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Rose has always assumed that everyone else knows, too. How could they not?
Adrien leans against Nino within the first five minutes of the start of class everyday, tucking himself into his friend's side and heaving an obvious sigh of relief as a weight drops from his shoulders. He backs away so sharply from Chloé and Lila, or he would if they ever left him space to retreat. He rests his hands on Marinette's shoulders and gazes at her like she hung every star in the sky. He flinches when Kim or Alix shout or when Mylene or Marinette drop things. He hangs around the edges of conversations like he doesn't know when he's allowed to jump in, or if he's allowed to jump in.
And then Rose mentions it offhand to Juleka one day.
And Juleka reacts by finding Luka, and dragging him into their room, and insisting that Rose repeat what she's just said.
"He's- he's not happy at home. Something's wrong, and he's not- he's scared a lot, and he's- something's wrong, when he goes home. Wrong like- like it was for me," Rose says, voice faltering in the face of her friend's worried expressions.
Juleka and Luka exchange one of those rare speaking looks that Rose still has trouble interpreting. She's gotten a lot better at it, but her friends have had a lifetime to develop that wordless language and Rose has only been catching up for a few years yet.
Luka speaks up first. "Do you think he's safe at home?"
Adrien flinches at loud noises and dropped pencils. He doesn't know exactly how conversations work, or how to tell someone that he doesn't want to be touched, or how to tell someone that he does. She's caught him checking the room for exits at the same time that she is often enough that they've begun to meet each other's eyes for only a fleeting second and then move on.
It's true that he's not the only one who flinches, and Hawkmoth's hobby of terrorising the city has made most of them far warier than they used to be. Adrien is far from the only classmate she catches checking the doors and windows- Ivan and Marinette had both started doing the same thing after Hawkmoth's first appearance, and Nath has been doing it for years- but he's the only one who does it quite the same way that Rose has learned to. The others scan openly, suspicious and on edge and not afraid to show it.
Well, except for Alya, who scans with excitement instead of ill-disguised fear, but Alya is the exception and not the rule.
Adrien doesn't check like that. Adrien checks in the same quick, darting glances Rose had learned hard were her best chance to not get caught at it.
(So does Nath, sometimes, but it's not so constant and she knows how often he goes to stay with Kim or Alix. She's not so worried about him, not like she had been at first. Nath has people. Nath might have had people before she had people.
She doesn't know who Adrien has. If he has anyone at all.
Because- because she thought they knew ).
Rose opens her mouth, but she shrinks back herself at the sudden memory of voices raised and things thrown, because this is a private family matter, isn't it, not something she should be sharing around, even if it's not her family-
Juleka holds up both hands, palms out, and takes deep, even breaths until Rose starts trying to match them. Until she can reach a count of ten. Luka takes a step back, fading into the shadows, fading out of her space.
It's not her family. This is her family.
And sometimes Adrien cuts himself off the exact same way that she just had.
She can't be the only one who sees him doing it.
Can she?
Rose shakes herself, and then tries to ignore the way the shaking doesn't really stop. Her voice shakes, too, but she still forces the words out and they don't even sound like she's trying so hard not to swallow them back. "No. He's not safe." Mylene dropped a pencil and Adrien flinched like he'd seen a butterfly. He's not safe.
Rose had had a family to run to. Anarka never really talks about it, because that's not really the kind of person Anarka is, but she'd welcomed Rose immediately and she'd never said a word about it when Rose stayed later and later and longer and longer and by the time Rose quit even pretending to go home she'd found that Anarka had already quietly gone to the school and changed her home address over to the Liberty.
Anarka never has actually said anything about it out loud, but Rose has a room here if she wants it (she always shares Juleka's but she has a room), and a seat at the table, and a stocking at Christmas that had just appeared and somehow matches the rest of the family's, and a place in all their family photos. She'd gone to live with- hide with- her girlfriend one day, and she'd been too scared to leave, and she'd found a brother and a mom too and by the time she stopped being scared she couldn't imagine leaving.
What does Adrien have?
Rose can easily name half a dozen people who'd take him in, from Nino all the way down to Chloé- not that it would be a good idea, but Adrien seems to be one of the only people Chloé ever listens to, and it's gotta be better than-
Rose thinks suddenly of the one and only time she's ever met Chloé's mom.
Maybe not.
(Except that Chloé's dad, aggravating as he is, will still move heaven and earth to try to keep his daughter safe and happy. There are stories there, and Rose doesn't want to learn them, but she thinks about it sometimes anyway).
"Is this... a recent thing?" Juleka asks, her voice soft. Rose glances up and finds her girlfriend's eyes are pained.
Juleka's apologised for not knowing Rose needed a safe place sooner. Rose keeps telling her it was never her fault, and that Rose would never have expected her to know, and it doesn't seem to help.
Rose really wishes she didn't have to say this. It seems silly now that she'd ever thought everyone else had known. Of course they would have done something if they'd known. "N-no. It's, at least since we met him?" Maybe not the first few days, but it seems a lot more likely that she hadn't noticed right away then it does that it had started any later. "I think longer."
Luka sucks in a breath and takes his own turn counting to ten. Juleka just- breathes, in that steady, measured way that tells Rose just how upset she is.
Then Juleka opens her eyes. "Call Nino. Luka, call Marinette. Get one of them to bring Alya, I'm going to go see what Ivan and Nath know about breaking into houses." She pauses. "Out of houses."
"I think," Luka pauses, because his breath's still unsteady, "I think it's going to be both."
They get Nino. They get Marinette and with her, Alya. They get Ivan and Nath, and they bring Kim and Max, and Kim brings Alix and Ondine, and they end up with... They end up with a lot of people. Adrien has a lot of friends.
Rose had thought that they knew.
There's too many of them to stay hidden as they try to get into the mansion. They get a few of their classmates to hang back, but not many, and Rose is pretty sure no one could have stopped Marinette or Nino but no one is stupid enough to try.
Rose is kind of scared to find out where Marinette learned to climb like that.
Or how she so perfectly throws the rope Alix had scrounged up for them. Marinette even manages to hook the weighted end perfectly around Adrien's window ledge, something Rose would have sworn wasn't possible if she hadn't watched her do it.
Rose isn't sure why Marinette had bothered, considering she'd climbed so fast Rose isn't sure she ever touched the rope.
Nino swarms up the rope to Adrien's room almost as fast as Marinette had climbed, though, and Rose thinks that maybe that's why Marinette had secured it after all.
It's only minutes before the two of them are climbing stealthily back out, Adrien between them and looking bemused, and then all of them have to scatter to go and rejoin the others.
For the most part they scatter into their own established groups, but Rose finds herself with Adrien and Nino.
She's not sure how Marinette agreed to separate even temporarily, but then she thinks about how Juleka gets sometimes when she finds out something Rose hasn't thought to mention before. Maybe Marinette needed to peel off for a few minutes.
Nino might need to do the same thing after they make their meeting point.
"Um," Adrien says, once they're several streets away. "Not a complaint, but... is there a reason I'm getting kidnapped?"
Nino falls back to Adrien's side, nudging his shoulder with his own. "Because we decided this time we're not giving you back."
Adrien blinks, bemused. "Okay, I'm pretty sure you can't do that."
"Watch me," Nino growls, but it's under his breath. From the way Adrien blinks again, it's not under his breath quite enough.
How had she ever thought that any of them knew?
They really hadn't known about her, either. From the worried way Nino is looking at her now, they'd never truly known.
"Where are we going?" Rose asks, wincing inwardly as she cuts off whatever Nino's about to ask. From what she's seeing, though, Adrien genuinely doesn't have any idea why they would all show up to kidnap him, and Rose knows from experience that if he doesn't know yet it'll still be too easy to startle him off.
Rose had already been on the Liberty for a long time before she'd admitted to herself that her parents had been wrong. Rose had been there more than long enough to realise that her parents weren't going to come after her.
She's acutely aware that they're going to have the opposite problem with Adrien.
She steels herself anyway. They're all creative and determined. Almost all of them have fought akuma and come out of it still swinging. If they combine their talents, they can figure out how to keep Adrien away from his father for good.
Assuming Adrien wants that. Rose hadn't, not at the beginning, but it had been different for her.
She thinks it's probably different for everyone.
She thinks of Ivan and Nath sleeping on their deck on too many warm summer nights to be a coincidence. She thinks of the week she'd dragged Nino to the Liberty after her while his parents escalated and escalated and escalated straight into a divorce.
She thinks of Kim's offhand comments about his empty home, about Alix's apparent lack of supervision and her standing invitation to sleep at the museum- somewhere Alix probably isn't supposed to be sleeping herself. Alix has mentioned her dad and Jalil being forgetful before. Rose has never known just how seriously to take that, but according to Juleka 'sometimes we sleep in a museum' is somewhere well past normal levels of forgetful. Rose wouldn't know.
She wonders if Adrien would know.
His problems seem to be almost the direct opposite of hers, so. Probably not, still.
Nino stops running once they reach the shop they'd agreed to meet Marinette and Alya outside of, closed this time of night but with chairs still set out on its patio. Nino looks at Adrien out of the corner of his eye and then snags two of them, dropping into one himself.
Rose quickly claims another before Adrien can assume that they're supposed to remain standing.
Nino tips his chair back and stares forlornly up at the night sky. "We actually don't have a plan, do we?"
"We could play keep away with him?" Rose suggests, tilting her own head back and still thinking of all her friend's different homes and places to sleep. Some of them still have one and not the other, but all of them are more than willing to share.
Nino snorts, which is answer enough.
"I still have several questions," Adrien starts, and then his head snaps around. He's turning towards Marinette before Rose knows Marinette is there.
Marinette doesn't quite look at him, but she's always been at her best when she's helping someone else. Taking a deep breath, she stands a lot straighter as she offers with the confidence he probably hasn't seen as often as the rest of them have, "I know we can come up with a few."
Her lips quirk as she turns to meet Adrien's gaze after all. "I hear I'm actually pretty good at spontaneous plans."
Bizarrely, Rose could swear that Adrien's shirt pocket laughs.