A Small but Stubborn Fire - KPG (2024)

Chapter 1: The Nightmare

Chapter Text

“NO, GET AWAY FROM ME!”

Sabine felt the shove toward consciousness as her eyes snapped open.

Marinette.

“Don’t touch me! I’m begging you!”

Her daughter’s pleas and screams rained down from the room above, scraping the unconsciousness from her brain as she flipped the duvet off her body.

“No! NOT THERE!!!!”

She threw herself out of bed, her body running on instinct, before she’d even processed what must be happening. Her knees thudded on the floor, her sense of balance chasing after her body—and gaining. She had to get upstairs!

“Tom! Tom! It’s Marinette! I think someone’s got to her room!” Her voice trailed off, growing breathy as she flung herself onto her feet and sprinted for the door.

On the way out, she reached into her open gym bag and grabbed her tai chi sword, out of breath with fear before she’d even escaped the bedroom. She slammed into the jamb of the door and felt pain radiate from her shoulder, but it didn’t slow her down.

Faster! Faster!

Her heart was in her throat, cold sweat already forming under her nightgown. Legs on fire, she leapt up the stairs three at a time.

One floor.

Two floors.

Marinette!

“GET AWAY FROM MY DAUGHTER!” Sabine screamed as she slammed the trap door open, erupting up into Marinette’s bedroom. She flipped on the light, launching herself toward the loft bed like lava cast out of a volcano.

Her body flared with madness. Sword co*cked back, grain of the wooden handle like sandpaper in her grip, she surged up the ladder, her mind rifling through long-forgotten anatomy lessons for veins to stab, and—

She stopped in her tracks as she got to the top.

Relief.

Confusion.

She perched with one hand wringing the top rung of the ladder, peering around to see if someone had disappeared into the shadows.

There's no one here. She's alone.

Her daughter was sitting bolt up with her hair a mess, a dandelion after a strong wind, tears sliding down her cheeks.

Naturally, she heard Tom before she saw him. He was like a storm rolling in over Hangzhou Bay—thunder, and thunder, and thunder, until an assault of lightning.

“I’LL KILL YOU!” He flew in, and she could swear she saw electricity bristling off his forearms.

Marinette’s eyes, blown wide, were like fish bowls filled to the brim with terror. Her irises drifted toward Sabine, and then to Tom. For a moment, Sabine saw Marinette in there, surfacing into the remnants of the storm that she and Tom had brought with them.

“Maman…what are you…” Marinette lost control of her own breathing and went limp.

“Meiyun!” Sabine finished climbing the ladder and crawled to her daughter’s side to make sure she hadn’t hurt herself. She hauled Marinette into her lap, gasping at her daughter’s tremors as she lay unconscious, the teaspoon cuddling the tablespoon.

Marinette croaked every time she inhaled, and when she exhaled, her lungs rattled like death.

What’s wrong with her breathing?

Sabine held her close and began rocking to soothe her. “Shhhhh, shhhhh, it’s OK. You’re OK. It was just a bad dream. Shhhhhhhh.” It was easier than expected to move her daughter around.

Is she losing weight?

She continued rocking her.

A question for tomorrow.

She turned her so she could hold her head to the crook of her neck, like she’d done so many times to comfort her plum blossom. She stroked her hair, matted to her forehead by cold sweat. “Shhhhh, baby, shhhhhhhhhhhhh. We’re here. We’ve got you. We won’t let anyone hurt you.”

Tom climbed the ladder to join them, the bed creaking nearly as loud as the blood rushing past Sabine’s eardrums as he shifted his weight across the mattress. He nuzzled Marinette’s hand to his cheek, giving her his warmth. His eyes scanned the room, lingering on various landmarks: a safety-pinned bodice draped on her dress form; her chaise with sketch supplies spread out; a tiny pillow it seemed she’d fallen asleep knitting…

He took a deep breath and tilted his head up, like he was checking if someone had entered from the rooftop access panel but was afraid of what he’d find. Then his eyes narrowed in confusion, blowing out wider than Sabine had ever seen them.

Her heart stopped.

What did he find?

She looked up to see what had struck Tom dumb.

A sketch?

There, pinned to the hatch where her daughter would see it every time she went to get some fresh air, was a drawing of a man in a white outfit and domino mask grinning back, looking ready to devour her flesh. Behind him, the moon was split in two. And there were words scrawled, representing an idea she'd never imagined her joyful, romantic daughter could ever consider.

"Love destroys."

Oh no.

Sabine refused to hand her over to Tom—"No men should touch her right now," she warned him—so he went down the stairs first to guide Sabine as she negotiated the awkward steps.

Clutching Sabine’s neck, Marinette kept her nose buried in her hair while Sabine swayed, trudging back to the master bedroom. She could feel her daughter’s breath on her neck, still elevated, irregular, and raspy.

With Tom looking on, Sabine laid Marinette down in their bed.

“We’ll be right here watching over you, sweetie.” Sabine swept Marinette’s hair off her sweaty forehead and, though her daughter was now fourteen years old, she sang her a lullaby Uncle had sung to her.

♬处处闻啼鸟，夜来风雨声♬

Sabine rocked back from the bed and sat down beside Tom on their bedroom sofa. Her pulse crashed against her skull like a captive child thumping at its prison.

Tom moved closer, and they held each other's hands. Where their fingertips touched, her skin throbbed as their heartbeats spoke in code. Every time Marinette exhaled, they held their own breaths, and Sabine silently implored her to take another.

Eventually, Marinette’s breathing came back under control. Only then did a terrified mother allow her own heart to do the same.

Chapter 2: The Next Morning

Chapter Text

Sabine woke early the next morning from her awkward position on the loveseat in her bedroom. She was alone, meaning Tom was already downstairs working. She wiped the sleep out of her eyes and looked at her bed.

Thank goodness, Marinette’s still asleep.

She hadn’t heard anything else at night, and with Marinette right there in the same room, that meant there must not have been any more nightmares.

Good thing it’s Sunday. She can sleep in.

She quietly stood up and stretched, feeling her vertebrae crack one at a time. She bent to the left and right to stretch out her hips. It wasn’t fun getting older, but when she glanced over at her daughter, smiling in her sleep…she’d take all the little aches and pains if it meant she had Marinette safe at home.

She would rather be tending to her croissant than selling them, but customers didn’t care about nightmares, and she had a business to run. She rushed through her morning routine as quiet as a mouse and snuck out of her room so as not to wake her daughter.

Freshened up, she arrived down in the bakery. Her husband was at the ovens, pulling out fresh boules of French bread to put on display. She ambled over and hugged him from behind, nuzzling the small of his back and drawing in his musky scent.

"Well!” Tom turned around in her embrace so he was facing her, bent over with his mouth to her ear. “Good morning to you, too, my poolish!" She could hear the grin in his voice. It sent a shiver down her spine, and the jerk knew it!

“Good morning, my big-a boy,” she whispered.

The first time they had ever made love, Tom had given her that nickname as they lay in bed after.

"Why poolish, Tom?”

His post-coital voice husky, he stared deep in her eyes, slid one of his large fingers softly along her ribs, and said, "Because it's wet! spongy! and the start of something that tastes amazing!" He wiggled his eyebrows seductively at her and began tickling her ribs.

Sabine thrashed around, giggling and kicking her legs, but she narrowed her eyes at him, trying to look intimidating. No such luck when your boyfriend towered over you!

Tom guffawed, and she slapped him firmly on the shoulder, but with all the love at her disposal. Tom loved puns, so she wasn't actually upset. And boys in France were so much more open about blue humor than back in China—especially the boys she was allowed to know. It was one of the things that made being with Tom feel so liberating: she could say what she thought without worrying about saving face. It wasn’t like back home with her mom.

Tom was freedom and safety.

So, not to be outdone, she gave him his own nickname.

They fell into a comfortable silence as they broke the hug to prepare to open the bakery. Sabine pulled money from the safe and restocked the till, while Tom finished loading the first batch of croissants and pain au chocolat on display.

As she reviewed the advance orders they had to contend with, the memory of last night gnawed at her like a rat in the walls, chewing through the wiring, threatening to burn the house down. She let her notes drop to the countertop and she leaned on her hands. But the countertops were bright white, which reminded her of the sketch, so she spun around, putting that memory behind her for the moment.

“Tom…about last night. That wasn’t any normal nightmare. Marinette was terrified when I got there. I could practically smell it.”

Her husband set a jar of baking powder aside and looked at her. She felt guilty that she’d managed to fall asleep last night because, from the way his eyelids sagged like an old archway, she knew he hadn’t slept at all.

She continued, feeling a chill in her spine as she recalled making eye contact with her daughter on the loft. “When she looked at me, it was as if she wasn’t even present, like staring at a blank sheet of paper. And she felt so thin! It doesn’t make sense! She always seems so happy. Do you... Could she be depressed?”

He shifted display items back and forth, arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. “I don’t know. When I got up there, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. She looked so small. So defeated. But why? It didn’t look like anyone else had been there. In fact, the only strange thing I noticed was—“

“—that sketch. Of the man in the white suit, and ‘love destroys.’ What was that?”

Tom paused and sniffled. “I’ve been wondering that myself.”

“She’s always been a romantic. She’s never talked like that before. She’s always going on about Adrien, and now she has that internship at his father’s company. They see each other more often, and she’s got something to be really proud of. She should feel more like his equal now. I can see Adrien has feelings for her, so, if anything, the situation should be looking up for her! But instead she draws that horrifying man in wh…ite…”

No.

She brought a hand to her mouth and began nibbling on a fingernail. She was vaguely aware of her eyes unfocusing as a host of horribles paraded through her imagination. She heard a soft hissing in the room and realized it was her own breath through her teeth.

Tom was fixated on her, eyebrows furrowed. “What’s on your mind, Sabine?”

“You don’t think...no, it can’t be....”

“What is it?”

“Do you think...maybe something happened with Gabriel Agreste? She’s shadowing him and Mlle Sancoeur. And he’s always wearing that white suit now, like in the sketch! Could he have...she’s idolized him for so long...and now she’s with him everywhere, probably alone in his office with him sometimes…and she couldn’t fight off a determined adult. And the few times I’ve talked to him, it’s like his voice can hypnotize you into doing anything.”

“Sabine—“

“’Love Destroys.’ That’s what she wrote, Tom. She’s finally in her element around Adrien, doing what she does best, so why that? Why now? If Gabriel took advantage of her, it would explain...Tom, she was yelling, ‘Get away from me!’ when I woke up last night. And for her to start thinking of love as destructive...”

Tom crossed to her and put his hands on her shoulders, likely to reassure her. “We don’t know what that sketch means. Maybe Jagged recommended her to someone and she’s doing another album cover, or some kind of production design. I heard her talking to someone yesterday on the phone in her room about a tiki something. Is he doing a show in Hawaii? It could be anything.”

“Well, we can’t do nothing! If it happened once, it might happen again! I don’t want her to get hurt, Tom. We need to figure this out!” She shrugged his hands off and shook her arms in frustration.

Tom nodded and stepped back, giving her space. “Okay. Maybe you should talk to her. Some kind of pretext. See what she thinks about the internship so far.”

“…alright. That’s a good idea. I’ll try. But Tom, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

The bell above the door rang, and Sabine painted a broad grin on her face. She turned to the door.

“Good morning, Mme Fournier!”

A few hours later, Sabine turned at the sound of footsteps bounding down the stairs into the bakery. “Good morning, Maman!” Marinette chirped, and she moved to kiss her on the cheek before she stumbled, nearly falling on top of Sabine, who easily caught her. Like she’d always catch her.

“Good morning, sweetie.”

Tom chuckled at the sight of his daughter being caught by his tiny wife. “Good morning, Marinette! Are you ready for your papa’s world-famous breakfast?”

“Yes! I’m so hungry today!”

“OK, go to the kitchen with your mom and let me serve you two. Today’s been a bit slow, so I don’t have to rush to make anything. I’ve got some time to watch the shop while I take care of the royalty living here!”

“OK, Papa!” Marinette gave him a quick kiss on the cheek and skipped back upstairs to the family kitchen. Tom gave Sabine a nod.

She took her time heading upstairs into the kitchen behind her daughter, and she joined her at the table, standing beside her daughter for a moment. Sabine slid her hands along the table, feeling the wood grain along her fingertips, and took a deep breath to draw strength.

“No, Sabina, don’t take the painting in yet!” Gina fussed and flitted around the moving van like a ladybug. “In France, the table is the first thing to move into a home. Moving the dinner table into a home first will fill it with good fortune! Then you can take in whatever you want. But: table first. Tom! Get your lazy butt over here and help me!” Gina laughed as she saw her son trundling over, balancing four chairs at once.”

“Sorry, Mamma!” Tom giggled as he set down his load.

“Oh, new neighbors!” said an elderly Chinese man, approaching the bakery entrance. “I’m Fu Wang, I have a massage parlor and Chinese medicine shop a few blocks away.”

Sabine waved, excited to be meeting another Chinese immigrant in the area. “噢，很高興認識您，王先生！我叫郑夏冰。︁But here people call me Sabine.”

Gina continued berating Tom as the two of them made their way to the van’s back door. “You’ve got your pregnant wife here—who’s never moved into a new house before—and she’s not accustomed to silly French superstitions yet. And you’ve got her carrying things in!”

“Okay, okay, I understand, jeez.” Tom picked up the table and maneuvered it inside by himself.

“Did I hear your...mother in law? Did she say you’re pregnant?” asked Fu.

“Yes!” She placed her hand on her stomach, just giddy from thinking about the bun in her oven. Oh no, Tom’s jokes were rubbing off on her!

He smiled wide, with a glint in his eye. “恭喜有喜了Sabine! It makes me smile to see a young family move into the neighborhood. We’re all so stodgy over here, like a bunch of turtles. You’ll inject some fun into the neighborhood.” The man peered beyond her and laughed. “And look at your husband managing that large table all by himself! First thing in the house—it’s auspicious.”

The man seemed to be listening to a hidden voice, or feeling a change in the wind she didn’t. He pulled his jacket collar a bit tighter and nodded at her. “I’ll say a prayer at the temple that your child be lucky in life! If you ever need anything, swing by. I’ve been in Paris a mighty long time, and I remember what it was like the first few years as an immigrant.”

“Thank you, Mr Wang. Have a nice day!” Sabine waved, then turned and marched into the bakery, pausing at the threshold to take a deep breath. She stepped in, followed the sound of Tom’s clomping upstairs to the kitchen, and imagined her future self sitting at the table having breakfast with her daughter.

But this wasn’t the future she’d imagined.

Sabine almost missed as she snatched the back of a chair to pull it out to sit down—she wasn’t sure she’d be able to stand for this conversation. Her legs were already feeling weak from anticipation. She needed to clear her mind, so, as she slid herself and the chair closer to the table, she squeezed the seat on either side of her hips.

Her imagination was torturing her, and she clicked her teeth together. She rubbed at her swiftly-warming eyes—“wow, I still have some sleep to wash off my face!” she excused—and fixed them on her daughter. She took a deep breath and steadied her voice as well as she could. “Baobei, about last night...”

Marinette considered her mother for a moment before she waved off the implied question. “It was just a bad dream, Maman! Nothing to worry about!”

Sabine clicked her tongue. “It seemed more than ‘bad,’ honey. What even was that?”

“Oh, nothing! I was a fairy tale princess and, uh, a wolf was coming after me!” Marinette explained.

“A big, bad wolf?” This sounded like an improvisation. “Did he blow your house down?”

Her daughter looked down at the swirling patterns on the table. “Basically.”

This took her by surprise, and she reached her hands over to her daughter’s. “Oh, my poor Red Riding Hood…”

Marinette pursed her lips, as if she were holding a secret at bay.

“You mean the three little pigs.”

“What?”

“The wolf blew the pigs’ houses down. Red Riding Hood was a different wolf. He ate her grandma.”

She’d never keep the Western fairy tales straight. Really, if Tom hadn’t been so present as a father, Marinette probably wouldn’t know any of those stories. Cendrillon, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White…Sabine had never been a fan of the weak girls in those tales.

Snow White…

Another intrusive thought about the sketch.

Marinette played with the napkin where she sat. “This was more like Liu Yi, and the dragon princess he found all alone, abused and discarded…”

She felt her throat constrict. “So there was a wolf chasing you, but also you were all alone and someone saved you? And you were…abused?”

“No, I…he was chasing me, and then I saved him from himself.”

Sabine fought the urge to press her harder. This didn’t make sense. Marinette had been terrified and screaming, but she was the hero in the story?

She wanted to ask why she thought being a hero would be so traumatic. But if she tried to force things out of Marinette, her daughter might clam up for good on this subject.

Daughters don’t tell their mothers everything. Certainly, her own mother had been so insistent about her “no boys” policy while Sabine studied in France that she hadn’t breathed a word about Tom until it was too late. Although Uncle must have known and kept quiet.

So she nodded and smiled. “OK, sweetie.” The Cheng family was filled with renowned financiers, and in a manner of speaking, Sabine was the same. It took nerves of steel, and shuttering one’s heart to listen to the mind. She invested in a future truth by buying the current lie.

She heard footsteps approach and let the conversation lull for a moment. Tom.

“Here you two lovely ladies go! Pain aux raisins, brioche, and marmalade. Aaaand here’s some tea. Enjoy!” With that, Tom left again.

Sabine took a sip of her tea and leveled her gaze at Marinette. “So...you and Adrien seem to be getting closer...”

Marinette nearly spat out her tea. “Well, I am at his father’s company every day after school now. Obviously we’d be around each other more, and he did ask Nathalie if I could shadow her at work, so I guess he thinks we’re close, too.” She paused, catching her breath after all those words and put on a faint smile. “Though that’s the kind of thing Adrien would do for anyone.” Sabine recognized a fake smile when she saw one. It didn’t sound like her daughter was praising Adrien’s selflessness; it sounded more as if she were trying to remind herself that she wasn’t special.

“What I mean is, you seem so much more confident around him lately. You still have that crush on him, right?”

Her daughter blushed, but frowned, and Sabine worried that might be a hint as to the truth.

Adrien?

But it couldn’t be; the boy was like a government building in Macau, green flags everywhere.

“Marinette, I know you tried to give up on him in the past…but if he didn’t notice you before, I think it’s changing. He’s around you all the time now, and he sees you confident and in your element.” She scooted her chair closer to her daughter and pushed a strand of her daughter’s hair back behind her ear. “You heart is a prize.”

Marinette pulled back and fiddled with the handle of her cup. “I don’t know. I’m so intimidated by his father that I think I probably look more foolish than ever to him. It’s all I can do not to embarrass myself at work.”

Intimidated by his father… “How is it working for Mr Agreste, by the way?”

Marinette’s frown deepened. “It’s really hard. He’s so brilliant, and he expects so much of all his employees. He’s got me running errands and doing other things for him constantly. Well, Nathalie has me doing that. I don’t know how she’s stuck around. I’m sure she is in love with him.” Marinette looked down pensively. “But I guess because he’s so charismatic, he can convince her to do anything...”

Sabine swallowed hard at that, while Marinette, seemingly unaware of the turmoil she was feeling, snatched a slice of raisin bread and started to eat.

“Marinette...you know if a boy pushes you to do something you’re not ready for, you can say no…right? I know I’ve told you before, but…do you know it?”

Her daughter’s mouth fell open. “What? Yes, wh-huh? Of course! Yes, I know that. Yesyes! But no-nothing’s happening! Adrien doesn’t see me that way! He’s just a friend. Friends don’t do that! Of course we wouldn’t be doing anything like that! hahahAHAHAhhaha! Right? Right!”

“Well with second boyfriends, things always move faster than with the first...”

“Mom, me and Luka didn’t even kiss! There’s no way this hypothetical second boyfriend would...get my goods so soon!”

“Okay, okay. And you know if it’s a man, you should always say no, right? You’re so young, but there are manipulative men out there who might try to take advantage of you. Maybe even charismatic ones...”

“Ew. Mom, where is this coming from?”

“I just want to make sure you’re prepared. It’s a lot easier to say ‘yes’ to something if you haven’t decided ahead of time to say ‘no.’ And you are working at that internship now; you’re around a lot of men without any supervision.”

“Mom, I think most of them are gay.”

“I’m sure not all of them. For example...Adrien’s father isn’t gay.”

“Ew. Mom, seriously? That’s gross. He’s like, actually old. And he’s my boss! Why would you even think I could be attracted to him? And besides, Mr Agreste has some secret fling going on with Nathalie. It’s so obvious they’re sneaking off to dark corners to do things. You don’t have to worry about that at all! Yuck!” Marinette tittered a bit more before getting quiet again. She looked down and resumed nibbling on her breakfast.

It was hard to tell if she was nervous or just weirded out by the subject. Either way, the conversation wasn’t going to bear more fruit. Sabine would have to find another way to look into what went on at the offices.

Sabine forced a smile. “Okay, Marinette, I’m glad. I just wanted to make sure you’re prepared. It’s increasingly not our job to make your decisions for you; we’re supposed to protect you and equip you to make your own decisions. You’re still young—“

“—I’m fourteen already.”

“That’s still young, sweetie. But I know what you mean. You’re becoming a lovely young woman, and we just want to help you become mature enough to live apart from us. You’ve only got a few more years in the bakery, and then there’s so many more things you’ll need to be wise to.”

“I know, Maman.” Marinette nodded. She reached over the table and put her hand on Sabine’s. “Thank you for looking out for me. I couldn’t ask for a better mom.”

Sabine bit her lip and smiled, forcing it to reach her eyes.

OK, what now?

Chapter 3: Dark Cupid

Chapter Text

After breakfast, Sabine headed down to the bakery to take over for Tom. Her mind was analyzing everything Marinette had said over the meal. It was nice, though, that Marinette had gotten up before noon for a change; they hadn’t had a heart-to-heart in so long, and she had known they were overdue.

Later that morning, a familiar face walked past the bakery window.

Alya.

Her heart raced.

On one hand, Marinette told Alya everything. Maybe Alya knew what had happened to her.

On the other hand, it was conceivable that, had Gabriel touched Marinette, she wouldn’t even have told her best friend. There were plenty of reasons why girls thought no one would believe their claims of victimization, as Marinette no doubt was aware. Any given night, one could turn on the news and hear another seemingly powerful woman unburden herself about an even more powerful man taking advantage. And this was a young, unknown girl with Gabriel Agreste, who probably had Eyes Wide Shut parties in his basem*nt with people like Tomoe Tsurugi and Audrey Bourgeois.

Sabine had fostered a closeness with Marinette. She expressed her unconditional love regularly, she supported her daughter’s dreams, and she shared (some of) her own emotional struggles. Teenagers were smart, and they could tell when adults were keeping secrets. It was one thing to present a façade of parental infallibility to young children; it was quite another to lie to your teenager about it.

But ever since the expulsion incident, she’d grown increasingly guilt-ridden, worrying that she’d lost her daughter’s confidence. Of course she wasn’t infallible! The evidence had been right there for everyone to see that day.

But she’d never once thought Marinette was keeping secrets from her until now.

Alya pushed open the door and walked into the bakery. "Hey, Mme C.”

"Alya, I didn't know you were coming over.”

“Me and Marinette are gonna go shopping at the flea market. She had an idea for a patchwork dress, and I was planning on looking for vintage costume jewelry. Nino and Adrien are supposed to meet us there."

Oh, that’s why she’d been up early enough for tea and talk.

Sabine forced a smile. “Oh, that sounds...dreamy!" She snickered.

Alya snickered back.

Marinette came bounding down the stairs and planted herself between them. “Hey, Alya. What's so funny?”

Sabine and Alya made eye contact over Marinette’s shoulder, the image of a white-overshirted boy-in-miniature frolicking along their sightline, back and forth. One could almost hear pigeons coo-cooing in the distance.

“Oh, nothing, sweetie. I hear you’re going to look for fabric remnants.”

"Yep!"

"Can you swing by the florist and pick up buttercups while you're out?"

Alya started laughing.

Marinette stared at them both. “Okay?"

Alya continued the teasing. “Hey girl, maybe you'll get lucky and find a little scrap of Agreste to play with!" She was slapping her thighs, almost crying.

Sabine stopped laughing. Thinking back to the previous night and to her conversation with Tom, she was mortified.

Alya, no!

She glanced over at her daughter, who seemed unaffected by the comment.

"It's ‘Gabriel,’ not ‘Agreste.’ Wait—" Marinette blushed, finally getting it. "That's not funny."

"Hey, what are you ladies laughing about?" Tom asked from the storeroom.

Sabine looked back over her shoulder. “Nothing, dear! Alya’s just teasing Marinette!”

“Oh, did she steal someone's phone again?!" asked Tom.

Marinette gasped. "Worst parents ever."

Alya giggled. “Oh my God, Marinette, I didn't realize your dad was such a troll!"

Sabine cleared her throat. “Speaking of trolls, spill the tea: what has my daughter told you about working for Gabriel Agreste? She won’t tell me anything, and I’m dying to know.”

To the side, she saw Marinette roll her eyes. “Ugh, not this again. Nothing happened!”

Alya looked between the two of them. “I feel like I’m out of the loop.”

Marinette growled. “My mom doesn’t seem to like me working for Mr Agreste, and she’s inventing reasons to tell me to quit. She thinks I’m attracted to Adrien’s dad!”

Alya’s eyes bugged out. “What?”

Oh no. She hadn’t meant to bring this up around Alya.

“Marinette, I...I didn’t say you were attracted to him. I just meant that powerful men can get away with a lot—”

“He’s not a criminal, Maman! He’s just—”

“An asshole?”

“Alya!”

“Well if the shoe fits…” said Alya. “In this case a very expensive shoe…”

Sabine frowned. Then who was it in the sketch?

“You know, menopause can cause paranoia, Maman.”

Sabine sighed. “I love that you have this opportunity, Marinette. But Alya, Marinette had a nightmare, she was screaming, and—”

She realized she shouldn’t be telling Alya this without asking Marinette’s permission first. She tried to recover. “And based on what she was saying, I’m just worried that she’s being…pushed too hard. That’s all.” She yearned to be straight with Alya—the girl was blunter than a rolling pin.

Sabine was desperate for help. However, it felt wrong to out Marinette if she had, in fact, been assaulted.

Alya snorted. “Oh, she’s definitely being taken advantage of. She’s shadowing Mlle Ice Queen. I don’t think that woman ever sleeps. When she’s not trailing at her boss’s heel, she’s driving Adrien crazy. And I can’t get a read on her at all! Just about the only thing I’m certain of is she can’t be Hawkmoth because she’d have no time!” Alya glanced at her phone. “And speaking of ‘no time,’ we need to leave now or we’re going to be late.”

“Ahh, you’re right!” Marinette screamed as she exploded into a flurry of movement.

Sabine caught Marinette’s eye as she began grabbing her things. It looked like her daughter had realized their earlier conversation was about more than just hypothetical men, and that she now believed it to be an accusation.

She shouldn’t have told Alya about the nightmare.

That’s something Mama would’ve done.

Marinette snatched her things and rushed toward the door, dragging Alya along. Sabine felt like her daughter was sand slipping through her fingers and high tide was coming. What was most upsetting, however, was that Alya had played it off as ludicrous, but was obviously rushing Marinette out the door to escape the conversation.

She must be lying.

“We expect you home by 7 for dinner!” she shouted at her daughter’s retreating form. But she wasn’t sure if Marinette heard her.

She was growing accustomed to that feeling.

Sabine worked in the bakery through rush hour, going through the motions and watching the clock. She thought she could hear the grinding of the gears slow down, denying her the break she needed. On more than one occasion, she accidentally gave away pastries for free.

Most days, when she saw a regular customer come in, she’d fill the order of whoever was at the register while also packing up the usual order of the friend who just entered. But today, she’d been listless and anxious, and the regulars could tell.

Is she going to be safe with Alya?

Adrien will be there; he’s handy with a sword.

“Mme Cheng, are you feeling alright?” asked Dr Desrosiers as he leaned in and peered into her eyes with concern, as if he were giving her a wellness exam. He practically kept baker’s hours, even on days he didn’t have clinic.

“Sabine, is there something the matter?” asked Mme Boucher, Marinette’s old math teacher from élémentaire, when she dashed in after her weekend half-marathon training. “Is everyone okay?”

“Miss Cheng, ma’am, is there something I can help you with?” asked Mrs Rogers, an expat who had moved here with her young family for a “more agreeable lifestyle.”

Do Americans never watch international news?

“Mme Cheng?”

What am I going to do?

“Mme Cheng!”

She felt someone shaking her shoulder, and she was pulled back into her body. She shook her head to gather her attention that she’d cast to the ground.

It was Frankie, an actor who was staying nearby while he worked on a small film. She caught his blue eyes before looking down at the rows of croissants in the display case. She reached in and bagged his normal order.

“I’m sorry, Mr Auberjonois. Here you go!” She handed his food over as he handed her the money. She watched him go, mentally urging him to move faster so she could call Tom to the register and dash upstairs.

The moment he’d closed the door behind him, Sabine called out to her husband. “Tom, would you mind watching the storefront for a bit?”

Her husband trundled into the storefront, wiping his hands and his brow. “Sure thing, honey.”

Sabine craned her neck to meet his lips for a kiss before she walked out, taking great pains to appear nonchalant.

She strode up the floors, taking stairs two at a time, until she was below the ladder to Marinette’s room, out of breath. Staring up at the door, it felt like a portal to a darker universe she didn’t want to visit.

She hesitated for a moment, trying to calculate when her daughter might return home. Realizing there was no way she could predict when her daughter would return, she climbed up through the trapdoor without bothering to close it.

She went straight to the ladder and climbed up to Marinette’s bed, lying down and focusing on that sketch like she was watching the sky for meteors.

Reveal your secrets.

But of course, the sketch didn’t respond.

And like when one sits out and watches for shooting stars scraping across the darkness right at the edge of one’s peripheral vision, she felt like she was just missing something important.

She squinted at the picture, but couldn’t make heads or tails of it.

The man was as she remembered. Tall, thin, white hair (albeit unkempt), blue eyes, a white tuxedo, white gloves, and an expression that straddled the line between malice and indifference. Everything about this picture screamed “Gabriel Agreste.”

But why the mask?

Marinette might have given him a mask to hide his identity in her drawing. Like magic, masks seemed to work that way. It was a point against finding any clues if her daughter anticipated the picture being used against her secret-keeping.

But as Sabine continued to look, she noticed something. Regret. Whatever Marinette had intended to depict in this sketch, the man regretted something.

Does she think he regrets what he did? Does she regret what she did? Or…what happened to her against her will?

Victims often blame themselves. She blamed herself plenty for things in her past even though it was irrational. Deprogramming yourself was hard work, made harder when you were trying to build and run a business. Some days, all she had was an infusion of calming Camellia sinensis, but oolong was a pu’er substitute for thera-tea.

Ugh, an accidental double pun. Tom would squee if he knew.

Why would Marinette hang this sketch up where she knew they would see it? And the message was so brutal. Surely she expected questions. “Love destroys” was so wildly out of character for her.

Is this a cry for help?

She considered the split moon, too. What did it symbolize? Sabine had an excellent memory, but she couldn’t recall anything Marinette had mentioned about Gabriel fashions involving the moon, so it wasn’t likely to be an homage.

It has to be metaphorical. Certainly it isn’t literal.

She recalled that Gabriel’s favorite motif was a butterfly.

Butterflies aren’t related to the moon, are they? Moths, sure, but butterflies?

She continued to stare at the picture, bouncing her feet on the mattress. She needed to scratch that carnal grin off the man’s face with her nails.

No one gets to look at my daughter like that!

If only that mouth could talk; he could tell her who he was. But pictures couldn’t talk. She needed to get her daughter to talk.

She could try to flatter her draftsmanship, but Marinette would see right through that. Her daughter was never one to accept a compliment graciously. It was always disbelief, embarrassment, confusion…exactly how Sabine had been at the same age.

Have I made her that way…like Mama made me?

She shuddered at the thought.

No. You’ve avoided so many pitfalls.

What should her next step be? She needed to dig deeper, but she was hesitant.

Do I talk to Nathalie? Alya? Confronting Marinette hasn’t worked.

It was times like this that she regretted—only in the darkest recesses of her heart—that she didn’t have more control over her daughter like her mother had once had over her. She felt guilty for even thinking it, and she’d certainly never tell Tom. But she understood how a mother’s fear could turn into a spear, jabbing away, intent on subjugating a defiant daughter.

But Marinette wasn’t defiant. She was determined. Those two character traits were the same object, just viewed from a different perspective. And she couldn’t afford to lose perspective.

A memory came to her of pictures she once saw online of a sculpture called Medusa with the Head of Perseus. She’d talked about it with her sister Meilin, among the first generation of truly liberated women from China.

Meilin had commented that Medusa’s pose reminded her of a teenager caught with a bottle of beer and cigarettes, needing a strong hand to be put back in line. It was no wonder her daughter Bridgette had called Auntie Sabine, crying about how she couldn’t wait to get away from home and go to university.

In contrast, when Sabine looked at Medusa, she saw Ladybug with the severed head of Hawkmoth. A woman determined to live against seemingly insurmountable odds. It was what she prayed would come to Ladybug—that distant avatar of hope—in time, and it was what she wanted for Marinette, too.

Out of ideas, Sabine decided it was time to take a book break. Maybe if she stepped away from the problem, a mouse of an idea might scurry its way into her brain.

She climbed down the ladder and gave the room a final glance to make sure there was no trace of her being there. Then she went back downstairs to tend to their customers and give her husband a break.

Some hours later, Sabine heard Alya shouting outside the bakery.

"Marinette? Marinette!" Alya’s voice was like the scream of a rabbit, a crippling wail of pain. Sabine felt the hairs on her arm stand on end. Already on edge about assault—

She dropped her towel, shot an apologetic look at the customer she was helping, and rushed out onto the street, desperately scanning for her daughter.

There! Wait, what's going on?

Marinette was on her knees on the sidewalk, leaning forward on one hand, the other clutching her chest. Even at a distance, Sabine could see her daughter breathing hard.

She flew to her daughter's side. "Marinette! Alya, what's going on?" Out on the sidewalk, a sheen of sweat had formed on Marinette's skin.

Is she having a heart attack? How is that possible?

Alya spoke with authority: "Stand right there in front of her, Mme C." Then her attention turned back to her best friend, continuing to talk slowly, in a gentle but determined voice. "Marinette, I think you're having a panic attack. I'm here for you; so is your maman. Do you see her? She's right there. Can you breathe slowly for me? In, and out. Innnn, ooooout. Innnn, oooout. Watch me raise my arm up and down." She began to move her arm a couple feet in front of Marinette in her line of sight.

Sabine zeroed in on her. She was humming and muttering, “No no no no." One of her pigtails had been pulled loose, like she felt constricted. Her hands were dirty, particularly the tips, where it seemed she had raked them across the sidewalk. Mascara streaked down to her cheekbones.

Sabine reached out and touched her, but Marinette wrenched herself away and curled into a ball.

"Nononononononono." The muttering intensified, like Marinette was stitching a web of sound to protect herself…as if she couldn’t bear to be touched.

Alya grabbed Sabine's wrist. "Don't. Mme C, please, stand. right. there." She gave her a firm push, and Sabine felt her own legs guide her to where Alya was pointing.

What is this? A panic attack? Why would Alya be able to recognize a panic attack or know how to handle one?

"Good, Marinette, that's real good. Look, your maman is right there. She's watching over you. You're safe."

Marinette's head creaked upward, and Sabine felt the air sucked from her body. It was as if all Marinette's energy was being spent fighting what she was seeing in her mind. Her daughter wasn't looking at her; she was looking through her.

Sabine ached to know what Marinette was seeing. The customers from the boulangerie peered out the door, unmoving, and the crowds of Parisian foot traffic—many just tourists—rushed by, avoiding making eye contact with the frozen girl in the middle of the sidewalk. Sabine was reminded again of Medusa and her victims, turned to stone.

She opened her mouth to shout out for help, but Alya shook her head determinedly, as if to reassure Sabine that, unlike in the Medusa story, there was a way back home for her daughter.

She stood back, shifting her weight between feet, watching Alya help Marinette. She narrowed her eyes.

Alya must know something.

Has this happened before? Did Marinette tell her something and then they looked up online how to handle a panic attack?

Oh God, this must have happened before. When? How have I never noticed? How did I not know what to do?

I don't know what to do!

Her eyes could have eclipsed the sun. She panted and felt her mind turned inside out. The last time she’d felt this truly lost, she was a teenager, standing outside an apartment in a strange country, waiting for Tom to answer the door and tell her what to do.

A panic attack. That's what Alya said.

What's happened to you, Meiyun?

Her eyes were drawn down the street, following Marinette’s stare. In front of Chocolaterie Artémis across the street, a teenager stood, dressed like Dark Cupid, slack-jawed. He was watching Marinette break down, arrows and a bow dashed before him on the ground.

He crossed the street, approaching slowly. “I– I was just standing here advertising the store. I didn’t do anything…”

Sabine felt like she had dunked her head into a frigid lake. She felt wide awake but everything around her sounded distant and fuzzy.

“You didn’t do anything wrong. It’s just the costume,” she heard Alya say. “But please, stay back.”

Is the mere thought of love enough to do this now? How is Cupid triggering her? Or does that boy remind her of an akuma?

Sabine felt her body move without conscious thought, as it placed itself between the boy and her daughter.

“Mme Cheng, come here," Alya ordered. "Calmly."

Shocked out of her reverie by Alya's patronizing tone, she approached. Calmly.

Alya took Sabine's hand and placed it on Marinette's back, guiding her in drawing circles.

"Marinette, see? Your maman is right here. That's her hand on your back. Can you feel her touch?”

The nos had become intermittent. She felt Marinette shudder under her touch.

“…yes…I…yes…” Marinette struggled to speak, and then there was only a soft humming.

"Good. You're doing so well, M."

Sabine looked over at Alya, a million questions and accusations in her eyes.

Alya, what's happened to my baby? What isn't she telling me? You know, don't you? Why won't she tell me? Would you tell me?

But all she got back was silence, as if Alya's eyelashes filtered out any answer.

Sabine looked again at her daughter. “Meiyun, let's get you home and to bed."

Time seemed to stretch on forever as the few approaching pedestrians who hadn’t marched back where they’d come from crossed the street to put distance between them.

After an exhausting few minutes, Marinette drew a long, shuddering breath, shivered, and finally spoke. “Okay.”

With great effort, she stood up, Alya and Sabine flanking her on either side, bearing much of her body weight.

"Alya?" Marinette asked, her voice like autumn leaves crushed beneath a boot.

“Yes?”

She was silent for a moment, struggling to aim her mouth closer to her friend’s ear, as if she didn’t want her mother to hear what was about to sneak out.

Sabine ordered her heart to settle down and pretended like she wasn’t paying attention so that the girls would keep talking. So she could spy on them.

"I just wanted him to stop hurting me,” Marinette murmured. “I didn't want to kiss him. But I had to so he would stop..."

A coldness creeped over Sabine’s chest, and she almost tripped as the sensation slithered down her torso to her legs. As they walked back to the bakery, she struggled to bear her own weight, let alone her daughter’s. With every footfall, she felt invisible chains around her ankles grow heavier.

She glanced one last time at the Cupid boy. She noticed a banner out by the storefront: "Sweets so sinful you'll hate yourself."

Oh, God.

Chapter 4: Rice Flour

Chapter Text

The next morning, Sabine knelt in front of the display cases, wiping down the dust that had settled overnight on the glass. She looked over at her daughter, who was up early (again!), helping divide up cash for the till.

Something had been tapping away at her brain, like the drip drip of water torture. Maybe her initial assumption was wrong. Maybe the sketch wasn’t Gabriel Agreste. He was a leading contender, so she’d gone with it. But she couldn’t shake that gut feeling.

Still, after the panic attack yesterday…well, had it just been someone under the influence of Dark Cupid? It was highly unlikely it could’ve been Gabriel, because hadn’t Dark Cupid made people behave contrary to their emotions? She loved her daughter with all her heart, but there was no way the man who’d married Emilie Graham de Vanily could have romantic feelings for a fourteen-year old girl he’d barely met. At worst, he would’ve become verbally demonstrative about her designs. But still…

Maybe multiple incidents?

She threw the brakes, not wanting to see where that particular train of thought went. Okay, maybe Dark Cupid had turned a stranger, and she’d had to fight him off? Hadn’t Ladybug rescued Chat Noir by kissing him? Maybe Marinette had done the same thing.

She really hoped that everything going on was only about an unwanted kiss.

Only an unwanted kiss.

The thought left a bad taste, as if that particular poison had oozed across her tongue. Aiming to wash her mouth out with something productive, she decided to get right into it.

“Marinette, what happened to you when Dark Cupid attacked?”

Marinette stopped flipping through the stack of bills. “Wh–why do you ask?”

“I heard you and Alya whispering when we were helping you home.”

Her daughter shook her head and smiled thinly, resuming her counting. “Oh, I don’t remember what I was saying. I was so out of it, you know? It was probably nonsense! You know how it is…forty, fifty, fifty-five…”

Sabine thought back to her own panic attacks, sometimes coming on when she stepped into an alley at dusk, or looked at a stone lantern the wrong way at Jardin Yili. Sure, they could mess with your memory, but Marinette must’ve been remembering something real.

She shook her head. “No, I don’t ‘know how it is.’ But I went back to the Ladyblog and TVi footage of the attack, and I couldn’t find you anywhere.” She hesitated before continuing. “But the akuma shot people and jumbled up their feelings. I heard you tell Alya you kissed someone so he’d stop hurting you. So I’m almost afraid to ask if you meant Luka.”

Her daughter stopped sorting the float, looking confused. “Luka? But Luka would never—”

“Yes, that’s the point. He would never. But if Dark Cupid had shot him, then he would’ve acted pretty different, right? And I know how he felt about you back then.”

Marinette looked almost offended on his behalf, but there was a wobble in her voice, almost imperceptible. “But I hadn’t even met Luka yet. And I don’t really remember what went on that day. Nothing happened to me. That whole day is a blur.”

Sabine moved toward her daughter, reaching out her hand. “But Marinette, you said—”

“It was the ramblings of a tired girl, Maman.” Marinette huffed, slipped the money into the till, slammed the drawer shut, and stepped out of reach.

Sabine closed the distance, opening her mouth to continue the inquest, but the street entrance to the bakery opened, and she glanced over to see who had arrived. A new delivery boy entered, carting in sacks of flour on a dolly. She growled in frustration. Heng. It was as if the universe was plotting to keep her in the dark.

“Hello, ma’am. Just dropping off the extra flour you rush ordered.”

“Thank you. Could you wheel it over here? I’ll take them to the storeroom from there.”

As she led the delivery boy away, she glanced over at Marinette, trying to signal with her eyes, We aren’t finished with this conversation.

Marinette didn’t respond, as if pretending she hadn’t caught her signal.

Sabine carried the sacks over to Tom as he checked their inventory leading up to the event they would be catering that weekend.

“Everything check out, Biga?”

Tom chuckled. “Looks like it, Poolish.”

Sabine set the final sacks down and walked over to Tom, wrapping her arms around him from behind. She took a deep breath of his scent. He smelled of yeast, cinnamon, and olive oil.

He trailed one finger along her forearm, drawing waves as he went. “You know, you keep giving me attention like this, I might have to ask you to marry me.”

“Pfft. Like I’d say ‘yes’ to you. What do you even have to offer, big, strong stranger?”

Tom spun in her embrace, grinning at her. His mustache dangled like cheese before a mouse, and she felt a pull toward his lips. “My name? Dupain. We are an illustrious family, you know. We invented bread.”

Sabine cackled. “Oh, I’d forgotten all about that story your father told me when I first met him.”

“Sir, this is my girlfriend, Sabine.”

Trying to ignore her nerves, she extended her hand and smiled hesitantly at this man her husband seemed too afraid to call “Papa.“

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr Dupain.”

Rolland Dupain looked at the hand that had been extended to him. Then he looked her in the eye. Or at her eyes. And then he looked back to her hand and crossed his over his chest.

“Does she have a last name, Thomas?”

She piped up. ”It’s—“

“I asked my son.”

Tom frowned. “It’s ’Cheng,’ sir.” He spoke loudly, but it sounded like a squirrel whose chirps were just resonating in a large drum. She’d never heard him sound so frail.

“As in PF Cheng’s? Is that your family?”

She parted her lips in confusion before Tom spoke up as if to protect her. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s a restaurant chain. Cheng’s. Or Chong’s.” He waved his hand as if dismissing a correction that hadn’t come. “Close enough. I read the trade publications every week.”

Rolland turned back to her. “The Dupains are an illustrious family, you know. We invented bread. It’s our heritage. And I like to ask other people about theirs.”

Sabine glanced at Tom, silently asking him, “Is he for real?” He looked like he wanted to crawl into a hole.

So I’m not the only one with a parent like Mama.

Rolland took a deep breath, puffing his chest out, and launched into what seemed to be a speech he’d committed to memory, sticking out an additional finger for each point in his spiel. “You see, our family stretches back beyond Loafamix the Gaul, whose yeast strain we still use in-house. Our coat of arms alludes to the appearance of leavened bread, and the Council of Heraldry and Vexillology in Belgium has concluded that it’s because our family has a claim to the earliest yeast bread in Europe.”

He cast a rotten glance at Tom. “A legacy we don’t like to put in jeopardy. Thomas, have you been experimenting with new ingredients in your bread again?”

Sabine felt her own chest puff out with pride. She’d watched Tom play around with rice flour portions in his doughs. She’d seen him smile, felt the cheap apartment floor tremble as he danced about the kneading table, and heard him hum as he tasted the various loaves. It was amazing what he’d been able to do by mixing techniques from different parts of the world!

But when she squeezed his hand and looked at his face in profile, he just looked sad.

However, in his forest green eyes, she saw a landslide rushing downhill. He clenched his jaw, as if he were preparing to defend a treasure. “There wasn’t anything wrong with me mixing in quinoa. You just added too much fire to the dough when it was most delicate, and it split!”

“Well good riddance! It got you back to pure French loaves again, didn’t it? Hopefully this little rice dalliance of yours will end up the same.”

Tom was squeezing Sabine’s hand hard, his arm shaking. She was starting to feel like this was not actually about bread.

He shifted on his feet, and whether he realized what he’d done, she recognized it immediately as him assuming a more rooted stance.

Tom rose to his full stature, towering over his father, and pumped their entwined hands as he spoke. “This time it will be different. I’m sure this blend has a future.”

Tom’s eyes darkened at the memory. “That didn’t go so well, did it?”

“No, it did not! But that’s okay. Your rice dalliance became a rice alliance! And in a way, he and my mother drove us together. I believe we would’ve found our way to each other eventually, and after your gallantry how could I have resisted? I mean, I guess your puns could’ve driven me away, but—”

“Hey, I’m funny! People like those jokes! Marinette likes those jokes!”’

“No she doesn’t, To—.”

“Yes, she does!” Tom pouted. “And Chat Noir! He loved those things when he had dinner with us!”

Sabine sighed, feeling like she’d had this argument a hundred times. “Maybe so. But he’s not funny, either.”

Tom huffed. “You’re right. You know, I’m still sore about how hot and cold he was with our baby.”

“Well, what are you gonna do? He’s dialed into Ladybug. What chance did Marinette stand against some woman squeezed into a skintight outfit? Plus he’s probably too old for Marinette if he’s going after someone like Ladybug—I think she’s immortal.” Her smile came to a rest, lopsided on her face. “At least she put herself out there, unlike with Adrien. Progress, you know? She’s growing up.”

She thought again about the nightmare, the sketch, and Dark Cupid. “Just not too fast, I hope.”

Tom grunted as he rearranged seven sacks of flour at the same time. “I guess so.”

Sabine dusted her hands off and wiped them on her apron. “Okay, I’m headed back to the storefront. She’s awake and helping, so I’ve been trying to pry information out of her.”

Tom threw the sacks of flour on the ground and hopped over to Sabine, hugging her. He looked down at his wife and laughed, drawing her attention to the fact that she was now covered head to toe with flour, like a cloud had vomited on her. “Hahaha! Well, let this fairy dust bring you luck, honey!”

But when Sabine considered the white that now decorated her apron, all she could think about was the sketch and Gabriel Agreste.

Sabine emerged from the storeroom into the bakery to see Marinette looking down, fiddling with the hem of her blazer, obviously trying to distract herself from her discomfort with the delivery boy.

He was encroaching into her personal space, trapping her against the wall.

“—exotic like you, I bet you can bake some pretty unique bread.”

Sabine felt her blood boil, and she rushed over to him, balling her fists. She jabbed one finger right in his face and then at their antique bread paddle on the wall. “Young man, if you don’t want that handle shoved up your ass, you should leave right now.”

The boy looked stupid enough that Sabine thought he might make the same pass at her next. His breath reeked. But when she reached for the paddle, he fled.

She turned to Marinette and examined her, fussing about, looking up and down for any injuries. Marinette had her arms around her torso, hugging herself, and sweeping the ground with one foot.

“I’ll call our supplier about him right away. But first, are you okay?”

Marinette pushed her hands away. “I’m—I’m okay. He didn’t touch me. He was j-just being gross. Y-yeah. It’s nothing I haven’t dealt with before.”

Sabine felt the world upend itself. Dealt with before?

How could she have missed that?

The direction of her daughter’s gaze told more of the truth than her words. Sabine took Marinette’s hand in hers and circled her thumb along the back of her daughter’s wrist. She’d experienced this so often herself, and she’d always suspected her mother had, the way she’d been suspicious of Tom. And she remembered her sister calling her, frantic about something she’d heard lobbed her way on the street.

It’s everywhere, I knew it, and I didn’t prepare her. But how do you prepare your child for a life lived skating atop a frozen lake of violence?

“I’m so sorry, honey. I never wanted you to have to go through stuff like that.” She paused, thinking again about the leer that boy had thrown at Marinette, and the face casting the leer morphed in her mind. It took the form of numerous men passing by her on the street who had objectified and othered her, wanting to treat her as an imported plaything. Then the leer took on the form of the man in the sketch.

“You know…when I first moved to Paris, I had to deal with stereotypes, too.”

Marinette didn’t look surprised, which in itself was an indictment of something. ”How come you never talk about it?”

Why didn’t she talk about it? She searched for an answer better than the ugly truth, but there wasn’t one. “That’s a good question, Baobei. I guess at first I was just happy to be in Paris and didn’t want to make any waves. And then it just became a habit; besides, other than your father, would anyone have listened to a Chinese immigrant anyway? When that actress accused Gerard Depardieu of sexual assault, even women defended him just because he was a great artist! Like he had a right to her body.”

She searched her daughter’s eyes, apologizing with a glance for what she was about to say. “Even when I met your grandfather, he wasn’t…kind.”

Marinette sniffed and looked at her toes, before confessing in a voice like the wind through overgrown grass. “I know.” Her eyes climbed back up to meet Sabine’s. They were laden with unshed tears. “That’s…been the hardest thing about getting to know him, trying to square how he is with me with how I figured out he’d been with you.”

Sabine smiled wanly at her daughter, but spoke with reassurance. “I don’t view it as a betrayal, if you’re worried about that.”

Marinette shook her head. “I know you understand. But I don’t understand why you’ve never said anything. Or why Papa hasn’t.”

She sighed. “Your father cut off contact with his father for me. And after years of marriage, I could tell how hard the separation had been on him. Your grand-père taught him everything—”

“Not everything.” Marinette pointed at her. “He fell in love with you. He married you.”

Sabine smiled. Their love had overcome so much, and this love was a precious part of her life.“Yes, he did. And I married him knowing what his family was like. I took away so many years between them by allowing your father to put me first. When you came home with Rolland after he’d been akumatized, I didn’t want to do that to you, too. You’d only just found him. And people can change, so I kept quiet.”

Marinette pointed at her. “But that’s exactly the problem! No one ever speaks up, so when someone does, it seems unbelievable, or people make excuses! And that’s why Alya’s never told her mom about the catcalls she gets, either.”

A chill overcame her. Catcalls? They’re still only children!

“It’s happening to Alya, too?”

Marinette scoffed. “Maman, have you seen Alya? She calls herself a ‘Creole smokeshow’!” She flailed her hands around her chest and hips.

Sabine was too shocked to laugh. “But she’s just fourteen!”

“Like that stops the kind of guy who catcalls? I’ve heard boys at school joke around, ‘Old enough to bleed, old enough—’!”

“Stop! I’ve heard it before. I don’t need to hear it again!” Sabine felt ill. “It’s disgusting!”

‘I know. But that’s how boys are.”

“No, Marinette. Don’t make excuses for them. Your father never talks like that.”

“Yeah, well that’s because Papa is special.”

“Sure, he’s special. But not because he respects women enough not to casually belittle them—plenty of men are like that. It’s one of those things that makes a man. You shouldn’t lower your standards just because a lot of boys talk like that… Does Nino talk like that? Does Adrien talk like that?”

Marinette laughed, but with little mirth. “I don’t think Adrien could say ‘boob’ if his life depended on it, let alone talk like that.”

“What about Chat Noir?”

Marinette’s eyes widened. “Chat Noir?”

“Oh come on, you told him you loved him! You must have spent time with him somewhere. What, did he whisk you away to the Eiffel Tower or something?”

Marinette blushed.

Sabine rushed her hand to her daughter’s shoulder. “He didn’t!”

“…he did. But just as friends! Do you remember Evillustrator?”

“What?”

“The akuma. Evillustrator. It was Nathaniel from school. I kiiiinda helped Ladybug by going on date with him.”

“Well, Nathaniel is a nice boy. But you shouldn’t—”

“No. I went on a date with Evillustrator.”

Sabine’s heart stopped. “Nathaniel when he was akumatized?!”

“Umm, yeah.” Marinette began tapping her fingers on her thighs. “He got akumatized because he wanted to go on a date with me. Of course I…I wasn’t interested, and, um, well—”

Sabine slashed the air with her palm as if it were a guillotine, cutting that subject of discussion off at the neck. “I don’t want to hear what emotion Hawkmoth was playing on.”

“But that’s how I met Chat. And, well…he’s not just a pun machine…” Marinette smiled fondly.

The low roll of her daughter’s voice through her chest as her eyes twinkled buoyed Sabine’s spirits. Marinette had scrawled “love destroys” alone in her room, yet here she was nearly blushing at the memory of a moon-bathed twilight above the city. “Well, they do say a girl will end up with a boy like her own father.”

“I think the similarities stop at puns. Anyway, he’s just a friend.”

A customer walked in, and Sabine smiled and stepped back from her. She brushed her hands on her trousers. “Well, regardless, I’m sorry you’ve had your share of jerks. I remember how small I felt when I got the ‘China doll’ stuff hurled at me.”

Marinette skipped toward her again and hugged her tightly, one arm around her waist and one cupping her head to her shoulder.

When did she get so tall?

Sabine returned the hug, but noticed how easily her arms reached around her.

“I’m sorry you had those experiences, Maman. But look at you now, owner of the best bakery in Paris!”

Sabine smiled. “That’s right! And one day people in Paris will be wearing your clothes.”

Marinette pumped her fist, a flash of something heroic in her eyes. “The Chinese are invading.”

Chapter 5: The Maternal Instinct

Chapter Text

Sabine lay in bed with her book and reading glasses while Tom stretched out his muscles after a long day of hard labor. On top of everything else, she didn’t want to tell him about the delivery boy, but she didn’t know how to talk to the supplier without it getting back to Tom. It was a good ol’ boy network built off handshake deals, after all. And she would be better at softening the blow than if someone outside the family told him.

Maybe solving this problem would help calm her down about the rest of Marinette’s problems. She looked up from her novel and peered at her husband over the edge of her reading glasses, taking in the blue veins interrupting the vast expanse of his forearm muscles like rivers carving their way through rough terrain.

The thought of rough terrain reminded her of her recent conversation with Marinette, about all the awful things she and her friends have had to endure—but also how mature her daughter seemed about it. Marinette had a wisdom that Sabine hadn’t fully appreciated before.

And despite the weightiness of the topic, her daughter had been smiling by the end of their talk.

Maybe everything is okay. Maybe Marinette has it handled.

“Tom…I think we should give Marinette some space to figure things out. I think that sketch was just a sketch, and that nightmare was just a nightmare. She seemed her normal self today."

He paused his stretches and straightened up, leaning toward her. ”Are you sure? You seemed to feel the exact opposite yesterday.”

Wondering how to respond, a memory escaped from her lockbox and creeped back into her consciousness.

She trudged to her mother's and sister's house from school, every step harder to take than the last, her latest exam balled up in her fist. She popped her jacket collar and tugged at the buttons before readjusting her pack. She felt her brows pull together from the anxiety and wind.

Mama isn't gonna be happy.

February was her least favorite month, owing to the humid winds sweeping in off the bay. Normally, feeling chills in her bones was her body warning her that her mother was near, but when the weather felt like this, she had no advance notice.

So what else is new?

The magpies seemed to agree it was unseasonably cold, even though she was certain it was the fear, not the weather, slowing her blood flow and making her fingers feel like they couldn't flex.

She wished Baba was still around. But it had been years since she had poured water over his hands and cast lit candles beneath his casket. At least Uncle had taken her in when she was younger. Not even Mama had dared defy his parenting style since she was the outsider.

Uncle was her home. His hearth was always warm from his soup experiments. “Celestial” he called them. Whenever she had some, she felt like she was floating through the sky wrapped in a blanket.

But Uncle was in France at the moment, meeting with industry players. It seemed that, despite being the black sheep of the family, having refused to go into finance, he'd managed to find a way to make the family proud.

If only I could, too.

She arrived at her former house. The placard by the gate may have said “Cheng,” but it was really her mother Huang Meifen’s fiefdom. She walked in to find her mother in the kitchen. She was sharpening a cleaver with her back to Sabine. Beside her on the cutting board was a chicken she must have killed and plucked herself this morning. Sabine imagined her mother snapping its neck and shuddered.

It’s not a good day for metaphors.

Her mother was not much taller than her, but her absolute belief in her decisions reminded Sabine why her mother idolized Empress Wu. Even at home, she was dressed in smart attire with an apron over it. It was hard not to respect this woman of middling birth, who had clawed her way to the top of society just as China was liberalizing its economy, even if those same qualities made her ill-suited to be her mother. It didn’t hurt that she’d married the son of a wealthy family with ties to Hong Kong.

Sabine gritted her teeth and placed her exam down on a nearby countertop.

But before she could say anything, her mother spoke up. “Xiabing, why am I hearing that you are up to no good in class?"

“What?” Sabine was taken aback. This fight wasn’t what she’d prepared for.

“Your teacher called—”

”Why is he calling here?” Was her mouth drying out? It sure felt like it.

“I’m the backup contact when your uncle is abroad. Is there a problem with that?”

“N-no.”

“No what?”

Sabine felt a coldness sweep up her arms and then down her chest, forming an ice-ball in her stomach. Once her mother got it in her head that something was true, there was no persuading her. Years of overhearing her mother’s rants at Baba—until she’d been sent to live with Uncle—proved it. And, for now, there was nowhere to go.

It’s no use.

“No, Mama."

"That's better. So why are you getting into fights?"

"I'm not!" How was it that every argument with her mother, she ended up feeling like a child?

"I can tell when you're lying.”

A teakettle of piping hot resentment was being poured into the vessel of her body. She stomped her foot. “I’m not lying!"

Her mother waved her hand that held the cleaver. An empty hand might have felt dismissive, but one with that amount of cutting power… “You lie all the time! Where you're going, who you're with, what you're doing—"

Sabine grimaced, knowing exactly who was feeding her mother these lies. The damn neighborhood snoop.

“I do not! Madame Wong just hates me! She's the one lying to you. She's a busybody—"

"She has been a friend of the family for years, and she's just looking out for our interests." (Empress Wu had had her own network of spies, too.)

“She’s looking out for your interests.”

“My interests are our interests, daughter.”

“No, your interests are yours and Me-me’s! Your interests haven’t included me since you sent me to live with Uncle!”

“Well, I couldn’t keep both of you.” Her mother sounded like she was reading from a dictionary, and it was infuriating. There ought to be a base level of emotion at play in a conversation, and Sabine felt like she had to contribute enough for the both of them.

"Our family is rich enough! You could have paid the fines!”

“We didn't get where we are by throwing money away!”

And then, as pins pricked at the corners of her eyes, Sabine wished she didn’t have to feel anything anymore. No, you just threw me away.

As if the tears had traveled through time, she felt them forming at the corner of her eyes in the present. She closed her eyes and scrunched her face, re-compartmentalizing the memory.

She’s not here. She’s not here.

While she was lost in her reverie, Tom had slid under the covers and was sitting beside her with his hand on her shoulder. “Sabine, are you sure we should just trust what Marinette says?”

She opened her eyes only to find herself comforted by his forest-green gaze.

I’m not going to shovel my traumas onto Marinette.

She pursed her lips and nodded. “I’m certain."

Tom took a deep breath and sighed. "OK. I'll go along with you for now. But if things get worse..."

"Tom, if things get worse I'll fight whoever stands in my way of getting her out of the bad situation she’s in.” She began tapping her finger on the duvet, reassuring herself that she needed to tell Tom about this morning. “ Speaking of which…” She relayed what had happened earlier in the day.

As she expected, Tom was furious.

Visibly trembling, he growled. “That boy better not set foot in here again, or I’ll show him something exotic. Where does he get off—”

“I know.” She reached over and took his hand in hers. “She and I had a good talk, and not just about what happened. We also talked about what kinds of boys are worthy of her affection.”

He pulled his hand from hers and crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, I’m not sure any boy is worthy of her affections.”

Sabine felt the low rumble of Tom’s bedroom voice as he grumbled about connards and enfoirés. She had felt so alone these past few days. Tom was an amazing father, but he was also soft in the ways that only people who’ve never had to move across the globe were. They’d both struggled to get the love they needed growing up, but uprooting your entire life and fleeing to another country gave you a covetous desperation for predictability and buffers. She knew he was worried about Marinette, but she felt more worried. Maybe it was all in her head. But seeing him like this, expressing this protective instinct…she needed that closeness from him right now.

She leaned in and hummed. “Well, I know one boy who’s worthy of my affections.”

“O-oh?”

“You’ve always been there for me, Tom, from the day we met...”

Sabine scooted her hips closer to his side of the bed and rolled over, her hair dangling on his neck. She leaned into his warmth for a kiss, but there was a thudding noise coming from upstairs.

Her head lifted back instinctively as she rolled her eyes upward and listened.

Not hearing anything, and miffed due to the interruption, she moved back toward Tom. As traumatic as that night with the nightmare had been, when she looked at her husband’s arms, she wanted that electricity she’d seen for herself.

But there was another loud thump, and she and Tom shot up in bed, almost knocking their heads together.

“You heard it, too?” Tom asked, concern palpable.

“I think so. Did that come from Marinette’s room?”

He rushed out of bed and started for the door. “I’ll go check it out. She probably just knocked something off her bed.”

“Y-yeah, it’s probably nothing.”

The stairs creaked as he hurried up.

She waited a few minutes, trying to read her well-worn, favorite mystery novel.

It’s nothing. It’s got to be nothing.

There was no way someone had snuck past their room via the stairs. And the only people who could get to Marinette’s room from above were a benevolent wonder-woman and a leather-wrapped hero who’d already declared his affections lay elsewhere.

It has to be nothing. Unless it’s an akuma.

But it’s nothing.

She’d sworn she would give Marinette space. This was just a test from the universe to make sure she’d meant it.

You aren’t Mama.

She would read the same two sentences of her book, forget what her eyes had unfocused over, and restart the paragraph. As luck would not have it, she was at the part where the detective found the girl’s body after having been killed by a jilted ex-lover.

No, no, no.

It was like her body was preventing her from absorbing the scene.

Finally, Tom returned. He looked…relaxed. Sabine breathed a sigh of relief.

You see? It really was nothing.

“Anything, honey?”

“No. I thought I heard Marinette whispering and some shuffling, but when I checked on her, she was working with her sewing machine. She was probably just on the phone with Alya when she heard her big, dumb dad approaching, and they stopped talking.

“I asked her what the sounds were, and she said she’d knocked over her dress form. I asked her if she’d heard the second thump, and she laughed and said I wouldn’t believe how clumsy she’d been, but she’d knocked it over twice. I’m not sure if I believe her, but everything seemed in order.” Tom grinned. “She’s sneaky like her mother sometimes.”

Sabine sighed with relief and then noticed the barb he’d pricked her with. “Oh, because we’re both Chinese?”

Tom put his palm to his cheek and grinned as he slid completely under the covers. “No, because you’re both women,” came a muffled tease.

Sabine took her time running her finger along the page of her book. She dog-eared her novel, folded it closed, and then thwacked the approaching lump of covers. “I’ll show you what women are like!”

“Please do!” Tom put his arms around Sabine’s waist as she threw the covers off them.

As the heat reconquered the cold in her body, she placed her hands on either side of his face and leaned in to kiss him, gazing into his forest green eyes. She reached over and yanked on the lamp cord, leaving them both in the dark.

The next morning, Sabine ran through a tai chi form while standing behind the display cases. It helped her stay limber while on her feet all day. It also centered her at a time when she so desperately needed to feel grounded. There wasn’t much of her mother’s “lessons” that she’d kept putting into practice, but it was hard to forget the trauma of martial arts training. And it helped her process her feelings.

I should teach Marinette again. Give her the tools to fight off an attacker. There was no way Marinette would be able to fight off anything in her current state. And she always woke up so late.

She wondered if it was due to trauma—she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sleep at all if she had to kiss someone to stop their assault.

She shuddered at her inadvertent slip-up. Assault.

Marinette bounded down the stairs, apologies already on her lips. “I’m sorry I overslept! I know I was supposed to be up and helping!”

Sabine tossed her daughter a washrag. “Just finish wiping things down. Mme Fournier was in here with her grandsons earlier, and they got raspberry jam fingerprints everywhere.”

“Ugh. Okay.”

Sabine went back and grabbed the broom and began to sweep the storefront. The bell above the door chimed, and she looked over to see who had come in. “Oh, Adrien, it’s lovely to see you!”

From behind her where Marinette was came the sound of something soft thudding against the plasterboard and then the tile. Her daughter had fallen over and somehow gotten the dirty washrag covering her whole face.

Adrien rushed around the display counter to reach her. “Marinette, are you okay?” Sabine watched him slowly kneel down beside Marinette. Not for a moment did he look like he would laugh at her misfortune.

“What? Oh yes. Wow, I think I slipped on some of that jam.” She removed the rag from her face and turned red. “A-Adrien! What are you doing here?” She shot back up on her feet like she’d been electrocuted.

“I’m here to pick up some pastries and then head over to Le Grand Paris to have lunch with Chloe.”

“Oh, with Chloe?” Marinette’s eyes seemed to unfocus for a moment.

“Yeah. You should’ve seen her yesterday. She was so mad I hadn’t visited in a while. ‘Adrikins, you are coming over tomorrow or else!’ I tried to cheer her up, but it didn’t work. I started crawling toward her like, ‘Chloeeeeee!’” He started acting like a marionette being tugged by its strings toward her daughter. “Chloeeee, I need you!”

Adrien put his hand on Marinette’s shoulder as if he were grabbing her to drag her away, and Marinette jerked away from his touch. He pulled his hand back as if slapped.

“Marinette?”

She hesitated before responding, and Sabine wondered about her daughter flinching.

“Oh, I’m fine. Adrien, that’s so funny!” Marinette laughed, but Sabine could tell it was a bandage over an injury. “Here, let me help you with your order. O-our bakery is so out of the way for you!”

Sabine could hear the kind smile in Adrien’s response. “I heard about what happened to you the other day. From Alya. Are you okay?”

Marinette looked at her feet. “Y-yeah. I just…you know how it is. With all these akumas. Oh, I wish Alya hadn’t told you! I don’t want to worry anyone.”

Adrien looked hurt for a moment, but he quickly wiped that look off his face. He reached for her hand as if he wanted to give her reassurance, but he stopped himself before he grabbed her. “Um, may I hold your hand?” It was uncanny how perfectly he marked off all of Sabine’s checkboxes as a mother. He was patient, sympathetic, vulnerable, and someone must have taught him all about consent—likely his mother.

“Y-yes, you can. I mean, you may!”

Adrien took it gently, as if he were giving her more time to change her mind, just in case. “I’m glad she told me, Marinette. Sometimes I get scared, too, and it’s nice to know someone as strong as you has problems like I do.”

Marinette gawked at him. “S-strong like me?”

“My Everyday Ladybug, of course.”

A red swept across her daughter’s freckle-dotted cheekbones at this compliment, and she moved her wobbly hand to begin bagging his order.

Sabine stepped out of the room to think. Her legs needed to move. Standing still made her feel ineffectual.

She began pacing, thinking about the flinch. What does it mean?

After giving Marinette a few minutes with Adrien, she went back into the storefront to find her daughter alone, leaning against the glass, looking exhausted.

“Didn’t you just break the world record for hours slept?”

Marinette shot off the glass. “No! Yes? I’m trying to make it unreachable!”

Sabine approached her daughter slowly, thinking back to the nightmare and panic attack she’d witnessed. “What happened? You seemed to be doing fine until…well, until Adrien put his hand on you.”

Her daughter’s eyes shifted back and forth. “Oh, well, you know how I get around Adrien. I’m just a klutz.” She shrugged. “That’s the way it’s always going to be, I guess.”

Sabine didn’t believe that’s what the flinch was about, but she wanted to keep Marinette talking. “I know how hopeless you must feel about it. I used to be like that around your father.”

“What? But you and dad are so comfortable with each other. I can’t imagine you ever being so weird and clumsy around him!”

“Well, I was. He actually saved my life before we’d even met.”

Marinette smirked, but Sabine wasn’t sure why. “Oh, don’t tell me you saved Adrien’s life and the rest of us just never heard about it.”

“What? Noooo. Can you imagine me saving anybody? With my clumsiness? I just thought it was funny, the idea of dad saving you, when he’s such a teddy bear.”

“And I’m not?”

Marinette laughed. “No. You’re a tiger mom.”

“Hey!”

“Okay, okay. A tabby mom.”

“You aren’t much taller than I am, Marinette.”

“Yeah, but those three centimeters make a big difference!”

“That’s true, three centimeters is the difference between a mouse and a rat!”

“Hey!”

The two squinted at each other for a moment, a high-noon standoff in a Western film, before the façades cracked and they began giggling.

“Come on, let’s finish getting that mess of jam cleaned up.”

Marinette picked up the rag that she’d had on her face earlier. “Sure thing, Maman.”

That night, Sabine called her sister, the one person who might understand what she was going through—trying to navigate not becoming her mother.

Her sister answered. “Wei?”

“Non ho a, Me-me.”

“Jiajia ho. How are things?”

Sabine paused, not knowing how to answer. Or even how to bring up her troubles. Mama had never equipped her with the ability to rely on people.

“Jiajia, are you there?”

It was like a dam burst. “I think I’m failing Marinette!” Sabine started crying. “Something’s going on with her and she won’t tell me, but she’s so jumpy around everyone, and she’s freaking out at the drop of a hat—and there’s this picture she drew, and I’m afraid, and I don’t know what’s going on, but I need to know, and—and every bone in my body is telling me to lock her up until she comes clean, but I just can’t turn int—”

“Jiajia!”

Her sister was trying to calm her down, but now that she had the momentum, she wasn’t going to let up. Self-flagellation was, in the end, the only way she knew to bare her soul to people. “The other night, she woke up from a terrible nightmare. It was horrible. She was screaming so loud that I thought a man was attacking her up in her bedroom. She told me she was fine, and I believed her. Then she had a panic attack on the streets. A cupid cosplayer triggered some bad emotional reaction, and then today she was talking to Adrien—the boy she has a crush on—and as soon as he touched her shoulder, she flinched back so fast, and I don’t know what’s going on. She keeps telling me she’s fine, but I’m about ready to lock her up until I can make sure there isn’t someone threatening her!”

Sabine gulped in air after that long speech.

“Oh, Jiajia, I’m so sorry you have to go through that. It has to be so tough.” Sabine could hear the hesitation in her sister’s voice. Meilin had never been one for sharing her struggles, and she wasn’t very good at expressing empathy, either. “I remember when Bridgette was first a teenager, we didn’t get along at all. Fights all the time. She was sneaking out, and I ended up stalking her social media accounts trying to figure out who she was still friends with, if she was seeing a boy, what she was interested in. It hurt so bad.”

Sabine could understand this feeling. She remained silent, taking advantage of her sister’s uncharacteristic openness. “And you know I couldn’t tell Mama. She would’ve hopped a plane and laid down the law on her. Probably torching the whole family in the process.”

“But Bridgette talks to you now, right?”

“Yes, she does.” Sabine could tell from the tone of her sister’s voice that she was trying not to rub it in her face.

“What did you do? Did your struggles resolve themselves?”

“Well, after a month where she refused to even speak to me, I pulled her out of school for the day and I took her to a spa so she couldn’t get away, and couldn’t use her phone. We had cupping done, we got facials—”

“A facial got her to open up?”

“I framed it as a reward for how hard she’d been working at school. But really it was to trap her so she had to talk to me.”

“Did she figure out what you were doing?”

“She did, and she was so mad at me. There was a lot of screaming on both sides. The poor attendant at the spa. It’s such bad luck to get between two Cheng women when they’re angry.”

“So how was this a good thing?”

“Bridgette got everything off her chest that she’d been holding in, and our relationship has been better ever since. The root of a lot of it was actually about Mama. I didn’t know it, but she’d been talking to Bridgette behind my back whenever she’d visit, trying to ‘encourage’ her—”

“You mean ‘threaten’ her.”

“Cajole her about her future career path. You know, that whole spiel of, ‘I was nothing, dragged our family into the elite, do not let us backslide, yada yada.’ Bridgette was angry I wasn’t standing up for her. And once she told me, I told Mama to back off. Done.”

Done.

That sounds nice. I want that.

Sabine ran her palm across her face and looked up, sighing, before drawing her fingers around her neck, pulling back the skin. “Do you ever feel like you aren’t doing enough for Bridgette?”

“All the time. You and me, we didn’t have the best role model. And unlike you, I still have the privilege of receiving our mother’s criticism. Speaking of which, why don’t you take some of that money Mama sent you—”

“You know about that? I haven’t touched that since it got here.”

“Jiajia, Who do you think told Mama to send it? She called me one day, railing about how she didn’t know anyone in Paris to talk to about an investment, and I reminded her she had a bloody daughter in town. I suggested she write you a letter or something, to try to patch things up, and she said she’d just send some money.”

Sabine was taken aback. “Mama thought she could just send me some money and everything would be okay? Do you know the last thing she said to me?”

“…Yes.”

“I knew it was a bad idea not to send it back right away. Now she probably thinks everything’s forgiven because I held onto it. Well, I definitely can’t use it now!”

Meilin sighed. “That woman. She and I may be in the same line of work, but we don’t think alike at all. Probably because of your good influence, when you were around.”

“Oh, I don’t know about that. I wasn’t around that much.”

“You stood up to Mama when it counted. She went a lot easier on me than you, in no small part because of how you two ended things.” Sabine heard her sister clicking her tongue, a tell-tale sign she was trying to solve a problem. “Don’t send the money back. Use it, but keep her away from Marinette. That way, there won’t be any strings explicitly attached to the money. Take Marinette for a mother-daughter spa day. They won’t let her take her phone in. She won’t be able to escape you, either. And she won’t even realize it’s a setup until it’s too late.”

Sabine began imagining how this trip might go. Sabine would apologize for being smothering. Marinette would take the hint and apologize for shutting her out. They would patch things up.

Yes. That’ll fix things.

Sabine grinned. “Alright, I’ll try it. What would I do without your demonic influence, Me-me?”

“Sit at home, letting more of that ghastly vanilla odor soak into your skin?”

Sabine giggled. “Someone’s jealous!”

The line went dead. It’d been a while since she’d teased her her sister into silence! Sabine opened her phone’s browser and began looking for a good place for a massage.

I have a plan.

Chapter 6: Healing Hands

Chapter Text

After she’d finished booking spa time for her and Marinette, Sabine fired off a message to Alya asking her to take notes for Marinette the following day at school. Then she headed upstairs to tell her daughter about the “reward” for all her hard work.

She climbed up the ladder to Marinette’s room and knocked on the hatch. “Marinette, I have something to talk to you about.”

She waited for a response, but none came. So she knocked again. “Marinette? Are you awake?”

Still nothing.

She pushed open the hatch. The light was on, but she didn’t hear anyone moving around. She shot a glance at the rooftop access panel as she finished the climb, but it was closed.

Emerging into the room, she turned around. Marinette was passed out on her chaise longue, arms thrown awkwardly like she’d fallen asleep mid-yawn, knitting needles and yarn scattered on the ground beneath her. There was a trail of drool beating a path from the corner of her mouth to her ear.

Sabine’s eyes crinkled with joyful familiarity, remembering early postpartum days at home, recovering and taking care of her new baby. Leading up to delivery day, she’d known that of all the baby fluids, dealing with poop would be by far the worst—especially since Marinette would be on an all-liquid diet, so it would be very runny. She’d coached herself up so she didn’t throw up at the sight.

But she was wrong! Yes, poop was smelly, but it wasn’t really that big of a deal if you got it on you. Keep calm and wipe it off. Pee? Basically warm water. It didn’t even stink.

But drool was disgusting. She hadn’t expected how gross she would find it when a babbling, happy Marinette would blow spit bubbles that dripped down her chin and onto Sabine’s cheeks and neck.

And here her teenager was, giving an unconscious master class in drool physics. But now that Sabine wasn’t on the receiving end of a wayward drip, she found it endearing.

She tiptoed toward her daughter to make her more comfortable. Marinette was a spry fourteen, so bad sleep posture wouldn’t affect her the next morning at all.

On her way, Sabine picked up off the floor a Chat Noir-themed blanket Marinette had made.

Always something on the floor.

Marinette stirred, and Sabine froze for a moment, hoping not to wake her. Then she continued her approach, quiet as a mouse. She reached out to sweep Marinette’s loose hair off her forehead, and—

“It’s me…” Marinette whispered.

Oh, how cute. She’s talking in her sleep.

“That’s me…”

Sabine wondered what this dream was about. She imagined Marinette was sitting at a mirror, makeup and hair done for her debut fashion show, astonished at her own beauty in this imaginary future.

Yes, it’s you, Meiyun!

“We can be friends,” her daughter continued.

The moment felt absolutely magical, like when she’d sat up late watching over baby Marinette, smiling as her daughter would giggle in her sleep or stick her tongue out like she was dreaming of latching onto a nipple.

“Mmmm, habbybirday to you…”

This triggered a memory of Marinette at three years old in February, parading around the bakery, yelling, “Konsheefazehh!” at all the customers who tried to buy something for Lunar New Year. It was one of the only memories Sabine had of her daughter speaking Shanghainese before the painful realization that she wouldn’t pick up the language without more family around. And there would never be more family around.

“…Sentibug…”

Sabine didn’t know what this meant, but of course people spoke nonsense in their dreams.

“No…don’t kill her…don’t! No!” Marinette had tensed up in her sleep.

Sabine scrunched up her face, dread clustering in her muscles. What new secrets were about to be teased but not revealed?

Kill her?

She had just convinced herself a trip to the spa would fix everything, and now murder?

She collected her nerves off the ground and reassured herself. Everyone has nightmares, and they don’t have to mean anything.

Repeating this prayer of petition, she managed to convince her body to believe it, and the tension left her face.

Sabine knelt down and pressed her nose to her Marinette’s cheek. “Shhhh, shhhh, it’s okay, Baobei…your mommy’s here. You’re safe. And so is your friend…”

Her daughter hiccupped and sighed, the tension in her body melting away. And then her eyes fluttered open.

“Maman?”

Sabine sat back, trying to draw Marinette’s anxiety away with the movement. She gave her daughter a tender, reassuring smile. “You fell asleep on your sofa, baby. And you were having a nightmare again.”

“Oh, but it ended so nicely.” Marinette looked confused, but she smiled as she stretched her arms and legs, twisting and twitching her body with happiness.

“Oh? Was your friend okay?”

For a moment, Marinette looked wistful and disappointed, but the sadness was gone as soon as it had arrived, like Mama on special birthdays. Her daughter answered, “Yeah. Well, it was, um, Bridgette. And I thought someone was going to hurt her. But then suddenly we were okay, and she came home with me, and we were like a family.” She pursed her lips before continuing. “Does that make sense? I know my dreams don’t make a lot of sense sometimes…”

“I’m just glad it got a happy ending.” Sabine hugged Marinette, who melted into the embrace.

“Yeah, happy…”

Her daughter trembled in her arms, clutching the back of Sabine’s shirt as hot tears were transferred to her neck where Marinette’s face rested.

The next morning, Sabine made sure to occupy space between the stairs and the front door so she couldn’t miss Marinette dashing out to go to school. She’d brought a chair out and sat down with a book. In all the emotion of last night, she’d forgotten to tell Marinette what they were doing today!

Sabine looked up from her tea when she heard her daughter bounding down the steps. She rounded the landing and came into view. Marinette had bags under her eyes, a broad smile plastered over what was otherwise an exhausted face.

Another nightmare after I left?

Sabine laughed. “My, my, Marinette, aren’t we up early?”

Her daughter nearly missed a step, but grabbed the railing and settled her feet. “Maman! You scared me! What are you doing sitting in the stairwell?”

She was so excited to take Marinette for a relaxing day out. Thankfully, she’d managed to reach one of their seasonal employees who had stopped by last week admitting to needing a little extra pocket money for dates with his new girlfriend.

But the appointment she’d booked wasn’t until later. “Given how early it is, I could ask you the same thing.”

“Well, you know, I just wanted to start the day off on the right foot! So much to do, so much!” She performed a fake jogging motion with exaggerated hand movements, tipping a bit on the nose of one of the steps before re-balancing. “Hehe! Me and Alya and Nino and Adrien have a group project we’re kicking off in the library before school today!"

Sabine’s heart sank, and she put her hand to her chest.

How can she lie like that?

She had messaged Alya first thing this morning to tell her she was surprising Marinette with a spa session and to ask her to take notes at school. Alya had initiated a video call right away, declaring that if it meant Marinette got to take a break, Sabine had her full support. (Alya could always be trusted in a pinch.) But the girl hadn’t mentioned anything about a group project!

“Take notes for Marinette? Not much difference from the usual, Mme C!"

"What do you mean, Alya? You normally take notes for Marinette?”

Alya sucked in a breath. "No! Of course not! She’s very diligent. She and I take turns with notes to give our hands a break. Mlle Mendeleiev is all talk talk talk! So much to write down! We started doing it a couple weeks ago because we were getting hand cramps!”

"Okay… Well, so long as she's not imposing on you all the time… Marinette has to learn to be responsible. You're not going to be in class with her forever."

"Absolutely, couldn't agree more! But yes, I will take notes for her. No problem! It sounds like you two are going to have a nice day out. She deserves it. You both deserve it!"

Sabine cleared her throat. “Actually, Marinette, I already called the school, and I'm treating you to a spa day today!”

Not only did Marinette not seem happy to hear this, but she looked nervous. But Sabine blinked her eyes once, and all that was left on her daughter’s face was gratitude. There wasn’t a trace of worry remaining.

“R–really? A spa day?!” Marinette fiddled with her backpack straps, scraping her thumbnails along the inside of the shoulder pads.

Sabine continued, undeterred. “I think you could use some relaxation, and I miss getting to talk to you."

“That’s…” Marinette took a deep breath, examining the tips of her shoes, like she was reminding herself of something. She looked up and made eye contact with Sabine again. “That’s so nice of you. Thank you! I could certainly use a break. Why not? It’ll be fun!”

Sabine wiggled her eyes at her daughter. “And it’s posh, too.”

Only excitement was left on Marinette’s face. “Really? That’s great! Umm, when did you want to get going?"

"Why don't we shoot for 10? That will give us plenty of time to get there. Go back to bed until then, sweetie. You look like you could use some more sleep.”

"Thank you so much!" Marinette gave Sabine a tight hug and then leapt back upstairs.

Right at ten, Sabine and Marinette sat down on the Metro. Sabine had tried to look “chill,” but she was certain Marinette knew she was up to something. So far neither of them had brought it up.

Sabine started reading over her emails, repeating “nonchalant” to herself in an effort to appear so. "How is your internship going? Your father and I never hear much about it, but we’re so excited for you and want to share in your joy.”

Marinette bounced in her seat and kicked her legs, her pigtails swinging. “Oh! Well, um, Nathalie is so intense, and Mr Agreste rides everyone hard…but I'm grateful for the chance, and I do enjoy the work. I mean, it’s not what I expected, but it’s still a ridiculous opportunity!” Marinette looked at her and raised her eyebrows, smirking. “And I still can’t believe they pay me. I have actual money from Gabriel Agreste!”

Sabine closed her eyes and luxuriated in her daughter’s enthusiasm. It was the emotional massage she needed right now. “Yes, that’s very nice, sweetie. But what did you expect before you started?”

When Marinette didn’t respond, Sabine opened her eyes again. "Marinette?"

Her daughter was now fidgeting and looking forward at a Metro employee aboard their car. Sabine put her hand on her daughter's shoulder.

Marinette jumped at the touch and snapped her head back to her. “What? Did you say something?”

“I just asked what you expected…”

“Oh. I'm not really sure. I knew this wasn’t a real opportunity—that Adrien convinced Nathalie to let me follow her around…but I think I had a vague idea that I'd be designing things, even if they were all going to end up in the trash.”

“Well, you’re only fourteen. You have so much more to learn. Don't take it as an insult.”

Marinette's gaze had once again drifted back to the man in the Metro uniform. Sabine let her gaze linger on him, on his thin brown eyebrows and aquiline nose. At the way he stared at a black family talking happily with each other. Then she recognized him, and she realized what was going on.

Qilin. She's thinking about Qilin.

Shortly after her akumatization, this man had disappeared from their bus route. She figured he’d been transferred, but it appeared he’d found a new, better job. It was so typical, guys like this f*cking up and falling up the ladder. The irony of him working so close to the Mandarin Oriental was not lost on her.

Sabine put her phone away, sat up straight, and pulled her mouth into a smile to disguise her grim feelings. She watched her daughter, trying to emit compassion and love that Marinette could absorb through the air. Trying to forget her own humiliation at this brute’s hands.

When Marinette rested her head her shoulder, Sabine relaxed. And until they reached their destination, she let Marinette just be.

”Sweetie, we're here.” Sabine gently shook her daughter to wake her up.

Marinette lifted her head off Sabine’s shoulder. “Hmm? Oh, okay.”

They grabbed their things and walked through the aisle. Sabine kept her focus on him. As she walked by, she smiled severely and looked him dead in the eye, channeling her mother’s imperiousness. He seemed to melt backward into the wall as she strode past him, out the door, and alighted on Place de la Madeleine.

They began walking toward the Boulevard de Capucines. Marinette was skipping, with a broad smile on her face. Undoubtedly she was looking forward to passing through the doors of the enormous glass wall that made up the façade of their destination. “Maman, I still can't believe you booked us time at the Mandarin Oriental! How can we afford this?”

Sabine sat at the dinner table alone, shocked. Before her sat a distended hongbao. Five minutes ago, it had been stuffed with crisp, large-denomination Euros. She hadn’t counted the money yet, but it had to be over—

No. She couldn’t accept it. She should return the red envelope. Retour à l’envoyeuse. There were probably invisible strings attached.

She examined it again. The opening had small tears, as if someone had stuffed it quickly. Nerves, or due to a lack of care? The latter.

Sabine snorted. Her mother certainly never took the time for her, so why Marinette?

There was a note in Chinese accompanying the hongbao. “For Meiyun’s needs.” Definitely lack of care. She’d never even met her granddaughter. Why the sudden change? And what did Mama expect her to buy Marinette with all this money? A brand new car? Hah. She still couldn’t get over the fact Gina thought a motorcycle was an appropriate gift for a fourteen-year-old.

Had Mama heard about Marinette getting lost in Shanghai? It was all over the news there. She’d never gotten a call checking in on Marinette, so…

She hadn’t wanted to touch the money. But, caught between a rock and a hard place, Sabine had thrown herself at the rock and hoped for the best.

“Oh, your father and I have some money squirreled away for special occasions, like your Shanghai trip ’to get in touch with your roots.’” She gave her daughter a knowing look. “And you're important to us. You've seemed so stressed lately, between your leadership duties at school, your commissions, your internship, and whatever else you get up to with Alya...or Adrien.”

"Maman! You know it's not like that! ...and I don't think it ever will be."

"Oh, nonsense. I know your father is more of the gushing type, and I don't say it enough. My Chinese friends joke that a parent doesn’t say, ‘I love you,’ unless they’re dying. But you're a real catch, sweetie." She gave her a little pat on the cheek as they turned onto Rue Saint-Honoré.

"...not for someone like Adrien—"

"Especially for someone like Adrien."

Marinette was silent for a moment. "I don't understand what you mean by that."

Sabine clicked her tongue. “Oh, honey, I know Paris doesn't always make us feel welcome, but sometimes it seems like the whole city revolves around you and you're the only one who doesn't notice.”

Marinette seemed to shudder at the thought, as if it were too true for her own liking. “I’m just a normal girl.”

"Well, I don't think so. Neither does your father. Neither does Clara Nightingale. Neither does Jagged Stone. Neither does Gabriel Agreste. And neither does Adrien."

Marinette fiddled with her fingers, appearing to consider what Sabine had said. "What if I've...changed targets?"

Sabine snorted. "Oh, you mean Chat Noir?”

Marinette began stammering and nearly tripped.

“Hah! Oh, don't try to deny it, I've heard you passionately defend him to Alya when she talks about how that fox hero should replace him. I'd be careful if I were you, Marinette. He seems like a bit of a playboy.”

Marinette furrowed her brows but didn't disagree.

She must be more tired than I thought. Sabine had been so certain she'd respond to that level of teasing.

There was a lull in the conversation, and Sabine began to pick at her nails. Better to do it now than on the massage table. “Marinette, I'm so sorry you had to see me akumatized like that.”

“What?”

“You kept looking at that Metro guy today, and it was the ticket inspector from the day I was akumatized. You were thinking about Qilin, right?”

“…yes.”

Sabine looked down at her feet and counted the cracks they walked over, avoiding each one, struggling with how to talk to her daughter about this. When Marinette was younger, Sabine had agonized over “the talk”—that there were always going to be people in her birth country who saw her as a foreigner. But the first time Marinette came home from élémentaire crying that some kids had made fun of her ‘smelly food,’ she knew she’d waited too long. And she was still waiting too long.

Not anymore.

”When I first came to Paris, I wasn't made to feel welcome."

Marinette was looking intensely into her eyes now.

"I traveled around with Uncle, helping him out with his networking and training, but I usually stayed inside our apartment when I wasn't going to French classes. When I did go out, I felt like everyone was staring at me. Sure, Paris has had Chinese immigrants for a long time, but we've never been allowed to feel French—corralled off where Parisians who can't afford to fly to China come to gawk at our culture. Even just walking to French classes, I'd get catcalls. And not the ‘nice kind.’”

"Maman, why are you telling me this?"

"I just...I think a lot about the times Uncle and I were akumatized. Neither of us were at our best. I know what people were saying after Kung Food. ‘Chinese are hardworking robots who can't handle criticism.’ We're closed-off. We don't try to assimilate. And it was the same sh*t after Qilin. And did Hawkmoth really have to make us look like stereotypes? Paris never lets us assimilate.

“Look at Chloe Bourgeois. She didn't come up with that stuff on her own about how Uncle should just make sushi. And don't think I don't notice when she says your name how she emphasizes the ‘Cheng.’ She's learning that type of behavior at home. And her mom isn't around, so she hears it from the mayor. The largest Chinese expat community in Europe, and his well-educated daughter can't even tell Japan from China, even when she has a Chinese girl in her class who’s done reports for Heritage Day.”

“…Yeah…”

Marinette’s quiet agreement broke her heart.

She'd always tried to shield her daughter from the ugliness in Paris. But Hawkmoth had put it front and center. It was hard enough to pretend you weren’t being treated unfairly because of your skin; but to have that disdain twisted into murderous intent that then triggered more racist invective?

Paris was where Sabine’s heart lay ever since she met Tom. Not even Mama's lectures about the family's legacy in finance had justified Paris in her eyes before him.

But sometimes the City of Love didn't act like it, and those were the times she wished she could take Marinette (and Tom) away. But to where? Shanghai certainly would never be an option. Too many bad memories.

Her daughter shook her head and giggled. “Screw Chloe. She’s gonna wear clothes with my name on them one day.”

Sabine reached for Marinette's hand and squeezed, nodding with a grin. “That’s our secret. We Cheng women endure.”

At the spa, they were told to leave their phones behind in lockers. Marinette protested, and Sabine was a little disappointed in her daughter for being so clingy with the thing. It would only be a couple hours; she could go without Alya for that long. She just wanted some time with her daughter.

An attendant handed them two robes and left.

Marinette turned to Sabine, looking sick. “You have to get naked for a massage?”

Sabine cursed herself. In all her excitement about Meilin’s promises of a revitalization of the mother-daughter bond, she’d completely forgotten about Marinette’s reaction to Adrien’s touch. And the panic attack. And the nightmare.

She smiled back at Marinette, trying to reassure her. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. Of course you don’t have to! I almost forgot what it was like at your age. You know, after months of being poked and prodded while I was pregnant with you, having doctors and nurses down there when I gave birth, and months of taking my breasts out in public to feed you, I kind of stopped caring so much. It’s just that it’s harder for the masseuse to work your muscles if there’s clothes in the way.”

Marinette began tugging at her fingers. “O-oh. I didn’t think about that.”

“You can keep your underwear on. That’s what I used to do. If you’ve got a knot in your back, they can slide their hands under your bra strap or unfasten it, if that’s okay.”

How could I be so careless? You’re so stupid, Sabine!

“Marinette, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

Her daughter looked at her in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“Well…I wanted to treat you to something special today, but I’d forgotten about your nightmares, and about how skittish you seem to be about being touched right now.”

Marinette set her jaw, fire in her eyes. “No. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m fine. I promise. This will be nice.” The flame dimmed a bit. “I just, um, don’t want to break any rules, you know?”

Sabine considered her daughter’s determination. “If you’re sure, hon—”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay. But remember that if there’s some place you don’t want them to touch you, you can tell them.”

Her daughter nodded. “Yes, yes. I understand. Just don’t look, okay?”

Sabine smiled, remembering when Marinette was a toddler and she ran around the bakery after hours pressing her naked butt to the display glass, snickering about “buns for sale”? Silly Tom teaching her those things. “I promise.”

After changing, they exited the locker room and met up with the attendant, who ushered them into the massage room. Marinette scanned the area.

"Marinette, is something wrong?"

"What do you mean?"

"You looked around the room, like you were looking for something specific.”

"Oh! Hah, well, we've had so many akuma attacks at school that I guess it's become second nature to make sure I know where the exits are."

“Oh.” Sabine was shocked to hear this, but it did make sense. And it gave her a sense of relief that her daughter was circ*mspect about danger. ”Are all of your friends like that?"

"Alya for sure. Adrien, too, come to think of it. We actually were joking about it the other day, that someone's going to think we're up to no good if we keep it up.” Marinette looked sheepish. “I was trying to be subtler this time."

"Well, I am your mother. I notice more about you than you think."

A flicker of a smile crossed Marinette's face. “Hm. I suppose that's true, Maman. You're very perceptive.”

Once the attendant left, Sabine continued explaining how the spa worked. Then they fell into a comfortable silence as they waited.

Their masseuses knocked, and—true to her word—Sabine didn’t look over. She heard a nervous sigh, then the robe drop, and some brief rustling, which must have been Marinette shuffling under the sheet. She herself casually climbed onto the table.

Sabine closed her eyes as her masseuse began kneading out the tension in her back. Amid the murmuring and small instructions passed between clients and workers, Sabine and Marinette managed to have a conversation.

“I was talking to your auntie last week, and she told me that Bridgette has been admitted to read economics at Cambridge. Can you believe it? The first Cheng girl in Britain, and she’s into Oxbridge!”

“Good for her! But, come on, they’re rich. Do people like that ever get turned down?” Marinette hummed with pleasure, obviously enjoying the massage. “I’m not saying she doesn’t deserve it, but…okay, I’m jealous. I hope in a few years Auntie will be telling her about me getting into ESMOnnnnghh…”

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine! I felt some muscle tension, like, quiver and melt away. Ohhh this feels amazing…”

“That’s good, sweetie.” Sabine felt herself relaxing under the hands of her masseuse. She carried so much stress around her shoulders from being hunched over at the table managing the financials, lugging around heavy deliveries, working the cash register, and even helping Tom bake in a pinch. She laughed. Rolland would love to hear that our records aren’t digital.

She heard more relaxed sounds coming from beside her, and Sabine said a silent prayer of thanks for her sister’s advice.

“Speaking of school, how do you feel about your studies this semester so far? You always have those last-minute projects you’ve got to run off and do with Alya, but I never hear whether your teachers liked the results.”

“Oh, uh, well a lot of them are small things Miss Bustier asks us to work on. Everyone knows I’ve worked with Jagged Stone and am at Gabriel now, and Alya is famous now for her blog, so I think she’s trying to get us more mature. She doesn’t grade the work. She just talks to us about it, yeah, so…Oh, not there, please.”

“What?”

“Oh, I was just talking to…what was your name again?”

“Esme,” answered her masseuse. “And that’s Charlotte.”

“I was just talking to Esme.”

“I’m sorry, are you Marinette Dupain-Cheng?” Sabine’s own masseuse interjected.

“Oh! Um, yes?”

“Wow, that’s so cool! There’s a few of us Jagettes who work here, and we just can’t get over the fact that Pajama Girl and Jagged Stone’s designer are the same person!”

“Ehehe, yeah, that’s me! Oh, no not in that area either. It’s a little too sore.”

“Pajama Girl?” Sabine asked through the face hole in the table.

“Yeah, from that time me and Adrien—”

“I figured as much! I just didn’t realize you were the subject of gossip! I’m surprised Mr Agreste hasn’t tried to take advantage of that kind of notoriety. You know, have you model PJs with some kind of amateur aesthetic…Pajama Girl-Endorsed!” She couldn’t help but giggle at her own joke.

“I don’t think the Gabriel aesthetic includes wearing a towel on your head in publi—I SAID DON’T TOUCH ME THERE!”

Sabine shot up and turned to Marinette in time to see her daughter, wide-eyed and jerking the sheet upward toward her throat, wrapping an arm around her waist, cinching the drape to cover everything below her neck. She caught a glimpse of enormous bruises up and down her daughter’s chest and shoulders.

Every alarm bell in Sabine’s head was going full tilt, overriding rational thought. She felt like when Frozer had conjured a blizzard throughout Paris, his chilled vengeance rending doors from hinges, invading the bakery. Her limbs were frigid even as they propelled her off the massage table.

The masseuse spoke up. “I’m so sor—”

“Marinette! Where did you get those bruises?!” Sabine shrieked. The welts she saw strafed her mind with unbidden images of a vicious, white-masked face as she rolled off the table and rushed toward her daughter.

“No! Stay back! I’m okay! Stay back!” Marinette was panting as she kicked at Sabine’s outstretched hands.

Sabine pulled up short and backed off, though each of her neurons screeched in unison that she needed to take her daughter home, shackle her to the radiator, and blockade the door so no one could lay a hand on her.

“Okay! Okay! Marinette, calm down!” Esme and her coworker had backed away toward the wall, exchanging awkward looks. “Could you two ladies give us a moment?”

The two masseuses quickly left the room, Esme tossing one more apology over her shoulder as they vacated.

Sabine backed up. “Marinette, it’s okay, I’m backing away. You see?”

Marinette had an exhausted look in her eyes, and she clutched the sheet to her body like a second skin, like she was wrapping herself in cellophane to stay preserved. “Y-yeah.”

“Okay. Okay. I’m giving you space and not going to touch you, and you’re safe. It’s just me, your mother, who loves you very much.”

Marinette obscured her terror with a veil of frustration. “Oh my God, I’m okay! She just hit a tender spot!” She growled at Sabine. “And can you cover yourself up? You’re gonna traumatize me!”

But Sabine could see beyond her daughter’s nervous attempts to conceal. With every shudder of the drape Marinette was using to hide the truth, like a shroud haphazardly tossed over a corpse, Sabine knew.

But she couldn’t decide whether to challenge her daughter now on this obvious lie. It was like viewing a solar eclipse through a pinhole. Without peering into the sun and risking damage, she’d only be taking in a distorted projection of the truth. “But those bruises—”

“I fell down the stairs at school. You know how clumsy I am!”

Sabine froze. How many times do women use that excuse?

She agonized over what the truth might be. Something had happened, and she’d lost Marinette’s trust. How could she get it back? She needed it back!

But again, thoughts of the broken relationship with her mother invaded her mind, and Sabine caved, deciding not to press the issue. She knew full well what too much aggressive mothering could lead to.

A single, treacherous tear escaped her eye and trickled down her face. “I’m sorry, Baobei. I just got so worried for you!”

Marinette’s smile was fragile, that of a porcelain figurine balanced precariously at the edge of a flimsy table. She was still pallid around the eyes. “Thanks, but I’m okay! Now, do you want to call the ladies back in and get relaxed again?”

Sabine eyed her daughter, wondering whether to let her pretend like no secrets had been spilled today, or to make sure she wouldn’t get triggered further. She sighed. “I want what you want.”

“Well, you did spend all that money…”

“Forget the money. We came here today for our well-being, not to get a bargain. If I wanted to save money, I would’ve taken us to a place where they speak Mandarin, not one where ‘Mandarin’ is plastered on the building.”

Marinette shot her the grin of a child who thought she’d gotten away with something. “Wellll...my forearms are pretty sore from all the sewing I’ve been doing…”

“Okay, then I guess we’re staying.” Sabine threw her robe back on and peeked out into the hall to find Charlotte, looking like she’d chided an embarrassed Esme the whole time they were out there.

The two women shuffled back in with her and they resumed the massages. But Sabine never heard Marinette sigh with pleasure again.

Chapter 7: Ill Omens

Chapter Text

Sabine stretched as she and Marinette walked outside the Mandarin Oriental and into the sun, trying to play off the recent turmoil and give her daughter a chance to open up without any pressure. “Ahhh, I don’t know about you, but I really needed to get out of the house.”

“Yeah…” Marinette wasn’t paying attention, instead fumbling with her phone.

“Marinette, are you listening to me?”

“Yeah…nice to get out…”

Sabine huffed and lunged toward Marinette, yanking the phone out of her hands.

“Hey!” shrieked her daughter, grasping to get the phone back.

“Marinette, I’m trying to talk to you and you’re back in your little phone world again. Take a break. Look, I don’t even have mine on. It’s wonderful to be disconnected! Right now, there could be—”

Marinette’s phone started wailing. She jumped for Sabine’s arm, which was stretched out, still holding her phone. Sabine jumped back. “Ah ah ah! Not until we get—”

“Maman, give it here! I think there’s an akuma attack!“

“Well, I don’t see one, so we’re safe. Stop fretting about akumas that are happening on the other side of the city. They never travel that—oof!”

Marinette had shoved Sabine, knocking her off balance. As Sabine fell on her butt, Marinette wrenched the phone back out of her grasp.

“Hey!” Sabine stood up and brushed her butt off only to notice Marinette wasn’t next to her anymore. “Marinette?!”

“Sorry, I’ve got to go! To the bathroom! Real bad!” she heard her daughter yell as she ran away.

She sprinted after her daughter. “What? Young lady, there’s an akuma attack, and we just left a spa with a really swanky bathroom!” She rounded the corner into an alley—Marinette was gone.

Angry at her for running away, Sabine threw her purse at the nearest wall. It landed, as her heart did, with a hollow thud. She felt ashamed that her first reaction was anger. But mostly she was terrified that something would happen to Marinette.

She ran around, looking down every side street, behind every dumpster, and over construction barriers into cordoned-off areas, but it was no use. Like when she tried to peer beyond the emotional walls her daughter erected daily, Marinette was lost to her.

The wail of sirens grew louder as the sky grew darker, but Sabine wasn’t sure if it was the adrenaline subsiding or an unnatural solar phenomenon that made it harder to see. She ducked under an awning and pressed herself against the wall, fighting to slow her breathing.

What was going on with her daughter? Running toward an akuma was unbelievable. She knew Marinette had helped in the past, but she couldn’t possibly believe it was safe to fight as a civilian, especially without coordinating with Ladybug or Chat Noir ahead of time! It was a death wish. But Marinette had such faith in Ladybug…

Maybe since she’d teamed up with her in the past, she expected the heroine to save the day and reverse the damage.

I don’t think she’s trying to die…

Had her daughter become an adrenaline junkie? Did she enjoy pain? These ideas didn’t make sense. But nothing made sense anymore. And it was agony to not be certain that Marinette wasn’t doing this to harm herself.

When Sabine had first heard of children cutting themselves, she was horrified and confused. What would motivate a child to do that? Weren’t people wired to avoid pain?

But because Sabine had sworn she’d be ready for anything as a parent, she read up on it. She learned that traumatized children often use physical pain to distract themselves from psychological pain.

And, bruises aside, Marinette was in great psychological pain.

She pinched her nose bridge, feeling a headache coming on, and fumbled with her phone to call Tom. She squatted down to rest on her heels after noticing her thighs wobbling. Remembering her conversation about Qilin, she was hit with a wave of self-consciousness about how Chinese she must look right now. She shot back up.

“Tom, Marinette ran away in the middle of an akuma attack!”

“She did what?”

“She just…ran! I’m worried she took off to find Alya and help her film things!”

She could hear Tom breathing on the other end of the line, but he wasn’t immediately responding. “Tom?”

“I’m sure she’s fine. There are so many attacks at her school. She must know how to take care of herself.” It sounded more to her like he was trying to keep himself calm rather than her. “Stay calm, Sabine. Do some of your tai chi. You don’t want an akuma finding you in that state. If she’s lying to you…remember when you thought Marinette was lying before and Hawkmoth enticed you to become Verity Queen!”

“Okay…okay. You’re right.” She took a few shuddering breaths and knocked her fist on her thighs to help keep them from cramping. “I’ve got to go. I’m going to pull up the livestream.”

“Okay. Stay safe out there.”

“I will. I love you.”

She said a silent prayer to anyone who was listening that she wouldn’t see Marinette be victimized, wondering if this paralyzing dread was why her mother had been so severe, if the unflappable Meifen had really been scared all along, and whether she and Marinette were on the same path to destruction.

Shanghai.

Uncle Wang, Sabine, and her mother were finishing up a hotpot. It was one of the few days each year when her mother would come to stay overnight with her and Uncle, so Sabine worked extra hard to make her mother happy.

She lifted out the last of the sliced beef and presented it to her mother, who accepted the food, cleared her throat, and got right to the point: “Xiabing, you’ve been seeing French tutors long enough. Now that you’re sixteen—”

“Your mother and I have been discussing your future.” Uncle Wang spoke up, using his stature and timing, but not the volume of his voice, to take over the conversation as her mother inhaled to continue. Watching her try to re-create the tension as he defused it was like watching someone struggle to fight an empty jacket.

His warm voice—like the bœuf bourguignon dont elle en avait discuté avec son tuteur du français—was a stark contrast to her mother’s clipped, aggressive speech, which always left Sabine feeling like she was listening to a choppy radio broadcast. “You will begin traveling with me whenever I go to Paris for trade shows and training. Sometimes I will have you help me, but usually you will be left to your own devices. We expect you to spend your time improving your French. Potential clients in the West generally treat us as outsiders, so it’s important that you be as eloquent and your French as native-sounding as possible.”

Sabine looked at him in surprise. She could almost taste the beef bourguignon she’d sample in Paris once there. “Of course, Uncle.”

He smiled at her. “Though you already speak French better than I.”

Her mother rolled her eyes. “What my brother-in-law is trying to say, with his sugar-coating ways, is that your French isn’t great, but it needs to be. I don’t want you going anywhere or doing anything that isn’t helping him or improving your French. Unless it’s something extra I tell you to do, like meeting with family business contacts.”

“Yes, Mama.”

“And I don’t want you getting into trouble like you do here. You are Chinese, not French, and they won’t let you forget it. We’re pouring our resources into you, like we did with your cousin in Tokyo, for the honor of the family. I know it will be tempting while you’re so close to the Louvre, but try not to waste your time looking at sculptures. There are more important things.”

“Yes, Mama.”

Meifen stood up. “I have an early morning flight to New York, so I won’t be staying tonight.”

Sabine was disappointed, but not surprised. Why did it hurt so much then? She gave a half-hearted response: “On my birthday?”

Meifen reached into her bag. “Here, a gift for you. Read it.”

Sabine bowed her head. “Thank you, Mama.”

She stood to walk her mother to the door of Wang’s kitchen lab. Meifen carefully stepped around a few experimental soups, looking at each one with both disgust and disinterest—a combination only she could achieve.

Once again, Sabine felt like she was escorting one of the family’s associates out the door, rather than spending time with her mother. Her mother had sent her to live with Uncle when she was so young. At the time, Sabine didn’t understand why, but over a decade, she had come to realize it was a blessing. Even if it was so her mother could focus on raising her sister.

When they reached the edge of the garden, Meifen blocked Sabine and opened the door herself. Without even turning to say goodbye, she walked through the threshold of the moon gate. Over her shoulder, she lobbed a final threat: “No boys.”

Sabine watched her mother slide gracefully into the family car before she closed the door and was zipped away by the driver.

Later in the afternoon, Sabine sat in her bedroom trying to distract herself with one of her C-dramas. But her treacherous eyes kept darting to the clock. One hour…two hours…two and a half hours…and nothing from Marinette. She looked out the window. The sun was setting. It was unsettling to see it set twice in a few hours. Whatever light-stealing akuma the heroes had been fighting, it felt like it was stealing a little light from Sabine’s soul as well.

She threw her remote at its cradle, swore, and got up to head to the kitchen. Maybe she could eat her feelings.

Twenty minutes later, her phone vibrated in her pocket while she and Tom were preparing dinner much earlier than usual. Marinette still wasn’t home, so maybe it was her! Distracted and nervous, she cut her finger. “Ouch!”

“Are you okay?” Tom moved to help, but she waved him off with her good hand.

She tried to staunch the blood as she fumbled with tugging her phone out of her pocket, but it kept dribbling out of the cut.

She wiped her hand one last time on a tea towel to clean her finger before she looked down at the lock screen, a picture of Marinette holding the bowler hat she’d made. The screen was smeared with blood across her daughter’s face.

Please let this not be an omen.

It was the school calling. She swiped to answer before wrapping her finger tightly in a tissue to let the platelets do their job. Something else red that healed wounds in this city.

“Oui, allo,” she greeted.

“May I speak with Mme Cheng, please?”

“Speaking.”

“Yes, this is Principal Damocles from Françoise Dupont. I’m afraid your daughter has been absent—”

“Oh, I know. But I called the school yesterday to let you know she wouldn’t be there.”

“No, Mme Cheng. I’m not talking about just today. This month, Marinette has had five unexcused absences from at least part of the day of school. This is not including tardies during akuma buffer times where we allow students to get re-situated after an attack.”

Sabine sat down in the nearest chair, unsure whether it was the cut to her finger or her pride that left her feeling dizzy. “Five absences? But I’ve only taken her out this once!”

Tom looked at her with confusion. “Marinette?” he mouthed at her. She nodded.

Damocles continued lecturing her. “Well, then I would speak with your daughter to find out if she has any good reason for having missed so much school. Here at Françoise Dupont we pride ourselves on academic excellence—”

“Is she not doing well in school?” Sabine heard a keyboard clacking through the phone.

“Well, umm, she is doing fine in school. Sufficient in some classes, outstanding in art and literature. But that’s not the point. As you may be aware, France imposes a 135 euro fine upon parents who cannot justify their child’s absence from school, and if her grades were to suffer, you and your husband could face a larger fine and imprisonment.”

“Imprisonment? For some absences?”

At this, Tom’s eyes bugged out. He left the food right before he prepared the beurre monté and approached her, rubbing circles along her back, likely more to reassure himself than her.

“Mme Cheng, that is what the Civil Code provides for.”

“OK, then…there must be something we can do. Is there schoolwork for her to make up?”

“I suggest you speak with your daughter and get her set straight. You don’t want her to end up expelled, do you?”

Sabine clenched her jaw and counted from five before speaking again, remembering the last time she’d spoken to the principal. When he’d expelled Marinette after that girl lied about Marinette trying to hurt her.

She had debased herself by not taking her daughter’s word as truth that time, and she wasn’t going to make that mistake again. She would give Marinette the benefit of the doubt and wait until she got home to ask her for her side of the story.

“And you wouldn’t want the news to cover the story of a class representative being expelled without a formal investigation—again—would you? I’m old friends with Nadja Chamack, and she is quite fond of Marinette.”

She heard Damocles huffing on the other end of the line. “Message received, Mme Cheng. It’s just municipal policy for a school to call the parents of a truant teenager after five absences. I’m just the messenger. I advise you to look into this. Even if her grades are fine now, this is always how it starts. Good evening.”

Stunned, Sabine lay her phone on the table.

Tom sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. “What was that about, honey? I haven’t heard you threaten someone in a long time.”

“That was Principal Damocles. He said Marinette has been missing school and that we could get in trouble for it!”

“What? Our little croissant is skipping?”

“Let’s not jump to conclusions. She’s probably got a reasonable explanation. I don’t know what, though. And she did run away from me when she found out there was an akuma attack. Do you think it’s gotten that bad for her living here in Paris?”

—THUMP—

They jumped at the sound.

Wide eyed, she looked at her husband. “I thought you said she wasn’t home!”

But he looked just as surprised as her. “I’ve been here all day; I don’t know how she could have snuck up there without me noticing. She would’ve had to have been very quiet.”

“I’ll just go check.” Sabine walked upstairs and heard muffled talking coming from through the trap door. She pushed through.

Her daughter was pacing around the room, muttering to herself. Her phone wasn’t in sight, there wasn’t any streaming video playing, and she didn’t have a video game headset on. She didn’t know what Marinette was saying, but she imagined it was negative. She’d been covering up negative thoughts for days now.

“Marinette?”

Marinette nearly jumped out of her own skin. “Maman! Gah, you scared me!”

“What are you doing here?”

Marinette stared at her mother with confusion. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? This is my room.”

Sabine gritted her teeth, wishing she had something in hand to throw across the room alongside her frustration. Her daughter didn’t seem to understand how terrified she left her all day. Marinette’s casual disregard of her feelings reminded Sabine of how her own mother used to be, and she just couldn’t let Marinette turn into Mama.

“Marinette! You ran off when you found out there was an akuma! And I haven’t seen you for hours! Your father said you never came home, and I’ve been downstairs worried sick wondering if you’d gotten hurt—”

“Ladybug always makes things better—”

“Akumas aren’t the only dangerous thing out there!” Sabine began enumerating with her fingers. “First you disappear, then you never text, you sneak back into the house to avoid a scolding, then your school calls to tell me you’ve been playing hooky! What has gotten into you? Are you trying to ruin your life? Do you want to get hurt? I’m sick of this, Marinette! You’re grounded until further notice!”

Her daughter gaped at her. They had never grounded Marinette for anything before. She was a model child, obedient in all the important ways, but without the cloying pantomime of obsequiousness that marked children as annoying. She was going to do great things one day.

But today, she was going to be shuffled back under Sabine’s wing and chained there until something changed.

Marinette spluttered, certainly taken by surprise. “What? But I have to meet with Clara to take her measurements for a commission! And I have my internship!” She stomped her foot, and Sabine’s own leg remembered the jolt of pain from when her own mother used to drive her to physical, cowering protest. “Y-You can’t do this to me! My future!”

“Oh, so now you care about your future? What about when you chased after an akuma earlier? What about what your teachers think of you?” Sabine threw her arms out wide. “Their opinions of you matter, too! Mlle Bustier is active in the SNES. A phone call from her could make such a difference when you’re trying to get into uni! That’s the type of connection you need to—ugh! I don’t know where I’ve gone wrong with you! If I’d have ever stepped out of line like this, my mother would’ve—”

Sabine caught her breath and felt a tension in her neck. She took a deep breath and let it out.

Now isn’t the time.

“You can still go to the internship. As for Clara, you should have thought of that before acting out! Have her come here, I don’t care. But you are not to leave this house except for school and your internship, do you hear me?”

Marinette set her jaw and looked at Sabine defiantly.

“I said do you hear me?”

“…yes…”

“What? I didn’t hear you.”

“I SAID YES, OKAY? GEEZ!”

Sabine growled and stomped down through the trapdoor.

As she left, she heard Marinette stomp up her own ladder to the bed and then out to the rooftop balcony, slamming the trapdoor closed behind her.

Sabine had to give it to her, Marinette knew how to dedicate herself to performative anger.

Chapter 8: Calligraphy and Coffee

Chapter Text

The first day of Marinette’s grounding started off smoothly enough. Her daughter gave her a kiss on the cheek as she skipped out the door to meet Alya. Once Sabine had seen them far enough from the house, she turned back inside the bakery.

“Tom, can you watch the counter for a bit? I’m going to run upstairs real quick.”

“Sure, Honey.”

Now’s my chance.

Sabine marched up the stairs, determined to figure out what was going on with her daughter. But the closer she got to Marinette’s room, the slower she took each step, as if her muscles were wasting away. Her heart was pounding.

Am I going to find a clue? Am I going to be able to help Marinette?

Please don’t let her secret be what I think it is...

She put her hand on the trapdoor and pushed it open, inching into the room like a mouse peeking out of its den, afraid a single creak would attract attention. Closing the trapdoor behind her, she glanced furtively around the room, not knowing what she was actually looking for. She almost laughed at the idea that Marinette might have set traps to protect herself, but she caught herself, realizing the implication that it would mean her daughter was afraid in her own fourth-floor room.

The chaise. Check under the chaise.

Kids hide things under sofas all the time!

She knelt down and slid her hands under Marinette’s chaise longue, but she palmed air.

There’s…nothing under here at all. Good job for keeping at least one place in your room clean, sweetie!

So what next?

Still kneeling, she scanned the room. Her eyes eventually climbed the ladder and fell on the loft bed.

Bingo.

She climbed up to the bed. There were fabric swatches scattered across the duvet, but nothing about it looked any different than it had since they’d given Marinette that starter kit for sewing years ago. She smiled, remembering young Socqueline running around the counter at the nearby crafting store owned by Jeannette, grabbing their hands and dragging them to the right aisle.

“If she’s anything like me, she’ll love this.”

Those were simpler times, back then. They’d drop in and Marinette would gush to her friend about a recent project, and Socqueline would shout out updates to Sabine of her taekwondo progress, knowing she was talking to a fellow martial artist. If only Marinette had shared that interest with her, too.

From Sabine’s vantage point atop Marinette’s bed, she surveyed the whole room. She scanned the sleeping area and the ground to her left, seeing Marinette’s small book collection, her vanity, and some stacked shoe boxes. Then she leaned back, gripping the railing for safety, and peered down around the steps where she stood. Her breath caught in her throat.

Her diary.

It lay open on her desk. Marinette wrote everything in it.

Sabine had once gushed about a necklace on a shopping trip with her daughter, and come her birthday nearly a year later, she’d unwrapped her gift to discover Marinette had remembered it. When she asked her how she’d remembered, her daughter had pointed to her diary across the room and smirked. “It’s all in there.” Then she’d pointed to her head, “Because I can’t keep it all in here.”

Sabine’s heart rate quietly accelerated and her breaths became shallow as she climbed down from the loft. No. Those are her private thoughts.

She turned to the desk and walked toward it. She reached her hand out to touch the pages, seeing her own fingers tremble.

Do it.

No.

Yes.

Without paying much attention to the text, she observed the penmanship, a memory of her mother’s words in her head.

“Xiabing, look at these strokes. There’s no confidence to them! One would think you were a foreigner learning Chinese. I’m going to have a talk with your calligraphy tutor. This is embarrassing. There’s no way I’m having you write out the banners for our fundraiser now!”

Marinette’s strokes looked timid.

Sabine froze. Timid? No! You’re not your mother.

She felt sick. She’d invaded Marinette’s privacy so comfortably, and she’d immediately turned critical. It was Marinette’s diary, after all—she could write as sloppy as she wanted.

Trust her.

Sabine took a step back from the diary just as Marinette’s voice rang like an approaching police siren, muffled by the trap door. “I’ll be back down in a sec, Alya. I can’t believe I forgot my backpack!”

Sabine startled, frantically scanning the area. I can’t let her catch me in here! But there was no hidey-hole to scurry into. An excuse would have to—

The trap door banged open.

“Maman! What are you doing?!”

She spun around to see Marinette crawling up into the room. She schooled her face not to betray her guilt. “Marinette! O-oh, good, you’re back! I thought I had left my ring up here last night after your latest nightmare. I was hoping you’d found it but forgotten it on your desk.”

Marinette stared at her, and then at Sabine’s hand, then peered into her eyes like she was reading her mind. Then she ran over and scooped her diary up from her desk, closed it, and hugged it to her chest. ”The ring…on your finger?”

“What?”

Caught.

Sabine looked down at her trembling fingers. She was a terrible liar. “Yes! Oh, haha! Silly me, it was right there the whole time! Oh, please don’t tell your father, he’ll tease me for days.”

“...right.” Marinette shifted from one foot to the other, seemingly unable to stay still.

Was it just the invasion of privacy that had her so anxious?

Marinette gulped loudly. She slapped her free hand over her mouth and laughed nervously. Then she spun around and rushed to her backpack by her desk, sliding the diary inside.

Sabine was proud of herself that in the end she hadn’t read anything. But at the same time…

She had been so close. If only her eyes had accidentally scanned a few pages.

No. This isn’t the way to get that knowledge. I can’t lose my daughter’s trust.

Sabine walked to the trapdoor and stepped through to the ladder. As she took the rungs one at a time, she ran her hand along the railing, feeling the wood grain beneath her fingers.

She paused, looking up.

“Marinette? You know I love you very much, right?”

“Of course!”

“And you don’t think I’m too hard on you?”

Marinette tilted her head and looked down at her, her eyes revealing confusion and concern. “No, not at all! Maman, is there something wrong?“

Straining to smile, Sabine ducked her head to hide her face. She inspected the ladder like she needed to pay attention while she descended, as if she hadn’t been doing this every day for years.

“No, nothing’s wrong. It’s just…sometimes parents want what’s best for their kids but don’t know if they’re doing the right thing.”

For a moment, the room was quiet and nobody moved. Sabine could hear the sounds of traffic and commerce outside.

Then her daughter shuffled toward the hatch and slid a hand over hers. Sabine looked up, and there was Marinette, crouched low, moving her forehead in to touch hers—Why did we ever stop doing this?—smiling broadly.

Marinette’s tender reassurances came confidently out of her mouth. “I’m so happy you’re my mother. Don’t worry about a thing; I’m not going anywhere.”

Her phone tolled with incoming messages, probably from Alya. “Ahhh!!! Except to school! Because I’m late! And grounded! Move, Maman!”

Sabine smiled and shuffled down the ladder, making room for Marinette to dart past. “Good luck at school today, honey!” Her hand brushed her daughter’s arm as she passed, and it felt like she was slipping away.

The heat of her shame melted the smile off her face. She made a beeline for the master bedroom, locking the door behind her. She turned on her white noise machine, sat down on the edge of the bed, and cried.

Get it together. She’s so much better than you.

-----

Close to noon, Sabine found herself anxious again, wondering how many calories she’d burned just tapping her foot. She pulled the cash out of the till and counted and re-counted it.

She had just vowed to trust Marinette. She promised herself.

But she could already feel that determination eroding. Was it a good idea to trust Marinette with so much at stake? Her life might be on the line! Her health. Her integrity. Her future.

Children don’t know what’s best. Parents do.

“Tom, can you watch the till for a few minutes?” she called out.

He popped his head into the storefront from wherever he’d been hiding, the tinny in-fight music from UMS Mini clinking and plinking from his phone. “Absolutely, honey. What do you need to do?”

“You know the woman who works for Gabriel Agreste, Nathalie Sancoeur? She gave me her number when Marinette started her internship, and—“

“Sabine.” He scratched his forehead. “We read stories about parents like this years ago. Do you really want to be that mom who calls her daughter’s boss?”

Sabine shook her head. “This is different. I’m not calling to give her a piece of my mind about anything. I’m hoping I can feel her out, suss out whether she’s seen Gabriel do anything inappropriate around Marinette.”

She smiled at her own plan. “Besides, Nathalie gave me her number. It’s not the same. Marinette isn’t an adult child at a real job after college. She’s just a kid.”

Sabine nodded to herself at that, feeling reassured that she did get to keep Marinette under lock and key if she wanted. “Nathalie is her boss, sure, but she’s also a bit like a parent. Like Mlle Bustier at the school. In loco parentis—that’s the term, right? She’ll understand.” She felt humor bubble up from the tar pit her heart had become the past few days. “I know she’s cold, but it’s not like she’s a villain.”

Tom sighed in resignation. “Okay, Sabine. But remember, reading her is like reading the phone book. All facts, no feelings. If you think you can handle her, I trust you.”

She winced, thinking of Marinette’s diary. It wasn’t Tom’s fault he didn’t know how much those three words hurt to hear right now.

She walked out of the bakery to the storeroom where it would be quietest.

I don’t think I have a choice, Tom.

Pulling out her phone, she dialed the number Nathalie had given her. The phone had only rung once when the line connected.

“Mme Cheng. To what do I owe the pleasure?” came the crisp voice of Gabriel’s assistant, sounding disinterested and attentive in equal measure.

Sabine made her voice as amiable as she could. “Mlle Sancoeur, I need to talk to you about my daughter. I think something’s going on in her life, and since you’re around her for a few hours a week, I was hoping to talk to you about anything you might have seen.”

Nathalie hummed. ”I’m afraid I’m rather busy at the moment.” Sabine imagined Nathalie multitasking with two tablets for work plus a hands-free device for their call.

“It doesn’t need to be right now, and of course I can meet you anywhere at your convenience. It would mean the world to me.”

Nathalie hummed longer and louder. “Regardless, I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary with Mlle Dupain-Cheng. She’s been an exemplary intern.”

Sabine tutted. “Still, you wouldn’t begrudge a mother some peace of mind, would you? I’ve noticed you around Adrien. I can’t help but feel like you understand how important this is to me.”

Never take no for an answer.

Nathalie sighed on the line like a leaking air canister, and Sabine marveled at the woman’s impressive lung capacity. But screw being an imposition when one’s child is in trouble.

“Very well. If it suits you, I will have some time at six this evening. Mr Agreste has an important meeting, and I will be across town handling some other items for him. I can sit down with you at Café de Flore. I will text you the address.”

“Oh, I know where it is.”

Nathalie sounded embarrassed. “Ah, I didn’t mean to imply—”

“I inferred nothing. Thank you, Mlle Sancoeur. I will see you then. I really appreciate it.”

“Hm.”

The call cut out. Sabine didn’t think she’d ever get used to that strange woman.

But she let Marinette shadow her, so she can’t be all bad.

[ping]

Sabine checked her phone as a calendar invite from Nathalie showed up in her notification list.

Well, Nathalie, I’ll see you at six.

At six on the dot, Sabine walked into the café wearing an attention-grabbing black zansae with gold and red embroidery. She knew Nathalie didn’t design for Gabriel, but it was a small opportunity to catch the eye of a member of his inner circle. Nathalie might say something to Gabriel, Gabriel might decide to investigate Chinese fashion, and—oh, goodness me—they just happened to have an intern who is half-Chinese… Seize every opportunity. She’d learned that from Uncle.

Tom knew what she was up to, but she’d told Marinette she was meeting up with a calligraphy student and asked her if she wanted to go. At the mention of “calligraphy,” her daughter had spluttered and reminded her that she’d been grounded and wasn’t going to let Sabine ”trick me into breaking the rules.”

Marinette had sighed dramatically, placed the back of her hand to her forehead, and moaned about how sad she was to be missing out on calligraphy and coffee.

Get this girl a prix d’interprétation féminine from Cannes.

In the café, Nathalie was already seated at a table, dressed in a crisp pantsuit. Despite it being the end of the day, her clothes looked like she’d just had them starched. There didn’t seem to be any wrinkles. It was like the fabric didn’t want to disappoint her.

Nathalie looked up from her tablet, undoubtedly dealing with demands from Gabriel, and abruptly stood to greet her, extending for une bise.

“Mme Cheng—“

“Please, call me Sabine.”

Nathalie’s mask of professionalism remained. “Very well, Sabine. Please, sit. I’ve already instructed the waiter to bring us drinks once he sees two at our table. You seem like a Barolo woman.”

How in the hell? “Thank you, Mlle—“

“Nathalie. I will pay you the same courtesy.”

Sabine felt wind in her sails for the first time since before the spa trip. If Nathalie brought this level of zeal to a chat, she must be aware of anything untoward happening at Gabriel.

“Your qipao is beautiful.”

Sabine feigned shyness. “Oh, this old thing?”

The waiter brought a bottle of wine and two glasses, then served each of them. Nathalie thanked the waiter and looked again at Sabine. “You said you had something you wanted to discuss regarding our intern.”

Sabine began curling her toes inside her shoes, trying not to blurt out her concerns. “Yes. Um, I’m not sure how to approach this, but…is Marinette with you the entire time at her internship?”

“Yes, her primary duty is to shadow me, to perform tasks that I deem an inefficient use of my time. Plus, of course, she’s a preternatural talent, and we want to cultivate a positive relationship with her. So she will get a little more exposure to the creative side than if she were a typical assistant’s assistant.”

“Wow. Thank you for that. I can’t tell you how much Tom and I appreciate you.” Sabine swirled the wine in her glass, watching the red dance in the light as it clung to the inside of the glass, black bits of sediment tumbling before sinking back down. “And when she does these tasks for you, you don’t stay with her…right?”

“That is correct.”

“And…do you know if she’d ever be put in contact with an adult...unsupervised?”

Nathalie raised an eyebrow. “Unsupervised by me?”

Sabine hesitated. “No. I mean...when you send her to do things, is it possible she’d end up alone with one adult, no one else around?”

“...I suppose so. Although it’s unlikely. Work moves at a brisk pace at Gabriel, and it’s almost unheard of for someone to be alone—besides Gabriel, of course. They’ll be in meetings, or sharing a design space on a floor with few private offices. Even if I sent her to make copies or retrieve swatches to deliver to a designer, it’s unlikely she’d be alone in the—“ Nathalie cut herself off and squinted at Sabine, her attention like a lens focusing a beam of light to a white hot point. “Actually, can I ask why you’re curious? Did Marinette tell you something happened to her?”

Sabine squirmed, knowing this was the Rubicon. “No. Well, not in so many words.”

“Then how did she—“

“She didn’t say anything. It’s her behavior.” Sabine couldn’t hold it in any longer. She had closed herself off from anyone not immediate family during this crisis, and her worries were like a dog bursting out the front door when it sees a friendly stranger.

“A few nights ago, Marinette woke up from a nightmare screaming about someone touching her. But she won’t talk about it. And then a few days ago, she got freaked out by someone dressed like Dark Cupid beside an advertisem*nt invoking ‘sin.’ I’ve seen her jerk back from being touched, too. I’ve got a bad feeling that someone’s behaved inappropriately with her, and I can’t for the life of me figure out when it might have happened.

“I’ve wanted to talk to some other parents, but our group chats from when the kids were young are all graveyards. I’m kind of hoping it’s just an akuma thing. It’s hard enough being an adult in Paris right now; I can’t imagine what it’s like to have your childhood traumatized by Hawkmoth.”

Nathalie looked at her with interest, resting her chin on her hand and leaning forward. “Go on.”

“You’d think if something were going on, we all would have noticed and resurrected a group chat. But…” She nodded toward her phone. “…nothing. And her friend—you know Alya Césaire, right?”

“Yes, she is one of Adrien’s friends.”

“Well, she seems to know something. But she won’t talk to me, either. I tried talking to Adrien—“

“What? When did you talk to him?”

For the briefest of moments, Sabine felt like a heat lamp had been turned in her direction, such was the fervor in Nathalie’s question. But the sensation was gone as soon as she registered it, and Nathalie was again sitting before her like it was a job interview. “Oh, he came by the bakery after he heard what had happened to Marinette. He’s such a sweet boy.”

Nathalie’s lip twitched at the corner before returning to its normal resting state. “Yes, he is.”

“You know, Nathalie, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say you had a hand in that.”

Nathalie looked equal parts wistful and ashamed. “No. I’m sorry to say I haven’t contributed to his kindness. I am not a warm person, and I serve his father too closely to be able to support Adrien’s emotional needs. It’s miraculous that he’s turned out the way he has. His father is...restrained in his emotions and believes that too much affection makes a child weak.”

“...I see.” Sabine took a long drink of her wine. “Actually, now that you mention Mr Agreste, I was curious how Marinette has interacted with him. Does she seem nervous? Confident? Quiet? Has her behavior around him changed during the internship?”

Nathalie eyed Sabine. “If you’re trying to figure out if Gabriel took advantage of her, I can assure you that is impossible. He is many things, Sabine, but he’s not a monster. Marinette would never have been left alone with him. He has no patience for interns, and I would not allow her into his office unaccompanied, either. Any powerful executive knows never to be alone in a room with a younger employee because of this exact scenario; it’s a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

Sabine shifted uncomfortably in her seat, feeling called out for her unspoken accusation. But Nathalie had handled it with grace despite knowing this was the type of thing that could ruin a reputation forever. “Okay. So never alone with Gabriel, unlikely alone with anyone else. Marinette joked that almost all the men working at the company are gay anyway...”

Nathalie laughed, and it rang rich and clean, like the first time one tried out a new set of earbuds. “That is true.”

Who knew Nathalie Sancoeur followed pop culture?

The woman, having apparently exhausted her joy reserves with one laugh, looked at Sabine seriously. “Actually, you mentioned you talked to Adrien. Did he...share any of how he’s been feeling lately? I’ve noticed him acting strange occasionally, but I haven’t identified any abnormal patterns, just a feeling I get. And I am not known for having feelings very often.“

Sabine wasn’t sure whether that was a joke. “Well, I don’t want to betray his confidence—”

“Please.” Nathalie leaned over and put her hand on hers, a sudden look of ferality surprising Sabine. “Adrien is very important to me. I was close with his mother, and after she...departed, I took it upon myself to be, at the very least, a bit of a watchdog. I don’t get involved—not like a mother, anyway—but I do want him to be safe and happy. If he told you anything important...”

“Well, not really.” Some of the tension left her body. If the hyper-professional Nathalie Sancoeur was willing to be this vulnerable with her, then she’d made the right choice by reaching out. “He seemed to understand panic attacks well enough...”

“Panic attacks?”

Sabine nodded. “Marinette had that panic attack, you see, and Alya knew what to do to help her resurface. And when Adrien came over, he was so tender with Marinette that I think he must understand, too. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s seen this happen to my daughter before and learned on his own what he should do to help her.”

Nathalie’s eyes glistened, as if the boy were there, giving her permission to feel. “Yes, that does sound like my Adrien,” she whispered, as soft as the rustling of feathers. “Sabine, you said Marinette seemed to be triggered by someone dressed like an akuma?”

“Yes.”

“Hm. The other day Adrien was meandering around a photo shoot during his downtime with a listless look in his eyes. I asked him about it, but he reassured me that he was just lost in thought. But now that you mention it, he has been increasingly agitated around pigeons, and we were doing another photo shoot with them.” Nathalie huffed and frowned. “I don’t know why Gabriel is so insistent on the bird since he knows Adrien is allergic to feathers. And you’d think after all the Mister Pigeon attacks, they’d be reviled.”

“He didn’t take a Rhinallergy before the shoot?”

“He is supposed to, but he has his mind on other things, so he often forgets. Gabriel used to outright forbid it, though, because it can cause water retention, and since Adrien’s a model...”

Sabine hummed in response. Opening her mouth risked the escape of a biting comment.

Nathalie continued. “But I wasn’t really thinking about the allergy. I was thinking that Adrien was steering clear of the pigeons as much as he could. I wonder if it’s Mr Ramier’s repeated akumatizations.”

“Maybe.” Sabine slid one of her hands into her lap and began tapping her knee. “You know, Nathalie, I was thinking about how many kids Ladybug has recruited as temporary holders. Kim, Alya, Nino, and Max all in Adrien’s class, plus Luka Couffaine—if you know him.”

Nathalie looked shocked. “How do you know about them?”

“The same way I imagine you do.” Unsure why Nathalie looked nervous all of a sudden, Sabine grimaced. “Chloé Bourgeois has been so loud about their shortcomings as temporary superheroes.

“Can you imagine if Ladybug ever recruited Adrien? How would you even know? He might be out there at night, sneaking around fighting villains. What would you do if it had been him dressed as that turtle guy? It’s awful how all our children are being affected by Hawkmoth. They’re going to live with this trauma their entire lives.”

Nathalie pursed her lips. “I really hope not. If I had one wish, it would be to make everyone forget Hawkmoth had ever happened.” Her phone chimed, and she glanced at it. “I’m afraid I need to get going.”

“Oh! Okay.”

“But I promise you I will keep an eye on your daughter at work. I’m in and out of the artist spaces enough that I can keep a closer watch. They’re such flighty things, sometimes you have to breathe down their necks to get anything done.”

“Don’t I know it,” Sabine said, rolling her eyes.

“I will make sure there’s no way she’s ever alone with someone.” Nathalie smiled and stood up. “I admit it was a mistake on my part not to keep a closer eye on her, since she’s so young. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.”

Nathalie took a few steps, paused, and turned back to Sabine, placing her hand on the table. “I suppose there’s no harm in telling you, but I think Adrien likes Marinette a lot more than he realizes. That makes her all the more important to me.” She looked left and right before leaning in conspiratorially. “I prefer this state of things over his obsession with Ladybug. He has a shrine in his closet he thinks I don’t know about. Maybe he’ll take it down for your daughter’s sake.”

Sabine laughed. “Well, then I’ll tell you a secret back: she used to have an entire wall of pictures of him from ads. Actually, I guess it’s not a secret since it was featured on national TV!”

Nathalie smiled. “We should scheme.”

Sabine was excited at the thought of this unexpected new girlfriend. “I’d like that, Nathalie.”

“Have a nice evening. Good luck with Marinette.”

“Thank you. And you, too. Let me know if she gives you any trouble. She’s had some unexplained absences from school.”

Nathalie’s stride hitched, she looked deep in thought for a moment, and then she marched out of the café.

Hm, that was odd.

On the walk home, Sabine received a text from Nathalie.

Sabine had already set up an appointment for Marinette before she got home.

Chapter 9: Matou et Soiris

Chapter Text

Later that night, Sabine hovered around the bakery door, pretending to be cleaning, so she could catch Alya on her way out. The girls were working on a “school project,” but she gave it even odds that it was actually an Adrien project.

Sabine caught her as she skipped alone toward the bakery exit. “Alya, can I talk to you a moment?”

“Sure thing, Mme C. What do you need?”

“The other day. With the panic attack.”

Alya’s jaw tensed, and her eyes darted back toward the stairs.

“How did you know what to do? Has this happened to Marinette before?”

As if she had manifested an illusion she thought would fool anyone, Alya smiled and relaxed. “Oh, everyone in our class knows how to handle panic attacks.”

Sabine began picking at her nails. “E–everyone? Alya, what’s going on?”

“It’s the akumas. You know, everyone in our class except Marinette and Adrien has been akumatized. Some of us multiple times.”

Sabine bit the inside of her cheek. “Hm.” It seemed like she was reading from a script, as if she and Marinette had planned this lie specifically. “Alya, I’ve been akumatized twice, and I’ve never had a panic attack.”

“Sure, but you were akumatized into a Chinese sculpture. How often do you think you’ll bump into something triggering here in Paris?”

Sabine thought for a moment. “I suppose not often.”

“Exactly! So you see, we’ve all learned how to deal with panic attacks because we all get them.”

“But Alya, why would a cupid have triggered Marinette? It’s like you said, she’s never been akumatized.”

“Right, but Dark Cupid was Kim, and you remember that awful prank Kim played on Marinette last year when she thought he was going to ask her on a date, right? So of course Kim’s ’love’ akuma form could affect her!”

Sabine wasn’t buying it, but she wasn’t sure how to proceed. Let’s try the direct approach. She’s a reporter; she’ll respect it.

She leveled her eyes at Alya. “I know how much you care about Marinette. But I don’t think you’re being honest with me. I think something is going on with Marinette that the two of you aren’t telling me. And I think it’s bad.”

Alya’s mask cracked. “N– no, everything’s fine. Marinette just really cares about us, and our pain is her pain!”

“Alya—“

“Maman! What are you doing interrogating my bestie?” Marinette spoke up from the stairs before flying into the bakery.

Sabine threw her washrag on the ground and poked her finger at her. “You two are hiding something from me. I want to know what it is!”

“Oh my gosh, we’re not hiding anything. Why won’t you trust me?”

“I do trust you! I trust that you think you’re taking care of yourself, but kids don’t always get that right. It’s my job to keep you safe, and someone is hurting you!”

Marinette groaned. “No one is hurting me except Hawkmoth. The city’s scary. All my friends have gotten akumatized. They’ve killed people! Mom, Ivan squished people under boulders!”

Sabine recoiled at this. She had been akumatized three times. Twice, she’d fully transformed but fortunately hadn’t hurt any civilians. The other time…she didn’t know what would’ve happened as Verity Queen. Hopefully she would’ve helped people by exposing the truth—if only I could do that now—but she hadn’t been successfully possessed that time, so she’d never know. “He killed people?”

“He doesn’t remember doing it, but he’s seen pictures of bodies that Alya won’t put on the Ladyblog. Mylene was turned into a monster, and she can’t even look at pictures of herself because she knows what Hawkmoth turned her into.”

“But when you saw the cupid—”

Marinette stabbed a finger at her chest, signaling to Sabine how abnormal her daughter was about all this right now. “I’m fine! When I saw him, I just felt so frustrated that Kim can’t even practice his archery anymore. It reminds him of when he was akumatized and shot people. In the heart! With arrows! Sure, he can’t remember doing it, but he knows he did!

“Did you know some of the people he shot left and murdered their partners and kids? I mean, Ladybug brought them back to life, but that’s why I reacted that way; I just care about my friends! Those people know what they did under their hypnoses.”

Her daughter continued ranting, flailing her arms like ropes lashing Sabine to a missile, constricting her breathing and paralyzing her limbs. Sabine’s eyes were peeled open, and she was forced to watch. She didn’t know where the bomb was headed, but she knew what would happen when it got there.

“Think about it, Maman. They regained consciousness after the akuma was destroyed, but the damage wasn’t undone until Ladybug cast her cure. There were minutes where those poor people were fully conscious at the scene of a murder. Literally with blood on their hands, not knowing what happened but seeing their children, Maman. Their children. Stabbed, strangled, crushed…I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it, but I can’t…I can’t stop—” Marinette was quivering, and she began gasping for air.

Before Sabine knew what was happening, Alya had begun rubbling circles on Marinette’s back, her phone brandished like a protective enchantment, swiping through photos and whispering quietly as she showed them to her. “Mme C, Marinette spends time with our friends talking them down when they’re freaking out. If it’s not Mylene or Ivan, it’s Rose, who carries around menthol ointment that she sometimes smears under her nose, because there are perfumes that trigger her.

“Even Chloe. God, Chloe. We were outside doing yoga in the school garden and she got stung by a bee. She went catatonic, like she was enacting Queen Bee from the victim’s side. They had to call an ambulance, and Marinette sat there holding her rigid hand the whole time.”

Sabine reached out for her daughter, who withdrew at the contact. “Marinette…” She was overwhelmed with jealousy at the closeness Alya shared with Marinette, watching her work her magic, imagining Alya to be painting talismanic script on her back and muttering incantations.

This can’t go on.

She was furious with Hawkmoth for doing this to her daughter. She was furious with Alya for not getting her help. She was furious with Marinette for keeping this trauma a secret. But mostly, she was furious with herself for not noticing it.

What kind of mother am I?

About the only thing Sabine could do was swallow. Her daughter really was Atlas, carrying the world of her friends’ emotional struggles on her back.

I’m the kind of mother who fixes things.

“Marinette, I’ve scheduled an appointment with a therapist. You’re going the day after tomorrow. End of discussion.”

“AHHH! Maman!”

“End. of. discussion. And you, Alya—“ Sabine was at a loss for words. Her throat constricted with emotion, a fist squeezing around her larynx.

“…I just wish you girls would have told me about this earlier. Marinette, I’m your mother. All I want to do is help you. You’re my whole world.” She yearned to connect with her daughter, but she feared marring Marinette’s psyche with her own burning shame.

Off to the side, her daughter’s eyes were scanning the doors and windows.

Marinette, are you even paying attention?

“Maman, calm down.” Her daughter’s hushed, hurried voice was like glass across sandpaper. “You’re going to get akumatized again!”

That caught her attention. She felt the tendrils of distress worm their way across her body and around her chest.

No, not again.

Hawkmoth cast an umbral specter, defiling his victims. Even brazen, authoritative Gina had confessed to shame at the memory of surrendering control when fighting back seemed pointless.

Sabine focused on memories of her own mother, with an iron bullet where her heart should be. How in control of her feelings she had been, to the extent that she didn’t seem to have any.

I need to be like that.

She rolled her spine straight, focusing on one vertebra aligning at a time, until she stood rigidly. She threw back her head so her chin was slightly elevated. The position was uncomfortable and unnatural. It was like she was cosplaying a villainess. But at the moment, her feelings didn’t matter.

She caught her reflection in a nearby mirror and shuddered, words refusing to form. She made for a terrifying sight, her posture changed as if possessed by another, her body moving in unfamiliar ways.

Glancing at the girls as they slowly backed away, she recognized from her own childhood the tell-tale signs of suppressing one’s feelings. Masks of indifference slid into place. It was a skill the whole of Paris had needed to learn—and fast—the past year, to prevent themselves from being akumatized. No one was perfect, but it felt good to try to be useful.

Alya broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Mme Cheng.”

Marinette had her hands in front of her, motioning like she was trying to talk her down from an emotional outburst. “Maman, don’t give him what he wants. Don’t let him take your humanity again.”

They thought she’d been akumatized.

Her shoulders fell, and she fought against the guilt rising up from her belly.

These girls have been through so much.

Two full akumatizations and one partial. Two girls who had seen and smelled death and destruction, and here she was, nearly throwing them back into danger. What could she do but relent and defuse the situation?

She felt disgusted with herself, with the city, and with Hawkmoth. She was, to her shame, also disgusted with Ladybug. That woman made everything look so easy. Whoever she was, she was ethereally good in a way no human deserved to be. Did she ever have a moment of doubt? From the outside, it didn’t look like it. A messianic figure far removed from the concerns of normal people; a lighthouse guiding the ship of Paris into harbor.

And yet, Ladybug dallied, taking a purely reactive approach to the akumas. Was she investigating the origin of the butterflies at all? Millennia of existence, and she still hadn’t defeated Paris’s own wizard terrorist. Being practically immortal, she probably didn’t understand the pressures of time; that, given only a few decades on Earth, every akuma attack was an agonizing flaying of one’s dreams.

Stop it.

She forced a puff of air out of her nose, accepting that the most deserving target of her ire was herself. She was the one losing control of her emotions. She was the one failing her daughter. She was the one getting angry at these two girls for acts of courage and selflessness.

“I’m sorry for scaring you girls. And Alya, I’m sorry for snapping at you.”

“So...no therapy session?” There was hope in Marinette’s voice.

“Yes therapy session.”

She walked off, leaving the girls to finish wishing each other good night.

After Nora collected Alya, Sabine hurried to the bedroom to rant at Tom about what she’d learned. She stormed in and made eye contact with him.

He sighed and set down the book he’d been reading on his side table. His reading glasses followed. She was certain he recognized the look in her eyes.

She marched over to her side of the bed with her fists balled. She backed up to the foot of the bed and let herself fall backwards. The box springs creaked with her emotional collapse. She kicked her legs in frustration.

Tom shifted in bed, and she felt herself pulled toward him, his body deforming the bed like a brilliant star creates a gravity well.

She faced him again.

The way he was looking at her, she felt like nothing else mattered but her problems. He’d discarded the world of his book when she entered the room. “What happened?” he asked.

“Tom, it’s just so frustrating. She’s been holding in so much, and I never noticed! When did it get like this? She used to tell me everything. She was an open book!”

He rubbed her arm. “What secrets has she been keeping?”

She recounted what Alya and Marinette had told her tonight, ticking off traumas that would leave a soldier screaming. By the time she was finished, she and Tom were both sitting up.

Tom looked aghast. “She…she told you all that tonight? This is happening at school? Why hasn’t the administration told anyone?”

“I don’t know! But I believe the girls, and it pisses me off that Damocles isn’t sounding the alarm! I know they’re teenagers and need to be prepared for the real world, but I’m not even ready for that yet. Neither is she. Tom, she’s fourteen, and our twenty-first century reality includes demonic possessions. She’s having panic attacks and night terrors. You know, I’ve been watching her at dinner, and she’s not eating much. And when she doesn’t think I’m looking, she’s sneaking macarons. That’s not a healthy diet. I’m worried it’s a coping mechanism. She’s not hungry, but she’s using the sugar to fight down negative emotions.”

Tom swung his legs off the bed and yanked his shirt over his head like he was going to war. “I need to talk to her. I can’t believe I’ve been taking this so casually.” He scowled. “I thought it was…I don’t know what I thought—I wasn’t thinking!”

Sabine crawled over to the edge of the bed and hopped off, putting her hand on his chest to hold him back. “No. She opened up to me. I should go talk to her some more, make sure she knows that we are here for her and won’t judge her for anything she tells us.”

“But—“

“You couldn’t have known.” She looked up into his eyes. “She’s gotten really good at hiding things. It’s not your fault. I shouldn’t have been so afraid of pushing her away. It’s my fault for this. I’m the one who was afraid we’d push her away.”

Tom relented, his body weight no longer pressing against her palm. He pursed his lips, nodded, and sat back down, bringing his face to her eye level. “Okay. You’re right. It should be you. And she’s always so much more relaxed in the evening. Alya’s isn’t there. She doesn’t have to posture and act like she doesn’t need her mother. You’re so important to her. Go upstairs and talk to her, but stay calm. Don’t make her need you. Let her need you.”

She puffed her cheeks out and let the air hiss through her pursed lips.

“Okay.”

Sabine walked up the stairs to talk to her daughter, but paused when a voice scratched its way through the hatch leading to Marinette’s room.

She must be on the phone.

Sabine had managed to resist reading her daughter’s diary, but she couldn’t help but eavesdrop when her daughter’s inside voice was as loud as André Glacier’s when he was hawking ice cream.

“I just don’t see what the big deal is, Kitty.”

“Marinette, your mother loves you.”

Sabine gasped. That sounds like a boy’s voice. In her room! She couldn’t believe it. How did Marinette even sneak a boy up there?

Somebody’s in trouble. And I’m sure this boy’s parents won’t be—

Wait. “Kitty”? Does she mean Chat Noir? She brought him into her room this late?

Never mind “this late”! At all? I thought he rejected her!

Sabine’s jaw tensed, and she squeezed and relaxed her fists a few times to dispel the new tension.

Chill out, chill out, chill out.

“Do you know how lucky you are to have a mom like her?” The tenderness and longing in Chat Noir’s voice was unexpected.

“Ugh, I know! It’s so annoying, though! Can’t she just leave me alone?”

Ouch.

Feeling the frustration mount again, Sabine threw open the hatch and sprung into Marinette’s room. “So sorry, Daughter, but I need to annoy you again for a second.”

Marinette shrieked and fell out of her chair. Chat Noir, who was up on the loft, didn’t react at all, as if he’d known she was listening in.

Of course he defended me.

Marinette recovered, getting back up on her feet. “H-Heeeeyyyyyy, Maman, what are you doing up here?”

Sabine didn’t know what to do. When she’d come up here, she hadn’t anticipated this scene: a flirty boy with super-strength in skin-tight black leather in her daughter’s bed. This matou.

She had a strange out-of-body experience, as if she were reading this happening to someone else in a novel. Was she meant to be angry at the uninvited guest? Hurt by Marinette’s attitude? Terrified of the implications of how comfortable Chat Noir appeared to be up there, wrapped in Marinette’s blankets?

All of the above.

“I came to apologize again and talk to you, but it seems I’m not welcome! And what are you doing here, Chat Noir? Did you just pretend to break Marinette’s heart for my sake? Marinette, is there a relationship status change you want to tell me about?”

Marinette sputtered. “No, absolutely not! With this alley cat? No way!”

“Awww, Mari-nettles, you’re making me feel sh-kitty”

“It’s not the time.”

Sabine agreed with her daughter. “It is certainly not the time, Marinette. It’s very late, and we didn’t know he was here at all. And you, Chat Noir, what are you doing sneaking behind her parents’ backs for a late-night rendezvous? Marinette, is he the one in your sketch? The one about love being destructive?”

It was all starting to make sense to her. “Oh God, it is, isn’t it? ’Love destroys.’ It’s the damn cataclysm! And you asked me about changing targets the other day! Chat Noir, what have you been doing with your hands around my daughter? How dare—“

“Woah, woah, woah, Maman!” Marinette ran at her mother waving her hands. “It’s not like that! And don’t talk to him that way!”

“Meiyun—“

“Do not talk to Chat Noir that way! He’s a gentleman, a hero, and he deserves respect!” Her daughter’s face was painted rose with a brush of fury.

Chat Noir hopped down from the bed between them, landing in that three-point pose Sabine had seen in countless Marvel movies.

I wonder how long he practiced that.

His cheeks were as red as Ladybug’s costume, his eerie slitted pupils dilated, a pair of black dots to complement his complexion. It seemed like Sabine’s insinuations had rendered him speechless. Then he turned and reached a hand to Marinette, placating her. Sabine noticed the way her daughter shied away from his touch.

“Hey, petite souris, it’s okay. She’s just looking out for you. It’s a good thing.”

That blush on his face gives him away.

Sabine thundered toward him and tried her best to impose her physicality upon a superhero who she’d heard had fought a Tyrannosaurus. “That’s something we agree on! I am looking out for her!”

Her control slipped with each word, her voice becoming shriller by the second. Jabbing a finger into his chest, she pressed on, panting with anxiety. “You aren’t entitled to sneak into my little girl’s room in the middle of the night!”

She shoved him back behind her daughter before glaring at her, stomping her foot with every word she stressed. “And you, Marinette, what are you thinking, having a boy over so late? Do you want to get pregnant? Is that it?”

Chat recoiled, his face turning even redder. For a moment, Sabine thought he might hack up a hairball. He took a step back from her. She’d obviously figured out the truth.

“You know,” he said, feigning a yawn—voice an octave higher than usual—“I am feline pretty tired. I think I should go.” Wordlessly, the interloper leapt up to the bed and out to the balcony. There was a final thump, and Sabine assumed he was gone.

Come back and face a mother’s wrath, coward.

Threat removed, she felt herself circling back to rationality. But then she saw her daughter’s face, red as a watermelon, as she pulled her gaze from the rooftop access panel.

Okay, maybe you got carried away.

“Maman, what were you thinking?” Marinette threw her hands up in the air, shaking her palms as if pleading with some celestial being for guidance. ”Ughhh, that was so embarrassing! Can you stop hovering? What’s gotten into you lately? You’ve always trusted me in the past to figure things out. And besides—” She plopped down in her chair. “Chat is my friend. Now he’s probably never going to come back! Don’t I deserve good things?”

Sabine scoffed. “What’s good about him? He flirts with Ladybug, flirts with Rena Rouge, flirts with you, visits you in the middle of the night.” He did defend her against Marinette’s slander a few minutes ago, but she was like a boulder on a mountainside, on an unstoppable, destructive roll. Guilt was for peacetime.

“Has he ever heard of the front door? Of course not! Alley cats don’t care about rules! And how old is he anyway? Do you even know? Alya said Ladybug has been around for millennia. Is he the same?”

Sabine crossed her arms over her chest, but she couldn’t hold still, and she began gesticulating wildly, her frustrations escaping with every slash and poke of her index finger.

“This is like that vampire book that plays the pedophile up as a romantic lead because he looks young! How many other girls do you think he’s seeing on the sly? God, he might have a whole litter scattered across Paris!”

Marinette got out of her chair and squared up in Sabine’s face, pointing at her chest, doing her best to tower over her. “Okay, you need to stop talking right now.”

Sabine was shocked at the fury in her daughter’s gaze. She was shocked at her own words, too.

Oh my God, I sound like Mama when she found out about Tom.

She slouched toward the chaise and crashed down, closing her eyes to help her re-center. Of course it wasn’t to hide any trace of unshed tears. She had to be strong for her daughter. She took a deep breath.

“You’re right.”

Marinette opened her mouth, looking like she had some choice four-letter words to dirty her mouth with. But before she let loose, Sabine’s words must have registered, because Marinette froze. “What?”

“Marinette, you’re right. I wasn’t being fair. I trust you. You’re a smart girl, and you have big dreams. I know your head is in the clouds about Adrien, but I never once thought you’d do something desperate and stupid with him. Why should I see Chat Noir as more of a threat to you than Adrien’s charm? I guess because Chat is older…”

Marinette threw an unreadable expression her way before smiling and approaching her. “Maman, I’m young, but you’re right: I’m not stupid. You need to relax. I’m fine.”

Sabine opened her mouth to interrupt, but Marinette didn’t give her the chance as she continued. “I’m not doing any of the things you think I’m doing. I’m not fighting off grown men who are attacking me. I’m not sneaking off at night with a boy. I’m not getting lucky. I’m not charming anyone. I’m just being me. Clumsy, friendly, anxious Marinette.” Her daughter gave her a pleading look. “And that girl needs her mother to trust her.”

Sabine nodded and took a shuddering breath as Marinette sat down beside her. “I know that. Intellectually, I know that. But the day you were born, my life was turned upside down. It’s impossible for you to understand until you have a child of your own, but the day you’ve been looking forward to for nine months…it arrives faster than you expect. You’re in the hospital. You’re exhausted from labor, overjoyed that the pain has subsided, and suddenly the nurses are handing you this brand new person and telling you that you are responsible for her health and happiness. And this magic just…overwhelms you, and you know you’ll stop at nothing to protect them.

“But then you go home, and every time the baby cries, there’s a voice that needles you, telling you that you’re unfathomably out of your depth. So much is just guesses and prayers. And it’s terrifying. So many days when you were little, I’d hear you fall down a couple steps and start screaming, or I’d catch you trying to plug a fork into an outlet I’d taken the cover off of for just a second, and I’d think, ‘I’m a terrible mother.’”

Marinette leaned her head on Sabine’s shoulder and wrapped an arm around her waist. “Maman, I don’t ever want to hear you say that again. How can you even think that? Like, I know I can be moody and a disappointment somet—”

“And I don’t ever want to hear you say that. You are not a disappointment, either.” Sabine fought against the rising tide in her eyes. “I know…” She sniffled. “Oh, sweetie, I know you’re going through something. And I know you feel like you can’t tell me. I just worry. I think, ‘Gosh, she’s only fourteen and already thinks I can’t help. What happens when she’s eighteen, and she moves away? What happens when she has her own children? Is she going to reach out to me then?’ I don’t want us to have the same rotten relationship I have with my mother….”

Marinette began to sniffle, too, and tightened the hold she had around her waist, leaning into the embrace. Sabine knew she was supposed to be the one taking care of Marinette, but it felt good to be on the receiving end right now.

“Did I ever tell you how furious my mother would get whenever she saw me talking to a boy?”

Marinette sat straight up and turned to Sabine. “You never talk about Ama…”

“For good reason. ‘You’re throwing your life away! Our family has high standards, Xiabing! Don’t shame me! You’re a Cheng!’ Even if you never meet her, it’ll be too soon. She really did a number on me. I don’t want to do the same to you. I don’t want to hurt you like she hurt me. I’m so sorry, Meiyun.”

Marinette moved to face her, kneeling down and hugging her once again. Her daughter’s chin pressed to her shoulder. Maybe everything was going to be okay.

If you talk to Marinette calmly, she’ll stay calm.

“But honestly, Maman, you should be apologizing to Chat instead.”

“Mangy I will, and mangy I won’t.”

Marinette retched. “Ugh, you and Papa are just like him.”

“Do you think I could get your father to squeeze into some leather—“

“Please don’t finish that sentence. Barf.”

Sabine felt bubbles of laughter dance up from her chest. “I guess I’ll leave the leather to your kitty.”

Marinette gritted her teeth. “Just. Friends.”

“Sure thing, petite souris.”

“Ugh, I asked him to stop calling me ‘Princess’ and this is what I’m stuck with now.”

Sabine booped her daughter’s nose and stood up. Marinette’s cheeks turned red, and she sputtered as Sabine pulled her up and into a hug.

Chapter 10: Weather Stripping

Chapter Text

“Marinette, we’re going to be late to your first session if you don’t get down this minute!” Sabine shouted up the stairwell.

Can this girl be on time for anything in her life?

In the time it would’ve taken Sabine to boil water and brew another pot of tea, Marinette trudged down the stairs. Naturally, her daughter wasn’t excited about this. She’d never been one for accepting help from anyone except her girlfriends, and then only when it came to Adrien. She usually carried her own burdens, as well as—it seemed—everyone else’s.

Maybe that was the problem. Because she was so devoted to helping everyone else deal with their own traumas from being akumatized, Marinette felt guilty she didn’t have any of her own. It was appealing to Sabine to blame everything on survivor’s guilt, because it was the trauma of the unharmed.

“Come, come.”

She practically had to shove Marinette through the residence and out the door. As they went through, she spared a glance at Tom, who gave her a thumbs up and a nervous smile. “Good luck,” he mouthed.

She walked with Marinette to the bus stop. Mercifully, the timing was perfect; they were able to board immediately. They flashed their bus passes to the driver and made their way to the first open seats.

They sat down, and Sabine crossed her legs so she was slightly facing her daughter. Marinette’s glare was like a drill, trying to pierce the vinyl back of the seat in front of her. She said nothing.

That’s fine; I can wait her out.

Finally, Marinette muttered under her breath, “If you actually trusted me, you wouldn’t make me go to therapy.”

Sabine’s anger flashed. “You never—”

Then she remembered where they were. She took a calming breath and whispered back, “You never tell me the truth anymore.”

“I told you I’m fine. That’s the truth.”

“You’re not fine. It’s clear to everyone. For crying out loud, Marinette, you shouldn’t be having panic attacks on the street! Or anywhere, for that matter!”

Marinette turned toward the window and shrugged. “Everyone has them.”

“So it seems. But Alya’s father takes her to the zoo for animal therapy with the horses. I lead your father in directed meditation. Even Nathalie told me Adrien’s in therapy.”

That caught Marinette’s attention. Of course it would.

“You talked to my boss?”

That was a surprise. She’d thought Marinette would latch onto this new fact about her crush. She’d forgotten all about Tom’s reluctance to reach out to Nathalie. “Y-yes, but no. I talked to another…well not another parent, but someone—”

“You talked to my boss! I can’t believe you!” Marinette snapped her head toward Sabine, hissing with frustration. “Oh my gosh, that is so embarrassing! Is she gonna fire me?” She clenched her jaw, nearly in tears. “How could you? As if she needed any more reminders that I don’t belong…”

Oh, now that wouldn’t do. “Marinette, Nathalie is the one who gave me the therapist’s number. She was happy to help. And, I might add, you’re there because you belong. She told me so herself!”

Marinette’s eyes widened, and she looked down at her hands, rubbing her fingers together. She looked back up at Sabine, her gaze speaking of hesitance and hope. “What exactly did she tell you?”

“She called you ‘a preternatural talent.’ ‘Preternatural’ means—”

“I know what it means.”

“And she said that you’re there because they want you to like them.”

Marinette shook her head like she didn’t believe what she was hearing. “They want me…to like them?”

“Yes, they think you’re great!”

“They…think I’m great?” There were hearts in Marinette’s eyes.

“Yes, sweetie!”

“They want me around!” Her daughter’s smile was blossoming.

“Yes, I told you!”

“Wait.” Marinette looked around at the other passengers and leaned in to whisper. “Adrien goes to therapy?”

“He goes to this therapist. Apparently he’s been going since his mother died.”

“But…he’s so happy.”

“No, Marinette. He looks happy. He isn’t fine. He looks fine. The same as the rest of us.” Sabine sighed. “I don’t think you understand what normality looks like because we’ve been under attack for so long. You go to Shanghai: akuma attack. You go to New York: akuma attack…” Sabine smiled wrily, recognizing how dark this conversation had become. “Hm. Marinette, are you Hawkmoth?”

At this, Marinette’s rosy cheeks went white as bone, her entire complexion changing as if she’d drunk bleach. “I…he…” She looked confused for a moment, as if she were trying to follow a trail of moonstones.

But she snapped out of it and pulled a grin taut over her face, making spirit fingers. “I mean, yes! Nooroo, cocoon me!“

Sabine fanned her mental rolodex for a reference, but nothing came to mind, so Sabine did her best Capitain Amérique impression. “I didn’t understand that reference. Nooroo?”

“Oh! Ummmm, it’s an inside joke! Sorry. Me and Alya were talking about hanahaki one day, and, um, then we imagined Hawkmoth being in love with someone, and we started imagining him having a norovirus? So…Noro? Yyyeahhhh…”

“Hana-what?”

“Hanahaki. Oh, it’s so romantic! It’s gotta be in your C-dramas, but I don’t know the word in Chinese. Hua-something. Hua like ‘flower.’ When you love someone who doesn’t love you back, you cough up flowers, and—”

“Oh! Huātŭbìng! Yes, I do know it. But, okay, Hawkmoth romantic? I’m not so sure about that!”

“Well, tall man, all alone, desperate to get his hands on some jewelry, and then this beautiful blue woman eventually joins him… You don’t think that’s romantic?”

Sabine’s felt a stab of pain in her head. How did we end up talking about this? She keeps redirecting…

“Hm.” She thought about how to respond.

Well, so can I.

Sabine glared at her daughter. “If you’re trying to ask if I approve of you inviting older boys—or any boys—into your bed in the middle of the night, I do not, young lady.”

Marinette blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“Don’t play dumb. I don’t care if he’s saved your life—”

“Ughhhh, I keep telling you we’re just friends!”

“Your father and I were once just friends, and then one thing led to another—”

“Ahhhh! Stop!” A number of passengers turned to look their way, and Marinette leaned in and hissed. “I swear I will jump off this bus!”

“Okay, okay! I’m just saying to be careful around that cat boy.” She knew she’d gone too far when Marinette’s expression clouded.

“See, that’s what I’m talking about. You were rude to him last night—”

“He shouldn’t have been visiting that late—”

“And then you acted like you understood and were sorry. You even apologized! And then today, you have me cornered on this bus, and you keep picking at the scab. You’re my mother; you’re supposed to believe me—”

“Marinette, I’m supposed to support you.”

“How is that any different?”

“People aren’t objective about themselves. That’s why our loved ones have to check our worst impulses. Sometimes I’m even mad at Alya for pushing your wild confession schemes. She shouldn’t be encouraging that craziness.”

“You know about those?” Marinette’s face had gone red.

At least it’s from embarrassment, not anger. “Mothers see everything. We have hundreds of eyes.”

Marinette settled down lower in her seat and crossed her arms over her chest, pouting.

Sabine stared at her daughter, not knowing what to say. The flowers on Marinette’s purse made her think of huātŭbìng, which made her think of Hawkmoth, and of the first time she was almost akumatized. Then her mind drifted to Lila and her accusations, and how she and Tom hadn’t stood up for Marinette forcefully enough.

Maybe she has a reason not to trust us.

But she didn’t have time to reflect on that incident further because the bus rolled to a stop. They’d arrived.

“Well, this is us. Let’s go, Marinette.”

Sabine stood up and let her daughter pass by, following her closely as they disembarked. Marinette was clenching her fists, arms locked at the elbows, shoulders hunched. Sabine had tried so hard to get this kind of help when she was a teenager, but it was clear her daughter didn’t want therapy—which was disappointing.

When the therapist came out into the waiting room, he looked to be in his forties and spoke with a slight accent. He wore jeans and a t-shirt, looking like he was about to close out the day and go for a hike, not heal her daughter.

But Nathalie had recommended him, and Sabine knew that woman only hired the best. Plus he was Chinese, which gave her a measure of comfort. He might have a better understanding of some of Marinette’s issues.

“Hello, I’m Dr Zhu.” He briefly bowed his head and extended his hand for a handshake, and Sabine met it. The handshake lasted slightly longer than most she’d encountered in France, and she immediately felt more at home.

“Hi, I’m Sabine Cheng. This is my daughter, Marinette Dupain-Cheng.”

He smiled at them and gestured to an interior door. “It’s nice to meet you both. Would you two please come with me into my office?”

Marinette, who had not stood up for the exchange, stared down at her shoes. She nodded, stood up, and trailed behind the therapist. Sabine followed them both, watching Marinette’s body language.

Dr Zhu closed the door behind them.

“Please have a seat.”

They did.

“So, my assistant forwarded me your intake paperwork, and I’ve studied it.” The doctor leaned toward Marinette, who was picking at her nails. The doctor gave her a sympathetic look. “Marinette. I understand you’ve been having some emotional struggles. Is that correct?”

Sabine glanced over at Marinette, waiting for her to say something, but her daughter was sitting there with her arms crossed, looking like she’d rather be at the dentist getting teeth pulled.

Sabine sighed. “That’s the gist of it. I think she’s struggling with something, but she won’t tell me what it is. She’s been having nightmares, I’ve seen her have at least one panic attack, she’s jumpy, and she’s been absent from school without explanation. I know she’s been bullied in the past, for a number of reasons…including because of where I’m from.” Sabine looked at the kind face of the doctor, knowing he’d understand.

Marinette rolled her eyes. “It’s fine. I’m fine.”

Dr Zhu leaned forward in his chair. “I’m glad to hear that, Marinette. But maybe we could talk about what your mother just said. I don’t need you to tell me everything, but maybe just a little bit? If you’d like, I could have her wait outside if you’d be more comfortable.” He glanced at Sabine, who nodded in understanding.

Marinette sighed. “Fine.”

He smiled at her daughter. “Over the past couple years, a lot more young adults have started attending therapy because of akuma-related stress, so I’m not surprised to hear a story like this. We’re basically living in a war zone, which research shows is highly correlated with childhood PTSD. But the good news is there are techniques we can teach our clients to regulate their emotions in a healthier way.

“And don’t worry about your emotions being too powerful; there isn’t a therapist’s office in Paris that hasn’t figured out tight weatherstripping and insulation at our doors and windows keeps those pesky butterflies out. You’re safe in here.”

Marinette scoffed, and Sabine made a mental note to check the weatherstripping and insulation around all the doors and windows at home. They needed to add springs and inspect the access panel from Marinette’s room to the balcony, in particular.

Too bad it wouldn’t stop boys with super-strength.

Dr Zhu gave Marinette his full attention. He smiled gently at her, revealing the crow’s feet that straddled his eyes. “Needing help with your emotions isn’t silly. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As a species, we have long abandoned our ability to live under the constant threat of violent death. Hawkmoth has been an evolutionary force that our culture hasn’t been able to adapt to yet. I wouldn’t be surprised if Ladybug and Chat Noir themselves have sought therapy.”

Marinette looked surprised, like it had never occurred to her that Paris’s heroes might have PTSD. Well, Ladybug might as well call herself the Iron Lady for all her steely resolve, but Chat Noir? Sabine had now interacted with several times, and she couldn’t shake the feeling he hid behind a jester’s cap for a reason.

She looked over at Marinette, who was glaring at her. Sabine glared back. This is for your own good, her heart cried out to Marinette’s.

Why won’t you let me in? What are you hiding?

“Mme Cheng, would you mind going to the waiting room while Marinette and I get to know each other? It looked like you finished all the paperwork, but it always seems like there’s one more form. Check with Lin at reception?”

“That’s fine.” She nodded to her purse. “I brought a book.”

Dr Zhu nodded and rose to walk with Sabine to the door. Sabine exited, and the doctor closed the door behind her.

The waiting room was quiet. Sabine put her fingers on the door she’d just exited through, and felt the coldness of the wood.

Please let her be okay.

She crossed the room to a chair, sat down, and fished out the novel she had been hoping to put a dent in for weeks.

Shanghai in the past.

Sabine came back to Uncle’s house from therapy. She’d been sneaking out to talk about things that had happened to her in Paris. She didn’t want Uncle knowing and having to keep it a secret from Mama to protect her.

She opened the moon gate and walked through the garden to get inside the house. Ever since she had started going to therapy, she felt a little lighter in her shoes. She was finally unpacking all the self-blame about having been sent to live with Uncle. It wasn’t her fault. Finally, she was beginning to understand it at an emotional level. And, as a bonus, the therapist had been helping her communicate with her mother.

Therapy was a relatively new treatment in Shanghai, and not many people had access to it. For once, she was thankful for her family’s money and her own monthly allowance.

“So, you’ve been going to therapy, daughter?” Her mother emerged as if summoning her form out of shadow only to blot out the sun.

Sabine froze. Mama is here? What is she doing here?

Her mother wore a dour expression, looked imposing in a dark green zansae, embellished with dark blue needlework. Her hair was pulled into a bun on the side, offsetting the golden angle of the…zuoren? She never wore a zansae that way. “It’s for barbarians,” she’d insist.

Sabine was immediately filled with dread. Had Mama received some bad news about her health?

No, she was too proud to tell anyone—not even her own daughter—about health problems.

But it was typical of her to use clothing to send signals…and having her lapel cross her body as one traditionally dresses the deceased? Sabine felt like her mother was accusing her of matricide.

What for?

To quell the panic threatening to rend her skin, she imagined her mother’s dramatic flourishes as simply those of a child acting out. Xiang-isan, her therapist, had provided her techniques for feeling confident by physicalizing strength, and now it was time to put them to use.

She stood tall and locked her knees, lifting her chin in the twilight. “Yes, Mama. You’ve told me that when you send me out to Paris for family business, I will need to be a fortress. As such, I took it upon myself to try some experim—innovative techniques.”

Her mother studied every inch of her, her all-seeing eye prodding for weaknesses to exploit, like an old taiji master looking for center of gravity issues.

“‘Experimental,’ you meant to say. Yes. And dangerous. Do you go there and blab our family’s secrets to a stranger?”

“N-no, I—”

“Are you disloyal in there?”

“What? No, I love—”

“Love?” Her mother scoffed. “You don’t know what love is.”

Sabine opened her mouth to defend herself, but her mother wasn’t satisfied with these light scratches. “I know all about psychotherapy. You cry to someone you don’t know about how your mother is mean, your father is dead, and your sister is too occupied. Did I raise you to be weak?” Her mother’s words stabbed at Sabine.

Yet Sabine parried. “You didn’t raise me at all. Uncle did.”

“Yes, and what a mistake that was. The black sheep of the family raised a weak link. Oh, if only you’d been born a boy. Wenjun’s son didn’t need help with his feelings.”

Sabine winced. She’d forever be lost in her cousin’s shadow.

“Do you still need therapy? Get acupuncture instead. At least there’s no talking. Or I can just give it to you myself right now.” Her mother reached into her bun to withdraw one of her hair needles.

The stone lantern behind Sabine projected her shadow onto her mother’s face, obscuring her eyes. By aid of the flames dancing in the lantern, Sabine imagined her mother to be a mogwai.

No, you talked about this with the doctor. She’s not that scary. Breathe, Xiabing, breathe.

But Sabine stopped breathing.

“You have to be strong, Xiabing. No one can see you cry, or they’ll eat you alive. No more therapy! I’ll make sure Dr Xiang knows what’s good for him.”

“But Mama—” she choked out, finally sucking in the air she’d been inadvertently denying herself.

“No more quackery.” When Meifen sliced her hand through the air, Sabine knew it had never even been a discussion. It was a decision made before she’d even entered the garden.

“And I will continue to have you followed, to make sure of it. I thought protecting you from kidnapping would have been enough, but that’s my failure as a mother by not making you hard as iron. You need to be protected from yourself, too. If you continue to put the family at risk, I won’t fail again. It will mean no more Paris, and we’ll marry you off to someone here, and then you can become his to keep in place.

Meifen whipped around and stormed out the moon gate. She didn’t even glance her daughter’s way again, like she’d forgotten all about her before she was even out of sight.

Sabine’s legs gave out and she fell backwards against a stone pagoda in her uncle’s garden.

I wish Tom were here.

Paris in the present.

Sabine was gripped by the chapter she was reading, her face pulled toward the pages of the book as if falling through a mirror.

—not understanding what had happened, Vronsky pulled the horse by the reins. She again thrashed all over like a fish, creaking the wings of the saddle, freed her front legs, but, unable to lift her hindquarters, immediately staggered and—

“OKAY OKAY, I’LL GIVE IT TO YOU!” Marinette’s terrified voice rang out so loud the door couldn’t muffle it.

Sabine’s eyes flew from the page, dropping the book as she rose. The receptionist also looked at the door in surprise. She ran to the door and turned the handle, throwing it open.

Marinette was cowering the corner, making herself as small as possible, arm extended toward Dr Zhu, warding him off. Her mascara was smeared as she cried.

The therapist was speaking in soothing tones toward her daughter. “Marinette, shhhh, it’s okay. You’re safe here. He’s not here. No one is here but you and me and your mother.” The doctor turned and indicated with his head for Sabine to approach.

Marinette was hugging herself, digging her fingers into her arms, staring at the parquet floor as if she were trying to get lost in the chaotic patterns of the wood grain. “Kitty, why? Why did you hurt me? You said you loved me.” Each clause was laden with vocal fry, sounding nothing like her, and she lost so much air that she barely finished what she was saying before sucking in air again.

The big lie echoed in Sabine’s mind as her stomach rolled over: Just friends. Just friends. Just friends.

It was certain. The sketch was Chat Noir. He had hurt Marinette. And they had both lied to her about the nature of their relationship.

But what had induced this reaction in her daughter? She looked to the therapist for an explanation, but Dr Zhu shook his head. Later.

“I’m going to teach you what to do when she gets like this,” he whispered.

“Please.”

He must have seen so many frightful things to be calm like this. How many akuma children had he shepherded through this wasteland, this disaster of a city?

Dr Zhu continued to speak softly to Marinette, staying at a safe distance, while he modeled calming techniques for Sabine to copy.

Sabine watched with trepidation. Could she replicate these techniques at home? What was it Alya showed her? She couldn’t remember! She tried to commit what he did to memory, but she got distracted every time a tremor snaked its way through her daughter’s body.

The doctor spoke in short, simple sentences. He had her synchronize her breathing with his. He told her how proud he was of her bravery. He reassured her that it was only thoughts, not the place they were in, hurting her.

He was speaking to Marinette as if she were a young child.

Won’t she hate that? She’s always reminding me that she’s not a child anymore!

She continued to scan her daughter’s body. Marinette’s fingers pressed up and down her arms, leaving white blotches that shifted pink, and Sabine suffered the image of a baby seal rent apart by a killer whale on the ice, blood diluted by the melting floe.

And yet, slowly but surely, her daughter uncurled her arms from her body. Her eyes focused on her surroundings again. She looked over at Sabine, and there was no trace of the terror that had just been there.

The techniques worked. She had her Marinette back!

“Maman… You’re here.”

A flat affect. Sabine’s heart clenched.

Dr Zhu gave Sabine the go-ahead to approach her daughter. She passed her hand over Marinette’s face, feeling how clammy she was. She rushed her eyes across every visible inch of her daughter looking for damage. But she knew the damage was all internal.

She cursed the world. Sabine had watched helplessly for years as Chloe Bourgeois needled Marinette, tearing her down one jab at a time. And then wonderful Socqueline and brash Alya had built her back up before dressing her in chain mail and handing her a sword.

It looked like that girl was gone.

Sabine fought back tears as she and the doctor helped Marinette to her feet, finishing the session. She had to be strong for her daughter.

Let’s head home, Meiyun.

Rather than subjecting Marinette to the bus, Sabine ordered a rideshare, and they waited in the office until it arrived. Her daughter refused to speak, so Sabine just held her hand and massaged her palm the way her uncle had when her own mother had been cruel.

Sabine felt like a criminal at a stranger’s sentencing, watching them suffer for her misdeeds. But what crime had she committed that Marinette was suffering for?

This city is a disease. We shouldn’t be here.

As soon as they arrived home, Marinette stormed up to her room. There was a groaning sound, and Sabine recognized it as the chaise being dragged over the hatch.

She hadn’t spoken a single word to her since they’d left therapy. The ride home had been eerie and uncomfortable as Sabine focused on the overt accusation Marinette had leveled at Chat Noir. But her daughter wouldn’t explain, no matter how much she asked her to.

Sighing, Sabine sat at the dining table. She was trying to lose herself in the boulangerie’s finances to give herself a moment’s peace from worrying about all their recent struggles.

The phone rang, and she lost track of the sums she’d been balancing in her head. Her eyes widened when she saw who was calling, and she immediately answered.

“Is this Mme Cheng?”

“Yes, this is Sabine.”

“Good evening, Sabine. This is Dr Zhu.”

“Hello, doctor. How are you?”

“I’m doing well, thank you. How is Marinette?”

“She hasn’t said a word. She fled to her room as soon as we got home. I just don’t know what to do. Doctor, what happened in there today?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t tell you what we talked about. I’m only legally allowed to disclose things if I think a patient is in danger or a threat to themselves. I can tell you Marinette seemed perfectly fine until the outburst that brought you in.”

Sabine drummed her finger on the table, worried about revealing one of her daughter’s secrets. “There’s…something you should know.” She didn’t see any other way forward. “Marinette is friends with Chat Noir.”

“What?”

“When she said ‘Kitty.’ I don’t think she said lowercase-k ‘kitty.’ I think she said capital-K ‘Kitty.’

Dr Zhu’s voice remained professional. “Hm. Well that’s…new information. She didn’t mention…I’m sorry, but before I tell you anything more, I need to take some time to reconsider my threat assessment. I mean…he’s a hero…”

Sabine huffed. “But I’m her mother. And I’m the one who brought her in. How can I evaluate whether she should keep coming to therapy?”

“That’s…really Marinette’s decision, not yours.”

Sabine lost her composure as a bitter laugh snuck out. She was furious.

Maybe Mama did the right thing by being so controlling.

“Her decision? If it were up to her, she’d wither away! It was hard to even get her to visit you today!”

Dr Zhu didn’t respond at first. “Again, I’m really sorry, but—”

“Forget it.” Sabine slammed the phone down and growled. It was time to get the family involved. She marched straight to the bedroom and flung the door open.

Tom looked up at her. “Sabine! Is everything—”

“Call your mom. We’re going to get Marinette out of Paris.”

Chapter 11: Fossil

Chapter Text

It was late on a Tuesday afternoon when Tom and Sabine sat in their bedroom with Tom's parents. Gina had driven in from Switzerland overnight. Rolland—whom Sabine had not been expecting—showed up, too. He’d loved Marinette almost from the day he met her, so Tom thought it was a good idea to have him come, too. And while he’d put in the work to get rid of his abhorrent views on race, it was still hard for Sabine to admit that, after Tom and herself, he might work harder for Marinette than anyone.

Sabine had warned Marinette that they were going to be having a family discussion about her, and they would call her down later to join. Until then, she asked her to stay in her room. Marinette had said something snarky about not wanting “to go to their boring party anyway” and stomped up to her room.

Sabine dialed in her sister, too. Meilin and Tom didn’t have the best relationship because of her brusque attitude, but she loved the family in her own, fierce way.

Rolland was sitting at attention in a chair, thick hands resting on his thighs. Gina was plopped down on a folding chair, her eyes traveling to everyone as they spoke. She said nothing but appeared deep in thought.

At the moment, Tom was explaining the situation. “Sabine and I have talked to some of Marinette’s friends and other parents and school staff. At first, we…um…we thought she had been assaulted by her boss.”

Gina sucked in air through her teeth, while Rolland bolted up out of his seat. Meilin’s voice thundered over the phone with promises of violence.

Tom reassured them. “But that doesn’t seem to be the case! Sabine took her to her first therapy session yesterday, but there’s no guarantee it will work. It’s a slow process, too, and so early. And we’ve been worried for a while. Sabine feels we’re at a breaking point, especially considering the…rough nature of that first meeting with the doctor.”

“Understatement of the year,” muttered Sabine. Tom gave Sabine a comforting look and put his hand on her thigh, patting it, before Sabine took over the conversation. “She’s been bullied at school by this girl named Lila. She’s apparently skipping class. She’s disappeared on me. She’s had some panic attacks. But she won’t tell us anything—”

“Does she have a diary?” Meilin interrupted over the speakerphone.

Sabine sighed. “Yes, she does, Me-me, but—”

“Have you looked at it?”

“Of course not!”

“Well, why not?”

“Because I’m not Mama! You remember what it was like. You lived with her!”

Meilin tutted. “Sabine, you’re being dramatic. Yeah, she’s your standard issue tiger mom, but she wasn’t that awful. When your own daughter is hurting this badly, you really won’t go for the most obvious solution?”

“Not that awful? Are you serious?! What happened to her threatening Bridgette—”

“Cajoling!”

“Meilin, please, just drop it,” Tom said.

Rolland wasn’t having any of it, though. “Spying on your kids is not the way it’s done! The first word in our national slogan is liberté! You should give them as much freedom as you can stand, because it’s good for them!”

Meilin shouted back, “Children need to learn obedience. She’s skipping class!”

“Meilin, she is class represen—”

“—paranoid, and I can’t help but be afraid—”

“Basta!” Gina said.

“—trust her, she’s always been so responsible—”

”—Please everyone—“

“—showed me that rice flour is more resilient to high temperatures—”

“Piantatela! Chiudete quella—”

“—Roland—”

“—Tom—”

“YOU WANT HER OUT OF PARIS, JUST SEND MARINETTA WITH ME!”

The room went silent, all eyes on Gina.

She’d made the suggestion Sabine was hoping with all her heart someone would make. She needed Marinette out of Paris. Marinette could have a lot of fun traveling around, and Gina was an educated woman, so she’d make sure Marinette wouldn’t fall behind on her studies.

Marinette loved feeling the wind in her hair when she traveled at speed on her scooter. Well, what little hair reached outside of her helmet! She must love feeling grown up. Let her feel a little more grown up by traveling around Europe on a motorcycle! It would be a new experience for her, having the wind blow even faster through her hair in Gina’s sidecar! Maybe she could even be tempted by a chance to drive it.

It sounds so appealing, maybe I’ll try it…

Rolland stood up. “You don’t just ship your children off! That’s not how things are done…anymore. Have you even asked Marinette what she wants?” He grunted and waved his hands dismissively. “Feh, I want no part of this.” He stormed out of the bedroom.

Gina watched her ex-husband leave. “Ah, quell’uomo benedetto, sempre cosi’ rigido… Che esagerazione.” She crossed herself. “Sabina, Tom, I think you’re right. Marinetta does seem different these days, and whenever I’m in town, it’s dangerous to feel anything. It’s always ’calm down, breathe deep, bottle it up.’ Maybe that’s how my nipote feels! She’s always been so empathetic, putting everyone else first.”

Gina gesticulated everywhere, a high-octane concert conductor, and Sabine understood where the Italian stereotype came from. “She’s always so sensitive with other people. Maybe she’s trying to shut down her emotions—so she doesn’t get akumatized—to protect everyone else. And now those emotions are escaping in unhealthy ways. Why don’t I take her on a little road trip, go down to the coast, let her breathe in the sea air? We could stop in Milan so she could see the fashion sights. Take her to the village of her ancestors. And I could tutor her so she doesn’t fall behind. Maybe in three months, we return, and she’s back to normal.”

Meilin jumped in. “You could bring her to London, Gina. We’d love to host you two. We have the space. And Bridgette is so fond of Marinette. She says she feels like a twin sister sometimes.”

Tom and Sabine looked at each other and at Gina.

Gina hummed a few bars of London Calling and leaned toward the speakerphone. “That sounds nice, Meilin. And Sabina, thanks for involving me. We’ve all been akumatized before, and it was because we weren’t communicating well. It’s good we’re talking now, so we’re on the same page with our girl.”

Sabine glanced at her husband. “Tom, you haven’t spoken in a while.”

He took a deep breath. It was clear he was nervous about letting his daughter out of his reach. “…I think it’s a good idea. I’ll really miss her, though. She’s never been away from us this long before.” He huffed. “But I don’t think she’s going to take this well, us making decisions for her. She’s got that independent streak, particularly this past year. Something has made her so much more assertive. I hope we don’t get her akumatized over this if she gets angry.”

Sabine stood up from the bed. She was torn. From everything she’d heard about him, sending one’s child away against their will to protect them sounded like something Gabriel Agreste would do. She’d never thought she’d be doing it to her own daughter. “Tom, I think you and your father make an excellent point about involving Marinette in the process. Maybe it’s not quite liberté, but hopefully we can make her feel a bit more egalité. We’ll try to steer her in this direction so she feels like she’s making the decision.”

Sabine coughed. She was parched after all this talking! “Excuse me for a moment. I’m going to go get some juice.”

She left the bedroom, walked to the stairwell, and went upstairs, emerging into the kitchen. She saw Rolland standing in front of the TV, silent as usual, arms crossed over his chest.

“Oh! I’d forgotten you were here.”

Because of their past, Tom tried to keep Sabine out of the same room as his father unless he was with her. Things between Sabine and Rolland were still touch and go, but were slowly improving thanks to their shared love for Marinette.

Roland stood stiffly, as if he were afraid to be in the same room as her, too. He kept his eyes on the TV, where there was an akuma attack ongoing.

It must be pretty far away.

Her father-in-law glanced back at her, and then at the TV again. He opened his mouth and closed it. He balled his fists, grunted, and nodded, like he was making up his mind about something.

Then he began speaking, fear audible I his voice. “You know…Sabine…I never actually apologized to you. How I treated you and Tom. I was such an asshole.“

Sabine couldn’t breathe. She hadn’t expected this.

“I almost missed out on Marinette’s life because I couldn’t get over myself and my stupid ideas about what was right. I should have been looking at how amazing things could be instead of getting angry at how they weren’t.” He looked down at his shoes, shuffling from one foot to the other.

Even in his softer moments, this was so unlike the man she’d known up until now. No one had ever apologized like this for hurting her. Not even Mama. She wasn’t sure how she was supposed to react.

But she had time to figure it out as Rolland continued. “Sometimes I lie in bed and wonder what kind of monster Hawkmoth would’ve turned me into if he had been around when I first met you. Back when I hated so much.”

His eyes glassed over as he gazed at a family photo of Sabine, Tom, and Marinette holding her new design for the boulangerie’s logo.

“She’s an amazing girl. You and Tom should be so proud. Hell, I’m proud, and I didn’t have anything to do with how she turned out.” He took his glasses off and buffed them on his shirt, dipping his eyes to her feet. “I’m so sorry. Uh, day-fuh-chee.”

Sabine gaped in disbelief as her father-in-law struggled through apologizing in Shanghainese. She sniffled and dabbed her eyes with her sleeve. She had been waiting for this for twenty years. She’d given up hope. Maybe she’d never get an apology from Mama, but she’d gladly take one from Rolland.

“Thank you. That means a lot.” She took a deep breath. “And for what it’s worth, I think you’ve done a great job making up for lost time. Having her over to pass on your baking skills? She’s always so happy when she comes home from one of your dates.”

Rolland turned to look her straight in the eye. He had a determined look on his face. “Sabine. Marinette is small, but she’s stubborn. If she hadn’t been so brave that day… The way she forced herself into my house to meet me...she must have been frightened. She didn’t seem to know I existed; she certainly didn’t know what I’d be like. And I know how I am. I’m rude, I’m ornery…”

“You’re a fossil!” Sabine chuckled.

“I’m a collectible!” Rolland laughed. “Besides, I’m modern now: Marinette convinced me to buy a TV!”

As her name slipped from his mouth, he smiled wistfully, staring into the distance. “She’s so thoughtful. She’s selfless. She’s brave. I’m sure I’ve seen her telling off that screeching mayor’s daughter the same way Ladybug told off Hawkmoth at the Eiffel Tower.”

He met Sabine’s eyes again. “My life would be so lonely if she hadn’t charmed her way into my house…”

He pointed at the TV. “Look at that girl swinging around. When I’m outside and see Ladybug flying overhead…when I see her helping out a kid who’s lost…when I see her telling off Chat Noir for acting foolish at the wrong time…when I see her fighting the akumas… It looks like all hope is lost, but she pulls a solution out of thin air... She reminds me of Marinette, finding solutions to problems we don’t even see. When Tom and I were estranged, she found a way to heal our family like a Ladybug cure. She is the reason I’ve been allowed to have a relationship with Tom again—why I’ve been able to get to know you. She’s why I have a chance to make up for all those foolish, lonely years…”

Sabine was struggling to follow his train of thought. Her chest compressed as if she’d been buried alive, and he sounded as if he were speaking to her through two meters of soil. Her face was cold, and her lips felt as if they’d been paralyzed. Was she having a stroke?

“What did you say?” she asked.

He looked at her with concern. “I said she’s why I’ve been able to make up for all those foolish, lonely—”

“No, no. Before that.”

“I, um, was just saying that Marinette and Ladybug are a lot alike.”

Sabine sucked in air as neurons tore layers of memories away like wrapping paper, revealing deeper truths beneath.

Marinette and Ladybug are a lot alike.

It threw her off balance. Events were flashing through her mind, now seen from a different position, like a lenticular printing.

“—find out if she has any good reason for having missed so much school.” Oh no.

“Tom, she ran away during an akuma attack!” Like she had to be there.

“I kiiiinda helped Ladybug” She practically confessed!

“Oh Kitty…you said you loved me.” Chat Noir was always proclaiming his love for Ladybug.

“Kim, Alya, Nino, Max, all in Adrien’s class” The temporary heroes were all in Marinette’s class!

“Nathalie, how would you even know?” Why didn’t I know?

“I had to kiss him so he would stop.” Chat Noir had been trying to hurt Ladybug.

“I can’t stop thinking about it” No.

The bruises. No. The absences. Stop. The disappearances. It can’t be. The effortless relationship with Chat Noir. No! The reactions to akumas, the resistance to therapy, the nightmares, the stonewalling, akumas following her to China, akumas following her to America, comforting Chloe comforting Kim comforting Mylene comforting Rose the same as Ladybug she’s brave she’s small she’s stubborn she lucky charmed her way—

“Sabine, is everything alright?”

“NO!”

Rolland jolted and stared at her in confusion.

She took a shuddering breath and smoothed her zansae. “N-no, sorry, I’m okay. A-actually, you’ve reassured me! I think we might be worrying about some fictional assault, or blowing the bullying out of proportion. It’s–it’s probably just bug stuff—teenage stuff! Yoyo—I mean, you know?” She waved him off. “Just a transformation thing. I mean, a growing up thing. She’s transforming! Into a butterfly! No, not a butterfly. A woman! There’s gonna be some growing pains, not actual pains, not that she’s grown already, she’s not much bigger than I am, and...”

She looked away from Rolland and began mumbling to herself. “I couldn’t do it... I mean, maybe if I had to, but she…” Her lip quivered. “She’s my baby…”

Her voice had nearly abandoned her. “She can’t even talk to Adrien...”

“Sabine, I’m not following you.”

“Don’t worry...” But Sabine couldn’t take her own advice. Her voice quieted to nothing as she fixated on the TV.

It can’t be her, can it?

But those are her pigtails…and she looks like the same body type…

No, it’s too horrible to imagine!

How could she possibly have been Ladybug all this time without us realizing? Without her getting hurt?

She’s just a child!

Wait, does Chat know who she is? He must if he was visiting Marinette and came to dinner with us.

Have they been together the whole time in secret? He’s certainly made no attempt to hide how he feels.

Is Adrien a cover?

Is that why she hasn’t confessed to him?

She leaned over and put her head between her legs before sinking down onto the sofa, pressing her palms into her thighs and curling her fingers to clutch at the fabric of her trousers, all the while focusing on Nadja Chamack’s steady voice, reassuring Paris that Ladybug would make it home. That Ladybug was so inventive.

Just like Marinette...

Wait, Marinette should be in her room. I can go check right now. I’ll climb up that ladder, throw open the hatch, call for her, she’ll pop her head out from under the covers of her bed, and say, “Oh, Maman, did you need something?”

She’s not Ladybug.

“Excuse me, Rolland. I think I might have upset my stomach, would you excuse me?” Without waiting for an answer, Sabine turned and slowly walked away from Rolland.

She found her way to the ladder and stumbled up, bumping into the railing as she climbed, the toes of her feet clipping the nose of a few steps along the way. Her heart thumped in her chest like the deep bass of a drum announcing a dead man walking, and she was the convict marching to her own execution, praying for a reprieve.

She pressed the trapdoor to Marinette’s room open and climbed inside. What should’ve felt like a mouse’s burrow, warm, cozy, and stuffed with knick-knacks collected over the years, instead left her feeling as if she’d climbed Everest. She struggled to breathe, her legs shook, and a chill of foreboding penetrated deep into her bones.

There were no sounds in her daughter’s room. No scissors, no phone calls, no sewing machine, no TV.

Please be asleep.

Sabine took the stairs to Marinette’s loft bed. Every creaking step, her heart cried out, Wake up. Wake up! Show me you’re here!

By the time she reached the loft, a chorus of traitors had begun looping in her mind: She’s gone, she’s gone, she’s gone.

Sabine peered down at Marinette’s desk from her perch and saw her diary and an uncapped pen to the side, as if they had been abandoned in a hurry. Through this whole ordeal, she’d refused to invade Marinette’s privacy. Not even thirty minutes ago, she’d argued with her sister over this very thing. Yet here she was, tumbling down the stairs in her haste to peer into her daughter’s mind.

She approached, fearing what secrets might spill from the pages. With every step toward the desk, she could hear her chains dragging on the ground, could feel the manacles clamped to her wrists. In a festering cranny of her soul, the voice of her mother hissed that there would be no clemency today.

Marinette can’t be Ladybug.

She glanced at the trapdoor to make sure no one could see what she was about to do. Then she closed her eyes and placed her fingers on the page, taking one final breath. She opened her eyes and focused on her fingertips. Her heartbeat accelerated, drowning out everything else. This was the event horizon, and if she passed through, she’d be sucked into an inescapable black hole.

Sabine did the only thing she could do: She crossed.

Her eyes fell on a sentence, written in happy scrawl, in the middle of the page. Today, Chat told me the funniest pun I’d ever heard. But I’d never admit that to him! I should tell it to Papa later.

thump

Sabine’s chest felt like it had caved in.

Oh, God.

She flipped back a few pages.

Me and Kitty were on the Eiffel Tower talking

thump

She turned to another page, this one with the ink smudged as if a tear had fallen on the page.

Today’s akuma was horrible. Why was there an akuma in Shanghai? I saw my Chaton d̷̛̻̳̬̝̿͑̒̚ḯ̴̝͇̤͖̯͊̑́̋̀͒̓̄͊͐͑͘̚͝ȅ̸̮͎̱͠

thump

Sabine began flipping through, faster and faster as each new revelation carved a piece of her throbbing heart out.

Tikki told me that

thump

Hawkmoth

thump

Scarabella

thump

I gave Nino a miraculous today. I was weak to need the help.

thump

Master Fu lost his memory today. Will that happen to me, too?

thump

Sabine was shaking, her unsteady hand barely able to turn the pages without tearing them. Her eyes found a sentence where it looked like a pen had torn through the paper, and its contents made her throat tense up as if she were being choked.

Today I saw my own dead body crumble before my eyes.

Sabine read on, her eyes devouring the text like a starved prisoner.

Bunnyx came and took me to a future where Chat had been akumatized. He blamed us for the carnage. He’d been turned bone white. The moon had been split in half. Paris had been flooded, and I don’t think anybody was left alive on Earth. It was terrifying. I could see the pain in my Chaton’s eyes, knowing what he’d done to me, but the naked desperation to undo it was the worst. How far would I be willing to go if I lost my mother…or if I hurt my Kitty? Was I responsible for all that? What sort of monster do I become that one day I hurt him with such finality?

And below that, Marinette had hastily scrawled seven familiar words.

Our love did this to the world.

THUMP

That wasn’t her heart this time; that came from the roof!

Sabine wiped the tears and snot from her nose and held her breath. She flipped through the diary trying to find the page it had been left open to.

There’s no time.

She dove behind a chair, out of view of the overhead access panel, fighting against instinct to keep her breaths shallow and quiet.

“Spots off.” The familiar timbre of Ladybug’s voice rung in the air, and Sabine nearly gasped.

Everything was bathed in diffuse ruddy light; she was a tortured soul, arrived in Hell, receiving her baptism.

“I’m telling you, Tikki, if he pulls that crap one more time, it’s gonna kill me.” That was Marinette’s voice now.

Sabine saw a red thing flit down the stairs from the bed, behind her daughter, talking. “You know he has to. You are the one who has to live so you can fix the damage. If you’re gone, there won’t be anyone to bring you back.”

Her daughter paused, placing her hand against the wall and leaning into it for balance, legs trembling as she dipped her head and sniffled.

Sabine whimpered involuntarily and ate her hands, trying to mute her reaction.

Marinette whipped around. Sabine held her breath, her chest shuddering as she strained to remain still.

Marinette turned her back to where Sabine was hiding and continued talking to the red thing.

Not knowing what else to do, Sabine kept herself hidden for maybe twenty minutes as she listened to her daughter ramble on to a floating red mouse. Marinette groaned with frustration about Chat Noir, she laughed about one of his jokes (but apparently didn’t want him to know she thought it was funny), and she talked a little about Adrien.

Why is she telling that thing all this?

Eventually, Marinette announced she needed some fresh air and went up and out onto her balcony.

Sabine took that opportunity to run over to the trap door and drop down to escape. As soon as she made it down, the air in the house seemed to resume normal density; she could breathe again.

“There you are!” Tom said.

Sabine stiffened up and spun around. “Yes! Here I am! Where I’m supposed to be! Nothing weird about me being here at all!”

Tom eyed her suspiciously. “Okay… Dad said you weren’t feeling well earlier and that you left for the bathroom. I looked but you weren’t there. I guess you decided to check in with Marinette.” Tom looked at her, hesitating. “Did you tell her already? How did she take it?”

“Oh, she is bugging out—I mean, not bugging out! She’s great! I just went up there and spotted her—saw her! She was eating. I guess she brought some food home with her? A hero sandwich! I mean, a gyro! Or something? Hehehe…” Sabine clamped her mouth shut.

Tom reached out and placed the back of his hand to her forehead. “Are you sure you’re okay? No offense, but you sound a little loopy…”

“I’m great!” Sabine willed her cheeks to stretch out, to pull a smile. “So how is it going downstairs?”

“Oh, when you left, the conversation kind of died down. Mamma had made that big declaration, Dad had already stormed off, you weren’t there, and your sister had a conference call with someone in Shanghai. Sounded like a family business thing.

“Then Dad headed home, saying something about having talked too much about his feelings, and he needed to get back home to his baking and ’enter the flow state.’ I think Marinette has him hooked on some wellness podcast. And Mamma headed back to her hotel.” Tom grinned. “You know, I think the fresh air is really going to do Marinette a world of good.”

Sabine paled. Oh no. “If she agrees to leave.“

“Well, we’ll just have to convince her, won’t we? She’s smart. She’s shaken up. She’ll agree with us after the shock wears off.”

I’m not so sure about that now.

Sabine began fidgeting. “Still, maybe we shouldn’t rush into this.”

Tom stared at her incredulously. “Are you sure you’re okay? You were gung ho about getting her out of Paris when you left for the kitchen.”

Sabine shook her head. “No, I still want to get her out. I just…think we need to finesse this with her. She’s so headstrong when she knows what she wants. I don’t want a bare-knuckle brawl trying to force her to do this. We have to be subtle.”

“What made you think this?”

“Strangely enough, your father—”

“My dad?”

Sabine tittered nervously. “Yes. Remember that whole liberté egalité thing? He was really fixated on it when we ran into each other in the kitchen, and he prevailed upon me not to be so rash and force Marinette to leave.”

Tom put his hands out in front of himself, palms facing her. “Back up. My dad? Whom you never talk to?”

“I talk to him!”

“Yeah, like, ‘How’s the weather?’ and, ‘I’ll go get Marinette for you.’”

“He…tried to patch things up with me?”

Joy swept across Tom’s face. “Really? That’s great! I mean, I don’t want to get my hopes up, but—”

“Also, he’s a lot more perceptive than we give him credit for. I think he’s really attuned to Marinette’s feelings.” Tom co*cked his head, and she threw her hands up. “I know! I’m just as surprised as you!”

Tom fiddled with his mustache. “Weird. Well, the plan’s still on, right? You’re just saying not to bum-rush her with the idea?”

“Absolutely. I still want her out of the city.”

“Okay, good. Just making sure we’re on the same page.”

She gave him a faint smile, feeling unease about keeping Marinette’s secret. “Always.”

Curled up in bed that night, Sabine’s eyes refused to close. She’d tossed and turned so badly that Tom had grumbled and left for the sofa. Still, sleep could not find her. Next time she needed to stay up late, instead of coffee, someone should reveal to her that Chat Noir was another child she knew.

Marinette is Ladybug.

Seven syllables with a symmetrical stress pattern forcing her mind into all sorts of asymmetries as she tried not to think about how bad of a mother she’d been.

The school suspended Ladybug because of something a girl with a self-confessed lying disease had accused her of. They suspended Ladybug for cheating and stealing! I didn’t believe Ladybug!

She wasn’t sure which was worse: that she hadn’t believed her daughter, or that she hadn’t believed—

I called her a “distant avatar.” It wasn’t funny, but Sabine belly-laughed.

Then she gasped.

Marinette can fly!

Another thought struck her, leaving her feeling worse. Marinette runs around in a skintight costume! That sculptor was interested in my fourteen-year-old!

She felt like she was on a carnival ride, the way her stomach was turning over.

These are children. Ladybug is a child.

Chat Noir is probably a child, too.

Another realization assaulted her senses. Chat Noir must have a family, too. A family like theirs. One that likely had no idea what he was up to. Should the two families should get together to support each other?

No. Marinette doesn’t want anyone to know she’s Ladybug. She doesn’t want me to know. I can’t tell her I know; it would freak her out!

What am I saying? Of course she needs to know! If I get akumatized again—

She recalled Dr Zhu’s comments about preventative measures they took at therapists’ offices around the city.

Weather stripping.

She needed to talk to Tom about sealing all their doors and windows. Especially the ones connected to Marinette’s room.

I need to tell Tom.

No! I can’t tell Tom! He’ll freak out.

Oh my God! Weredad!

Worst-case scenarios pillaged her mind. Images of an akumatized Tom crushing Marinette’s skull and tearing her earrings off. Her daughter fried by a lightning strike. Limbs snapped by Manon. Sliced in two by Uncle.

She shuddered to think what that Rossi girl would’ve done.

Marinette saved Tom! She saved all of us!

Sabine’s eyes widened. She’s saved all of us!

She thought back to a previous dinner. She’d reached over to remove a fish ball from the hot pot, it had slipped out of her chopsticks, and Marinette had caught it mid-fall with her own. At the time, she’d been astonished at her clumsy daughter’s blind luck.

Why didn’t I see it before?

She reached over to her bedside table and grabbed her cellphone. She mashed her thumb to the sensor to unlock the screen and searched for “Ladybug,” compulsively reading each result.

She clicked on a link labeled “Ladyparts” and immediately regretted it. Plastered across the top of the page was a close-up, cropped photo of her daughter’s butt. She was in her costume, but the intent of the website designer was clear.

What the hell?

Her face heated up like a volcano. It took all her willpower not to throw her smartphone at the wall. She wanted to track down the owner of the site and beat them within an inch of their life.

But, like a person near the edge of a cliff, she couldn’t help but peek over and into oblivion. She skimmed the subject lines of posts on the first page. Then the second. Then the third. Rings of Hell that would’ve reduced Dante to a twitching mess.

There are so many comments!

There were pinned image galleries labeled “LADYBUTT” and “TIDDIES” that were exactly what she guessed they’d be. There were clips edited to make it look like Ladybug was doing things she definitely wasn’t doing. She even saw a few entries with a subject line labeled “Deep Fake.”

She flopped back flat on the mattress, stared at the ceiling, and whimpered. France hadn’t even banned revenge p*rn until recently. Deep fakes had already been used in political campaigns. Of course this filth existed.

Sabine felt violated, and it wasn’t even her in the photos.

I hope Marinette doesn’t know about this.

When she clicked on a few more innocuous-seeming discussions, she met with walls of text by users with names like SpottedDick and f*ckyCharm and ChatteNoire. Art of what she might look like without a mask. A lot without clothes. Her and Chat Noir. Her and Rena Rouge. Her and Hawkmoth.

What the f*ck?

Screeds about how tight Asian girls were, fantasizing about trading sex for permanent residency. She’d heard it all before, but reading that racist filth directed at her daughter was a trauma she’d never imagined.

She’s just a kid!

Sabine wanted to murder everyone. She wanted to murder the man who invented the Internet. She wanted to murder the man who invented the keyboard. She wanted to murder the man who made the phone she was using to browse this disgusting site.

Her hands were shaking. Sabine fought back a scream so Tom wouldn’t come running.

Those are my people you’re talking about! That’s a hero you’re talking about! That’s my baby you’re talking about!

She grabbed her pillow and mashed it to her face, sobbing. The cotton of her pillowcase absorbed her tears. These terminally online race fetishists were despicable, but she had to passively watch as strangers picked Ladybug’s life and body apart like it was a commodity to be traded and consumed.

The realization that she shared her daughter with the rest of Paris flipped every emotion upside down, and an unhinged cackle erupted out of her mouth. She’d gotten her wish: she knew. But for attaining this knowledge she’d been cast out of Paradise.

But Marinette had been cast out a long time ago, so at least they were in it together. And yet, the only thing she could do was to pack Marinette’s bags and send her on a tour of Europe with Gina.

But how do I force a super-powered teenager to do anything?

Chapter 12: The Armory

Chapter Text

Three days.

For three days, Sabine kept her mouth shut.

For three days, Sabine had her phone clutched in her hand. Everywhere she walked, everywhere she stood, the screen was on, and she was studying everything on the Ladyblog. Every fight, every hit, every fall, every clue.

Why didn’t I know?

That first night, she’d lain in bed on her back, her phone above her face, screen dimmed as much as her aging eyes could handle, reading transcripts of the statements and scant interviews the heroes had given.

Chat Noir had given their bakery a shout-out. “Best macarons in Paris,” he’d said. Every time something like that came up, they saw a surge in business for a few days, and then a higher base level of advance orders.

But this time, he’d said something strange. He’d specifically called out their passionfruit macarons.

They didn’t sell passionfruit macarons. And a few customers who had come around for that flavor—including one Adrien Agreste—had left disappointed.

She’d always wondered if her daughter had been baking for the heroes. And now she had her answer.

I suppose Marinette was never really making those for Adrien.

The only time her screen wasn’t on was when Tom was around. He knew how strongly she felt about too much screen time. If he saw what an addict she’d become, he’d start asking questions. And for now she was hoping she wouldn’t have to lie.

An omission is still a lie.

Her stomach turned in knots.

Get used to it.

It was inconceivable that she’d torture Tom with this knowledge.

It was after an akuma attack in which she’d seen Ladybug take a frying pan to the face that Sabine decided it was time to confront her daughter. But it still took her nearly a full day to gather up her courage off the floor and confront her fears.

The next evening, she climbed up to the attic and waited in full view of the rooftop trap door for either Ladybug or Marinette to drop through.

And drop through Ladybug did, feet-first onto her bed.

Sabine’s knees threatened to buckle, but she tensed her quads and spoke up. “Meiyun, what have I told you about dirty feet on the furniture?”

The hero looked at the mattress and gulped. “Umm, that I shouldn’t—I mean, Mayoom? What’s that?” Ladybug peered down at her with her head co*cked to the side.

“Please. Stop.” The next four words were like soap in Sabine’s mouth, cleansing but oh-so bitter. “I know you’re Marinette.”

Ladybug clapped her hands together. “Oh, Marinette! Do you know where she is? I was going to ask her to help redesign my costume!” She jumped down to the ground, landing in the same three-point pose Chat Noir had a few nights ago. She and her partner must have practiced that together.

As Ladybug continued her rant about costume design, she contorted herself into all sorts of positions that would have been comical had Sabine not been imagining her daughter’s safety taking an axe to the neck. It was as if she were a character in a cartoon. Sabine didn’t know a human body could make those shapes.

Her daughter tugged at her uniform, sticking her tongue out and frowning. “This thing is so boring. There aren’t even any pockets! Do you know how hard it is to finagle my lucky charms without pockets? This one time, I conjured up a pocketknife, and I didn’t have pockets, and it was like, ‘Hah! What’s next? A pocket protector?’ Boy, wouldn’t that be nice, a protector in my pocket. Chat would love that! He’d call me a pocket protector because I’m so small that I can fit in his pocket!” She tittered at her own joke, eye twitching.

Sabine couldn’t believe she hadn’t figured it out before. Of course Ladybug was Marinette.

It’s so obvious!

“I read your diary,” she interrupted.

Ladybug—Marinette—gaped at Sabine, blinking her eyes. Once. Twice. Thrice. “You read your daughter’s diary? That’s low, Miss Cheng. Playing dirty, even. Speaking of dirty, did you know I fought a sentimonster one time that was like a big, purple slime? It was called Feast. Speaking of Feast, did I ever tell you how much I love your bakery’s macarons? They’re the best, especially the passionfruit ones. Oh, and speaking of passion, doesn’t your daughter have a passion for fashion? Because I came here to get some help with my costume. I think I already told you that. But you look like you don’t believe me. So I’m telling you again. That’s why I’m here.” Ladybug crossed her arms over her chest and nodded so fiercely that Sabine thought she might get a headache.

“Marinette, your diary is one big confession—”

“You mean Marinette’s self-insert fanfiction? She’s so good at that stuff, such vivid imagery—what an imagination, right? But the girl loves the lore a bit too much if you ask—”

“You died. You saw the end of the world. You are in love with Chat Noir.”

Ladybug clamped her mouth shut and stared at her.

She stared right back at Ladybug. Sabine would win this game; she had fourteen years of experience giving the Mom Stare.

Ladybug’s earrings beeped rapidly, like sonar in the movies when a torpedo is about to slam into the station, and she abruptly de-transformed. Ladybug’s costume was pumiced off, revealing her daughter beneath.

Sabine was rooted in place, watching her daughter. She couldn’t breathe, and it looked like Marinette was struggling as well. Her heart throbbed in her chest as she felt the last shred of her hope die.

It was settled. There was no “reasonable explanation” to save her from the awful truth that her baby flirted with death on the nightly news.

Marinette shook her head and backed up, her face ashen like a dying fire.

“Maman, listen. I’m not actually Ladybug. She just gave me her Miraculous to test out. That’s why I look like her. Like, I can be a decoy during akuma attacks.”

Sabine narrowed her eyes. “Do you think that sounds better?”

Her daughter was like a specter in the mist, an alabaster totem of fear, a corpse drained of all its blood. Her mouth was agape like a Munch painting, as if a scream were frozen in her throat. Then her lip started to quiver, and she turned her back on Sabine, pacing away, tugging at her fingers.

“No, no, no, no. This is bad. Ohhhhh, this a disaster!” She rounded on Sabine and stomped her foot in plaintive protest. “Why were you spying on me? Am I that bad of a kid that you had to start prying into my private thoughts?” Her voice shrank as she looked down at her feet. “I thought you trusted me.”

Sabine’s heart spasmed.

“Marinette, take a breath,” a high-pitched voice said. Sabine’s attention was pulled to the red thing floating above her daughter’s shoulder. She’d forgotten they had a guest.

That must be Tikki.

Marinette looked at the floating red thing and then at Sabine, a vein fattening under the surface of her forehead. It reminded her of how Tom looked at Rolland and her when they were in the same room—as if he were desperate for a pause button. “Is there a kwami masking thing to suppress memories? Maybe a spell in the Grimoire?”

“You know I’m not allowed to know what’s in there,” said the small creature.

Sabine had to interrupt this madness. “I’m sorry…is your name Tikki?“

The small creature sighed and turned in the air, staring at her with all-knowing eyes like an owl’s. “Yes, Sabine, I’m Tikki. I’m the Goddess of Creation. I’m the one who transforms Marinette and gives her her powers.” She rattled off facts like it was a conversation she’d had many times in the past.

“The…Goddess of Creation?”

“Yes.”

“Gods exist?”

“Yes. Well, ‘exist’ might be the wrong word.”

What did you even say to that?

Sabine scrunched up her nose and decided to go with what she knew: parenting.

“Marinette, we grounded you. What were you doing going out? You were out with Chat again, weren’t you?”

Marinette had the grace not to lie again. “Yes.”

“Out on the Eiffel Tower, in the moonlight, making out—”

“No! There was an akuma! It was a time travel akuma!”

Sabine threw her arms into the air. “Time travel? Come on, you expect me to believe that?”

“Maman, it’s true, I can time travel!”

Suddenly there was another Marinette, dressed like a rabbit, stepping out of a strange blue oval and taking her—its?—place next to herself. Itself. Themselves.

“See?” said the copy.

Sabine spluttered and fell backwards. “What the f*ck.”

The copy returned through the…portal…and vanished. Then Marinette walked into her closet, closing the door behind her. There was a rustling sound, and then Marinette whispered something like “clockwise.” A blue light briefly cast a strange-colored shadow under the closet door, and then Marinette returned. “I told you.”

Sabine’s voice cracked. “What were you doing in there?”

“Visiting us one minute ago.”

She stood up off the ground and dusted off her pants, stalling for time. In an attempt to lighten the mood, she adopted a laid-back pose, channeling Cool Mom Energy. “Well, if you’re going to cosplay the Playboy bunny, at least it’s PG-13. I bet Chat Noir likes that one.”

Marinette bared her teeth and shoved her finger in Sabine’s face, hissing. “Stop deflecting from the fact you read my diary!”

Sabine fought back a yell.

Can’t let Tom hear.

“Well, what else was I supposed to do? You’ve been stonewalling us for weeks, denying there was anything wrong, when it was obvious you were struggling with something big! I tried and tried, Marinette. I turned a blind eye to the evidence up here in your room, refusing to invade your privacy. But you left me no choice!

“And you're lucky your grandfather hasn't figured it out, because he was downstairs singing your praises a few days ago, about how you’re ‘brave like Ladybug’!”

Marinette went silent, casting her face down, then peering through her eyelashes at Sabine. Her voice was like wilted flowers rustling in the wind. “I don’t feel so brave these days.”

“Marinette, can you please stop speaking so cryptically? Your father, your grandparents, we’re worried sick! Even my sister knows something’s gone wrong with you. I saw the bruises. There’s the nightmares. Not to mention the panic attacks. At least now I know why you’re missing school!”

Marinette slouched, as if more weight had been heaved onto her back. Then she walked over to the corner of her room, put her back to the wall, and slid down into a fetal position, mumbling to Tikki, who had floated alongside her like a second shadow.

Sabine hung back to give her daughter some space, straining to hear what they were saying across the room.

“Tikki…it wouldn’t be that bad to use Fluff to undo this…right?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea, Marinette. It would throw a wrench in causality.”

“Right…but it can’t be as bad as—”

“I think…this is something you’re going to have to get used to.” Tikki turned and made eye contact with Sabine, and she felt herself dragged into a vortex, the oppressive weight of eons of consciousness thundering in her head not to mess this up. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but she’s your mother… If anyone else was going to find out, at least it’s her.”

“Anyone else”? She told someone else?

Marinette slowly raised her eyes to Sabine, who didn’t have to be right next to her to recognize the expression. It was the same one she’d worn every day last year when she’d come home terrified over whether Chloé would fulfill the various threats she’d made that day.

It was the same expression Sabine had seen in the mirror as a teenager whenever she knew she would face the inquisitorial squad that was her own mother.

When Marinette finally spoke to her again, her voice was like the last petal snapping off a neglected and dried-out orchid. “You’re not gonna tell everyone…right? I mean…Papa would die.”

Sabine shook her head. “Absolutely not. This stays between you and me. I don’t need your father putting himself in harm’s way, trying to protect you from every akuma attack. It took every ounce of restraint I had not to chase after yesterday’s akuma. And you know your father…”

Marinette sniffed and smiled. “Yeah. He’s the best. But he can be…emotional.” She sighed. “It would probably give away my identity, too. No one is supposed to know about me. It's too dangerous. If you ever get akumatized again, Hawkmoth might be able to figure out my identity and come after me. Or worse, he could come after you as leverage against me.”

Sabine co*cked her head. ”How?”

“By akumatizing you and then reading your mind.”

“But to target me he’d have to know that I know Ladybug’s identity. How would he know that?“

“He’d…umm…he’d…” Marinette deflated as she got lost in thought, like she was trying to reconstruct an argument someone else had told her rather than one she’d crafted herself. It reminded Sabine of when Marinette was six or seven years old and would present Sabine’s clothing as her own designs, but when Sabine asked her how the garment was constructed, she couldn’t explain.

She sighed and walked over to her daughter slowly, as one would approach a squirrel in the park so as not to scare it away. “We—that is, your family—decided on a plan to help you.”

“A plan?” Marinette huffed.

Sabine gave her daughter a once-over. “Oh, look at you. Do you even realize your hands are shaking?” She knelt and hugged her daughter, but released her quickly, remembering Marinette’s new hesitancy with physical contact.

Marinette looked at her hands as if they were someone else’s. She seemed disoriented, and Sabine couldn’t help but see her own teenage self in her daughter once again.

Her daughter reached out and interlaced her fingers with Sabine’s, taking a hesitant breath. “Okay, Maman. It feels like I’ve been stuck on a hamster wheel the past year. I’d appreciate a plan.”

Sabine lifted Marinette’s hand to her lips and kissed it. “I’m glad you realize. Because it’s perfect. Your grandmother has volunteered to take you on a road trip and homeschool you while you’re away. You can get away from Lila, Chat Noir, Hawkmoth, Paris—”

Marinette jerked her hand out of Sabine’s grip and jumped up, turning so her back was no longer to the wall. Her profile slipped into the shadows. “What? No, I can’t go! Paris needs me.”

Sabine stood and turned to face her. “Paris needs you healthy. Which you aren’t.”

“I’m healthy enough. And what am I supposed to do? I can’t just abandon the city.”

“Well, what happens if you do?”

Marinette looked at her incredulously. “Well, for starters, the city gets destroyed and there’s no one around to repair the damage! And maybe Chat gets worried I abandoned him, or gets emotionally manipulated, or he fights Hawkmoth alone and dies for real, and then I never know his name, and I can’t go comfort his family, thank them for his service, tell them how amazing he was, and I won’t get to say goodbye. Then I’d get akumatized, and—oh God, I would be a terrible akuma. What would I be? A spider weaving tapestries of creation? An evil knitting fairy? Remember when we almost got akumatized together? He called me ‘Princess Justice’…”

Her daughter’s breathing spiraled like she was on a carousel, speeding up as she looked for the brake to stop the ride.

When we almost got akumatized together…

Old memories resurfaced…Hawkmoth’s clammy, psychic fingers slithering over her body, hot breaths whispering “Verity Queen” into her ear as he took control…the urge to just lie back and let it happen.

She shivered, remembering the self-disgust she’d felt afterward. It was like she’d let another man into her bed, the Day of Scarlet Moth.

She thought she’d be able to handle talking about this with Marinette, but instead she felt like she was a mouse caught in a flood, being sucked into a storm grate.

How can she do this day in and day out?

Something broke inside. She fell to her knees, not even caring that her daughter would see her tears.

She was vaguely aware of her daughter transforming again and leaping back out through the roof.

The next morning, when Sabine returned from the market, she found Tom waiting for her in the living room.

He stood across the room with his arms crossed. “Marinette told me you two discussed going away, and that you said she could stay. Why did you change your mind?”

She tightly squeezed the handles of her grocery bags.

What? I didn’t!

Tom was looking at her, trusting her to be honest with him. She felt guilty about keeping secrets, but what was she supposed to do? Marinette was right that the more people who knew her identity, the more danger she would be in.

Sabine at least had an idea how she might keep that secret from Hawkmoth should she be re-akumatized, but it wasn’t something that Tom could pull off. Her husband was many things, but dissembling he was not.

She took a deep breath, put down her shopping bags, and sat on the sofa, gesturing for him to join her. She took his hand in hers and leaned against his shoulder. His steady heartbeat thrummed in his fingertips, and it calmed her down.

Time to spin a yarn.

“You remember when I showed up on your doorstep in Paris after my mom threw me out?”

“Yes…”

She clenched her jaw, fighting back tears. “I know how it feels to have to leave your family and your home and travel somewhere unfamiliar.” Even as she told him the truth, her voice cracked at the realization that this must’ve been how Marinette felt the other night.

Tom squeezed her hand. “Right, but she’d still have Mamma.”

Sabine closed her eyes and scrunched her tingling nose. “I know it’s irrational, but I’m terrified that if she leaves my sight, she won’t come back. I’ve spent so much time trying to prevent this exact thing, and…

“When she was expelled, we didn’t protect her enough. To her, it probably looked like we believed the principal and that Rossi girl unquestioningly. I had my doubts, but why didn’t I say anything? I spent that whole night wide awake, afraid that I’d fall asleep, miss the sound of the back door, and wake up to discover her bed empty the next morning.”

She wouldn’t even need the door.

Tom nuzzled the top of her head with his chin. “Poolish, the issues between you and your mom were so much bigger than one mistake. She was abusive. You are not abusive. If anything, with the amount of freedom we give her, we’re neglectful.”

Sabine’s heart stopped. “Neglectful?”

Tom shook his head. “You know what I mean. We trust her with a lot of grown-up decisions, and she hasn’t let us down yet. She’s really mature. Unbelievably so. Are we sure she’s my daughter?” He laughed, but her mind was still back at what he’d said before.

Neglectful…

She nuzzled closer to him. Tom’s chuckles were like breadcrumbs guiding her back home, and something clarified in her mind.

For the first time since she’d discovered her daughter’s secret, she could see the path laid before her.

As soon as Marinette got back from school, Sabine roped her into watching the shop.

“I just have something really important to dig out of storage,” she told her. Between the website, the news, re-reading about old akumas, and wondering about some of the inaccurate information—or misinformation—on Alya’s blog, there hadn’t been much that was actionable.

And Sabine did not like feeling helpless. Even when she’d arrived in Paris for good, she’d quickly been swept away by Tom, and it was hard to feel helpless when you had a grizzly bear of a man with boundless love and enthusiasm throwing ideas out.

The only relief to be had after finding out about Marinette’s…occupation…was that she was certain her daughter hadn’t been sexually assaulted. Who could possibly do that to Ladybug, a girl with godlike powers at her disposal?

Hawkmoth and Chat Noir.

Okay, but…Hawkmoth wanted their Miraculous. And her daughter still had hers, meaning he couldn’t have done anything.

And Chat Noir was absolutely in love with Ladybug. She couldn’t imagine what it would take to make him take advantage of her. He wasn’t that type of guy. And Marinette seemed so sassy and comfortable with Chat Noir in her room when she was just her normal self.

No, Chat Noir wouldn’t have violated her.

All along, it’s been Miraculous stuff.

But the relief had been short-lived, given what was happening to her daughter multiple times a week. The only thread of hope she held onto was that now she had something she could do.

She went to the master bedroom and slid out a trunk from under the bed, popping it open and rustling through the items stored there: her bridal dress, a sonogram—Marinette’s first picture—a couple reviews of Uncle’s pop-up restaurants in Paris when he was first making a name for himself. And…

Yes, there they are.

She pulled out a meteor hammer and rope dart that had sat disused since she’d arrived in Paris. She’d preferred using her tai chi sword for years because she had fewer bad memories of that weapon. Tai chi was such an internally-focused art, and so slow-moving, that it was hard to accidentally stab yourself.

She stood up and held a weapon in each hand. In her left, a three-meter rope with a twelve-centimeter, sharpened metal rod on the end. She had loved watching people showcase this weapon’s uses before Mama made her start learning.

“Xiabing, focus and do it again!” yelled her mother from across the training hall.

Sabine’s eye was bruising up from where she’d accidentally hit herself with her meteor hammer. The metal ball, tied to a long rope, lay on the ground in front of her. She looked listlessly at the weapon, gradually remembering where she was.

“Xiabing!”

Sabine sighed, coiled up the rope, and took her position.

Sometimes you’d see someone in Shanghai at a park, crowds giving them a big buffer, spinning and swinging the rope around in a way that no doubt would remind Marinette of cat’s cradle. A skilled practitioner could wrap themselves up in the rope and, by pairing torso and neck movements with hand releases, cause the rope to unfurl from the body, accelerating the dart and piercing and shattering targets from a distance.

She’d almost knocked teeth out on two occasions. Both times her mother had scolded her for risking no longer being marriageable, and then demanded she do it all over again.

The meteor hammer was not too different. This weapon was also a long rope, but it had a metal ball instead of a dart. It reminded her so much of Ladybug’s yoyo that she had to use it as a training tool for her daughter. Unlike the rope dart, it was not used for stabbing. It was a long-distance bludgeoning device. Some versions had a ball at both ends, making for a tough weapon to fight against.

One benefit to these weapons was that both were easily concealed and carried around. And in the case of the meteor hammer, if anyone ever asked to see what she was carrying, they might assume it was a weird Chinese yoyo.

Sabine quickly coiled up both weapons and dashed downstairs, through the bakery, and out the door, yelling her excuses at Marinette. “Emergency house call! Pastry disaster!”

Top tier lie. Nailed it.

She made a beeline for the park and tested out each weapon until her muscle memory kicked in and she was roping and wrapping and launching her weapons with accuracy.

There were a few people walking by who stopped to admire her movements, hips still limber and shoulders fluid after all these years.

Thank you, tai chi.

After feeling certain she wouldn’t pop herself in the mouth when she showed off to Marinette, she coiled the ropes, clutched them in her fists, and ran back to the bakery, resolving to cocoon her daughter in vigilance.

I’m going to make Marinette the most powerful bug the world has ever seen.

Chapter 13: The Knitting Fairy

Chapter Text

It was the next morning, and Sabine had marched right through her daughter’s bedroom, summoning military spirits like an American drill sergeant.

“Get up, we have to train. I’ve packed macarons.”

“Mmmhhh, wha…what, Maman?”

“I figured out how to get around this: I’m going to train you.”

Marinette peeked her head over the edge of the bed, looking incredulously at her mother. “What? What do you mean?”

“You know your grandmother trained me in kung fu. You had to have noticed my skill when I was Troublemaker’s minion. And when I was Qilin. But I only ever taught you the basics.” She thought back to eight-year-old Marinette, no muscle or fat on her body, flailing her arms around like rubber bands, smacking herself in the face. “I hated it, and I could tell you did, too.”

Sabine frowned, remembering the cold winter mornings in Shanghai when Mama expected her to train. “You know, when I was a kid, I thought meteor hammers and rope darts were so impractical. Who carries a weapon around like that?”

Marinette, having made her way to her loft bed’s ladder, tucked a strand of hair back behind her ear, brushing her earring. She paused and appeared to be lost in thought for a moment. “I do.”

Sabine nodded. “Yes, apparently you do. But I also didn’t pressure you to train because I had to use my skills once, and they still didn’t help against my attackers. My mom obviously was disappointed with my progress.”

“Wait, wait, wait. Hold on.” Marinette rushed down the ladder, still holding the Chat Noir plushie she’d made, speaking quickly, her voice filling the room. “First, you told me I’d learned everything you knew and it was okay to stop. Second, Ama trained you? That’s where you learned it? I figured it was a school thing. Third, someone attacked you?”

Sabine laughed, and then re-evaluated her tone. Compartmentalizing violence must run in the family. “I was. Your father rescued me.”

Marinette puffed up her cheeks and blew out air. She giggled. “Yeah, I wouldn’t wanna fight Papa! I mean…I did, that one time. Weredad. Hehe.”

Sabine thought back to that day, and the square peg she’d been trying to fit through a round hole finally slipped through. “Chat Noir rejected you…for you. And he was so confident Ladybug would show up in time that he rushed headlong into rescuing you. I remember thinking, ‘Wow, he really must love Ladybug. Marinette never stood a chance.’ But you did stand a chance! A whole chance!”

“Oh, I wasn’t actually crushing—”

Sabine gasped, cutting her daughter off. ”Oh my God! I thought Ladybug was an ancient being. She’s you!” So many ironies and revelations had trickled into her consciousness every day since she’d learned what her daughter was up to when everyone was looking.

Then she remembered Ladyparts. She wished fewer people were looking.

She shuddered, returning to the point. “Anyway, training! Yes, Mama taught me. It was way more intense than some school program. Your grandmother would wake me up every day at five and make me go out to our courtyard, where she’d drill me until I was exhausted, then fight me full contact.”

“How long did that go on for?”

“Until she started showing signs of osteoporosis and the doctors told her to take it easy. Get up and get dressed; we’ve got work to do. We’ll catch the bus and go to the park.”

Marinette threw her stuffed Chat Noir at Sabine. “The park? No, that’s embarrassing!” She paused, appearing to consider something. “I have a place we can go.”

“You have ‘a place’? What do you mean ‘a place’?”

“Me and Chat have a place that Master Fu left to us after he lost his memories.”

“Fu? Like Fu Wang? The masseur down the road?”

“Yes, he was...well, I don’t know how much I should say. The point is, he had two hideouts, but I accidentally led Hawkmoth to one of them, so we’ll go to the other.”

“Okay. And you said it’s your place with Chat Noir?”

“Yes. Wait.” Marinette blushed and slapped the ladder to her bed with her palm. “Not like that, Maman!”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Should I have? I know I joked about it the other day…”

“No! No way! He’s just my partner. There’s nothing going on between us.”

“I mean, you did tell him you loved him when he had brunch with us. And I’ve seen the picture of you two kissing when Alya and Nino were akumatized. I’ve actually been looking at that picture a lot since I found out who you were. Was that your first kiss?”

“…No.”

“No?” Sabine sidled up beside her daughter. “Oh, Marinette, have you been holding out on your maman?”

Marinette blushed and started waving her hands around.

She’s doing her Gumby thing again.

How that girl managed to bend over at those angles and not fall over, she’d never understand. “Well, there was another time, but it doesn’t count, I just kissed someone to break them free of the akuma’s control.”

Sabine clasped her hands to her chest and batted her eyes, making a kissy face. “Ah, true love’s kiss breaks the spell! It wasn’t Adrien, I know that much. As good as you apparently are at keeping secrets, that’s one you wouldn’t have been able to keep quiet about!”

Marinette slapped her palm to her forehead. “ItwasChatNoir.”

“I’m sorry? I couldn’t hear you.”

Marinette clenched her jaw and growled through her teeth. “It. Was. Chat. Noir.”

“Oh! Wow! So you’ve kissed him twice.”

“Umm…,” Marinette grumbled.

“More? Marinette, sweetie, do your father and I need to prepare a croquembouche?”

“I hate you.”

Sabine giggled. “I love you too, sweetie. Just remember our conversation, that you don’t have to say ‘yes’ every time a boy asks you something.”

Marinette’s face grew an even deeper red.

Is this my new normal?

Marinette huffed. “Whatever. Are you gonna get out so I can get changed?”

“Sure thing. I’ll be right downstairs.” Sabine stepped through down to the ladder. “Hurry up, I want to leave in ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes? That doesn’t even give me enough time to text Alya to tell her my mom is crazy!”

“Tick tock, sweetie.” With that, Sabine closed the hatch and climbed down, smiling at the sounds of her daughter sprinting across the room, and eventually the muffled voice as she undoubtedly was calling Alya to vent. Or maybe she was talking to Tikki.

Sabine still wasn’t sure how she felt about sharing her home with a god. She seemed nice enough, but didn’t gods usually come with words like Ragnarok, Armageddon, and...Cataclysm?

At least she didn’t live with whatever god gave Chat Noir that ability. What would it be like to break bread with something that could end reality?

What if her partner ever went crazy and touched Marinette with that power? Could the Goddess of Creation hold off the Goddess of…Destruction?

Sabine felt the blood drain from her face, recalling what she’d read in Marinette’s diary. She had been so high on adrenaline and fear that her memories were a threadbare quilt, unraveling even as it was stitched together. There was something about Chat Noir, and…

Her skin froze, and she felt like someone had curled their fingers under her rib cage and pressed up into her organs. Our love did this to the world.

What was it her daughter had said? Chat Noir had been akumatized…

Sabine felt the strength in her forearms vanish the way it did when she thought about medical procedures. She needed to clench her fists, but she lacked the strength to do it.

She’d work with Marinette to improve her combat skills, but it was imperative that she get Marinette to leave Paris.

But how?

She’d had no good ideas so far. Hypnosis? Sneak attack? Neither choice was viable. What sort of parent brainwashes their kid? It was such Hawkmoth-ish behavior. And physical violence? First off, she was pretty sure she couldn’t lay a hand on a transformed Ladybug, and second, she wasn’t Mama. It was unthinkable to hurt Marinette.

“Okay, I’m ready! Come back up!” her daughter called from above, plucking her out of her spiraling.

Sabine gathered her thoughts and gripped the railing. A few calming breaths later, she had her smile back, anxieties packed away in a weatherproof box and shoved into the attic.

Emerging into Marinette’s room, she saw her daughter standing there beaming. “Ready in five, Maman. How about that?”

Sabine laughed as she finished climbing into the room and put her fingers on her head like large ears that stuck out. She screwed up her voice. “You thank, honey.”

“What?”

“You thank, honey?”

“Is that some kind of old person reference?”

“What? No, it’s Toda!”

Marinette co*cked her head. “…Yoda?”

“Yoda!”

Marinette sighed. “I don’t think he talks like that. Also, that is totally an old person reference! Oh my Gooood, you can’t even get old people references right!” Her daughter smirked at her. “Spots on!”

Sabine had to avert her eyes as the pink light threatened to blind her. She blinked, waiting for her vision to return to normal. “That’s going to take some getting used to.”

Marinette hummed an assent as she looked down at her chest and then twisted her trunk around, looking behind herself and down.

“What are you doing?”

“What?” her daughter asked. “Oh…just, um, checking.”

“…Checking?”

“You know, to make sure everything’s, um, in the right place. There’s this website…”

Sabine felt her heart clench at the confirmation that Marinette knew about it, too.

Ladybug rummaged around in a bag by the ladder and pulled out a piece of fabric. “You ready to go, Maman? The place is stocked, so we don’t have to take anything with us.”

Sabine grabbed her backpack. “Okay, but why are you transformed? Isn’t that going to draw attention on the bus?”

Marinette looked at her mom with a glint in her eye and cackled. “The bus? No, we’re taking the Marinetro!”

“The what?”

Before she knew what was happening, her daughter slapped the fabric—a mask—on her face and grabbed her around the waist, leaping up to the loft, through the access panel, onto the roof, and then out flying wildly toward the Seine.

“WHAT THE FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU,“ Sabine screamed into the wind.

“You might wanna keep your mouth closed, Ms Cheng!” her daughter shouted as she swung them higher and higher in the air. “You don’t want to swallow any bugs!”

Sabine shut up.

This was awful. She’d never liked roller coasters, and she tried to fly as little as possible. Before Marinette was born, Tom had sometimes gone sailing in a small dinghy he used to own. Carsickness, seasickness, morning sickness, motion sickness. Nothing compared to this.

Paris looked like a playroom filled with toy blocks beneath them, and she felt gravity wring the blood from her head and draw it down her neck.

Matricide. Marinette was trying to kill her.

Sabine had no idea where they were going, except perhaps to Hell.

The wind screamed past her ears, and beams of light lasered through the clouds, blinding her. The only sense guiding her right now was a sense of impending doom. How could Marinette fight like this? She looked terrified as soon as her scooter went above five kilometers per hour!

They abruptly landed in an alley, and her daughter opened a sewer grate.

Oh, goodness.

Ladybug gestured at it. “Okay, um…citizen…I found what you were looking for in the sewer.”

Sabine co*cked an eyebrow and made to respond, but Ladybug was already lowering them down through the manhole with her yoyo.

Sabine looked around once they were inside. There were brown, bricked-up walls with mold and other…stains…splattered everywhere.

The smell was…she’d been right. They’d arrived in Hell.

She looked up and saw a meter-thick pipe running into the distance in both directions.

Is there poo in there?

And the water! It was green like the ooze in the Ninja Turtles movies.

There’s definitely poo in there.

Her daughter pointed to an opening in the wall about a meter high and two meters wide.

Sabine stared at the hole and the brown puddles nearby in the dingy, dank bowels of Paris.

Bowels.

Sabine was confused. “What, am I supposed to be looking at something?”

“This is the entrance.”

“Okay, so is there a hidden button to open it like a garage door?”

Ladybug gave her a look like Sabine had asked if Paris was a city in Texas. “No, we crawl through.”

“What? Are you…” She trailed off, as Ladybug was already slipping through on her hands and knees.

When Sabine had vowed to make Marinette the strongest bug in the world, she didn’t mean a co*ckroach.

She held her breath and closed her eyes tightly, trying to ignore the fabric moistening at her knees as she crawled through the gap. She did not hear the gurgling of water—definitely water—reverberate through the…shat-acombs.

She felt the bricks along her back disappear and she looked up to see she’d made it through into a large room with a small door off to the side marked “STORAGE.” There were a few chairs pushed against the wall, plus a small basket and some water bottles.

She sighed with relief. “You said Wang-xiansheng lives here?” Sabine whispered, withdrawing her hands toward her body so she didn’t accidentally touch anything.

Ladybug bowed her head. “Lived. Remember Miracle Queen?”

“That was him? The turtle?”

Oh, God. Fu.

Sabine vowed her daughter would never have to live in a sewer if she could help it. “Wait, ‘lived’? What happened to him? He died in that fight?”

“Oh. No, he’s still alive.” Ladybug smiled. “He’s actually getting his happily ever after, now.”

“Oh, well, that’s not so bad then! Is he off on a beach somewhere?”

“He’s with his long-lost true love, Marianne.”

“Why ‘long-lost’?” Sabine gasped. “Your diary! You wrote that he lost his memories! What happened?”

Her daughter went quiet and shifted back and forth, from one foot to another. “I...I don’t want to tell you. It’ll only make you worry more.”

“Why would I worry because someone else lost his memories?”

“Can you please drop it? It’s too painful.”

Marinette sniffled before she stepped back, reached into her yoyo, pulled something out, and pressed it into Sabine’s hand. “Put this on.”

Sabine looked down and saw a pendant. “What for?”

“You’ll see.”

Trusting her daughter, she put it on, and a small mouse shot out. Sabine jerked her head and swatted her hands in reflex, before realizing it was just floating there, smiling and staring at her a little like Tikki stared at her, but with less intensity and more curiosity.

This is crazy.

“Maman, this is Mullo. If we’re going to train, and if you want to help at all, you’ll need a Miraculous.”

“Hello, Maman! It’s so nice to meet you!” The mouse creature extended a hand. Sabine hesitated before reaching out her hand to shake, but Mullo gave her a high-five, squealed, and flew around in circles before landing on her shoulder. “We’re going to have soooo much fun today! Hey, are you going to keep me forever?”

She looked over at her daughter, eyebrow raised.

Ladybug sighed. “Mullo, we’ve been over this before; I’m only giving you out to people temporarily. My mother is just going to need extra strength so I don’t hurt her while we train.”

“Okay! I can definitely do this very normal request! Wheee! Oh! Hey! Maman!”

“Um, Sabine is fine.”

“Okay, Sabine-Is-Fine! You know what? You should try my power out while you can! If you say ‘multiply,’ you will split up into however many copies of yourself you want! And when you’re ready to be normal again, you say ‘unite’!”

Sabine gawked at Mullo, feeling reality tilt around her.

I can clone myself?

”Are you ready?”

She gnawed on her lip, thinking. “I guess I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.”

“Yay! Okay, to transform, just say ‘get squeaky’!”

“Get squeaky?”

Sabine felt a tingling from her navel rising up to her neck, like she was zipping up a tickly wool sweater with no shirt on underneath.

Ladybug gave her a once-over. “This is weird.”

“You’re telling me.”

“OK, so what kind of training did you have in mind?”

* * *

Sabine was growing frustrated with her daughter’s lack of improvisation with her yoyo. She only had a few moves, and Ladybug telegraphed them. A martial artist trained to fight against weapons would be able to predict her moves and capitalize on it.

“Come on, Marinette, you’re more creative than this! I’ve seen you incorporate all sorts of stitch patterns in your designs.”

“Gah! Identities! Call me ’Ladybug’! What if Chat Noir showed up and heard you?”

“Would it be so bad for him to know who you are?”

“Yes!”

“Why?”

“Well, for one thing, I’m certain he’d be disappointed that it’s me. Have you forgotten that he visits clumsy Marinette sometimes? He’s seen me stab my finger with a sewing needle! How much do you think he’d trust me when we’re fighting akumas if he knows I do stupid stuff like that when there’s no pressure at all?”

“Are you kidding me? That boy is in love with you. I bet if he knew who you were, he’d be so excited!”

She’d meant it as a joke, but her daughter started sniffling.

“That’s the other reason! There’s another universe where we did share our identities with each other, and when he got akumatized, he killed pretty much everything on earth.”

Sabine’s mouth dropped open. She was understanding better the events mentioned in the diary. She thought back to the sketch and her thoughts about Tikki’s destructive counterpart, but didn’t ask any more questions. Right now, she wanted to keep training her daughter to be a better fighter.

Sabine panted as her daughter gritted her teeth. Both were sweating profusely. They’d been at this for hours.

“I want to die,” Ladybug muttered.

Sabine walked over to her gym bag while talking and began fishing around for a lacrosse ball she used for trigger point therapy. “Well, you’ve got this yoyo thread—how long is it?”

“As long as I want—”

“You’ve got this infinite length thread and you’re just using it to swing about like Spiderman, shield yourself like Captain America, and sometimes catch people who are falling? Come on. Those are just Marvel moves. Show me something new. Peter Parker isn’t a seamstress. Steve Rogers doesn’t knit. Show me what the Knitting Fairy can do!”

Without warning, she threw the ball at Ladybug’s face, striking her target. It rolled down her body and back to Sabine, who picked it up again.

“Ouch! What’s your problem?”

“My problem is that you don’t seem to take ladybugging seriously!”

“I beg your pardon?” Ladybug stalked toward her.

“You pull all-nighters on sewing projects! Sure, that’s fun, it’s your dream, but you could die as Ladybug. Remember when we watched Harry Potter and you kept complaining about how lazy Harry was? ‘He can do magic, and all he wants to do is goof around!’ Well, now you can do magic, so why aren’t you spending all day mastering it?” She launched the ball in frustration, and it bounced all over the room like they were in a giant pinball machine.

Ladybug threw her arms up. “I am! Haven’t you noticed the weird smells coming from my room?”

“All teenagers have weird smells coming from their room!” Sabine snatched the lacrosse ball out of the air as it ricocheted back toward her from behind. Ladybug’s eyes widened momentarily before she furrowed her brow again, continuing her rant.

“Well, not me! Not until I became Guardian! My room smelled like ADRIEN THE FRAGRANCE! It was radiant! Carefree! Dreamy! And now it smells like rotten fruit, and the kwamis fly around all the time making a mess! I had to learn to interpret cryptolalia—”

“What?”

“Like a made-up spiritual language! I dunno, Chat Noir taught me the word—who cares? It’s a chemistry textbook I barely understand! And I’m still fighting akumas all the time! And I never wanted any of it!”

Sabine shook her head. “But it’s a gift, Ladybug! A gift! You get to fly around in the air; you get to perform miracles! Apparently you can time travel! You are Harry Potter! Heed those old complaints you had! Now stand up and show me something crazy!”

She threw the lacrosse ball again, this time at the wall behind Ladybug.

Looking furious, Ladybug snapped her wrist, and Sabine was certain her daughter was scribbling something profane in the air. With one final arm movement, the yoyo froze in midair. Ladybug twisted her hip, and a loop she’d threaded shrank, snagging the lacrosse ball around the middle as it rocketed by.

Ladybug retracted the string and grabbed the ball, frozen but for her chest heaving with exertion. She looked stunned. “I can’t believe that worked.”

Sabine grinned, a bit of saliva flying from her mouth as she, too, gulped for air. “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Knitting Fairy.”

* * *

About an hour later, they were resting, drinking water. Sabine thought finally they’d made good progress, but she still had so much more to teach her daughter. She hadn’t even gotten to more advanced meteor hammer work yet.

That will have to be next time. I can’t have her too bruised up!

“Hey, Bugaboo, are you in here?” Chat Noir’s voice came from down the sewer hallway and through the crawlspace.

Ladybug gasped and froze, looking around the room frantically. “Oh no, it’s Chat! You have to hide!” She shoved Sabine toward the storage closet.

“What, why? I’m in costume right now.”

“Just get in there!”

“Ugh, okay!” Sabine hopped in and closed the door. She squinted in the dark and realized she had very little wiggle room.

Gross, it’s so dirty in here, like the mold has mold.

She chose the most comfortable position she could find and listened in.

“Now what’s a beautiful girl doing here in a place like this, M’lady!”

This is how he talks to her when they’re alone?

“Oh, would you stop it? What if someone heard you talk to me like that!“

“I’m not concerned about purr-veillance down here, Bug.” She could hear him cross the room to her daughter.

And then Sabine sneezed.

She froze…and heard stomping toward the door, which was nearly torn off its hinges. She felt herself jerked out as her eyes re-adjusted to the light. Then she tucked into a roll and hopped back up, taking a fighting stance.

“Who are you? How did you find this place? Oh!” Chat Noir froze, and then he co*cked his head to the side as he stared at the necklace she wore.

He appeared to recognize she was wearing a Miraculous. He looked relieved for a moment before appearing frustrated. He furrowed his brow as he turned toward Ladybug and thrust his finger at her. “So you’re just giving the Mouse Miraculous out to everyone except her, huh?”

Her? Sabine could hear the disappointment and frustration in Chat Noir’s words.

Ladybug sighed like they’d had this conversation too many times before. “Her identity was compromised, Chat.”

“Well, so were the others, and you still brought them back into the fold!”

Not wishing to see Chat Noir and her daughter fight, Sabine interrupted. “Excuse me, what are we talking about?”

He turned to her. “You’re the second person Ladybug has given the Mouse miraculous to, after the most amazing holder revealed herself only to me.”

“I’ve never seen a mouse join you two before.”

“She had a covert mission. She was brilliant. My princess—”

Sabine snorted. Princess. Ladybug and Chat turned to stare at her. “Sorry! Still got some dust in my throat from the closet!”

“And what should I call you?”

“Call me…Duoshu.“

Chat laughed. “多鼠嗎? 多么原创。”

She and Ladybug gawked at Chat Noir.

“You speak Mandarin?” Ladybug sounded nervous.

Chat paled and put his hand behind his neck. “No? Just some Duolingo. I definitely don’t take private lessons.”

Duoshu leaned forward. She had to know. “Chat Noir, are you Chinese?”

Ladybug interrupted. “Okay! Enough chit-chat, Duoshu! We can’t be sharing personal info. Identities need to remain secret, you know!” She glared at her.

Duoshu tried to steel her face to look serious for Marinette, but she was too excited to show off for this boy who was so devoted to her daughter, who was not only polite—notwithstanding the sneaking into Marinette’s room at night—but spoke her language.

She walked back to her gym bag to grab her water bottle, humming a tune she’d heard a long time ago about matchmakers.

“Ladybug and I have been training together. Want me to show you some moves?”

Ladybug opened her mouth as if to protest, but Chat Noir spoke up first. “Yes! That sounds awesome!”

Duoshu took a swig of water, set down her bottle, and adopted a fighting stance.

Chapter 14: Push Hands

Chapter Text

It had been an hour since Chat Noir arrived at the improvised sewer vukuoe. Duoshu lunged for him and knifed her hand near the center of his spinning staff, where his hands were. This interrupted its motion and sent it flying away like a wayward helicopter propeller. She scurried toward him, placing her left leg behind his right and rotating her trunk counterclockwise while hooking her right hand around his arm. She slammed her left arm into his chest beneath his arm and tossed him over her knee like a rag doll.

He fell on his back with a thump, yelping like a cat whose tail had been stepped on.

“Have you ever thought about swinging your staff somewhere other than about its middle?”

Chat Noir stared at his hands and then up at the ceiling. “How did you—”

“My husband says I’m quite disarming.” She stepped back and offered him her hand.

“Oh, booooo!” Ladybug jeered from the other side of the room. “No puns allowed!”

The boy gaped at Duoshu, but took her hand, and she hoisted him back to his feet.

She looked analytically at Chat Noir as he recovered his weapon. “Why don’t you try holding your staff at one end. It can extend, right?”

“Y…yeah,” he managed to say through heavy breaths.

“So use it like a saber, like you’re used to. But you can hold it with both hands on one end—or even just on one half—and swing it around to deflect attacks. It will keep your hands out of reach of an akuma’s grasp. We use it like that in tai chi.”

“Okay…can you…show me what you mean?”

“Sure. May I?” she held a hand out, gesturing at his baton.

He nodded and handed it over.

“Okay, do you see anything like a stick around here?”

He reached over and tapped his baton, and it separated into two shorter sticks, which lengthened in her hands.

I wish I had one of these when I was a kid.

Duoshu tossed one of them to her training partner. “Okay, so come at me however you’d like, young man. You are young, right? You’re not…an adult?”

“Duoshu!” Ladybug chastised her, and Chat Noir looked at both of them like he didn’t know what to say.

“Well, come on, then.” With a wave of her hand, Duoshu invited him to attack.

Chat Noir swung his staff at her head, and she ducked, letting it fly overhead. She gripped her staff with one hand at the end and one about half a meter away. As Chat Noir jabbed and swung his staff around, Duoshu blocked or deflected every attack with minimal movement, occasionally lifting her foreleg to avoid a sweeping attack.

She hopped back out of range. “Do you see what I mean?”

Chat Noir stopped attacking and held his staff horizontally, examining it. “Yeah. And you’re right, it would keep my hands out of many akumas’ reach.”

Duoshu beamed at him. She glanced at her daughter before turning back to her sparring partner. “Hey, are you ever late for school?”

Ladybug groaned and stomped off to the other side of the room where their gear was.

Chat Noir watched her and then looked back at Duoshu. “No, ma’am. I’m very punct-mewl.”

She smirked at him. “I think you can do better than that one.”

He frowned and appeared deep in thought for a moment, before smiling. “I am litter-ally always early.” He cleared his throat. “So, how did you meet Ladybug?”

She smirked at him. “I know what you’re trying to do, Matou, and it won’t work.”

Chat Noir raised his eyebrow, flashing an unrecognizable emotion, then waved his hands in defense. “What do you—”

“I’m not going to tell you that I teach a martial arts class, or that I’m her mother, or that she’s really a boy named Marino.”

The boy laughed, drawing the attention of Ladybug. “That’s…oddly specific. I really hope they’re all lies, because if they’re true, I’m going to call him ‘Super Marino’ so much that I’ll make myself crazy.”

“Anyway, she must have some kind of deep background research power, because I’m just a lady with a particular set of skills—”

“Have you acquired them over a very long career?” Chat Noir smiled at her.

Sabine co*cked her head. “What?”

“I thought you were quoting… Never mind. You were saying?”

“Oh, I guess she found out about my martial arts background, because she approached me at my business, told me she knew I was trustworthy, offered me the Mouse Miraculous, and asked me to teach her about the meteor hammer and rope dart.”

Chat Noir looked over at Ladybug, who had grabbed a water bottle and was now holding it to her neck, cooling off. His eyes appeared to trace her figure, and he looked completely vulnerable in the moment.

Marinette could wreck him with a glance if she wanted.

Sabine thought back to the creepy delivery boy, and then regarded the hero in front of her. She’d caught both of them thinking about her daughter. But Chat Noir obviously saw her as a person, even if he had no idea who it was behind the mask. She wasn’t just a body. After fighting alongside each other for months, he undoubtedly knew her heart.

“Chat Noir?” Duoshu said.

He snapped his head back to her. “Sorry, I, um—”

“You were distracted. I could tell.” She smiled and glanced over at her daughter. “She really is something, isn’t she?”

“Yeah…”

“Well, make sure you don’t disrespect her! She’s not someone to be trifled with, and after some training with the meteor hammer, she’ll be unstoppable, even if you’ve got superpowers!”

Chat Noir put his hand behind his head, rubbing his neck, looking nervous. “I wouldn’t dream of it. Hang on, meteor hammer? That sounds like a special move in a video game, not a weapon.”

Duoshu jabbed a finger in his direction. “Watch it, boy. Don’t disrespect my heritage.”

Chat blanched. “I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to!” He looked back to Ladybug, who was watching them closely now, and raised his eyebrows. “You just…found a kung fu master on the street?”

Ladybug shrugged and nodded.

He turned back to Duoshu. “So what are they? I think I can guess about the rope dart—it’s a dart on a rope. But what’s a meteor hammer?”

“It’s an old Chinese weapon a lot like her yoyo. It’s a metal ball on a long rope. Think of it like a rope dart, except meant for bludgeoning instead of puncturing. There’s a Western martial arts film I can recommend to you where the hero ties a rope to a horseshoe and uses it as an improvised meteor hammer.”

“Holy moly! I never thought of improvising something like that!”

Duoshu puffed her chest out in pride. “Well, it’s not something for the modern age. There are guns now, so armies aren’t running around swinging iron yoyos at each other. But when I was a young woman, I did have to fight off some men using a makeshift rope dart.”

That revelation drew Ladybug’s gaze. Caught up in bragging about her culture, Duoshu had forgotten for a moment that her daughter was listening in. She’d never told Marinette this story, and she hadn’t planned on ever doing so. She shook her head, trying to signal to Ladybug that she wasn’t going to talk about it when they got home.

Chat Noir, on the other hand, was starstruck. “You fought off some attackers? With…what did you mean by ‘makeshift’?”

“Some keys on a lanyard.”

“Woooooah, 太酷了!”

“谢谢。” She dipped her head in gratitude.

Ladybug just huffed, and Duoshu felt like she was finally getting her daughter back for all those times she’d refused to speak Mandarin with her at home.

“Ladybug, your partner was just saying I’m awesome. Actually, Chat Noir, would you like me to show you something else? You do a lot more short-range fighting than Ladybug, and I know a thing or two about close-quarters combat. In tai chi, we also use a straight sword, but since you seem pretty good at fencing already, I’d rather teach you something called tuishou.”

“Fencing? What’s, uh…what’s fencing?” Chat Noir gritted his teeth, no doubt chastising himself for telling such a flimsy lie.

Ladybug squeaked. “Duoshu, I told you we aren’t supposed to know anything about each other’s civilian identities!”

“I hardly think—”

“Please stop ‘hardly thinking’ and start fully thinking!”

Duoshu opened her mouth to respond, thought better of it, and held her tongue.

Chat laughed. “这是你第一次被她骂吗？”

“不是。”

“UGH! Come on, you two, speak French!”

Duoshu and Chat Noir shared a laugh once more before she encouraged him to adopt the appropriate stance.

“Now, the goal of this exercise is to develop an ability to sense by touch where it is I’m moving, and react with a move to trap my arms or destabilize me.” She raised her right arm and had him do the same. “Now keep your arm in contact with mine as we move our arms around. Good, that’s perfect!”

Ladybug sat down nearby, fanning herself—it really was very humid down here—while Duoshu continued coaching Chat Noir, pushing and adjusting her center of gravity to give him more of a challenge as they danced around each other.

He’s a really fast learner!

Duoshu smirked, recalling a meme Tom had shown her of an angry muppet alongside the text, “I think I will cause problems on purpose.”

She asked him in Mandarin, “So tell me about this little mouse of yours.”

Chat Noir blushed but answered back in the same language, his voice taking on a new timbre, as if he were singing. “Her robe is a cloud, her face a flower; her balcony, glimmering with the bright spring dew, is either the tip of the earth’s Jade Mountain or a moon-edged roof of paradise.”

Duoshu felt as if the floor had been chiseled out from under her.

Who is this boy to quote Li Bai so easily?

She was uprooted, and Chat Noir’s next push rolled her across the room.

He gasped. “Duoshu, ma’am! I’m so sorry!” Chat bounded over to her and helped her to her feet.

“Chaton, what the hell?” Ladybug ran at him. “Just because you’re mad that I gave her the Mouse Miraculous doesn’t give you the right to treat her like that!”

“M’lady, no! It was an accid—”

“Ladybug, it’s my fault. I lost concentration. It’s not his fault.” Duoshu looked over at him and gave him an approving nod. “He did what he was supposed to do. In more than one way, I underestimated you today, Matou.”

He appeared thrilled by the nickname, and bowed to her. “I need to go back home soon, but before I do, could you show me something with the meteor hammer? Please?”

Mothering a child was in itself a rewarding experience, but it was easy to downplay one’s parenting achievements. It had been so long since she’d done something that made her feel like she deserved praise, and it was too tempting not to show off a bit.

“I’ll do you one better. Multiply!” With that, Duoshu split into two copies. They both marched over to her gym bag. One Duoshu pulled out a meteor hammer, and the other pulled out a rope dart.

Her two copies froze as she adjusted to double the sensory information. She was looking at herself. When one copy moved, she felt it in the other copy. Or was the copy feeling it and she was feeling what the copy was feeling? Was she the copy? No, the copy was her. Or she was it. Her.

Us. We are the copies.

The sewer smelled just as awful from either pair of nostrils.

The two Duoshus placed left palm to right palm, feeling the pressure, and she was reminded of placing a candle between parallel mirrors and seeing a hundred reflections of the light diverging into an illusion of distance.

“Hey,” one of them said into the other’s ear, and the speaker heard the greeting in her own ear.

My God, this is weird.

It was like being at a loud disco trying to have a private conversation. She had two sets of thoughts in her head, or in her heads, but with some focus, she could listen to one train of thought and ignore the other.

After half a minute of disorientation, she had a handle on it. Now it was like driving on the highway at night, and focusing on the right lane line when an oncoming car approaches with its brights on. One wants to look at the car, but it’s too bright. Not looking at the car is the safer way to avoid crashing into it.

One of the copies walked away and the other caught a glimpse of how good the costume made her look from behind. And then she thought of Ladyparts again, and her copy turned around and frowned at her.

They stared each other down and began pacing, making sure to stay far enough away from Ladybug for safety. These were, after all, deadly weapons. As she mentally measured out a buffer zone, she noticed Chat Noir had taken a seat beside his partner, bouncing his knees in excitement. Without warning, Shengbiao—the name she’d chosen for her copy wielding the rope dart—swung the dart in a large loop and caught it with her toe as it swung by. She flicked it at the head of her opponent, Liuxing—naming herself after the weapon she was wielding—who stood just out of range.

Liuxing wasted no time, dancing within range and twirling her meteor hammer. She twisted the rope around her body before straightening out, slingshotting the ball at Shengbiao, who was now within range. Shengbiao’s eyes widened as she turned her body so the ball flew by, narrowly missing her head.

“Hey, watch out, we’re just sparring!”

“Sorry!”

“Duoshu, be careful!” said Ladybug, standing up. “I can’t cast a cure to fix normal injuries!”

Both copies huffed. “Change of plans?” she asked herself.

“Sure.”

Liuxing picked up the lacrosse ball she’d used earlier and threw it so it ricocheted wildly off the walls of the bare room. Shengbiao stuck the tip of her tongue between her teeth as she concentrated, angling her arms and hips to wrap her rope around her neck before jerking her head as she bent over. The dart at the end of her weapon flew true and speared the ball.

Chat Noir shouted his approval, whistling loudly as she re-unified herself.

“Holy sh*t,” said Ladybug.

Duoshu cast a disapproving look at her daughter. “Do you kiss your mother with that mouth, Miss Bug?”

Ladybug opened her mouth to respond, but no words came out.

Chat Noir leaned toward Duoshu with a glint in his eye. “我从没见过她说不出话来。”

They shared a laugh as Ladybug scowled at them.

Once Chat Noir left their secret hideout, Duoshu and Ladybug headed home. When they got back to Marinette’s room, Duoshu de-transformed and faced her daughter. Since the time the bakery had played host to that—apparently—sham of a lunch date with Chat Noir, she’d thought him to be sincere, earnest, and trustworthy. Setting aside her one night of blind paranoia, of course.

Today, he had proven himself to be more complex than he led people to believe with his mid-fight antics.

“You know, your partner is really something.” She bumped her daughter with her hip.

“Yeah, he’s amazing,” Ladybug replied, her voice tinged with admiration, though her posture stiffened slightly.

“And he’s really smart.”

Ladybug hesitated, apparently not liking where the conversation was headed. Her eyes darted around the room, avoiding Sabine’s.

“Mm-hmm,” she finally mumbled, ducking away to fumble with a ball of yarn she’d left on her desk.

“He knows Chinese. He’s not too old...” Sabine’s voice trailed off, rising in pitch with conspiratorial implication.

Ladybug crossed her hands over her chest and set her jaw. “Stop trying to play matchmaker!”

“I’m not!”

“Oh, really? What was with all those prying questions when you two were training?”

“I was just curious, Marinette!”

“Identities!”

“I was just curious, Ladybug. Oh, come on, we’re in Marinette’s room right now. You don’t think anyone spying might put two and two together? Relax!” She huffed. “Oh, just detransf—”

“Spots off!” Ladybug’s abrupt command cleaved the conversation in two.

Sabine was bathed in pink light.

Marinette wagged her finger at Sabine. “No, you can’t relax when you’re in costume! I was sloppy one time and Hawkmoth almost got all the Miraculous, and Master Fu lost his memory.”

“What?”

Marinette turned away, looking down at her hands, fiddling with her fingers. She drifted away from Sabine, appearing to be struggling to confront the reality of the situation. Then she bowed her head, clenched her fists, and nodded.

“When you give up the guardianship of the Miraculous, your memory gets wiped of everything related to the Miraculous. For him, it was everything, because the Miraculous were his whole life. He forgot me and Chat because he picked us as holders. He forgot the love of his life because she’d helped him guard the Miraculous when the Nazis invaded. And now…it’s my burden. I have to make sure it doesn’t happen to me.”

Sabine fiddled with the hem of her zansae, struggling to find her voice. Her lungs were a floating pool toy slashed by a knife. It was like every breath in, the air just leaked back out, unused.

Fu was that old?

What does that mean for Marinette?

Sabine considered the totality of the facts at hand, and she was terrified by the conclusion she reached. She clutched Marinette’s hand as if she could sense a pickpocket trying to steal her away. No, it was worse—it was like reading that there were child traffickers active in the area.

How can I let this go on?

She spun Marinette until she was directly facing her and put her hands on her daughter’s shoulders, her eyes wild with fear. She felt an otherworldly strength in her forearms, like in one of those stories she’d read about a mother lifting a car off her child.

“A-are you going to live that long? And are you going to lose your memory? You said anything related to the Miraculous! I wore one today! Are you going to forget me? Marinette, why did you let me wear one?”

Her daughter blanched. “You’d figured out my identity. I think that sealed it right there. We didn’t do any more harm than we already had.”

Sabine was trembling now. “So you’re going to forget me?”

Marinette tried to pry her mother off, grimacing. “Not if I’m really careful, and we beat Hawkmoth. Then I can put away the Miraculous for good. I’ll remain the Guardian until I’m very old, maybe until I die of old age.”

“How old?”

Marinette shrugged. “Master Fu wore the Turtle Miraculous all the time, which prolonged his life. The longer you wear the jewelry, the more you take on properties of your kwami.”

Sabine stared at her daughter. The more you take on properties of your kwami… “Do you do anything…ladybuggish? What even would that be? Like, do you secrete smelly liquid like they do? I mean, more than—”

“GROSS.”

Sabine felt she could’ve filled an armory from all the daggers Marinette was throwing with her eyes. Her grip loosened, and she recoiled. “Well, it would be helpful, wouldn’t it? Imagine if Chloe was bullying you and you could just shoot yellow goo at her.”

“This isn’t funny!”

“I’m sorry, Marinette. I’m not trying to be flippant. But this is just so much all at once. Wait! Does Chat get…really male cat-like? Is that why he keeps coming around?”

“I’m. Not. Listening!” Marinette spun around and started pacing away from Sabine.

Sabine could hear the hurt in her words. The frustration. The dammed-up sobs waiting for the levee to be breached. Sabine knew she should stop, but she couldn’t help herself. Even as a small voice in the back of her head whispered, “Your mother did this to you. You need to stop. Stop it.” She fought against a powerful current, trying her best not to perpetuate the trauma cycle she’d nearly drowned in as a child. But it was in vain.

“What kicked all this off was you having a nightmare. You were screaming at someone not to touch you, and you keep downplaying it like it was nothing. But there’s no way it’s nothing. You never had nightmares like this before. What is scaring you so much at night? That sketch… Can we please talk about it? I was so sure it was Mr Agreste, but you said Chat Noir got akumatized in another…timeline, was it? You drew him, didn’t you?”

Marinette turned back to her mom, tears at the corners of her eyes. Her shoulders slouched as she leaned to one side, as if she were a tower about to collapse. Any vitality she’d had today had been sloughed off by the scraping of a horrible memory she had carried alone for too long.

She began in a hushed voice, as if speaking too loudly would manifest the experience and bring it into the real world. And yet, somehow, Sabine felt like she was being judged by Yama before a banishment.

“You read my diary, right? What do you think? I saw my own future, and I was dead. I was a statue of ash, and when I touched it, I eroded into dust. And then Chat Blanc showed up, knew my name, and tried to kill me after he’d destroyed all life on Earth. I had to fight my best friend to stay alive—and the only reason I’m alive is because he let me win.”

Marinette continued, her voice reaching a crescendo. “That’s why I can’t leave Paris. Because if I leave, Hawkmoth will still akumatize people, worse and worse until we have another Chat Blanc on our hands. And that time I might not win!”

Sabine felt her legs wobble. “I need to…” She didn’t even have the energy to make it to a chair. She dropped on the ground in the middle of the room and lay back, staring at the ceiling, eyes unfocused. Menacing, abstract images raced through her mind, a Danse Macabre. Strokes of white and red, oils on a canvas piled up and whirling like a maelstrom, and she found herself praying that she’d forget what it represented.

Please let me wake up.

But, against her better judgment, she dug deeper.

“What happened there? Where was Hawkmoth? And how did you see yourself?”

Marinette appeared to age ten years just considering how to answer. She opened her mouth and closed it wordlessly. Finally, she sighed. “I showed you I can time travel using the Rabbit Miraculous, right?”

“Yes.”

“Well at some point in the future, I will give the Rabbit miraculous out. I will curse a friend with this power. They’re doomed to fumble through time, making sure nothing destroys the universe. She came to me, telling me I’d caused a disaster but refusing to tell me how, then dropped me off in the future to fix everything. Even Hawkmoth was dead, the same way as me. Best I can tell, he akumatized Chat Noir, and then in his distress my Kitty triggered a mass extinction.”

Sabine stopped breathing.

Extinction.

Marinette closed her eyes and grimaced, before nodding to herself and opening her eyes again. The fire of determination burned in them, leaving Sabine feeling scorched. “I have to stay. I have to win. And only then can I relax. If you think the panic attacks you saw were bad, imagine what I’ll be like out of Paris, unable to closely monitor the situation, watching from a distance as Hawkmoth destroys more and more and me not able to fix things.

“Until he’s stopped, I can’t burden anyone else with this responsibility. I already feel bad for what I’m going to do to my friend, and I haven’t even done it yet!

And setting aside the fact that I’m going to yoke someone to the Rabbit Miraculous, doomed to plow the fields of time, if I have to pass on my earrings, I would die watching Alya fight Hawkmoth over and over with a fraction of my experience and rapport with Chat.”

This caught her attention, and Sabine rolled up and stood, the disorientation fading. “Alya?”

“sh*t! You see why I have to be so careful? sh*t sh*t sh*t, Maman, you can’t tell anyone! You can’t tell Papa. You can’t tell Nonna or Grandpa. Not Auntie. No one. I’m sorry you have to keep this a secret, it feels so bad to lie all the time, but the fate of the universe hangs in the balance, and—”

“MARINETTE. BREATHE.” Sabine clutched her daughter to her chest and squeezed, hoping the weight would help her daughter escape her own anxiety spiral. She stroked her daughter’s pigtails and kissed her scalp.

Marinette melted into her embrace, reminding her of a time she’d come for comfort after skinning her knee. Sabine wished a bandage were all it would take this time.

Marinette tugged at Sabine’s zansae, straining the seams. She muttered something under her breath, and only after Sabine’s ears had readjusted to the noise level could she make out what her daughter was trying to convince herself of.

“We endure. We endure. We endure.”

That evening, Tom walked into their bedroom as Sabine was unfastening the frog buttons on her zansae so she could take a shower. His mouth dropped open, and he stared at her.

Using the Mouse Miraculous had heightened her senses. All her senses. And Tom was right there, practically dropped into her lap. She let the zansae fall to the floor and leaned toward him, lowering her voice. “Hmmmm, it looks like a mouse has wandered into my den…”

As he backed away, she stalked toward him like a hungry cat, swaying her hips as she approached. Right as she was upon him ready to pounce, he grabbed her arms.

“Sabine, why do you have all these bruises?”

What? She looked down at her abdomen and saw an errant few marks. Maybe she’d gotten carried away.

She chirped. “Oh, i-it’s nothing. I just…well, I took Marinette to do some self-defense training today. Her nightmares scared me into realizing that I needed to make sure she could defend herself, even if no one is hurting her now.”

Tom threw his finger around, pointing out all the sensitive spots that had begun forming the past couple hours. “You call this self-defense? If this is you, what does she look like? You’re a far better fighter than her! And you’re an adult!”

“Oh, she’s fine! I mean, a little worse for the wear, but we’ll both be okay. And I need to make sure she’s strong.”

“Make sure she’s strong?”

“Mm-hmm.”

Tom glared at her, releasing her arms and turning his back to her. “You sound like your mother.”

Well, that was the buzzkill to end all buzzkills.

“I do not sound like her.” She stomped over to a peg on the wall by her side of the bed and grabbed a robe she’d taken home from the spa trip, throwing it on and tying the belt around her waist.

“Do you remember when you showed up at my doorstep, crying, with bruises all over your body?”

“That’s nothing like this!”

“Oh, really? Because from where I’m standing, you’re covered in them again, and unless you just stood there while our fourteen-year-old daughter laid into you, I’m guessing she’s got a set to match!”

“She’s not hurt! She’s fine! In fact, we’re closer than ever! I feel like she’s finally opening up to me again; she’s talking to me!”

“Yeah, because you’re beating it out of her!”

“No! I knew about it already!”

“So you’re punishing her because of what she told you?”

She felt a twinge of guilt. “No! I’m just…there’s new…information…something that made me decide she has to fight better…”

Tom pinched the bridge of his nose and sighed. “What new information? Sabine, do you hear yourself? You’re punching on our little girl because you’re afraid she’s in danger here in Paris, but you still don’t want to send her away! Is this about Marinette, or trying to prove that you’re better than Meifen? Because I’m not gonna stand by and watch you add more violence on top of whatever she’s going through right now!”

Sabine hesitated, trying to get her emotions under control, before she revealed a secret that wasn’t hers to reveal. She owed Tom the truth. But she owed Marinette her silence. “Well, she’s much better at fighting than you give her credit—”

There was a rapping at their door, and it swung open. It was Marinette, clutching a half-finished Chat Noir amigurumi. “Is everything okay?”

Tom’s eyes were immediately drawn to their daughter’s shoulder, exposed to the air by her spaghetti strap shirt. It was splotchy and purple. He rushed over to her and started checking her over. “Oh, my little croissant, are you okay? What happened?”

She glanced at her shoulder and back at him. “It’s no big deal, Papa. I just knocked myself with one of Maman’s weapons today. A bat.” She smiled brightly, reaching up and patting him on the shoulder. “You don’t have to worry! She’s taking good care of me. Come on, it’s okay. I’ve had worse falling down the stairs in front of school.

She lies so easily…

Sabine would never have been able to guess at the truth if she hadn’t been there—that she’d had Marinette training with far more uncontrollable weapons than a baseball bat.

Do we even own one?

Tom finally spoke. “Okay, honey. If you’re sure you’re okay…we won’t keep you up.”

“I’m okay, Papa!” She kissed him on the cheek and gave her mom a quick glance before skipping out of the room.

Sabine approached her husband cautiously. “You see, Tom? Everything’s under control. I’m in control.”

Tom grunted, and together they began their well-practiced twin dance, showering, brushing their teeth, and climbing into bed before turning out the light. Sleep must have found him quickly, because Sabine lay on her side, watching the rise and fall of his chest find a slow pace.

She’d had her first taste of the complications that her daughter had been dealing with. How many balls Marinette was juggling at any given time just to keep everyone in Paris safe, not to mention to keep herself alive. Sabine and Tom had twenty years together, and even then she was afraid of the damage she’d do to their relationship with these lies, and she’d barely begun.

White lies here and there in a marriage were normal, if not acceptable. But she’d never lied to him about something big before. She remembered when they got married, how simple her moral calculus had been. Her loyalty was to Tom, and everything she did would be for him.

But now Marinette, flesh of her flesh, was challenging assumptions she hadn’t even realized she’d had. Tom had chosen Sabine as his partner. She had a duty to honor him. But Marinette hadn’t chosen to be born. Sabine had imposed life on Marinette—which meant Sabine owed her more.

She’d also vowed to protect Tom. And she needed to protect Tom from the truth.

She understood now why Ladybug had to keep Chat Noir at arm’s length. It was obvious they had feelings for each other. Well, he made his feelings obvious, and, while her daughter wasn’t open about it, you couldn’t know a person for over a decade and not pick up on things. There was a spark, born of self-sacrifice and mutual defense. Shared trauma made for good kindling. It had certainly been the spark for Tom and her.

Was that why Marinette didn’t pursue Adrien? Was she afraid to keep such a big secret from him and destroy their relationship before it got off the ground? Was she self-sabotaging her attempts to confess to him?

Yes, she’d had a brief relationship with Juleka’s brother. The boy had shown up at their house, talking about a makeup date they had after Marinette had missed the first. And, for a week after they’d broken up, Marinette had been despondent, making odd comments about how she was unloveable.

At first, Sabine had assumed Luka had done the dumping, but when she’d found out Marinette had broken up with him, her daughter’s behavior after the breakup made no sense to her.

Now it did.

Her daughter was at that age where she was figuring out who she was, and who she wanted to be with while she experienced her becoming. Tom had been a port in the tempest that was Sabine’s life when she was not much older than Marinette.

And Marinette had Chat Noir.

Marinette wasn’t just dealing with school or social issues. She was dealing with things that literally went bump in the night. Things that snarled, bit at your heels, and tried to disembowel you.

And as long as her daughter was at home, Sabine would fight for her, fist and fang—and light a candle for Chat Noir, the boy who was her shield.

Chapter 15: Indelible Ink

Chapter Text

At Sabine’s insistence, every few days, Duoshu and Ladybug made their way back to the subterranean training spot. Almost invariably, Chat Noir would show up. Sabine wondered if he had anywhere else to be, any family who missed him when he was off getting slapped around by an auntie.

They took rest days because the kids needed time for their growing bodies to heal. Certainly not because Sabine couldn’t keep up with them.

That is why, for the umpteenth in the past couple weeks, Sabine found herself, in the middle of the day, soaking in the tub, water as hot as she could stand it. The tension in her muscles unknitted as she lay with water up to her ears, muting the ambient noise on the street drifting in through the window.

There had been a number of akuma attacks since she’d discovered Marinette’s identity, and every time, she reminded herself she needed to figure out a way to convince her daughter to take a vacation outside Paris.

But with the bakery, the calligraphy class she taught at the cultural center, her tai chi practice, and all the mom stuff she was obliged to do, she always forgot. Later, lying in bed, she’d chastise herself for being inattentive, vowing to spend time the next day brainstorming. But the next day would come, and she’d rush around again, handling her normal responsibilities.

How did Marinette manage everything? She was practically head girl of the school. She was Ladybug. She had all those small projects for her friends. She helped out with Kitty Section. It made sense now how she was able to wall off the breakup from her quasi-professional relationship as Luka’s costumier. Fourteen-year-olds normally weren’t mature enough to do that, but Marinette…

Sabine never used to forget like this. Before she had a kid, she didn’t even have to write her appointments down. But then came all the sleepless nights, and the colicky baby crying out for comfort, the one-hour sleep sessions bookended by breastfeeding sessions with Marinette while Gina flitted around the house, picking up all the slack left by one exhausted new mother.

Of course, they had barely any support staff at the bakery back then. Poor Tom had vowed throughout the pregnancy that he wasn’t going to be like his father. That he was going to be present. But while the loaves could rise by themselves, they couldn’t bake each other.

Then came the fights between Tom and Rolland from the prep area, shouting about “blends” and “imported ingredients” that she knew were code for something else. Before Tom threw him out for good. By then, the sheen had come off of Paris.

She’d read about Japanese tourists visiting Paris for the first time, experiencing hallucinations and nausea when they realized it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. That it was a big, smelly, loud city like everywhere in the West. Paris Syndrome, they called it.

But Sabine loved it. Oh, she loved Paris for all its chaotic, historic, beautiful grotesqueries. The city had been her savior.

And now Marinette was the city’s savior. It shouldn’t be that way. If only there were a way to show the city what they owed her. What Sabine owed her.

She’d thought she’d left her mother back in Shanghai all those years ago. But as she lay in the tub, a cluster of muscles would relax, and another would cramp, and she’d feel herself sliding into a lively mountain stream headed down, down, down into a frigid lake.

Mama would’ve made it happen. She would’ve stared Ladybug down and bent her to her will. She’d have barred the windows, bolted Marinette’s trapdoor from below, and led her around on a leash. Or maybe she’d have thought of a way to make money off the superpowers. She would’ve terrorized Hawkmoth until he surrendered.

Or maybe she’d have ranted about how whorish it was to wear Ladybug’s costume, how unseemly it was to appear on TV, and how unprofitable it was to rescue people for free. She’d have deconstructed Marinette and carved a marionette to take her place, clutching and tugging at the strings.

Because Sabine had twenty years and ten thousand kilometers between them, and she felt like the strings she’d torn off had been re-attached.

It hurt, having your psyche held up and re-threaded by a malefic puppet master. Or was it the physical exhaustion that brought her to tears even when she was engaged in self-care? Because surely the bathwater she rested in now had become like the Dead Sea. Maybe she’d be floating by the time she gave up trying to relax.

She shuddered at the morbid name for that place, so near to Sodom and Gomorrah.

As a teenager, she’d met a group of clandestine Christian missionaries and been to one of their in-home worship services. They never convinced her, but she still remembered some of the lessons.

Near the Dead Sea lay two cities filled with the degenerate and wicked. God sent his own supernatural instruments down to prove the viciousness of the people, who demanded they be turned over to be savaged.

Not even a deluded parent, offering to sacrifice his own daughters, managed to resolve the conflict.

Sabine rolled onto her side in the bathtub, massaging deep into her left hip, whimpering as she relieved some tension that had made it painful to hop out of bed too quickly.

Here she was, sitting back as her daughter sacrificed herself in a fight against the wickedest man in Paris, who demanded control of their world’s cosmic instruments, to save her city from destruction. And Sabine knew how this story ended: God sent his favored family out of the city, forbidden to look back. Once they were safe, He rained down fire on the cities.

But, unsure of their salvation, one woman turned and looked back, and she was turned into a pillar of salt for her lack of faith.

Marinette had in an alternate timeline been turned into a pillar of ash. If Sabine’s family lived out their own version of this story, who would look back? If she convinced her daughter to leave, would Ladybug stare in horror at the city’s remains, ascending like smoke from a furnace?

Or was Sabine the one who would look back, like she was now looking back and longing for her mother’s strength, burning with shame? Could she lead Marinette forward without looking back to see if her daughter was buckling under the pressure of her polka-dotted mantle?

She startled at the rattling of her phone by the tub, and her heartbeat accelerated in tandem. It was another akuma attack.

Her leg muscles were weak from the long, hot soak, and she swayed a bit as she stood, fumbling for the phone and unlocking it.

It slipped from her grip like a slick bar of soap and clattered to the floor.

Groaning, she grabbed her towel and passed her hands across the cloth to dry them off before reaching down to pick the phone back up. She brought up the app Alya and Max Kanté had created as a companion to the Ladyblog.

After confirming that there was an ongoing akuma attack, she stepped out of the tub and quickly dried off, threw on her robe, and crossed to the bedroom to watch the coverage on TV.

How long had Chat Noir and Ladybug already been on the scene? They already looked winded, fighting back against an akuma with blades for arms. Ladybug swung herself around the conflict zone, grabbing onto church spires and lampposts and whatever else she could hook onto, and launched herself in the air.

While airborne and flying upward, she released her yoyo and wrapped it around a few loose objects to throw at the akuma. Each time, Chat Noir followed the object in and grabbed items off the akuma to smash. It seemed he hadn’t found the akumatized object yet.

The camera was facing awkwardly up. Then the cameraman slipped, tilting the view and briefly exposing victims’ bodies, sliced in half. A voice gasped, “Merde,” and the camera was trained upward again.

She winced in pain and looked down at her fingers. She hadn’t noticed that she’d begun biting her nails, but it seemed she’d gnawed one down far enough to expose the nail bed.

She inspected the injury, putting pressure on the finger to quell the pain. But she was rooted in place, unable to fetch a bandage. She couldn’t leave the TV. She couldn’t abandon these kids. They were in danger.

They had to go. She had to get them out of Paris. She looked at her injury and knew. She would wrench Marinette from Paris no matter the pain. Maybe she could talk Chat Noir into leaving, too. But how could he talk his family into leaving?

Then she heard a sickening thud on the broadcast. She looked up and saw Chat Noir against a brick wall, struggling to stand up. He looked half-asleep and swayed, knees bent, before putting his fists back up like he was in a boxing match.

Back off and regroup, kids. Regroup.

Her senses clustered around the images coming from the TV. All went silent but for the hum of the aging transformer behind the screen. Dread made her lean in toward the TV, biting her lip hard enough to draw blood, feeling like she had dropped feet-first into a hole lined with nails.

And then her world exploded into a wall of sound, an oppressive violence of discordant wails and screams. Ladybug let out a roar so emotional and fierce, it was like a stampede running through a ravine, reverberating everywhere. She dashed toward the akuma, yoyo tossed behind her, hooked onto something unseen.

Sabine’s trembling hands found her cheekbones, pressing into them like she was testing a melon for overripeness.

Something’s wrong.

Her daughter was getting too close to the akuma.

Sabine held her breath, eyes unblinking and drying out.

Once Ladybug got within striking range, the akuma’s blade-arm sang as it sliced through the air and into Ladybug’s forearm, raised up to block the attack.

A searing pain shot up from her navel, as if the place Marinette was once physically attached to her was receiving sympathetic pain signals. She whimpered at her daughter’s arm, half-severed by the akuma, and felt a burning in her own arm.

But Ladybug seemed numb. With a flick of her wrist, she’d looped her yoyo string around the akuma’s neck and yanked, cutting off its circulation.

She was trying to garrote an akuma that had nearly taken her arm. The Miracle Cure would bring the victim back, but the memory of seeing someone’s life drain from their eyes wasn’t something that could be washed away with soap and a scalding bath.

The akuma flailed its knives around, and Ladybug continued to dodge the attacks as she choked out the akuma, blood spurting out and pouring down Ladybug’s injured arm.

Did Tikki replenish Ladybug’s blood? There was already so much of it everywhere, visible even despite the camouflage of the super-suit.

Where was Chat Noir in all this? The last she saw, he’d been knocked for a loop, woozy as he stood. Was he okay? He needed to get back to the fight so Marinette wasn’t alone!

The camera was zoomed in tightly on Ladybug, and as the struggling hero and her nemesis battled, they spun around, a demented pas de deux. The livestream caught a tightly cropped view of Ladybug’s face, gripped by mania, her intensity appearing on the precipice of collapse.

At long last, the akuma’s attacks slowed and halted as it fell to its knees and then forward onto its face. Ladybug knelt on the akuma’s back and began rifling around, apparently searching for the akumatized object she needed to free the victim from Hawkmoth’s control. But it didn’t look like there was anything left to smash.

The cameraman widened the field of view to reveal Chat Noir, who had an addled look on his face as he traced a jumbled path between bodies on the ground, eyes dragging from one to the next.

Sabine wished she could be there to comfort him. He needed his mother right now, but she was probably tuned to the same broadcast, transfixed, looking at the boy she also knew to be a stranger, having a similar, ignorant wish.

The stream zoomed back in on her daughter, who was, with her good arm, hammering the akuma with her balled-up fist on its temples, on its neck, thrashing against soft tissue in desperation. Anyone watching the broadcast could see the viciousness in her eyes, contrasting with the clumsy, uncoordinated rage. It seemed Paris was witnessing Ladybug’s breaking point.

Groaning, she hit a strange marking on the akuma’s lower back, and the black butterfly escaped. Had Hawkmoth placed an akuma inside a tattoo?

Chat Noir staggered near Ladybug, who was still straddled atop the victim, apparently woman with a pink mohawk, still unconscious. The heroine’s shoulders heaved with sobs even as she abused the victim, her nearly-hacked-off arm dangling and trembling as red fluid pooled beneath it on the ground.

Chat Noir pulled her off the woman and hissed something in her ear.

She seemed to regain awareness, because she looked at her injury for an uncomfortable length of time. It was like all of Paris was holding its breath.

Sabine, too, held her breath, her hands on the TV, pressed up against the screen like she was trying to teleport to the scene. She imagined every wrinkle, every strained facial muscle, to be the stroke of Edvard Munch’s brush as the camera rendered its own version of The Scream in red with black spots. Sabine wished she could be there right now to comfort her baby. If she knew where Marinette kept the Miraculous, she could transform and join them. But that would not go down well with her daughter, so she said a silent prayer of thanks for Chat Noir, that he was there for Ladybug, comforting her.

Her daughter slowly looked up, took aim, and just nudged her yoyo toward the butterfly, catching and purifying it.

Sabine took a hesitant breath at the sound of her daughter mumbled her incantation to fix the damage.

As the magical ladybugs swarmed downward, the news crew began running toward the heroes, likely to try and interview them. Alya was visible behind Ladybug, sprinting toward her with her cellphone waving around.

Ladybug turned and looked in Alya’s direction, and whatever Alya saw in the heroine’s face stopped her dead in her tracks.

There was no customary Bug Out this time. Ladybug just left.

A few minutes later, when Sabine heard the soft, tell-tale thump on the roof, she crept upstairs. As she ascended the ladder to her daughter’s room, she heard muffled sobs. When she pushed at the trapdoor, it wouldn’t budge.

She staggered back downstairs, hot bath forgotten, thinking about Ladybug’s useless, oozing arm, and all the severed bodies.

But for Tikki’s protection, that could’ve been her little girl.

Who even cared what the akuma called itself? Not Sabine. She was consumed by her daughter’s surrendering body language even as Ladybug’s face showed a determined fury. She was haunted by the glimpses of the dead, and of an imagined future where Ladybug hadn’t won, her body tossed into a pile with the others, the remainder of blood chum after a shark frenzy.

Paris was a Hellmouth. Marinette needed to get out before she was dragged into one of Dante’s lurid Circles.

Sabine dropped down on her bed and fell backward. As her head hit the pillow, visions of Ladybug’s yoyo melting into a de-coagulated puddle of blood played behind her eyes.

As she napped, she dreamt of carnage, feeling like a dragon’s claw was dragging across the inside of her skin. She rose for dinner and joined Tom, but Marinette never came down.

Tom wondered aloud if Marinette might be getting sick, and Sabine reassured him that she would look in on her. After they’d cleared the table, she told him to get ready for bed while she checked the trapdoor again. It still wouldn’t budge.

Too emotionally drained for a fight, she let Marinette be. There would be time enough for a conversation about mortality tomorrow.

That night, Sabine dreamt that she grabbed Marinette by the hair and dragged her along the Seine toward Rouen.

She woke up in the small hours, exhausted, and she couldn’t fall asleep again.

The next day, on her third cup of coffee before nine in the morning, Sabine again tried the trap door to Marinette’s room. It swung open, so she went up and climbed the ladder to her daughter’s bed.

Marinette lay with her head turned to one side. As Sabine reached over to shake her awake, she glared at the earring, resting like a sacred carving, uncovered through years of erosion from a site of human sacrifice. Creation? It was a periapt of destruction stabbed into her daughter’s earlobe.

If only Sabine could crush the jewels until there was nothing left of the burden Marinette bore like an ox with a plow lashed to it. But during a training session, Ladybug had told Duoshu that their jewels were virtually indestructible, so they could fight full contact.

She peered beneath the duvet at her daughter’s arm, reassuring herself that the the Cure had repaired the injury. There was no wound, but an oblong purpling remained—a mute reminder of Ladybug’s sacrificial ferocity yesterday. Otherwise, she seemed fine.

Physically, at least.

It felt so long ago that she’d first seen the bruises on Marinette’s body at the spa. The ladybugs rebuilt the city. Even if they couldn’t wipe away the indelible ink scrawled across her daughter’s psyche, at least they should’ve repaired her body.

Sabine jolted as she thought about the knife-armed akuma slicing people in half and nearly removing Ladybug’s arm. The blade shouldn’t have been able to penetrate Marinette’s outfit. Was Hawkmoth getting stronger? Would the akumas be worse?

She needed Marinette to be more prepared until she could convince her to give up on the city and get out. Sooner or later, Tikki’s luck would run out, and there wouldn’t be any more magic ladybugs—just a supervillain cackling over two corpses.

She hurriedly nudged Marinette awake.

“Wha?” Her daughter blinked weakly in the sunlight.

“Get up. We have to go to the sewer. I have some ideas for training.”

“What time is it?”

“Time to train. No time to spare.”

After Duoshu led Ladybug in a warmup of stretching and light calisthenics, they sat on a pair of chairs in the heroes’ sewer alcove.

Maybe the last battle has changed her mind about leaving.

“Have you given any more thought to Grandma—

“Identities!” rasped Ladybug.

Duoshu huffed in frustration. “To…the Motorcycle Holder’s offer?”

“No. It’s out of the question.”

Duoshu felt her stomach knot with worry, and she tapped her daughter’s weaker arm. “How’s it healing?”

Ladybug swung her other, dominant arm in circles, grinning. “Still as yoyo-ey as ever.”

Obviously, she was asking her daughter about the injured arm. The one she’d indicated by touch. But Ladybug seemed to have regressed back to denial. This, after weeks of a gradual opening up, like a child on Christmas after being told they were only receiving socks.

Her daughter was as evasive with her words as with her maneuvers in battle, the way Mama had instructed Sabine to be. “Ladybug… How is your other arm? The one that almost got lopped off yesterday.”

Her daughter’s mouth smiled, but not her eyes. Ladybug was going to get forehead wrinkles before laugh lines. “It’s fine. The Cure fixed it.”

Duoshu raked her gaze across Ladybug’s arm then made eye contact. “It didn’t look fixed this morning.”

Ladybug didn’t say anything, and the room was so quiet you could hear crickets.

Duoshu trod gingerly onto the next topic, ignoring the Keep off the Grass sign her daughter seemed to have erected between them. “Why are the buildings back to normal but your arm isn’t? Why don’t the bruises go away?”

Ladybug lowered her gaze and answered feebly. Had Duoshu been the holder of a different Miraculous, she might not have heard.

“I leave them because I deserve it.”

“You…you think you deserve to be injured? Why?”

“Because it’s my job to protect everyone. Those people today, who…who got cut… They aren’t going to have any physical scars, but they’re going to remember the feeling of getting hacked apart the rest of their lives. I can’t fix that.”

Duoshu felt like she’d had her stomach hollowed out with a spoon, like she was the gourd and her daughter’s words were the child making a bowl as a crafts project. She could almost see her guts haphazardly tossed to the floor, leaving a mess for someone else to come by and bin later.

Someone who was better at managing these horrors than Duoshu.

Rather than try to appeal to Ladybug’s rationality, which seemed futile at the moment, she decided to set the conversation aside to continue training.

An hour later, Duoshu’s back was tender. But her soul throbbed. The dull, persistent ache had become an acute, precise skewering.

Her legs wobbled, and she failed to connect with her daughter at all, physically in the spar as well as emotionally in their conversation.

She wondered if she should be proud, that it meant her daughter had taken all the fighting lessons to heart. Ladybug had mastered all her lessons, but every time Duoshu felt pleased, her mind would summon up images of the bodies. She’d run out of things to teach her daughter, but it still wasn’t enough.

Ladybug danced around, teasing her with her boundless agility. Her daughter smirked as she hopped from one leg to the other, drawing from seemingly unlimited reserves of energy. “How old are you again? Instead of Duoshu maybe I’ll call you Oldshoe.”

Grinning, she reached out with her left, non-dominant arm to tap at Duoshu’s cheek, as if to say, “I’m not even trying anymore.”

“Take this seriously!” Duoshu screamed as she sliced her arm directly at Ladybug’s injury. As the attack made contact, Ladybug looked shocked, whimpering like a kicked puppy as her legs buckled under the assault.

Duoshu mounted Ladybug, pinning her to the ground. She leaned forward, resting hand on the ground to the side of her daughter’s head, face drawing near Ladybug’s. “You almost died yesterday! You could’ve been one of those bodies, Ladybug! And now you aren’t—”

She was pulled violently backward off her daughter and tossed like a rag doll across the room. Her back slammed against the wall, and she heard brick and mortar crumble.

“What is wrong with you?” Chat Noir’s voice thrust at her like a lance, piercing her side, and shame settled upon her head like a crown of thorns.

Duoshu imagined her mother’s voice rippling in her ear as if it were a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the globe.

It was the last thing she heard before passing out.

Chapter 16: Cataclysm

Chapter Text

When Sabine came to, she was in Marinette’s bed, tucked in and de-transformed. Her daughter hummed a sweet tune below. Sabine rolled over and took a long look at her.

Marinette limped from her desk to her dress form. She looked at a tape measure and nodded as if to confirm a measurement.

Watching her daughter navigate her room with her injury reminded Sabine that she’d pinned her child to the ground and shouted at her, how vicious she’d been. Self-loathing emerged from an old grave in her heart.

But it wasn’t time to wallow in depression. She wasn’t going to be Nero, fiddling while her relationship with Marinette burned.

She groaned as she sat up and shuffled her butt toward the ladder down to the bedroom floor.

Marinette stopped humming, and without looking up, she sighed. “…You’re up.” She looked defeated.

Sabine flew down the ladder and knelt at Marinette’s feet, grabbing her hand and practically nuzzling it to her forehead. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what happened. It’s almost like I blacked out. Next time, I’ll—”

Marinette tugged her hand out of Sabine’s grasp and stepped back. The orange hues of the late afternoon sun filtered in through the bedroom window, painting her daughter’s skin an otherworldly hue.

Sabine finally looked up at her eyes and saw how red they were, like she’d rubbed them raw. A dozen emotions flitted across her daughter’s face, warring on the map that showed the path of their future relationship. Sabine held her breath, awaiting her judgment.

Marinette’s voice tottered like an acrobat balanced atop platforms of cylinders turned sideways. “I think it’s best…that I don’t give you a Miraculous again. Not if there’s a chance that’ll happen again. I’m already at war with two Holders, and I almost died fighting another. I can’t fight a fourth.”

Sabine felt her stomach fold in on itself. How could she protect her daughter if she’d never get Mullo again? “Don’t you think that’s a little harsh?”

“A little harsh? I had to hold Chat Noir back after you passed out. He was absolutely feral. I could only get him to stop by…” She swallowed, her hesitation thundering in Sabine’s ears. “By telling him you’re my mother.”

“You—” Sabine tried to swallow, but her throat had gone dry. She’d messed up. Ladybug wouldn’t even tolerate mention of extended family’s names because protecting her identity was paramount. And Duoshu’s actions had caused her to reveal a much more intimate relationship. Chat Noir didn’t know he’d been training with Sabine, but he came around the bakery enough… He knew Duoshu spoke Chinese. He knew Duoshu was a skilled martial artist. And maybe Duoshu had inadvertently dropped other hints when they were bantering.

Oh, no.

She’d told him she was Ladybug’s mother as if it were a joke. She’d told him she taught a martial arts class. She’d told him that Ladybug might also be called “Marino.” That was scarily close to “Marinette.” Sabine had laid the explosives, and it had taken one sentence from Ladybug to explode the walls she’d built around her civilian identity.

“You told him you’re my daughter?”

Marinette closed her eyes, slowly opened them, and looked beyond Sabine, as if reliving a nightmare.

She’d thought about welcoming this boy, her daughter’s partner, into her home once the masks fell, but how would he ever trust her now? Sabine pressed for more information. “What did he say?”

Marinette sounded so small in her response. “He…he started muttering something about abusive parents…”

Abusive.

Tom had joked that she was neglectful. Now Chat Noir was calling her abusive. She had few of her mother’s facial features, so she’d never had to stare in the face of her abuser when she looked in the mirror. And Sabine had always thought she was the hero of her own story…

Am I the villain in Marinette’s?

Her daughter had fallen silent, appearing to consider her words carefully before finally speaking with a voice trembling like a plum blossom in the breeze. “I can’t trust you with that power again, and I don’t know how I can trust him around you, either. I’m the Guardian; I need to know my Holders well enough to decide who gets to be active. And…I think Chat Noir can protect me better than you.”

Sabine opened her mouth to speak, and then she closed it. Her shoulders drooped. Marinette—the Guardian, she reminded herself—was right. “I understand.” She dragged herself toward the trapdoor.

“Wait.”

Sabine froze, nearly standing at attention at the authoritative tone in Marinette’s voice. Could a fourteen-year-old really sound like that? That was the voice of a guardian, and Sabine waited to hear how this one was going to advise her.

Her daughter approached and began stippling something to Sabine’s temple. “We can’t let Papa see this one.”

Concealer.

Sabine wondered how many times Marinette must have concealed the truth from her the past year. For the first time in her life, she seriously entertained the thought that her daughter would be better off without her.

After Marinette had applied a setting powder, Sabine was dismissed. She trudged downstairs and to the bathroom, half-closing the door before falling backwards against it to force it the rest of the way closed. She crumpled to her butt and sobbed into her knees.

The next day, Sabine and Tom were huddled around the TV watching a livestream of another akuma battle. She bit the inside of her cheek to keep from telling him it was Meiyun. It felt like every conversation they had these days was about her, and she felt weighed down by chains, the walls of her cell closing in. How long would it take her to spill the secrets?

"Wow, Sabine, have you ever seen Ladybug this on her game? Look at her go!" Tom was like a teenager watching his favorite football player hit a purple patch, standing at rapt attention with a huge grin on his face. He didn’t seem to notice how closely Sabine was pressed to his side, anxiously squeezing his arm.

Despite being stripped of her Miraculous, Sabine couldn’t help but feel a surge of pride watching all the hard work finally pay off. It seemed Marinette’s psychic injuries had healed, because she was moving with so much self-assurance.

Ladybug was scrappier, with better tactics and economy of movement, and—the most bizarre outcome of all—improved yoyo skills. The heroine bobbed and weaved, hurling the yoyo in incomprehensible loops, defying every law of physics with the way the string would tear her from her perch and traverse dangerous paths toward the akuma's weak spots.

Chat Noir stood off to the side, openly admiring Ladybug like a sentinel of adoration.

Alya must have bought a new zoom lens, because she was capturing an immense amount of detail. Sabine hoped it was a powerful zoom, and that the girl wasn’t as close to the action as it seemed.

So crisp was the stream, that it was easy to see the green in Chat Noir’s terrified eyes, the flexing of his leg muscles, and the stretching of his arms. He dove in front of his partner as the akuma made a turn that Ladybug seemed not to have anticipated, and it shot its weapon. When he was vaporized by a laser-like beam of light meant for her, nothing remained but a scorch mark on the pavement and his ring spinning to a stop like a lucky coin that had run out of good fortune.

Sabine dropped to her knees, gaze plastered to the floor. Her stomach threatened to dump its contents, and she tasted bile. An electric tang tickled the sides of her tongue.

He’s just some kid!

Not only had she never gotten used to seeing someone die during an akuma attack, but she knew him! She’d met him—twice! She’d had him over for dinner! He was in love with her daughter! He was a sweet boy who knew how to pass dishes; use a fork; say, “Yes ma’am”; speak Chinese; use an épée; and protect her daughter.

He had a weak left side defense that could use some work. He had astonishingly quick reflexes. And God help her daughter, he was funny. He quoted poetry! He had ceased to be just a hero to her. He was… He was family. He’d earned inclusion. If, indeed, the masks one day came off, she’d treat him like a son for all the good he’d done for her daughter.

And he’s also someone else’s son, too!

Chat Noir had parents somewhere in Paris who must love him dearly. And, like Tom—and like her, until recently—they probably had no idea of the greatness he’d achieved.

And on a more selfish level…

If Chat is dead, my daughter has to work twice as hard.

If Chat is dead, there's no one left to protect her.

If Chat is dead, then she can die, too.

She jumped as Tom’s hand came to rest on her shoulder, and she almost blurted out all the secrets she’d been carrying lately, leaping around in her mind like an orchestra of crickets. Or fluttering like a fallen butterfly, searching for a cranny to rot in.

Luckily, he spoke before she could. “It’s okay, Sabine. Ladybug will bring him back like she always does. He’s a superhero.”

Sabine wondered what would happen when Chat Noir exhausted his nine lives. She thought of Chat Blanc, and how Ladybug had brought him back even then. She shuddered at the image of Marinette being akumatized.

Sabine made a mental note to doublecheck the new weatherstripping.

Sabine stayed glued to the TV the rest of the fight, silently willing her daughter to win. She felt like she’d been flung into space, careening through the cosmos, feeling the gravity of stars fight over her as she hurtled past.

This time, she wasn’t cheering on two millennia-old heroes. She wasn’t even cheering on someone she’d broken bread with. She wasn’t only rooting for her daughter to do her job or to claw her continued survival from the clutches of a madman. She needed Marinette to win for the poor mother out there who otherwise would never know what happened to her son.

When her daughter had finally won and screamed “Miraculous Ladybug!“ Warm rains of relief fell, but it wasn’t the deluge she needed to be cleansed of her fears. Just as Tom had predicted, Chat Noir came back to life, looking none the worse for wear. He was singing, trying to cheer Ladybug up as she weakly thumped her balled-up fists against his chest, weeping.

Tom turned to her and grinned. “You see? I told you he’d be fine. Ladybug doesn’t know how to lose.”

But having raised the girl beneath the mask for fourteen years, Sabine knew that wasn’t true.

And now Sabine sat at the dinner table with a small plate of macarons, lost, pawing at an old Polaroid her husband had snapped of her with toddler Marinette, baking a birthday cake for Gina.

I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do.

Tom had gone for an afternoon walk, saying it was Parisians’ responsibility to show Hawkmoth that they weren’t afraid of venturing outside their homes after an akuma. If only a jaunt around the block could suffice for Sabine!

She didn't usually drink, but now she was kept company by a bottle of something Tom had brought back from a baking convention. Its burning vapors were a salve to her frayed nerves.

She had seen Chat Noir dive in front of Marinette to save her life. And he'd died.

He'd f*cking died.

Tom was right. It had happened before. But that was when she didn’t know…

The boy kept protecting her daughter. All this time, he’d been there for her, loving her and protecting her, before Sabine even knew anything was wrong.

But they’re children!

Chat Noir. Chat Noir. He was as young as her daughter—practically a baby—though he had courage beyond his years. What could have driven him to such heights of self-sacrifice? In the unfathomable depths of her soul, in the crevices she was afraid to explore, she doubted even she could repeatedly commit suicide like that. It was a debt she could never hope to repay.

And Marinette…

She’d seen Chat Noir give his life for her, and then she’d had to soldier on—alone.

No wonder she's falling apart.

What kind of parent am I that I didn't see it? My baby is hurting, and I was no more aware of her pain than Mama was of mine.

And today…

It could have been her. It could have been her. Oh Meiyun, it could have been you.

She clamped her eyes shut to staunch the flow of tears. Her throat was sore from her neck muscles tensing against the sobs she was burying.

Burying.

She thought about Chat Noir’s vaporization. Would there even be anything left to bury?

In an futile effort to stave off her worst thoughts, she focused on the clock on the wall, but—

Tick tock. Time running out.

I can't bury my Marinette.

She sat naked in a snowbank with no blood flowing to her extremities, numbness spreading its tendrils. All she could do to stay lucid was to clutch at the anxiety circling around her brain like a rescue rope and crawl out.

Guardian or not, it was imperative to remove Marinette from this dire situation. If things kept up like this…

She’s going to die.

And Sabine would raze Paris to the ground before she let that happen.

A loud thump made her head jerk and her heart race. Marinette was back. It was now or never. No more wasting time.

It’s hopeless.

I have to try.

What do I say?

Marinette’s objections were about Chat Blanc and about Hawkmoth destroying the city. But screw the city. Marinette was going to die. Why didn’t she understand?

Sabine hugged the photograph to her chest, trembled as she walked toward the ladder, and slowly ascended, every tread creaking with the promise of oblivion.

She placed her hand on the trap door above her head and looked up. Her hand was shaking against the wood grain. Her nose tingled with the threat of tears. She took a calming breath and spoke up.

“Marinette, are you there?” she hissed through the door, hearing her own voice clicking throughout the space.

“Yes. Come in.”

Sabine lifted the trap door and shuffled in, hunched over and prepared for a fight. She forced a sympathetic gaze. “Hi, Sweetie.”

“Hey.” Marinette peered over the side of her bed’s safety railing, making a valiant but futile effort to hide how shaken up she was.

Sabine didn’t know where to start. She reminded herself that she’d come up here for a reason, but she felt blocked from broaching the subject by a force field. If she couldn’t convince her daughter to leave…

No, Sabine would. She would convince her. She was her mother’s daughter, and Huang Meifen had always gotten her way.

Marinette spoke up to fill the silence. “Um, I guess you know where I've been. Did you need something?” She looked apprehensive.

“Yes.” Sabine took a deep breath and looked at Tikki hovering around her daughter, likely comforting her after Chat Noir’s death and resurrection, and felt a stab of recognition. It had to be hard for Tikki, to elevate someone to godhood only to see them diminished by the same act.

“Tikki, could you give us some privacy, please? I set aside some macarons for you downstairs.”

Tikki glanced at Sabine, and then at Marinette for permission. “Thank you, Sabine. That’s very considerate of you!”

Tikki phased through Marinette’s floor as Sabine climbed up the ladder to Marinette’s bed. She knelt at her daughter’s feet, eyes locked on her knees, palms resting on her thighs.

After what seemed like an eternity, Marinette's voice rasped out, having been fighting its own losing battle against crying. “Maman?”

Sabine's eyes were weary as they slunk upward to return Marinette's gaze.

Focus.

Her throat tight with emotion, Sabine strained to speak, and her voice was like the branches of a neglected oak tree, scratching against each other in the dead of night. “Baby, I was so worried about you today, watching you on TV… There are moments where I get taken out of my body and it’s like I’m watching one of those superhero movies, and then I see you take a—I see you get hit, and— When an akuma hits—“

“It doesn’t—”

“Let me finish.” Sabine sniffled and looked up to try and stop the tears. “When you...when you take a blow, I feel it. It might as well be me up there, being used as a punching bag. Sometimes I feel like my heart is going to explode just watching it. It gets revved up so high. And then it feels like I've jumped off a cliff, and I’m being skinned alive by the air whipping past, waiting for the impact that’ll end everything. I can’t bear to think what would happen to your father if he knew you were the one out there.”

“Maman—”

“No, Marinette, this is serious! We both…we both saw what happened to your partner today.”

A solitary tear slid down Marinette’s cheek, carving a path around her nose before settling on her quivering upper lip. She ran her hands through her hair and looked at Sabine. “Sometimes I really hate him…”

“Oh, Meiyun…” Sabine could hear the lie in her daughter’s admission, the self-immolating devotion to a comrade-in-arms. “This is too much for the two of you. If Chat Noir’s parents knew it was him out there, they’d be making the same decisions about their son. No one should go through this, especially not children.”

Marinette scrunched her eyebrows upward and together. “What are you saying, Maman?”

Sabine squeezed her eyes shut, afraid to see Marinette’s reaction. “Sweetie, have you given any more thought to traveling with your grandma?”

Marinette sighed. “Yes. But I can’t. You know that—”

“It's just I think it would be really good for your mental health. It’s so obvious to us that you need help. You need to unburden yourself for a bit—let someone else take over... And it would give me a break, too, to know you’re safe. A parent can’t ignore when their child is hurting like this. All day I feel like I’ve been marooned on an island of dread.”

Even bathed in the glow of the afternoon sun, Marinette’s jaw cut a look of defiance.

It’s not working!

Sabine slouched toward her daughter, limp in resignation, eyes reloading another volley of tears.

If only I was the one with the Lucky Charm…

“Maman, I hear you. I promise I’m listening to your concerns. But isn’t that the burden you accept when you decide to have a kid? That you’re going to have to watch them get hurt and fail, and hope that you raised them well enough to overcome it alone?

“Yes, but most parents don’t have to deal with their children being Ladyb—”

“You and Papa have been amazing parents, and you prepared me for struggles. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’ve grown up. I’m almost an adult. I know I don’t look like it, but I’m strong. I know you don’t believe it—“

“Meiyun—"

“No, please. Don’t try to guilt me with my Chinese name.” Marinette reached out and fumbled with Sabine’s fingertips, matching her tears with her own in a sympathetic ballet of pain.

She lay Sabine’s hands back in her lap and looked up, meeting Sabine’s eyes with blue flames in her own. “I’ve made up my mind on this. I'm staying, and that's final. Paris needs me too much. Chat needs me too much."

Sabine reached out and tucked a hair back behind Marinette’s ear before placing a hand on her daughter’s cheek. “Meiyun, I know you’re strong. You’ve grown up so much, and we’re so proud of you. But this? This is too much for anyone—even the strongest, most mature person in the world. It’s too much responsibility. It’s too dangerous. You’re a soldier who was drafted in an emergency and thrown untrained into the fray. And then Fu lost his memory, and you got handed a grenade masked as a battlefield promotion. And it’s not just you. Chat Noir died today. He’s died so many times!”

Marinette swatted Sabine’s hand away, her tears falling harder. “Don’t you think I know that? I have a front row seat to the worst show every time!”

“Then get out of the seat and leave. He died so you could live. So live. Get out of town, get yourself well!”

“I can’t! I can’t leave him all alone. It would kill him, Maman.”

“It’s killing him now!”

“No, you don’t understand. It’s not just about the akumas, it’s…” She shook her head. “Look, I don’t know much about his personal life, but I can tell this much: he’s been abandoned. He would die if I deserted him!”

“Then convince him to leave, too. He’d do anything for you. He’d abandon Paris if you asked him to! Surely if you two didn’t show up for enough battles, Hawkmoth would realize you’re not here anymore and give up…”

Marinette choked out a bitter laugh. “And then what? He goes on a rampage around the globe? I can’t reverse damage at a distance. You saw what happened to Paris when I was off in New York! Think of the burden on the city, rebuilding without the aid of magic. Think of how many people died that day and never came back!”

Sabine shook her head. “I just—Meiyun, it’s…you have to live. You have to live! You have to! I can’t take it anymore. How can you take it? Over and over, this fighting, this bleeding, this dying—it’s terrifying! I can’t…I…please, please, please, don’t do this anymore. I can’t see you do this anymore—”

“I don’t have a choice! I was appointed this task—”

“f*ck THE TASK! This is your life! You only get one, then you die and that’s it! There’s no do-over if you’re not around to bring yourself back to life! You deserve peace, and love, and—and hamsters—and pancakes! Don’t let everything slip away because some old fool threw jewelry at you and told you to suit up!”

“That’s not how it happen—”

"Please!" Sabine prostrated herself before her daughter, clutching at the cloth of her pajamas, feeling the cotton under tension. The fabric tugged against her grasp, threatening to snap. “Marinette, please, I'm begging you to see reason—”

“Maman. I can’t go! STOP ASKING ME!” They both stilled at the outburst. Through her tears, her daughter looked like she’d surprised herself. As far as Sabine could remember, Marinette had never yelled at her quite like that before—a pleading, mewling, desperate cry for support.

Her daughter shifted back and hunched over, hands wrapped around her torso, silver tear-streams glistening, tracing her freckled cheekbones like a constellation map. “Yes, this job is hard. But it’s my duty. I accepted that a long time ago. Anyway, I’m the Guardian. My fate is bound to Hawkmoth until he’s defeated, even if I give up being Ladybug. And how could I abandon my Chaton? You saw what he does for me. It would be a betrayal beyond betrayals! And do you have any idea how much it would hurt me, to know that I’m forcing someone else to carry the weight of my Miraculous?”

Marinette sniffled. “I couldn’t do that to a new Ladybug. That person would have a mother, too. Could you really make someone else’s mother go through all this, just so you don’t have to?”

If it got you out of Paris, I would do it with a smile on my face.

The self-admission was bitter in her mind. She talked to herself a lot about getting Marinette and her partner out of Paris to protect them, but a replacement Ladybug? She was an abstraction. There was no face. There were no hugs, no shared meals, no scraped knees she’d kissed back to health. Couldn’t her daughter find an adult? Maybe a bit of a bitch who could lean in? Hell, she’d do it if she had to.

Sabine scooted closer to Marinette, wiping her tears away. And in a voice soft as ice crystals cracking when taken out of the freezer, she lied: “No. No, I suppose I couldn’t.” She took a deep breath and sighed. “I’m sorry, Marinette. I’m so sorry that you have to go through this, and now that I know your identity, I’m sorry that you have to worry even more.” She began picking at her cuticles. “I feel like such a failure as a mother.”

Marinette sniffed, but she shook her head and smiled. “You’re not a failure. I couldn’t have asked for a better mother. The amount of love I feel in this house? Every time I'm around Adrien and Mr Agreste, I feel it deep in my bones how lucky I am to have you and Papa.”

Sabine thought back to how reserved Nathalie had been when they’d met up for coffee. She remembered how the woman had gradually opened up, and the affection she’d shown for Adrien, like nastic movement toward the sun. It sounded like she might be the closest thing he had to family.

Nathalie was strong, too. What would she do if Adrien were, say, Chat Noir?

Marinette placed a hand on Sabine’s, preventing her from damaging her skin further. ”Anyway, I’ve had a while to accept my fate. It’s so new to you that you haven’t had time to think about it like I have. But you’ll get there.” Marinette smiled. “Can I... Can I have a hug? Please?”

Sabine threw herself into her daughter’s arms, sliding her hands down and up Marinette’s back and shoulders. She kissed the crook of Marinette’s neck and sniffed as she'd done every late night while breastfeeding Marinette as an infant.

We have to leave.

Sabine slid her hands once more up her daughter’s shoulders, cupping her cheeks with her hands. One of her fingers brushed against her daughter’s earlobe, her nail dragging against the Ladybug Miraculous. It was right there. The jewelry a mad man had murdered and destroyed to obtain was hers for the taking, and how easy it would be to remove them right now. Marinette couldn’t transform without both, right? It was such a clean solution. Without her earrings, her daughter was just a teenager.

But the image of Chat Noir flickered in her mind, and she hesitated. He’s been abandoned. That’s what Marinette had said. And suddenly the face in her mind became that of her own mother, gripped with fury, fists flying.

Sabine had to use words. She needed to communicate.

But before she could pull her hands away, Marinette gasped and shoved her away. Sabine wobbled backward on her knees, twisting and propping her arms on the bed’s safety railing to prevent her from falling.

"Maman, what are you doing?"

Sabine took an unsteady breath, eyes cast down to the floor. “Meiyun… I can’t watch you fall apart.” She banged her hands on the railing and spun around on her knees to face her daughter again. She extended a hand from a meter away. “You’re…you’re going to die one of these days! It’s too much for me! Give me your miraculous!”

Marinette shot to her feet, slightly hunched over, her head nearly touching to the ceiling. “You— you sound like Hawkmoth!"

Sabine felt a stab of dread as her daughter tensed before her. "No, Marinette, I'm not—"

“TIKKI, SPOTS ON!”

Sabine stood up to match Marinette, her palms up in front of her making calming motions. She inched toward her daughter, whose legs had begun trembling. “Shhh… Meiyun… I’m not going to take your Miraculous.”

Marinette’s chest heaved as she reached her fingers to her ears as if investigating why she hadn’t transformed. She inched further away from Sabine toward the headboard. “Stay back!”

“Okay, let’s both take a breath.” Sabine smiled, trying to lighten the mood. “What do you think I’m going to do, rip them off?” If only she could hug her daughter, maybe everything would be okay. She continued making shushing noises as she approached Marinette.

“Don’t come any closer!”

“Meiyun, calm down… You don’t want to fall…” Her eyes lingered on Marinette’s black studs and Sabine remembered a pair she’d bought for her own mother one time, how they had been a harbinger. She couldn’t disarm her daughter, could she?

She wouldn’t.

Sabine lost herself in a reverie, re-playing the cataclysm that was her final interaction with Mama. For a moment, she forgot where she was, and her body tensed with nostalgic anxiety. Her mother had something of hers, and Sabine had wanted it back. If only at that time she’d lunged for it—

“No!”

Marinette’s scream shook Sabine from her trance. She fixed her eyes on her daughter’s as the haze of Parisian dusk fanned its golden glow in streaks across Marinette’s face like bars on a cage. She was squeezed against the wall now, arms spread wide along it, panting with sweat dripping down her face. Her unseeing eyes swung violently one direction and then another.

Sabine kept her voice soft, trying to remember what Dr Zhu had taught her. “Meiyun. It’s me, your maman. Look where you are. I’m not akumatized.” She crouched down, making herself look as non-threateing as possible as she slid nearer to Marinette. “I’m not hurting you. I’m so proud of you and how strong you are.” She was almost close enough to hug her now. “Give me your hand. I’ll help you down where it’s safer. Then we can talk about lending out your Miraculous—”

Marinette squeaked and flailed her arms, shoving past her toward the ladder. Sabine toppled over, and she instinctively gripped onto Marinette’s pajamas to re-balance herself. The jostling tipped her off the bed, and she accidentally took her daughter down with her. Sabine reached for the safety railing and managed to snag it enough to slow their fall, but she lost her grip. Together they plummeted, and her core seized up as she slammed to the ground. Then the wind was pressed from her lungs as Marinette landed on top of her.

Marinette groaned and struggled to roll over onto her hands and knees, like she was going to run for the door.

Tikki phased in through the floor. “Marinette, is everything—”

“SPOTS ON!” Marinette choked out. The transformation bathed her room in pink light. The temporary heat from the magic evaporated the sweat and tears from her face, leaving twin salt trails that seemed to reflect amplified light in the room.

Ladybug threw one final look at Sabine, the blaze in her daughter’s eyes gone, her self-immolation complete.

How had things escalated so fast? She hadn’t even tried to take the earrings…

Then Ladybug was out the window and away, not even stopping to close the access panel.

Gone. She’s gone. She’s gone.

Sabine curled up on herself on the floor, moaning and wailing. Now that the adrenaline was subsiding, she could feel her injuries. Her gaze drifted to one of the feet of Marinette’s task chair.

She lay there, unmoving, seduced into a trance by the steady, insistent beat of her own heart. She lost track of time. And, like a supplicant without a religion seeking deliverance, Sabine fashioned her own makeshift prayer:

Come back. Come back. Come back.

Vision blurred with tears, she didn't see the black butterfly coming.