I will love again

New Year's Special - Part 1

A/N: I know, I am a little late, but here is another special, supposed to be around new year's! And, after more than 5000 words, I decided to do more than one part! So enjoy!

They had planned their dinner for the 31st of December, after the sudden idea, to celebrate the new year all together.

Well, not all of them, as Gabriel and Nathalie had taken Colette and Hugo to a skiing trip somewhere north of Paris and Marinette and Adrien were enjoying the week without their youngest child quite a lot.

As it would be a new year's eve dinner, Emma and Michelle had eventually decided to join their siblings and so they had switched locations and were now all at the Agreste mansion, some of them busy with preparing their food, some decorating and the rest was just outside, playing in the freshly fallen snow, as if they were still children.

Hélène was staring at them through the fogged window and smiled, while she rubbed her belly, yet there were tears glistening in her eyes too.

"What's wrong, Napkin?", Marcel asked, as he laid an arm around his older sister's shoulders. He couldn't say big sister, because he and Maurice had been taller than her, since Kindergarten.

The young man had been helping his brother in the kitchen and was now finished and looking what else he could do around the house, when he saw the pregnant, young woman standing at the window of the dining room, watching her younger siblings and niece and nephew, running around, tossing snowballs, pushing each other into the soft, white fluff.

Hélène shrugged.

"Is it because you can't do what they are doing this year or because of Antoinette still being with her parents? When will she be here? Did she already call or text you, about that sudden, not for strangers, 'emergency'?", the tall young man asked, while he pulled her into his arms, after he had seen the tears begin to fall.

His sister clang on to him immediately and started to cry, quietly but the sobs whook her whole body and Marcel gently rubbed her back while he just waited until she had let everything out.

Several minutes passed, before the girl lifted her head and wiped her face clean with her sleeve.

"You're disgusting, you know that?", her brother exclaimed and they both laughed.

"Come!", he then said, "let's go and sit down, then you can tell me!"

He nudged her slowly to the fireplace and even helped her to sit down on her beloved bear fur.

"Thank you, Marc", she hummed, as she laid on her back, hands on her tummy, staring at the ceiling.

"Okay now, spill!", he demanded and Hélène sighed, before explaining:

"You know, that Antoinette's parents were visiting us at the 26th, right?"

Marcel nodded.

"Well", the mother to be continued, "as it turned out, her parents aren't very fond of us, being a couple, but they always thought, this was just a phase and we would soon figure out, that this wasn't right! But when they came for dinner, they were at first incredibly happy, that we were obviously living together as just friends, because I seemed to have gone 'the normal way'. But then we told them, that we are going to raise her", she looked down and gently stroked the side of her, through today's tight shirt very well showing, bump, "together as her parents and..... well........ they freaked out. Told us, we were disgusting and that all of this was wrong and that the poor baby would be totally traumatized, when it was old enough to understand and hear the other children laugh about its 'two mums'."

She snorted cynically.

"I could keep myself from telling them, that of course parents, who argue all of the time, while raising their daughter would be much worse. Barely, but I held it back. For the girl I've been in love with, since the first day, we sat next to each other in class. And that made me eventually understand, why she always fought her feelings, why she struggled with being seen with me hand in hand, why 'she' wanted to try the 'normal' way. Because all her life, those people told her, that all she felt was wrong and made her feel bad for being in love with another girl!", Hélène now sobbed again.