First Order of Business | Adrienette

Hot Off the Press

It is a very important day in Agreste Incorporated on floors five through fifteen. Floors four and below get to keep their usual mundane routine of coming in to sew mass produced pieces, deal with payroll, oversee HR nonsense, and drink coffee from the first floor coffee bar with a tiny little macaroon from the bakery down in the 21st arrondissement. The IT department nobody ever thought about is also fully staffed, exchanging the best of gossip they overhear when people pretend they aren't there.

Today's news is that Adrien Agreste, son of company President Gabriel Agreste, will be instated as Vice President. Many believe that it is the simple act of nepotism. Others have seen Adrien work his way up to the thirteenth floor since he graduated from his university. There were rumors he wanted to start working since completing secondary school, but after the sudden death of his mother, his father was more compelled to send him away.

Ground floor workers who knew Adrien since he was a small child toddling behind Emelie Agreste in the sewing and fabric rooms, thought it was an awful choice only a rich man would make. When Adrien stepped foot through the front doors again with an awfully dimmer smile after four years, their suspicions were correct. Adrien had needed to stay home and be nurtured by love and instead, he got his father's back turned to him. He is still the same kind and gentle young man, but he no longer asks people if they want to hear a joke or turns a normal conversation into a comedy routine.

Adrien sits in his office on the thirteenth floor with most of his things in boxes. The only thing left out is his laptop and a framed photo of his family where he is fifteen years old, and his mom is alive and her eyes are crinkled in the corner from how wide her smile is. His father is smiling down at both of them, an arm around each of them. It was one of the outtake photos that Adrien snagged off a USB he stole from his dad's home office. It was intimate. It was the family Adrien grew up in and the one he had lost so suddenly.

There is a knock at the door he doesn't reply to before his secretary barges in saying, "Thirty minutes, Adrien." She is very pregnant and balancing a cube gift box on stop of her stomach. It is tied with a fancy black ribbon at the top.

"Chloe." Adrien stands up the second he sees her and rushes over to take the box. "You can't be carrying things like this."

"It's fine, it's not heavy." The box doesn't weigh anything, but Adrien had already scolded her a few times for trying to move his things up to the fourteenth floor. "I finally got Kim to take some of your boxes to your new office, but I think he got distracted already. Haven't seen him in an hour. I swear, this place is going to fall apart the second I leave."

Adrien puts the box on his desk and turns to face her. She's even more easily agitated these days. Adrien can take Chloe's heat easily, but he's concerned for her and the baby who constantly kicks her bladder. "You're not supposed to be doing a lot right now," he reminds her.

"Well, I was supposed to be on my babymoon two weeks ago, but somebody kept putting off accepting the VP job," she chides him. He gives her a weak smile, scratching the back of his head.

When his father first offered him the position, Chloe was the only one present. She had told him two things: Congratulations and that she wasn't leaving on maternity leave until he was the newly installed VP if he chose to do it. She didn't trust anyone else to handle his business, and Adrien wasn't sure if he could trust someone else, either. Ultimately, it led to her delaying her maternity leave for three weeks.

"Open the box," she tells him, waving dancing fingers towards its direction. Adrien takes off the lid from the unlabeled box. There is a satin sage green button up folded inside, adorned with black buttons. "Your dad wants you to wear it to the press conference. He said it was one of the last things your mom ever sewed together." Chloe wears a tight lip smile, some of her lipstick is getting smudged to her upper lip and her eyes dewing with tears. When Adrien gently reaches down to pick it up, Chloe lets out a choked sob and he jumps back a step.