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The benefits to an education received through homeschooling were myriad and manifest.
This, Adrien Agreste had known from a young age, practically as soon as he was ready to enter into the rough equivalent of kindergarten, beginning to work with the first in an extended series of nannies, tutors, and private instructors. All curriculum guidelines were met with stringent adherence to the ministry of education's standards, and then exceeded in every way because those had been designed for lowbrows, no brows, and ignorami.
Otherwise known as public school children.
So Gabriel Agreste said.
And Adrien wasn't one to disagree with his father.
At least not out loud.
The very first major research paper he had been assigned, right around the time he'd turned ten, required him to itemize and analyze the most salient current sociological studies on the emotional adjustment, academic achievement, and employment prospects for children who were so blessed as to have been born to financially independent, invested and dutiful parents. The self-sacrificial and conscientious decision to homeschool children was to be lauded.
Such things were manifestations of parents' loving concern and care, so Adrien was informed by his father through a scheduled meeting with his assistant.
Nathalie even read father's note off the good stationary. The business stationary! Monogrammed, too!
Adrien was worthy of the much prized business stationary, only used for the most vital of formal matters.
As if there could be any greater affirmation of his value to Gabriel.
The corporation or the person?
It didn't matter. They were the same thing as it was only by way of convenient legal fiction that either one could be considered anything akin to a human being.
Adrien didn't quite follow what Marinette meant by that when, on hearing of his father's magnanimity, she'd started ranting in her loft bedroom, mouth frothing just a little bit with the sheer amount of spittle that was flying about. Fortunately, that had garbled some of the obvious cusses as she stormed back and forth between her chaise and sewing desk while pausing occasionally to chuck bolts of material about haphazardly, like Godzilla hucking toy cars, in yet another display of that bakery-girl muscle. Fortunately, he'd been there to intercept the flying fabric before Marinette accidentally shattered a window or smashed her computer monitor.
Close as he'd ever come to playing pitch and catch.
When composing that term paper, Adrien had been lucky enough to be held to the lamentably and laughably poor rubric used in a university undergraduate course. Educational standards were slipping even faster than literacy levels in all educational milieu, so Gabriel Agreste had insisted with a sneer on being given a summary of Adrien's twelve page essay.
But the point was that Adrien knew from a young age that homeschooling was in his best interest, from developing emotional processing skills to fostering intellectual development. All to secure the best possible future for a lad.
All the research said so.
And authority figures, familial, academic, or governmental, would never lie to him.
The very suggestion was so laughable it made him cry outright!
Such a lark!
For all that education, though, Adrien remained well aware that his sphere of knowledge was limited in key respects; isolation had left him unprepared to pick up on certain social cues and norms that defined the friendships of his peers.
Given the initial struggles, a certain degree of emotional detachment or, one might even say, dissociation but never in a pathological way, was quite to his benefit.
Entirely to his benefit, really.
But it was that lack of socialization that surely led to some of the initial faux pas, little errors in his behaviour. The first lunch had been just one example. Not his fault, though. It wasn't as if an isolated home-schooled child could be expected to know how to eat his lunch without the requisite pieces of silverware, including seven distinct forks and a pair of escargot tongs, rather than a single flimsy plastic cafeteria spork, which was both spoon and fork simultaneously while functioning as neither.
Most frustrating of all, though, was the regular failure to understand or intuit what was obvious to his peers.
Heck, he'd been in university before he found out what Playing Super Penguino really meant!
That sort of thing blossomed into a moderate form of social anxiety, which, for some reason, he had no trouble plastering over with a broad, fake smile and an additional smidgen of feigned obviousness.
Must have been all the modelling work.
Plenty of practice with focus-group tested smiles, there.
Today, he'd run head first into a tight spot that once again had him straining, gritting his teeth, mired in a flaming ocean of ignorance the likes of which had plagued him throughout his teenage years.
This time, though, he couldn't hold back. He had to know! It was impossible to resist the pull of feline inquisitiveness and breathless anxiety, so intense that he had quite literally stopped breathing, it seemed, because his lungs were on fire and his vision hazed, the pristine white panels of his bedroom ceiling blurring to the point that it seemed that a nice London fog had rolled in.
He hefted himself up so that he was propped up on his elbows.
"H-hey?" he inquired, brow pinched and jaw quivering with strain as he gazed through squinting eyes at his otherwise occupied princess, whose form was swimming in and out of focus. "Do you think that ... you could ever see me as... MORE than a friend?"
From her comfortable position, splayed out on her belly, Marinette looked up at him with a quizzically cocked brow.
He suspected that her somewhat mangled expression was one of confusion, though he couldn't fathom what might have been unclear about his carefully-phrased question. Had she, in all the months and years they'd shared, never even pondered the question that burned in his mind and heart, kept him awake each night for hours on end?
It did not, however, impel her to unwrap her lips from their heavenly spot, halfway down his really rather insistent and moderately aggrieved erect cock.
Now, said lips had arrested their journey downwards, completely still.
Much like the tongue that was mid heavenly swirl, just about to reach the cleft of his balls.
Transitioning from quirked brow to rolling eyes, just for a second before she deepthroated his cock with what sounded like a half pleased, half exasperated groan, Marinette appeared disinclined to respond.
Given that it was a really rather pressing matter, Adrien might have asked again, but for the fact that she grasped hold of his smoothly waxed balls - everything was waxed because a gentlecat made things easy and smooth and clean for a lady - and began to roll them in that special and insistent way that he really liked.
That kind of short circuited most every attempt at thinking.
Oh well.
Adrien's fists clenched, nails digging into his palms, and a guttural, sighed hiss burst from his lips as he came down Marinette's gullet, the contractions of her throat milking him dry, his princess swallowing his release with her lips locked to the base of his cock.
He simply supposed that they'd figure it out eventually.
