Chapter Text
“Why is your outline for that chapter so long? You do realize that’s the chapter I’m presenting on, right?”
Chloé gripped her pencil in her hands until it audibly cracked. “I’m writing down the important parts of the chapter. Just like the assignment sheet says. What is the problem?”
Marinette looked off to the side as if the remainder of her patience was lying dead near the windows. “The assignment sheet said to summarize the chapter. Not write down every single little detail. Our presentation is only ten minutes long. Which means we each have only three minutes to speak. So if you’re going to make it that long then how am I going to — ”
“Then you do it!” Chloé snarled. “Why are you presenting on my part of the report anyway?”
“Because you’re impossibly lazy and you wanted to present on the shortest chapter! Which means that now we have to read off of each other’s reports for the presentation and you’re making yours too long.”
“I told you to go to Mme. Bustier and tell her to switch our chapter assignments. But no, you waited until the last minute and now it’s too late.”
“I was perfectly happy with my assignment! You were the one throwing a hissy fit. You had to got to Mme. Bustier.”
“I was busy this week, that’s why I told you to go do it.”
“All you do is sit around and file your nails all day, you’re telling me you didn’t have time to go do it?”
Alya smacked her hand on the study table and made both of her study partners snap their heads up. “Both of you need to shut up.” Alya pointed her pencil at Chloé. “Your outline is too damn long, and you’re gonna get points off that. Tighten it up and stop complaining.” And pointed it at Marinette. “And you. Stop being condescending. That’s just going to start a fight and god help me if we don’t get through at least half the project before the period ends. So reign it in for two freaking seconds and just work.”
“You reign your friend in!” Chloé demanded. “She started it!”
“And I’m finishing it,” Alya said. “Now get back to work before I yank out the extensions I know you’re wearing.”
Chloé grabbed her hair and glared at Alya as if daring her to follow through on the threat. But Alya shoved her notebook against her chest and stared at her until Chloé went back to writing.
Mme. Bustier’s rationale behind the group assignments was that Marinette and Chloé needed to get used to working harmoniously with each other and Alya seemed like the perfect person to balance out their personalities and serve as a go-between so that the project would run smoothly. As much as she loved Marinette, Alya would’ve much preferred being paired with Adrien and Nino again over spending more than half the time ending petty arguments and getting no actual work done.
It was strange because Marinette was extremely level headed and polite when Chloé wasn’t in the room. But the moment the two of them were forced to be within a meter of each other, things got extremely ugly and Alya wasn’t sure if she had anymore patience for it today.
The most recent truce only lasted for fifteen minutes before Chloé sighed dramatically and pulled out a nail file from her pencil case. “Can we take a break?” she complained. “We’ve been at this for ages.”
“We’ve only been in the library for half an hour,” Marinette mumbled as she continued to annotate her textbook. “You’re not even halfway through the chapter yet.”
“Because history is a ridiculously exhausting subject,” Chloé huffed. “I’ll take as many breaks as I want.”
Marinette sighed. “You don’t care about doing well on this, do you?”
Chloé scoffed. “Absolutely not. I find the whole concept of homework to be redundant and insulting to my intelligence.”
Marinette rolled her eyes. “Yeah, that sounds like the exact kind of thing an intelligent person would say.”
Alya dropped her pen and pushed her glasses up to rub at her eyes. “We were doing so well….” she groaned.
“Excuse you, Dupain-Cheng, you seem to be forgetting who helped you with your maths assignments during the entirety of 9ème. You certainly appreciated my intelligence back then.”
“That doesn’t count, we were eight,” Marinette said. “Besides, the only reason you were doing well was because your father got you a maths tutor right when you started école. Which is totally cheating, by the way.”
“Don’t you insult Mlle. Huppert,” Chloé frowned. “She helped me with all of my homework until she graduated university. And, as I recall, she helped you too whenever you came to my house to play.”
“Again. We were eight. Apparently whatever Mlle. Huppert taught you didn’t rub off because here you are acting like a baby about a silly class project.”
“Just because I don’t see the point in homework doesn’t mean I’m not smart, you stupid brat.”
Alya had one of her brows raised during the entire exchange. “Wait a minute. You guys were in école together?”
Chloé leaned back in her chair. “Unfortunately…”
“What do you mean unfortunately?” Marinette asked. “We made friendship bracelets in arts and crafts together. You begged your father to keep us in the same class when we moved up to 8ème and 7ème.”
“I did not beg him!”
“You so did! You and I started crying on the last day of 9ème. We were hugging each other and refusing to go home because we didn’t want to be separated next year. Your father had to come in and pull string and keep you happy.”
Chloé returned her focus to her hangnail. “Ugh. Whatever.”
“Hold on. Hold on,” Alya announced. “You two need to backtrack for me really quick.”
Marinette made a show of pulling all her books closer and trying to get back to her reading. “It’s not a big deal, let’s just get back to work.”
Alya snorted. “So it’s fine to take breaks when you two want to fight but suddenly work is more important than talking about you two actually being civil when you were younger?”
Chloé shifted in her seat. “I mean….for the sake of accuracy….isn’t wasn’t just us being civil.”
“Can we seriously not do this?” Marinette begged.
“Too late,” Alya grinned. “I want an answer. What was your deal?”
Chloé’s face softened, and she looked at Marinette as if silently asking her whether or not it was okay to relay the details that Alya was asking for. Marinette got this sick look on her face like the words that were prepared on her tongue were going to make her retch, but she swallowed back the feeling and refused to meet Alya’s eyes when she went ahead and said, “We… were best friends in école.”
Alya’s eyes bulged. “What!?”
Marinette seemed reluctant to confirm but she nodded regardless. “We were in école together for three years before we came to Françoise Dupont. The two of us were practically inseparable.”
Alya leaned forward in her chair and darted her eyes in between the two girls who were awkwardly turning away from each other and sitting on the edges of their chairs. “You mean to tell me that the two of you stop just short of pouncing on each other whenever you’re in the same room, but six years ago you were trading friendship bracelets and were terrified to move up a grade without each other?”
Chloé spread her arms wide. “We. Were. Eight. Things were simpler back then.”
“How did you guys meet?” Alya asked in awe.
Marinette chuckled. “Chloé was defending my honor.”
“There were these three boys who were yanking on her braids on the first day of school,” Chloé explained. “So I marched over to them, pushed one of them into sandbox, and threatened to tell the teacher on them. I think Marinette was crying so I redid her braids, said her hair was pretty, and asked if we could be friends because it was a new school for me and I didn’t know anyone.”
“And we held hands all the way to the classroom, even when our teacher started to break us up into separate tables.” Marinette smiled softly. “I guess she didn’t have the heart to separate us up because she always sat us right next to each other from that day on.”
Alya eyes crinkled in amusement. “That’s quite possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Chloé shrugged. “We were really loud, we liked dressing up our dolls more than we liked playing with them, and we were the co-founders of the anti-boy club we started with the other girls in class. We were perfect for each other. Besides, up until then my only real friend had been Adrien. I was dying to have a girl best friend for once.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s why we hung out so much,” Marinette said, directing the comment at Chloé as if she’d just come to the realization. “Whenever you came to my house it seemed like you had a long list of things you wanted to do before you left. Like you were checking off a bucket list.”
“Oh definitely,” Chloé confirmed. “Adrien could never fit into my dresses and he hated watching princess movies with me. He liked watching those fighting animes more. So the first thing I did when you invited me to your house was pack all my dresses and princess DVD’s into a bag so that I could show them to you.”
“Now that you mention it, you were really intense about me liking those movies.”
“I had no one else to talk to about them.”
Marinette laughed. “Remember those fashion shows we used to put on?”
Chloé tipped her head back and cackled. “My mother walked in on us wearing her evening gowns and high heels and I think Marinette was wearing some of her lipstick.”
Marinette turned to Alya. “That was the start of my fashion designing career, by the way.”
“Seriously?” Alya exclaimed.
“Chloé had expensive taste, of course, and I always used to be amazed that there were people out there who could sew something so pretty with just their own two hands. And eventually I figured out that I wanted to be one of those people and make something pretty.”
Chloé nodded. “I got her a sewing kit for her 10th birthday I think. To get her started.”
Marinette blinked and hummed in thought. “You know….I think I may still have that. The pink one with the hearts and roses on it, right?”
“Yeah that’s the one.” Chloé tilted her head and furrowed her brows. “You kept that all these years?”
“It’s on my window sill,” Marinette said. “I still keep spools of thread in it.”
Chloé let out a long breath. “Oh….”
Marinette chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Is that….bad?”
“I mean I thought you threw it out or gave it away.”
Marinette shook her head. “Too pretty to throw out.”
A tentative silence grew between them as they sat with the revelation. It seemed like the reminder that Marinette might not want to keep anything Chloé had given her anymore had sobered them up and thrust them back into the reality of their current situation because they broke their gazes and turned back to their books, shoulders hunched and faces twisted in discomfort.
Their words were enough for Alya to feel the lingering intensity of their past friendship, and during those few precious moments of nostalgia, Marinette and Chloé had gotten along more beautifully than Alya had ever seen. Up until now, their rivalry had always felt like this petty, ridiculous, and at times hilarious attempt at breaking each other down because Marinette hated Chloé’s selfishness and Chloé hated Marinette’s popularity. Classic butting of heads. But seeing them look so thoroughly awkward next to each other made Alya decide that this was more tragic than anything else.
It probably wasn’t any of her business, but the reporter in her couldn’t help but ask the question. “Why did you stop being friends?”
Marinette rolled her eyes and flipped a page of her book. “Ask Chloé.”
“Don’t you start,” Chloé frowned.
“Start what?”
“Start your whole holier-than-thou, I-did-nothing-wrong, I’m-the-victim performance.”
“Excuse me?”
Chloé turned to Marinette again but kept her demeanor cold and distant. “I’m not the only one who screwed up, okay? You are completely incapable of thinking about anyone’s feelings aside from your own and you took it out on me.”
“ I took it out on you!?” Marinette was raising her voice. “You followed me to Fraçoise Dupont because you were dead set on making my life miserable like I’d wronged you somehow. Whatever happened between us when we were ten is no excuse for close to three years of being a complete monster.”
“You did wrong me!” Chloé countered. “You called me a terrible person and a horrible friend even though I did nothing to you!”
Alya was eyeing the librarian who was scowling at how loud their argument was getting. “Guys, okay, calm down — ”
Marinette snarled, “I never said that to you!”
“Yes you did!” Chloé insisted. “Don’t try to make it seem like I’m remembering it wrong because I remember it perfectly. You stood in front of me with half of our class behind you and said that you didn’t want to see me ever again because I was a terrible, horrible friend who didn’t care about you. Which is bullshit, Marinette, because I did care about you.”
Marinette scoffed. “You seem to forget that right before I said that, you pushed me away from you and said that you didn’t need some stupid, poor baker’s daughter trying to comfort her about things I could never understand.”
“I was angry!” Chloé explained.
“Angry about what?” Marinette asked. “You realize that I thought you hated me because you avoided me for close to two weeks and wouldn’t talk to anyone? Not even to me? I called your house everyday, I came to that hotel every single day. You didn’t want anything to do with me. I finally corner you one day and ask you to tell me what’s wrong, and you just snapped — ”
“No,” Chloé corrected. “No, that is not what happened. You came up to me and asked what was wrong and I told you to leave me alone because I didn’t want to talk about it. Then you went into this whole rant about how whatever it was, it couldn’t have possibly been so bad that I couldn’t call you or go to the movies with you. I had to just get over it. Because literally everything is about how you’re feeling and not about how I’m feeling.”
“I can’t read your mind Chloé! You wouldn’t tell me why you were upset. So yeah, I assumed it was something stupid.”
“I didn’t have to tell you anything! And how dare you assume it was something stupid.”
“I was ten!” Marinette exclaimed. “I didn’t know what the heck it was, stupid or not. And yeah, I was hurt that you were avoiding me. I mean, god, what was so bad that you treated me like I was some stranger you didn’t recognize.”
“My parents got divorced, alright?” Chloé finally shouted.
Alya felt her heart sink as she watched the horror slowly take over Marinette’s face. Chloé’s chest was heaving from the exertion of their argument and all the rage was beginning to simmer down into humiliation as she sunk into her seat. Chloé didn’t wait for Marinette’s response and instead started packing up her books. “I’m going home,” she muttered.
Marinette was still too stunned, looking at a point off into space. “You didn’t tell me that, Chloé….”
“Because you wouldn’t have understood.” Chloé’s voice was getting thick and Alya was too afraid to make herself known and try to stop this conversation before the two of them really hurt each other. “My mom left me, okay? She didn’t just leave my father. She got up and left and didn’t leave any way for us to contact her. She didn’t even tell me when she was leaving. I had to come home from school and listen to my butler tell me what happened. I was ten thinking my mother didn’t want me and that she regretted being part of a family with me, but no. Marinette needed a friend. Marinette needed to play with dolls. Marinette needed help with maths and wanted to gossip about stupidity while my life was falling apart.”
“That’s not fair!” Marinette cried out, and yes those were definitely tears welling up in the corners of her eyes. “I didn’t know, you can’t blame me for that.”
“No you didn’t know.” Chloé slung her bag over her shoulder and got up from her seat. “And you would never know. Because everyone loved you. Your mother loved you. Your friends loved you. Strangers loved you. There was never any doubt that people wouldn’t gravitate to you. Meanwhile, once I lost you and lost my mother, I had nobody.”
“So that’s why you started bullying me?” Marinette asked. “Because I made one mistake that you wouldn’t let me fix? Because you were jealous?”
“I wasn’t jealous!” Chloé snapped. “I wanted everyone to realize that you weren’t perfect. That you could be just as mean and nasty as I could.”
“I don’t pretend to be perfect. I never pretended to be perfect. We were both young and we both said stupid things, and you would punish us for that all these years later?”
Chloé blinked and cursed under her breath when she realized that there were tears rolling down her cheeks. “It wasn’t going to work, Marinette. Things happen for a reason, people leave for a reason. And as far as I’m concerned, they can stay gone. Because I don’t need friends or my mother or you to feel important. I do that just fine by myself. Because I’m amazing. And anyone would be lucky to know me.”
Marinette scowled. “So that justifies it? Justifies all the horrible things you do to everyone else, all the horrible things you do to me. None of us are as important as you are, so you’re just gonna step on us and make us feel horrible about ourselves until we see how brilliant you are by comparison? Until we know how it feels to be you?”
“Don’t pretend to know my life, Marinette!” Chloé snapped. “There you go again!”
The words were stuck in Marinette’s throat and they came out sounding broken. “I’m not pretending to know your life, I’m trying to understand what happened to you. I know you, I’ve known you longer than most people, and you were never cruel, not even for a moment. If you need me to apologize to fix this, then fine, I’ll apologize, but the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was understand how to make you stop all this and go back to being — ”
“What?” Chloé asked. “Being friends with you?”
Marinette swallowed and set her jaw. “Being you. We don’t have to be friends. If it’s too late for us, then fine. But I want you to go back to being the person who protected and defended this skinny, tiny little girl she didn’t even know without a second thought. Because I miss that person.”
Those last words made Chloé’s bottom lip tremble, and Alya felt like she was watching the two of them balance precariously over the edge of a huge chasm that had kept them separated for years. For a moment, it looked like something was about to shift. That maybe Chloé would join Marinette on the other side or that they’d at least meet in the middle and promise to revisit the thought. But Chloé gnawed down on her lip and breathed in through her nose as if she was composing herself and putting on the face she kept on for everyone who dared question her. And then Alya realized that whatever steps forward the two of them had just taken, Chloé had pulled them back right where they started with a single look.
“I’m going home,” she decided. “I’ll send you the report tonight.”
Marinette watched Chloé stomp out of the library and shut the door behind her hard enough to shake the frame. Marinette didn’t look hurt and she didn’t look angry. She looked discouraged — as if she’d finally realized that anything involving Chloé was bound to crumble to pieces, and that she would always be too helpless to stop it.
Alya cleared her throat. “Babe, are you okay?”
Marinete lifted her chin, squared her shoulders, and sat back down in her seat. “I’m fine,” she lied. “We can just finish without her.”