Café au Lait | Miraculous Ladybug [DISCONTINUED]

chapitre un

O N E
"ladybugs and black cats"

—

The young girl sprinted to the next block, her destination Collège Françoise Dupont, her school. She was running late, as per usual, and she did not want to miss another five minutes of class.

She'd overslept, and Tikki, her kwami, had tried to desperately wake her up, but to no avail. She'd finally opened her eyes when her phone rang, signaling that her best friend was calling, wondering where the hell she was.

She ran up the stairs to the building and up to her classroom, never stopping or slowing for a beat. She burst through the classroom's door and skidded to a stop, breath coming in short gasps, trying to regain a normal breathing pattern again.

"Marinette, I see you're late again," Miss Bustier stated, as said girl apologized profusely and hurried to her seat, trying not to trip. Her best friend, Alya Césaire, leaned over in her seat to whisper into Marinette's ear as she slid in next to her.

"What took you so long?" the Ladyblogger practically demanded. "I called you ten minutes ago!"

"Sorry, Alya," Marinette mumbled. "I overslept again." In truth, the bluenette had been dealing with an akuma attack yesterday, as her alter-ego Ladybug, the single heroine of the city of Paris. Coming home later than planned, she'd had to do her homework quickly and fell asleep soon after. By then, it was past her normal bedtime and she'd missed some of the valuable rest.

Alya rolled her eyes and offered a small smile to Marinette. "Mari, you have to stop oversleeping. What time are you going to sleep? You can't keep being late to class. I can't just be a human alarm for you, every single day."

"I know, Alya. I know. I did my homework late yesterday..." Marinette tried to come up with an excuse. She shrugged her shoulders. "I had a lot more than I expected."

Alya didn't buy it, and Marinette could tell, but decided against interrogating the girl. Both of them turned to the front and began concentrating on Miss Bustier's lesson.

Breathing a sigh of collective relief under her breath, Marinette reminded herself to make up a better excuse next time.

—

Adrien Agreste stared out the window of his room, his eyes blankly roving over the beautiful Parisian landscape.

He felt like a bird trapped in a cage. Its own cage.

Although he was the son of the internationally-famous fashion designer Gabriel Agreste and was a famous adolescent model himself, he was restricted in many ways. Outsiders thought that he was as free as those black cats that roamed the streets wherever and whenever they wanted, but he was quite the opposite.

All his life, he'd been privately tutored, escorted from location to location, watched over, and briskly ignored (mostly by his father). He couldn't leave his own home without a bodyguard and notifying his father, or Nathalie Sancoeur, his father's assistant. He never had any friends, because he simply wasn't allowed to.

Adrien's room was quite large, but he had already gotten bored of pacing around it a long while ago. His large windows produced a great scenery of the city of love, but that didn't change the fact that he'd been confined in this room for a few hours.

He slumped down on his white couch and closed his eyes.

After a few moments, his eyes opened and that's when he noticed the small, black-and-red hexagonal box on his coffee table.