One shots

The Past Is Catching Up

A/N: The finale of season 5 never happened! 

Nathalie was just trying to walk towards the dining room without her crutches or her supporting device from the Tsurugi-Company, when she heard the doorbell ring and instead of walking further and through the two winged, iron door, she turned around and managed the few steps to the entrance of the Agreste mansion.

There she simply grabbed the handle and opened the door a little, then completely, seeing a young woman, maybe eighteen, maybe even younger, standing outside and trying to see anything in the shadow of the atrium.

"Hello!" the assistant said sternly, "can I help you somehow?"

"I am looking for Gabriel Agreste!" the female replied, her face emotionless, her voice firm and steady. As if she had practiced this sentence a thousand times, Nathalie thought.

"And what business would he have with you?" the older woman asked her coldly.

"Well, after I turned eighteen, my adoptive parents let me see all the documents, they had about me and my biological parents, and it turned out, that he is my father!" responded the girl.

Gabriel had heard the doorbell too and was now approaching from upstairs, seeing his assistant turn pale and begin to sway. He couldn't hear, what the young woman had told her, but obviously it had been something really bad.

Taking three steps at a time, he rushed down the last stairs, and got there just in time, to catch  an unconscious Nathalie in his arms.

Lifting her up bridal style, he called out her name, as he was about to carry her back to the first floor and into her room.

"Nathalie, please. Wake up! Don't scare me like that again!"

Hearing the assistants first name made the teenage girl gasp and without hesitation she now entered the mansion and followed the tall man up the staircase and then along the floor on the right, where he pushed the door to a bedroom open and brought Nathalie inside. 

As he was just placing her on her bed, he noticed that he had been followed and was about to yell at the woman, when he felt his oldest friend's hand on his arm and turned around to look at her.

"Don't!" Nathalie hissed hoarsely. She cleared her throat, then tried again. "Don't send her away. She... she is..."

Tears were now running down the woman's cheeks and she was sobbing heavily.

"I'm so sorry!" she gushed out. "I should have told you. But back then, my parents forbade me to talk about it and later... well, when's the right moment to tell your best friend and the man you never stopped loving, that your own family forced you to move away so nobody would find out, that you had given birth at the age of seventeen? That you never had had the chance, to tell the father of the child, you had taken away immediately after it was born, that he was a father? When should I have told the man, who had fallen for another woman, while I was gone for almost a year, that I had tried to take my own life, after they took away the baby, I really loved? Tell me Gabriel, when?"

She cried even stronger now, her still fatigued and damaged body reacting with a severe coughing fit. 

The designer instantly laid his arms around her and helped her sit up, so she could breathe.

"Shush, my dear. I am right here and I'll always look after you, Nath. Just take deep, slow breaths, okay?" he hummed softly into her ear. Despite being completely overwhelmed and barely able to think, after what he had just heard, his concern for the woman, he had once loved more than anything else, was stronger and made him react on instinct.