Miraculous One Shot Compilation

Attention from Adults

As soon as he exited school, Adrien was assaulted, but his bodyguard couldn't do a thing about it. The boy's olfactory assailant had come rushing down the street from the Dupain-Cheng bakery and punched him directly in the nose.

Obediently, he turned and followed the scent of baking pastries, ignoring the gorilla honking the horn at him to stop. As he came through the door, he was greeted by a vaguely familiar woman. "Oh, hello, Adrien right? If you're looking for Marinette, she and Alya are out in the park."

'Why would I be looking for Marinette in here?' He wondered momentarily, then he wanted to slap himself. This was a business, but it was also the residence of the proprietors and their daughter. 'Marinette lives here, idiot.'

"Uh, no thanks, Madame, I followed my nose here actually." Adrien dug for his wallet. "I was hoping to get some of whatever that was I smelled."

"You smelled my croissants!" The baker - Marinette's father - boomed, coming out of the kitchen, brandishing one of his crescent shaped creations as though it were a weapon. "They drag poor, innocent people off the streets all the time!"

The woman - Marinette's mother, he now realized - laughed cheerfully. "Oh, if you don't mind me saying, you could use more to eat, you models always seem frightfully thin."

"Not by choice," Adrien hissed to himself, then spoke aloud again "This kind of thing really isn't on my diet. I'm being bad by coming here, but I just can't stand to follow the rules every second of every day." He immediately wondered if he should have said that. Would they refuse to sell to him? Were they allowed to do that? The bakery couple were wonderfully nice people, but they were parents, and parents get mad when kids are bad. Do they get mad when other people's kids are bad?

Tom was glaring at Adrien, looking him up and down, making him uncomfortable until the large man thrust the croissant into the boys hands. "Doesn't your father feed you anything?! He should be ashamed of himself. He can well afford the food, he has no excuse to keep a sack of bones for a son!"

Adrien was shocked to say the least. He'd expected them to be mad at him, not his father. Instinctively, he went on the defensive. "I don't think he knows how thin I actually am, he hardly ever sees me, and... how much do I owe you for this?" He raised the croissant.

"It's yours boy, eat it! Right now! I want to see that you do it."

"Thank you!" Only manners restrained Adrien from shoving the entire thing in his mouth at once.

"What kind of father doesn't notice when his son gets this thin?" Sabine commented.

"Not a very good one that's for sure." Tom grumbled in response. "Listen, Adrien, you should come by and let us feed you more often."

"Or," Sabine put it "if it's too hard for you to sneak away, we can always send the food to school with Marinette. I'm sure she wouldn't mind the task." She and Tom chuckled as though that were some inside joke between them.

"I can come!" Adrien found himself exclaiming eagerly. He wanted to talk to these warm people again.

--

As Adrien continued to visit the Dupain-Cheng bakery, the food - wich he now insisted on paying for - quickly became his least favorite part. Not that he didn't adore all the baked goods, but they couldn't compare with the attention he was also fed. Gradually he opened up to them, and gradually he told them everything.

"Did you have to tell them that you're Chat Noir?" Plagg whined to him one day when Adrien finally got home. "That could be dangerous for you and them."

"I can't help it, they're so good at giving advice. Besides, they'd have to be akumatized for it to be a problem, and you have to be in a bad mood to be akumatized. Their home is the happiest place on earth!" Adrien reasoned.

Plagg could see he was getting nowhere, and he had to admit one thing to himself. Whenever Adrien went to see Ladybug's parents, it put him in a good mood, and when he was in a good mood, he was willing to shell out the camembert. You lose some and you win some.

Meanwhile, in the bakery, Tom was wondering if he would do anything with the information that the boy his daughter liked was head over heals for someone else. He just wanted to protect her as best he could from heartbreak. He decided he probably wouldn't say anything, knowing his daughter, Marinette would never be able to confess her feelings anyway.

"Yes. Okay. We'll talk to her." Sabine hung up the phone with a sigh "That was the school. Marinette was absent in study hall and the first part of geometry. I don't know what's gotten into her this year. She has always been late getting to her first class, but she never used to skip parts of the school day once she got there."

Tom looked thoughtful. "Study hall and the first part of geometry did you say? Weren't those the same classes Adrien told us he had to miss because of fighting an akuma?"

"Oh!" Sabine's hand flew to her mouth as she came to the same realization her husband did. Maybe they'd be saying something after all.

--

Over a few more weeks, they kept a close eye on Marinette's behavior and confirmed their suspicion. Their daughter's absences from both home and school coincided perfectly with akuma attacks.

"Well?" Sabine sat beside her husband on the couch. He'd been sitting wordlessly for hours, his mustache scrunching up into a prickly bush as he thought.

"You know," he finally said "when that boy's idea of 'being bad' is to eat a pastry every once in a while, I really don't mind him hanging around our daughter."

--

On Adrien's next trip to the bakery, he was presented with two flat, cardboard boxes. "This one is for you, and this one is for Ladybug. Can you deliver it to her?"

Of course he agreed. In his box he found a single, enormous, sugar cookie with a simple message frosted onto it, thanking Chat Noir for all he did. He assumed Ladybug's gift was similar. It turned out he was wrong.

"What do you have there?" His partner asked him as they met for a routine patrol. It wasn't every day he brought a flat, cardboard box with him.

"Some civilians gave me presents for us." He explained "I already ate mine, this is for you."

Ladybug took the box and opened it, quiet as her eyes slid over the message laden cookie. Once her mind was able to comprehend what it said, she let out a squeak of surprise. "I- I see you met my parents."

"Your parents?" He asked, moving over to see what was written on her cookie.

Dear Marinette,

We suggest you go ahead and share your identity with Chat Noir. We promise you won't regret it.

Sincerely,
Maman and Papa

"Your parents." He breathed.

"Yeah, my parents. I guess the ladybug is already out of the bag, so are you going to let the cat out?"

"Uh, yeah, sure." Now he knew why Tom and Sabine had been holding in laughter when they handed him the boxes. They already knew who Ladybug was - their own daughter. In the face of all that, Adrien was kind of confused by the thought that came to the forefront of his mind 'They approve.'