Chapter Seven

Helpfully, Nathalie's translated version of the grimoire forsook the riddles that once complicated the process of making magic potions. She spent the better part of her time away from the baby sitting at her desk, the grimoire propped up against her computer screen and translations opened on her tablet while she fiddled with a disparate range of materials that she mixed into bottles and vials.

She mixed together almost every type of kwami power-up potion. Her initial intention had been to create only one and study it as much as she could, but quickly she realized there was almost nothing she could gather from such a basic and inflexible concoction. The task certainly seemed not to have anything to do with whatever the Sorcerer had attempted against her husband. A very small part of her was relieved by that. Gabriel's description of the event had chilled her to the bone; if the Sorcerer had been attempting to destroy the miraculous (or worse, him), Nathalie was ever so slightly comforted that she wasn't heading in the direction of proving those objectives feasible.

The rest of her, however, knew that the only way to be useful was to make sense of this magic and advance everyone's understanding of its capabilities, and one power-up wasn't going to manage that. To test whether she had gotten the first mixture right, Nathalie handed it over to Nooroo, whose big eyes reflected the pretty blue sheen of the vial. As she swallowed, intricate lines started to draw themselves across his wings and down his forehead, appearing like trails of snowflakes.

"Oh, wow," she breathed, surprised by the alteration. "You look lovely, Nooroo."

He shyly admired his own wings. "It's been several hundred years since I've transformed," he murmured. "You humans like to have all of the fun."

She smiled at him. "Well, that one was a success. I don't know how much I can gain from this, though."

"That's okay. Take it one step at a time. Keep practicing."

Nathalie liked Nooroo. She didn't have much of an opportunity to interact with him all those years ago thanks to how close Gabriel preferred to keep him. He was undeniably better company than Plagg, naturally soft-spoken and kind, and though she enjoyed his presence, a feeling of guilt deepened within her chest for the way they used to treat him. She faltered her gaze at his demonstration of an innate tendency towards forgiveness, adding it to the list in the back of her mind of the many gifts she didn't deserve to receive.

Nooroo insisted he wasn't supposed to know the ingredients, so he kept his back to her while she worked. She made a few more potions, the water, the space, the earth. Each one she tested on Nooroo proved to have been correctly mixed, though it wasn't too difficult considering the hardest work had been done for her. She was in the middle of making the fire potion when she paused and glanced up at the kwami with a sigh.

"What is it?" he wondered, turning to face her. Still donning his earth transformation, his wings looked like thin sheets of crystal, reflecting the light from the window onto her hands and making them appear a luminescent purple.

"There has to be a way for people without a miraculous to interact with magic," she said. A bottle of olive oil sat to her left, one of the ingredients of the fire potion. "These power-ups are for you, but do you think there are ways to make some than enhance human abilities?"

"In the same way?"

"Yes."

Nooroo shrugged. "Not that I've personally seen. Quite honestly, I doubt it."

"You do?"

He floated forward and leaned over the grimoire, gazing at Nathalie solemnly. "Like it's said -" he tapped the page "-kwamis are the source of all miraculous power. Even the potions you give us are essentially worthless without our physical forms to interact with them. And your healing potion, as well: it stopped having an effect on you as soon as it had erased the damage caused by Duusu's corrupted power."

Nathalie was staring at her glowing purple fingers. Her eyebrows knitted. "No, maybe that isn't right."

"My Lady?"

"I used to think the same, but now I might believe otherwise, that it was the miraculous, not Duusu, that was hurting me," she insisted. "It was the brooch that maintained the physical damage. The brooch that Marinette had to fix." She scrolled through the notes on her tablet and pressed her finger against the screen once she had reached the page explaining how to deal with a broken miraculous. "There's not a word about healing the kwami itself. I'm aware that they can become ill, but that's a completely different problem, isn't it?"

"Well, yes…"

"Anyway, my point is that the miraculous is more than a vessel for a kwami's magic. There's something about it that has enchanting properties in and of itself."

Nooroo shook his head. "I don't know how the peacock brooch was broken. There's not much I can tell you with unwavering certainty. But here is what I know: the miraculous is a bridge between kwami and holder. I am willing to bet your illness was caused by Duusu's power, that the damage to the brooch meant more than what your body could handle was seeping through it when you were transformed."

"More than what…" Nathalie's hands balled into fists and she gnawed on the inside of her cheek. The butterfly kwami's gentle, well-meaning voice echoed sharper in her mind as she processed his explanation. Something in her chest tightened, sending a pang into her heart. All those months of pain, and to not know exactly where it came from….It should put her at peace to take Nooroo's word for what it was, but the row of colorful potions sitting at her fingertips urged her to continue striving towards a different breakthrough.

What was worse was that years ago she would have readily agreed with him, back when it didn't make a difference how she was dying, back when she could smile and nod at any conclusion because she thought her fate was sealed no matter what. Mayura's magic used to burst freely from her miraculous the more she strained it and the less her mind could withstand the emotion she harbored within. It was surreal and terrifying to watch her pain leave her body like that, in a burst of light and heat from right above her heart. No, she could not deny Nooroo, not with those memories. Nathalie blinked rapidly, trying to clear her head. If the damaged peacock wasn't a solid enough basis for her speculation, she would need to find something else. Coming up empty-handed wasn't an option.

"What is wrong?" asked Nooroo. He released the grimoire and came an inch or two forward. "I've said something, haven't I? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to disturb you."

"No, it's nothing."

Nooroo stared at her clenched fists. He didn't argue.

She paused for a moment. As she watched the faint vertical oscillation of his small form in front of her face, her thoughts drifted to the one who possessed his brooch and to the very power that allowed him to set this ordeal in motion several years ago. She tried to bury her thoughts on the peacock's wounds, focus on the way it had made her feel stronger. "Nooroo, the miraculous has power even while you are not absorbed into it."

He tilted his head. "I suppose."

"Yes, think about it. Gabriel and I were capable of detecting emotions without being transformed. All it took was wearing the miraculous. Being transformed made the experience more vivid, yes, but there had been times when I was nearly bowled over by emotions that weren't mine, simply because the brooch was pinned to my person." She adjusted her glasses. The momentum of her new thought process obscured the unease tangled throughout her mind. She continued to seize it. "And there was that one sentimonster - Feast, I remember - whose amok I could sense despite not being transformed as Mayura. I could feel its hunger like a whisper in my mind."

"Yes, that's true," Nooroo said. "I hadn't thought about that. None of the miraculous seem to share that particular ability of the butterfly and peacock."

"But they have to possess some amount of power in their own right, something that can interact with de-transformed bodies. If the miraculous can, there has to be other magic that is capable of the same, right?"

"I...wouldn't be sure."

"What I mean to say is that kwamis can't be the only source of power if this is true. It must be more complicated than that."

The conversation ended there. A knock cracked against the door. Nathalie rose to her feet as Gabriel entered with the baby squirming in his arms.

"She's been fussy," he announced, and in response Anaīs released a tiny, frustrated cry.

Nathalie inhaled briskly. A glance towards the window informed her of the way the light had mellowed over the last several hours. "Oh, what time is it? I need to feed her. I've been at this all morning."

"Almost eleven. How is it going?" He handed the child off. She fidgeted like mad, her little fists balled with anger and demand, her nose wrinkled. Nathalie tickled Anaīs's cheek, and the infant turned her head to try to fasten lips over her mother's fingertip, letting out a peeved whine when she tasted empty air.

Smiling, Nathalie answered, "About as well as you might expect. Nooroo enjoys transforming."

The butterfly kwami flapped his wings from where he had flown to sit on top of the computer. Gabriel dipped his chin upon noticing the glitter of their jewel-like texture. "He closely resembles his miraculous."

Bashfully, Nooroo answered, "I thought the same."

Nathalie took a seat on one of her blue chairs to breastfeed and Gabriel took the other. "I was in the middle of working on the fire potion."

"Sounds thrilling."

"Yes, about as thrilling as the water, ice, space, and earth."

"How are you feeling up here?"

She gazed at Anaīs suckling. The baby was beginning to settle down, stopping her restless movement. Her hair, raven as her mother's, poked out from beneath the purple hat she was wearing. "I suppose it beats sitting around biting my nails in anticipation for the end of the world, which is how the last week has felt."

Gabriel gave a tight grunt of agreement. "A couple minutes before I came to check on you, I was sensing some stress." Nathalie raised her eyes to see him gesturing towards his miraculous, which was hidden beneath a cream-colored tie. "This isn't too much, is it?"

Nathalie shook her head perhaps a second too late, because he didn't appear to be convinced, but not wanting to address his concerns, she said, "Nooroo and I were actually talking about that power of yours right before you came in. I'm certain that magic has to be a lot less simply than our experience has ever made it out to be."

"Is that a good thing?"

"It's good in that I know this task won't be fruitless, but frustrating in that I have no idea where to begin."

"Can Marinette offer you no other help?"

Nathalie turned back to her baby to find her pale blue eyes gazing right at her. She looked at the floor instead. A familiarly bitter taste crawled up from her throat and washed over her tongue. "No. She's given me all that she has."

"Well, in that case, we'll hope it's enough."

Several minutes later, when Anaīs was finished feeding, Nathalie handed her back to her father. "Would you like to watch Nooroo transform into a fire-kwami?"

Gabriel's hand curved around the baby's head. "That sounds like it could be dangerous."

"It isn't, Master," said Nooroo. A moment later, his crystal-wings flashed, returning to normal as he dismissed the earth power-up. "The only thing that will change is my appearance."

Nathalie added the last few ingredients to the mixture she had already begun, a drop of oil, some ginger root, and a pinch of ash, which she had scraped out of the living room fireplace. A previously colorless blend, after absorbing the final additives, turned bright red, brighter than blood or rubies or lipstick. The bottle sizzled. A short trail of smoke rose out of its neck and disappeared shortly after.

She smirked at Gabriel. "As they say, ta-da."

"You look like a mad scientist."

"You've got the 'mad' right."

She gave the bottle to Nooroo, who swallowed about half of it. Nathalie and Gabriel flinched back as his wings appeared to burst into light with a deep shriek of energy like the hiss of an akuma's creation. The ends of his limbs darkened until they looked as though they had been bathed in embers. As he flapped his transformed wings, they appeared like two broad flames waving in opposite winds upon his back. Gold firelight flickered across the faces of her awestruck husband and daughter.

"I wasn't expecting that." Nathalie flipped the page of the grimoire. An illustration of a fire-kwami depicted Pollen, whose usually black stripes were painted in dark red. No fire to be seen.

"This one is my favorite," Nooroo admitted. He looked between his master and Nathalie. "I recommend not allowing Plagg to get his hands on this one unless absolutely necessary. He has a tendency to start fires."

"I thought you said this wasn't dangerous," growled Gabriel, pressing Anaīs to his chest.

"It's not dangerous when I use it, Master."

Nathalie took the bottle back and stared at its glowing contents. Brilliant and colorful as the medicine she hid away in her bedside drawer, the bitter taste of which still lingered in her mouth from earlier. Their inexplicable coloring, the way they changed and glowed despite being made up of unremarkable materials. How do oil and ash create something like this? Seaweed and joyful tears? It didn't make sense.

"Marinette said something about magic either interacting with or coming from the miraculous," she murmured, "and that this falls under that first category. But how? What gives this transformative power beforeit comes into contact with you?" She eyed Nooroo with intensity, as if his startled stare back at her would provide any answer to her question.

"Curious, indeed," Gabriel said. "Is there really no explanation in the grimoire?"

"Well…" She scrolled through her tablet until she reached the introductory page on the kwami power-ups. "I highlighted a sentence earlier, but unfortunately it isn't very expansive. Here - 'Power-enhancing potions allow a holder to become suited to different natural environments by equipping their kwami with the magical properties of the ancient elements: fire, water, ice, earth, space, blood, and spirit.'"

Gabriel narrowed his eyes in thought. "So, that means there is magic existing independent of the miraculous, magic found in the world around us."

A spark of triumph warmed her face. "I guess so."

"What if that magic only reveals itself when it comes into contact with or in close proximity to kwamis or to the miraculous?"

"That explains the power-ups…" Her grip tightened over the bottle, skin shining faintly red where it curled around glass. A familiar sight in blue. But it doesn't explain my medicine. I've been healed for a year, but the magic still makes itself known. "Very well, that's a solid thought. Now there's the question of how all of these disparate ingredients somehow replicate the power of 'ancient elements'."

She went over her lists. In Gabriel's arms, the baby was getting drowsy, eyelids falling closed and her round cheek plumping out as her head lolled against her shoulder. The oversized flaming butterfly floating on fire in the center of the room was not enough to keep her interests.

"There appears to be a remnant of every element within each potion," she observed aloud. "Ash for fire, a tear for water, snowmelt for ice - I used an ice cube, worked just fine - pollen for earth, dust for blood -"

"Dust for blood?"

"I assume because of the dead skin."

Gabriel's revolted expression took her out of her head for a moment. Suddenly, she was beginning to remember the absurdity of the situation.

So, she sank into her chair, quietly eyeing Nooroo's blazing wings, the vials half-filled with mysteriously glowing substances, the archaic encrypted book, and finally her face in the black reflection of her lifeless computer screen, the features of which were mostly obscured by darkness but visibly perturbed. She shook her head and tried to disregard the mess in front of her, choosing instead to lean back and stare at the ceiling. Maybe she could make some kind of sense out of the blank white space above her head. "It's interesting," she went on, hyper-aware of the tone of her voice as she tried to keep it level. "These potions create some kind of relationship between the kwamis and the elements, and the potions don't change regardless of which kwami will be consuming them. Yet, they are bound by different miraculous and different powers. That seems to indicate to me that, ultimately, the elements have nothing to do with kwamis or miraculous magic, no more than they have anything to do with me."

Gabriel sounded rather distant when he replied, "Maybe…"

Her thumb ran up and down the glass of the bottle still in her hand. "Nooroo," she muttered after a moment.

"Yes, My Lady?"

She sat forward and held up the potion. "What would happen if I drank this?"

Nooroo's wings flared with surprise. "Why would you do that?"

"I want to know how it's possible to interact with magic without a miraculous."

He winced. "I wouldn't recommend that."

"Neither would I," Gabriel snapped.

"Would it do to me what it does to you, Nooroo?"

The kwami's mouth hung open as he struggled to give her an answer. Gabriel stepped around the desk, his blue-gray eyes hard as stone. "Nathalie, you've been busy with this all morning. You should take a break."

"I can't," she told him.

"You need to."

"No, what I need," she began, leaning towards him, "is to figure this out. The sooner I do that, the sooner we can get out of this."

"That is not your responsibility alone. Please, Nathalie, put down the potion. Continue later."

"Why? What would I do instead? Pretend everything is fine? When it's not?" The ice in her husband's face split apart, melting under the wild heat in her glare. He was rigid with shock for a heartbeat; then, softening, he knelt before her carefully. The baby was asleep now, still clutching a button on his shirt. Nathalie envied the child's peace.

"My dear." He freed a hand and set it on her knee. "You're overwhelmed."

"I'm okay. I can withstand overwhelmed."

"Please, you don't have to."

She cupped his jaw, rolled her chair a few inches closer. "What do you mean?" she whispered. "What do you mean I don't have to? Look at where we are."

Something within him deflated.

"What else am I going to do if I can't do this? Am I meant to watch you and Adrien leave the house every time the city is attacked and just - hope for the best? Do you know how awful it was to do that last time?"

"Nathalie, love, I'm sorry," he murmured.

"No, don't apologize. I don't blame you. I just - I just can't do nothing. I can't. I wouldn't be able to forgive myself if something went wrong, if I hadn't done enough to try to stop it."

"Don't take on that burden," he urged her. He took her hand off his face and kissed her palm.

"I don't want to. I'd give anything not to be in this situation. I had normal long enough to develop a taste for it, you know."

"We'll get it back."

She closed her eyes to block out the hopeful light in his face. If she let herself believe it, she would fall apart were it to fail her. Nathalie should be unlearning how to count herself out of hope, but tragedy was far too familiar a monster to turn her back on.

"Love." He squeezed her hand.

"I have a question," she whispered.

"What is it?"

"How did the Sorcerer use that potion again?" she asked quietly.

He hesitated, and she presumed he was surprised at her for bringing it up. "I think they recited some kind of spell, then the bottle shattered, and the potion floated around their hand."

"I don't have a spell," she mumbled. One eye opened to glance at the fire potion still in her hand. Then at Nooroo. But I have…

"Nathalie—"

She pulled her hand away from him and uncapped the bottle. Nooroo froze, a sound of protest making it only halfway up his throat. Gabriel leaped up and grabbed her arm, but mindful of the infant who had just jerked awake at his sudden movement, he took several paces back a second later, realizing he was only in the way.

Nathalie didn't do what either of them expected, which would have been to drink the rest of it. Instead, standing from her chair, she poured it out over her fingers all at once. A cry of agony sprung from her lips. She hadn't expected it to burn. Tears welled in her eyes, and she dropped the bottle to pound her fist against the desk. The other glasses rattled. The empty ones toppled over, rolling onto the floor.

Gabriel tried to come forward to help, but she shook her head at him. She raised her eyes to Nooroo, who trembled with fear.

"My Lady!"

"Nooroo," she grunted from behind gritted teeth, holding out her burning hand. The red mixture dripped from her fingertips. As soon as it lost contact with her skin, its color vanished. "Come here."

He was reluctant, but he drifted forward without argument. An inch of space existed between him and Nathalie's fingers when she decided to reach out and touch the top of his head. The heat her hand exploded up her arm and into her chest, and in unison, Nooroo's wings of fire blazed until they were twice their usual size. He gasped and launched himself halfway across the room.

The potion on her hands flickered like cinders smoldering in reverse. Just as the agony in her breast was fading, a palmful of fire burst into life. An instinctual wave of her hand did not dispel them. She paused, breathing heavily, and stared at the light she had created.

"No way…"

Gabriel said under his breath. The baby was wide-eyed now, staring at the flames sitting with such ease in her mother's hand. He approached slowly, protecting Anaīs's head. "How did you…? Does it hurt?"

"No," she breathed. The burning had ceased. Nathalie twisted her hand, and the flames shifted about her fingers. A sudden panic quickened the pace of her heart. Her arm tensed. Quickly, she clenched her fist, and the flames extinguished, not even leaving a breath of smoke behind.

Nothing remained of the potion. Across the room, Nooroo's appearance returned to normal, and twitches of fear unsettled his ordinary purple wings.

Nathalie dropped into her chair, and it rolled back to bump the wall. She studied her hand, but not a burn grazed her skin; now they only trembled with amazement. Something frigid congealed in the blood that had seconds ago been so fiery and unbearable. She recalled Gabriel's description of the Sorcerer's attack and wondered if what she had just inflicted upon herself was anything like that faux cataclysm.

He was right at her side now. The baby looked about as upset as she had appeared when Gabriel had first walked in.

"I'm sorry," she whispered to Anaīs. "I'm sorry, baby."

"Are you okay, Nathalie?"

"Yeah."

"You're frightened," he said, earning a pitiful laugh from her. She kept forgetting about his miraculous.

"No," she protested, "Only...bewildered."

"How did you do that?"

"I don't know. I -" She tried to comfort the baby by faintly strumming her fingertips down the length of her arms. "I was just thinking about the Sorcerer's potion being on their hand, that if they had created some kind of derivative of the miraculous's power that maybe I could do the same thing with the potion, and -" Nathalie paused, blinking. "Maybe that's it."

In spite of Gabriel's plea for her to remain seated, she stood up again and grabbed her tablet. "But instead of a spell being the catalyst for the reaction, it was my contact with Nooroo. I don't know if these situations are totally comparable, but it seems to me we both had a concoction with previously existing magical properties that required some sort of additional intervention in order to be activated. The kwami power-ups are meant to represent the natural elements, and the Sorcerer's potion, miraculous magic. I wonder if there was some extra step to creating it. Either way, that information isn't in my hands. But I might be able to figure it out. Like this fire came from ash, their cataclysm might have come from another."

"Nathalie."

She turned around. Gabriel's stare was dark with reluctance. Having finished writing down her discoveries, she set the tablet down between a pair of fallen vials, not breaking his gaze. Even without a miraculous of her own, she could sense something deeply fearful within him. The storm clouds that had gathered behind those oceanic irises of his cast a dark gray shadow upon their seas, stirring up powerful waves: crests of love and troughs of ice-cold fear. Some combination of sympathy and guilt formed a knot of brambles in the pit of her stomach, giving her enough pause to realize she was quickly sinking into exhaustion.

"I'm in awe of you," he told her gently. He closed the distance between them and pressed a kiss to her forehead. When he pulled away, it was to meet her weary countenance. "Will you take a break now? Please?"

"I…" She should say yes. Screwing her eyes shut, she was able to hinder the worry swirling in his stare, but the fatigue in her bones deepened as well, and she couldn't find it in her to outright refuse.

The mess around her desk made it difficult to leave the room. Nooroo, finally floating back towards them, offered to take care of it.

Gabriel put the baby to bed. He and Nathalie stood above her until she was fast asleep, Nathalie humming her lullaby, the words flitting dreamily through her head.

When the clouds come in
They'll blacken out the light
The rain will soon begin
But all will be alright…

Someday, the storm will end...

A few minutes later, Nathalie lay curled up beneath her own sheets. She squinted into the pale daylight surrounding her like a mist, never able to close her eyes for long. Each time she did, her own mind startled her back to alertness, devoured by thoughts of her mission, of magic, of fire, until they left with the darkness.

Someday, the storm will end…
Someday, we'll start again…

Several days ago, Gabriel had asked Nooroo to find Conspiracy.

Everyone else had been puzzled by the request, but he explained that it was Nooroo's acute ability to sense and track emotions that allowed him to discover the guardian's identity nearly two years ago. If he had been able to find Marinette then, despite not knowing the guardianship had been passed down to her, he should be able to locate Conspiracy, or even the Sorcerer.

Though Nooroo had tried, he was unable to detect anything definitive. "I don't know what they want," he had explained. "I could find the guardian because I know a guardian's responsibilities, I know her motivations. I don't know what these supervillains are after."

The ladybug and cat miraculous was suggested to him, but after a second try, there was still no luck. Lila, of course, he could find at once, but there was nothing that could be done about the girl yet. For his nonperformance, Nooroo apologized, and everyone reassured him that he didn't need to fret.

But Nathalie had noticed the way Gabriel's visage darkened. She approached him slowly, set a hand on his back, and he told her,

"They are bigger than us."

And she hadn't known what he meant at first, but she was beginning to understand. She was beginning to see it everywhere. She recognized it in herself, this devastating smallness, this deprival of control. Hawkmoth used to be the one pulling the strings, but that had changed. The fate of his family had rested solely in his hands for so long, and now he had nothing but his love and fear to drive him, powerful but cripplingly immaterial weapons.

Ultimately, the ones that saved her.

"The problem is they might not be enough this time."

They might not be enough to define us.

She didn't notice herself fall asleep, but a soft voice coming from the other side of the room slid through the quiet like a wind at her back. She opened her eyes to find that not much changed. Still facing the window, she saw that the clouds had thinned and the room was just a touch brighter. But not much time had passed. Gabriel was speaking. It took her a moment to key into his words.

"...needs to rest. Not now, Adrien."

"I understand."

Adrien?

He must have been home for lunch. Nathalie turned over to catch him at the door, just leaving the room. "Wait."

"Oh, you're awake," he exclaimed, spinning back around. Plagg leaned against the doorframe, apparently disinterested in the exchange as he gnawed on a wedge of his favorite cheese.

"Yeah," she murmured, feeling for her glasses on the bedside table. She hadn't realized how tired she was until she had sat up. Her head was in a fog. She felt heavy. "But I'm okay. What did you want?"

"I was just asking Father if you two wanted to join me for lunch, but he told me you had a busy morning."

She gaped at him. "Really? You want to eat with us?"

"Why not?"

Nathalie slipped the glasses back on her face and blinked the rest of the blurriness from her eyes. In a low voice, she wondered, "You're not still angry?"

His gaze dropped to his feet, grasp tightening around the strap of the beg he still carried around his shoulder. "What's the use of that?" he asked, half-addressing himself. "We've all got worse things to worry about. It's not like these villains have anything to do with our...complicated family drama."

Gabriel, who was sitting up in bed with a tablet in his lap, drew a deep breath. "I hope that means you aren't opposed to Marinette's decision to include us."

"Of course I'm not."

"We never really talked about it."

"No, but-" He crossed his arms and shrugged. "You know I trust her."

That wasn't the answer Gabriel was looking for. He flung a quick glance to Nathalie beside him, and then looked back at his son. "You trusted her when she pulled that stunt the other day?"

"Father."

"You tried to defend us, I assume."

"You don't know what she was dealing with," his son admonished.

"It doesn't matter. She got over it when it mattered. What I want to know is if you trust us."

"Yes." Here, Adrien looked up again, and Nathalie was reminded so keenly of his mother by the way his green eyes flashed with conviction, and so much of his father by the crispness and brevity of his reply. He went on, "Yes, of course I do. It was wrong of me to take you keeping your involvement with Lila a secret so personally. It's just - she's unpredictable. She's malicious. It was hard for me to make sense of the thought of you willingly working with her."

"Adrien, we're no saints ourselves," Nathalie murmured. Sometimes she wondered if Adrien had ever fully recognized the extent of their wrongdoings, particularly the ones they had committed against him. It felt to her that he was beginning to last week, when he finally understood just how intently they had manipulated and taken advantage of the people close to him.

"But you're not bad people. You've just done bad things."

She winced. "What's the difference?"

"Enough," Gabriel said, setting a hand on Nathalie's thigh. "If you forgive us, Adrien, then there's nothing more to discuss."

His son seemed a little stunned by his severe tone. Even Plagg took a break from devouring his camembert to stare across the room. In the stretch of quiet that followed, the temperature in the room seemed to drop. Nathalie drew the covers further up her legs. Something cold and brittle as ice crystallized in the air. Her breath pierced her lungs.

In an unexpectedly fragile voice, hardly above a whisper, Gabriel pressed, "Do you?" He dipped his chin towards his throat. "Do you forgive us?"

Adrien nodded. "Yeah. I do."

"Then that's all."

Nathalie reached and squeezed Gabriel's upper arm, gave him a look as if to say, What's gotten into you?

But she knew. It was the same thing that scared him when she'd managed to set fire to her hand. Nathalie's gaze faltered to stare at the fingers curled around his bicep, at the absence of burn marks and blisters despite that intense pain she'd felt. She wondered if it was under her skin, somewhere, if it had managed to reach her heart. Just because she couldn't see it now didn't mean it was any less real.

Real as the miraculous pinned below his throat. Real as glass shattering around him and Conspiracy. Real as the doubt the city cast upon his intentions.

Real as the hearts he feared would cease to love him if he didn't do the right thing this time.

"Adrien," she said faintly. "We'll eat with you. Give us a few minutes."

"Yeah, no problem," he replied. "Come on, Plagg."

The black cat kwami eyed the pair with concern as he floated after his holder. Stuffing the rest of his cheese in his mouth, he shut the door behind them.

Gabriel wouldn't meet her eyes once they were alone. He glared towards the foot of the bed, and when he wrinkled his nose, Nathalie couldn't help but smile. Anaīs did the same thing. Despite everything, she knew that most fiercely, Gabriel was terrified of losing his loved ones. Not much had really changed after all.

She brought her unburned hand up to his jaw, turning his head to face her so she could kiss him on the mouth. At once, she could feel him melt against her lips, her touch bearing the weight of his uncertainty. When Nathalie pulled away, she curled her body against his own, resting her head on his shoulder, closing her eyes.

"You're better at that than I am," he whispered, breath gliding into her hair.

"Maybe a little."

He slipped his fingers between hers, drew a circle into her palm with his thumb.

Fall apart, fall together, be strong for him, be strong for her, over and over...