What did the word want mean, anyway? Wanting things wouldn’t make them true. He wanted his mother back: not something that was going to happen. He wanted his father to want him: evidently not an option.
Maybe he did something wrong. He’d been trying, right - the way you are meant to try for the people you love - and his father had been trying back for a while, Adrien had seen it, so maybe he had done something wrong. What had led up to that? What led up to the midnight phonecall where Gabriel slurred and Adrien worried and his father told him he was not wanted, had never been welcome after his mother had disapeared, had never -?
What led up to that? Did Adrien do something wrong? If he could just track down what he had done wrong, he could... if he could just fix whatever it was that had made Gabriel angry, he...?
Ladybug landed beside him, and Chat dragged a gasp in - swallowed - scrubbed at his eyes, quickly, because he did not need to worry Ladybug, as well, he could at least look after the one person who did still want him. (That wasn’t fair. Really, it wasn’t: he should have been at Nino’s. Or the Dupain-Chengs’. He should have been with his family, his actual family, but instead he had left out the window and run as hard and as fast as he could, as Chat Noir, until his lungs could not quite breathe air and he choked on his own sick - they were a little way’s out of Paris, now). How had she found him?