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SIXTEEN | STAY A LITTLE WHILE
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A HULKING PRESSENCE ON THE EDGE OF THE UPPER EAST SIDE, THE AGRESTE FAMILY MANSION MADE ALL THE OTHER NOBLE HOUSES SEEM INSIGNIFICANT IN COMPARISON. It's vastness cast a shadow over the gated community the father and son resided in; an imposing structure wrapped in an aura of cold elegance. Unlike a lot of their neighbours, that had a lot more classically designed structures, the Agreste family home was constructed with a modern eye. Its sleek futuristic lines were a stark contrast against the cloudy sky, giving it an almost otherworldly pressence. The gardens, pruned to perfection and spanning an acre, made all the other ones look like a childs vegetable patch with its rigid hedges and pointed rose bushes. In his fifteen years on this earth, Adrien Agreste had never seen so much as a blade of grass out of place.
Inside, the vast rooms felt empty and contained a constant, almost haunting echo to them, the silence typically only broken by the faint rustle of curtains in the drafty halls. Shadows often danced across perfectly polished marble floors, alluding to at a time when this home was once filled with warmth and laughter. The walls, adorned with striking art, seemed to silently mourn the absence of life, while the sleek furniture stood like lonely sentinels, untouched and draped in an unsettling stillness.
And although Adrien Agreste had long since come to dread these dinners, he was also grateful for the silence to be broken. He would gladly accepting having to sit through surface level small talk with the Osborns and the Bourgeois' over the silence.
Ever since he had enrolled at Midtown Science and Technology, Adrien had found coming home even more lonely than before (which was saying something because he used to have an army of imaginary friends as a child). He always felt empty when the school bell would ring and he'd have to leave the constant noise he'd grown to find so comforting. The ghost of what his life could have been–if his mother was still alive–haunted the blonde far too often these days. A constant punch in the guts to remind him that he would never know the love his friends grew up in.
Fictional media always pushed the idea that money couldn't buy happiness and as a little kid, who could point at any toy in a catalogue and have it appear in his room the next day, he had never quite grasped the concept. However, the older he got and the more time he spent having friends that weren't conjured in his imagination, the more he was starting to get it. Adrien would happily watch every high wall of this house burn to the ground if he could live one more day with his parents from before (or even just parent. Singular).
