The Peacock's Revenge

~Chapter One: The Suspicion~

Marinette Dupain-Cheng was finally living her normal life again. It only took a few days of people being in shock by her before it was back to ordinary. She went to school, she baked with her parents, she freaked out over Adrien, all the usual Marinette activities. In fact, she freaked out over Adrien even more than before because of the way he'd been talking to her, yet at the same time she was freaking out less knowing he was Cat Noir. Recently, Adrien had gone out of his way to start conversations with her and just talk really often, and sometimes he even sounded flirty! But in honesty, Adrien didn't even realize he was doing it most of the time. He must have been the only one in the entire school that didn't think he was deliberately flirting with Marinette, because every time he did it was kind of an accident.

Since Ladybug had...........left....Adrien seemed to find all of Ladybug's best traits in Marinette as well. And since Ladybug wasn't around to be his confident, positive, reassuring friend, he turned to Marinette for those things. In some way he couldn't describe, Marinette seemed to already know all of his problems and everything going on in his life already. Obviously he never told her anything about how he was Cat Noir, but whenever she talked to him it felt like she knew, or maybe he was making that up in his head because she acted like Ladybug.

Either way, they both grew so much closer with one another as their civilian selves. Marinette knew Adrien was Cat Noir, and knew everything else he was going through, in some ways she knew better than Adrien himself. Even though she was still too frazzled by him to start conversations, she never refused the opportunity to talk to him whenever he brought it up. So often they would just hang out together one-on-one after school and at each other's houses.  Basically everyone at school thought they were a couple, but Marinette knew Adrien didn't see her that way, and honestly, really she didn't mind so much at the moment. She knew Adrien had too much going on to even consider Marinette as more than a friend, and was too oblivious to see that he was treating her that way. He just wanted, and desperately needed, a strong friend to rely on, and Marinette was just that. Because she understood his situation so well, Marinette could tell he really wasn't trying to make moves, yet, for now she was happy enough to just be his shoulder to lean on in a time of need.

This situation had also been really convenient in other ways for Marinette. Her and Tikki had been talking and decided that Gabriel's assistant, Nathalie, was likely the wielder of the peacock miraculous. They considered just asking Nathalie for the miraculous back, but they didn't know whether or not she was aware that Marinette was Ladybug, and didn't want to risk revealing her identity unnecessarily. Since she was hanging out with Adrien at his house all the time anyway, it was a perfect chance to slowly gain more information about Nathalie and what she might be up to, if anything.

So far Marinette didn't seem to suspect that Nathalie was plotting anything, all she really knew was that she graciously offered to be Adrien's legal guardian while Gabriel was in prison. But she still took the opportunity to look for anything suspicious whenever she went over to the Agreste's.

Little did Marinette know that this "opportunity" was actually giving Nathalie the opportunity to do the same thing, to slowly get more bits of information, and reveal Ladybug's identity.

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Nathalie Sancoeur now had a whole new level of responsibility, after one month since Gabriel had been sent to prison, she finally completed the paperwork to become Adrien Agreste's legal guardian for the following two years. Adrien wasn't very happy about his situation, as the overwhelming joy that everyone felt upon Marinette's return was unfortunately short-lived, and  everything felt like normal after a few days of her being back. Since Marinette's return had been Adrien's biggest source of joy lately, his delight wore off when it wasn't a big deal to anyone anymore, thus leading to Adrien remembering his practically miserable life, where his dad was in prison, the love of his life left him completely with barely any explanation, and Nathalie was in charge of him. At first Adrien didn't mind at all that Nathalie would be taking care of him, in fact he was a tad excited! Adrien always liked her and she seemed to go out of her way to make him feel better more times than she had too, so he wasn't at all expecting it to be as bad as it was.