Chapter Fifteen

In the dining room, Nathalie sat crossed-legged on a chair pulled out from the monstrously large oak table, a piece of furniture she perhaps missed least of all since the move from the mansion to the new house. Even when she, Adrien, and Gabriel had all gathered to eat around one end of the table for the sake of effective conversation, its obscene size had never failed to annoy her. She had been glad to be rid of the thing. It was less irksome now that she knew she would never have to eat another meal there again.

With a sigh, Nathalie turned her head to the window. She had drawn the curtains open just enough to see out from where she sat, and it looked like the morning gloom was thickening into a blanket of fluffy gray clouds. It would rain later, the humidity would finally break, and hopefully it would start feeling a little more comfortable in the mansion. Nathalie didn't know how much longer they would have to stay there, though she wished this would all be over in a matter of minutes.

She was hot and tired, in desperate need of a shower and some food and definitely several hours of sleep. She must not have shut her eyes for longer than an hour and a half the night before, which wasn't particularly abnormal since Anaïs had been born, but it felt to take a greater toll on her today than usual. Her eyelids fluttered as she sat breastfeeding her baby, who every now and then made a soft noise that shot her back to alertness.

"Sorry…"

Anaïs blinked slowly at her mother, drawing out a small laugh. It was a light-hearted sound Nathalie hadn't heard from her own mouth in a long time. It was a relief in its own right.

Because while Nathalie felt exhausted, she didn't feel weak. When she left the lair to fetch Anaïs after the Sorcerer's capture, she dropped her transformation and anticipated the worst. But the tightness in her chest that followed was only a manifestation of her nervousness. She was not sick. The peacock miraculous was no longer capable of hurting her. Breathless and overwhelmed, Nathalie had crumpled to the floor, feverishly pulling the hair off of her face.

Duusu had come down to her side, "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she gasped. "I'm fine. Nothing's wrong. I just - oh."

"You did it."

"Yes." Nathalie tasted bitterness on her tongue, the bitterness that came whenever she was craving her medicine, but she swallowed dryly and forced herself to stand again. The room swayed, but only for a moment. She pressed her palm to her heart. She tried to calm down.

"You were amazing," murmured Duusu, her tail feathers brushing Nathalie's shoulder.

And Nathalie found herself believing it. The corner of her mouth twitched into a little smile. "Thank you."

From there, she had gone to her child, feeling her pulse race in exhilaration that she did not feel weak climbing the stairs, that she did not feel flames bursting to life in her lungs, that the rooms did not spin as she passed them by, that she did not have to pretend to be alright. Nathalie fed her baby, drenched in sweat and desperate for a cool bed to sleep in, but she did not think about never waking up.

Duusu had spread herself across the table, swiping dust away with her tail. She paused and leaned over, her magenta eyes fixed on the baby. She said, "Now I understand why humans love babies so much. They're so cute!"

Nathalie smiled, staring into Anaïs's wide blue gaze, which flickered across her mother's face. "Babies are the only perfect thing in this world."

"They are pretty perfect, but don't forget, I'm right here," Duusu quipped.

"Yes, babies and Duusu. Forgive the oversight." Nathalie gently flicked at a piece of her daughter's hair.

"I never imagined you with a baby. Then again, I haven't seen very many."

"Anaïs was a surprise."

"How so?" The kwami tilted her head curiously.

"We-" Nathalie colored, shooting an embarrassed glance at Duusu. "We didn't think about having a baby. We didn't try for her."

"Oh." Duusu didn't say anymore, which Nathalie was grateful for. She assumed that after thousands or millions of years of existence, kwamis would have to know where babies come from by now, but she would have liked to avoid explaining it to Duusu regardless.

It was amazing, though. Amazing and terrifying that Anaïs was not even a thought in Nathalie's imagination until the very end of August that previous year. It seemed like such little time but such hell to go through to finally meet her. Finding out she was going to have a baby knocked the breath out of Nathalie. She remembered standing there in the bathroom with the test in her hand, staring with unblinking eyes at those two pink dashes while Gabriel waited in the doorway. He must have read her mind. She remembered hearing him say "It's positive" as though he was staring at it himself, with more certainty than she could claim to have that she was processing any of this correctly. She remembered him eventually walking into the room, placing one hand on her back while he used the other pluck the test out of her shaking fingers. They sat at the edge of the bathtub, and he glanced at her and softly asked, "Do you want this?"

And she said, "Yes", not even realizing it was true until she heard it on her own tongue.

He watched her for a moment, as if expecting her to correct herself. She didn't, so he squeezed her hand and kissed her temple and whispered, "Then so do I."

But Gabriel had been worried. Worried for her, mostly. She'd stopped needing her medicine six months earlier, but that didn't stop the overprotective side of him from being unsettled at any sign of her feeling ill. She suffered from migraines and fatigue from time to time. It was nothing she couldn't handle, but she knew it was probably hard for him to see her unwell after her life had nearly been taken by the peacock miraculous. But Nathalie, leaning against him, her eyes on the pregnancy test that had been left on the bathroom countertop, promised him that she would be fine.

And she was, at first. An old habit of Gabriel's - asking how she was feeling every time she walked into a room - resurfaced, and she always gently brushed him off, even if she didn't feel all that great. Pregnancy was just like that, right? They tried to keep it from Adrien so they could tell him on his birthday near the end of September, but Nathalie's morning sickness was severe and they couldn't hide that something was going on. Adrien was pleased, overjoyed, in fact. They'd worried about his reaction, so it was a great comfort that he was excited to be an older brother. But it only managed to remedy so much. Nathalie couldn't stomach anything. Nausea kept her up at night whether or not she'd eaten all day, and Gabriel would find her curled up on the bathroom floor under a blanket she'd dragged from the bed, waiting on a relief that could never grace her for very long.

It reminded her eerily of the way she'd lay when she was dizzy from the peacock miraculous a year before: closed eyes, waiting for the world to stop spinning and her stomach to stop churning, waiting for the little magic inside her to cease its habit of slowly killing her for no good reason.

Gabriel was insistent that she eat despite her abhorrence for food. There were times she managed to choke down slices of bread and spoonfuls of plain oatmeal, but they had very little luck. Almost everything that went down came back up again, and Nathalie grew weary of it fast.

She was hospitalized in November, because she had dropped eight kilograms and passed out trying to climb the stairs (luckily, Gabriel was right there to catch her and call an ambulance, for her paleness sickened him). She was dehydrated and lived off IV fluids for two weeks. At her sickest, Nathalie couldn't even swallow her own saliva. Hyperemesis gravidarum was a very different kind of illness than being slowly drained of life force by an ancient magical artifact, but she hadn't experienced weakness this heavy and dreadful since she had risked her life to use the peacock miraculous. Pregnancy might have actually been worse, only because she was desperate to be okay for her baby's sake.

Nathalie couldn't stop thinking about it: how close she had come to dying and how willing she was to be gone. She couldn't stop thinking about how far away she was from that mindset now. She clawed at her sheets as if ripping holes in things could replace the imperfections in this new life she and Gabriel had built. Every day she woke up sick was a day she felt she was being dragged back into a past where she'd taken her own life for granted. She needed that life now. She needed it for her. Nathalie had once come hours from giving it up to the peacock miraculous and knowing that made her feel even worse.

The first thing she was able to stomach in a long time was her medicine, which she'd begged Gabriel to make as they neared Christmas. She was in and out of the hospital with cycles of dehydration and other deficiencies and was wearing out to the point where she rarely wanted to get out of bed. Gabriel told her it was only a coincidence that her condition improved once she started taking the medicine again, just like it was a coincidence that the earliest she felt the baby kick was when she swallowed that first bitter mouthful. Even though she knew he was right, she kept the medicine handy. It seemed to help when she was nauseous and that was all she could want.

By January, she was exhausted and scared. Gabriel insisted that she rest as much as possible, and promoted Alain in the middle of the month to combat her insistence that she needed to work. But she did need to work. Resting gave her too much time to think, and little by little, she was starting to remember with intensifying detail what it was like to be inches from death. She started to dream about it at night, wake up clutching at her chest as if she couldn't breathe, coughing sometimes though there was nothing to cough out. Gabriel reached out from his side of the bed and put his hand on her arm while Nathalie pressed her fingers to her temples. She swore she had a splitting headache, but a few seconds later she realized she didn't feel anything at all.

Nathalie struggled to pick a name for their daughter. She didn't know if it was because none of them sounded right, or because any name at all made the baby feel uncomfortably close, closer than she already was growing in her mother's womb. Gabriel suggested Anaïs one night at dinner, and Adrien liked it so much that they couldn't decide against it, but Nathalie never called her baby Anaïs. She always called her Baby, because that helped her ignore the fact that her daughter would one day not be a baby, that she would one day be able to talk and walk and think for herself and look at her parents and just not like them sometimes. Nathalie knew all children didn't always like their parents, but she found that especially unbearable because this child would have a dreadfully good reason for not liking Nathalie and Gabriel. This child had parents who were once supervillains. This child had parents who terrorized a city. This child had parents who were bad people, and might have still been bad people. Nathalie couldn't think clearly enough to convince herself she wasn't unforgivable, not when her dreams at night constantly reminded her of how much she was willing to risk to do unforgivable things.

They'd been so lucky. Unfairly lucky. She'd recovered from her illness, she'd watched Gabriel and Adrien mend their relationship, she'd married the love of her life and moved into a house that was perfect for a growing family. Maybe all of that was the universe showing her what she didn't deserve before it was ripped away again. Maybe this was the punishment she thought she'd escaped.

She finally told this to Gabriel when sharp abdominal pains signified a placental abruption in February. Nathalie thought she was having a miscarriage, but the complication turned out to not be very severe. She was kept overnight at the hospital and sent home with the instruction to stay off her feet and avoid lifting anything heavier than two kilograms. Gabriel told her the moment she slipped into bed that she was not - they were not being punished. He squeezed her hand, running his thumb across her wedding band and kissing it. Nathalie didn't know it at the time but he was about to ask Marinette about the butterfly miraculous, about that single shred of control he wished he had over what was happening to his wife. Perhaps Gabriel wanted those empathetic powers at his disposal once more, so he could know how she was feeling, so he could be quicker to act. Perhaps he wanted something more, something to fall back on if Nathalie was right and something went wrong…

A placental abruption happened again in March, scaring them both half to death, but it was just like the first, easily treatable and no cause for any major concern. They wouldn't run into any other complications until the baby's birth, but the next six weeks of waiting were six weeks of uninterrupted anxiety. Nathalie couldn't stop thinking about Fortune leashing her by a thread, shrewdly waiting for the right moment to cut her loose. Nathalie couldn't find any way to tell herself that things would be fine, even if the baby was born healthy. Nathalie couldn't stop imagining either a future with no baby or a future with a baby who'd grow to resent her for everything she wasn't penalized enough for. There was no way to picture a world where her family was happy and whole, because she'd done nothing to earn happy and whole.

Meanwhile her dreams never wanted to stop reminding her that she should be dead. Days before the baby's due date, she woke gasping for breath and grappling for Gabriel beside her, who woke with a harsh scare. He gave her some medicine and sat quietly with her until she calmed down, squeezing her hand every time he felt it tremble. Then, he leaned into her hand, his fingers spread across her belly, and whispered, "I don't believe I deserve this either."

"Gabriel, please -"

"Shh. Don't think about us, Nathalie. Don't think about what we deserve. Think about Adrien. Think about how excited he is to meet his sister. Think about how much he already loves her. Maybe you and I have no business having a baby, but I know you think Adrien is good enough to deserve this."

Nathalie had fallen silent. Her breathing mellowed. Gabriel played with hair while she felt the baby kick and tried to let herself smile. She hadn't smiled since Adrien and Alain had surprised her by decorating the nursery. Her step-son's radiance was impossible to ignore. It helped her through the last several days of pregnancy feeling much more at ease than she had felt through eight other months.

Anaïs was born at 4:47 AM on April 27th, and Nathalie remembered that it was raining. Waterdrops pelted the window while her baby wailed at the shock of life.

She held Anaïs for the first time against her heart and said, "Good morning."

Some hours ago, she'd been delirious enough with panic and pain to say something like, "This is death, long-overdue," right into Gabriel's face as he strained to keep as calm as possible for her sake. She didn't remember it at all, but he'd mentioned several days later when she noticed something bothering him, when after all that misery she was finally overwhelmed with joy.

Nathalie fell in love with Anaïs the second she heard her cry. For a moment, she'd believed that all her grief would melt away and leave nothing behind but that pure and perfect love, but Nathalie never stopped being afraid. Nathalie was never certain that she'd wake up in the morning with everything she still had when she went to sleep. It felt easier sometimes to wait up and watch it all lie still, just in case something shifted or fell or vanished into thin air. Nathalie didn't deserve to keep it, but she'd fight anyway.

She was fighting a little differently now. She'd spent so much time trying to resist the person she used to be, believing those demons would come bearing the form of something familiar, something that haunted her nightmares. But she'd just worn the face of that demon to stand against a new one, and she survived.

It felt like a re-beginning.

Nathalie finished feeding Anaïs, and from the dining room table where Duusu was still sitting, the kwami remarked, "You're crying."

"Am I?" Nathalie wiped her eyes and looked at the streaks of moisture on her finger as if she was bewildered by the occurrence. "Oh, I was just thinking about Ana."

"You went through a lot, didn't you? I can sense it."

"Yeah," Nathalie sighed, stroking her baby's cheek. "But it was worth it."

Both Duusu and Nathalie startled at a knock against the door. In walked Hawkmoth a moment later, his cane tucked under his arm as he pulled another chair out from the dining room table and sat himself across from Nathalie.

"Oh, hello!" exclaimed Duusu, rising into the air. Hawkmoth offered her a nod in greeting before turning back to his wife and child.

"How's it going?" Nathalie asked, shifting the baby in her arms.

"I removed Chloe's akuma and sent her off. I don't think she needs to be around for the next steps," he replied, planting the cane between his knees.

"Did she...ask any questions?" Despite the room being totally empty of anyone who shouldn't be hearing the conversation, Nathalie couldn't help but lower her voice to a near-whisper.

Hawkmoth shook his head. "No, she didn't say a word. Not to me, anyway. But what about you? When Marinette arrived here to give you the peacock miraculous, did she make any sort of comment?"

"Marinette told her this place had become a superhero hideout since we moved out. After I transformed, she and Queen Wasp left, and I met them afterwards. Of course, we had to come all the way back again." Nathalie sighed, rubbing her forehead with two fingers. "Admittedly, it's not a very steady lie. I don't know for how long we can keep it up."

"I believe the girl's smarter than she's given credit for. I only hope you and I did enough today that she'll be willing to keep her suspicions to herself." Hawkmoth held out his arms, and Nathalie passed Anaïs over. Her eyes shone up at her father as her head settled into the crook of his elbow. "Hey, love," he murmured.

"I know Chloe's relationship with the heroes is a little turbulent, but I'd think seeing us fighting side by side with them would reassure her," said Nathalie, fanning out her shirt.

"Her good word would mean a lot," Hawkmoth agreed.

"I'm still worried."

"So am I."

Trying to shake those thoughts out of her head, Nathalie went on to ask, "And what of the Sorcerer? Are they no longer paralyzed?"

"We have them bound to a chair. They've been utterly silent," answered Hawkmoth gravely.

"Have you not removed their mask yet?"

"We tried. It…" Hawkmoth shifted in his seat. "It seems to be adhered to their face."

"Ew, what?" Duusu cut in. "Can't they breathe?"

"Apparently." Hawkmoth's gaze reflected the gray light streaming from between the curtains, turning his gaze to liquid silver as he blinked at Nathalie timidly. "We're wondering if there would be a way to remove it with magic. A way that wouldn't necessarily harm them."

Nathalie glanced at her feet. "I wouldn't be able to help, unfortunately. I don't know nearly enough."

"I understand." Hawkmoth brought his chair a little closer, until their knees were nearly touching. "We'll start talking to them soon, see if we can get them to admit anything about what they're up to, who they are."

"I don't have a very good feeling about it," she admitted.

"Neither do I, but we'll have to try. Lila won't be any help."

"What's wrong with Lila?"

Hawkmoth's expression darkened. He caressed his thumb along the baby's fingers while he stared grimly into Nathalie's alarmed face. "The Sorcerer did something. Something with some potion. I can't imagine this happened organically." He exhaled a sharp breath and chewed on the inside of his lip before he went on, "Anyway, we're leaving her alone. She's in the lair with Ladybug and Chat Noir, curled up into a little ball against the wall. Chat tried to talk to her, but she's fairly nonsensical at the moment."

"And it's not an act?"

"No. Her emotions are far too intense for them to be insincere. From what I can tell, she's terrified. Terrified for her life, but she's also...confused. I'm not sure, there are a lot of blank spots, and others that feel tangled up."

Nathalie harbored quite a significant indignation towards Lila, but her husband's unease was quite apparent, and it invoked just the slightest bit of concern for the girl. "Duusu?" Nathalie prompted the kwami. "What do you feel?"

"Not much more than that, to be frank," was the reply. "She feels like she's floating in this sort of cloud. Something had definitely been done to her mind."

"Would you know what kind of potion could accomplish that?"

"Unfortunately, there's little I know about sorcery."

Nathalie sighed. "Yes, I figured."

A light drizzle of rain began, softly misting against the window. Hawkmoth detransformed when Nathalie told him she wanted to see his face, which allowed Nooroo and Duusu to reunite once more with a friendly, enthusiastic hug. They went into the atrium to catch up on their own, and then it was just Gabriel, Nathalie, and the baby sitting quietly together in the old dining room, listening to the gentle rain, watching it trickle down the window.

After a couple minutes, Gabriel leaned forward and kissed Nathalie tenderly on the cheek. His breath was warm on her skin, but despite the heat, she didn't mind it at all. His lips trailed down to her jaw and kissed her again, even softer this time. When he pulled away, Nathalie's heart melted at the love kindling his gaze. His face hovered an inch from hers as he murmured, "I'm proud of you."

A hand fell softly against her chest. His index finger brushed the edge of the brooch pinned to her shirt.

"Something about you just feels...brighter."

Nathalie kissed him on the mouth, taking his hand and placing it entirely over the brooch. She sighed faintly, lips curving into a smile. Pride was an emotion she'd never experienced through a miraculous before. It felt like stretching in the morning. It looked like glittering water behind her eyelids. It tasted like ice and gold.

"How are you?" he asked, when she pulled away to look at him briefly. She laughed and pressed her lips against his again. "Happier?"

"Possibly."

Nathalie held her husband's face between her hands and remembered the look he gave her when he first told her he loved her, when he said he wanted to get married, when he realized she was pregnant, when he saw their baby for the first time. She would remember his face now, that bright silver love glowing up at her. He was beaming.

Nathalie grabbed her baby and kissed her too, right on the nose. For a moment, she forgot there was a world outside this room. It was only Gabriel and Anaïs and her and if Adrien was there too, then everything would feel perfect. And even though it was fleeting, even though it wasn't even true, she'd give anything for that.

"You know what I just realized?" Gabriel asked.

"What?"

"It's the thirteenth of June."

"Is it?" It took her a moment to understand why he brought it up. Her heart dropped into her stomach and she gasped in embarrassment. "Wait - it is!"

"Can you believe it?"

"I completely forgot."

"So did I, until just now."

"It's been a whirlwind of a day. It's not even 10 AM."

"So hopefully we can get this over with and have some kind of proper celebration later?" Gabriel quirked an eyebrow, setting a hand on top of Nathalie's, the one clutching the baby's head.

"'Getting this over with' doesn't sound to me the likely way we'll be approaching this problem," she murmured sadly.

"No," he sighed, "Probably not."

"I can't believe we've been married a year," she whispered. "And all of this has happened."

"Life refuses to let us get comfortable," he remarked.

A faint buzz interrupted their conversation. Gabriel dug his phone out of his pocket and read the notification. "Adrien," he said, "'LB thinks it's time to start questioning soon. When you're ready, please come back'."

"We should probably go up, then?"

"What are we going to do with her?" asked Gabriel, glancing at the baby.

Pursing her lips, Nathalie gave it a moment of thought. Anaïs was calm in her arms, opening and closing her fists, one of which was fastened around her father's pinkie. "I'll call Alain. He must be at the office today since he hasn't wondered where we are at this point. I'll tell him to get someone to cover his work there so he can watch the baby for a few hours."

"You don't think he'd mind playing nanny?"

"I feel bad, but he doesn't have a choice. I'm not leaving her alone again, and I'm certainly not bringing her into the same room as Lila and the Sorcerer, whether or not they're tied to a chair." Yet, the thought of parting with Anaïs was a threatening one. After the encounter in the nursery that had shaken her just hours earlier, Nathalie could not help but tighten her grip around her daughter as she visualized herself handing her away for an uncertain stretch of time, even if it was to a person she trusted.

Gabriel sensed that she was becoming anxious once again, because he reached out and tucked the hair behind her ear before letting his palm come to rest against her jaw. He offered her a reassuring smile. "Very well. What will you give as our excuse?"

"Water damage here at the old house that we need to look into? I don't know, something boring that he won't question us about later." Nathalie rose to her feet and Gabriel followed her movement. He took both chairs and returned them to their places around the table. Nathalie was just pulling out her own cell phone when she noticed he was standing stiffly with one of the chairs balancing on its back legs beneath his grip. His gaze was turned towards the center of the dining room on the other side of the table, where there remained a formal seating arrangement around the fireplace, and a family portrait of himself, Emilie, and Adrien looming over the rest of the room.

Nathalie smiled faintly at those three beaming faces. She was surprised he'd wanted to leave the portrait there, and not bring it to the new house for Adrien's sake at least, but according to him it had been made at Emilie's request, so he found it best to leave it behind. Gabriel seemed to think of the mansion as Emilie's, despite it being in his name. She knew the place would always carry a lot of memories for him, especially because it remained rather unchanged.

"If you want, you can go up there and start questioning. I don't know how long it's going to take me to get Anaïs off my hands…"

Her voice had trailed gradually into a low murmur as she realized Gabriel wasn't paying attention. He was absolutely rigid, and from her angle, she could see that his skin had gone a little pale.

"Gabriel?"

"Wh...what's that?" he asked.

He wasn't looking at the portrait. Nathalie placed herself right at his side and followed his gaze to the other side of the room. She was struck with confusion when her eyes landed on a pile of debris lying among the seating arrangement near the fireplace. The pieces were uneven and black as though they'd been charred from a fire, but nothing else in the room had sustained any damage that indicated something like that had taken place.

Gabriel approached the mess. He knelt on the ground and reached his fingers out gingerly. "It looks like it may have once been a chair. Didn't there used to be four of them here?"

Both he and Nathalie gasped as he made contact with a piece of the debris, for the moment his fingertip brushed up against what they'd thought to be a solid fragment, the thing crumbled into dust, like black ash falling out of nowhere.

Gabriel leaped to his feet with a jolt. "What on - did Adrien do this?"

"What happened?"

"It's been - cataclysmed," he said. Horror flashed in his eyes like a power surge had run through his body. "Either Adrien really hated this chair," he grumbled, before kicking another fragment and watching it disintegrate, "or the Sorcerer has been spending more time here than we anticipated. They messed around with their potions in this house."

Nathalie's spine tingled with cold. "Well," she breathed, forcing her voice to remain level, "that's one thing we can ask them about."