Sabine checked her phone again in anxiety. There hadn't been an akuma attack in the last two days, which meant that one would begin any second. She'd been telling herself that every few minutes since breakfast. Tom was playing video games with Marinette. He was supposed to be getting information out of her, but it didn't look like he was trying too hard. Sabine watched them while she stirred the soup. Steam rose off the surface in faint curls and twists.

The phone screen lit up, and she grabbed it. An emergency alert. An akuma had been spotted. Civilians were advised to shelter in place until Ladybug and Cat Noir had dealt with the problem.

It was the same message that she'd read dozens of times (and ignored more often than that), but now it made her mind numb with fear. But she had to go through with their plan.

"Oh, there's another akuma attack." Her voice sounded hollow and forced. To her dismay, Marinette immediately paused her game and turned around, looking concerned.

"Where is it?"

"Parc Montsouris," Sabine said. "I just got the text."

Marinette looked out the window, her face steely, game controller forgotten next to her. Tom and Sabine shared a worried glance.

"Dinner won't be ready for another half hour," Sabine said, then took a deep breath to keep it from shaking. This was the most important stage of the plan. "Did you finish all your homework?" Please. Please, say no.

"Oh, uh, yeeaaah, now that you mention it, I do remember that I forgot to do something." Marinette waved goodbye quickly, then bolted up her stairs, letting the trapdoor thump loudly behind her. Sabine came to sit next to Tom, soup completely abandoned.

"It's looking likely," he said. Sabine could only nod. She felt numb, and wondered if she could actually go into shock over this.

He reached for the remote and switched to the news. Cat Noir was already there, fighting a giant frog monster by himself. It was hard to tell because the camera was so far away, but he looked like a teenager himself.

"We could still be wrong," Tom said.

Nod.

Ladybug swung into view amid scattered applause. Cat Noir dodged a jet of steaming red goo that shot out of the akuma's wide mouth and waved to his partner. She waved back, her cheerfulness jarring against the backdrop of the fight and Sabine's own dread.

"Do you want me to check?" Tom asked.

She couldn't even nod. She stared transfixed at the screen, barely registering the shift of the sofa, the creak of the floorboards under his footsteps.

He climbed the stairs and knocked on the trapdoor. "Marinette?" No answer. "Marinette?" Sabine closed her eyes as the trapdoor creaked open and Tom's footsteps disappeared.

She sat still, focusing on the faint screams and gasps from the television. She didn't hear Tom come back down.

"She's not there," he said, sitting down next to her and grabbing her hand. "And the skylight's propped open." She squeezed back tightly.

"That basically confirms it," Sabine finally said. "Our daughter is Ladybug."

Tom sighed. "Yeah."

On screen, the reporters were running for shelter, Cat Noir was yelling at civilians to stay out of the way, and bright red puddles sizzled on the pavement.

"What are we going to do?" Sabine asked. "How did this even happen?" The real question she wanted to ask was why Marinette had never told them, and how could they have not noticed for so long?

The camera crew set up again, much farther away, but Sabine was wishing they could do one closeup shot of Ladybug's face, just to prove herself wrong about her identity.

The battle didn't look like it was going well. The super duo was on the defensive and having a hard time avoid the frog's goo. The akuma had covered most of the available surfaces already, so they had fewer and fewer places to safely land. The cameraman crept closer and closer, finally stopping when he was a mere twenty feet from the battle and Ladybug yelled at him.

"We should turned this off," Tom said, though he made no move for the remote. "She's going to be fine."

"No, I need to watch."

They flinched and gasped for the next few minutes, and Sabine shrieked when Ladybug slipped and got hit in the chest. It knocked her back, but it didn't seem to do her any damage. She jumped back up to her feet before Cat Noir could even reach her, even though he ran to her at top speed, ignoring the spray aimed for him and almost getting hit himself.

"You okay?" he asked.

"Fine just... Ugh! Gross!"

"You could say you're in a sticky situation," Cat Noir said, before laughing loudly at his own joke and his partner's predicament. Sabine's heart was still pounding as she clamped down on Tom's hand.

Ladybug's face tightened with the effort of holding in her laughter, then scooped a bunch of the stuff off her stomach and reached to touch him. Thick strands of it hung off her fingers.

"Oh no, not slime!" Cat Noir jumped back, dodging both Ladybug and the akuma. "Slime! Whatever will I do?"

Tom pulled Sabine closer. "Well, it doesn't look like a very dangerous one." Sabine was sure he was trying to reassure himself as much as her, but she wasn't having any of it.

"They should be taking this threat seriously," she said. "If they're overconfident..." She couldn't bring herself to finish the sentence, so it hung in the room along with her dread.

Sabine was unfortunately right to worry. The frog reared back on its hind legs and came down on the street so hard it cracked the pavement, letting out a wide stream of the goo. Ladybug, still distracted with teasing her partner, didn't react fast enough. Cat Noir did, and he jumped forward fast enough to shield her, though he got a faceful of slime. He spat it out on the ground while Sabine and Tom leaned forward in their seats, desperate to know if he was all right.

Ladybug just patted him on the back and laughed.

"See?" Tom said. "See? He's fine. They're both fine."

"That thing can break pavement. What if it had landed on them?"

But the atmosphere changed as their daughter laughed with her friend. They seemed so earnest in their amusement and maybe even relaxed. The voices of the onlookers and reporters changed in response, becoming less strained. The news report itself changed. Cat Noir tried smearing it on a camera as a warning when it got too close, smiling the whole time, while Ladybug rolled her eyes at his antics.

Her parents watched their exchange in interest. Despite the levity they were injecting into the fight, Cat Noir was obviously still very protective of their daughter, which they were both grateful for. He pushed her out of the way of another jet of slime when she was distracted by her own Lucky Charm, and he didn't hesitate to continue fighting without her while she took a few minutes to set up a trap for the monster. They didn't miss the adoration on his face when he watched her.

Ladybug – Marinette – was protective of her partner too. When the monster got too close to him, she would yell out a warning. When it landed on top of him with another sickening crack, she dropped the trap she was crafting and leapt forward to wrench the monster off of him. To anyone else, Ladybug still looked calm and in control, but to her parents, they saw the panic that briefly flashed across her face when she realized her partner might be hurt.

That delay made the fight take a little longer than it might otherwise have. By the end, Ladybug dashed off, hand over an earring. Cat Noir waved at her as she left, a hesitant smile on his face, then turned and comforted the frog victim, who was now nothing more than a disheveled and confused-looking man in his fifties.

"She'll be coming home soon," Tom said. "Should we go up there and wait for her?"

"Not yet," Sabine said. The reporters were trying to get close again, no doubt to interview Cat Noir and the latest victim. The poor man looked shaken, and Cat Noir did his best to shield him from the reporters, finally picking him up and carrying him away.

"We need to talk to her about this," Tom said.

They fought against impossible odds with laughter, though they were both just children. And Cat Noir cared about their daughter so much, that was plain. How deep did that go?

"We need to talk to him too," she said.

Author's note: I'm back with a new multi-chapter story! This is one of the things I was working on during NaNoWriMo last month! This story is going to be very mellow and fluffy. :) It gets Christmas-y near the end, so the original idea was to have it done around Christmas time, but I don't think that's going to happen. I haven't decided on a schedule yet, but I'm hoping for twice a week.