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Adrien opens the door. He looks horrible.
“Oh, thank Gimmi you’re here.” There’s carrot puree all over him, and all over the baby; his guest must have frowned, for he pulls his hand back and wipes it on his sweater. “Sorry, the house is a bit of a mess — please come in.”
‘A bit of a mess’ doesn’t even begin to cover it, but as long as his coat is spared, Felix doesn’t mind. He and Adrien never got the chance to be noisy, to leave toys under the sofa and crayons on the coffee table: there’s something a bit foreign to it all, but he knows his cousin must be doing something right.
Although it really, really doesn’t look like it right now.
“Have you slept at all in the past week?” Felix aims for the kitchen, without asking for permission. “You look exactly as bad as you did the first time.”
“There were only supposed to be three of them,” Adrien mumbles, collapsing on the sofa. “I’m too old for this.”
“I thought being a parent was the most wonderful job in the world,” he teases, filling the kettle up. “The epitome of happiness. Your words.”
“It is. I’m just not very good at it.”
But Baby Sabine smiles, one of her adorable two-toothed grins, and her dad relaxes a little. Felix shakes his head, reaching for the cabinet; then stops to marvel at the fact that the lavender cup is his, that he has a place in this joyful capharnaum.
It never gets old.
“I hope your plans for today include taking a shower.”
“Sure. If I can remember how that works.”
“After that, you’ll take a nap,” he adds, hand heavy on the chamomile. “I’ll pick Louis up from school. See how long it takes him to realise I’m not you.”
“You’re the best brother in the world.” Adrien smiles — this never gets old either. “But that’s not why I called you over.”
The kettle beeps. Felix fetches it with a quirk of his eyebrow.
“It’s about Hugo.”
“What about him?”
“Hmm, everything?” Sabine bounces on his knee, giggling uncontrollably. “He got dumped by a girl, I think.”
“You think?”
“Luka deduced it from the disruption in his inner melody.” Felix still can’t believe that’s an actual parenting trick. “Mari and I didn’t even know he’d been seeing anyone… She was not amused.”
“I can imagine.”
“Point is: he’s holed up in his room right now. Been there for days. And I don’t know what to do.” The sigh that escapes them is far too dramatic. “Emma never gave me any trouble at that age… Why can’t they stay little forever?”
Nevermind that Emma and Hugo are twins, or the recent tirade about infant care. Sabine picks up on her dad’s distress, and affectionately smears orange paste all over his cheek.
“That’s tragic. It truly is.” Felix struggles to keep a straight face. “But if you can’t get through to him, I don’t see how I could help. After all, you have more experience getting ‘dumped’ than I have.”
“You think you’re sooo funny, don’t you.”
“Hilarious, actually. But please go on.”
Adrien rolls his eyes, but there’s a crinkle there he can’t disguise.
“Hugo is a bit of a hopeless case.”
“Encouraging.”
“For me! Not for you! He won’t listen to me because I’m his lame dad or whatever. But you…” He gestures widely then, and Sabine almost tumbles off his lap. “You’re powerful in a way I can never hope to be: you’re the Cool Uncle.”
“You think I’m cool?”
“I think you’re my only hope.”
It’s something so precious, this teasing between them; and the chamomile hasn’t infused yet, which gives them both a much needed reprieve.
Felix will regret this later, he thinks. But really, he won’t.
***
Life is awful and he wants to die.
It’s a reasonable course of action, he thinks, considering the mortifying silence of his phone: Hugo refreshes his messages every minute or so, and the soft glow of the screen is starting to look like a pyre. Dad refuses to let him wither away in peace, bringing offerings of food he’s too magnanimous to refuse, so it looks like his agony is going to last a while — until he dies of grief, or maybe of old age.
The door creaks open. He curls into an even smaller ball.
“Rise and shine, caterpillar!”
“Go away, Dad!” Hugo groans, or maybe sniffles. “Have you no respect for privacy?”
“As a matter of fact, I don’t.” There come the inevitable footsteps, followed by the dreaded dip of the mattress. “You and I need to have a little conversation.”
“I don’t want to talk to you! Fuck off!”
Apparently, that was the wrong thing to say: the blanket comes flying off, and he fumbles to get a hold of it, and when he finally looks up —
“Is that how you talk to your dad?” The voice scolds, stained with a hint of amusement. “I have mixed feelings about this.”
“Uncle Felix!”
“The one and only.”
Twins or not, Felix is unmistakable: there’s something sharp in this green gaze of his, although his nephew has seen it melt countless times. The nose is unique too, elegantly aquiline, designed for sculpture and sketches; Auntie is the only one who ever got its likeness right, committing it to paper with the gentle caress of her charcoal.
… Gosh, he’ll never have what they have.
“Is that how you live?” Uncle crosses his arms, inspecting the mess of his room. “This place reeks of yperite. Do you have a gas mask I could borrow?”
“If you’ve come to humiliate me, I’m afraid Sasha’s beat you to the punch.” Hugo’s arms stretch out as he falls — ready to attend his own crucifixion. “Why is life so cruel, Uncle?”
“It’s not. You’re just the narrative’s favourite.”
Through one half-shut eye, he catches the intruder playing with a snowglobe.
“Don’t drop that! I wasted an entire afternoon trying to get the glycerine concentration right.”
“You made this?” Uncle, never one to miss an opportunity to misbehave, shakes the trinket like a pair of maracas. “You really take after your mum.”
“I don’t care about Maman. I care about Sasha.”
“So your teenage angst extends to all three of your parents… points for consistency, I suppose.”
No one understands his pain. Hugo pulls the covers up again, resolute: he has decided to sink, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it.
“Well, I’m going to the craft store.” He hears the characteristic way Uncle smoothes his coat out. “Come along, or rot.”
“Good riddance.”
“I guess I’ll have to spend all the money on this gift card on my own… Tragic…”
“You’ve got a gift card?” Hugo peeks out of his hiding hole. “How much?”
“Enough to cover the materials for a bunch of snow globes. But I suppose you’re too entrenched in your woes to even care about such trivial matters.”
“I know what you’re trying to do. It won’t work.”
Uncle smiles, and makes his way to the door.
***
Five minutes later, they’re in the car, on a grey chunk of road that really doesn’t suit their destination; rain falls around them like arrows, a cacophony against the glass, and Hugo lets out what can only be described as a professional sigh.
“I hope you know this isn’t the end of the world.”
The teenager, in pure teenager fashion, sags into the backseat.
“No one understands.”
“Do you hear yourself?” Felix turns the headlights on; gold cuts through the dense anthracite. “Or have George Michael’s highest notes made you deaf already?”
Hugo grunts; his uncle doesn’t spare a glance back, but he knows the earbuds are now back in their case.
“You think you know everything.”
“Don’t I?”
“No. You’re living on an entirely different planet.” There’s a thud then. Is he trying to break his skull against the headrest? “All of you are. Papa is a guitarist, which means he could pull any girl he likes —”
“Again, I have to ask: do you hear yourself?”
“… and that’s not even the worst part.” Hugo pauses, but Felix won’t grant him the grace of a question. “The worst part is that Maman and Dad are none other than Ladybug and Chat Noir.”
“Oh, you’ve figured that out already?”
“Point is: love comes easy to them. To all of you.” That is the funniest thing he’s heard all week. “Auntie and you never even had a single fight.”
“I distinctly remember being held at chair-point,” Felix observes, contemplating the windscreen wipers’ dance. “There was also a bokken, that one time.”
“You deserved it.”
“While you are innocent of all crimes, of course.” Finally, he interrogates the rearview mirror. “The perfect boyfriend, through and through.”
Hugo knots his hands together, which is answer enough: after all, he is also Adrien’s child.
***
“I mean when you think about it, like, really think about it — it’s not my fault.”
The glitter works wonders, as it always does: just looking at the sparkling shelves unlocks something in his chest, a cascade of words that have been boiling right under the surface. Distantly, he wonders if there might be magic at play — fairy wings, maybe, crushed into some sort of truth serum.
“I have so many things to do all the time. Homework, and DIY projects, and band practice…”
“Oh? You’ve picked up an instrument at last?”
“Urgh, no. I only go to support my friends… Sheet music is faaar too complicated for me.” Sighing, Hugo adds another bocal to his cart. “I shouldn’t need a Rosetta stone to play the ukulele, you know what I’m saying?”
This next one is blue, so blue: it reminds him of Sasha’s eyes, dark and deep and a thousand things he can’t put into words. The universe must be conspiring against him today.
“She said she felt neglected. What does that even mean? She’s not a baby or a pet... I can’t always hold her hand. I can’t always text her back within the hour.”
Even though he really wishes she would text him back right now. How long has it been — two, three days since they last spoke? A miserable ‘ok’ from her side, not even capitalised, not even softened with an emoji or two?
She used to send him hearts, so many of them, sparkling and twirling and pierced by Cupid’s arrows. He would respond with something funny: a GIF of a cat having the zoomies, a nerdy reference that never failed to make him snort.
“So what if I never told her I love her,” he breathes, setting the bocal back on the rack. “I did. I loved her. That has to count for something, right?”
Silence: Hugo lifts his head, his anchor of a head that drags him down an uncharted abyss, and blinks.
Uncle Felix is nowhere to be seen.
***
Hugo isn’t four: he’s almost in high school, almost an adult, and most importantly, he has a phone, this magical instrument that can get him out of trouble in an instant.
Except he has murdered his battery checking for texts that never came, didn’t want to be here in the first place, and most importantly, he’s fourteen — almost a child still. Suddenly, what was already a shitty day turns into a hint of stress, a stream of unease, a wave of anxiety he’d rather not be dealing with right now.
“Uncle Felix? Where are you?”
The store isn’t that big — he can’t have gotten far. Hugo peeks into the next aisle, the one where the weird cardboard animals roost, and finds… nothing, except for weird cardboard animals. He’s especially not a fan of the stag head on the top shelf, staring him down like he is the hunting trophy.
Uncle Felix wouldn’t leave without him, would he?
Yeah, he absolutely would. Which is great. Phenomenal, even.
Hugo leans against the shelves.
Theoretically, he could walk all the way up to the bus; but that would mean getting soaked. Alternatively, he could ask the staff to call his dad; but that would mean explaining he got lost in an arts and crafts store like a baby — maybe even suffering through an announcement on the speakers.
The logical course of action is to accept defeat. To press his knees to his chest and his face to his knees, and pretend he’s still in bed.
“What are you doing?”
Hugo cracks an eye open, and finds his uncle standing there.
“You abandoned me,” he whines, for good measure.
“I was gone for less than a minute.”
“You’re supposed to look after me,” Hugo snarls, pulling on his hoodie’s strings. “What if something horrible had happened to me? What if I had gotten akumatised?”
“Oh, I’m sorry — did you think this little trip was about you?”
The comeback is so brutal, so unexpectedly vicious, that Hugo has no choice but to straighten up.
“I was content to stay home until the day I died! You brought me here!”
“I said you could come along if you wished,” Uncle shrugs mercilessly. “I would have come regardless.”
“What the fuck could you want from an arts and crafts shop?”
“I’m not here for myself either, genius.”
Uncle waves his hand around, and Hugo spots it at last: a beautiful sketchbook, hardcover and all, and not a small one at that. There’s room for thousands of sketches in there, he bets, and the paper must be smooth and sturdy and that beautiful cream colour that makes one want to chew on it.
“Of course.” Hugo hits his head against the shelf. “Uncle, why do you hate me?”
“I don’t hate you yet,” he counters, “but if you don’t tone your self-centeredness down, I might start.”
“This is torture. You’re twisting your marital bliss like a knife in my wound.”
“Could you stop whimpering for a minute?”
Hugo does, even though it’s unfair: there’s a long tirade incoming, because of course there is, and he would rather walk the path of least resistance.
“When she was fourteen, your aunt started a journal. Which was also a sketchbook, and a herbarium.” Uncle runs his fingers against the spine, gently, tenderly. “There weren’t a lot of beautiful things in her life, so she needed to hang on to what she could… By the time we met, there was almost no room left in there.”
“So you got her a new one?”
“I did better than that.” This glow in his eyes is for Kagami, and Kagami only. “I brought her the best quality sketchbook I could find, and brushes, and watercolour pencils. Everything I could think of, I got her.”
“That’s very nice of you, but —”
“I left a note on the back of the cover, telling her how much I wanted her to have this — how much I wanted her to keep drawing, writing, and collecting flowers like memories. How much I wanted to build our nest between these pages, and stay there forever… In short, how much I love her.”
“I think I get it, Uncle.”
“And,” Felix goes on, because of course he does, “it’s become a tradition between us. I don’t wait for her to tell me she needs a new sketchbook or more acrylic paint — I pay attention to these things, and she always finds them on her desk right on time. Always with a little note, of course.” He pauses there, and presses the gift to his heart. “Il n’y a pas d’amour, il n’y a que des preuves d’amour.”
Hugo keeps quiet, fidgeting with a loose bead. It must have escaped the jewellery corner, he thinks, and rolled all the way here to die.
Finally, he sighs the obvious out of his chest.
“I ruined everything, didn’t I.”
“Indubitably.”
“So what now? Is this the part where I make some grand romantic gesture?” Already, his mind is spinning. “Because I can do that. I can totally do that! I’ll craft her something, or run to her in the rain, or something —”
“No. Dear gods, no.”
Uncle kneels close, and Hugo braces himself for a revelation; for the magic trick that will save his relationship, and put his life back on track.
“This is the part where she moves on to someone better,” Felix grins, evidently proud of himself. “And, hopefully, it knocks some sense into that angsty brain of yours.”
Hugo’s jaw drops, but no protest makes it out.
“Come on now.” Uncle taps his shoulder, then rises once more. “We don’t have all day.”
He sets the present in the cart, lovingly; and his nephew has no choice but to follow.