Forgotten

Chapter 4

Nino had replied promising to bring over the work Adrien missed in his classes and Adrien had decided to put his energy into researching Chloe's accident. Surely, with the mayor of Paris, an international celebrity, and their daughter someone should have written at least one news article about the collapse.

But nothing showed up.

Whether Gabriel had done something to keep the media quiet or he had done something to stop information reaching the house, Adrien felt himself deflate. So much for his father changing because of the freak accident. There had to be an ulterior motive, of course, there had to be. Nothing would cause such a sudden change in his father's demeanour, not the even the loss of some of his wife's oldest friends. Stopping Adrien from getting information was such a classic Gabriel controlling move, trying to 'protect' his son by hiding him away from the world.

It didn't work, though. While it had taken a while, Adrien was at a normal school and he was Chat Noir, a superhero with near-infinite freedom. Everything that Gabriel had worked so hard to prevent Adrien seeing, every experience Gabriel had tried to exclude him from had come back later.

"Plagg?" Adrien called out to his kwami unsurely, not knowing what Plagg was doing. Recently, the tiny cat creature had been much more comforting and hadn't demanded cheese once. Apparently, Gabriel wasn't the only that seemed to be going through rapid personality changes.

"Yeah, kid?" The fridge didn't even more as Plagg phased through the door, holding a wheel of camembert.

"I want to transform so I can see what happened myself."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Plagg swallowed the cheese in one go before continuing. "You might just feel worse after seeing it. You don't have to go and look at things you don't want to, and if there's one thing I've learned through my years is that if you do something because you think you have to, you'll only regret it later."

"My father has tried to block me from finding anything out, so I'm going to search for answers myself. Plagg, claws out!" Plagg could only sigh as his holder made what he considered to be a huge mistake.

Chat Noir leapt out the window of the Agreste Mansion and onto the rooftops of Paris. If he followed Chloe's normal route home, he should be able to find the building pretty quickly. Except it was almost completely untouched, except for the police tape and the boundaries keeping everything separated from the inside.

Of course, there wasn't going to be anything left, the ladybugs had already come through. Had he been expecting differently? The building wasn't still going to be in pieces and spread across the road and he wouldn't be able to see anything, or even guess what had happened inside. He had been too busy fighting the akuma to worry about if people had been inside the building, assuming they would evacuate the building the second it looked unstable. But for whatever reason, no one had. And the consequences had been severe and deadly.

When he was standing on the edge of the building, Chat noticed the scene was still swarming with people. Investigators, reporters, nosy citizens, everyone that could have a passing interest was there, loitering around the barricades and police tape. He even thought he saw Lila for a few moments but when he blinked, she was gone, and he dismissed the thought. Chloe and Lila didn't like each other, why would Lila care about what the repaired scene of a building collapse looked like? She gained nothing from Chloe being injured or in a coma.

From the street below, Officer Roger Raincomprix looked up at the hero on the roof. Sadness was evident on the boy's face and Roger couldn't help but sympathise for the boy. Both of the heroes looked around his daughter's age and she had been torn up about the accident, so it only made sense that other people her age felt the same way. With the way Sabrina talked about Chloe made it seem like she was the most popular girl in all of Paris.