31. Chapter 31

A/N: So if anyone gets lost by the whole screenprinting screen process/wants to know more/whatever, I pretty much just searched "How to screen print t-shirts at home DIY" on Youtube and went off a video I found there.

"Oh, this stuff smells," Adrien grumbled Friday evening as he and Marinette worked side-by-side in her bathroom. The space was only lit by the dim red light from a few flashlights, and even those weren't pointed towards their work. Apparently too much light could make the mixture Marinette was making set before it was supposed to, so they had to work in near-darkness to get the screen printing screens ready to go.

"I would turn on the bathroom fan, but I don't think there's any way to do that without turning the light on, too," Marinette said. She accidentally elbowed Adrien as she reached for the next screen to coat. "So, uh- hopefully this isn't too poisonous?"

"Oh, that's comforting." Adrien spread the mixture across his own screen, doing his best to get it spread out evenly across the entirety of the fabric. Marinette had demonstrated how to do it earlier, but it was a little hard to see what she was doing clearly when it was so dim. "And so how are all of these supposed to dry in here? There's not enough space."

"Um." Marinette didn't sound too confident. "Well, normally whenever I do this, I just store the screens wherever I make them, but there's too many this time. I set up a drying area in my bedroom and taped a double layer of black garbage bags over the window so light couldn't get in, but I don't know how we're going to get stuff from here to there. It's not like either of us can see in the dark, and we can't turn on the lights even for a moment."

Adrien sat straight up at that as an idea clicked in his mind. "Wait, repeat that again."

"We can't turn the lights on even for a moment?"

He shook his head, then realized that she couldn't see him. "No, before that."

"Neither of us can see in the dark- oh!" Marinette exclaimed, catching on in an instant. "If you transform, you'll be able to see! But don't do it in here," she added quickly. "I don't know what kind of effect that kind of light would have on the mixture."

"Oh, don't worry," Adrien said. He finished his work on his screen, then felt his way up so he could stand. "I have no idea where Plagg is. I gotta find him first, and then I'll transform in the living room. I'll close the bathroom door on my way out."

"Don't turn on any lights!" Marinette called after him. Adrien laughed.

"No need to shout, bug. I haven't gotten that far," Adrien teased. He whacked his knee against the toilet and swallowed a swear, instead edging forward more carefully. "Oh, boy. This is gonna be difficult."

"I'll go get Plagg!" Tikki suddenly piped up from somewhere to Adrien's left. "He'll meet you in the living room."

It took Adrien nearly five minutes to work his way out of the bathroom, close the door so none of the light from his transformation could get in, and edge down the hallway to the living room. Once there, he didn't dare go too far in. The risk of disturbing any of the piles of clothes was just too great.

"Plagg, stop sniggering over there and just transform me," Adrien ordered. He held out his hand in wait, and sure enough, there was a squeal as Plagg was yanked towards his Miraculous. A flash of light lit up the room, and suddenly Adrien could see again.

Sure, maybe everything was tinged green from his night vision, but what did that matter?

Chat Noir headed back towards the bathroom with a spring in his step. It was much easier now, and soon he was stepping back into the dark bathroom. It was nearly bright as day with his cat vision, and Chat Noir had no trouble with maneuvering his way among all of the screens littering the floor.

"Better?" Marinette asked. She turned and squinted up at him. "Can you move the finished screens to the bedroom and set them up like I told you earlier? And once that's done, we can go to bed."

"On it!"

Saturday dawned far earlier than Adrien would have liked, especially with how late they had worked the previous night, but he wanted to help Marinette finish the work on her printing screens. While she could probably manage by herself, every minute counted and his help would probably shave at least half an hour off the entire process of setting and washing the screens.

So he rolled out of bed, made pancakes while Marinette showered, got dressed in his most grungy clothes (after all, Marinette had said that this part of the process could get messy; she had said the same thing about the their previous night's work and she had definitely been right, so he was going to listen to her advice), ate, and followed Marinette over to her very chemical-scented apartment.

"I'm opening all of the windows first," Marinette announced, dashing across the room. "Shoot, I should have done this last night, but I thought it would get too chilly in here. Aaaand I don't know why I cared, because I wasn't even going to be over here."

What followed was a series of mad dashes to and from the darkened bedroom, bringing the dried screens out and keeping them hidden from the light until the pattern laminates were in place and could be put in the sun. The exposure for setting for each screen didn't take long at all, and then Adrien was running the screens back inside. It really didn't take long to do each individual screen, but there were a lot of them. Some of Marinette's designs required multiple screens because there was more than one color on one shirt.

"Washing time!" Marinette announced as soon as the last of the screens were set from the sun. "C'mon, I'm gonna wash them in the shower. You can hand the screens to me."

Grinning, Adrien let out a low whistle. "Whew! You're inviting me to shower with you? Spicy!"

Marinette groaned and swatted him, but she couldn't hide the small smile of amusement that flitted across her face.

The next part was by far the messiest as water sprayed all over the bathroom while Marinette tried to wrangle the shower head to point where she wanted it. It could be taken down to be used as a handheld shower head, but she just didn't have enough hands to hold on to it, the frame, and the sponge all at once.

"How did you do this before?" Adrien asked with a laugh as he slid past Marinette to take the shower head from her. "It looks like you need three hands at the very least."

"I think I propped the frames up on something," Marinette admitted. She ran the sponge over the screen, and Adrien was almost surprised to see the design emerge as certain sections of the chemical wash rinsed out. She compared the design with the laminate, nodded, and then set the screen aside to grab the next one.

And the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

"And here I thought you said that the screen-printed shirts were fast and easy," Adrien joked halfway through the process. He was absolutely drenched, thanks to the few times when Marinette had accidentally held the screen too close to the sprayer and all of the water came right back at him. She had apologized, of course, but Adrien had jokingly sprayed her back and they had decided to call it even.

"They are!" Marinette protested. "Once the screens are done, they're really fast."

Adrien tried not to laugh. "Yeah, so, funny thing... we have to make screens for what? Each shirt? Several per shirt? That seems like a really important time component."

"If they order more of the same pattern, then I can reuse the screen," Marinette told him. She switched out the screen she was working on for the next one. "And there are several shirts in the same order with all the same pattern."

"Do you think people would order more of the same pattern?" He would have thought that they might want a couple shirts with the same pattern for different band members, but if that was the case then they would surely order all of those shirts at once, right? "Like, how likely is that?"

Marinette shrugged, then cringed as another spray of water reflected up into her face. "It depends on how big the band is. If they have a good following, then they might want more shirts to sell to their followers."

...oh, that sounded like that could be a big commission. Adrien's Marinette-is-overworking-herself alarm went off again. "That sounds like...a lot of work."

"It wouldn't be!" Marinette assured him hastily. "It would be one or two designs, probably, just repeated a bunch of times. It would be a one-time thing making the screen. And I would order pre-made shirts for those, too. It would just be the applying the ink and setting it that I would have to do. And I would set aside a large chunk of time to do it, too. And if they're a really big band, they would probably just buy the pattern to have a commercial manufacturer do the printing to sell."

Adrien nodded warily. In his mind, the jury was still out on how long that would take. His definition of fast and Marinette's definition of fast seemed to differ sometimes.

Both of them were fully soaked by the time the last screen was cleaned and ready to dry, mostly because they had devolved into water fight mode at the end. Adrien swore that he was just trying to help clean Marinette up- after all, she had lots of little flecks of the chemical emulsion mix on here from the sections that had washed out all over here, and surely she wanted those washed off, right? And what was the point in waiting for things to wash off in the washing machine when he had a shower head in his hand? - but Marinette had squealed and splashed him back. The screens had been forgotten for a few minutes as they focused on getting the other as wet as possible. Only Tikki flying in and demanding to know what on Earth they were doing made the two of them get back on track.

"I'm going to have to put some towels down to get the water up," Marinette said ruefully as she looked at all of the puddles on the bathroom floor. "Any chance I can borrow your towels, too? I promise I'll wash them."

"I can wash them, too," Adrien pointed out a bit breathlessly, shoving his sodden bangs out of his face. "The puddles are partly my fault, too. But yeah, I'll get all of the towels over in my apartment." He looked down at his dripping clothes. "And some dry clothes, too."

"Yeah, I should change, too." Marinette tugged her shirt off, wringing it out. An impish look flickered across her face, and she snapped the shirt at him, sending a splattering of water his way.

"Very funny," Adrien said immediately, moving to shed his shirt as well. Maybe he could wring it out over her head. "But don't you know cats don't like-"

"I thought you were trying to be productive today!" Tikki scolded them, zipping back through the bathroom door. "And the puddle in here is starting to seep into the hallway carpet. Are you going to do something about that?"

Yelping, Marinette scrambled to get out of the tub. She grabbed the sole towel left in her bathroom and laid it out next to the door. It immediately turned dark with water. Adrien followed at a slower pace, pulling his shirt off and wringing it out in the tub before trying to wrestle it back on. It stuck to his skin oddly, but it would work for now.

(And by for now, he meant "for thirty seconds until he could get back to his place and change".)

Adrien headed back to his apartment, wincing as he dripped on the carpet. He grabbed dry clothes and all of the towels in his bathroom, even down to the hand towels and washcloths (there had been a lot of water on that floor) before trotting right back to Marinette's apartment. Much to both his and Marinette's horror, the carpet outside of the bathroom was slowly getting more and more wet. They threw down all of the towels to try to get the water soaked up, but there was no way to fully dry the part of the carpet that was already sodden.

"I want to get the frames back outside to dry and to make sure they're fully set before I use them," Marinette told Adrien while they changed into dry clothes and dropped their sodden things into the bathtub. "Do you think I could use your balcony for that? It gets more sun in the afternoon."

"Of course. And, uh... remind me again why it is that the sun is so important?"

"It sets the emulsion mixture," Marinette told him. "The UV light does, at least. That's why I used the transparencies to get the pattern on. The dark parts of the pattern block the light, and then the mixture behind those parts doesn't set and washes out, and then later the ink goes through those washed-out parts. Setting the screens out for the rest of the day means that I'll be sure that it'll hold up."

...that sounded like something he would be interested in, actually. Chemical reactions could be cool.

"Do you think you'd be willing to do the rest of the hardware today?" Marinette asked, then corrected herself. "Except for the snaps. Those are hard to get in exactly the right place, and I'll do them. But if we get those done, then I'll have my kitchen counter back."

Adrien grinned. "Sure. I like being Master of Bling."

Adrien didn't miss Marinette's slightly worried glance at the clock as they hauled the frames and all of the pieces he had to decorate over to his apartment. It was fast nearing midday, and she still had a lot of sewing to do.

Like, a lot of sewing. He was pretty certain that she had wanted to finish assembling all of the pieces that she had already pre-cut, and that was on top of the screen printing that she wanted to do on Sunday. It was a ridiculous amount of work to do, really, but she had deadlines to make. As long as she got enough sleep and actually ate, he would be happy.

"Why don't you eat, and I can get the frames out to dry?" Adrien suggested. "I have wraps in the fridge. They're the same kind that I made for you during Fashion Week."

Marinette laughed, even as she made a beeline for his fridge. "What, did you just make a giant batch of them?"

"Yup!"

Now that the screens weren't in such a delicate stage, Adrien could carry several at a time out to the balcony to set up. He noticed during one of his trips in that Marinette had vanished- his guess was that she had scarfed the wrap and had headed straight back to her apartment to sew- but that was fine. The sooner she got to work, the sooner she would get done.

"Hey, Adrien!"

Adrien paused in setting out the last of the screens and glanced around, trying to locate the source of the call. His eye caught on a movement and he glanced up to see Marinette's coworker Sarah waving to him from her balcony, one floor up. He waved back.

"Has Marinette roped you into helping with commissions?" Sarah called with a grin. "I know she said that she had a lot to get through."

"Actually, I volunteered," Adrien called back. "She has a huge backlog of commissions to get through right now before she can get it down to a reasonable amount."

Sarah frowned. "How much does she have to do? It was just Fashion Week! She should have restricted what she was accepting more!"

Adrien cringed. Apparently Marinette hadn't shared the full extent of her overworking herself with her teammates, which…. was understandable, really. Some of Marinette's co-workers might then think that Marinette wasn't applying herself fully to her main job. Still, he trusted Sarah. "Yeah, about that... she didn't want to turn anyone down or wait list them, so she was accepting everything. And she's going to wait list any more requests until she's caught up and has a bit of a break, but right now she's buried. So I'm helping her get through some stuff so she can have a better idea of what she has left."

Sarah winced at that. "Oh, I can understand why she might do that, since she's so young yet," she said sympathetically. "I've never gotten a high enough volume of commissions for it to really be a problem, but Marinette seems to be a band favorite right now. Does she need any help sewing? I already ate lunch, so I could bring my machine down and do a bit of sewing today in exchange for dinner."

"Oh, that would be great!" Adrien could make dinner no problem- he was running out of things he could actually do to speed Marinette along anyway- and Sarah and her sewing machine could really help Marinette put a dent in her pile of work to do. Adrien could take care of the hardware while the two women sewed. "She's got a ton of stuff cut and ready to sew."

"I'll be right down, then!" Sarah called. She grinned and vanished inside. Adrien quickly made sure that the last screen was laid out flat and headed in as well so he could tell Marinette that she would soon be having yet more backup.

"Won't you have enough to do without making dinner?" Plagg wanted to know when Adrien came back in. "You have, like, a million rivets and eyelets and other shiny metal things to put on the outfits."

"I'll have to make dinner anyway for Marinette and I. It won't be that hard to make an extra serving." Adrien stepped around the outfits set out on the floor, all marked with where the hardware was meant to go. "And it won't take all day to do the hardware. It only takes a couple seconds for each rivet, really."

Adrien stepped out of his apartment, leaving Plagg behind. He paused at Marinette's door- hopefully Marinette was actually at a point where she could use the sewing help, and hopefully she would be open to the help, because he knew that she could be annoyingly stubborn about things at times- and then he shook the thought off. He knew that she had a lot of things cut out but not sewn together, and she was floundering so much right now with the number of commissions that Marinette would surely be thankful for the help. Besides, it wasn't as though Adrien had commissioned a stranger to come in and sew. Sarah was Marinette's friend, and just like Adrien himself, she wanted to help Marinette.

"Hey, Buginette," Adrien announced, stepping into Marinette's apartment and looking over at where she was (very predictably) parked in front of her sewing machine. "I found more backup."

Marinette paused the sewing machine and turned to look at him. "What?"

"Sarah volunteered to come down and help you sew in return for dinner," Adrien told her, grinning when he saw Marinette's eyes go wide and a relieved look start to spread over her face. "And I was going to have to make dinner for us anyway, so it won't be hard to make an extra serving. Do you want me to help you clear off the kitchen table so she can sit there?"

"Oh, that would be great."

It wasn't long before Sarah was knocking on the door. Adrien let her in and pointed her towards the table, grinning at her exclamation when she caught sight of the piles of clothes organized around the room, then left the two designers to work. Tikki flittered after him as he headed back to his apartment to start work on the hardware.

"Marinette is lucky to have such great friends," Tikki commented. She looked happy. "They'll probably get through a lot of the stuff that Marinette has cut today! I bet that they'll manage to finish up at least one order today, if not two, and then with the screen printing tomorrow...that'll finish up several commissions!"

"That's going to be nice," Adrien agreed. "And I picked up boxes yesterday, so we can package things up right away and get them sent off. I might even start packing things up this afternoon if they're almost complete, just so it isn't so crazy over there." He grinned remembering the look on Sarah's face when she first spotted the insanity that was Marinette's apartment. Adrien had to wonder how horrified Sarah would have been if she had seen the mess before Adrien got everything organized.

Before Adrien got started with the hardware, he got out cheese for Plagg and cookies for Tikki. The two kwamis settled down (Plagg on the balcony to nap in the sun and Tikki on the table to watch Adrien work) and Adrien started in on the first piece, one with only a few rivets for emphasis in a few select places. Marinette had taught him earlier in the week how to put the studs in using a scrap piece of fabric, so that Adrien wouldn't mess up any of her nearly-completed pieces.

That would be a disaster.

"So are these pieces done once the rivets are in, do you know?" Adrien asked Tikki as he carefully punched the first hole and then set aside the hammer to thread the rivet through. "Or is there still work left to do on them?"

Tikki frowned as she thought about it. "I think there's still stuff left to do on some of them, at least. Ones with lots of studs or rivets get a lining put on after, like with the other ones you worked on before. But I think she has most of the liners done, they just have to be attached."

"I'll bring pieces over once I finished a couple, then," Adrien decided. He tapped the thin tool- what it was called he really didn't remember, even though Marinette had definitely told him several times- twice with the hammer, firm but not so hard that he might smash his fingers, then set the tools aside to check his work. The rivet was firmly in, so he moved to the next one, and the next one, and the next one.

"Can you put some music on, Tikki?" Adrien asked as he put the last rivet in the first jacket and checked to make sure he had gotten everything for the piece.

"On it!"

Adrien worked his way around the room to the beat of Jagged Stone's newest album. He did the pieces with the fewest studs and rivets and eyelets first, then brought the pile over to Marinette for her to inspect and sort into piles of finished and needs a lining before he went back to work on the hardware-heavy pieces.

Those really did take a long time. It sped up a little when Adrien punched a whole slew of holes first and then did a bunch of rivets one after another instead of doing one at a time, but it was still late in the afternoon by the time Adrien finished up the last piece and brought it to Marinette for a liner.

"Time to start working on dinner," Adrien announced to the kwamis as soon as he had dropped the last piece off and was back in his apartment, stretching and twisting to try to work out the stiffness that had settled in his back. He would have to use his rice bag heat pack later to try to fix that. "And then while stuff cooks, I can work on my homework a little. Ben said that he thought my essays are all ready to go, but I want to quick double-check on a couple things before I turn it in, and I have some other stuff to work on."

Tikki frowned. "Are you neglecting your own studies to help Marinette?"

"I've got everything under control!" Adrien hastily assured her. "I can spare the time. I just can't completely stop studying. And if I'm really running short on time, I can probably do without the essay read-throughs, since they're technically only rough drafts." He let out a frustrated huff. "It's too bad this didn't happen during the summer. I would have had entire weekends and my evenings free to help and I could have taken time off to do the print shop errand... but then again, I think I've done most of the stuff I can help with, at least for now." After all, he couldn't help at all with the sewing, or the designing, or the pattern-making or anything. The best he could do was keep on top of his own work so that when Marinette could use his help, he could spare the time.

Adrien moved through the kitchen, cutting potatoes and chicken and heating the oven. It really didn't take long at all, and then he was tossing everything in oil and spices and arranging it in the dish so things would all cook through before sliding the dish into the oven and setting the timer. He rinsed off his hands- handling potatoes always made his hands feel gross and starchy- and then headed out to the balcony to bring in all of the screens that were still sitting outside. They were all dried and very much set, which was perfect. It looked like everything had come out nice and clean, which meant that Marinette wouldn't have to redo anything.

Which was fantastic, of course. She really couldn't spare the time right now to redo any of the screens.

With the screens safely stored away, Adrien settled in at the table to study. He only had two exams before spring break started and they were in classes that he was doing well in (thank you, Ben) so he wasn't scrambling or anything, but that didn't mean that he could slack off before the tests. He was partway through his flash cards when a beep reminded him that he had to grate some cheese to go on top before the dish came out of the oven.

"Well, some studying is better than no studying," Adrien said cheerfully, hopping up and setting the flashcards aside. "And I can study after dinner, too, unless Marinette has something else I can help with."

"I thought you were going to start getting stuff into boxes after dinner," Tikki said, zipping after him as Adrien took a block of cheese out of the fridge and rummaged around in a drawer to find the grater. "Are you going to study after that, then?"

"Boxing things up shouldn't take long," Adrien told her as he started to grate the cheese. Plagg roused from his spot in a ray of sun and floated closer, and Adrien automatically swatted him away. "I already have the piles all sorted out. I might need to sort the pieces that got finished today, but it still wouldn't take a whole lot of time. I just have to put things in the boxes and then seal up the ones that are finished." He scooped up the grated cheese and dumped it into the measuring cup he had taken out. It wasn't quite enough, so he picked up the block of Mozzarella and started grating again. "And you said that there would be a few things finished today and maybe several more tomorrow, right?" He groaned. "That's going to be fun to try to carry to the post office. I don't even know how I'm going to manage."

"Marinette could get a couple boxes," Tikki pointed out. "Even if you leave at different times, you could just each take as many boxes as you can carry. Maybe some of the boxes could wait for another day. And I don't know if the screen stuff is actually going to be finished tomorrow. I think it has to dry overnight and then get heat-set."

"Fair enough." Adrien picked up the next handful of cheese and tossed it in the measuring cup, frowning as he did. He could have sworn that the cup had been fuller before. "I just want to get things out so Marinette can check them off and delete it from her commissions list."

"She just collapses and hides the row," Tikki told him. "She doesn't delete it. It's so she still has that information on record, but it isn't muddying up her spreadsheet."

"So Marinette can do that, then." Another handful of cheese, and it was still not enough, which was rather odd. "I just want her list of incomplete commissions to shrink, and soon. She's so stressed out about the whole thing."

Tikki nodded. "Yeah! That's what I told her when she just kept accepting new commissions, but she was sure that she could keep on top of things, even when that list started getting ridiculous."

Adrien nodded, trying to figure out how much Marinette would have left if she got everything she wanted to finished in the next two days. Tikki had said earlier in the day that with everything that had been cut out finished, two commissions would be fully completed. Once the screen printed shirts were done, two more would be completed and three would be really close, with just one piece left to cut out and sew together for each. If she did the cutting tonight and maybe tomorrow morning, then maybe Sarah would be willing to come over again tomorrow (in exchange for another meal or two, of course) and finish those up.

That would be seven out of twelve commissions complete, and three of the others almost done. The other two were all in different stages of in-progress.

And speaking of done, it seemed that he finally had enough cheese. Setting the grater and the chunk of cheese aside, Adrien turned around and started setting out potholders for when the dish would come up out. After a couple seconds' consideration, he decided to make a tossed salad to go with their meal, since they didn't have a whole lot of fruit around for a fruit salad.

"Plagg, stop stealing the cheese," Adrien said in utter exasperation when he turned around to find that he was mysteriously short of shredded Mozzarella yet again. "I need to have it ready to put on, and I can't do that if you're stealing half of it every time I turn my back."

"Put it in the fridge," Tikki suggested. "Plagg hates going in the fridge."

Plagg gave Tikki an utterly betrayed look and darted in to try to steal another pawful of shredded cheese. Adrien swatted him away and quickly shredded another quarter cup of cheese to stuff in the measuring cup and stick in the fridge before Plagg could try to take any more. The move was largely useless, though, since the timer went off seconds after the fridge door closed and Adrien had to take the cheese right back out so he could sprinkle it over the top of the dish before it went back in for the final few minutes. With the timer set (and the rest of the cheese block safely in the fridge, away from Plagg), Adrien headed over to Marinette's apartment to summon the two sewers.

"Oh, perfect timing," Marinette said as soon as she spotted Adrien peering around the door. She flipping off her sewing machine and stood, stretching. "I was just about to suggest a break. My back was starting to complain."

"Do you want to borrow my rice pack?" Adrien offered as Sarah finished up a seam and stood up as well so he could escort them across the hall. "I don't want you uncomfortable."

"Maybe, yeah. Only if you don't need it, though."

"Oh, it smells good," Sarah said happily as they entered Adrien's apartment. She grinned at Adrien. "I gotta admit, I really can't cook at all and I'm always so jealous when I hear about the stuff you two make. Whenever Marinette brings leftovers for her lunch, I always have to keep myself from stealing it because it smells so fantastic."

"I can give you the recipes," Adrien volunteered. "There's some really simple ones that anyone can do. I used to not be able to cook at all, either," he added when Sarah looked extremely dubious. "But my friends taught me, and now I only screw up sometimes."

Marinette grinned and elbowed him as they sat down around the table. "My parents and I keep trying to teach him how to decorate cookies and cakes, too, but he's kind of hopeless at that."

"Yeah, well, I'm not an artist, am I?"

Dinner flew by fast as the three of them laughed and joked. Adrien noticed when he went into the kitchen for seconds that some of the melted cheese on top of the chicken and potatoes had mysteriously vanished. Clearly Plagg had decided that he hadn't had enough Mozzarella earlier. He heard Marinette let out a small snort of amusement when she went out for more several minutes later and he glanced over to see her making shooing motions.

Apparently she had caught Plagg red-pawed.

With dinner finished, Sarah and Marinette went back to work while Adrien washed up the dishes and put things away. The leftovers were almost completely devoid of cheese now, he noticed. Maybe they should have brought the whole dish out to sit on the table instead of keeping it in the kitchen so Plagg wouldn't be able to get to it.

Once everything was properly cleaned up, Adrien dug out the pile of boxes he had bought earlier in the week plus a roll of packing tape and headed across the hall. Once he had wrestled his way through the door (it was hard to open it properly with his hands full), Adrien started popping open the boxes and taping the bottoms shut so they would be ready for him to start filling them.

And then he started the long process of packing up commissions, working his way slowly around the room.

Adrien couldn't help but grin as he loaded outfits into boxes, triple-checking each outfit against each order packet and adding the colorful sticky notes to each box that were still missing pieces. Marinette's apartment was slowly starting to look like less of a disaster zone, now that most of the pieces of fabric that had formerly been simply piled along the wall were now sewn into actual outfits.

Of course, finishing all of the outfits that had been in-progress didn't mean that Marinette was all caught up with her commissions. She still had a few final preliminary sketches to alter and album art to work on plus a couple outfits that had been designed but hadn't had the pieces cut out- though at least she did have all of the materials for them, and once she got the sketches approved then she would have a whole new set of outfits to sew. But getting all of the in-progress outfits done would just mean that a bunch of her commissions were finished and she could be paid in full for the pieces, and that Marinette would be less stressed without her apartment being absolutely filled with stuff and with a shorter list of things to work on.

"I don't know how you managed to live in here with all of this mess," Sarah said as she finished up another seam. She glanced over at Adrien as he filled another box. "Like, how could you even move around? How did you eat? You were using your kitchen as a storage area!"

Adrien grinned as he folded an elaborate cape to fit in the box. "Simple. We tend to eat over in my apartment. There's less chance of accidentally finding thread in our drinks then. That's always a plus."

That got a laugh out of both Sarah and Marinette.

"How long do the screen-printed shirts take?" Adrien asked after ten minutes of careful packing and list-checking. The commission he had just run across had one jacket and half a dozen screen printed shirts. The jacket was done- it was one of the ones he had just studded, and now it had a lovely soft liner- so it was just waiting on the shirts.

"Not very long now that the screens are made," Marinette told him, not looking up from where she was sewing pockets on a pair of pants. "It'll take some time to set stuff up for the printing, and for things to dry and for me to iron things- and shoot I don't have an iron or an ironing board-"

"You can borrow mine," Sarah said immediately.

"You are a godsend," Marinette told her coworker. "And then once stuff is ironed, then it's done," she finished. "It's just that I have so many to do, so I'll probably be doing that all day."

Sarah grinned, turning to look at Adrien. "Yeah, it's definitely a good thing you eat over at your place. It's gonna smell like paint and ink or whatever over here."

"Ink," Marinette corrected. "And there's a bleach-like chemical that I use on some of the darker shirts, and that really smells. I'm going to have to have all of the windows wide open."

Adrien frowned over at her. "Do you have something so that you aren't breathing all those chemicals in? A face mask or something?"

"Yes, mom."

Adrien laughed and went back to packing things into boxes. Sarah wasn't so appeased.

"It's not healthy to be sleeping in the same apartment if it's not well-ventilated!" she scolded Marinette. "And I could still smell the screen mixture when I came in. It's one thing to work in it for a few hours, but it's something entirely different to be breathing that stuff in all night." She sent an impish look at Adrien, and he suddenly wondered how much Marinette's coworkers suspected about the two of them. "Unless...you didn't sleep over here?"

Marinette looked panicked for a moment, then her expression smoothed out. "Yes, well, sleeping on the couch in Adrien's apartment is better than breathing that stuff in all night."

"Uh-huh. The couch."

"It's quite comfortable once you pile a bunch of blankets on the couch," Marinette offered. That was a lie, of course- or, well, Adrien supposed that maybe with a ridiculous number of blankets the couch might not be so bad, but it would take more than the number of blankets he had in London.

"Hey, this one is finished," Adrien announced a minute later. He had checked the list three times, and everything was there. "Can I tape it up and get the labels taped on it, or did you want to stick anything in there?"

Marinette was at his side in an instant, looking at the list. It only took her twenty seconds to confirm that the order was in fact finished. "Just stick the printout on top, I think. Then they can see their order and check for themselves if they want. And then yeah, it can get taped up and labeled and put by the door."

Grinning, Adrien did just that. The box went next to the door and he moved down the line.

"Hey! Here's another one done!" Adrien exclaimed a few minutes later. He adjusted the front of the topmost jacket and then arranged the order printout on top of that. "That's two down!"

"Yeah, and ten to go." Still, Marinette looked happy. "How many more do you have left to check?"

"Three. But there's several orders just have the screen printed shirts left," Adrien added quickly when Marinette looked downcast. "Three so far. So they don't have that much left to do, right?"

She sighed. "Oh, I suppose that's something. I guess things will look a lot better after all of the screen-printing stuff is done. That's a lot of shirts."

Adrien had to laugh at that. "Oh, you're telling me." He had had to go through the boxes of shirts and- yeah, there were a lot of them. Over fifty, easily. Maybe even over sixty. It was going to take a long time to get them all done, but each individual shirt... well, Marinette had sworn up and down that shirts individually didn't take up that much time, especially when she had help with the ironing.

As it turned out, one more order was completed, and that box went over by the door as well. Four orders total only needed the screen-printed shirts to be complete, and Adrien set those closer to the door as well.

"I can come by tomorrow afternoon," Sarah told them as they wound up for the night. "I might not stay quite as late, but I can probably get a good chunk of a jacket done in that time."

Adrien grinned. "I'll make homemade mac n' cheese," he volunteered. "With Cheddar and Gruyere and Parmesan."

"Oh, I'm coming whether you want me to or not," Sarah announced with a grin. "I haven't had any mac 'n cheese other than the boxed stuff for... well, I don't know if I've ever had truly homemade mac 'n cheese."

"There's boxed macaroni and cheese?" Adrien asked, puzzled. That wasn't something he had ever heard of. Marinette sighed and rolled her eyes at him before addressing Sarah.

"I could definitely use more sewing help, but... I had been planning on doing all of the screen printing stuff tomorrow, just to get it out of the way." Marinette looked like she was starting to reconsider that decision. The offer of more help was just too tempting. "But I suppose I could maybe..."

"I can sew while you ink, I'm not going to be offended by that," Sarah assured her. Marinette grinned.

"Well, in that case... I would love the help!"

There were only three pieces for Adrien to bling out Sunday morning. He worked on those in his apartment while Marinette worked on cranking out seemingly endless screen-printed shirts in her apartment. Sarah showed up after lunch and set up her sewing machine in Adrien's apartment, since Marinette's place smelled strongly of ink.

"She's got clothesline strung up left and right," Sarah reported after making a trip across the hall to get something to sew. "And dozens of shirts hanging up to dry. It's going to take her forever to heat-set those."

"I'm going to do that," Adrien told her. "Ironing is something I can do, no problem." He grinned. "Even if I never did my own laundry or anything at home, I'm not totally helpless. Marinette has told me how to do that kind of stuff."

"Oh, I should have guessed." She sat down at the sewing machine and started working. "You two work together well. Marinette was telling me yesterday how much you've helped, and honestly? You'll probably be up to forty hours of work you'll have done for her by partway through next week."

Adrien shrugged. "I don't mind helping. I wouldn't want to be doing it all the time, but Marinette was just buried in work."

"Oh, you aren't kidding. I can't believe how full Marinette's apartment is!" Sarah paused and adjusted the fabric before starting to sew again. "I can't tell her what to do, of course... but I would suggest that in the future, she shouldn't take on more than one or two commissions at a time. She can draw out the designs for one while sewing another with two commissions at once... or she could have more time to do other stuff and only do one at once. But it doesn't make sense to take on twelve commissions at once."

"I think she knows that now." Adrien snapped a rivet into place with a sharp whack of the small hammer. "And a lot of the orders came in right after Jagged's album dropped and that article about her ran but they've been slowing down since then, according to Marinette. So hopefully she only gets a reasonable number of commissions going forward. I could see her getting stressed out over a long wait list, too."

Sarah laughed as the sewing machine whirred again. "Oh, she might! But that's a sign of success, to have wait lists out the door. And then if she has commissions, then she can afford to not get a job right away whenever she moves back to Paris. Or maybe she'll end up just doing freelance and commission work, should she so choose. Most people can't survive on just that, but..."

"But most people aren't Marinette," Adrien finished. "If any of the bands that she's designed for want more shirts for merchandise, or if they want more pieces, then that's a regular source of income. Well. Regular-ish."

They went back to work, and Adrien finished up his pieces. Sarah set her work aside temporarily to sew in the liner of the jackets, and then Adrien ran the finished pieces across the hall to put them in their respective boxes.

The smell of ink was almost overwhelming.

"Oh boy, this place is practically a hazard zone," Adrien commented as he ducked his way around the clotheslines and hanging shirts. "I don't know how you can breathe."

Marinette's laugh was muffled by the mask covering her nose and mouth. "Yeah, well, I'm standing by the open door. It's not quite so bad over here."

"If you say so." From the looks of it, all of the windows were open, as was the patio door. Adrien could hear the bathroom fan humming merrily, and even the fan over the stovetop was rattling along. "Is it this smelly normally when you do screen printing?" If it was, that could be a problem if they wanted to move in together. Right now, they at least had his apartment to escape to. If they only had one apartment and it smelled like this... well, that would be a problem.

"I always did it on my balcony at home," Marinette explained. "I should have dragged my table out there so I could do the same thing here, but I didn't think of it. All of the screens are going out on the balcony once I'm done with them for now, though. That might help with the smell a little bit."

"You could probably hang shirts out on the balcony, too," Adrien suggested. He glanced around and then corrected himself. "Well. Some shirts, at least. There's a lot of them."

He had thought that there were a lot of shirts when they were just in the box, or set out along the wall. It looked like a while lot more when they were hung up all over the room.

"I do have some out on the balcony," Marinette told him. "I just couldn't fit that many out there without risking them brushing against each other and smudging ink. And in the future, I think I would just do small batches. I'm tired of inking stuff already, though I am, like, three-quarters of the way through everything, I think."

"Anything I can do to help?" Last jacket folded and put in the correct box, Adrien headed over to investigate what Marinette was doing. "Or should I stay out until it's time to iron?"

Marinette only had to think for a second. "Just wait until it's time to iron. I don't want anyone else putting the ink on, just because it's important to get the screen straight, but it's hard."

"Got it." Adrien ducked in for a kiss, then remembered the mask and swerved to the side to kiss Marinette's cheek instead. "I'll clear out. Remember to take breaks, yeah?"

"Yes, mom." Marinette pulled off her mask briefly to kiss him back. "I promise. And I'll go outside to get some fresh air sometimes, too. I know it's important. And thank you so much for all of your help, it's making things go so much smoother."

"Anything for you, love," Adrien assured her, planting another kiss on her forehead. "I'm glad to help. Always."