Disclaimer:

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug and Cat Noir is not mine. I'm only a fangirl, dying for Season 2 to begin. Enjoy my attempt to console myself while we wait.

Chapter 1 - Heartless

Adrien Agreste's Russian tutor thought she was hot.

No, that was not a typo.

Larisa — she preferred to go by her first name — thought she was seriously hot stuff.

He knew because she spent at least a third of every lesson looking at herself in a compact mirror that she apparently kept on her at all times. The mirror was palm-sized, and its cover was a tai chi pattern of green embellished on gold. Adrien wouldn't have liked Larisa even without her mirror. She acted too bored with life, and she reminded him of a grown up Chloé Bourgeois. But the mirror reminded him of…

Well.

It reminded him of someone else, who he didn't like to think about these days.

"Mr. Agreste, focus, please," his tutor said. She never called him by his first name. Also, she probably thought she had to act like a tutor every now and then to justify the insane amount of money his father was paying her for the hour she spent with him every night. What a waste. He was learning more from the online lessons she made him do as homework than from her.

"Mr. Agreste. Your translation. Read it out loud, please."

He looked down at the translation he was supposed to be working on. Adrien was already fluent in English, French, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. It was only late September, but he was ahead in his history, science, literature and calculus lessons. He'd added a Russian class because his father insisted that he maintain a full course load, even if all his lessons were private. He'd been offered other options: psychology (he wasn't interested in dissecting the tangled ball of yarn his feelings amounted to these days), physics (he'd had quite enough first-hand experience with the laws of gravity), and accounting (he didn't want to think about what else he should be accountable for). Russian was safely unrelated to anything relevant in his life, except for the possibility that he and his father would be moving to St. Petersburg in a few months. It had been the obvious choice.

"Mr. Agreste!"

He began reading the translation out loud. Larisa made a noise that made her sound like a replica of Chloé Bourgeois trying to indicate her disgust over poor service at a restaurant. Adrien was more familiar with that sound than he wanted to be. He considered Chloé a friend — what else did you call someone you'd known most of your life? She wasn't a friend he particularly liked to spend time with, but she was consistently there. In fact, Chloé was the only friend he'd seen since the end of July. He hadn't wanted to see any of his friends over the summer. Even Nino wasn't getting more than a few text messages here and there. Chloé had a tendency to show up at the celebrity events Adrien's father, Gabriel Agreste, made him attend, though, so her presence in his life was unavoidable. He would be seeing her again tonight, at a charity banquet his father's brand, Gabriel, was sponsoring.

Larisa made the disgusted sound again. Adrien looked up. He'd thought he'd been doing the translation well, and that he might even be hitting some of the accents right. But it wasn't about him. Larisa was looking at herself in the mirror again.

"This rain is destroying my hair," she muttered.

"How was the translation?" Adrien asked.

She looked from the mirror to him like she was confused. "What?"

"How did I do?" he asked. "With the translation you just asked me to read."

Her phone started chiming. "Looks like our time's up!" she said cheerfully, silencing the phone and then picking up her bag. It was a cheap, knock-off brand. "It's been an hour. Would you be a doll and show me to the powder room before I leave? I have to fix this mess."

"Three doors to your left down the hall," Adrien said dryly. "Same place it was yesterday when you went to call your boyfriend during the middle of our lesson."

She hung her bag over her shoulder and flashed him a smile. "Do the next four online lessons over the weekend, Mr. Agreste. I'll see you Monday."

"Yeah. Monday," Adrien said, and he stayed seated as Larisa exited the room.

Marinette Dupain-Cheng was out with her best friend Alya, eating pho at the Vietnamese place down the street from Alya's house. Marinette normally liked pho and she always liked this restaurant. Today the noodles in her pho tasted like salted rubber, and she was barely managing to hold her chopsticks.

"So then Nino said he thought it would be fun for us to hold-up the bank down the street from the school."

"Uh huh," Marinette said. "That's great."

"I know, right?" Alya said. "It's going to be the sexiest date ever. We're even planning matching burglar outfits. Think you'd be willing to help design them?"

"Sure," Marinette said sullenly. "Whatever you want."

Alya whipped Marinette's chopsticks out of her hand, forcing Marinette to look up. "Are you paying attention to anything I'm saying? You just promised to design the burglar outfits for our bank hold-up date."

There was a time when an accusation like that would have embarrassed Marinette. Now days, she didn't have the heart to feel embarrassed about such things. She could barely feel anything at all, to tell the truth, and honestly, that was an improvement over how she'd felt most of the summer. She shrugged.

Alya set down her chopsticks and groaned loudly. "Girl, you have got to get over this. So what if Adrien doesn't want to come to school anymore? You have plenty of other friends, and there are plenty of fish in the sea. This is not the end of the world."

Marinette picked up her chopsticks again. Alya was right about Adrien. It had surprised her when he'd cut her off this summer, especially with how nice he'd been to her in June. But it hadn't been just her he'd cut off. He was hardly communicating with anyone from school. Even Nino was barely hearing from him, and they were supposed to be best friends. It was easy to understand why. Everyone who didn't live under a rock in Paris knew that Adrien and his father were still receiving death threats from an unknown source, and Adrien was a kind person. He didn't want to put any of his friends in any more jeopardy than he thought he already had, and she knew all too well that he had good reason to think that whoever was after him would come after his friends if that's what it took. She got why he was distancing himself. She thought it was a little ridiculous, but it was understandable.

"I know," Alya said with a heavy sigh. "It breaks your heart that Adrien is so scared, and you're crushed that your crush didn't come back to school. But if you ask me, he's being cowardly about the whole thing. We all told him we weren't afraid to be his friend. You told him half a dozen times yourself! The sooner you get over him, the better."

"Mmm…yeah," Marinette said. "Probably." She didn't agree with Alya, actually. Adrien was sensitive, and it wasn't a bad thing to be vulnerable enough to feel fear. Marinette did wish he'd come back to school. He had to be lonely, she still thought they could be great friends, and in her mind, Adrien Agreste was still very crush-worthy. Except…she wasn't crushing on him anymore. Not really. Because as wonderful as Adrien was, he wasn't…

Well.

He wasn't the one breaking her heart.

Thunder crashed outside and Alya sighed. "I love a thunderstorm. It just makes me feel so good to know the world is being washed clean."

Marinette's head drooped. It was supposed to rain all night. Fun. Patrol was going to be splendid.

Alya grabbed her hand. "Oh, Marinette, honey, you have to learn how to smile again! It isn't going to hurt like this forever. He's just a boy. You're you! And you get to keep you for the rest of your life, no matter what. So it's all going to be okay, I swear!"

The skies looked dark outside.

"I think I need to get home," Marinette said.