Chapter Text
Why, what are those creatures, making honey down there? They can’t be bees — nobody ever saw bees a mile off, you know.”
-Alice, Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
*.*.*
Chat Noir first shows up at her house about two days into summer.
Apparently, according to him, they’ve done the calculations, and she’s the most likely target for the next akuma attack. He mumbles something about having extra time to patrol now that school is out.
Funny. Chloe thinks, sizing him up as he crouches on the carpet of her Presidential Suite. Hadn’t Alya proven they weren’t in high school months ago?
Alya’s allowed to be wrong, though. God knows she’s been wrong before. Alya’s bad at math. She can be bad at this too.
Chat Noir likes to hang out in the corners of her room, patrolling the sides of it with his leather-gloved hands behind his back. Sometimes he whistles. Chloe doesn’t like the whistling.
“Where’s Ladybug?” she asks him, but she already knows the answer. Ladybug probably couldn’t be bothered. Chloe’s not important enough. Even after all of this. Chloe’s made of the same slightly stiff paper as the magazines that sit in a stack in the corner of her room; glossy and beautiful but not quite strong enough. Ladybug’s made of the same kind of marble that holds up this hotel and makes this room feel too cold. Of course she’s not worth her time.
Chat opens his mouth to speak, but she decides she doesn’t want the answer. “Nevermind, I don’t care. Obviously she has more important things to do.”
When he doesn’t respond, she decides she’s right.
There are a lot of arguments that she doesn’t let go past that point, a lot of things she refuses to figure out in her head, because once something gets in there, it sticks. Just like bubblegum on a seat at school. Just like lip gloss in free-flowing hair.
Just like the idea that when people aren’t there it’s because they don’t love her as much as she loves them.
At this point, she’s considering just asking him to leave, but she hasn’t really talked to anyone other than her father and the maids (if yelling at them counts) because even Sabrina’s not here for the summer. It’s a lot easier to convince herself she’s not going crazy when there’s someone besides her reflection to vent to.
Chloe lets Chat stay. Or, at the very least, she doesn’t shoo him away. He waits with her for a few nights every week for an hour or so, and then his ring starts beeping and he flies off. He mentions cheese.
She would just ring a bell and have some brought up, but she doesn’t really see the point.
*.*.*
“What’s this?” he asks, gold hair wild and green eyes wide with curiosity.
Chloe lays on her bed, stares at her fan, and glances at the art out of the corner of her eye.
There are two portraits of two women who both disappeared within a year of each other and they hang parallel across the street, roughly reflections but not quite. One is inspired by Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. The other by a different one of his portraits—
the Portrait of Eugenia Primavesi.
Needless to say, there’s a very good reason neither Chloe nor Adrien ever got really into art and art history. It’s hard to appreciate the beauty of something that is a constant reminder of the amount of tragedy you had to become familiar with for it to exist.
Chat Noir stands in front of it on a warm night in July. Chloe wonders if there’s something special about his superhero suit that keeps him from overheating when she’s sweating beyond the point of being able to pull it off as glistening. She should be cool; she’s wearing those yellow rayon shorts and that white crop top. She might as well be dying.
Chat’s eyes are glued to the painting. Chloe’s not sure if she’s okay with the amount of time he’s spending in front of it since he could at least pretend to actually be here to keep her safe. “Pretty, isn’t it?”
It’s not pretty. There are so many more beautiful things around the room. Things like the dress she had custom-made for that wedding last year. Things like her signed copy of XY’s album. Things like the only other art in the room - a drawing of Ladybug she had commissioned last fall.
“She’s my mother. See the resemblance? Everyone says I look just like her. Only better.”
Chat jumps a bit. “She’s very beautiful. I’m sorry about what happened.”
“Don’t be,” Chloe says, trying as hard as she can not to get sucked into that grief conversation everyone always wants to have. “She’s been gone for years.”
“Acapulco, right?” he asks.
Chloe’s breath catches, her back arching a bit on her grey silk sheets in the static motion of the act. His words are quiet and she almost mishears them… almost. She’s almost too caught up in the rotation of her ceiling fan and the white noise in her ear like someone forgot to turn off that old television they used to keep back when she lived in a house not a hotel and with a mother not a butler.
That’s not true, they had a butler back then too.
Acapulco. It’s a faraway place. A real place. One that has only ever been uttered in the same sentence as her mother’s name in one type of conversation, and those conversations are only heard by two people.
Adrien wouldn’t—
He couldn’t—
If he told anyone—
Chat’s blond head quickly turns around to face her, as if he’s realized his mistake. He doesn’t have Adrien’s eyes, per se, since the masked hero has eyes that are fully green, even the whites becoming chartreuse. When he looks at her, though, his eyes get wide like they did the first time she ever mentioned the name of that place. There’s that nearly doe-eyed innocence present in the usually mischievous cat’s eyes. The pure sincerity of a mistake. The fear that comes from a slip of the mouth.
Chloe sits up slowly, eyebrows knit. Her breathing is shallow and her mouth is parted. She wonders if she looks hurt. She wonders if he’s the first person to see her really look hurt like this since that day that Acapulco first came out of her mouth. She wonders if maybe, eventually, Acapulco is going to do this to her too—make her finally go so far off the edge that she feels the need to roam the streets in costume just to feel something again.
(If she’s really being fair, though, they probably went their separate ways a long time ago since she already pretty much feels nothing on the inside.)
Chloe doesn’t say, You didn’t tell me and I’m hurting. Chloe doesn’t say, How many other people have you accidentally let that word slip to? Chloe doesn’t say, What happened to us, Adrien; we used to be so close and now you feel a million light years and a mask away?
Chloe says, “Your hair is terrible.”
It’s true. It looks like he just ran a mile through high winds and crashed into a pigeon’s nest. It looks like a perm gone bad. It looks like someone piled a thousand banana peels on his head and called it hair.
If anyone were to ask Chloe why she didn’t know the person she’s considered her best friend for most of her life seemed unrecognizable to her with only some black leather and a mask separating them, she would swear on her sapphire heels that it’s because of that hair.
Chat Noir tilts his head to the side and blinks at her in confusion. He looks like a cat. She supposes that might be the point. “I’m sorry.” He’s stammering over his words, like she’s brandishing some sort of weapon at him instead of looking at him through heavy lidded eyes while the white noise that’s the musical soundtrack to her isolation plays in the background of her mind. “I shouldn’t have brought her up.” Ha. He thinks the reason her eyes have glazed over is because of her mother. That’s a good one. “It’s okay,” she manages, somehow not putting Adrien at the end. She lays back down on her bed and stares at the fan again. Its circular motion reminds her of sleeping but not quite. Like a record playing and no sound coming out. “It’s not like I actually remember her.”
It’s okay, Adrien.
It’s not like we’re really friends anymore anyways.
That could be why the sound of Acapulco hurts her so much, though. It’s both a reminder that they used to be close, bonded tight together by tragedy, and a reminder of said tragedy.
It’s a lot easier for a four year old girl to tell herself that when her mother goes missing it’s not because she’s dead it’s because she’s somewhere far away instead. It’s a lot easier on a four year old girl when the cops are in the other room being told by her father that she got into that taxi and they never saw her again to think of somewhere warm and sunny and far away from here.
So, when she’s crying in her mother’s abandoned study, not paying attention to her play date, and he comes over and pulls her out from under the desk and brings her to a globe, she points to a place on the map and tries her hardest to read it out loud.
She mispronounces it for the first three years.
Acapulco.
The same word that lets her know that that little boy isn’t so little anymore and also isn’t her friend anymore, but must still feel some sort of pity towards her because he shows up three times a week to patrol her room and make small talk, which is pretty ridiculous because it’s not like she’s really been leaving the hotel anyway.
Neither of them really say a word for the rest of the evening.
When he goes to dive off her balcony later that night, she contemplates calling out to him, but she doesn’t. She can’t even think of anything to say.