Seven Seconds

A Betrayal of Lips

The newest and the best. That was the only acceptable standard to the demanding and hard-to-please Gabriel Agreste.

So it was that time of year again; the new version of smartphones was coming out, so everyone in the Agreste household was getting an upgrade.

"We'll be getting you a new phone tomorrow," Nathalie told Adrien during dinner. "They'll be able to seamlessly transfer everything from your current phone to the new one. Just make sure that there's nothing in your deleted files folder that you want to keep. Those files don't get transferred."

"Deleted files folder?" Adrien repeated, stabbing another piece of potato with his fork. "Don't things disappear forever once you delete them?"

"No," the woman replied, getting agitated. "They go to your deleted files folder. If you want to get rid of things permanently, you have to go in and delete them from that folder."

He furrowed his brow. "That doesn't make any sense."

A sigh, full of annoyance. "I didn't design the system, I'm simply telling you how it works."

After finishing the last bite of his dinner, Adrien wiped his mouth with his napkin and turned to face Nathalie. "Sorry, I'm not trying to give you a hard time."

"It's fine," she replied with tight lips. "Just make sure that everything is ready for tomorrow morning."

"I will."

"Good, now run along to your room and have a good night."

"Thank you Nathalie," Adrien said. He got up from the table and swiftly made his way upstairs to his bedroom, closing the door behind him.

Now that they were alone, his kwami Plagg popped out of his shirt and flew off to get a piece of Camembert from the mini fridge. Adrien, meanwhile, took out his phone and started searching through the files. After a minute, he found what he was looking for.

There it was, just like Nathalie had said. The deleted files folder. What an asinine concept. What was the point of deleting something if it still remained on your phone?

Although he was pretty sure that there wasn't anything important, Adrien scrolled through the files anyway.

They were mostly pictures, even a few pictures of Ladybug. But those ones weren't deleted because he didn't like them. He just thought that he had enough pictures of her already in his camera. After all, three hundred and seventy-two photos of the same person was enough.

He scrolled through amusedly, remembering the times that were captured in the disregarded pictures. But then he got to a video file, one with a time of about five minutes. Perplexed, he opened it up to watch it.

His best friend Nino appeared on the screen and started speaking. "Hey my dude, I'm not quite sure what to tell you, except for you're my man, dude. And bros are always there for their guys."

Adrien stopped breathing, overcome by emotion. This was the video that his friends had made for him on the one year anniversary of his mother's disappearance. The video that he never got the chance to see, all because his cousin deleted it.

His cousin, Felix, had visited months ago. And during his visit, he swiped Adrien's phone and searched through it. But worst of all, he opened the video and deleted it before Adrien could watch it.

Even though they looked exactly the same, almost like identical twins, Adrien and Felix could not have been more different personality-wise. Felix deleted the video out of anger, or jealousy, or out of some other malicious intent.

But now it was back.

Actually, it had always been there. Adrien just simply didn't realize it.