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When Nathalie wakes up, the first thing she thinks is that nothing hurts anymore. Her head is clear. Her skin doesn’t burn under the sheets. Her bones don’t feel like breaking when she stands, and the breaths she sucks in don’t rattle in her lungs. She doesn’t feel sick.
The second thing she thinks is fuck. And third she goes for her crossbow.
Gabriel is, of course, dead, and Bug Noire will not stop shaking no matter how many minutes pass, even when the freed Kwamis crowd around to comfort her.
There are a lot of things Nathalie wants to say, like this is wrong. Like, I can’t hold this in and maybe jail is better and do you really want to keep doing this, Marinette? Nathalie reaches up to pull her hair tie out with careful, steady hands. She blinks through the red strands falling into her eyes, and combs it out with her fingers, and ties it back in a bun again, neater this time. You could almost think nothing ever happened. Her hair is not white; her braces unneeded; GabrielAgresteisdeadandahero. She says, “Let’s go get Adrien.”
She can feel the clock ticking, each moment like a little blow. The timer started when Gabriel died. There is only so long the Kingdom will give her.
Marinette draws herself together. “Let’s go get Adrien,” she echoes. Time marches forward. In the rubble, so does Ladybug.
In the rubble, Nathalie follows.
It seems to come from all angles. Or it doesn’t. Or Nathalie has lost it. Adrien’s social worker hates her—truly, without exaggeration, Margot seems to be done with Nathalie from the moment they meet. Of course, from the moment Margot walked in with Amelie, Nathalie should have expected that. It doesn’t matter what strings Amelie pulled to get another eye in the situation. The Kingdom pulls more. Nathalie “finds reasons” to fire almost all of the newer staff around the house. She turns the house upside down for cameras and recorders, but she never loses the feeling of being listened to. She shuts off her phone at night and buries it under pillows.
“Monarch accomplice still at large,” goes the tv in the lounge. “But what about Mayura?” cries a crackly voice over the radio while Nathalie is waiting in a café. She leaves the coffee behind. She leaves the shop behind. None of it matters. Just leave it all behind. IS THE TERROR EVER REALLY OVER? asks the headlines on the newspaper stand.
She runs into the house like there’s hounds after her. Adrien is at school. There is only Gorilla to look at her, hard and steady. She pants in the entryway and pretends he is not looking and orders coffee for delivery with one of Gabriel’s credit cards. You don’t know anything, she screams in her head until Gorilla goes away. She takes a painkiller and another painkiller and she waits for her coffee. She answers an email and another email and for a moment she can pretend her job is as easy and simple as that.
Her coffee arrives. She drinks it. Another email yields itself in her inbox, flagged urgent.
Re: regarding guardianship
The intense panic that spikes up Nathalie’s chest, tearing through her throat, is so severe that she nearly vomits on the spot.
She has to do this. She has to respond. She has to. She can cheat a lot of things, like the law, and death, but she will not cheat Adrien. And she is the only—no. The closest thing he has for a parent. Something bubbly and hysterical wants to burst out of her chest. Oh, Emily. If you could see me now.
(Let alone Emily—would Gabriel hate her, to see her making these decisions for Adrien? Does it matter? Should she hate him?
Oh, it would be easier if she did.)
At the end of the day… at the end of the day, Adrien’s grandparents would take him. Nathalie knows they would, if she asked. Rocky meeting or no, Adrien might even flourish with them. Emil and Milly would love to have him. But Johnny and Gabrielle would probably be better.
Nathalie doesn’t ask.
She electronically signs the papers and sends them back over.
She gets the summons to the meeting an hour later. And the call from Tomoe before she can even finish hyperventilating into her bedsheets.
“We need to talk,” Tomoe says, very short and clipped like this is using up precious time. Nathalie feels frankly ill, trying to follow the dizzying trail of her life that led to this moment.
“You’re talking to me now,” she squeezes out, itching to say so much more, and Tomoe just huffs at her.
“You will come to me,” is all Tomoe says, throwing in a, “now,” before the call is over. And, well. This is Nathalie’s life now, so she throws on a jacket and scarf and calls an Uber. Tomoe meets her outside, which Nathalie stares at. She doesn’t know what to say. It all feels so bizarre. Everything has felt cold and bizarre for weeks, and everything is so, so different. She climbs out of the car in silence and the driver is gone before she and Tomoe ever say a word to each other.
“What do you know?” Tomoe asks, straight to the point. “It will not serve either of us to present a conflicting account of the recent events.” The recent events is a mild way of putting it. Nathalie wishes someone would just say it how it was. Since everything went to hell. Since Gabriel fucking died. Since everything I was fighting for made a Wish and went up in smoke. Wasn’t this what Tomoe had been fighting for, too? Wasn’t she angry? Wasn’t she just furious and eaten up inside like acid always lingering at the back of her throat?
Tomoe’s face and body language reveal nothing. Nathalie wants to shake herself. It’s a lot of presumption to think that Tomoe’s motivations or feelings would be anything alike to hers.
“I know everything Gabriel knew,” Nathalie says finally, and Tomoe waves her hand as if to say that’s obvious. “No, you too. What do you know?”
“You and Ladybug have some sort of alliance of your own,” Tomoe says. Her tone is neutral and unaccusatory, but Nathalie burns with some strange shame anyway. “Your stories to the media have been collaborated with consideration of what information you would individually release. These circumstances would lead me to assume that this is part of an exchange to keep your past activities private. I myself have a similar arrangement through virtue of my daughter’s relationship to Ladybug.”
Tomoe’s close enough to the truth. There’s no need to further elaborate on her assumptions. Nathalie shifts on her feet, swallowing. The panic in her chest has gone through a few different stages—now gnawing, buzzing, a feeling that could just swallow her right up.
“So what did you have in mind?” she gets out through the feeling, and Tomoe smiles that terrible little smile that she does sometimes. There is no use in wondering if Nathalie is screwed. She has been screwed since she followed Gabriel and Emily into their dorm room at university twenty years ago, and Emily shut the door and cupped her hands over Nathalie’s ear and whispered, “I have a secret.”
Oh, who is she kidding. Nathalie’s secrets would have been the death of her long before the Agrestes ever got their hooks in her.
“I have a secret,” Emily had said, and her hand was so soft against Nathalie’s cheek, then. When she was not dead. And the Gabriel who was not dead had smiled like he was so excited to take on the world with them, and the Nathalie so young she’d still lived with her father in that big empty house in the country had thought, helplessly, we can be crazy secret spy adventurers together. We can keep our secrets together all the way across the world and never, ever tell them to anyone.
She’d thought, I’ll stay with you forever and ever until I’m dead. And most of all they’ll never catch up to us, ever. But they’d made a liar of her.
“Where are you going?” Adrien asks on that night, and Nathalie jerks instinctively. It’s such a simple question. She feels like a trapped mouse.
“Just out,” she says. “Ah, um. I have a—uh—dentist appointment.” She winces as the words come out of her mouth. Adrien looks thoughtfully out at the complete darkness outside.
“It’s okay, you know,” he says. He looks so grown-up these days. Sadder. Taller. More confident. Sometimes she feels so small and lost and disappointing when she looks at him. “It’s okay to move on. I know it’s hard. It’s really hard to move on, and it makes you sad, and it doesn’t help when you have to deal with what everybody else thinks about it too.”
She swallows. “Okay,” she says, “I know that,” and it’s a little questioning. He wants to say something. Something that isn’t any of that.
“It’s okay if it’s a date,” he gets out all in a rush, and her face burns instantly. “Like if you go out sometime and it’s a date, and not a dentist appointment. It’s like—obviously I won’t be mad—”
Nathalie’s brain is a litany of oh my god oh my god oh my god right now. “Of course,” she manages. “Anyway, I better get going—” her phone is buzzing. Has been buzzing. She does not need to look at it. Her smart watch lights up with the message anyway as she flees Adrien and his kindnesses.
THEY ARE READY FOR YOU.