to that should be was uncertain. "He'll get better now, won't he?" seemed foolishly optimistic, but "He won't get better now, though," seemed unnecessarily cynical. She wanted to believe he would recover. She had to believe he would recover, but she didn't know how that would be possible. Doctors were only human.
And a gunshot wound like that...
Her stomach churned, and she squeezed her eyes shut, trying to banish the mental image of Adrien lying still and cold in a coffin. He had to live. He had to.
"Monsieur Agreste," She began, "How did you—?"
How did you find us? How did you know? What's going to happen now?
She couldn't get any of those questions out. Her gaze wandered to the shaded window and the door that Adrien was locked behind, and for a moment, she looked as though she wanted to break it down and at least stand in the same room as him.
The moment passed. She shuddered, and had to throw out a hand to catch herself on the wall to keep from collapsing.
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No part of him could bear to face a world with both her and Adrien gone.
Marinette Dupain-Cheng was the only distraction afforded him, and on the other side of the wall, he heard another flurry of activity, more tense voices, more screeching alarms. A countdown.
The girl lost her feet.
Automatically, Gabriel reached out and brought one careful, steadying arm around her shoulders. He was thin and angular, but solid, a strange echo of his son. He held her up as if she weighed nothing.
Her fingertips had left smears of Adrien's blood on the window.
Three years, and he'd had his back turned. Gabriel didn't answer her question.
"He was back to climbing as soon as he had his cast."
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Chat Noir's blood. Adrien's blood. One and the same.
He was in there fighting for his life and neither of them could do anything to help him.
Being able to hear the muffled sounds of the alarm and the voices of the doctors in the other room did nothing to help calm her. If anything, it only made her more anxious, and she shot a glance at the door. It wasn't merely worried - it was terrified.
Gabriel didn't answer her question, but he at least kept talking, and she latched onto that distraction the way a drowning girl might latch onto a flotation device.
"That sounds like him," She whispered, her voice brittle and shaky. "That sounds so much like him."
How many times had she watched Chat Noir fall, and then pick himself right back up and throw himself into danger all over again? The boy was the epitome of fall down seven times, stand up eight.
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"He's a remarkably stubborn young man," Gabriel agreed, keeping his arm around Marinette's shoulders. Though he'd meant it as literal support, it wasn't solely for her benefit.
Silence descended, and the fear crept in, suffocating, awful. Gabriel took Marinette's shoulders and led her to the nearby sink, turning on the water and putting her hands in the spray, encouraging her to do something, to accomplish a task. It was a basic coping mechanism, one that Gabriel knew all about.
Work himself to the bone, so he wouldn't have to think.
Once they'd finished washing up, Gabriel handed her a few paper towels before taking his own, carefully drying his hands.
His head snapped up as a doctor came out of Adrien's room, headed over to them. Later, Gabriel would see the terms he used in countless books, even more internet articles. He used technical terms and jargon Gabriel had never heard before, had no way to make sense of... until the doctor sighed and told them that Adrien was stable, but critical, and had likely sustained some measure of brain damage.
The extent was unknown. He would need more scans, more tests.
"For now, we're inducing a coma," the doctor explained. "We'll find out exactly what was damaged and keep him on support for now, but after a transfusion, his vitals picked back up. It's a good sign.
"If you want, you can see him now."
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Someday, when Marinette was older, she might be able to force herself to work to cope, even with things like this going on (but she hoped she never, ever saw something like this happen again). She just didn't have the practice doing so to power through this.
It was, once again, Gabriel's direction that got her from point A to point B, and it was Gabriel's direction that got her to actually wash the blood off her hands.
She didn't throw the paper towels away once her hands were dried; she held onto them tightly, wringing them anxiously as the minutes went by and they waited for some - any - kind of news.
The door swung open. Her head snapped up as Gabriel's did, and she listened, not understanding a word of the jargon but understanding well enough once the doctor explained what they had chosen to do.
If you want, you can see him now.
She took a step toward the door, her first independent action since Gabriel had pulled her to her feet back in Hawkmoth's lair, and then she paused. Chat Noir had been her partner but it had been her lapse in judgment, her mistake, that had gotten Adrien shot.
And Gabriel was his father, as complicated as that relationship was. She looked from the door to his face, as if to ask permission to step through.
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Once they were granted permission to see Adrien, he headed for the door. On the way, he put a hand on Marinette's shoulder again, leading her through along with him. He didn't question it, or her presence, or her feelings.
Later, some part of him would wonder why he so instantly accepted her as a part of this. Perhaps it was because he'd saved her life. Perhaps it was some long-buried, rusty fatherly instinct. He felt powerless, ached to protect his son from something he was ultimately useless to combat, but he could take care of her. Even if it was to make sure she washed her hands, or let go of that wadded-up bit of paper towel.
Gabriel took it from her hands, tossed it away in the wastebasket as they entered, and hung back, taking in the whole picture.
Adrien had grown up tall and strong, with still-broadening shoulders and a steady, warm presence. In the hospital bed, hooked up to half a million machines, a nest of wires and tubes running down under his hospital gown, blood still streaked into his hair... he looked small, pale and fragile. He looked like a little boy.
His boy, who had spent three years just one mistake away from ending up in this bed.
There's a lot of things you don't know about me.
Gabriel clutched the footboard of the bed until his knuckles went white, watching the way Adrien's eyes moved under his lids, listening to his steady breathing.
They were children. They were still children.
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Seeing Adrien like this, looking so still and fragile and vulnerable, was awful. She wanted to run, but she couldn't. Not when it was partially her fault he had ended up this way.
She stepped away from Gabriel and knelt down at the side of Adrien's hospital bed, searching his face for some sign that was going to be okay. From the way her face crumpled, she didn't find it; she swallowed the lump forming in her throat and had to dig her fingernails into the palms of her hands to keep from reaching for him.
She couldn't risk jostling any of the tubing and wires. Not if they were what was keeping him alive.
"Sorry..." Her voice was small. "I'm so sorry. For everything."
It wasn't entirely clear whether she was speaking to Adrien or Gabriel. In all honesty, she was apologizing to the both of them. The way she saw it, she had a lot to apologize for.
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I'm so sorry.
Some part of Gabriel did blame her. She should never have trusted Hawkmoth. She should have pressed her advantage while she had it, destroyed him the moment she had an opening. A hero did not have the luxury of innocence, of believing in the good in others.
But Marinette reminded him far too much of someone else for him to condemn her. She could have been killed today, and nearly had. Somehow, he felt that Adrien paying her price would burn the lesson into her heart more effectively than anything he could say.
Gabriel focused on the way Adrien's lashes were long enough to tangle together, and finally spoke again.
"You didn't know his identity."
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"...neither of us knew."
And now he might never know. The doctor had brought up the possibility of brain damage. She didn't want to assume the worst, but she had a tendency to leap to the worst conclusions even in the best of times, and... even if he did wake up, what sort of condition would he be in? Even if she did finally tell him who she was, would that knowledge even mean anything to him?
Her heart clenched uncomfortably. She had known for quite some time now that he desperately wanted to know who she was; it was his form of kindness to swallow that down and wait for her to be ready that kept him from pressing the issue over the last three years.
"He wanted to know. I thought... I thought it was safer if we didn't. So that he—" He. Hawkmoth. She couldn't bring herself to say his name. "...No clues. So that he couldn't track us down."
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"A wise choice, especially considering how often he was turned against you."
It was a cold thing to say, but it was also utterly true. Innocents and romantics might have argued otherwise, but keeping that knowledge from Adrien had probably saved Marinette's life more than a handful of times.
"Though I don't suppose he would have gotten very far." It would have been better to quit while ahead, but Gabriel was never one to sugarcoat things. "Deplorable combat technique, not nearly enough offense, no sense of when to press the advantage."
The fencer in him. The perfectionist.
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Divide and conquer, or so the saying went.
As Ladybug, she had never really discussed the times Chat Noir had tried to hunt her down with her partner; she knew it wasn't really him doing it, and she hadn't wanted him to carry the weight of that with him. There was a part of her that hoped he remembered very little of those experiences, if he remembered any of them at all.
She managed to hold her tongue at first, but when Gabriel moved on to critique his fighting, she flared up.
"His combat technique wasn't deplorable," She hissed. "He was good. He saved so many lives with it!"
Hers included.
But if this recovery went badly, the one life he wouldn't have been able to save would be his own.
no subject
Gabriel probably should have been annoyed, but if anything, he liked the way she snapped at him. So few people had the courage to do so. (Of course, she was also defending his son. That helped.)
"He did, but he also had a habit of intentionally using himself as a human shield. He relied on your luck, and luck has a way of running out."
He came to a stop, suddenly pained, looking down at the hospital bed again. After a long look at Adrien, he left his bedside, came back with a slightly damp stack of paper towels, and handed a few of them to Marinette.
Without a word, he went to work cleaning the blood from Adrien's skin, navigating carefully around all the tubing and wiring. It wasn't perfect, but he didn't want him covered in dried blood, either.
no subject
Her voice caught in her throat again, and she looked down, her gaze resting on his face as the sound of Gabriel's footsteps reached her ears when he went to fetch paper towels. When he returned with them and handed some to her, she didn't need to be told what to do; she took them carefully in hand and began to clean the blood from his other side.
There was so much more of it than there should have been. She felt ill again, just looking at it.
Her cleaning brought her hand to his forehead, and she gently brushed a few strands of hair away so she could get at some of the blood that was crusting under his bangs.
"...if it wasn't for him," She managed, after a moment or two, "I don't think I would have lasted more than a week out there. I owe him everything."
Biting her lip, she chanced a glance up at Gabriel's face.
"So if there's - if there's anything I can do to help, then... please... let me help."
no subject
Despite Gabriel's frigid old heart, Adrien was impossible not to care for. That quality drew people naturally to him, but as he watched Marinette brush his hair back from his face, he began to understand. For her, it was more than that.
This was deeper than a partnership.
Gabriel regarded her carefully.
"... you may."
He paused, then skipped over the heavy bandaging on one side of Adrien's head. "He will be moved home as soon as possible. You are welcome to visit him there."
This was assuming the hospital would let him. But even if it turned out that Adrien went downhill, he wanted him at home. Not here, not in the hands of people he didn't know and personally background check, where anyone might walk in, where anyone might take his picture and capitalize on the Agreste affinity for misfortune, speculate on what might have put him there...
No. He would see to it.
no subject
Marinette's smile was brief. Very brief, and it only just barely reached her eyes, but her relief at being allowed to stay close and make sure he was going to be okay was entirely genuine, and there was the barest hint of the quality that had made Adrien remark that she had his mother's smile so long ago.
She kept it turned on Gabriel for only a moment before she returned her attention to Adrien.
...he was breathing, and there was some color in his cheeks. That was something, even if he was comatose, even if he might never be the same when he woke up. He was still alive.
She had been so sure, back in Hawkmoth's lair, that he wasn't going to be.
The first couple of days would be crucial, she was sure. The doctors would have to run their tests and determine what course of action to take from there - but if he could just last that long, then maybe...
Marinette wiped up the last of the blood on the side she was working on, and then slipped her hand into his to give it a light squeeze. It was only a momentary thing - she let go just after - but some part of her hoped that even if he wasn't conscious, he might at least be aware that two people who cared about him were present.
That was all she could hope for, for now.
no subject
He'd have the best possible medical care available. He'd make sure of it.
Adrien didn't quite respond when Marinette held his hand, but as she pulled away, his fingers gave a tiny twitch, kittenish. It might have been a misfire of nerves, but it looked very much like he was trying to keep her close.
Gabriel felt a twinge, and looked to the door.
"There will be an investigation," he said quietly, thinking ahead, raising his eyes to take in the bruises on her face.
"You will need to tell them," he picked his words carefully, "about being attacked. About what the man looked like. They will look for him, so you will need to be as detailed as possible."
He told her more with what he didn't say, with what he did. The girl was clever, and he knew it. She also had the determination to keep secrets. He didn't like relying on her... but it seemed he had little choice.
no subject
But they won't find him.
Plagg's power was that of destruction. Gabriel and Plagg together had utterly disposed of the man who had been Hawkmoth; there would be nothing for the police to find. Gabriel would probably come under suspicion. She might, too.
In fact, when they didn't find any trace of Hawkmoth, it was almost an inevitability.
But Gabriel hadn't touched the gun and neither had she, and she was pretty sure that once he had lost his transformation, their enemy hadn't been wearing gloves. There would be a clue in the fingerprints, and the police would find it. She just had to ride this out until then.
Her mouth felt dry.
"They're going to ask why I was there with Adrien... and if they ask our friends they'll find out that he and I didn't really hang out on our own much. We went to the same lycée, but..." She bit her lip. The police might assume it was a date, if she kept quiet about it. It might be easier to make them believe that, too, but it felt like a lie. "But... he was always closer to Nino than he was to me."
Her expression hardened.
"...whatever we tell them, we have to make sure they accept it."
Because, so help her god, if Adrien did wake up, she didn't want anyone distressing him with questions he had no way of answering.
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Gabriel, sadly, was oblivious to this. He was in for a very rude awakening.
There was no question in his mind that Adrien would go along with them. He wouldn't want his indentity coming out either. Hopefully, he would have the good sense to never ask what exactly had happened to Hawkmoth.
"You've been through quite a lot," he said carefully. "It would be understandable if you didn't want to speak about what you've been through."
He was all too aware of the possibility of someone listening at the door. If what had happened with Adrien's mother was anything to go by, the police would be here soon.
"Miss Dupain-Cheng, please stay here with Adrien." he asked, moving toward the door. "I have arrangements to make."
... later, he'd realize that he felt comfortable leaving her with him. At that moment, nobody else would have been enough.
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Marinette, sadly, did not have the presence of mind to clue him in to the possibilities of what he might be asked and what their friends might say. It was all she could do to keep from breaking down right here and now.
She was only just barely holding it together, because if Adrien did wake up, she didn't want him to wake to a sobbing girl at his bedside.
She nodded mutely as Gabriel went for the door, and then she settled herself in to keep watch.
Medical knowledge was not one of her strong suits. The beeping of the monitors, the tubes, the wires - she had no idea what any of them meant or how the worked. All she knew was that they were helping Adrien tread the very narrow line between life and death.
She hoped it was enough. It had to be enough.
And she swore, if anyone came in here to interfere with his recovery, she would fight them.