Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Our Heroine is Born
It had been a long, hard labour but finally, Sabine Cheng held her daughter in her arms.
Her lovely Marinette.
The small, exhausted woman smiled down at her girl, her daughter, before looking up into the eyes of her Tom, her great, lumbering, soft, bear of a husband. It didn’t need to be said. She knew they would both do anything to see her girl be happy and healthy.
She turned her tired eyes back to her little girl, who cooed up at her.
She was beautiful. With bright blue eyes, and a full head of black hair......wait.
“Tom?” Sabine called to her husband carefully.
“Yes, darling?”
“What colour hair does our little girl have?”
“Hmm? She’s right there love, are you feeling ok?” He laughed.
“Humour me for a second, you great lump. What colour hair does she have?” Sabine asked, more firmly, exhaustion forgotten for now.
Tom raised a questioning eyebrow at her before answering.
“Well, if you insist,” he starts with a chuckle, “Our little Marinette has a large amount of black hair.” Sabine’s relief lasted only an instant before it was interrupted.
“Hang on, now you mention it. Looking closer it’s still black, but when the light hits it right it’s blue. Isn’t that strange, honey? Honey?”
Toms voice fades into the background, as the mother’s fear was made real.
Marinette, her lovely, baby girl, had blue hair.
Natural blue hair. That it was only when the light hit it right did nothing to erase this.
Sabine had, to her shame, watched a lot of anime over the years, usually reading the manga to match, and her studies lead her to one, horrifying conclusion:
Marinette was going to be a Protagonist.
The mother’s horror quickly turned into determination, and she looked up at her concerned husband with steel in her eyes.
“Tom, we have a lot of work to do.”
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It only took a few heated discussions to get her husband on board with her plan, but thankfully Tom had taken a number of literature papers at university and understood the power of narrative causality, that terrifying, implacable force that drives a story or, in this case, causes one. In his initial panic the baker had offered to leave them, but Sabine had quickly talked him down, reminding him that doing so would only contribute towards a Tragic Backstory, which was to be avoided at all costs.
The plan, at it’s core, was simple:
Make Marinette be a normal girl, with a normal life, and do everything necessary to ensure this.
The life of a protagonist was inevitably messy, and frequently cruel, and the inexperienced parents would do anything to spare their darling girl from such a fate.
Soon after arriving home from hospital the pair put the first step of their plan into action. If they wanted to prevent the fate of a Protagonist, then they would have to know the warning signs, which meant research was needed. With a sigh, Sabine dug out her large library of anime and manga from the storage closet. They had been expensive to buy as a teenager so she had been loath to part with them and now her hoarding was paying off.
Hauling her stash into the living room, Tom met her with a loving hug, a hot chocolate and cuddles with her new baby girl.
Sabine sighed into his arms, and smiled at the gurgling baby.
It was all worth it, just for them.
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Very quickly their long hours of research was paid off
Sabine looked down at the letter in her hands, re-reading it for the umpteenth time, with a sad smile on her face.
“Darling, what’s wrong, what does it say?” Asked Tom, coming up beside her.
The mother turned to her husband, smiling while wiping away a tear
“It’s a letter from my Aunty’s lawyer. She died and has left me some estate, but I have to be there in two days or I forfeit my right to it. It even came with plane tickets! I could just go for one day and we would be set for life!” She exclaimed.
Tom nodded cautiously before sighing and gently guiding her by the shoulders to face the window.
Sabine looked up at her husband, puzzled by his response before turning to face where she had been pointed.
Oh.
There on a soft blanket was her baby girl, her Marinette, smiling as she kicked her legs, her hair gleaming blue in the sunlight.
And with a sigh, the mother tore up the letter and threw it in the bin, keeping hold of the tickets.
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Two days later the mother held her daughter while crying, her husband hugging her firmly as they watched the news. The screen showed the still-burning plane, who’s flight number and the worst of the fire matched those of the seat tickets clutched in her hand.
Sabine’s sobbing only grew worse as she realised this was far from over.
Narrative Causality was ruthless, and a tragic backstory was too tempting for it to give up easily.
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Over the coming weeks, the parents inherited multiple estates from distant relatives, won prizes in contests they never entered and won awards they should never have been eligible for.
All of these shared a few traits in common: The ‘prize’ was time sensitive, only one of them would be able to collect it and they would always have to go on a short trip alone.
It was always only a short separation, for a grand reward.
Each time, they turned it down.
Each time, they watched as the plane they would have taken, the bus, the train, was met by an accident.
Sometimes broad and sweeping, an engine failure or explosion killing tens of passengers. Sometimes very specific and all the more terrifying for it, a plane of glass shattering and piercing a single seat sharing a number with yet another ticket that had arrived to engineer such a fate.
It was small relief that their research provided them with a light at the end of the tunnel. They had both broke down sobbing when they discovered that while they may never be completely free of inflicting their daughter with a tragic backstory, 99% of them held a child’s parent dying in childbirth or in the first year.
They just had to outlast it.
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The universe grew too impatient for schemes.
Sabine had been about to go in the van to deliver an order, when Marinette started screaming in the house, and refused to settle for the next hour, causing the mother to request the order be picked up instead. Shortly afterwards, the small Chinese woman received a call telling her that the pick up had been delayed. She listened in dumb shock as the caller explained that all of the taxis and delivery vehicles in a radius of blocks had been involved in freak accidents. All within minutes of when the order was due.
To the parent’s relief no-one was harmed in these accidents, though the passenger doors on each (thankfully empty) taxi were caved in.
The bakers made orders pick up only the next day. No catering commission was worth their lives.
Life moved on.
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They closed in on the 10 month mark and the universe was at it again.
They had been so careful.
They had kept strictly to their regular customers, taking on no new catering jobs, taking none of the opportunities that just so happened to fall into their laps.
Kept their day to day lives as regular as possible for new parents.
They had thought they were doing well.
Sabine had been waiting in the car with Marinette, enjoying some light classic rock while Tom did the grocery shopping. Nothing new, nothing fancy, nothing risking a new allergy.
The mother smiled as she saw him step out of the shop and begin to cross the car-park, then gasped as two cars back into him. At the same time.
Had it been anyone but her Tom (Like me, for example, her brain supplied) they might have died.
Thankfully Tom was built not unlike a grizzly bear, and proved it as he shoved the cars away from him, car bodies denting with the force.
He walked back to the car, dismissing the flustered drivers responsible for the collision, and got back into the car silently.
They ordered their groceries delivered the next week.
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It was Marinette’s birthday but Sabine knew better than to relax.
Her bright eyed, blue-haired babe had been born at 4 pm exactly (which on hindsight was a warning itself).
Looking at her watch, it was 3pm now.
The mother had her husband close the shop early.
At 3:30, Sabine had Tom take Marinette upstairs and barricade the room, crying as she ordered him to leave.
At 3:50, the mother sat with a cup of herbal tea in a vain attempt to calm her nerves.
At 3:53, she heard Marinette start crying and waited a minute to see if Tom had this.
At 3:54, she knew he did not.
At 3:55, the mother stood to aid her husband in calming their baby and had started up the stairs when a car ran through the wall, demolishing the table and chair she had been using.
Sabine stared blankly at the car half inside the house, listening dimly to the faint plink noise of cooling metal and steam before looking once more at her watch, feeling ice running through her veins as what just happened set it.
She dimly recalled that over that last week or so, her watch had been slightly off, slowing down somehow. One glance at a wall mounted clock told her it was off by 5 minutes.
The real time was 4:00pm exactly.
And there it was, Narrative Causality’s parting shot.
She had felt safe, that whatever was going to happen would occur at the last possible moment.
And it had.
And she hadn’t known it.
As Sabine listened to her husband discuss insurance with the driver, she found herself curled around her little girl, softly singing Joyeux anniversaire, and crying gently as Tom took her in his arms.
She knew that their work was far from over, but they had escaped the tragic backstory for now, and that was enough.