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Chloe doesn’t quite remember the break up.
It’s, for lack of a better word, hazy. There was alcohol involved and hitting of a Agreste 2021 Spring Collection Limited Edition handbag and also she’s pretty sure Alya’s new book was tossed across the room and might’ve been what broke the lamp.
Whatever. It’s whatever. She got it out of her system a few hours ago, after screaming “Why the fuck can’t anything in my life go right?” from the giant intricately golden balcony attached to her hotel suite for about 15 minutes straight.
There was something about Queen Bee too. Something about “keeping secrets” and “large parts of your life that you didn’t tell me about” and “what the fuck Chloe, I thought we were in this together” but, you know, it’s whatever. She’ll get a manicure and get over it and the tabloids will be right about how she has commitment issues and daddy issues and All The Issues.
When the top coat has dried, and she’s sitting in the white leather chairs of her nail salon of choice knowing that the entire world is just absolutely waiting for what she has to say about the situation, she writes a tweet:
@alyacesaire (she has the nerve to be verified now. Actually literally verified by Twitter dot com. Chloe is endlessly frustrated by this fact): great book. bounces off of other people’s heads very well. 10/10. i hear it’s written well too.
And from there the book becomes involved with the breakup. Chloe spends a lot of time screaming off her balcony. Her neighbors, she thinks, must be incredibly lucky.
“You’re not supposed to be messing with the kids, Chloe.”
Adrien, bless his heart, sounds just a little bit like someone who should be barbecuing for his kids when he speaks on the phone these days. Personally, Chloe thinks it's the flannel. She can hear him wearing it. Even from here. It’s aging him.
“You’re not supposed to be messing with the kids, Chloe,” she - very maturely - mimics back to him before whipping back behind the corner. “Shit. Shit. I think she saw me.”
Adrien laughs. “What did I say?”
“What did I say, Chloe? Shut up. They’re going to hear you too.”
Tiny Bee, as she’s taken to calling her - Queen Bee is the name of one person and one person only in her mind - is currently up against an akuma the likes of which she’s seene a ton. Streetwalker his name is… she thinks. He was a door to door salesman at one point maybe. Chloe wouldn’t know. She’s never had to deal with one outside of akuma form before.
The girl in black and yellow waves around her scepter with all the carefulness of a teeny-bopper. It does almost absolutely nothing. “Flick it!” Chloe calls out, finally absolutely done with staying silent. “Flick your wrist a little harder!”
Tiny Bee jumps for a second, but obeys her command. A light flashes. The scepter works as usual.
Afterwards, Chloe buys her a coffee and passes Alya’s book across the table. “Wanna know a secret?” she asks, and likes the way the honey swirls around in her tea. The younger girl leans across the table, eagerly, and Chloe lifts up her pinky finger to reveal a tiny tattoo of a bee.
“You’re B…” Tiny Bee whispers, almost awestruck. Chloe prides herself on her reveal capability, despite the fact that she can actually hear her ex’s voice in the back of her head, saying something along the lines of so you could tell her but you couldn’t tell me? Whatever.
Chloe winks. “At your service?” She’d curtsy if she wasn’t sitting down.
“Alya never specified… You were the only one. Everyone else has guesses, of course. Adrien Agreste as Chat Noir was fairly obvious by the end. Marinette Dupain-Cheng as Ladybug, too. Even Nino Lahiffe and Jade Turtle… But you… No one could guess you.”
She does a little flip of her hair and then frowns at the color. Maybe she should get caramel balayage again. “How would you feel about a trainer?”
Tiny Bee almost falls over in her seat.
The reveal of Gabriel Agreste as Hawkmoth came with the book. Not out-rightly, but underneath the surface. It bubbled and boiled, racing head to head with Chloe’s broken engagement and so-called “lesbian affair” for the head of the tabloid papers. Somehow, Mr. Agreste never seems to have found out about the endeavor. Chloe saw the teeny-boppers hoarding newspapers once. She supposes they might’ve had something to do with it.
Alya is less than pleased that the least obvious of her characters’ identities has been revealed. She subtweets a few times. Chloe very blatantly likes all of them. Marinette tries to tell her off for it and Chloe just rolls her eyes. It isn’t until Alya Cesaire flat out calls her, at what must be four in the morning in New York City, absolutely fuming that Chloe feels a little tinge of remorse about it.
“I hid you so carefully,” she shouts. “You were my… My Mona Lisa’s smile! My great mystery! People were supposed to spend years trying to figure it out.”
Chloe files her nails again with the hand not holding the phone. “And they’ll still do it. What does it matter if Tiny Bee knows.”
“She has a name.”
“Yeah, I know. It’s Amber. A for adorable. A for angel-”
She can hear Alya’s eye roll over the phone. “A for this was supposed to be Alya Cesaire’s great mystery, goddammit. You can’t just go around telling people my secrets.”
“I think you mean my secrets.” Chloe scoffs. “Shouldn’t I be the one who cares about whether or not people know I was Queen Bee?”
Alya grumbles something under her breath.
“I’m sorry. What was that?”
“I didn’t think you cared much about anything at all, Chloe. Especially not after what happened recently. BTW, my book is for reading, not throwing at your girlfriend.”
“Ex-girlfriend,” Chloe clarifies.
Alya sighs. “Yeah, I know. I read the papers.”
“Well, for your information, I care a little bit about a little bit of things. Amber is one of them. As for the purpose of your book… That’s somewhere in between Whatever Happened to Lila and Whether Or Not Kim and Max Are Getting Married Too Young. Kapiche?”
“No one even says that anymore,” Alya says. And then hangs up. Chloe’s not entirely sure why, but she feels a little bit like she won.
That is, she does until she checks Twitter and sees an incredibly spiteful tweet from Alya that just says “heading to paris. have some babysitting to do.”
I’m not a baby. Chloe texts her. She doesn’t get a response.
A month into training Amber, Chloe is forced into a brunch that she does not want to go to. She sits there, arms crossed and surly as Amber asks Alya question after question. About halfway through her potatoes, Chloe wraps her arm around the younger girl, stares Alya dead in the face and mouths mine.
Alya mouths back. Person.
Chloe would like to say she’s not bothered, except she hasn’t felt any word close to family in quite a little bit now (if she really wanted to get sad and dark she would say she hasn’t since that one rainy day years and years ago, but Chloe’s not dark and sad). Amber feels a little bit like that. Chloe looks at her and sees ways to make wrongs right. The girl in a makeover movie. Her younger self. Something.
It didn’t help that she said her mom died when she was young. Chloe got a little too invested after that.
“Is it true?” Amber asks. “Did Ladybug and Chat Noir really live happily ever after?”
Chloe thinks of Marinette and Adrien, their tip-toeing around each other. It’s hardly something she’d call a relationship, much less a happily ever after. Honestly, she loves both of them, but if they were smart, she figures they’d stay far away from each other.
But maybe that’s just her. She’s always been more of a run-away type person than anything else.
“Absolutely,” Alya smiles.
“And you and Jade Turtle?”
Chloe is almost tempted to blurt out the whole not-so-secret of Marinette and Nino dated for like two years, but she doesn’t, because she loves Amber. Wanting to watch Alya fumble over her carefully-crafted happy ending almost wins out, though.
Alya chokes on that happy ending. Chloe watches her cover it with a laugh. “We’re still good friends.”
Amber’s face falls a little. Oh well. Better the girl figure out not all happy endings are forever now than later. It’s that little mistake that lead Chloe so far off the beaten path. She huffs. If only the garden society girls could see her now.
“So you’re like Miss Bourgeois, then,” Amber says. Alya raises her eyebrows at the Miss Bourgeois. Chloe gives her a shit-eating grin. “Looking for love.”
Alya’s eyebrows get a little higher on her face. “I guess so. Yeah. I don’t think I’ve ever thought of it that way before.”
“Well we were both head over heels for Ladybug,” Chloe reminds her, raising her tea in toast to the whole thing. “Cheers to that messing up our love lives for all time.” Amber happily clinks their glasses together.
“Yeah…” Alya mutters. “Cheers to that.”
The thing Chloe doesn’t explain to Amber about her time as a hero is that originally it wasn’t all of them. They were not chosen all at once like this group of kids was. Amber already knows this from Alya’s book, of course, but she doesn’t really know, not really, what it was like for Chloe to look out her window and see Ladybyg swinging across the skyline of Paris. Red and black and everything Chloe wanted. She doesn’t explain what loving her was like. Only a select few know that.
Adrien knows. Adrien knows but he would always know. The way Chat Noirs always know. He knows rooftops at midnight and long-forgotten kisses and the way it feels to watch your girlfriend shatter the memories of her father.
Chloe doesn’t know it that way. Her version of loving Ladybug was entirely made of hidden glimpses and then stolen touches and being the Most Obnoxious and Annoying as she possibly could be just to get her to please stay a second more, please? Alya was the only one who knew that way of loving.
They never bonded over it, though. Chloe supposes that was fate. The same fate that tossed Adrien and Marinette at each other carelessly and then tore them apart the same way only to do it again and again and again.
Amber comes to her eventually with a story of a crush, and it’s not on one of the other heroes, but a classmate, and Chloe breathes a sigh of relief because she’s still not ready to tell that story.
She calls Alya up later that night, despite her only being a few miles away in a different hotel - she’d claimed she wouldn’t stay in Chloe’s hotel even if her boss paid her to - and tries to explain the feeling to her, that shared unspoken thing. The sky looks almost purple, rich like the wine in Chloe’s glass that she swirls around as she talks. She thinks of her ex.
“How am I going to tell her that story?” she asks, before taking another long sip of wine.
Alya isn’t going to know the answer, Chloe knows this. If she knew the answer she would’ve already told the story - wrote it in that book of hers. Or a different one at least, now that she’s a relatively-established author. A love story maybe. Ha. That would be funny. As if any of Alya’s relationships have come even close to a novel-worthy material.
Not that any of Chloe’s have either.
Chloe hears the sound of Alya’s keyboard long before she hears her actual answer. She’s writing, maybe, or looking something up. She’s always doing one of the two.
“I don’t know, Chlo,” Alya says. Chloe forgets when she started calling her that. It used to be just a nickname Adrien used. Nowadays its user base rotates up and down depending on whether or not Chloe’s dating. She thinks she might like the way Alya says it, though - short and curt. Like it’s less of a pet name and more of a way to make her life easier.
“If I knew, well, you would’ve thrown two of my books at your ex. Not just one of them.”
It’s not funny, it’s really not, but Chloe laughs anyways. Maybe it’s because she’s in the same apartment and her ex isn’t here anymore but Alya is, kind of - at least her voice is. And it’s not quite a replacement, but, for the first time in a long time, the thought of her as someone other than the Most Extravagant Pest crosses Chloe’s mind.
“I don’t know why I’m laughing,” Chloe responds. “That wasn’t even funny. Stop making me laugh at things that aren’t funny.”
“Tell her that it’s life,” Alya says, after a while. “That sometimes in life we fall in love with people we really really shouldn’t. Sometimes it’s unrequited, sometimes it’s not. Sometimes it’s with someone you used to hate a whole bunch.”
“What?”
“Goodnight, Chloe.”
Afterwards, when she’s hung up, when Chloe’s glass of wine is drained and her eyes are drooping and she should probably start taking off her makeup, her eyes drift to that book. That damned book that started it all. Alya’s book.
You were my Mona-Lisa’s smile.
It’s a weird thing to be proud of, but she’s proud of it, in a way.
Alya leaves too soon.
Funny, Chloe wouldn’t have said that on the first day, but she’s grown on her a little. She’s grown on the kid a lot. Amber nearly cries at the airport, and fully breaks down in the car, talking about “meeting her heroes” and all that nonsense.
It’s not fair, Chloe thinks. Couldn’t she have stayed just one more day? Amber would’ve felt better. It would’ve been better. She would’ve felt- Well, Chloe doesn’t know what she would’ve felt.
Alya Cesaire is a box that she’s checked “it’s complicated” ever since their secret identities as the newest team members were first revealed. It got worse and messier in college when Marinette and Nino were doing their thing. And better when Adrien came back. And then worse again. And then better. The cycle repeating endlessly until they’d spiraled into this exact moment in time.
Chloe looks at her metaphorical box, paints over it with her signature pink pearl nail polish and says “I’ll think about it tomorrow.”
“Do you think she’ll come back?” Amber asks, after they turn the corner away from the airport.
Chloe ponders it. Eventually, she’s sure she will. If any significant developments - positive or negative - happen in Marinette’s life she probably will. Maybe if Gabriel Agreste finally figures out how to clear the fog around his memories. But probably not for a while.
“Maybe,” she tells Amber. “Eventually. Probably. She’ll write another book eventually, I’m sure.”
Amber shakes her head vigorously. Her tiny ponytail whips back and forth with the motion. “No, I mean. Like this. Like just for fun.”
Chloe scoffs. “She wasn’t here just for fun. She was here because she doesn’t trust me. Most of them don’t. Can’t blame them - I don’t trust most of them either.”
“That’s not what she said when I asked her.” Amber pouts.
“Whatever.”
Chloe stares out the window of the moving car. She moves her hair out of her face. Adjusts. Closes her eyes and opens them again. The view doesn’t change in those few seconds. Her thoughts don’t either.
“Why did she say she was here?” Chloe finally asks, turning back to look at Amber.
Amber looks up at her, young eyes big and hopeful. The kind of big and hopeful Chloe doesn’t think hers ever were. She shrugs.
“She wanted to see you.”
The thing about staying in Paris, Chloe realized about a month into her first year at university, was that it meant staying in Paris with Nino and Marinette. She had friends, sure. The garden club. The brunch society. The seventeen other heiresses who she should’ve gotten along swimmingly with except she didn’t because could be a little bit terrible to be around sometimes. (Although, if she was being honest they were terrible to be around too).
Marinette and Nino were different, though. They were friends who knew what it had been like on that grey day with all the rain when Gabriel Agreste turned to dust and back again. They knew rooftops. And wind. And all of her weak spots in a fight.
Somewhere in there she’d gotten a little bit tangled up with their lives.
So, when she crashes one of their pancake breakfasts and brings up her dilemma - all hypothetical, of course- the two of them are very nice and pretend that Chloe is not the Most Obvious Person Ever when she’s thinking about possibly dating someone.
“Well, Chloe,” Marinette starts, which is never a good sign, if Chloe’s being honest. “You could always just try talking to her.”
Chloe rolls her eyes. “Okay Miss I’m-Gonna-Hold-A-Grudge-For-Five-Years, yes I’m definitely listening to your relationship advice.”
“Not fair, Chloe,” Nino interrupts. “You asked us, remember?”
“I remember,” Chloe grumbles. “I just forgot that you two are totally unqualified in this department.”
This time Marinette’s the one to roll her eyes. Chloe watches her make a point of eating her pancake very noisily.
“What department?” she asks when she’s finally swallowed her bite.
Chloe rubs her hand on her temple. “The department of her. She’s… I mean it took you two like three years to tell her. How long is it supposed to take me?”
The two of them stop dead cold. Apparently she wasn’t being as obvious as she’d thought she was.
“Well shit, Chloe,” Nino finally says after a few seconds of silence. “Alya? Really?”
Chloe hides her face behind a hand. “Yes, really. I think.”
“Really!” Marinette sounds a little too overjoyed. Chloe is beginning to regret this conversation by the moment.
Nino leans across the table. “Well then there’s only one thing you can do: send her a song.”
She wasn’t originally going to take his dumb advice, but everything else just seemed too… defeated. They were rivals, first, before anything. Over ladybug. And then over Marinette. And then over things like class president when Marinette got too busy for it. And then it just continued. Spiraled. They tend to do things like that.
This is a kind of defeat, she supposes. If it’s mutual then it’s mutual defeat and Chloe won’t have to scrape her ruined pride off of the ground with a plastic fork. If it’s not, though… Well, she’d rather not try too hard then.
So, she takes Nino’s terrible advice and texts Alya a song. It’s some old thing from the seventies. The lyrics are weird and messy but every time she’s heard it this week it’s reminded her of her and Alya and Amber, sitting around a table in the hotel garden, playing cards. The chorus especially. She can just feel Alya kicking her leg every time she cheated.
Adrien’s advice was a little less obvious. He’d been back at his place near the vineyard and Chloe had felt it. The disconnectedness. The flannel, too, but that wasn’t relevant. He’d told her to just be honest, and wait it out.
Ugh. Adrien and Marinette and their “don’t go about this in the most roundabout way possible” advice. This is why they keep messing up together, she figures: too much straightforwardness.
Alya sends back some Indie song about being “oceans away” from someone. Chloe spends about half an hour analyzing the lyrics. Then she sends back an Amy Winehouse song.
They trade songs for a day and a half. Chloe’s about to search through her music for another one when Amber comes rushing in, hands a little bruised, dragging an unconscious kid in a fox mask behind her.
“There’s something wrong with his kwami!” she half-yells half-whimpers and Chloe’s hit with one of those rare realizations that they really are just kids - that she was once just a kid just this small fighting things so big. “I don’t know- Chloe, I didn’t know who else to go to. Fu’s missing somewhere and I just… I just thought maybe you would know the answer.”
Chloe holds Amber close to her, in a hug tighter than any she’s given possibly since she last sent Adrien off. She strokes her hair, holds her tight, and dials Alya’s phone number.
“Hey Chloe,” Alya says when she picks up. She sounds a little snarkier than usual. “Finally tired of playing song tag?”
“Alya,” she starts.
“Yes, Chloe? Anything you’d like to say to me?”
“Alya, I’m serious. Stop fooling around. Amber just dragged in the fox kid. She said something about his kwami being hurt. Alya, it’s your kwami. Surely you have some sort of answer…”
Alya’s tone immediately changes. “How fast can you get me there?”
“We have a jet in Albany,” Chloe answers.
“Of course you do.”
“I’ll let them know you’re coming, just. Just hurry, Alya. Okay?”
Alya laughs a little, but it’s shaky. “Okay, Chloe,” she says. “I’m coming.”
By the time Alya shows up at the hotel, in a sleek black coat carrying a folder full of loose leaf papers that Chloe presumes are all her old research, Amber says they have a lead on where Fu might be.
Chloe watches Alya weave her way between the teeny-boppers who have set up camp in her suite as she comes over to the couch where the young boy and his kwami lay, both pale as death.
“Thank you,” Chloe mouths when she sees her. Alya nods.
The two of them scan through Alya’s notes for hours, ignoring the operation going on around them. Kids come in and out. Chloe considers pausing to do background checks on them but she supposes if they steal anything their kwamis will probably just make them return it. That’s what Pollen would always do, anyways.
Alya’s close, Chloe realizes. Too close. Their shoulders keep brushing and she knows they’re both leaning over the same folder, going through the same papers, but it shouldn’t have to be this way. She shouldn’t be able to feel her breath on her neck.
Chloe shakes it off. She can think about this later. When they’ve saved the kid.
A paper in the center of the stack catches her eye. One with a picture of different colored rings. She only notices because, for a little bit there, she’d been looking for rings. But that engagement seems light years away now.
Chloe pulls out the stack and holds it up to her fluorescent lights. Nothing.
From the corner of her eye, the full moon glimmers. Chloe shifts towards it and holds the paper up there. Hidden in between the page full of rings, Chloe can see a second paper - an incredibly thin one - containing a page full of thick text.
She nudges Alya’s shoulder and the other woman looks over. She frowns, pulls out her glasses, and begins to read the words out loud.
They blur together, honestly. They blur because Chloe’s been working on this for just over eight hours. They blur because she only ever half-listened when Pollen talked so the intricate details of how her powers worked never really stuck with her. They blur because she knows Alya’s picking apart each word.
One specific word does catch her eye, though: memory.
“Stop,” Chloe says. “Go back. What did it say about memories?”
Alya frowns but obliges. “If pressured too hard through illusion magic, one with magic-induced amnesia can let out a cloud of memory dust. This dust can be poisonous to a kwami caught off-guard.”
“That’s gotta be it!” Chloe yells. About half the teeny-boppers look over at her. “What do you think, Amber? You were with him.”
Amber purses her lips. “The old man did cough something out. Something purple and dusty.”
Alya nods. She moves to read the rest of it. “A cure does exist, however. It can be created by mixing the kwami’s desired food, an object belonging to the amnesiac, and saltwater. This will create a broth that must be fed to the kwami-holder, whose soul-connection will help heal the kwami.”
“Soul connection?” Chloe asks, incredulous. “Okay, someone needs to re-write this. Or like write a handbook or something.”
“My next project,” Alya swears. “I’ll do that next. Just… tell me that you have something from the Agreste fall line.”
Chloe winks. “I’ll do you one better,” she says. “I already have the winter line.”
“Are you willing to rip it up and put it in a broth?”
“Fall line it is!”
Amber’s friend comes back to life coughing and sputtering. His kwami comes back in a similar fashion. Chloe and Alya give them all one giant lecture about not messing with Gabriel Agreste ever again. At some point in the lecture Alya makes a quip about them not having to rip up half of Chloe’s wardrobe to save these damn kids. She laughs at her own joke and Chloe’s eyes follow the upturn of her smile.
The night suddenly feels agonizingly long. Chloe shoos the kids out of her apartment almost too fast.
“So… Amy Winehouse?” Alya asks, when they’ve left.
“Shut up,” is Chloe’s eloquent response to that.
Alya nudges her shoulder. “I was going to ask you about it earlier, but…”
“Yeah, they’re… they’re a handful.”
“I’m glad you called me.”
There’s something about red hair under moonlight that Chloe has just realised she likes in these past few months. Not Nathanael’s red, but this red. Alya’s red. The red that fades and bobs in and out. It’s beautiful, in a way Chloe never would’ve thought. Then again, though, she’s not an artist. She’s a hotel heiress.
“I’m glad I called you too.”
Alya smirks. “Does this mean you caved first.”
“What- I never! For the record, I did not cave. That was just. Amber was in trouble and-”
“How many more songs would it have taken then, Miss Bourgeois? This reporter would like to know.”
“This reporter can go fuck her-”
“Shh.” Alya steps forward and puts a finger over Chloe’s mouth. With her other hand, she gestures to the one last straggling teeny-bopper, trying to lug out what remains of Chloe’s fall collection Gabriel scarf. “Kids, remember?”
“I’m a lady,” Chloe objects. “I can say fuck if I want-”
This time, it’s not Alya’s finger on her mouth that cuts her off, but her lips. Chloe breathes into it, soft and steady and only slightly caught off-guard. She tries to remember how the whole kissing thing works - it’s been a little bit - and accidentally steps on one of Alya’s toes.
They break apart in a fit of quiet giggles. Chloe finds her smile again and then captures it with her lips, finally remembering how to do that thing she’d wanted to do for so so long.
“I win,” Chloe says, in the end.
“In your dreams,” Alya responds, although she sounds a little bit breathless. “I’m the one who’s verified on twitter.”
“Oh shut up.” Chloe says. And then she kisses her again.