Chapter Text
“Fairies with gossamer wings / Bring forth beauty, grace and joyful things”
-Molly Friedenfeld
Pollen is, first and foremost, the worst.
That’s Chloe’s first impression, there, she said it. Stuck somewhere in between the oh my god I’m gonna be a superhero and oh my god I can fly is the realization that this little fuzzy yellow thing floating in front of her telling her about her magical duty or whatever is the actual worst.
She’s Despair Bear on steroids. A constant reminder of her failures as a person while also being annoyingly optimistic. Chloe almost wishes she’d gotten stuck with Plagg instead. Sure, he constantly smells like the moldy, rotting cheese that she knows he’s stashed somewhere under Adrien’s bed (how he can’t smell it is beyond her), but at least he didn’t sound like a jazzercise instructor from the eighties.
Still, she goes to bed with a smile on her makeup-free face. She stares up at the fan above her bed and, for the first time in years, recognizes the little star stickers Adrien had stuck up there when they were kids, sparkling behind the blades. The world is hot but right now it’s not bugging her.
Chloe falls asleep to the buzz of Pollen’s snores.
*.*.*
She awakes, bright and early, to a beeping comb. The beautiful golden hairpin shrieks like a crying baby. Skree! Skree! Skree! The sun has barely risen, but Chloe jumps up. She pulls her hair into a ponytail and shoves the comb in there before realizing she has absolutely no idea how to like… activate her powers.
She may or may not have been paying all that much attention the night before.
She looks over to Pollen, who is smirking with a smug upturned lip. “What do I say?”
“What do you say?”
See. The Worst.
“What do I say to become a hero? I wanna fly off of the roof! I wanna soar like a bird!”
Pollen shakes her head. “Like a bee, darling. Soar like a bee. There’s a magic phrase you have to say.”
“Yeah. I know,” Chloe rolls her eyes. “What is it?”
“What do you say?”
At this point Chloe is about frustrated enough to just jump off her balcony herself and hope her impending death is enough to get Pollen to stop messing with her. “THAT’S WHAT I’M TRYING TO ASK YOU!”
Pollen laughs. “No, darling. What’s the magic word?”
Somewhere in the back of her mind, a Teddy Bear winks at her.
“Oh,” Chloe says. “That magic word. I forgot about that.”
“I had a suspicion.” Pollen looks at her expectantly. “Go ahead.”
“Could you please tell me whatever the hell it is that I say to fly off of this balcony and help those poor unfortunate souls save themselves?”
“Baby steps,” Pollen mutters.
“Okay! Baby Steps!” Chloe waits for a transformation to happen, for her to lift off of the ground and sprout wings. Nothing happens.
Pollen groans. “No, no. That wasn’t- Nevermind, darling. The key words are: Buzz Off.”
Chloe smiles, and she thinks her cheeks might break. It’s so perfect. Absolutely and totally perfect.
“Buzz Off!”
It’s the fog that overtakes her first. Not in reality, but in her mind. Something slightly yellow fills her mind and she can feel her eyes gloss over. Chloe’s vision shifts out of focus for a second as something akin to ribbon begins to entangle first her arms and then her legs, spiraling all the way to her toes.
And then there’s the wings. They’re small, like wearing children’s dress up clothes. They buzz and hum from where they burst from her shoulderblades. Chloe feels the weight of a whole world slip off of her shoulders.
When the world shifts into focus again, she realizes she’s floating. Hovering a few feet off the ground, toes covered by a shimmery synthetic boot.
She turns to her balcony, the same balcony so many superheroes have been on before, and jumps off.
If you’d asked her before today, Chloe would’ve said she’s never thought about the feeling of climbing up the table out there, putting one foot and then another on the metal gating, and just jumping.
There’s a reason, though, why she does it so instinctually.
*.*.*
She’s late to the fight, as she thought she’d be, and Chloe would reprimand Pollen but she… can’t. There isn’t as much of a difference in this state between her and the yellow fuzzball of constant annoyance. Pollen is the wings on her back, the comb in her hair, the weight missing from her shoulder tendons.
For once in her life, Chloe’s anger is left targetless.
And then there’s Ladybug. And Volpina. And Chat Noir with his stupid stupid banana peel hair. They’re sparring with an akuma that looks vaguely like the man who brings post to the Agreste mansion every day. They’re fighting hard, but Chloe can just tell it isn’t enough from the many many akuma fights she’s seen.
She scans the scene with honeycombed vision, finds a weak spot, and flicks her trompo straight at it. The yellow weapon unravels at the speed of sound, and a trail of glowing energy rises in its wake. It hits the akuma right under his ribcage. He grunts in anger.
Immediately, Chat Noir and Ladybug stop what they’re doing and turn to look at her. Volpina keeps going, not looking at her. Chloe wonders if she can recognize her, if Nicola’s desire to ignore her goes beyond their civilian selves.
“Who are you?” Ladybug yells. Something like pride swells in Chloe’s gut.
She winks and salutes them. “Queen Bee at your service!” Then she recoils her trompo and aims it again. The akuma trips a bit over the trail of light, but catches himself.
“What are you all doing just standing around?” This time it’s Chloe’s turn to yell. “Don’t we have an akuma to fight?”
“We do,” Volpina says, but still declines to look at her. “We don’t know if we can trust you, however.”
Chloe rolls her eyes at the irony. Wasn’t her whole point of coming here because Ladybug and Chat Noir wouldn’t trust new people?
“I say we give her a chance.” Ladybug smiles at Chloe and she can feel her heart rate rush in time with the beating of her wings. “After all,” she tells Volpina. “We gave you one.”
*.*.*
The fight does not go exactly all that well. It drags on. Longer than it should with four people. Chloe’s still uncertain about most of her powers. She throws her trompo at the wrong angles. The four of them jump and run into each other, not yet used to a larger team.
Eventually, though, they destroy the akuma with Ladybug’s light. And then promptly run off when all of their devices start beeping.
Chloe checks her comb. It’s not beeping. She wonders if there’s something wrong, only to realize that she has more time. Coming late gave her something after all. She surveys the streets around her only to see a familiar Hawaiian shirt round the corner.
She follows him, wings beating, heart still racing from Ladybug’s probably undeserved trust in her. The man in the Hawaiian shirt is holding something. Gabriel Agreste’s book. Bound just as she remembers. This man, the man who she’d saved, must be Fu. That Fu. The Fu Nicola wouldn’t let her steal from.
Chloe can feel the gears in her mind turning, but no conclusion follows. Instead, she stalks him from street to street, needing to get her hands on that book. The book that might have all the answers.
He enters a massage shop, with an ornately carved wooden door. Chloe peeks inside to see a large room divider, a suspiciously beautiful gramophone, and a series of wooden cupboards with flowers carved into them. Fu unlocks the cabinets with an intricate amount of key moving and locks the book back inside.
Chloe doesn’t think she could remember the order of the keys if she tried, but now, at least, she knows where it is.
Still, this guy chose her. He thought she was worthy of these wings, of this second chance. Is it really right if she repays that favor by taking his book from him?
Life isn’t fair, Chloe thinks. Mom leaving wasn’t fair. It’s his fault for putting so much faith in someone he barely knows.
She doesn’t take the book, though. Not right then. Instead, she listens to the fading beeping of her comb, and falls back into the alleyway around the corner.
As the honey-scented fog of being Queen Bee falls away from her and Pollen reappears, Chloe feels that weight return. First on her shoulders then on her heart. The joy she’d felt from Ladybug fades too, dripping slowly, agonizingly, away until all that’s left is that hollowness from the other day.
Immediately, she craves the sensation of flight again, but Pollen looks exhausted.
Chloe sighs. “Let me take you home,” she says, and she cups her kwami in the palm of her hand. She walks with her all the way to the Lourve and then waits for her driver to come pick her up.
It’s only later, when she’s sitting on plush leather and watching the city pass by her window, that she realizes she’s still barefoot. Still in her pajamas. Still with no makeup and messy bedhead.
Chloe groans and hopes no one saw her.
*.*.*
The first thing she notices when she wakes up is the burning in her legs. Like the age spreading through her the other day, but different. It twinges and fades and comes back. She can see, she can breathe, but can’t quite feel right.
“Exercise will do that,” Pollen offers in explanation. Chloe groans.
“I didn’t think it would affect me in real life!” she complains. “It’s not like I can do those flips without the suit on!”
“There’s a period of training,” Pollen tells her. “Where your skills in the field and your skills out of the field aren’t equal. The purpose of your pain right now, darling, is so that your muscles learn how to do those flips without the suit on too.”
“Why, though? It’s not like I’m fighting anyone with like Kung Fu when I’m lounging around the hotel.”
Pollen’s face falls serious. “It’s going to get harder,” she warns. “More dangerous. Your civilian selves need to know how to fight too. Just in case.”
Chloe makes a face. “In case of what?”
“I can’t tell you that.”
She’s about to press her further when a familiar pair of black pleathered legs land on her carpet. Chat Noir smiles when he sees her and then Adrien smiles too, the black cat fading away.
He promptly runs over and tackle-hugs her.
“According to all known laws of aviation,” Adrien starts, cheshire grin beginning to consume his entire face. “There is no way that a Chloe should be able to fly…”
Chloe groans and pushes her head into her pillow. “Is this your fun idea of waking me up?”
“Well,” he replies, “I’m having a lot of fun with it.”
She pushes down on her mattress, trying to lift herself up so he might get off of her, but her arms are suddenly engulfed in the pain of a thousand bee stings. She gives up. “Does it always hurt this much?”
Adrien stands up. “At first, yeah. It wasn’t fun. I told my dad I was just practicing fencing more but… yeah. I wish I could say it gets better.”
Chloe groans again at the thought of more of this, of waking up like this every day for who knows how long.
“Chlo, though! You can fly!”
Chloe frowns. “You don't know that that was me.”
Adrien looks her dead in the eyes. “Chloe, I’ve known you my entire life. You put yourself in my phone as Queen B. It wasn’t hard to figure out.”
Suddenly, there’s a prickliness behind the pain. Something anxious buzzes in her gut.
“How do you feel about it?” Chloe asks, tentative.
Adrien bursts into another smile. “You deserve it, Chlo. You deserve it so so much. You look- I haven’t seen you look this happy Ladybug-absent in so long.”
Despite the pain, Chloe can feel what he’s talking about. “Yeah…” she says. “I am, I think. I like feeling like I earned something. Like it’s mine.” She frowns. “What does Ladybug think?”
Adrien nods. “She’s… unsure,” he says. “You did a good job, for a newbie. The last Volpina freaked us out, though, Chlo, you’ve gotta understand that. And… another addition to the team wasn’t exactly in Nicola’s contract.”
“So she doesn’t know it’s me?”
“Nope. Good thing, too, considering… It’s just. Her last Ladybug and Chat Noir- They never had another team member. She isn’t exactly an expert at fighting with four if you didn’t notice.”
“I don’t know,” Chloe says. “I thought she did a good job. It was me that was mostly messing up.” She then sits up immediately. “Don’t you dare tell anyone I said that, though! Let the record show I did an amazing job!”
Adrien ignores the second part of her statement. “Well,” he says, “Beauty is in the eye of the Bee Holder.”
Chloe throws a pillow at him.