Chapter Text
August 28, 2044
Danielle Agreste awoke on her fourteenth birthday to a world drastically worse than the one she’d gone to sleep in, but she didn't realize it at first. Her first thought, upon waking, was merely confusion that her mother hadn't excitedly woken her up already. Her mother worried, for some reason, about all three of her children having to share a single birthday, and she had a tendency to overcompensate by going completely nuts with the day every year. Usually Dani didn’t like to be woken early, but she never minded on this day.
Yawning, Dani looked across the room at her sister, Emma. Emma was awake, no surprise there. But she was staring wordlessly at her phone in the dark, which wasn't like her. Usually when Dani did that, she'd get a lecture from her sister about the dangers of eye strain, or something like that. “What are you watching?” Dani asked. Emma jumped visibly.
“Oh,” she said. “You’re awake.”
“What are you watching?” Dani repeated.
“The world go to hell in a fucking hand-basket,” Emma said in a dull monotone. She turned back to her screen as Dani’s eyes widened. Emma never swore.
“What is that supposed to mean?” Dani got up to look at her sister’s phone. “What's going on?”
“Oh, where to begin,” Emma sighed. “Well, the government’s been overthrown. Not just ours, either, the governments of at least ten neighboring countries. Spain, Portugal, the UK, us, Germany-I forget the rest, but don’t worry, they’ll replay which ones soon. All major cities are currently occupied by a magically enhanced private militaristic force calling itself The Order. They’ve got control of the news, too.”
Dani grabbed her sister’s phone and stared at the scrolling news in disbelief.
“And they've got some giant force-field up,” Emma continued. “No one from the outside can get in, so we won't be saved by America or China or Russia or anybody like that. Oh, and they claim they've “neutralized” all superheroes inside the perimeter. Which is a pretty bold claim, but Ladybug and Chat Noir haven't shown up yet, so it's probably legit.”
Dani walked over to their bedroom’s only window and lifted the shade. “The roads are a mess,” she said. “And… is that a tank?”
“Probably,” Emma said, not looking up.
“This is crazy, Emma. Things like this don't just happen literally overnight.”
“It's certainly rare,” Emma said, “but historically speaking it's not completely unprecedented.”
Dani sighed. “What did Mom and Dad have to say about all this?”
Emma shrugged. “They're not home. I assumed they went out early for party stuff and got caught in all the chaos.”
Dani glanced out the window again. “It might be hours before they get back,” she said. “I'm gonna wake Louis up and fill him in.”
“Oh, fuck,” Louis said, staring at the news in horror. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, this is bad.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Dani said.
“No. No, you don't get how bad this is,” Louis said, sinking into a chair and grabbing his head in his hands. He was starting to hyperventilate.
“Do you think we’re idiots?” Dani asked, starting to get mad. “What’s not to get? What is there to miss about how terrible this is?”
“What are we going to do?” Louis asked, not answering his sister. His breathing was continuing to get faster, and his sisters exchanged a worried look over his head.
“I… I don't think we can do anything, Louis,” Emma said gently. “We should just stay here and wait for Mom and Dad to get back.”
“Mom and Dad aren’t coming back.” He looked up at his sisters, his face white as a sheet. “There’s something I never told you guys,” he said. “Mom and Dad are Ladybug and Chat Noir.”
For about twenty seconds, his sisters stared at him as though he were crazy. Then Dani punched his arm. “That’s not funny,” she said, annoyed. “Not right now, not with everything that’s going on.”
“Ow. No, it isn’t funny. It’s the truth.”
“I think I’d be able to tell if my parents were superheroes,” Dani said, looking at her sister. “Right, Emma?” Emma was now staring into the middle distance, seemingly lost in thought. Dani waved a hand in front of her sister’s face. “Earth to Emma,” she said. Emma blinked and looked at Dani.
“Dani,” she said, putting a hand on her sister’s shoulder, “this explains everything. Or, well, at least it explains a lot.”
“What? No it doesn’t. What’s there to explain?”
“Well, why Mom and Dad aren’t home right now for starters-”
“They’re just out, they’re not-”
“And why they’re so flaky sometimes, and those stupid vague “business trips” they’re always taking-”
“They’re not always taking them,” Dani said. “They go on maybe one a year.”
“But why would they go on any, Dani? Dad’s a public school teacher and Mom’s a fashion designer! Their jobs don’t overlap at all. And they never say what they’re for, or where they’re going, and they’re always super last-minute. And, look, I don’t remember all of them but I’m pretty sure the last one coincided with Ladybug and Chat Noir taking care of that weird earthquake thing in Argentina.”
“That… that could be just a coincidence…” Dani’s temper was starting to die down, and a profound nervousness was taking its place. As a general rule, Danielle Agreste preferred to be angry.
“And it would explain why nobody answers any goddamn questions in this family,” Emma said, now starting to get uncharacteristically worked up. “Every third question I ask, I hear “It’s a long story, sweetie” and then some nearby adult abruptly changes the subject. I swear to God, it should be printed in Latin on the Agreste family crest. Like… like, take Grandma. Have you ever asked Dad about when she went missing?”
“No, I-”
“Well, I did once. “Oh, that’s a long story, honey.” His mother went missing for four years, everybody thought she was dead, and then Ladybug and Chat Noir out of nowhere rescue her on the other side of the world, and Dad doesn’t have one thing to say about it?”
Dani took a deep breath, let it out, and turned back to her brother. “Did Mom actually say she was Ladybug?” she asked.
“Well, not in so many words-”
“There, see? It’s just Louis being over-imaginative again.”
“-but she certainly didn’t deny it when I asked. She just said it was really really important I never talk about it to anyone, and she’d tell all three of us everything when we were sixteen.”
“Sixteen?” Emma asked, annoyed. “She was going to wait two more years before telling us anything?”
“When was this?” Dani asked. Louis shrugged.
“I don’t know, eight, nine years ago?” His sisters gaped at him.
“You’ve known that long?” Dani asked.
“Well...I mean, no, I’ve known much longer than that, it’s just that that’s when I was old enough to, you know, realize that nobody was talking about it and actually think to ask why. Honestly for years I thought we all knew and everybody just knew not to bring it up, but the older I got the more obvious it was that everyone else in this city is just, like, completely clueless about it.”
“But...but how did you know?”
Louis threw his hands up in frustration. “I don’t know,” he snapped, “how do you know it’s Mom and not a mysterious stranger when she wears a hat you’ve never seen before?”
“That’s not-okay, right, that does it.” Dani pulled out her phone. “We’re ending this crazy speculation right now. I’m calling Mom. One of you call Dad. One of them is bound to answer, you’ll see.” Frowning, Emma grabbed her phone and selected her father’s number from the menu. Emma and Dani both lifted their phones to their ears expectantly. A few seconds later, they could hear their parents’ cell phones, both ringing slightly out of sync with one another, from their bedroom a few doors away. All three siblings went pale.
“Well that’s not good,” Emma said. She hung up and headed for the bedroom door, her siblings trailing close behind her.
Emma slowly opened the door to the bedroom, and all three of them peered inside at once. There was absolutely no sign that their parents had left, except for the fact that they weren’t there. Their father’s glasses were still on the nightside table, their mother’s purse was thrown over a chair, their cell phones were plugged into their chargers. The sheets of the bed were rumpled, but not thrown aside.
“Is it just me,” Louis whispered, “or does it look like they literally vanished into thin air in the middle of the night?”
“No, not just you-what’s that on Mom’s pillow?” Dani asked. Louis took a step inside, then stopped and looked around.
“It’s her earrings,” he said.
“No, Mom’s earrings are black and those are-” Dani stopped mid-sentence as she recognized what she was looking at. “Oh my God,” she whispered.
“I guess whatever spirited them away wasn’t strong enough to grab a Miraculous?” Louis guessed. Spotting a box of tissues, he grabbed two and approached the bed. “Don’t touch these,” he said. “For some reason I have a strong feeling it would be a bad idea for anyone other than Mom to pick these up.” Using one of the tissues, he scooped the earrings up and twisted the tissue around them, then shoved them in his pocket. “Do either of you see the ring? Oh, here it is.” Leaning over to his father’s side of the bed, he grabbed the iconic Chat Noir ring with the second tissue and showed it to his sisters before putting it in his pocket with the earrings.
“You’re just going to carry those wildly powerful artifacts around all crumpled up like that?” Dani asked, indignant.
“Nah, I’ll find somewhere safe for them.” Louis frowned. “Now that I think of it, I’m kind of surprised an armed guard hasn’t, like, shown up to take us into custody and search the house for these.”
“Maybe they don’t know who Mom and Dad are yet?” Emma guessed. “I mean, in real life.”
“Well, they’re going to figure it out soon, I bet,” Louis said. His initial panic seemed to have mostly abated, but he still looked pale. “We should probably lock the front door, just in case.”
Dani raised an eyebrow. “In case of an armed guard? I don’t think a locked door is going to stop them.”
“Well, it might give us enough time to run out the back, anyway,” Louis said. “It can’t hurt.”
The three of them headed downstairs, and Louis crossed the room to the front door and bolted it shut. All three were pointedly trying not to look at all the decorations their mother had obviously stayed up late putting up the night before. Something about them seemed almost offensive, like they were taunting the triplets, ghosts of a carefree life that was clearly over.
“Hang on,” Emma said. “What are those?” She pointed to three small black boxes on the countertop, ornately decorated and each with a bow and a tag. Dani was closer; she leaned over and looked at each tag. “They’re all unsigned,” she reported. She read each one out loud.
For Danielle, to be used wisely in the coming trials
For Louis, to be used wisely in the coming trials
For Emma, to be used wisely in the coming trials