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“You know, kit, I don’t mind too much what you do as long as I get to eat my cheese, but you do know that if you sharpen your claws against every available surface, eventually you’ll have nothing around you?”
“That is ridiculous. What’s the purpose of a claw if it isn’t sharp?”
Plagg flashes his teeth at her. “Sweets, just because you have claws doesn’t mean you always need to use them. There is such a thing as too much of a good destruction. Even blue cheese can spoil.”
Chloe rolls her eyes. “You love hearing yourself talk, huh?”
“Yeah, ‘cause I’m very wise. That’s why I know when it’s time to take out my claws and when it’s time to stop scratching people.”
Chloe doesn’t dignify that with a response.
The handsome fox in front of her is stilted when he bows – a bit too forced, a bit too comical for her taste (a bit too spotlight-grabbing) – and Noire Royale’s smile is thin ice someone can very easily fall through.
“And who is this?”
“Orionard, my–”
Her fangs must be glaring, threatening to crack the top.
“I wasn’t talking to you.”
Chancinnel doesn’t flinch. “Orionard’s ability is to create illusions, Chloe. We’ll use that to our advantage with the Sapotis. Here’s how–”
Chloe listens to the plan with one ear and to the steady beating of her own heart with the other – thudthudthud, an armed battalion riding up her throat and threatening to spill over from her eyes. Chancinnel doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed at having implied the two of them aren’t enough for this.
She can feel poison, at the core of it. She tells herself it’s the effect of the miraculous – this always happens.
(Liar, liar, liar, says a voice that sounds suspiciously like Plagg – her stupid, stupid, ridiculously stupid kwami that’d had the audacity to look at her and say you’re one of the mice who play at being cats, aren’t you? the first time he’d come out of the damned box.
Poison isn’t how I roll, sweetcheeks. That’s all you.)
“I’ll go on ahead,” she says, not waiting for a response, not staying to triumph at Chancinnel’s stunned look as she does so. “Nice of you to try and figure it all out, as per usual , but if these kids are anything like their sister, a little more of a beating could only help them.”
“Chloe–”
But she can’t hold back.
So she lunges straight into the crowd of small, ugly gnomes and bashes as many of them as she can with her baton and throws the occasional one in the direction of a familiar shape and doesn’t, doesn’t, doesn’t think–
but still activates her Cataclysm when Luka shouts at her, instinctively stretching it out where he wants it before he can say where that is
–and just like that, the battle is over, and the magic ladybugs are sweeping through the city and her tired body. Chloe’s breath briefly catches when she sees the giant amusement park that wasn’t in the Parisian skyline a moment before, but it quickly releases when the illusion dissipates. The ringing of Orionard’s timer as he lands somewhere to her left is deafening.
“Go find an alley to detransform in. I’ll meet you in a bit,” Chancinnel tells him from behind her, and the fox lunges off as she turns to face her partner.
She knows he can’t stand her. In moments like these, it’s very clear on his face just how much. She lifts her chin up and stares him down. If they won’t love you, you need to get them to respect you anyway.
(Plagg keeps telling her that being in sync with her partner shouldn’t be hard. Chloe doesn’t think she should believe him.)
“That was incredibly reckless and irresponsible. You can’t keep doing this, Chloe. We’re not heroes for ourselves in this, we’re heroes of Paris.”
He doesn’t say I’m only dealing with you because I have to be. He might as well have.
Bully for him.
“Big heroes we are, using the help of a user of a third-grade miraculous,” she says, but can’t stop herself from flickering to check for the shadow of a carnival palace. “We could have handled this on our own. An illusion can’t take the akuma from a person.”
At this, he actually pinches himself on the bridge of his nose, as if trying to figure out how to reason with her. A knife drops in her stomach: her mother, her fifth birthday, a careless mistake–
“Trying to save the entire city on our own is hard when we can’t even work together as a team.”
Oh, that is rich.
“Really,” she says, and this time, the honey in her tone makes him flinch, “what team, pray tell? The one where the only plans we need to follow through on are the ones you come up with because you’re the great ladybug user who can handle it all on his own and I’m the poor, stupid, spoiled Black Cat who is too impulsive to think of a plan? Tell me, are you thinking about asking for my input one of these days, or will you continue to treat me like just another lucky charm you can get to perform magic tricks so that you can win?”
He’s looking at her. He’s still angry, that much is certain (your point doesn’t negate his point; this time the voice is Adrien’s, and she bites down on the hurt), but there is something else twisting his face now, something like regret.
Chloe wants to cry. She wants to scream at him for being so damn virtuous. For being unable to make up his mind on whether he hates her or not. Whether he should treat her like a force of nature he just has to contend with or a–
(–Chloe doesn’t remember when she became a tornado. She doesn’t know what she is without the storm; she only knows she can’t survive outside of it, in her own human skin, the one that hurts when her mother slaps her and that she prefers adorned with expensive clothes and jewelry to hide the softness of her person.)
“Chloe, I don’t think this–”
“I don’t care what you think,” she says, extending her baton at the same time and letting the night carry her away from his voice.
(Liar, liar, liar.)
Dupain-Cheng’s boyfriend is… sweet, she supposes is the polite term for it. Boring is what Chloe herself would use. Unobtrusive, generic, predictable: he only gets mad when her honour gets questioned, and then it’s up to Noire Royale and Chancinnel to sort out the mess that is Bob Ross’ akumatisation. He hadn’t even had the spine to take the akuma on himself.
(Chancinnel, as far as she can tell, has no right to be as angry as he is about the whole thing, but Chloe can never tell what’s up with him.)
But boring doesn’t fit Marinette, who fell headfirst in love with Adrien Agreste after being exposed to his sense of humour. She’s heard Cesaire tease her at times for her taste in ‘nice guys’, but Cesaire and anybody who thinks like her is a fool of ridiculous proportions in Chloe’s opinion. Adrien is so outside of the ‘nice guy’ stereotype it’s actually laughable, and that would be obvious to anyone who’s ever bothered to ask him five questions in a conversation that don’t involve his family or modeling.
Marinette herself is a ball of chaos, a kind of frenetic excitement permeating her very existence, and Chloe finds herself drawn to it again and again, poking it like a bear, trying to see what reaction she will provoke this time. Before she did it out of malice, but now it’s more a scientific curiosity. She wants to see that life directed at her – the stupid quotidity of living in a bakery five minutes away from school with parents you see every day, the friends who will fight you even as they love you, the spine that comes with time. She wants to drink it all in. She wants to be the centre of its attention.
(Plagg smirks at her out of the corner of her eye. Her stomach suddenly seizes, and she pretends she didn’t see him.)
Fuck up once, shame on you.
She is staring at the wall above her headboard, piles of clothes all around her on the bed.
“Hey, Chloe, what’s the matter? You’ve been pretty upset lately, tell me how I can I help you–”
“By pissing off and leaving me alone.”
There’s only silence between that and the shutting of the door. Chloe barely hears that as well.
She feels like she’s in a dream, some sort of nightmare where the entire world is melting into her own internal storm. Shoes fly out of her wardrobe and the most she can summon is a glare at where they land. She can barely sleep at night from the indeterminately-real clanging of pans, and her breakfast tastes foul in her mouth, where she would have assumed it to be tasteless.
It is only when her hair gets pulled in class and Dupain-Cheng gasps that she realises it’s real. She manages to pull away and runs, runs, runs back home to the hotel, where Orionard is already waiting–
“Chancinnel went to fetch another wielder, we’ll sort it out, don’t worry–”
“I don’t need your reassurance, you filthy dog–”
–she doesn’t trip on spite, though (when has the universe ever done that to her?), but on solid thin air, and curses as she somehow manages to curl into a ball and bounce back into a run before her face can smash into the floor and destroy whatever is left of her dignity. Sabrina isn’t the sort of person who goes for sports, but her father is the sort of person who believes kids are best disciplined through exercise drills.
She hears a yo-yo zip and pull something behind her as she smashes the elevator button, and turns to see Chancinnel fighting to get an invisible enemy away from her. Immediately before Chloe though is a (she admits, grudgingly, only to herself) surprisingly stylish turtle-themed superhero.
“Donashella,” she introduces herself as she shoves Chloe into the elevator. Chloe focuses on how many Adrien-levels of stupid that pun is to avoid acknowledging the hammering in her chest.
“Good to see at least one other person with style,” she spits out, not thinking too much about it, then says, “Let me just transform and–”
“Chancinnel said that it would be safer if you stayed away from this one for your own safety. They might manage to talk Vanisher down with Orionard.”
“When has that ever worked on an akuma?”
Donashella shrugs as they exit on Chloe’s floor. “I’m sure I wouldn’t know. I trust Chancinnel, though, and you should, too – he is your partner.”
Chloe stops dead in her tracks, but quickly resumes fiddling with the lock on her room. All the anger drains out of her, suddenly – or rather, drains further into her, pooling into her stomach and in her chest, squeezing her lungs.
It reminds her of childhood. Being sent away from her mother’s study for having spilled a coffee cup on a magazine by accident.
Later, after the fight is over and Sabrina has apologised and Chloe has said nothing but pulled her into a hug, Chancinnel looks at her and says, “I’ll take you to meet the Guardian.”
And Chloe realises that the future of Paris doesn’t rest on unspilled coffee, but on Nadja Chamack (or, kwami forbid, Alec Cataldi) not having any reason to look into akuma whose origins could be traced to one of Paris’ heroes. On neither of these heroes causing akuma in the first place.
And just like that, Chloe knows she’s forced him to make up his mind about her.
There is something savage twisting in Chloe’s gut as soon as she sees the Tsurugi girl enter the cinema on Adrien’s arm.
They’re smiling as they talk, and Chloe is struck how beautiful the two of them look - separately and together. Adrien with Dupain-Cheng is the Adrien she’s known since her childhood - the boy who could find a joke and some joy in everything - but Adrien with Tsurugi is the Adrien who still straightens his back around his father. His smile is easier around Kagami, but it’s the same one he always gives him, as well.
And just like that, Chloe hates her. Because Chloe relied on that smile as well, on Adrien-the-polite, and she was facing the music for it. But Kagami, with her pretty dark hair and her polished wood eyes, was smiling with him and holding his hand.
Chloe and Adrien used to attend functions like these, playing couple and running around when their parents weren’t looking. Until Chloe looked at her mother one day and figured that she had something to prove. Until Adrien wouldn’t look her in the eye anymore.
Marinette is looking at them with a different sort of sadness, and Chloe has an idea.
(And if it doesn’t work by the end, well, at least the former shakes her hand. Chloe doesn’t even bother denying the butterflies in her stomach.)
Fuck up twice, shame on who?
Sabrina’s hair - a natural ginger where mini-fires dance whenever the sun hits it (how many times has Chloe said ‘put it away from your face, it’s disgusting’ instead of ‘can I brush it?’) - is copper-dark now. The longer Chloe stares at it, the more she can taste the blood in her mouth.
Orionard lands next to her as Chancinnel, Donnashella, and Beathiven try to trap Miraculeur, offering her an arm to help her straighten up. Noire Royale takes it, not even bothering to snipe something about how he’s just as out of breath as she is.
“Stay back,” he says, eyes darting between her and the fight 20 steps ahead, where Chancinnel’s yo-yo continues to catch on thin air as Miraculeur dives to sting Beathiven with his own Venom.
Chloe nearly laughs. “Given how much success you’ve had taking the staff off of her, I think me getting close enough to grab it might still be our best shot.”
“You’ve already taken at least three Cataclysms to the stomach.”
“Four, but who’s counting?”
“Chloe–”
–there. The same tone Chancinnel uses on her all the time, but this time it’s coming from Orionard.
And it sounds familiar.
Chloe takes her eyes off the battle to look at him – really look at him, and he blinks under her gaze, eyes running away from hers.
“What?” he asks, the calm in his voice a bit too forced.
The vague outline of an idea is taking shape in her head, but before she can even try to voice it, Chancinnel shouts at them to move, and they manage to jump back just in time to avoid another Cataclysm.
“Chlooooeeee, have you seen me yet? Do you understand now that I can be powerful, too? That you don’t have to care what the rest of them think?”
Noire Royale refuses to look at her partner as Miraculeur says this.
“You shouldn’t be powerful, Sabrina,” she says, and realises she’s phrased it incorrectly as soon as her friend snarls.
“What I mean is–”
– you shouldn’t have to keep up with me. It’s not who you are. I shouldn’t be making you–
“–see, Miraculeur, how ungrateful your friend is? You would be much better suited to the cat.” Mayura smiles behind her, and Chloe wants to punch her face in. Next to her, Orionard emits some kind of low growl that makes her hairs stand on edge.
A second later, though, there is a yo-yo string coming closed over the empty space Mayura’s dodged out of.
“Doubtful,” Beathiven says, sting suddenly poised a centimeter away from Sabrina’s neck, Donashella’s shield and body straddling the latter’s. “I’ve never seen Sabrina so much as hiss at a person, and Chloe could gouge the eyes out of people with objects less sharp than claws.”
Chancinnel cuts him a sharp glance as he paralizes Miraculeur, and Chloe files that information away for later. Orionard’s already gone from her side, chasing Mayura somewhere, and her side feels empty in a more-than-physical way without him.
Good thing we didn’t need to rely on things less sharp, though, Noire Royale thinks as the magic ladybugs sweep through her. The cloudy feeling in her diaphragm dissipates, but is replaced by something much more damning at the way Chancinnel looks at her.
“Are you okay?”
He looks like he wants to come closer, but there’s something stopping him. Something like duty. Something like fear.
Something like disappointment. “I’m fine. The ladybugs fixed me up.”
He nods, looks like he wants to say something more–
“I’m sorry, I couldn’t catch her on time,”
–and shakes his head at Orionard instead.
“It’s fine. You three, meet me at A2, R4, T7 for the miraculous.”
Donashella mutters something final to Sabrina from where they’ve kneeled next to her with Beathiven, then they both nod at the rest and go off. Orionard lingers, his eyes catching on Chloe’s, and there it is, that strange familiarity again, but it’s gone as soon as his tail disappears behind a chimney two buildings over.
She looks back at Chancinnel. He’s still looking at her like he’s torn, and that unnerves her. She thought they were over this.
But it seems like there’s only one way they can be. Three steps later, she’s kneeling down next to Sabrina, a shattered structure of glass in her chest, and she says, “Sabrina. Sabrina, come. We need to talk.”
They don’t sit together at school anymore.
Dupain-Cheng keeps throwing her concerned looks after Chloe mutters ‘mind your business’ with less debris than a tornado usually carries. Marinette’s self-righteousness at Sabrina’s red eyes in the days soon after the battle has been replaced by a type of confusion Chloe doesn’t want to see.
Chloe sits at the back of the class now, alone. Her phone is usually off, tabloid notifications thus avoided, but it doesn’t matter. Her attention is never on the board. It’s a million miles off. She wishes she could be a million miles off.
(And then, one time in geography class, a plan forms.)
It hits her like a ton of bricks one day, as she watches Kagami and Marinette exit the school with Nino, Alya, and Adrien, blue and blue and deep brown flashing in the light. As Sabrina goes out soon after, the late afternoon sunlight bounces off of her hair. She doesn’t think just guys are pretty. She doesn’t think girls are just pretty.
(Plagg doesn’t say anything when she tells him, but his lack of surprise is loud and clear anyway.)
It starts like this: her mother isn’t shouting. She is replying cooly, cruelly to Chloe’s question: You can’t come to New York. Your sister doesn’t have space in her room to host you.
It starts like this: another Gabriel Agreste fashion show. Another attempt to prove herself. Another humiliation. Her mother, trying to turn her to a golden sculpture for her collection, the only way you’ll ever do anything of value.
It ends like this: a scream. A heavy cloak over her mind shattering. Master Fu unconscious.
It ends like this: Chancinnel panting heavily next to her. Beathiven’s Venom poised at her throat. Dracarougis’ storm at the ready. Chancinnel taking her ring off.
Chancinnel giving it back to her later.
(She gets flashes of the middle in her dreams. Chancinnel shouting that he needs her on their side. That he is on hers. Most of them are less pleasant than that: Orionard and Donashella dodging each of his attacks, Beathiven and Dracarougis going in for the kill. If her partner hadn’t fetched the Snake for himself, they would have succeeded.)
“Noire Royale is gone,” Plagg says, hovering before her face. “Chloe Bourgeois isn’t a user anymore. She should stay that way.”
Chloe looks at Plagg. Looks, looks.
“Chloe Bourgeois is dead. I killed her.”
Plagg inclines his head. There is a hint of a smile on his lips. Chancinnel looks on.
“Oh? And who is there instead?”
Chloe shrugs. “Someone who can ruin when it counts.”
(Long live Catlady.)
“I have no right to ask you to be my friend again, but know this: I am ready to be yours if you ever need me,” she tells Adrien, and there it is, the sun behind the clouds again.
“You are a lovely person, and I should have never treated you the way I did,” she tells Sabrina, and there is a sad smile there, a closed door that isn’t hanging off its hinges anymore.
“I’m sorry for mistreating you,” she tells Marinette and Alya and Nino and so, so many other people, and they nod and they let her know they’ve heard her.
And nothing changes overnight, including her. But the days become bearable and the nights stop being sleepless, and suddenly she isn’t always snapping at someone.
“I will do better,” she tells Chancinnel, and the new guardian lets her prove it.
Catlady pinches her nose as she ducks into the sewage shaft, narrowly avoiding being spotted by the knock-off Guitar Villain. She hates it when Hawkmoth becomes wise every once in a while and remembers that the worst akumas he can make were the ones that can lock them away with just the brush of a hit.
She sees the snake miraculous passing hands and nearly sighs in relief before she realises it’s not from Chancinnel to Juleka, but from Juleka to Chancinnel.
“I’m sorry,” she says, face streaked with tears, “I tried. I tried so many times, but it wouldn’t work, and you kept dying, and–”
“Shh, it’s okay,” Chancinnel says, reaching a hand out towards her head, but that hands freezes as soon as he sees Chloe descending down the ladder. “Maybe you weren’t the right person for this Miraculous. That’s not your fault. We’ll sort it out. Go hide now.”
Juleka nods and runs off, but she mumbles something under her breath before she does. Chancinnel’s face is whiter than Chloe’s favourite pair of jeans.
It unnerves her.
“She must’ve turned back the time while-”
“Yes, I know. Infinite grandfather paradox and all that aside, we have a villain to deal with. Did she say where her brother was?”
Chancinnel’s right thumb is rubbing circles on the box as he replies, “He’s here?”
“I saw them both go in earlier, before Desperada started capturing people on my side of the street. Ask him, he seems like the type Sass would like.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“He’s already a wielder.”
Chloe can’t believe her ears - and not because none of the B-team even remotely resemble Luka Couffaine, though with kwami magic that didn’t necessarily count for much. This is a child’s argument coming from a very pragmatic person; the admission is in the way he’s not looking at her.
“Then give him Sass and explain to him that we need the Snake along with the Ladybug and the Black Cat this time and not whoever he usually is, it’s not like it’s dual wielding or–”
“Chloe, I can’t.”
She wants to Cataclysm the wall. Or his face. “Why not?”
He looks at her, then. “I told you. He already wields a miraculous.”
“That doesn’t–”
–stop.
Il utilise déjà un miraculous has two meanings.
Chloe stares at her partner. Dark hair, red tips. Blue eyes. A boy with earring holes.
Behind the mask, Luka Couffaine swallows at her.
This is not the time, some distant part of her says, and she knows it’s right.
“Who else, then? If you give me the box, I can sneak around and find them–”
“I’m the guardian. I should be the one to give it to them.”
He should know damn well at this point what a slap this is to her face, but Chloe sees the fifty different types of tension in his shoulders and, for once, bites her tongue. She might’ve been naive about trusting the whole world with her identity, but at least she had done it willingly. He is forced to trust her in this instance. She can’t blame him for being mad about having no choice.
But still–
“–then give me Tikki again. Plagg will give you a better chance to escape.”
“Hawkmoth will know you know my identity then.”
“He’ll think Catlady does, and she’s an unknown as far as he’s concerned. I’ll do okay with the Ladybug. You know I will.”
“...Alright.”
He doesn’t say but this time he’s right and there’s a risk he’ll capture you and get the information out of you. Chloe hates the way this excites her as she calls off her transformation and switches out her ring and studs for another pair of earrings.
When Chat Muse lands next to Miss Luck a bit later, he is accompanied by a scale-clad jade serpent with liquid bronze eyes. He introduces her as Serafu. Chloe is a bit too winded to care, even if the gold details on Serafu’s plate are… distracting.
Desperada doesn’t stand a chance after that, and before Chancinnel leaves with the Snake wielder, Chloe nods towards the sewers and receives a nod in return.
She waits maybe two minutes before she hears a thump on the other side of the wall, but it feels like an eternity. He calls off his transformation behind it; she walks to the other side, still as Miss Luck, and detransforms while staring him down.
After jewelry has been exchanged and he still hasn’t looked at her, Chloe says, “I won’t rat you out, you know. It’s your business. I’m sorry that I had to find out like this.”
Luka swallows again and it’s vaguely transfixing, the way his mouth moves; now that she’s seen the boy with a propensity for spewing music and talking in lyrics in the face of her down-to-earth hardass of a partner, she can’t unsee it. At the same time, the images still don’t quite match-up.
“Thank you. I’m sorry for being… difficult, earlier.”
“Apology accepted,” she replies, not missing a beat. He snorts.
(Her heart misses one this time; oh, fuck–)
“I need to get back to Juleka before she wonders where I went off to.”
“You do that,” Chloe mumbles as he sprints off. “Good talk.”
(Somehow, that’s not even a lie.)