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Chloé was upset.“Oh, Marinette, I don’t know why you’re being so mean to me…”No, actually. Chloé was livid.“I’m not being mean to you! All I said was that you said you were injured in your other leg yesterday —”“Actually… I’m injured in both legs. They just flare up on different days. Don’t you believe me?”Chloé was in fact burning with the fury of a thousand suns. If suns could even be furious. If they could, then they might get close to as angry as Chloé right now.It wasn’t even that Marinette was having a bad time. That wasn’t a problem, and it would never be a problem. No, the problem was that Marinette was having a bad time and it wasn’t Chloé’s doing. She was supposed to make trouble for Marinette. Not Lila.As Marinette dug her own grave even deeper, Sabrina leant over and whispered, “Isn’t it weird how she’s so angry these days?”“No,” Chloé murmured back. She knew Marinette. They’d been in the same class for over three years now, and she knew every single one of Marinette’s buttons — except, of course, the romantic ones. Adrikins had found those in a single day, and Chloé had no desire to find them for herself. But she knew every single way possible to upset Marinette.Marinette cared about justice and fairness, and she cared about things being done the right way. It was almost like a compulsion for her, and an incredibly annoying one at that. She cared about lies, and if you told one near her and she wasn’t stupid enough to fall for it, she would get upset. Even if it didn’t hurt anyone. She probably thought that Lila lying her way into privileges was bad because it meant other people lost their privileges, or something silly like that.That wasn’t the only problem Marinette had with lies, either. Any lie could do it. In fact, that was actually partly Chloé’s fault, because in cinquiéme she had spent a few months driving the girl nuts just by telling her nothing except obvious lies. That had been pretty satisfying, but it lost its charm after a while, so she’d stopped lying and gone back to regular bullying.Also, Chloé didn’t really know for sure, but she was reasonably certain that Lila had done something else to Marinette. Marinette didn’t get this up in arms over nothing. Even constant lies couldn’t make her this amount of weirdo. She reacted badly when she felt endangered, which was honestly her only admirable trait, and for her to react this badly meant that Lila had probably done something that nobody else knew about.“I think it’s weird, though,” whispered Sabrina. “She’s always so nice. What’s gotten into her?”“She’s never been nice to me,” said Chloé.“Well… I can understand why,” said Sabrina, in the tone that meant ‘but that’s fine, Chloé, I still think you’re the best’. “But you know what I mean.”“Yes. But I don’t think it’s weird.”Truth be told, though, there was absolutely something strange going on with Marinette. It was just a different type of strange.She had started to flake out on her friends. This was something Chloé had picked up from listening in on conversations, which she didn’t really do on purpose because she didn’t care: the conversations were just being held out loud in the classroom, and right behind her head.Marinette’s grades had also faltered — after getting As on practically everything except gym since the start of middle school, there had been multiple Cs and even Ds this semester. She hadn’t gotten higher than a B-. In other words, Marinette was struggling with something-or-other.Actually, it was even worse than that — when Chloé suggested sabotaging that Kagami girl during the premiere for the Ladybug film, Marinette had actually gone along with it. For Chloé, of course, that kind of thing was par for the course. But old Marinette would never have done that, let alone done it at Chloé’s behest. And on top of everything else, new Marinette had started to lie, obviously and frequently. Even though she hated lies, and seemed uncomfortable with lying even now. Which meant something was up.Hormones? No. Probably not. Her crush on Adrikins? Maybe that was part of it, but her crush on Kim hadn’t done anything like this to her. Trouble at home? Well, that was always a possibility, but the bakery didn’t seem to have any problems — then again, a lot of people seemed fine when they really weren’t. Maybe Marinette had been akumatised one day and nobody had noticed? Hm… Maybe Chloé should light the Queen Bee lantern and present her suspicion to Ladybug.If Ladybug even bothered to show up. Ugh.A sharp sound brought Chloé back to the present. As she looked back at the scene at the front of the classroom, she heard the chorus of soft gasps that both contrasted and underlined the sound from before. Lila held a hand to her cheek, and had taken a step back, looking at Marinette with wide eyes. And opposite her, Marinette — with her hand hanging limp between them, and eyes that seemed even wider. Not to mention her gaping mouth, which could have admitted an entire apple.“... I… I’m so sorry, I…”“Look at what she did!” said Lila. Her voice was shrill, and she was clearly talking to everyone except Marinette. “She hates me! You all saw it!”“I’m sorry! I really shouldn’t have done that —”But Lila cut her off by starting to cry. Loudly. It barely even sounded fake, and if you didn’t listen closely — if, for example, you had just seen what happened and thought it made sense to cry after that, which it did — then you would believe her automatically.Chloé didn’t believe it. And she had had enough of Marinette ruining things for herself, when it was her job to do that. She stood up, stomped across the floor, grabbed Marinette by the wrist, and yanked her out the door before the baker girl could do something even stupider.“Hey! Let me go!” Marinette protested, but she was just a little weakling. Chloé could have dragged her all the way into the Seine and she wouldn’t have a chance to resist.“I’m not letting go,” said Chloé. She was too mad to say anything else.“I need to say sorry!” Marinette’s wrist twisted and pulled, but to no avail. Chloé started to take her down the stairs, and it was a sign of her vast and forgiving heart that she made sure Marinette had enough time to get her footing on the metal-railing steps before tugging onwards to the courtyard.And Marinette kept protesting and pulling and whining and being generally a pest the whole time, until Chloé threw her through the doors to the changing rooms and slammed her into a locker, and put one hand on either side of the baker girl’s head.“Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” she said, adding as much dripping contempt to her tone as she could muster. But honestly, she was still angry, and it just didn’t come off right. Anger wasn’t contempt, it was — anger.Marinette shrank. She didn’t try to duck under Chloé’s arms, and she didn’t try to kick or push. Like always, she just stood there like a little wet kitten. “... Are you… are you going to stuff me into a locker again?”Chloé was very happy that she managed to get that Socqueline Wang girl expelled last year. Césaire had taken over the role of being on Marinette’s side all the time, and she could still come down and be annoying, but she wasn’t the type to resort to violence. Wang would have kicked Chloé through a plaster wall if she saw this. Césaire would stop at taking pictures and handing them to the teachers, and the teachers were incompetent, so she wouldn’t be able to help at all.“Ugh, no,” said Chloé. “That was two years ago and I’m here to talk some sense into you, you ridiculous idiot!”Marinette managed to look smaller and yet more defiant at the same time. “I… I don’t need you to talk sense into me! You’re always mean!”“Right.” Chloé sighed. “Remind me of the thing you just did, Dupain-Cheng?”“I — I, er. I… kind of hit Lila.”“Mm-hmm?”“In the face. I, I slapped her.”“So you have absolutely no sense and you need someone to talk it into you.”Marinette looked down. “I didn’t mean to,” she muttered. “And she deserved it.”Chloé blinked. She had definitely not caught the last few things that happened before the slap, but the idea of a Marinette who wanted to hit someone in the face was a new one. Either the baker girl had gone crazy, or Lila had managed the previously impossible.Even so, this wasn’t the time to give up on sarcasm. “Yuh-uh,” Chloé said, rolling her eyes. “Lila made up a story about a leg injury and that means she’s evil, got it.”“She insulted Dad!” Marinette protested, suddenly a couple inches taller, a few degrees redder in the cheeks.“Really. That’s not what it sounded like.” Granted, all Chloé had really heard was the apology after, but it didn’t sound like the apology of someone who was righteously indignant about her baker dad.Marinette looked down again, but she didn’t change her tone. “She said… she said she was sorry to hear that Grandad disowned him. All pretend-y sorry, too, like Dad did something wrong. And I lost my temper…”“Which you shouldn’t.”“Which I shouldn’t have, but —”“But you’re an idiot and you did anyway,” finished Chloé. Well, that was kind of a typical Lila line. Sympathy and compassion as a mask on top of a veiled insult or smear.“Dad isn’t even disowned! They made up! I helped! And how did Lila even know about that, she’s not supposed to —”Chloé put up a finger just a short ways away from Marinette’s lips. Marinette closed her mouth and stared at it as though hypnotised.“I don’t need to hear your ridiculous sob stories,” said Chloé. “I need you to stop making everybody hate you.”“What do you care?” said Marinette, barely glancing away from the finger, like she expected it to go up her nose or into her eyes or something, which, gross. “Because it’s painful to watch. And I’m the only one who’s allowed to make your life miserable.”This time, Marinette pushed the finger away with the back of her hand. “Excuse me for not believing you want me well, then, Chloé. I need to get back to the classroom.”“And do what? Say sorry, so she can keep planting all kinds of weird thoughts about you in their heads? Double down so they all think you’re being unreasonable? You can’t beat her, baker girl. You’re too stupid. You’ll just ruin your reputation even more.”“I still have friends, you know.” Marinette folded her arms, puffed up her cheeks. “More friends than you. Your reputation is horrible.”“Doesn’t matter. Unless you shape up, people are going to think worse of you. That’s just how it works. And they’ll feel bad for Lila, and they’ll flock to her, and she’ll lie to them about you, and the cycle will repeat.” Chloé shrugged with her free arm, keeping the other hand flat against the locker door. “Maybe they’ll still be your friends. But they’ll trust you less and less. Maybe they’ll prefer to hang out with Lila over you, and Lila won’t want you to hang out with them if she’s there. Eventually, you’ll be all alone…”“My friends aren’t like that,” protested Marinette, but Chloé could see the doubt in her face. Could hear the desperation in her voice. “They — they’ll understand.”“They already think something’s up with you,” said Chloé. “You’ve been cancelling on them last minute lately, haven’t you? Maybe they feel like you don’t want to be their friend.”She was being mean. That was part of the point, of course, but the real goal was just getting baker girl to agree to the plan.There was something deeply satisfying in standing here like this. Chloé had dominated Marinette for three years. Then Alya had come and Marinette had grown a spine, and it got harder to dominate her, and then Lila had shown up and upstaged Chloé at every turn. It just wasn’t any fun anymore.But this… if she could convince Marinette to do this, if she could bend Marinette’s will after her own, then she was in control again. She could dominate in a completely new way. Maybe she could recruit Marinette as another Sabrina, even.A second-place Sabrina, at least.“I want to be their friend!”“But they don’t know that,” said Chloé. “You, baker girl, have been making your friends feel unwelcome since the start of the school year.”Which was kind of weird, actually. Because most of this started before Lila was even there. Marinette had seemed more agitated — not angry, like Sabrina said, but like she had a shorter way to reach the endpoint of all her emotions — and she had lied, and started to ditch her friends, since the start of the school year. At least if classroom gossip was anything to go by, which it always was.“And when you also get so angry with someone that you hit them in the face,” here came the death blow, “you don’t exactly inspire people to like you more.”Marinette looked like she was about to be hit in the face. She cowered, her eyes wide like she had seen something terrifying, and her mouth hung half open.“What…” she started, but she fizzled out into nothingness for a few seconds. Chloé waited, certain that she had won.But before Marinette could open her mouth again, something clanged outside. Chloé turned to look, and the doors opened to reveal — who else — Alya Césaire.“Marinette!” said Césaire. She glared at Chloé for a moment, before taking a step closer. “Chloé, leave her alone, or I will —”“It’s — it’s okay, Alya,” said Marinette, pushing herself up a little. “I’m fine.”Alya came to a standstill mid-step. She was obviously confused. “You… you are?”“Y-yeah. We’re just talking. Don’t worry about me.”Chloé grinned smugly at the intruder.“... Okay, if you say so,” said Alya. She didn’t seem convinced in the slightest, but she had lost her initial forcefulness. “Hey… come to me if something’s up, okay? You seemed really out of it back there, so if there’s anything I can do…”“I’ll be okay,” said Marinette. It was barely louder than a whisper, but in the echoey room it could have been heard clearly basically anywhere. “I’ll be back up soon.”“Right,” said Alya. She was definitely not convinced. But there was probably a distance to cover between ‘not convinced’ and ‘willing to contradict Marinette’, so she took a step back again and frowned. “I’ll just… you know where to find me. Okay?”“Yeah,” said Marinette. “I do.” She even smiled, if faintly.Chloé would have smiled, too, if that wouldn’t have seemed incredibly weird. Instead, she cheered in her head. She had done it — convinced Marinette to do whatever she said. She was back in charge.Alya left. And Marinette seemed wistful, even sad, about it. That wasn’t good, but it was maybe a certain amount of okay given the situation.“Here’s what you’re going to do,” said Chloé, putting her finger back in baker girl’s face. “After school, you’re coming to the hotel. Not straight away, because I don’t want people thinking I associate with low-class scum like you. Wait half an hour after school, then come and knock on my door. I’m going to teach you how to defeat Lila.”Marinette frowned. But eventually, the frown became a single, firm nod.And Chloé grinned like a lion. ////////// “So the problem is,” said Chloé, once Marinette was installed on her couch, “that you’re stupid.”“I’m not stupid!” said Marinette, eyebrows so sharp they could have cut steel.“You just barrel on ahead with whatever you want to happen,” Chloé continued, ignoring the interruption. She paced back and forth in front of her TV as she spoke, only glancing at the girl to make sure she was listening. “You don’t have any finesse whatsoever.”“Humph,” said Marinette. Her arms and legs were both folded tight, like she wanted to be in contact with as little of the room as possible.“You may be smart when it comes to books, but you can be really stupid with people sometimes.”“Are you going to do anything other than insult me today, or can I leave?”“I’m not insulting you. I’m giving you advice.”“I’m not going to listen if all you’re going to do is call me stupid,” said Marinette.Chloé considered this. It was fun to insult the baker girl, but if that came in the way of continuing to dominate her, then it might be wise to tone it down a little.This backtalk was getting to be a little annoying, though — Marinette had recovered very quickly from earlier in the day. That was a bad sign when it came to crushing her spirit again, but for the time being it would have to work. Taking Lila out was more important.Even so… maybe Chloé ought to find some other way to remind the girl that she was only here at Chloé’s whims, and would be cast right into the dark again without that grace.“Okay,” she said. But she made sure to add a flourish like she was insulted even by the suggestion — folded her arms and turned her nose up. “If you’re gonna be that thin-skinned, I guess I can be a little nicer.”“Good! I still hate you,” said Marinette.“The feeling is mutual. Anyway, all I’m saying is that you need to think twice about what you’re doing. Which you’re terrible at, but I’m going to teach you how,” said Chloé.She was about to reveal her trump card. The small remote in her hand was just for this specific function; she had prepared everything for this moment.“How are you going to teach me?” said Marinette, clearly unimpressed.“By showing you someone who’s really good at it,” said Chloé. She pointed at her TV with the remote, and pushed the red button. The screen lit up, and a moment later it revealed the full-screen picture of Ladybug she had gotten off the Ladyblog just ten minutes ago. Triumphantly, she turned around to Marinette again. “You should be more like Ladybug!”Marinette stared. Her mouth was half open. “Um…”“What?”“That’s… Ladybug,” said Marinette.“Of course it’s Ladybug. What are you, stupid?” said Chloé. Then, because she recalled Marinette’s protest just a minute ago, “I mean, congrats for noticing.”“But…”“But what? She’s the best example there is,” said Chloé. “And you with your goody-two-shoes thing probably want to be more like her anyway.”“Er.”“Anyway, here’s the deal. When Ladybug fights an akuma, she doesn’t just go straight over and punch it in the face. She looks at what’s happening, and then she makes a plan. And a lot of the time, the plan is to trick the akuma in some way. Right?”“I… don’t get it,” said Marinette.Chloé furrowed her eyebrows. “You really are —”“I’m not stupid.”“Whatever. You’re going to have to work more like Ladybug if you want to beat Lila.”“But Lila isn’t an akuma! I can’t purify her,” said Marinette. “Um, not that I’d know how to do that anyway.”“Okay,” said Chloé, pinching the bridge of her nose. This was unusually slow, even for the baker girl. “Let’s try this another way. Whenever Lila makes up some utterly ridiculous lie, you try to figure out what the truth is and then you barge in with that. But that’s a stupid way of doing it. When you’re dealing with a liar, the truth won’t help, because she can always come up with another lie to explain it. She creates reality, not you, and you’re always on the back foot because you’re still looking up what the truth is.”Marinette raised one eyebrow, and her frown didn’t shift one bit.Then she raised the other eyebrow, and her mouth formed a tiny circle. Some kind of synapse was clearly firing inside her brain, lighting her eyes up. “You mean… like a gish gallop? Or the, er…” She turned just a little bit red.“What?”“The… um, the… the bullshit asymmetry principle?”“What? I don’t know,” said Chloé. “Are you just making up words?”“No! They’re real things,” said Marinette. There was an energy to her voice now, and she loosened her hands, waved them around as she spoke. “It’s like, you lie faster than people can correct you. It’s easier to lie than to prove something is true, so when someone makes something up it’s like, um. Yeah. Like… a lie can run around the world before the truth gets its boots on?”Okay. This was too smart for the baker girl. “If you knew all that, why are you so stupid about Lila?”“I’m not stupid! And I don’t know, maybe it’s because we’re not in debate club? We’re not exactly arguing about global warming, I just want to hang out with my friends and stuff.”Chloé tapped her feet. “Right. Okay. I guess. But that means you were being stupid, because you know better and you still did the stupid thing.”“Okay, maybe,” sighed Marinette. “But stop calling me stupid.”“No.”Marinette frowned again. “So… what’s your plan, then? I can’t exactly summon up a lucky charm to fight Lila,” she said. “Or, um, at all. I can’t summon a lucky charm.”Weird ending aside, Marinette’s question was fair. But Chloé had had the answer ready since before the locker room. She grinned, in a way she knew looked self-satisfied but hoped would also look cunning and disarming. “My plan is… you defeat Lila by lying right back at her.”“... What?”“You lie, just like Lila, and then she won’t know what to say back and then you win.”“Isn’t that kind of… evil?” Marinette tried. She glanced at the TV screen again. “Ladybug doesn’t lie.”“Ladybug lies to akumas all the time. Look, lying isn’t evil unless you use it for evil. When Ladybug tricks an akuma — lies — she’s actually being a hero.”Chloé was lying now, at least in how she presented things. But Marinette didn’t need to know that. Lying to defeat Lila wasn’t the same as lying to defeat Hawk Moth, unless Lila had actually done something evil in secret. Which was possible, but Chloé wasn’t going to even try to find out, because she didn’t care. All she cared about was being on top of Marinette again.It seemed to be working, too. Marinette squirmed in her seat, which she only did when she was considering something seriously. “I… I guess that’s true,” she said. “I don’t want to defeat her, though. I just want her to stop… I want her to stop. She keeps making me look bad on purpose. Ugh… and I feel like if I tell anyone about it, they’re just going to say I’m overreacting.”Overreacting? Maybe. But for Chloé’s purposes, baker girl was underreacting. “Trust me,” said Chloé. “I’ll get you fit to fight her in no time.”Marinette’s glare could maybe have pierced a damp paper bag. “That only makes me more worried,” she said. \\\\\\\\\\ The next day, they whispered their way through their strategy in a washroom stall before school started. For whatever reason, the baker girl looked less than satisfied with the situation.“So that’s what you say. Got it?” Chloé concluded.“I can’t believe I’m taking advice on lying from the worst liar in the world,” said Marinette, rolling her eyes.Perhaps in another situation, Chloé might have taken offence to that. But she was the one in command here. “And I still managed to rile you up with it for a whole year,” she said, putting on just the right smirk to rile Marinette up some more.“It wasn’t a year! It was like a couple weeks at most —”“See?” hissed Chloé, holding up her hand to remind baker girl to be more quiet. “It doesn’t matter if the lie is good or not. Nobody cares. All that matters is to be convincing about it.”Marinette had half her mouth twisted into a shape that suggested she didn’t believe the obviously true thing that Chloé had just said. “And… what do I do when she comes up with something else?”“I don’t know. Improvise, or whatever. You’re not completely helpless.”That was 100% a lie. But confidence mattered when it came to lying. Chloé had surfed by her whole life on lying to her dad about things at school, and he had believed her because she stuck to her guns, and because he was an idiot. None of the other students had believed her, but that literally didn’t matter. She only needed to convince the people with power, so she focused on them.Marinette had a harder job in front of her, Chloé could at least admit that much. Everyone in class needed to believe her, not just one man who firstly was at city hall when whatever thing happened and secondly had a clear bias. But the mechanism was the same anyhow. As long as she could make them trust her presentation, they’d swallow the lies easy.“I’m still not sure…”“Hey. Go out there,” said Chloé, and put her hands on Marinette’s shoulders. “You can do it.”She really wasn’t used to being encouraging. But in order to get what she wanted, she would try even that. Even touching the baker girl. It wasn’t horrible to touch her, but it wasn’t right. Like, it was horrible on a mental level, but not physically.“You… really think so?”“Yes.”Maybe. She was kind of lying, but she also had to be hopeful about this. Marinette would have to do it, or Chloé would never get back to how things used to be. And that would be horrible, so just this once the hope would have to win.“Okay. I — I’ll do it. But if this blows up on me I’m blaming you.”“And nobody else will,” said Chloé, letting go. She could afford to sound self-satisfied now, because if this worked she would have good reason to be. “Now, go on, baker girl.”“Ugh,” said Marinette, and pushed open the stall door. Chloé followed her out.The first thing they saw when they left the stall, though, was — again — Alya Césaire, bent over the sink and washing her hands. She froze completely as she caught them over her shoulders in the mirror, her eyes opening wide. “... Marinette? What were you doing in…”“Nothing!” said Marinette, and her voice sounded strangled despite no longer being a whisper. “I, we, we were just talking, haha.”“What about?” said Alya, looking suspicious. She turned around to look at them directly, shook some water off her hands in a surprisingly menacing way. “I hope for her sake you don’t mean ‘talking’ as in ‘getting stuffed into the toilet bowl’.”“She’s completely dry,” said Chloé. “I swear on it.”“Right…”“It’s true, Alya. She just wanted to tell me something.”“Right.” Alya’s harsh expression faded into something much softer. “Okay… but you know you can talk to me about whatever, right? I’m here for you.”Marinette nodded fervently. “Of course. I, um, I’ll talk to you later, anyway. Thanks, Alya.”“Yeah. Always, girl. Uh, good luck.”Alya went to grab some paper to dry herself off. Chloé and Marinette pretended to go wash their hands instead. Once Alya disappeared, though, Marinette collapsed on her feet in front of the sink. Her back and shoulders sagged at the same time. “Ugh… I hope I don’t disappoint her.”Perhaps it was time for a different kind of manipulation. “You know, if this succeeds,” Chloé said, “she’ll love you even more.”“Yeah. Yeah… you’re right, actually,” said Marinette. “I — I think. Maybe. It’s worth a shot.”The walk up to the classroom was strangely loaded, and Chloé made the decision to dart ahead up the stairs to reduce the weird. Also, it would be smart to not give away the game to Lila before it had even started.When she stepped into the classroom, Alya gave her the stink-eye — but that was expected. Everyone else was already there: Lila and Miss Bustier included, and Marinette of course excepted. Lila and Miss Bustier were talking about something in hushed tones by the teacher’s desk, and Chloé could make a very safe guess on what it was.“Hi, Chloé,” said Sabrina, just as Chloé sat down next to her.“Yeah, hi.”“Have you seen Marinette today? I think Miss Bustier wants to see her.”Chloé turned towards her seatmate with one eyebrow raised. “Why would I have seen Dupain-Cheng? I hate her.”“Right,” said Sabrina. “Of course.”Then, the door opened again. Marinette inched inside, clearly cautious. Maybe that was because every eye was on her as soon as she entered, or maybe it was because of what was about to happen — or maybe it was just the sight of Lila. Either way, Miss Bustier called her name out before she had even closed the door behind her.“Marinette? Could you come here for a moment?”Marinette obliged, wringing her hands, eyes darting to random people around the room. Not to Chloé, though, which was a little bit annoying.“I hear there was an… altercation yesterday,” Miss Bustier continued. “With Lila. Don’t you think you ought to make up?”“Miss Bustier,” said Adrikins. His hand shot up as he said it. “Don’t you think you should handle this in your office, maybe?” There was a small chorus of agreement around the room.“I’m sorry, but when something happens in public it’s only right it gets resolved in public,” said Bustier, smiling her little ignorant smile.And Lila, next to her, had the audacity to look wounded by Adrikins’s suggestion. “I hope you’re not suggesting we brush this under the table, Adrien… what if something worse happens in private?”“It’s — it’s fine,” said Marinette, cutting off a protest from both Adrikins and Césaire. “It’s better if everyone knows…”“If everyone knows what, Marinette?” said Miss Bustier.“What happened yesterday… I’m really sorry, but it wasn’t my fault.” She sounded appropriately apologetic, but also appropriately spontaneous. Either the baker girl was a better actor than she let on, or she was just so nervous about the situation that it improved her performance. “You see… I have this traumatic reaction when it comes to my grandfather. If someone mentions him, I have this nervous twitch… it’s because of what happened between him and Dad.”“... What?” said Lila; Miss Bustier echoed her with a slightly longer, “What do you mean?”“It’s too hard to talk about. But when he comes up, I need to hold myself back… it’s very painful to me.”Chloé had some notes on Marinette’s acting. She was speaking a little too confidently, and a little too directly, now that she was in the middle of it — but she was doing an okay job, on the whole. As long as the audience wanted to believe her, they would ignore the warning signs, and this was a class that was almost always on Marinette’s side. Honestly, it was almost sickening how ride-or-die they could be for her when Lila wasn’t involved.Miss Bustier had a slightly more complex reaction this time. She looked between the two sides of the conflict, clearly struggling to make sense of what was happening. “Um… So… you’re saying, Marinette, that whenever someone says the word ‘grandfather’, you have to hit them?”“No,” said Marinette. She seemed taken aback at the question, so much so that she almost broke character. “That… would be weird. It’s just when people talk about what happened between my grandad and my dad.”Behind Chloé, Mylène whispered “Oh no… that’s so sad…”But Chloé tensed a little in her seat, even though it seemed that the lie had worked. Because if Lila came up with something else now, Marinette would have to improvise.And Lila was the next person to speak. “That’s so sad to hear, Marinette. I didn’t know how badly you were affected by the tragic falling-out between your grandfather and father…” — Chloé could hear the smirk under those words.Marinette’s reaction, though, was nearly perfect. She hesitated for a moment, and then she jabbed her arm forward, but she grabbed it with her other hand to hold it back. It was also a small and not very dangerous motion. Lila still jumped a little, but to everyone else it must be obvious that things were under control.“I’m sorry!” said Marinette. “It’s just like that… but I was ready now. I thought someone might talk about it again, so I prepared myself mentally. I didn’t know yesterday that anyone knew, so I wasn’t ready then. I’m so sorry about what happened, Lila, and it won’t ever happen again.”“Well…” said Lila. “I’m happy to hear it.” Her tone shifted ever so slightly into smarmy as she continued: “But Miss Bustier, don’t you think she should go to counselling? This could endanger other students.”“Well —”“I already am,” said Marinette. “Outside the school. But, but I am. I’m getting better.”“Well,” said Miss Bustier, sounding about as out of her depth as she ever had, “I think… that means the matter is resolved. Right? Lila, Marinette, go find your seats and we can get started with class…”Chloé had to admit she was impressed. But she wouldn’t let it show — especially not now, because someone might notice and get suspicious, but she also wouldn’t let it show to Marinette later because ugh. The improvisation had gone surprisingly okay, and while the acting was so-so on the whole it had done the job well enough. Plus, the story about counselling outside of school could be useful for other things, though Chloé wouldn’t credit Marinette for that. All in all, this first attempt had gone better than she’d feared..Now they knew it could be done… and that meant they should try even harder next time. ////////// Their next planning session was two days later. Lila had told another few lies in that time, but nothing targetted at Marinette, and nothing that was even particularly unbelievable. Hence, Chloé’s plan was to just talk about possible attacks Lila could make in the future.Which got derailed immediately when the idiot baker girl put her hackles out the moment she sat down on the sofa. “Why aren’t you going to say anything?” she said. “If you want her gone so bad.”“Because everyone hates me,” said Chloé. “You included. It wouldn’t help.”“Why not?” said Marinette, and Chloé had no idea whether the girl was being contrarian on purpose or just out of her usual stupidity.“People don’t trust people they hate. If I joined in they’d see through me straight away.”“So you’re just using me to get what you want, and you’re not going to do anything yourself.” Marinette threw her upper body back so it slumped over the backrest. “Great.”Chloé rolled her eyes. “Yeah, duh. I’m using you. And I hate you too.” Here, Marinette frowned. “But you want the same thing I do.”“... Yeah. I guess.”“So you just buckle down like a good little idiot and do what I tell you to, and everything will be fine.”“I’m not stupid.”“Sure, whatever.”Chloé studied Marinette’s defiant little face. The sharp blue eyes that glared back, the frowny little mouth that Chloé knew had teeth behind it. There wasn’t enough gratitude. Not enough submission. Marinette may have won the previous duel, but Chloé wasn’t really any closer to achieving her goal.But if she got Marinette to win a couple more times, then gratitude would probably follow. And with it, slavish devotion. The girl had fallen in love with Adrikins just because he gave her an umbrella; she loved it when people did kind things to her. It was seriously ridiculous how easy it was to get her on your side.Even so, Chloé hadn’t managed it yet. She didn’t want it, either — not like that. She definitely wouldn’t reciprocate any positive feelings. But if she was going to come out on top, she was going to have to make Marinette pathetically grateful.“I’m still helping you, baker girl,” she said, shaking her head. “Don’t forget that.”“You can help me without being a jerk.”“Only if you stop being stupid.”“I’m not stupid!”Chloé sighed and went back to looking in her notebook. For once in her life, she was doing homework, and it wasn’t even anything to do with school. It was just notes on the social dynamics in class, and the things people talked about during free period.Lila’s lies since last time had honestly just been… dull. The majority of her lies were always just general stuff, lies to let her get out of things she didn’t want to do or get favours she didn’t need, but she also told smaller lies every now and then to hurt people. Well, more specifically: to hurt baker girl.There hadn’t been any of that since last time, though. Even though it was clear she was upset about the resolution to the slap thing. In other words, she was probably planning something for later, or at least seething enough about what happened to boil over at some point.The class seemed to have fully accepted Marinette’s fib, too. Sabrina had been baffled by what happened; she said it was like Marinette had stopped being angry overnight. But all of Marinette’s actual friends had come up to her and sympathised with her, and she had received a fair few hugs in the first break after.The teachers were less certain. Chloé had overheard a conversation between Bustier and the headmaster out on the landing, and it sounded like they had no idea how to handle difficult situations.That wasn’t exactly news, because Bustier’s reaction when Chloé had ruined Marinette’s birthday present for the teacher had been to tell Marinette in class to get over it and that she loved it either way. Chloé had enjoyed it at the time, and in all honesty she still did — it had been really satisfying to see baker girl get put down. But from a purely objective standpoint, the whole situation had been messed up whether or not Chloé liked it.So the headmaster had told Bustier to keep an extra eye out on Marinette, in case she slapped someone actually important by accident and they needed to go into damage control. And then, class had started again.“We’ll need to be ready for her next attack,” said Chloé.“You mean I need to be ready.”“Duh. Obviously. It’s your neck on the line.”“Ugh.” Marinette put her chin in her hands. “I know that. But I don’t have to like it.”Chloé raised just one eyebrow. “You did well on the improv last time. But I don’t think you’re ready if she invents something completely new. What you need is to think on your feet more. Be more like Ladybug.”Marinette blinked in obvious surprise. “Was that a compliment you just gave me?”“What? Ew, no. I’m telling you to be prepared, stupid.”“Right,” said Marinette, looking away. “You’re mean and I hate you.”“Yes. I know.” \\\\\\\\\\ The next lie came just over the weekend. And Marinette wasn’t even in the classroom for it — she was late for school by all of first period by now, perhaps because the akuma the night before had literally attacked the bakery.But Lila was there, and she turned on the crocodile tears as she talked to Nathaniel during first break. Her voice was just a teensy bit loud for what she was pretending to be a two-person conversation. “I went to Tom & Sabine’s bakery on Saturday,” she said. “And — they didn’t want to serve me. I think Marinette told them to keep me out?”Nathaniel put his hand on Lila’s shoulder. “I’m — I’m so sorry to hear that,” he said. “I’m sure it’s just a misunderstanding, maybe they thought you were someone else?”“No,” bawled Lila, burying her face in her hands. A lot of people had turned around to watch the scene at this point. “They said — they used my name, and they said I wasn’t welcome.”“Maybe it’s because of the dad thing,” said Alya. “Her dad’s probably a little upset about things, so maybe it was him. I don’t think Marinette would do that…”But even though people were protesting, there was a seed of doubt there. Of course there was. It wasn’t exactly a secret that Marinette didn’t particularly like Lila.Chloé slipped out her phone while Lila kept sobbing and throwing out more vague accusations. ‘Lila’s at it again,’ she typed. ‘Something about being banned from the bakery.’Then she paused to try and think of a counter-lie. But before she could get that far, the door slammed open, and a gasping Marinette half-tumbled into the classroom. She looked around with wild eyes, and mumbled an apology for being late despite there being no teachers present.Before she could get to her seat, though, Lila spoke up. “Why do you hate me, Marinette?” she said.Marinette stopped halfway up the steps. “... What?” she said, though Chloé could clearly hear the ‘Because you suck’ that she didn’t say.“I just… I really wanted to try one of your dad’s pastries…”Lila dissolved into fake tears again. It fell to Lahiffe to explain the situation. “Uh,” he said, clearly not comfortable with saying this even though he had chosen to speak up, “Lila says she went to the bakery during the weekend, but, uh, she says she got turned away. Did you really tell your dudes to turn her away?”Marinette looked like she knew she was done for. This was bad — she wouldn’t even have had time to see the messages that a lie was happening, given how fast she came through the door. And she didn’t have any preparation for countering this specific lie, either.Her first response was — well, it was understandable, but weak. Chloé could see the cogs turning in her head. “Um… I didn’t… did that really happen?”“Yes,” wailed Lila. “I just wanted a raspberry tart…”Chloé wrinkled her nose. They didn’t even carry raspberry tarts at the bakery — but of course, nobody in this room except Marinette had complete knowledge of the items they had available. (And except Chloé, who regularly ordered deliveries to her room.) So either Lila had made a bad guess, or she was specifically goading a protest out of Marinette.But Marinette didn’t take the bait. She stared in disbelief for a moment longer, and then she widened every part of her face in mock realisation. “Oh! That’s right, Mum told me about something… she said there was a customer who kept touching the items on display and not buying them. And that’s super unhygienic, so she told them to leave… that was you?”The entire room went quiet. Chloé felt her mouth fall open. That was a brilliantly devious lie, and Marinette had improvised it out of nothing. Even Lila was dumbstruck, because she had set up every part of the story to allow for this conclusion — and the best, and in fact only, answer she could possibly give was to say she didn’t do that and then move on. She could maybe insist that she was turned away without having touched display items, but there was no momentum behind that point of attack if Marinette had no idea about it, because the important part had been that it was Marinette who didn’t want her in the bakery.Of course, Lila did the sensible thing. “I… er, no. I didn’t do that. That must have been someone else.”“Maybe you went to a different bakery?” said Nathaniel, trying to sound jovial. “Depuis’s? I went to Depuis’s once and they were really rude.”“No, I… er…”That was when Mendeleiev entered the classroom. She had three thick binders stuffed under her arm and a severe scowl on her lips, and when she saw the scene up on the steps she breathed in roughly through her nose and said, “Everyone sit down and shut up, or it’s detention for the whole class!”It was unlikely that anything more would have happened anyway. But Mendeleiev’s interruption had handily cut off even the smallest possibility. Marinette took her seat and breathed out slowly, and Alya patted her on the back.And Chloé was forced to admit, for the first time in her life, that the baker girl was better than she’d given her credit for. ////////// Lila didn’t lie as much the rest of that week. She kept up her earlier lies about not being well enough for gym and needing to have her bag carried, but those were mostly harmless. The rest were just heavily suggesting that she knew a few famous people.Things didn’t feel entirely peaceful, however. There was a definite sense that the class was waiting for something to blow up. Chloé was also waiting for something to blow up, and she didn’t like the waiting. It felt like bad news.Admittedly, she also didn’t like the waiting because if Marinette felt like dropping her shoulders, then Chloé would no longer be in her position of dominance.That was why she called Marinette over once every day, half an hour after school, regardless of whether there was anything to talk about. She had to be in control, or this whole exercise was pointless anyway. And Marinette dutifully came over, and she sometimes brought with her a sketchbook or some sewing project she was working on, and she just worked on those as Chloé went through her own notes about class dynamics.One time, Chloé even got Marinette to do maths homework for her — she didn’t need it, Sabrina already had that handled, but it was satisfying to know that baker girl could be made to do that too. Even though she looked really annoyed to be doing it. Over time, maybe she could be transitioned into doing all the homework…That Thursday, while they sat on opposite ends of the couch, Marinette spoke up without being prompted. She wasn’t doing the homework then — that was the day after — instead, she sat with her sketchbook and a pencil full of bite marks, drawing some kind of nonsense. She kept drawing as she spoke, too.“Thank you,” she said.“Huh? What?” said Chloé. She might as well have been told that there were pigs flying past the window. “Thank you for being on my side. I know you hate me, but… y’know. At least you’re helping me.”“All I told you was to be more like Ladybug.” Chloé wrinkled her nose. Sentimentality was not her forte, and especially not over the baker girl. Nor was it something she wanted, even though having Dupain-Cheng around wasn’t as horrible as she had always imagined it would be.“It helped. It gave me… a push, I guess,” said Marinette, not even looking up from the page.Then, as though she really had more to say but just wanted to seem subtle about it, the baker girl went on: “Actually… I kind of feel like you’re the only one I can trust right now.”Trust. Yeah, right. Chloé would break that trust as soon as she could. The moment Lila was out of the picture, the two of them would go right back to being mortal enemies, as things should be.“You think I’m the only one you can trust when Césaire wants to bend me over a table just for being in the same room as you,” she said, keeping her voice as dry and sarcastic as possible.“That… I trust Alya with almost everything,” said Marinette. She slumped a little in her seat, looked down at the floor rather than at her drawing. “That’s not the point. But she likes Lila, and when I tried to tell her about… ugh. No, I don’t want to talk about that. The point is she’s amazing and a great friend and I love her, but you know what Lila is up to.”Chloé raised an eyebrow. She felt like she knew less of what Lila was up to than what Marinette did, given what was just said. Something must have happened in secret between them.Well, it wasn’t like she cared about that. She only cared about getting Marinette back under her thumb.“Oh, whatever. Don’t let it get to your head.”“Also, you haven’t called me stupid in three days. Which means you listened when I told you to stop.”“That’s just because you’ve been acting less stupid. You’re still stupid.”“I’m not stupid.”“Stupid.”“You’re mean,” said Marinette, like she was talking about the weather. “And you stink.”Chloé tried to reply. But somehow, the ‘you’re mean’ part stuck in her craw. She was helping, wasn’t she? Shouldn’t Marinette be snivellingly grateful about that? Chloé was giving out help from the goodness of her massive heart, and the girl didn’t see that? Granted, she was still planning to stop helping later, but… Ugh.“I don’t stink,” she said after a little while.“Sure.”Well, at least Marinette didn’t have any illusions about them being friends. Chloé watched her sketch for a little longer, and then she slammed the table hard enough to make baker girl jolt, and said it was time to practise lying some more. \\\\\\\\\\ Either Lila thought Monday was the perfect day for lying, or she had just needed the whole week to prepare her next attack. Maybe it was both. Either way, they were getting back the results of their French tests from the Friday before, and Bustier handed out the results one by one.Chloé got an A, of course. That was Sabrina’s doing. She smiled smugly as she saw the encircled letter in red on top of the page — although she did notice that she lost one point due to something about a word being the wrong ‘class’. Ridiculous, utterly ridiculous; Sabrina was slipping. Maybe she had caught the stupid from somewhere.But then Bustier remained standing by the desk with one test result still in her hands. “Marinette,” she said solemnly, “may I ask you to come to the desk for a moment?”Marinette’s eyes widened. “Um… sure?” she said, as she pushed up from her seat.“Also, bring your bag, please.”The room was very quiet as Marinette walked to the front. Everyone had realised something was up, but they didn’t know what yet — but Chloé was almost certain that Lila was involved. And if Marinette wasn’t being stupid, she must have realised the same thing.“Today, I received an anonymous note in my mailbox, saying that you had stolen the answers off my desk before the test. May I see your bag?”Even a stupid Marinette ought to realise this was Lila by now. But the girl looked absolutely dazed as she just handed her weird little bag over. Chloé clenched her fists, hoping that Marinette would be able to pull off something clever again… but things didn’t look good, because this was a lie that couldn’t be counterattacked. It could only be accepted or denied, and neither option seemed like a great idea.It only took a few moments for Bustier to rummage through the bag. Then she pulled out two stapled-together sheets of paper, with what were presumably the answers written on them. “It seems the anonymous note was correct,” said Bustier — horrible, awful. She had the nerve to sound concerned and disappointed.And if Marinette tried to deny that she stole the answers, she would look insincere. Sure, people trusted her on the whole, but Lila often attacked by planting little seeds that would grow for later. And if Marinette admitted to stealing them, even though she didn’t, she would look really bad.“Miss Bustier,” said Adrikins, once again raising his hand after speaking, “if the test was on Friday, couldn’t someone else have put the answers there?”Oh. Or they could use logic to defend her. That… might actually work.“Marinette never cheats,” said Césaire. “That doesn’t make sense!”“She got every answer right,” said Bustier, shaking her head.“I — I did?” said Marinette. A stupid smile lit up her face.“Cheating to get everything right isn’t an accomplishment, Marinette,” said Bustier. Marinette’s eyes fell. “You’ve been getting mediocre results this entire semester. I don’t believe you would have gotten a top score if you didn’t cheat.”“But —”And then Lila spoke up. “Oh, Marinette, this is so terribly unlike you… you’re always so well-behaved!”And that was the real clincher, Chloé realised with a bang. It wasn’t about getting people to believe that Marinette had actually cheated — though it was a bonus if they did — it was about getting Marinette riled up again. But this was still a very small lie… something else must be up. Chloé squinted at the little lying minx at the back of the classroom and tried to figure out what she wanted, but all she saw was a smug grin that was entirely focused on Marinette.There was a horrible silence over the rest of the room, until Marinette spoke. “Actually…” she said, and Chloé could only hope the bait hadn’t worked. There was a certain strain to baker girl’s tone, like she was forcing herself not to swallow the hook. “The anonymous note was from me.”Bustier raised both eyebrows. “... What?”“You see,” said Marinette, and her voice cracked ever so slightly but gained confidence as she went on. “I noticed the answers sheet lying on your desk before the test. Out in the open. And… and I thought, that wasn’t very safe. So I stole the sheet to demonstrate that your security procedures… they’re a little lax, to be honest.”Damn. Marinette was good — she was good good. The class was clearly on her side in this, so the only person she needed to convince was Bustier. And making Bustier feel embarrassed because she made a mistake meant that she was the one on the back foot, not Marinette. This was deliciously devious. And Bustier stood there like a little kid caught with her hand in the biscuit tin.“I thought if I used the answers to get everything right on the test, I’d show you that you need to be more c-careful, um, with your materials. Especially if it was me, because of — of my grades. I know I’ve been struggling with school lately… it’s for personal reasons, you know… But I didn’t cheat just to get a good grade, and that’s why I put the note in your mailbox.”‘Personal reasons’, huh. Very specific. Chloé almost wanted to ask what those reasons were, but she guessed they were lies too.Bustier looked down at the answers sheet again. “Oh… I didn’t realise I left the answers… I’m sorry,” she said. “But you should just come and tell me next time. Okay?”“Marinette never makes things easy for herself,” said Césaire. She sounded like she was halfway laughing. “It’s just like her to come up with a zany plan like this.”The halfway laugh wasn’t alone, either. The entire room felt lighter somehow, and the tension that came in with Bustier’s accusation had vanished. Mylène whispered something to her boyfriend, and it was a gentle joke about Bustier. Marinette had pulled it off.The only person who seemed unhappy right now was Lila. Her frown was intensely frowny. Chloé leant the side of her head on her hand and grinned to herself, but also a little bit to Marinette as the baker girl walked back to her seat. Because hell, she deserved it this time. ////////// But Chloé knew that wouldn’t be the last attempt of the day. She had already realised there was something else going on, although when nothing else happened for the rest of that class she nearly forgot about it.Then, right before the next class started, Lila entered the room with thunder and lightning in her eyes and went to her seat, where she put on probably the fakest smile Chloé had seen anywhere except in the mirror. And then, right after class started, a message went out on the intercom from the headmaster: “Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Lila Rossi, please come to my office.” Bustier looked surprised, but she let the two of them go without much comment. Marinette seemed almost terrified as she walked out of the door — and Chloé couldn’t help but feel a pang of worry for her.But Chloé still didn’t have her head about her enough to realise what was coming.The scream must have disturbed every class in the entire school. Even someone sleeping in the boiler room would have been woken up by it. Chloé shot up from her seat before anyone else — was on her way out the door before anyone else had left their desk. The voice hadn’t sounded like baker girl’s, but —She stopped by the railing. Soon after, several other people — from her classroom and others — also came out to see what was happening. And what they all saw was Lila, lying crumpled in the courtyard at the foot of the stairs, wailing and crying and clutching her leg. And they saw Marinette, standing atop the stairs outside the principal’s office, with a horrified look on her face.“Owww!” cried Lila, “She pushed me! She pushed me,” and it was so obviously fake — but Chloé saw that because she hated the girl’s guts.“I — I didn’t!” said Marinette. “I…”But the evidence was undeniable. It wasn’t the right evidence, it was evidence for people with rocks for brains, but the circumstances were too dramatic for people to catch on. Someone whispered, “Do you think Lila accidentally mentioned her grandfather again?”And then the headmaster’s door burst open, and Damocles stomped out next to Marinette and looked down at the court, and it was all sealed. He breathed in deeply through his nose, and his eyes flared with anger, and he said, “My office! Now!”Normally, this was where things would have ended. There was no way Lila had a single injury on her body, because all her injuries were always pretend. Anyone would be able to tell that this was a lie, if they bothered to check. But the school staff weren’t exactly known for their ability to think about stuff — otherwise they would have noticed by now that Chloé got top marks on every test despite not writing a single word for any of them. And inside the headmaster’s office, Lila would be in control.Chloé couldn’t let this stand. She stomped away from the class, right over to Marinette, and stood next to her as Damocles helped Lila back up the stairs. When Damocles tried to lock Chloé out of his office, she put her hand severely on the inside of the door and said, “Do I have to tell Daddy you wouldn’t let me in?” — and he didn’t even try to protest.Lila shot her with a glare. She didn’t bother to answer it. She was just here to figure out what Lila was planning, and if possible, to stop it from happening.Bustier was also called inside. What the rest of the class was doing, Chloé had no idea, and she honestly couldn’t care less about it.“Well now,” said Damocles. “What is the meaning of all this?”“She — she pushed me down the stairs,” sobbed Lila. “Without warning. I never did anything to her, and she just — she just pushed me!”“I didn’t!”“Marinette Dupain-Cheng,” said Damocles. He sounded like he was on the verge of exploding. “You had better have a very good explanation for this.”Marinette glanced at Chloé. Like she was asking for help. But Chloé couldn’t really do anything — if she did, it would give the game away. It would put Marinette on the bad team that everyone hates, next to Chloé. And while she’d always used to be on the good team that everyone loves, the association would make people ask questions. If people thought the two of them were on the same side, then Lila would be able to keep going, and things would never go back to normal.The teachers and the headmaster would believe Lila, because they had a bad habit of not checking things. And as long as she dominated the conversation, Marinette could only follow along — and stumble.And the worst thing was, Marinette had set herself up for this. She had lied about how she sometimes had involuntary physical movements. If she said she didn’t do it, they would call her a liar. If she said she did do it and it was on purpose, they would expel her. And if she said she did it and it was an accident because of her trauma response, then Lila could just say that Marinette needed to be put away somewhere because she wasn’t safe to be around.Somehow, despite being stupid, Marinette seemed to realise all that in the moment their eyes met. She breathed in deep, and looked down at her lap.“I…” she started. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to do it, it was an accident.”“I didn’t even say anything about her grandfather this time!” said Lila, trying to drive the wedge in deeper.Smartly, Marinette didn’t move her arm in response. She couldn’t seem even more dangerous than she already did. “No,” she said. She was almost whispering. “I — I was trying to help. I saw her shoelace was untied, and she was at the top of the stairs, and when I tried to warn her about it she… she just recoiled backwards and fell. I think she was afraid of me, but I didn’t even touch her.”Okay. That was a decent start, but it put everything in a he-said-she-said — well, she-said-she-said — type of position. Word against word, and of course nobody else had seen what happened. The teachers would need to shift their expectations now, except…“My shoelace isn’t untied!” protested Lila, as though she was offended at the suggestion.But Marinette just looked down at Lila’s feet. “Actually… they both are,” she said.Chloé stared. The shoelaces were untied. So either Marinette had noticed and Lila hadn’t, or she had somehow managed to untie the shoelaces herself. Either way, baker girl had planned this for a few minutes, and it was getting a little bit unnerving even for Chloé. If Marinette could do this, be this level of mad genius, maybe it would be a bad idea to go back to bullying her…“But she — she pushed me!” said Lila. She clearly wasn’t willing to let this go.And Marinette hadn’t won. The other students still thought Marinette had done something or other, even if they thought it had been an accident. The teachers were clearly not convinced in favour of either side. All Marinette had done was to strengthen her position a little. Chloé folded her arms and leant back against the wall, anxious to see where this was going.“Maybe I touched you after that,” said Marinette, “but I was really just trying to grab you so you wouldn’t fall.” She also sounded a little teary now; her acting had improved a bit. “I — I’m so sorry for what happened, Lila. Are you okay? Did you break anything? You tumbled down all those stairs… you’re probably full of contusions and abrasions.” Contusions and abrasions? Ugh. “I…”“In fact, Headmaster, I think it’s very careless of you to not take her to the nurse’s office first to make sure she’s okay,” Marinette went on. She was louder now. “I think she needs a checkup. The fall looked really ugly.”Lila scoffed. “Actually, I learned falling techniques from my friend who’s a stunt artist. I’m fine, and I don’t need to be looked at by a nurse.”“Well,” said Damocles. His eyes moved quickly between the two girls seated before him. “Ah. Marinette, you should be more careful going forward, but, er…”“But she pushed me!” said Lila. “You all saw it!”Nobody saw it, of course. Lila was trying to sell the lie with her tone and nothing else, and it halfway worked.“She says it was an accident,” said Bustier.“You know how much she dislikes me, Miss,” said Lila. She didn’t even turn around to look at the teacher. Her tone was somewhere in the midzone between tears and annoyance; she was clearly off-balance from how easily Marinette had blunted her attack. “And I’m not just saying she pushed me because she did. It’s that she’s also stolen a — an heirloom necklace from me, which I got from my nonna back in Italy…”Another attack. Chloé rolled her eyes.“Is that true?” said Damocles, though he didn’t seem particularly comfortable with asking the question. If Lila was off her balance, then Damocles had already fallen on the floor and crashed through it to the storey below.“Yes! She — I saw her put it in her locker after she took it from me… it’s shaped like a fishing hook, and it has an orange and white pattern on it, and the chain is gold so it’s also super valuable…”Marinette said nothing. Which was probably for the best. Maybe she was speechless, or maybe she was just biding her time. Either way, it gave enough room for Damocles to make a decision.“... Well, then we should make sure to check if that’s true,” he said, and pushed himself up from his seat. Like he thought proof for the theft would be proof for the shoving. “Everyone, follow me, and let’s get to the bottom of this.”Maybe the bottom was already reached when they left the office and found the entire class waiting right outside. Bustier had clearly told them to wait, or something — they stood there like a little crowd of sheep, just waiting for instructions. Ugh, disgusting.Except Adrikins. And Sabrina. But they were still part of the problem.And then Bustier told everyone, “I think you’d all better come with us downstairs.”“Is Lila okay?” said Mylène. “I can take her to the nurse.”“Marinette, are you okay?” said Alya, hesitating only a little bit. “What’s happening?”“Did Marinette really push Lila?” said Nino. “When are we getting back to class?”“Soon,” said Bustier. “We just have to figure out if Marinette stole something from Lila, and then we can go back to normal class again…”Max’s hand shot up. “Is this information really pertinent for the whole class to know?”Okay, maybe they weren’t completely sheep. They had some thoughts of their own. But they were still annoying, and the question went unanswered either way.The entire entourage — class included — walked downstairs. Chloé followed on the outskirts this time, hanging back to observe: for once, she was convinced that Marinette might actually be able to handle things on her own.Damocles, Lila, and Marinette walked up to the locker. There, Marinette slowly twisted the knob to her code position. Chloé knew it well, from previous attempts to do the thing Lila had obviously done: to place something inside. Though in her case it was cockroaches and stupid insulting notes, not something ridiculous like planted evidence.The locker door squeaked open. Everyone held their breaths as Lila reached inside, and took out a necklace that looked pretty much like what she had described in Damocles’s office: a fox’s tail design, on a golden chain, but curved in a way that made it look like a hook of some kind.“Here! This is my necklace!” said Lila, and Chloé could hear the obvious triumph in the girl’s voice even as she was trying to sound distraught. “Like I said, she stole it from me!”“Miss Dupain-Cheng, uh…” said Damocles. “What do you have to say for yourself?”Every eye in the room was on baker girl. But baker girl’s eyes were only on the necklace.Did people think she’d stolen it? Chloé tried to scan the crowd. People seemed surprised, if anything — maybe some of them thought it was true. Césaire looked especially surprised, though, and Chloé couldn’t in a million years imagine her doubting the baker girl. There was something else going on there.“Well, Marinette?” prompted Bustier. “Why is Lila’s necklace in your locker?”“That’s actually… my necklace,” said Marinette. She didn’t take her eyes off it. “I’m making a replica of Rena Rouge’s necklace for a costume, and… I’ve been working on it for a while. I’m almost done. I just need to engrave my signature.”“Is that really true, Marinette?” said Bustier. “Are you sure you aren’t misremembering?”“Miss Bustier,” said Césaire, “Rena Rouge’s necklace looks exactly like that. It’s a… very good replica.”“And if the Ladyblogger says it, you know it must be true, dude,” said Lahiffe.“No! It’s my nonna’s necklace!” Lila protested. “It’s exactly the same!”Marinette — shook her head. The teachers looked carefully back and forth between the two, like they had no idea what to do. And Lila seemed to realise this battle was also lost.“I — I saw it,” Lila said. She was a lot less forceful now. “It was stolen, and then I saw her put it in there!”A coward’s way out. But it was probably the smartest thing she could have done: all she said this time was ‘it was stolen’. There was no direct accusation this time: she was giving herself a chance to wuss out of it, without actually backing down.And sure enough, the class provided the obvious explanation by themselves. “Maybe someone else stole it?” said Sabrina. “If they look so similar, maybe you just think it’s the same one…”“Or maybe Marinette took yours by accident after someone stole hers!” said Kim, resident idiot.“It’s got to be a misunderstanding,” said Césaire, nodding. “I don’t believe either of them would steal anything.”Damocles slammed his fist into his open hand. The noise cut off several other people from making new suggestions for what had happened. “Then it’s clear,” he said, even though nothing could be farther from the truth. “Someone has stolen Lila’s necklace, or Marinette’s necklace, and we will raise security and check with the police to make sure nobody gets away with this heinous crime!”And Marinette, as the devilish little trickster she had become, looked at Lila and said — almost calmly: “You can keep it. If it looks so much like the necklace your grandma gave you, I think it’s only fair. I can just make another one.”It was brutal. It was incredible. Marinette, who had somehow found a way to counter three entirely different lies from Lila in a single day and come out of it with only a little bit of dirt on her shoes, had just ended it conclusively by telling everyone: ‘I haven’t got a single negative feeling against her. I am willing to give up my own hard work to let her have a nice thing. Look how kind and gentle I am.’And because Marinette was — was Marinette, everyone was going to believe her. She did make weird stupid things like clothes and jewelry. She could be unlucky enough to make someone fall down the stairs while trying to help them. She would come up with the idea of cheating on a test to prove that it was possible.It was baffling. It was terrifying. She had gone up against someone who had planned out everything, and she had won, just by noticing details that nobody else could possibly have noticed. The shoelaces. The way the necklace apparently looked exactly like Rena Rouge’s. Marinette might be on Ladybug’s level of thinking deviously — she was certainly better at it than Lila.After Damocles’s announcement went out, and Marinette gave her fake gesture of goodwill to the lying minx, the students broke up. A couple of them went to Lila to comfort her about the theft and ask her if she was hurt from the fall, but a small group of girls also went directly to Marinette. Of course, Césaire was in front.Chloé couldn’t hear what they said, because there was too much noise and too many people between them, but she did see Alya wrapping her arms around the baker girl. And suddenly, once the arms were around her, Marinette seemed very small. Not like Ladybug at all. She had a scrunched-up face, a twisted-up mouth, and screwed-up eyes, and she seemed to lean into the hug way too heavily for someone who had just conclusively trumped Lila.And then — out of nowhere — Damocles howled. He had opened the door, and as Chloé span around to look she saw a swarm of butterflies, no, akumas, pouring into the room. They were a sickly dark red and they moved much faster than any akuma Chloé had seen for months, and they were clearly out for victims. Damocles was already caught when she saw him, but more touched down on Bustier, on Lila, on Nino, on Ivan, on Adrien…… and then the rest of them all swarmed towards Marinette.An icy hand clenched its fingers around Chloé’s heart. Marinette had just struggled for a whole day against cruel attacks, and while she had obviously won, she deserved to have a break by now. The akumas would not get her, not while Chloé Bourgeois was here —— and then an akuma touched her sunglasses. And she heard a syrupy voice whisper in her ear about all the people who deserved to be crushed under her heel. \\\\\\\\\\ The school day was a bust after that. The teachers had struggled to keep order even before half a dozen people were akumatised, but the chaos afterwards was too much for them. Nobody wanted to sit still anymore, and everyone ended up just chattering, to the point where Mendeleiev got so upset she stormed out of the classroom in the last session before lunch. As the bell rang for lunch break, the announcement went out that everyone could just go home for the day, but that those who wanted to could stay behind for lunch.Chloé didn’t want to. The swarm of akumas had vanished on its own, and Hawk Moth never got to finish his ridiculous speech to her — the last she could remember was that he yelled something weird, and then everything cut off, and then she was on her knees in a room filled with white butterflies and confused shouts.She didn’t know if Marinette got caught. But either way, at least it didn’t last for long enough to actually be a problem for the girl. The only negative effect was that it had made the day a lot messier, and it wasn’t like the mess wasn’t already there.As lunch started, Chloé went home by herself, intent on raiding the hotel kitchen for food rather than eat the crummy stuff from the school cafeteria. Leftovers from the hotel breakfast buffet: fruits, berries, pastries, cheese, salted biscuits, and a lukewarm waffle with strawberry jam — and she brought it all up to her room and spread it out on the table by the couch. She also brought some apple juice and, frankly, a cup of hot coffee, because she needed it.And then, as she was about to take her first bite out of the waffle, she heard a knock on her door.She got to her feet, a little bit curious and a little bit annoyed, or actually quite a lot annoyed but she was trying to not let it get to her. As she pushed the door open she started to say, “Sorry, Sabrina, but I need my alone time toda—”But the person outside her door was baker girl. And she didn’t look good at all.“... C-can I come in?” she asked.Chloé opened her mouth to say no, but nothing came out. She couldn’t even manage to look withering. After a couple of attempts, she gave up and just stepped aside — which Marinette took as an okay-to-come-in.The baker girl was quiet. Very quiet, in fact, even as Chloé told her to sit down on the sofa and to not interrupt her eating. She just nodded, completely mute. It was bizarre. Chloé had never seen this side to Marinette before, and while she had always known that it existed, it was so very different to see it face to face. So very… awful.Because it was an even worse version of the face that baker girl had while Césaire hugged her earlier, before the akumas hit. Chloé had definitely seen similar faces before that, too, like before-states to whatever this was. Marinette had looked a little like this after she found cockroaches in her locker. After Chloé got the Socqueline girl expelled. After Chloé had made Sabrina pour glue into the girl’s backpack. After Chloé had made fun of her for her weird home-sewn puffy jacket, and then yanked it so hard it tore at the seams.But Chloé had never seen anything that looked this bad before. Up until now, Marinette had always either fought back or run away before it got this far. This face was one she must only have shown to her parents — or even just her mirror. She had never looked so… weak, feeble, broken, in front of Chloé before. And that made the waffle feel really uncomfortable in Chloé’s mouth.She swallowed and put the plate down. “What… what’s up?”Marinette shook her head. “You should eat. I won’t interrupt.”Chloé frowned. Then she picked up a blueberry and flicked it at Marinette’s face.“You already interrupted, stupid,” she said. “Out with it.”But Marinette didn’t say ‘I’m not stupid’. She just looked at Chloé with soggy eyes.“Come on already,” said Chloé. “Why are you here? Go hang out with your real friends or something. Césaire and the gang. Speak up already, or I’ll have you thrown out.”Marinette’s expression didn’t change. She already looked like she was out on the streets. She fiddled with her fingers for a little bit, and Chloé felt too embarrassed to say anything.“... Sorry,” the baker girl said finally, damply, looking at the floor. “I know I shouldn’t be here. We hate each other, and you think I’m stupid. And right now I know I’m stupid, because… because I came to you, but… I really don’t have anyone else to talk to.”“Really now,” said Chloé, only half managing a deadpan tone. “Blogger girl? Your parents? DJ Headache? Placard girl?”“No. I, I can’t. I — I know I should, but if I even think about doing it I… I feel like I’m going to vomit…”“Oh.” Chloé wrinkled her nose. “Not on my lunch, please.”“Keep your stupid lunch,” snapped Marinette. Okay — there was some fight in her. That was good. “I just need to talk to someone who doesn’t ask questions or doubt me and who knows what’s going on, and… and for whatever reason, you’re the only one who fits the bill.”“Well… okay,” said Chloé. She breathed in through her mouth. “Go… go ahead, then. Talk, or whatever.”Marinette sniffled. Then she nodded. Her eyes dropped to her knees; her thumbs twiddled.“... I’m tired,” she said at last. “I… I’m sick and tired of the whole Lila thing. I feel like I’m going to fall apart. And it’s not… I’m not upset because she’s lying. Not like that. I mean, I hate liars, and I know you know that. But I think… Ugh. It’s like… I feel I have to look over my shoulders all the time, and…”She trailed off. Chloé sighed. “Right. Because she tells lies about you sometimes. Big deal.”But Marinette turned her sad eyes towards Chloé. The look she gave wasn’t of the withering variety. Even so, Chloé felt herself wither as she met it.“She… she threatened me in the bathroom,” said Marinette. “She said she would ruin my life. She’s said it multiple times, but the time in the bathroom I almost got akumatised, and… and I can’t be akumatised, if I get akumatised it’s all over, and if I… and she keeps lying about me to make me look bad, and that’s bad enough, but… but. She threatened me, Chloé. She even put me — she put me in front of an akuma one time. She got me attacked by, um… yeah. And it was like… the last time I felt like this was…”Once again, Marinette trailed off. Chloé could make a pretty good guess about what she had been about to bring up, though. It could be any one of many bullying events, like Kim’s spiders on the diving board — well, Chloé’s spiders — or the glue in the backpack, or when Socqueline Wang got expelled, or when the jacket got destroyed, or… it could be a lot of things that Chloé couldn’t even remember. But she knew the general area of things that Marinette was referring to.“... And I’m insane and stupid for telling you about this,” Marinette continued a little while later. “You’re mean and you hate my guts. And you’ll probably use this against me somehow, but… but I can’t tell Alya. I can’t. She’s my best friend but I just, I can’t, I just can’t.”“Why not?” said Chloé. She was surprised at herself for how… normal she sounded. It sounded like a normal question.“Because she thinks Lila is a good person.”“That’s it? That’s why you can’t tell her?” Chloé let out a groan. “That’s just stupid. She’s ride-or-die for you.”“Well, I’m stupid, right?” said Marinette. There was a certain edge to her tone. “So I do stupid things. And anyway, it’s not about that. I know she loves me. But with Lila it’s just… I don’t feel like I can trust anyone.”“Except me,”  said Chloé with half-hearted sarcasm.“Yeah. Except you.” Marinette sniffled, pulled her sleeve across her nose. “It’s like… it’s like I have to try to explain why a poisonous spider is dangerous, and the spider only wants to bite me so I’m the only one in danger. And… and everyone else is like, look, the spider is so cute, I want to pet the spider, but I can’t because it’s going to bite me. She’s going to bite me, Chloé. That’s what it feels like. Everyone’s holding the spider. And I know that logically, Alya is on my side. But she’s holding the spider in her hands and petting it. Ugh. That analogy makes no sense, I know, but I just… I don’t want to even try telling her about when Lila threatened me.”“Because…”“Because what if… what if she doesn’t believe me?” Marinette swallowed so painfully that Chloé could see the girl’s body spasm. “If… if she tells me I’m just overreacting again? It’s like… even if she doesn’t say that, even if she believes me, I can’t know for sure and I don’t want to try because if she does say that I’ll have nobody. I-it’s the worst thing I could ever imagine happening, and — and I tried talking to her before, before Lila threatened me, and — and she said, she said I was overreacting because I was in love with Adrien.”Chloé raised an eyebrow. “And you weren’t?”“No!”“But… you are in love with Adrikins, right?”Marinette sagged. “... Maybe. I don’t even know right now. I’m just… an emotional mess all the time. And he told me he believes me about Lila, but I just… he told me not to make a big deal out of it. And then she does this and she tries to get me expelled and to get the entire faculty mad at me, and she is making things be a big deal and, and I was scared out of my head the entire time and the only reason I survived in Damocles’s office is because you were in there and I knew you knew, I felt like I was going to break into tiny little pieces every time I even looked at Lila today and I’m so sick and tired and I want to curl up into a little ball and just not think about anything!”Chloé tried to say something, but hesitated. She wasn’t even sure what she was going to say. Was this a bullying victim felt like every day? Had Marinette been this distressed in the past when Chloé turned the entire school on its head just to bother her, then had Daddy pay off the teachers to not do anything about it?Maybe Marinette was just extra down right now. Or maybe she’d felt even worse before, when Chloé and Sabrina had reigned supreme over the school courtyard. Either way, just seeing her like this was making something inside Chloé boil and burn. She was upset, she was livid, she was furious like a thousand suns. And she hated to admit it, but a lot of it was aimed at herself.Because bullying the baker girl was one thing. But seeing her shattered face in the aftermath… that was something completely different.Marinette heaved her entire body with the next sigh, which sounded like she was very close to crying. “And… and I love Alya, and I love Adrien. I’d trust them with so many things. The fact I can’t talk to them about this is just… stupid. I’m a stupid idiot and that’s why I’m here, telling the person who used to make me feel like this about it. I just… I needed to tell someone, and even though you hate me, and even though you’re mean, it’s better than trying to tell someone about the dangerous spider and ugh I — I j-just…”The girl broke into full-on tears then, planting her elbows on her knees and her face in her hands, and her shoulders heaved and she sobbed. And Chloé could only sit there and watch.Marinette had just confirmed it. Everything she felt right now was stuff Chloé had made her feel before. And seeing it with her own two eyes, even knowing that this time it wasn’t her fault, it was the worst feeling Chloé had ever felt.Even at her actiest, Marinette was still a little stiff and awkward, because she just wasn’t good at lying — she was, at best, good at coming up with lies. But this was a Marinette that was so incredibly honest that she was dissolving into tears, and it was ripping at Chloé’s insides.“... For what it’s worth,” Chloé tried, “I don’t hate you.”It wasn’t even a lie. That was the worst part. How could she hate someone who had poured their entire self at her feet like this? She wasn’t sure what she felt about Marinette right now, but it wasn’t hate, and it wasn’t disgust, and it wasn’t even something so small as distaste. It was something that made her actually want a good thing to happen to the baker girl.“Actually,” she went on, “I don’t think you’re stupid, either.”“Yeah, r-right,” said Marinette, her voice incredibly uneven. “Like — like I’d believe that.”“I mean it.” For the first time she could remember, Chloé made an effort to sound genuine. “You managed to think of three lies out of the blue. Three great lies that stumped Lila completely. That takes brains. And you use big words like ‘faculty’ and ‘contusions’.”Marinette sniffed again. “Chloé… ‘faculty’ isn’t a big word. It means the, the t-teachers at school. We ha-had it on the test…”“Oh,” said Chloé. Then she added, “I got an A.”That got a snort out of baker girl. “Y-yeah,” she said. “I gu-guess you did.”Had making Marinette laugh been the goal of saying that? No; Chloé knew well enough that it was just to save a little face. But she had to admit that the laugh was an unforeseen positive to having said it.Not that she would concede either of those things to anyone.But she did have enough of a heart to finally pluck up the box of tissues from the table and hand them over. “Here…”Marinette didn’t say thank you. But she did grab a tissue and wipe it on her face, and then she blew her nose on it. Then she took another, and blew again. The tissues ended up on the floor, crumpled and nasty, but getting it out at least meant she was no longer burying her face in her palms. She was red and there were tear streaks glistening on her cheeks, and she didn’t seem not sad, but… it was still kind of nice to see her at all.“You’re better than Lila,” Chloé tried.Marinette grimaced. “That’s — that’s like being told I smell better than r-rotten fish.”“You smell better than rotten fish.”Another snort. But Marinette’s face didn’t look amused. It looked twisted, upset, like the pre-broken face again. Maybe it was too early for jokes…Chloé continued, “I think you’re pretty smart, actually. You’re not Ladybug, but you’re close.”“Don’t push it.”“It’s true —”“Don’t,” Marinette repeated. She held up a hand, palm towards Chloé, so close to that it obscured half her face. “Maybe you don’t actually hate me, but we’re not like that yet.”“But…” said Chloé — but whatever she was about to say, and she honestly had no idea what it could have been, it got caught in her throat. Right now, Marinette was in control, and Chloé didn’t want to wrest that control back. She wanted to say something, but not if it would make Marinette more upset. She had probably done that enough in her life already.In fact, she rather wanted to ask what had happened to Marinette this semester. Falling grades, until today for whatever reason; even worse at getting to school on time; leaving her actual friends hanging. She wanted to ask, because what if she could help with that too?But before she could actually speak the question, both of their phones suddenly blared at once. An akuma alert — Hawk Moth must have recovered.“Shit,” said Marinette — also something old Marinette would never have said. “I… I have to go.”“Why?” said Chloé. “It’s safe here. Ish.”“I — I’ve promised my parents to come home whenever there’s an akuma,” said Marinette. “They want to know I’m safe.”Chloé stared into Marinette’s eyes and knew for a fact that the baker girl was lying. That was not the face of a Marinette who had just told the truth. But there was also an urgency, a pleading, under the words that was paralysing. Chloé wanted to know the truth, but if she had to see Marinette cry another time, she would just be crushed.“... Go on, then,” Chloé said. “Don’t get caught.”“I’ll try not to,” said Marinette, and nodded. “You too.”And then she ran out the door, and Chloé was left all alone again.She sat down with her lunch. The waffle was cold now, and so was the coffee. The cheese had started to melt and sweat.Even so, it still tasted better than the first time she tried eating. ////////// The akuma — or whatever it was — didn’t take long to defeat. Chloé saw the repeat on her TV later in the day; there were two Ladybugs, and also Mayura was there. The second Ladybug probably wasn’t an akuma, but Chloé honestly couldn’t be sure about that because the transmission went fuzzy in the middle.She even forgot to go out and activate the Queen Bee signal. There was just… too much on her mind. Too much else to care about.Ladybug won in the end, of course. She was smart enough to figure out a solution, and it didn’t even take her that long.Still, Chloé couldn’t shake the weird little thought at the back of her head: ‘She’s not as good as baker girl.’ \\\\\\\\\\ Marinette came by several more times that week. Completely without being asked to, even. She was still a little spiky, but Chloé was starting to recognise the pattern. It was one she’d used herself a fair few times. It was about testing whether it was safe to let down your guard again, so you shot first and then waited to see what happened. And because you were the one who steered where things were going in the small parts it felt like you were in control of the whole, even though you really weren’t.She couldn’t begrudge Marinette for it. Actually, it sort of ate at her chest whenever she noticed it, because now she knew where it came from. All she could really do was to not get the spikes out further.It was on the third visit of the week that she realised she didn’t really care if Marinette was under her thumb anymore. What she really craved was the baker girl’s company. Marinette, with her incredible ability to conjure up lies and notice tiny details, and her smart little brain, would be great to have at her side. Maybe it could even lead to discounts at the bakery.They didn’t need anyone else, either. Marinette had clearly forgiven her friends, but Chloé was starting to hate them. If Marinette had come to her — to her previously biggest bully — to cry on the sofa, then something was wrong with all of them and they could all burn for it. Even Adrien. Maybe not Sabrina, but definitely all the others.Or maybe Marinette hadn’t forgiven her friends completely. Because she seemed able to prioritise coming to visit Chloé more than she prioritised those friends. Mylène had even brought up to Ivan today that Marinette didn’t come to the boat on Monday, even though she’d been invited.Chloé raised the question as an aside, while Marinette was working on some kind of design sketch.“What do you care?” Marinette asked. Spikes out — she was testing again.“Just asking,” said Chloé. She picked up a grape from the fruit bowl and started to chew on it. “Can’t a girl be curious?”Marinette groaned in obvious annoyance. And then nobody spoke for a little while. Marinette’s pencil worked rapidly across the page.Chloé couldn’t really tell why the baker girl was doing this. Either she was trying to make sure that she’d made a good choice when she decided to trust Chloé, or she was sure she’d made a bad choice and was now signalling her disapproval of her past self. Or maybe she was just spiky anyway, because of whatever issues at home were causing her to nearly flunk at school.Five minutes later, though, Marinette put the pen down and spoke — this time unprompted. “I come here because I can work on things in peace,” she said, half sighing the words out.“I talk to you all the time,” said Chloé.“And I can just ignore you,” said Marinette.Which was fair. In a sense. “Can’t you go meet your friends and ignore them?”“It’s harder to ignore five people than just one.”The spikes were still out. Chloé could tell from the tone of the words, even from the fact that Marinette was so bluntly talking about ignoring people. She was trying to grab control of the conversation.Maybe that was also something she couldn’t get from her so-called friends. If she tried to talk to them like this, they would probably be annoyed with her.Or maybe… and this was what was keeping Chloé from getting upset with this treatment… maybe Marinette needed that control so much more when she was talking to an old bully. Talking to those ‘friends’, even though they wouldn’t listen to her about Lila, probably just felt safer in general. Even though it wasn’t.“So you’re not avoiding them,” Chloé asked, picking up another grape.“I only avoid them if Lila is there.” The tone was still spiky, but the admission was not.“People in class say you’re a bit flaky. Like you don’t show up for things or you call off visits out of the blue.”Marinette sighed. But she didn’t reply this time either. Chloé waited patiently, swallowed four more grapes and also four blueberries.Then, five more minutes later, Marinette spoke up again. “I have a lot of things to do,” she said. Even less spike this time; it almost sounded like she was conceding something-or-other.“Like what?”Marinette turned her sketchpad around and held it up so Chloé could see. “I’m designing a costume for Clara Nightingale.”“Uh-huh,” said Chloé, nodding.“I also help my parents at the bakery sometimes.”“Uh-huh.”“And I have homework,” said Marinette, sounding slightly irritated now.“But you do worse at school now than last year?” said Chloé, a little bit surprised. “Except the test last week, but most of the time —”“Ugh.” Marinette put her forehead onto the sketchbook. “I know. Don’t remind me.”A deflection. And there were no spikes this time, just frustration. So this was something baker girl didn’t want to discuss at all — she wasn’t even testing to see if discussing might be safe.Well, it didn’t matter all that much. As long as baker girl was here and not anywhere else, things were fine.And as long as she didn’t cry again.Chloé wasn’t stupid enough to have no idea why the crying had mattered so much to her. She had the ability to tell her own emotions apart, and she knew she felt protective over the baker girl. But it still felt strange to know that she had been affected this deeply by it. After fourteen years of caring very little, she suddenly cared a whole lot, at once, about one thing. Maybe it could be called guilt, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like anger.Anger at Marinette’s pretend friends. At the school, uh, faculty? That was the word, right? But most of all, anger at Lila.And as long as Lila was still around, Marinette would keep looking over her shoulder. She would keep being afraid.Chloé picked up another blueberry from the bowl. Without even thinking about it, she gave it a little squeeze — and a tiny bit of purplish-blue-black ran down her thumb.An idea rang out in her head, dark but refreshing.“Baker girl,” she said. “You’re basically going to live in fear until Lila is gone, right?”Chloé looked over. Marinette seemed baffled by the question. “I… maybe? I don’t… know…”“So far, all you’ve done is wait for her to lie and then respond to whatever it is.”“... I guess…”A little more blueberry juice dripped down Chloé’s thumb. “I think it’s about time we strike first,” she said. “If we make the first lie… she might make a mistake.”Marinette frowned. “And… what’s your suggestion?”“That we give you a bruise. And then we’ll see her squirm.”“You’re going to hit me?” said Marinette, and her spikes were out again just like that.“No, dummy. We use berry juice.”If it was possible for the baker girl to look any more distrustful, then Chloé might have paid to see it, because it would have been an accomplishment worthy of prime time TV. Her eyes were incredibly narrow, and so was her pouting mouth. “So… you’re not going to hit me?”“I would never,” said Chloé, putting her non-blueberry hand to her chest. But even she could tell that one was a hard sell. “I mean… I don’t want to anymore.”Marinette glared some more. Then she seemed to run out of steam, and looked down at her sketch again. Then she started to draw, slowly pulling her pencil across the page.Chloé might be the person in the world who knew the most about Marinette’s defence mechanisms, but she had no idea if this was one of those times where Marinette needed to define her distance clearly before she answered. She didn’t know if the idea, for as little she had explained of it, had gone over well.But at least Marinette wasn’t leaving.There were five more minutes of scrabbly silence before the girl spoke again. But it wasn’t an answer this time. She just said, “I saw you got akumatised on Monday.”This was new. “Really,” Chloé replied. She could still remember the feeling, but honestly what she remembered most was the burning anger she felt right before. Marinette’s expression in Césaire’s arms. The chaos that came before that moment of horrible clarity.“Yes,” said Marinette.She put a few more lines on the sketch, and then she added, “I saw you looking at me before that.”“Right,” said Chloé. She still wasn’t sure where this was going. “And this matters because…”“Just shut up and listen,” said Marinette.Okay. Baker girl was really testing the limits now. She was either about to admit to something really embarrassing, or she was going to leave. And Chloé couldn’t really think of a way to say ‘okay’ that wouldn’t sound either sarcastic or rude, so she just… followed the command. Adjusted her legs a little bit.“I guess you don’t know what you looked like before the akuma hit you,” Marinette continued.“I didn’t exactly have a mirror, baker girl.”“You know, some people are emotionally aware enough to know what their feelings look like on the outside.”Another jab. This story was going to be the most embarrassing thing Marinette had ever told anyone, judging by all the aggressive preamble.Then, another wait. But it was shorter this time.“You looked scared,” said Marinette. She sounded just a little bit softer. “Like… angry scared, but I could tell. And you were walking towards me.”“... And?”“I think that’s why I came to see you afterwards.”Chloé could only frown. This almost felt like a joke. “What, you were worried about me?” she said through half-gritted teeth.“No, idiot,” Marinette snapped back.But her eyes had changed. Chloé looked into them — and she realised. Marinette was being so defensive, so cagey, because she was afraid for herself. She was saying, she wouldn’t have come if Chloé hadn’t shown concern for her first.The realisation of that was enough to rip all the remaining annoyance out of Chloé. She didn’t know if Marinette was trying to communicate that information intentionally, what with the thing about being emotionally aware, or if it was just apparent to her because she knew what Marinette looked like when she was scared. Because she at least had the emotional awareness to recognise in Marinette the things she felt herself.“... Did you get akumatised, too?” was really all she could say in reply.“No.”Chloé didn’t say, ‘That’s good.’ She just nodded once, to let Marinette know that she heard. But her heart beat a solid thump of approval.It was a little strange that Marinette was so afraid of being akumatised. It was stressful in the moment, sure, and a little embarrassing afterwards, but it wasn’t painful. Then again, Marinette wouldn’t know that — even so, there had to be something else going on. A phobia, maybe. Maybe that was why she ran away during akuma attacks, because she was just so scared of the entire thing…… maybe that was why she was extra scared of Lila. Because Lila made her feel bad, and if she felt bad she might get akumatised.Then again, Lila threatening her, Lila putting her in danger with an akuma… that was more than enough reason to take Lila down. Chloé squeezed the blueberry even more without thinking about it, and juice poured out way too quickly. She had to dive for the tissue box before she stained her clothes.As Chloé did that, though, Marinette just looked at the sketchbook some more. But she didn’t draw anything in it. She just tapped it with her pencil, like she was considering something.And then she said, “So this idea of yours…”“Yes,” said Chloé, wrapping up the stained tissue. The dark blue still stuck to her skin, though, like blueberry always did.“Tell me more about it.”Chloé smirked. ////////// It was really a very simple idea. Get Marinette in a situation where she was alone with Lila, stain her eye or arm or something so it looked like a glaring bruise or wound, and act like Lila had done it to her. For once, Lila would be on the back foot, and from everything Chloé was able to pick out… the little spider was bad at lying when she didn’t control the narrative. She had protested feebly when the necklace hoax and the falling-down-the-stairs lie had failed to connect, and while she’d managed to weasel out of it then, there was a chance they might knock her down with something more direct. If they could get her just enough off balance, they could make everyone hate her in one fell swoop.And Marinette could sell the lie. She was usually awkward when she lied, but everyone liked her, and that was the important part. Belief wasn’t something people arrived at through logic, but something they justified after they’d already started believing.And Chloé could hide out in the room somewhere unseen, so that Marinette wouldn’t feel alone and scared. That wasn’t vital for the plan to work, but it felt important nonetheless. She would also bring the blueberries, because Marinette had a habit of breaking or forgetting things.On top of everything else, the plan would go into action on Monday. Lila’s favourite day for lying. If she tried anything herself, Marinette would counter it, and that would make Lila look even worse.“Okay,” was all Marinette said after she had it explained to her. She didn’t seem up in the clouds about it, but she also didn’t seem particularly opposed.“You’ll be rid of her forever,” said Chloé, pulling sing-song-like on the ‘ever’ part.“... Maybe,” said Marinette. She had put the sketchpad entirely aside now, like it had become a distraction in her thinking process. Instead, she held a hand to her face so that it covered one half, and she was watching the empty part of the sofa between them very intently.“No more looking over your shoulders. You won’t need to worry about her at all.”Marinette puffed. “Why do you care so much?”“Are you going to complain about that now?” humphed Chloé.“No, I mean… what’s in it for you?”“Nothing.”“Fat chance.”“It’s true!”Well — it was somewhat true, at least. Getting Lila out of the way was useful for both of them. And maybe there was also something there about assuaging her guilt for what she used to put Marinette through. But she really didn’t have any other motive. All she wanted was to install herself back at the top of the class, with Marinette at her side. As… as something-or-other. A thing. It didn’t matter what happened to anyone else.Marinette’s eyes looked like they were trying to bore through Chloé’s. Even the one that only peeked out between her fingers.But then she said, again, “Okay.”“And look, all your friends will like you again.”“They like me now…”“Well, whatever.”The plan hadn’t been taken off the table. That was the important part. Marinette was considering it, and if she considered it long enough she’d accept it, and if she accepted it she would commit to it.Chloé watched her for a little longer. She honestly couldn’t understand why it was taking the girl so long — there were literally no issues. Taking Lila down was important, and the only way to take her down was by lying better than her. And once she was out of the picture, Marinette could stop feeling scared all the time. There were no downsides to this plan whatsoever.“You really want her to keep stepping on you?” said Chloé. It was a low blow. But it was for Marinette’s sake, and it did the trick. Marinette’s eyes shot up wide, and she stopped breathing with an audible gulp.“... No,” she said.“Then…”“I’m in.”Chloé smiled. “Good. On Monday, Lila gets what she deserves.”This time, Marinette seemed a little more convinced. She nodded. “Yeah… Yeah.” \\\\\\\\\\ They met up early that Monday — half an hour before school started — to finalise their plan. Marinette had clearly psyched herself up for it this time, and nodded with gusto when Chloé explained the finer details just inside the door to the boiler room.It would be a black eye. It would be on her left eye. It would look fresh, but not too big, so Marinette could pretend to want to hide it. It would look painful, but not too much, so Marinette wouldn’t need to act out too much fake pain.Just before the first free period, Chloé would sneak out to the ladies’ room and hide in a stall. Then, Marinette would go down right after class, and say something about how she needed to fix her makeup. If Lila followed — which of course was the greatest issue with the plan, because she might not, but if she didn’t they could just try again. But if she did, they would put the plan into motion, using the five blueberries that Chloé had plastic-wrapped in her purse.Once they were alone, they would make the bruise with the help of single-use gloves, and then Chloé would go back upstairs first. Marinette would only go back a few minutes after class started, and she would try to look really quiet and shameful — not a hard task for her, that one.And then, the teacher would ask when she saw the eye what happened, or the others would ask after class. Maybe Césaire would even ask during, and there would be enough of a stink raised to pause whatever was happening and put everyone’s attention on Marinette.“Got it,” said Marinette. “Sou— sounds good.” The pause was because of a yawn.“Why are you tired?” asked Chloé. “You’ve only been up for like an hour.”“Ten minutes,” said Marinette, who would probably end up being late for her own wedding one day. “And I’m not used to being up early…”“Well, I hope you’re awake enough to pull this off.”Marinette nodded. Despite what she said, though, Chloé thought maybe the bleary eyes could help make the lie a little more convincing.“Also, if she comes up with a counter-lie, improvise,” said Chloé. “You’re good at that. Just find a hole in what she says and make up something new that makes her seem bad.”Marinette nodded again. She seemed far less certain this time, though. “Um…”“What?”“... What if everyone hates me afterwards?”Chloé flicked her ponytail over her shoulder. “Nobody hates you to begin with. It’s fine.”“But —”“Also I don’t hate you.”“Ugh,” said Marinette. “But like… I’m just… I’m worried that…”Chloé grabbed her by the shoulders. “Look. That’s not going to happen. And even if it does, who cares? I won’t hate you. You’ll put on the black eye, and then you’ll do the best performance of your life, and you’ll rule this school. Lila won’t know what hit her.”Marinette frowned, looked down. But she hadn’t said no yet. She was still on board.“... Yeah,” said Marinette a little while later. Her jaw set a little bit firmer. “I… I’m tired of being scared.”“Good,” said Chloé. “Now, let’s get out of here before anyone sees us.”“What, like that’s a problem?” said Marinette, in a pretty good attempt at deadpan.Truthfully, Chloé wanted to say that no, it wasn’t a problem. But she had her pride still, so she said, “Yeah, because you’re stupid.”“I’m not stupid,” said Marinette. She didn’t seem particularly bothered by the jab.Then she turned around and pulled the door open, and walked outside.And stopped. Because Césaire was there, yet again. Walking past, like she’d just arrived for the day.“... Marinette?” said Césaire at first; then, when she noticed Chloé, she frowned heavily. “Chloé.”“H-hey, Alya,” said Marinette, wagging her fingers in a silly little wave. “Good morning.”“Marinette,” said Alya. She stepped forward and took hold of Marinette by the shoulders, and even yanked her a little away from Chloé. Chloé bared her teeth. “If she’s doing something to you, blink twice.”“I’m fine,” said Marinette. “Don’t worry… we were just talking, honest!”“Yeah, I know your lying face, and this is definitely your lying face. You can’t trick me,” she said, like she hadn’t been tricked by the baker girl several times already. “And I’m worried for you, girl. If there’s anything going on, you can talk to me about it, okay?”Chloé couldn’t see Marinette’s expression. She very much wanted to. She would probably have seen several things, but right now she expected Marinette was looking pretty out of it. Eyes down, a small frown, but nothing like obvious disapproval. Just a way to convey the thing she couldn’t — or wouldn’t — say out loud: ‘I can’t talk to you about anything.’And if Chloé were in Marinette’s position, she would have wrenched herself loose and said, ‘Go away! I can’t trust you,’ and then several nasty insults. But that wasn’t Marinette’s style. She was meek and quiet. That was how she had always acted, even while being bullied.“... I know,” Marinette mumbled. “But nothing’s wrong right now. Chloé just wanted to have a word.”Césaire mellowed a little bit when she heard that. Her eyes took on a far more feeling shine. “Where were you on Saturday? Everyone missed you at the party.”“I had, er, commissions,” said Marinette.“... Okay,” said Alya. She didn’t seem entirely convinced. “You weren’t caught in the Mr Pigeon attack, were you? I thought he was on the other side of the city.”“No,” said Marinette, a little faster. “Not that. S-sorry. I’ll be there next time.”“Mm… okay. I’m happy to see you, anyway.”Alya probably wasn’t lying. But her mouth was curved into a dissatisfied frown. She let go of Marinette’s arms and stepped back.And then, she raised one finger and pointed it straight at Chloé. “If I find out you’ve been doing anything to her, I — I don’t know what I’m going to do, but you won’t like it.”Chloé could only stare. She might have snapped back on any other day — but right now, she was actually a little scared. From the fire burning in blogger girl’s eyes, Chloé was genuinely afraid that something physical might happen to her. Not just the usual futile report to the teachers.“... I’m not doing anything to her,” she managed. “Relax.”“You better not be,” said Alya, dropping the finger slowly. And then she actually did smile, and rubbed Marinette’s arm, and said just to Marinette, “I’ll be waiting in the classroom. Okay? Don’t fall asleep on your way up the stairs.”Marinette nodded, twice this time. “I, I won’t.”And then Alya went down into the courtyard and towards the staircase, leaving the two of them pretty much alone in the school entranceway.“Ugh,” said Marinette. “I just…”“Was Lila at the party?” said Chloé.“She — she was invited, I… don’t think she actually turned up.”“That’s bad enough,” said Chloé. It confirmed her suspicions, at least. Marinette was being left out again, and nobody had asked how she felt about that. Except her, Chloé Bourgeois, the best friend in the whole world.Were they even friends right now? Well, kind of, maybe. At this point, Chloé needed to admit to herself that she was at least okay with the idea. She would be a damn sight better than all of Marinette’s other friends, because unlike all of them, she could tell when Marinette was frightened. And she wanted to kick Lila in the teeth, while they just fawned over the lying spider’s every move.“Let’s wait a little longer before we go up,” she said.Marinette raised her eyebrows. “Why?”Not ‘because I want to keep you away from Césaire’. Just… “Because I think you’ll be more focused if we get you un-tired first. Let’s go splash some water in your face.” ////////// The classroom seemed about normal that day. People chatted about the weekend, discussed their homework, talked about the metro ride over and the most recent song they heard. They said hello to each other and asked how things were going. Regular, boring stuff.Marinette even had a small gaggle around her. The regular girls, discussing plans for a sleepover. Sleepover? Ugh. If they had also invited Lila, Chloé was going to get over there and have words —“I finished all your homework for the week,” said Sabrina, pulling Chloé out of her thoughts. “Here.” She pushed a little folder across the desk.“Good,” said Chloé, and grabbed hold of it to make sure everything was there. “You — wait, the whole week?”“Yes. I thought since you’ve been so busy lately, I should hack into the faculty server and get the weekly plan out early, just in case you’re busy this week too.”Chloé sighed as she flipped through the pages. She had been neglecting Sabrina lately — had messaged her that she wouldn’t be available after school for a while. With Marinette coming over almost every day, Sabrina had become a second priority. And while Sabrina was no Marinette, she was handy to have around, so it would probably be smart to not make her feel ignored.“Maybe we should go shopping on Wednesday,” Chloé suggested.“... Maybe? Is that an order?”“Yes.” Darn it. She had spent too much time tiptoeing around Marinette’s feelings. “You have to come with me.”“Okay,” said Sabrina. “I’m looking forward to it.”“Right.”Chloé looked back at the circle around Marinette. Lila wasn’t in yet — when she did come in, how many people would break off to surround her instead? Lila was undeniably popular, but she wasn’t Marinette’s calibre. Or Adrien’s, for that matter. She floated around and caught people’s attention, but people didn’t really talk about her when she left the room. Like she was just a distraction.In a sense, that was good, because it confirmed the obvious: Marinette was just better. But it was also bad, because Marinette didn’t deserve to be surrounded by people who drifted away from her the moment something shiny entered the room.Today, she might get what she deserved. Or… her ‘friends’ might learn nothing. Well, Chloé would be with her either way. The dangerous duo, Chloé and Marinette. The new queens of the courtyard.“It’s been interesting,” said Sabrina. “I mean, for the past few weeks.”“Hmm?”“You’re watching her, right?” Sabrina continued. She didn’t say who ‘her’ was, but Chloé knew it was Marinette. “Things were pretty weird, until she slapped Lila. I feel like I know her better now, though.”“You have no idea,” said Chloé, shaking her head a little.“What do you mean?”“Don’t worry about it,” said Chloé. She turned back to Sabrina. “Hey… what do you think of her?”Sabrina’s eyes widened. “Marinette?”Chloé nodded — it was all she felt was necessary.But before Sabrina could answer, there was a ripple of sound by the door. And then, Bustier’s voice said, “Okay, everyone! It’s time to settle down.”Bustier hadn’t entered the room alone. Lila had also stepped inside with her, and Lila looked about as happy as Chloé would have expected: she was smiling as she waved at people, but behind the eyes lay something dark and angry.The class toddled on. The information was boring, and nobody said anything worth listening to, least of all Bustier. In all honesty, Chloé might have asked to leave the room early even if she didn’t have plans with Marinette. When she asked, she was allowed to go — Bustier was always so very lenient with her, even without the threat of Daddy.She went downstairs, took the stall that was the farthest away from the door, and locked it. Then, as an afterthought, she climbed up on the seat in case her feet would be visible. After all, if someone else came in and saw her there, they might start blaming her for the black eye and not Lila.The bell rang. A minute later, the door opened; one set of feet stepped inside.“Hey,” said Marinette’s voice. Chloé didn’t answer, but she did knock twice on the side of the stall.Now they only needed to wait and see if Lila was coming.They couldn’t speak to each other. If they did, someone outside the door might hear and stop to listen. Or if someone opened the door and a conversation abruptly ended, it would sound suspicious.Chloé heard Marinette turn on the sink.Then, the door opened.“Hey,” said — Mylène. Not Lila.“Hey,” said Marinette.One of the other stalls opened, then slammed shut and locked. The sink was still running.Mylène flushed, and went to wash her hands. A few more pleasantries were exchanged between her and Marinette, and then the door opened again, and another set of feet entered, and Mylène said “Hi.” The door opened yet again. Feet exited.It was horrible. Just waiting for something to happen, but not being able to see it. Just standing there hunched like a freak, and being fully aware that the something might not even happen this time. Just listening to the feet ambling around inside, and waiting for them to leave again so the next set of feet come through the door, and hoping that they would be the right ones —— but then she heard it. The lock turning, and the tense quiet filling the room.“Hello, Marinette,” said Lila’s voice. She must have been the person who came in after Mylène after all — but of course she didn’t say anything then. She must have waited and taken a look under the stall doors — Chloé was suddenly very happy she’d decided to climb up on the seat.“Hello,” replied Marinette’s voice. There were spikes in it, and a lot of them.“Fancy that. Seeing you here.”“I’m not afraid of you.”Lila laughed. “Really? Well, you should be. I could walk out of here and tell people you hit me again. Maybe they won’t believe me, but they’ll start to wonder if it’s true. Or I could have something else up my sleeve and you’ll never see it coming.”“I’m not afraid —”“You think you’re clever, don’t you… you managed to wriggle out of it last week, but are you sure you could do it again? You know, I’m pretty sure all your friends really hate you. Nobody likes you, Marinette, with your freaky dad issues and weird little habits. I’ll show you. Just you wait.”Chloé could feel her blood boiling from that speech. It was the kind of honest you could only get from someone who thought they were immune to all consequences, someone who had the freedom to be brutally free-spoken.Actually, it was the type of speech she herself had made a few times. To Marinette, mostly. That dampened her fury a little, but not enough to get her to calm down.She bit her teeth together, clenched her fists, waited — because now they had the perfect opportunity. Once Lila left, they could lock the door, and they would even have a witness in Myléne that Lila and Marinette had been alone in here.“You’re worthless,” Lila continued. Her voice was sugary sweet, disgustingly so. “Don’t forget that, Marinette. You’re worthless, and I will destroy you.”And then footsteps away, and then the door unlocked, opened, and then… closed.Chloé jumped down from her perch. She unlocked the stall, and pushed her way out, and she saw Marinette’s back as the girl went to lock the main door, and then Marinette turned around —She looked horrible. She was clearly on the verge of tears, and her mouth was already twisted up.“Chloé…” she said. “Chloé, I don’t think I can do this…”“Don’t say that,” said Chloé. “You know all that crap she told you? You can take her out right now if you do this.”Marinette sniffled. “But…”“She won’t be able to hurt you if she’s gone.”“But what if… what if she’s right? What if everyone really hates me?”The pained sound of Marinette’s voice was awful enough to make Chloé feel a piece of that pain herself. But — they could all burn. “If they do, then who cares? I don’t hate you. I —” and here Chloé had to swallow a lot of pride — “I actually think you’re pretty cool. So go out there, and get rid of her. You can do it!”Marinette looked like she actually had just been punched in the eye. But… she nodded. That was approval.Chloé pulled out her bag, took out four single-use gloves, and then the plastic-wrapped blueberries. She put on her own gloves and handed the other two to Marinette; then she unwrapped one blueberry and pinched it a little, enough that some juice burst through. She took it to Marinette’s eye, and started dabbing some droplets around. Squeezed a little more, then repeated the process. Marinette just stood there, like a sniffling statue.The entire thing took a few minutes. But at the end, after some smearing and wiping, Marinette had a convincing black eye. Not only that, the fact she looked like she was about to cry made it even more convincing. It was like the assault had actually happened — which it kind of had, hadn’t it?Chloé took off her gloves and smacked appreciatively. “You look amazing,” she said.Marinette frowned. Frowned, and looked down.“Hey. You’re going to rock this,” Chloé went on. She took hold of Marinette’s jaw and twisted her face slightly to see the eye a little better in the overhead lights. “Just improvise like Ladybug — you’ll have Lila on her knees in no time.”“Right…”“I’ll go upstairs.”Marinette still didn’t say anything. But her eyes were pretty damp. She would look pretty darn convincing.Letting go of her chin, Chloé turned around to the door and unlocked it. She stepped outside carefully, to make sure nobody was there, and then she peeked back inside and said, “Lock the door after me.”“... Right.”Yes — this was going to work. Marinette was going to earn sympathy points just for the way she looked, let alone what she would get when she told her story.Chloé went up to her seat next to Sabrina, and sat down to wait. There were still three minutes left before class started again — Marinette wouldn’t be here until at least five, six minutes from now. Chloé made a comment to Sabrina about how terrible the water in the fountain was.Bustier returned. She asked where Marinette was, and Mylène raised her hand and said she saw Marinette in the bathroom a while ago, but nobody volunteered that they had seen her after that. Bustier decided to start the class first, and said Marinette would show up when she was ready.The minutes ticked by. Two, then three, and no Marinette. Four, five, six, still no Marinette. Seven, eight, nine, and Chloé was getting worried — had something actually bad happened to her? She glanced around, just to make sure that Lila was actually there in the room. Of course, she was seated right next to Nathaniel as always. But why was Marinette so late?Then — twelve minutes after class started — the door opened. And Marinette stood in the opening, looking like hell on earth.She had clearly been actually crying; the eye looked even worse in the yellower light of the classroom, and at this amount of distance. Her frown was incredible in just how big it felt, how deeply it seemed to go.Everyone turned to look at her immediately. Reactions were almost as quick.“Marinette?” said Adrien.“What happened?” said Alya, almost getting up from her seat. “Did you fall?”“Oh my goodness,” said Bustier. “Marinette, are you okay?”Several more voices made sounds, but nobody else asked coherent questions. Soon, everyone just stared, waiting for the baker girl to answer.“I…” said Marinette. She was breathing fast, and getting faster — clearly hyperventilating. “I — I — I’m sorry —”And then she turned and ran out again.Césaire’s hand shot up. “Miss Bustier! Permission to follow my best friend?” she asked.“Well, uh…”“I’m going anyway,” she announced, and slid out from the bench.As she set off at a half-run towards the door, Adrien and Lahiffe also raised their hands. “We’re going too,” they said.Chloé considered raising her own hand — but she didn’t want to compromise the plan. Not now, not until it had definitely worked. But luckily, Miss Bustier solved the problem for her when she said, “Uh, I think we should all break off class just to make sure everything is okay with Marinette?”With that permission, Chloé pushed to her feet and set off out the door as well. She got out to the railing by the top of the steps, and she saw Marinette down in the courtyard, running towards the boiler room. She saw Césaire and Adrien and Lahiffe, either at the bottom of or in the middle of climbing down the stairs, in hot pursuit.Was this part of the improvised plan? Getting everyone down to the boiler room, because it made for a more dramatic setting? Well, if it was, Chloé had to be there to see it. She went down the stairs herself, followed into the boiler room, was joined by at least most of the rest of the class along the way.She found Marinette — surrounded by the three who had left first — sitting on the floor of the basement, huddled up against a wall. Césaire was kneeling next to her, rubbing her arm; Lahiffe had his hand on her knee. Adrien stood back a little and just watched. Césaire cooed gently, clearly just trying to calm Marinette down.Chloé took a similar stance to Adrien, but a bit further away. She folded her arms in the background and just waited to see what would happen.“Are you okay to speak?” asked Césaire after a little while. “Can you tell us what’s wrong?”“I… I’m not okay,” said Marinette. She had buried her face in her hands, but she was clearly crying.“Tell us what’s wrong,” Césaire continued. More people came down and stood in a tight half-circle around the little scene; most ended up closer than Chloé, so Chloé moved to the side to have clear line of sight.“I c-can’t,” said Marinette.“Relax. Breathe. It’s going to be okay.”“I-it’s no-no-not…”Chloé frowned. This wasn’t acting. The baker girl was actually having a panic attack. She was going to need help…“We’re here for you,” said Lahiffe. The sentiment was echoed by a couple of the others — and honestly, that was the biggest lie Chloé had heard in a while.“Just tell us what’s wrong, and we’ll help you,” said Césaire.That made something snap inside Chloé. “Oh my God,” she said and groaned. She stepped forwards, so that she was just inside the little half ring. “You’re all stupid.”There was a brief silence. Then someone, anyone, whoever whatever, said “What?”Chloé pointed at Marinette. “The reason she’s crying is because Lila threatened her in the bathroom before class!”Bustier cleared her throat. “Chloé, please don’t make up lies.”“It’s true. She’s threatened Marinette multiple times, and she’s been pushing bad stories about her just to hurt her this whole year. Last week she said Marinette pushed her down the stairs and stole her necklace, and it was all just pretend! And I don’t know how nobody’s realised yet that she’s doing it all! Like, seriously?”“Actually,” said Sabrina, raising her hand. “Marinette explained all that. She said it was an accident, and the necklace was just a mixup —”“Those were also lies! Because when she tried to tell the truth, everyone just said she was jealous!”Chloé glanced down at Marinette. The girl seemed more relaxed now. At the very least, the panic attack seemed to have gone away a little bit, even though she was still crying — and she was looking straight at Chloé. That was good. The help was working, even if it was completely different from the actual plan.Then the worst possible sound rang out. Lila spoke up from somewhere at the back and said, with fake innocence: “I can’t believe you’re trying to make up such vile lies about me, Chloé. Do you really hate me that much?”Of course she was there. And Chloé realised she had made a mistake, because she had started the fight by speaking the truth. That didn’t work against a liar, and because everyone hated her to start with, they were probably going to believe the liar they liked over the honest girl they didn’t.But if Chloé was going to speak the truth, she was going to speak all of it.“I hate you more than you can imagine, you lying little spider,” she said. “But I hate you because of the things you’ve done.”“How can you be so mean —”“You told her she was worthless and that you would destroy her,” growled Chloé. “I was there, I heard it. And you walked down those stairs and cried that she pushed you but you wouldn’t let a nurse look at you so they could tell you weren’t injured at all. I don’t know what your problem is, but I hate you, I hate you for making Marinette feel so alone she had to come to me to talk about it, because nobody else would listen. She cried on my couch for ages, and she was incredibly brave for doing that.”The room was completely silent now. Chloé wasn’t sure if that was because people were starting to question Lila or not, but she was pretty certain that most of what she just said had just passed by people’s heads. At best they would have snagged the general gist and maybe a few details, but the point of saying all this was to frighten Lila. To let her know that it wasn’t just Marinette who knew. To make her worry that the rest of the class had heard it all, and knock her off her little high horse.And of course, Lila’s first response was crocodile tears. She didn’t even say anything, she just put her face in her hands and started to fake sob. The people closest to her — Ivan and Mylène — moved in to comfort her.And that was another truth that Chloé was going to speak. At this point, it didn’t matter if she put Marinette on the bad team, did it? The girl was so much better than everyone else in this room anyway.“Actually,” Chloé said, “I hate all of you. I hate you for making Marinette feel alone. You say you’re her friends, but you believe someone who bullies her over her?”“Chloé…” sounded Marinette’s voice. But Chloé ignored it, because the truth wasn’t fully out yet.“You’re all stupid. Each and every one of you. Maybe you’re trying to comfort her now, but you’d leave her the moment someone cooler came around. You all suck, and Marinette deserves so much more than all of you.”“Chloé, don’t…”“I’m going to take her back to my penthouse,” said Chloé. She bent down and took hold of Marinette’s hand, feeling incredibly hot in the head. “You can sit here and think about how much it sucks to be without her, but it’s too late. You didn’t trust her, so you’re all worthless. And if you hurt her again, I will destroy you —”“Chloé!” said Marinette. Her voice was shockingly loud compared to what it was just seconds ago — and she tore her hand out of Chloé’s grip. “Shut up!”Chloé turned and stared. Marinette had wrapped her arms around Alya, and everything about her just shouted ‘spikes’. She was curled up and her expression was the angriest Chloé had seen it in a long time. And all Chloé could say, was just — “What?”“I’m not going to your place! Not if — what do you think you’re doing right now?”“I’m defending you —”“No! You’re not!” said Marinette, her voice shrill. She dug further into Alya’s side, and Alya accommodated her, put her own arms protectively around the girl. “You’re just hurting people!”Chloé furrowed her brows angrily. “You were panicking, stupid — what was I supposed to do? Let it happen?”“I’m not stupid!”“Whatever!”“No! Not whatever!” Marinette pushed to her feet, and Alya helped her along. Soon they were both standing there, watching her like she were gum on their shoes. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, Chloé Bourgeois, but you were also my bully until just a few weeks ago. Maybe you still are. But I’m not going to let you control me either.”Chloé opened her mouth. Then she closed it. The entire room was quiet, except for the echoes that only served as a reminder of what had just been said. There was no answer to give. Marinette was right, and Chloé had almost forgotten it all.“Thank you for speaking up for me. But I don’t want to hear anything else from you, unless it’s the word ‘sorry’. Come, Alya… let’s go somewhere else.”Not even Lila said a word as the two of them left. Everyone looked at each other, or at Lila, or at Bustier — or at Chloé. Nobody seemed certain of anything, least of all what had just happened.Chloé spun the entire situation around in her head. She wasn’t sure why Marinette reacted so badly, she didn’t really know why the baker girl would care so much about friends who obviously didn’t care as much for her.But she didn’t really care about all that, when push came to shove. All she knew was that she needed to apologise. \\\\\\\\\\ Marinette disappeared completely after that. Her and Césaire were nowhere to be found at school, and not even the teachers dared to say anything about it.The entire event downstairs ended up putting a stop to the school day in much the same way that akumas usually did. Bustier simply dissolved the class fifteen minutes after she’d gotten everyone back into the classroom, telling people to go home early and do homework instead. There was just something about the fact that nobody really knew what reality was anymore, and that not just Marinette and Alya but also Lila had just disappeared, that made Bustier give up completely on keeping order.It was hard to tell what anyone thought. In part because nobody seemed to know what they  thought for themselves. The chatter that Chloé caught on the way up from the boiler room, as they gathered back into the classroom, was mostly in the form of confused questions and then answers that felt like questions in themselves.“Do you think it’s true?”; “I don’t know…”; “Can we really trust Chloé?”; “I don’t believe Marinette would lie like that, but…”; “Why did Marinette have that black eye?”; “Maybe Lila did it? But would she really do that?”; “So Marinette wasn’t making a Rena Rouge costume?”; “What do you mean?” — it was incredibly strange to listen to people try to pick fact from fiction when everyone just had bits and pieces of each to choose from.It was also frustrating. To listen to all these idiots try to figure out whether or not the girl they had known for years and pretended to care about had really been bullied. Chloé had expected to not be believed all that much, but it was almost more irritating when people didn’t even know for sure if they believed. Like they didn’t care enough to figure out the truth.Or maybe it was more irritating because… Marinette was upset, and for whatever reason, it was Chloé’s fault. And she didn’t even get to see her to ask what was up, and that just left everything in a terrible rut.When Bustier said class was over for the day, it was freeing and horrifying at the same time. Chloé went outside school to go home, but she came to a stop at the foot of the stone steps. If Marinette wasn’t anywhere here, then she might have gone home. The bakery was open, of course, but it was impossible to tell if there was anyone upstairs.As she stood there watching, a voice behind her piped up. “Um…”She turned around. Mylène was standing there, holding her school bag in her hands and twiddling her thumbs, not fully looking at Chloé. “Yes?”“I was just wondering… the things you said. Downstairs. Are they all true?”Chloé folded her arms. “Of course it’s true,” she said gruffly. Mylène deigned to look at her before asking her next question.“The… threats?” Chloé nodded. “And calling Marinette worthless?” Chloé nodded. “Did Lila lie about getting pushed down the stairs?” Chloé nodded. “And, um, the necklace?” Chloé nodded. “Um, how do you know?” Chloé — stopped herself from nodding.“Because I talked to Marinette about it. Duh.”“Do you know if Lila really punched Marinette in the eye?”“Well… no,” said Chloé, groaning on the last word. “She didn’t. That was… you should talk to Marinette about that.”Mylène nodded awkwardly. “Um… yeah, that makes sense. Did she really come to you to cry?”“Yeah. She had nowhere else to go.”“Um… yeah,” said Mylène, dropping her eyes to the pavement again. “I, I think I need to apologise to her, or something. Or talk to her, at least.”Chloé almost spat back, ‘Of course you need to apologise to her, you idiot!’ — but even she could recognise how ironic that would be. Chloé Bourgeois, telling other people to apologise to Marinette. Admittedly she had already kind of done that today, but now that she was out of her indignant rage she felt… less like doing that.“I think you need to trust her,” she said instead. Because that, at least, was a thing she had done better than anyone else of late.Mylène sighed quietly. “Yes… you’re right. Um, thank you.”“Why are you saying thank you, placard girl?”“Because,” said Mylène, smiling the faintest and most frightened smile Chloé had ever seen on anyone except Marinette, “you tried to help her. I, um, I didn’t think you would ever do that.”Chloé felt like she had just been kicked in the leg. “Uh, well, okay…”“I’m going to go home now. So, um, bye…”Then Mylène turned around rapidly and scuttled away, leaving Chloé alone.So… there was some hope, at least. Maybe telling the truth, just this once, had actually been better than lying.Chloé turned back towards the bakery. She had no idea if Marinette was actually there, or somewhere else, so it would be pointless to even try and go there to ask for her. Marinette was probably still angry, too, and needed time alone to calm down. Plus Marinette’s parents would definitely be upset if Chloé came to see her.Chloé stood there, watching the empty upper windows for a little longer. There wasn’t any sign of motion.Then she made her decision, and walked to the bakery anyway. ////////// “Well, er,” said Tom Dupain. He glanced aside at his wife. “I don’t think Marinette wants to see anyone right now…”“I know,” sighed Chloé. She was the only guest at the bakery right now. “I know she’s upset. But can’t you at least ask her if I can come up?”“You know how she feels about — about you,” said Sabine Cheng, and to be honest, Chloé had no idea right now. That was why she needed to see Marinette so much. “I don’t think it’s a good idea.”“Please. Just ask her. Let her choose, and if she says no, I’ll leave. I promise.”Tom Dupain shrugged. “Honey?”“Well…” Sabine Cheng closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. “Okay. I’ll go up and ask her. But if she says no, I expect you to leave right away.”Chloé wanted to protest. It was fine for her to promise that on her own, but it felt different when someone was commanding her to do the same thing. But this wasn’t the time to squabble about that, so she bit her teeth together and nodded.Sabine walked to the back and out of the bakery, and her footsteps were audible in the stairwell even with the door shut. Another door slammed further up.“So,” said Tom Dupain. He sounded like he was reaching for something to say, pulled the ‘o’ out longer than it needed to be. “Do you know… why she had the black eye? Did she fall?”“No,” replied Chloé, because apparently she was stupid now. “I did that.”“You did what —”“I mean it’s makeup!” she yelled, raising both hands and wincing; Tom Dupain was not a man she wanted to see angry. “It’s not real! But she is very sad and I want to talk to her and make things right and I promise I didn’t hit her!”His nostrils were flaring, and his hands were fists, but — slowly, the nostrils relaxed and the hands unclenched. “... Okay,” he said. “But if she tells me you’re lying, you’ll never set foot in my bakery again. Got it? Not even as a customer.”Why was everyone trying to threaten her today? She was literally trying to help Marinette. She —— actually, no. She did get it, if she let herself think about it for a bit. If she stopped being so stupid and proud all the time. She knew full well that people hated her; if anything, the weird and unbelievable thing was that Marinette seemed to hate her so little. That Marinette had dared to come to her at all in the first place.“I know,” said Chloé, even though she couldn’t help a hint of bitterness from creeping into her tone. She was trying. She was helping. Darn it all.Sabine Cheng’s feet sounded in the stairwell again. They both turned to the doorway, just waiting for Sabine to come through and deliver judgement. Each step felt horrible and heavy — the echo made them ring out like some kind of doom bell.And then Sabine Cheng showed up. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at Chloé, and — waved for her to come through.Chloé breathed out in pure relief. She glanced at Tom Dupain, who stepped aside — symbolically more than functionally, because he wasn’t actually blocking her. And she nodded to him before she walked to the back of the bakery.“Alya is up there already,” said Sabine as they climbed. And water, as always, was wet. “Marinette says it’s okay for you to come, but… she said she has something to tell you.”“Tell me?”“She’s not happy. That’s all I could tell.”“I, uh, I figured as much.”Sabine stopped outside their apartment. She put her hand on the door, turned to face Chloé with her entire body.“I don’t know what’s going on, but I want you to know just how many times our daughter has come home crying because of you,” she said. She looked incredibly severe, but also a little — pleading? “She’s really struggled. The only reason I’m letting you up right now is because she isn’t alone, and because she said she wanted you to be there. And you should know just how lucky you are that she lets you come upstairs at all.”Chloé looked down. She still wanted to protest — it wasn’t exactly nice to come visit and just be told over and over how much she wasn’t wanted there — but she couldn’t deny what she was being told. Or at least, she believed all of it. Of course Marinette had come home crying, of course she had struggled. Of course Sabine Cheng was reluctant to let her into their apartment.And the part she both believed and couldn’t deny, was that she was lucky.“I know,” she said. “I won’t hurt her.”“Good. But I expect you to do better than just not hurting her.” Sabine pushed the door open, but didn’t go inside herself. “Follow the stairs up. They’re in the bedroom. Through the hatch, remember to close it carefully so it doesn’t slam.”“Uh, right,” said Chloé.Sabine left without another word. Barely another look, even. Maybe she felt she had said her piece, but Chloé didn’t really understand what ‘doing better’ meant. Maybe Marinette would explain it when she came upstairs?She walked up the steps, hesitated for a moment with her hand on the trapdoor. She hoped Marinette wasn’t still crying. She hoped the crying wasn’t her fault. She would hate to meet that sight again.But even if she waited for a hundred years, she couldn’t really undo anything. She could only avoid consequences. And what else was she here for in the first place, if not to experience consequences? She breathed in and pushed.The room upstairs was quiet. It was pink. It was small, too. But it was pretty, in a kind of childish way, and it smelled a little of strawberry perfume.And when she turned her head, she saw Césaire and Marinette on a chaise-longue at the far end, Alya with her hand on Marinette’s knee.Alya frowned when their eyes met. “Chloé,” she said.“Hello,” said Chloé. “Marinette.” She didn’t really care to address Césaire.“Chloé,” echoed Marinette. She didn’t seem to still be crying. But she still had the fake black eye, and both eyes glistened in a way that suggested  she had been crying until maybe a few minutes ago. She didn’t smile, either, or indicate in any way that she was happy for the visit.“I wanted to, uh, talk,” Chloé tried.“Yeah.” Marinette sighed. “I thought so.”It felt like being called in front of a council. Chloé walked up the remaining steps, got her feet on the floor, then tried to gently close the hatch. But the trapdoor slipped out of her fingers and slammed loudly shut. “S-sorry,” she said in the echoey aftermath, surprised at how much she herself hated the sound.“It’s okay,” said Marinette, though she was obviously exiting a wince.There wasn’t any more room on the chaise. Instead, Chloé took the rolling chair by Marinette’s desk and sat down in it, and pushed it a little closer to the other two. It was far too quiet. Like everything she did was being watched and judged.“How are you doing?” said Chloé. “After…”Marinette didn’t reply. Instead, Césaire spoke up. “We’ve been talking about Lila,” she said.“Oh,” was all Chloé could say. The word sounded lifeless and dull in the empty space around her.“I didn’t realise what was going on,” Alya went on, looking back to Marinette. “I’m so sorry. I was stupid.”“You’re not stupid.”“I acted like I was. You’re my best friend, girl. I should have listened to you.” Alya stroked Marinette’s cheek, far too gently, with the outside of her fingers.And now, the council felt almost like a performance. Like Chloé was watching a TV show. Until Alya turned her head to Chloé again, out of the TV screen, and said: “You know, it’s really galling when you think you’re someone’s best friend and think they can trust you with everything, and then you find out you were just wrong. And then you have to reconsider a lot of stuff.”There was a certain pointiness to what Alya said, but it wasn’t that sharp. It was more like a jabbing finger than a needle.“And it’s also galling that she had to panic for you to realise something was actually up. And someone had to tell you what the problem was,” Alya went on.“Right,” said Chloé. She didn’t really have much to add.“I don’t like you, Chloé. I think you’ve been awful the whole time I’ve known you.” Chloé frowned. “But I’ve made a big mistake with Marinette, and you didn’t, and you even tried to fix it. So… you can’t be all bad, I guess.”“I don’t like you either, Césaire. I think you’re stuck up and rude and —”“Chloé,” said Marinette. The warning in her tone would have been obvious even to a complete stranger.“— uh, but I suppose she trusts you. So there.”“That’s the problem.” Marinette threw up her hands — clearly, even if she were still afraid of being bullied, she had enough bravery left in her to be brash. “Chloé… I’m really glad you stood up for me today. Honest. But you’re just… you’re just horrible.”“Hey!”“You thought it was a good idea to call everyone idiots. Well, they’re not! They’re smart and nice and I love them. Alya is my best friend. Nino’s been my friend since I was five. I hang out with Mylène and Rose and Juleka and Alix whenever I can. I wouldn’t do that if I didn’t like them, would I?”But that was just — Chloé didn’t even dare think the word, in case it slipped out. But it still was that thing. “So you’re fine with people who ignore your pain?”“I didn’t show them my pain.”“Marinette,” said Alya. “That’s silly. You signalled to me all the time. And I never stopped to ask why you did that, even though I should have. I thought it was just about Adrien or something…”“Hah,” scoffed Chloé.“Chloé, shut up,” said Marinette. Chloé did as she was commanded, but only because it was Marinette saying it; she glared at Alya instead.“Maybe… maybe they did make a mistake,” Marinette went on. “Maybe I’m the one who made a mistake. But that doesn’t make them stupid, or worthless, and — and,” she said, and with each ‘and’ she worked herself up even more. Her eyes seemed to burn, and her voice frayed, “and, and, how dare you use Lila’s words about me to hurt them? I felt like I was going to throw up after she told me that. I, I was scared, I was really scared, and — and you just said the exact same… ugh. You really are a bully. A mean, nasty bully.”Chloé swallowed. “I haven’t bullied you for weeks now —”“You called me stupid a million times! And, and do you think I feel safe when you turn right around and just bully all my friends? You didn’t stop being a bully, you just put me in the safe zone, and I can’t tell if I’m going to stay there if you just keep being mean to everyone else!”“I helped you!” snapped Chloé. It was an automatic response. She knew, she knew that Marinette had still been afraid and defensive when they were alone together. Technically speaking, she even knew that Marinette’s friends weren’t stupid. But every part of her that was able to speak wanted to scream and protest, wanted to put them both in their place.“You were a complete jerk!”“Marinette,” interrupted Alya. She put her hands on the baker girl’s shoulders. “Relax. She’s not worth it.”Marinette closed her mouth — looked down. Breathed in through her nose. “Ugh…”Chloé wanted to ask the obvious question: ‘Do you want me to start bullying you again?’ But even thinking about asking that felt like a stab in the gut, and if she did say it out loud her entire mouth would be burnt to a crisp for it. It was a horrible question. And despite all the barbs Chloé showed outwardly right now, she really didn’t want things to go back to the way they were last year. Having Marinette in her room had been comfortable. Watching the girl work on her projects had almost felt like she was doing something herself. And sparring with her, figuring out her defences, seeing her gradually soften up, had been fun.So instead, Chloé just folded her arms and leant back.“For what it’s worth,” said Alya. “And I already said this to Marinette. And I don’t really think it’s fair for me to say it, but I’m going to either way. Lying back at Lila was kind of funny now that I know that’s what was happening, but it was also really stupid.”“Why do you get to call me stupid?”“Because I’m not a bully. Duh.” Alya rolled her eyes. “Anyway, the lying made it really hard to keep up with, like, anything? I guess Marinette didn’t accidentally push Lila down the stairs, but I don’t know if she cheated on the test or not. I could totally see that happening.”“I didn’t cheat on the test, Alya. I got a good score because I studied.”“Well, okay, I can also believe that. Trust me. But here’s the thing, giving yourself a black eye to give Lila a bad name was a horrible idea, and I’m so glad you didn’t actually do that. I’m glad you panicked and Miss Sunglasses decided to just go whole hog on the truth instead, because if you actually got her in trouble with that… not cool, honestly.”Marinette looked dour. “So… we were supposed to just let it keep going?”“No, but… there are other ways.”“She was terrified of telling you,” said Chloé. She took some delight in seeing Alya squirm at those words. “She said if you had brushed her off, it would have been the worst feeling in the world.”“Well, yeah,” said Alya, “but… I didn’t, right? I listened…” Even she sounded uncertain in what she was saying.“Would you… have listened if it was me giving Chloé’s speech?” Marinette’s voice was almost a whisper. “If I was alone?”Alya opened her mouth. Closed it again. Opened and closed it two more times.“Alya…”“Yeah,” said Alya. She breathed out. “Yeah, I would. And I promise that I’ll listen even better from now on. You can come to me with whatever, whenever. I promise. Okay?”Marinette nodded. Sniffed. Smiled. Hugged Césaire. And just with that, it seemed that the problem had just… stopped existing.Chloé wanted to protest — but she wasn’t even sure what she would protest. Maybe the fact that the two of them got to be so comfortable together. That Alya got to be excused for not listening, and they could still hug and comfort each other afterwards. That the two of them got to be angry with her, together, as a unit.The truth was, though, that she got it. She got why she wasn’t involved in it, why she wasn’t being let in. She had spent years locking herself out, and now she was rattling at her side of the door, when every single lock and key was with her.And Alya, for all her uppityness and annoying habits, was a good friend to Marinette. Chloé needed to admit that, even if it was grudging. The problem wasn’t Alya. The problem was that —— that Chloé was jealous. She was jealous of their closeness.Sabrina was faithful. But she wasn’t loving. And that was because Chloé had never allowed them to be friends. They had at most been partners in crime who went shopping together. And she had been even worse to everyone else, so even though Mylène might talk to her because of Marinette, there was nothing that could possibly make Mylène feel close to Chloé without a whole lot of effort on Chloé’s part.And the worst part was that the person she wanted most to be close to right now… was currently in Alya’s arms. Why else would she subject herself to all this ire today? Marinette was fun, interesting, and brave. She could outsmart Ladybug and she kept making cool things. Who wouldn’t want to be her friend?Old Chloé, that was who. Old Chloé would have tried to kill Chloé for thinking this. But Chloé wanted to kill old Chloé right back, so that was just how things would have to be.Well, she did have the keys. She had already opened one lock when she let Marinette come into her room for the past few weeks. She just needed to open more of them, and hope for the best.“... I’m sorry,” she said. And she didn’t look at either of them, because even the admission made her want to kick something really hard, and she would be wrong to but it was a physical reaction that was ingrained into her. She would rather strangle herself than kneel before anyone. But if she was going to kill old Chloé, then strangulation was a good way to get started.“What?” said Alya.“I’m sorry. I wasn’t thinking earlier. I’m sorry for hurting you, Marinette.” Chloé swallowed, clenched her fists, because otherwise she would start hurting herself for real. “I want to make up for it, if… if it’s okay for you.”There was a pause. Then Marinette said, in a voice that was somewhere halfway between firm and empty, “Okay. But…”Chloé got the prompt straight away. But this was even harder to say. She kept her eyes fastened on her lap. “I… I’m also sorry to Alya. And everyone. They’re — you, Alya, you and the others, you’re not stupid. Or worthless. And I promise I won’t bully anyone again, cross my heart.”Someone got up. She didn’t dare to look up at who it was, partly because it would be embarrassing for anyone to see her face right now. The steps towards her were slow, almost painfully so, because she had to force herself to sit still and shut up.Then Alya said, “You’d better not promise something you won’t keep.”“I — promise. I promise.”“So you’ll never rip someone’s jacket again or put cockroaches in their locker?”“I would ne—” No. That was the wrong thing to say. She took a deep, aching breath. “I’m sorry, Marinette. I’m really sorry. And I won’t ever do that again, to you or anyone else.”“Good,” whispered Marinette. It was a very weak whisper, but it made Chloé’s heart beat faster nonetheless.“And,” Alya continued, “you’ll never call anyone stupid again, or get them in trouble with the teachers over nothing?”Chloé swallowed again. “I’m going to try. I might mess up. But I’ll do my best.”“What do you say, Marinette?”No sound. But Marinette must have done something, because Alya then said, “Well, if she says it’s good, then I gotta be fine with it too. Shake on it?”Chloé looked up. Which was fine this time, because her expression right now had changed into almost pure surprise. She saw Alya standing there with her hand out, like that was a normal and not ridiculous thing for an enemy to do. And she saw Marinette behind Alya, with a vague smile to end all vague smiles on her face. It was almost impossible to read, but — it was a smile, if nothing else.And maybe Chloé was feeling a little ridiculous today.She reached out her hand. “Shake on it,” she said. And Alya made the last move to connect them, and she smiled as she did so.“Good,” said Alya. “And I’ll hold you to that promise. If you do anything to hurt Marinette, I will end your sorry life.”Chloé squeezed Alya’s hand extra hard. “The same goes for you, Césaire.”“Don’t make it into a competition, please,” Marinette called out. She sounded a little exhausted, but also a little amused. A bright spot, finally. “If you fight I won’t be friends with either of you.”“Really?” said Chloé, blinking. Alya let go of her hand in the meantime, after having squeezed back extra hard herself.“Well… I’ll be friends with Alya either way. But I’ll be better friends with her if she doesn’t ruin this. Please, don’t ruin this. I want everyone to get along…”Get along, huh. Well, if it had the perk of having people like and trust her — more particularly, having Marinette like and trust her — she would absolutely get along.“How are you feeling, Marinette?” she asked.Alya and Marinette both stared at her like she had grown not just a second head, but also a third and a fourth one for good measure.“... What?” she asked.“Okay, freaky,” said Alya.“But a good freaky,” said Marinette, still smiling vaguely. “Thank you, Chloé… um… I’m feeling okay, but I’m also kind of tired, and… I think I want to take a shower…”“Yeah. Of course,” said Alya. “We’ll leave you alone.”Chloé opened her mouth to say something — she actually wanted to talk to Marinette a little more, one on one. But the part of her brain that wasn’t stupid knew better than to push for that now. “Right,” she said, and buried her questions for another day instead.They climbed down the stairs together — Alya closed the trapdoor very gently — and then they left through the main door, still together. It was a quiet affair, other than the loud echoes in the stairwell, other than Chloé’s own beating heart and meaningless thoughts.But when they were outside, Alya walked in front and then turned around, her arms folded and her expression serious. “Chloé,” she said.“Yes?” said Chloé, alarm bells already ringing.“Chloé Bourgeois.”“Marinette asked us to be friendly, blogger girl,” Chloé snapped back. “Don’t try me. I don’t wanna break my promise so soon.”Alya’s serious expression remained for a moment longer. And then she broke into a smile — one that, for all its smallness, felt incredibly real.“I’m just testing you,” Alya said. “I’m sorry. Look… I’ve given you a real hard time. I gotta admit, I feel like I’m right to give you a hard time, given what you’ve been for most of this school year.”“Your point?” said Chloé. She really had no idea where this was going, and despite the smile she felt out of place in this conversation.“Well… I don’t know. But I want to give you major props. You stood up for Marinette in a way that I don’t think I ever could. Sure, I could sing her praises all day, but… you spoke up even though everybody hates you. You were ready to burn even the little bridge you had left in order to help her. And… honestly, I can’t even imagine that. Must have taken some serious guts.”Chloé frowned. But she nodded, too, just to acknowledge that she’d heard.“And look… I’m not proud of this. But I think if it came down to it, if Marinette tried to tell me the things you said today, and she was alone, like — you know, the thing she asked up there… I’m not sure I would have believed her. Not right away. I don’t know for sure, I want to say I would have, but I know there’s a chance I would have needed some more proof. I don’t want to hear one bad word against her, but she gets obsessed easily. And that means she sometimes makes some real bad decisions. And for the record, I still think the black eye was a bad decision, but with Lila overall… I might have assumed she was obsessing over nothing. And that would’ve been wrong of me. So… thank you. Thanks for standing up for her when I didn’t. You listened to her and you spoke for her. I’m actually impressed.”It took about until Alya’s comment about the black eye for Chloé to realise that the girl was being for real. The thought of Alya saying anything nice about her, in any context, had seemed utterly ridiculous before — in fact, it still seemed utterly ridiculous, but the ridiculous thing was literally happening right in front of her. “... Uh, thanks,” she said in return.“I’m not saying that just because, by the way,” Alya went on. She sighed, kicked at a pebble on the pavement. “Look… I’m going to betray Marinette’s trust one more time today. But this time I’m sure it’s good for her. You went a long mile for her today, and she says you’ve been a good listener when she’s been at your place. And the way you spoke to her and looked at her just now, I genuinely believe you care about her. Yeah?”Chloé nodded. “I want to be her friend. Yes. You’re right,” she said, trying three separate responses that each felt like they lacked something. “Uh.”“Good. Because I trust that you won’t do anything bad with what I’m about to tell you.”“Which is…” started Chloé, but then she realised she was being prompted again. “I mean, I won’t.”“I think… she might have a crush on you.”Chloé stared.“Look,” Alya went on. “I don’t think she’s full on in love or anything. But the way she talked about you before you came up was pretty wistful. Like, she likes that you were being kind to her. And she got really aggressive at you when you tried to insult everyone today, and I’m sure you as much as me know she wouldn’t get so upset if she wasn’t really disappointed. She’s put a lot of faith in you, you know?”“Césaire, what are you talking about? This is —”“Ridiculous, yeah. I don’t get it, I really don’t.” Alya shrugged. “But I know what my best friend is like, and I’m pretty darn certain. She’s like early days with Adrien, before she got all weird about it.”“Right…”“Anyway, I’m not saying you need to do anything about this. I’m not saying you have to feel any one way about it, either. But Marinette is terrible when it comes to being in love, and in this case I think it’s best to let you know it’s happening. For her sake, I mean, because it means you can let her down easy and early and she won’t have to stress out about it for an eternity. Or if you want to give it a shot, you can let her know she has a chance. The only thing that matters to me is that she gets good things. And that means, Chloé Bourgeois, that if you hurt her… or try to bully her about this… I will make it my personal mission to end you. But I trust you won’t do that, right? Because you’re turning a new leaf.”“Why are you telling me this, when you clearly don’t trust me?” said Chloé. There was too much going on — too much weight to the idea that Marinette might have feelings for her — to respond to the actual contents of what Alya had said. So all she had left was to be irritated at how she was being treated. Like she was evil, or whatever, when she just wasn’t.“Honestly, I do trust you,” said Alya. “I think you’re being genuine with this. From what I’ve seen today, you’ll do everything you can to not hurt her. I just want to be clear where we stand, because even if I can’t do everything for Marinette I’m still her biggest supporter. I’m her best friend. And she’s my best friend, too. I’m not sure you have any idea what a best friend is, but it means I love her a whole lot.”Chloé folded her arms tight. Alya raised her eyebrows.“I don’t appreciate that every word you say is a veiled insult,” Chloé said.“Hm,” said Alya. “No, you’re right. I’m being cautious, but… I guess, for what you did today, you deserve a pat on the back.”“Don’t touch me,” said Chloé. Alya hadn’t moved, but the suggestion felt like a threat.But Alya just laughed in response. “I won’t. But seriously, I actually do appreciate you being around today. And I hope you’ll do better going forward.” She reached out her hand again, and she smiled just like before: small, but undeniably real. “If you want, we can touch like this. Or we can just go back to school. But, you know… thanks.”The ‘do better’ did sting a little. This time, though, Chloé had to admit that it was fair. If today was the day she swallowed all of her pride, then this was just another piece of it left in her mouth. She hadn’t done well at all so far, particularly not with Marinette. This wasn’t a snipe, it was just… saying ‘do better’. Just like Sabine earlier.So Chloé swallowed her pride, swallowed physically, nodded, and took Alya’s hand again. “Thanks,” she said. “For giving me a chance. And, you know. For supporting Marinette.”“Always,” said Alya. “Well, we should probably get back to school, right?”Chloé did consider not telling her that school had been cancelled. But that was old Chloé talking, so she strangled the impulse. “School’s out for the day,” she said. “Bustier said we should go home and do the homework instead.”“Oh. Cool. Means Marinette won’t miss anything, either,” said Alya. “In that case, I guess we’ll see each other tomorrow. Later, bougie girl.” And she waved with a half grin, then turned around to leave.“Yeah,” said Chloé, loud enough for Alya to hear. But she did allow herself the indulgence of adding, “Stupid,” under her breath.She almost felt bad for doing it. But it wasn’t even an insult this time. It was just her working out a small piece of annoyance from the earlier conversation. Annoyingly, she even found herself smiling at Alya’s back as it disappeared around the corner.The walk home was… weird. It was stressful, but in a strange sort of way where it was all on the inside. The streets were reasonably empty, the skies were clear, there wasn’t much noise anywhere, and it should have been a perfectly fine walk.But no. It was stressful because her thoughts just wouldn’t stop shrieking.She ignored them. The whole time. She only allowed herself to listen to them when she got up to her room, kicked off her shoes, lay down on her bed, and rolled over onto her stomach.She shrieked out loud, then. This had been the weirdest day of her life so far. And it wasn’t even lunchtime. She had heard Lila threaten Marinette and gotten so worked up about it that she shouted at the entire class. She’d been shouted at by Marinette. She’d had a polite, if awkward, conversation with Mylène, and she’d shaken Alya’s hand twice. Alya may or may not kind of like her now — but even if all Alya did was to accept her, that was weird in itself.Maybe she could have survived all that just fine on its own. Maybe. But to also learn that Marinette might have romantic feelings for her now… that was like, well, it was like nothing else she could imagine. It was like a joke, except she didn’t think it was one. It was bad and good at once. She didn’t want to make Marinette fall in love with her, and both of them liked Adrien anyway, or… used to, and how the hell was Marinette so stupid that she’d fall in love with her own bully —— but. It was also flattering. It felt… warm. Gentle. If Marinette had fallen in love with her, then that meant she had done something right.Chloé wasn’t in love. Or at least, she didn’t think she was. But Alya had been right: the absolute last thing Chloé wanted to do right now was to hurt Marinette. And that meant she had to take those feelings seriously. In… whatever way was the best for taking them seriously. If they were even real.Yeah. Maybe they weren’t even real. She should talk to Marinette about this, not Alya, because Alya could just be imagining a crush.The problem, though, was that Chloé had absolutely no idea if she wanted the feelings to be real or not… \|\|\|\|\| The next day at school didn’t help. Lila was gone from class — Bustier said she had called in sick — and the mood in the classroom just turned weird when they heard that.Sabrina was also weird. She didn’t seem upset about yesterday at all, but she did ask a lot of questions that Chloé would rather not answer, such as ‘are you and Marinette friends now?’ or ‘why did Marinette have a black eye?’. And the entire rest of the class acted weird, too, because several of them actually smiled at Chloé over the course of the day. Not brightly or forwardly, but in that tiny awkward way where they were obviously of two minds about it.And then there was Marinette. Who didn’t treat her weird, not the Marinette kind of weird. Who didn’t babble or flush, who didn’t seem like she had any kind of crush at all. She just smiled way too brightly, waved, walked over to say hi with just a tiny hint of shyness before going across to her seat.Maybe there was a small explanation to be found when Alya nudged Chloé in the side and whispered, “I said we should give you an easy time today. See how well you do. That was nice of me, right?” Maybe that only added more questions. Regardless, Chloé was in the same spot she started in.“Help,” she told Sabrina during lunch.“Did I forget a part of your homework?” said Sabrina. “I’ll fix it right away!”“No,” said Chloé.Then her thoughts stopped. She hadn’t thought deeply enough about this thing between them before, but the thing Sabrina had just said had reminded Chloé of another type of situation. One that usually involved hostages.“Uh. Sabrina…”“Mhm?”“You don’t need to do my homework anymore.”Sabrina’s eyes shot up wide. “Are you… are you saying we won’t be friends anymore?”Friends? Were they even friends? “N-no. I mean —”“Is the shopping trip tomorrow cancelled?”“No!” cried Chloé. “Look — I’m saying, you don’t have to do my homework anymore to be my friend. We’ll go shopping tomorrow and I’ll buy you a really cool hat all for yourself, or shoes, or whatever. And a smoothie. We can have smoothies. Ugh. Sorry. I just mean, don’t worry, I still want to be your friend. I’ll be a great friend.”Sabrina’s eyes twinkled. “You will?”“I’ll be the greatest friend anyone’s ever had,” said Chloé, putting her hand to her chest.Because if improving didn’t also include improving for the one person who had stuck by her all this time, then she might as well just give up. Sabrina deserved to be more than just what Chloé had treated her as — a pawn.“You already are the greatest friend,” said Sabrina.Which — almost felt like a veiled insult at this point. After what Chloé had seen yesterday, between Marinette and Alya. But it was probably her fault Sabrina was like this to begin with…“Actually, Sabrina,” she said, “how do you feel about getting a study session together? With Marinette, and maybe Alya?”Maybe Sabrina stared like that because she was surprised. Maybe it was because she thought she’d have to do even more sets of homework.“I mean a real study session,” Chloé hastened to add. “Where we study together. And everyone does their own work.”“Okay!” said Sabrina, and — yeah. The way she smiled at that was pretty good to see.But the issue with Marinette still wasn’t resolved. For one thing, it was hard to get her on her own, because there was always somebody at her side. Alya was nearly always there, of course, but almost everyone else hovered around her at some point during the day. It got to the point where Chloé simply gave up, and sighed a prayer to whatever god existed — probably none, but she was getting desperate — that Marinette might end up alone sometime before the end of school.It didn’t happen. Even after school ended, Marinette was immediately corralled into a group walk along the Seine with half the class — and while Chloé might have liked to walk there with her, she didn’t feel confident that the others would want her among them. And imposing, when Marinette wanted her to not cause trouble, seemed like a terrible idea. So she went home on her own.In the evening, though, she had a sudden hankering to get some fresh air. So she went outside again, not to go anywhere, but just to see what would happen if she walked in one direction for a while.The city was bustling at that time. It was the kind of busy where the entire class could have been within a hundred metres of her, and she wouldn’t have been able to pick out a single one due to the large crowds. She strode past many a shop window without even glancing inside; instead, she looked to the benches and the pathways along the river. They drew her eye, somehow.Even so, it took her a long time to realise she could just change sides and walk by the riverside. She had been so used to crawling for shops her whole life that walking anywhere else simply didn’t occur to her, not until she suddenly noticed that she was being an idiot.There was still a large crowd on the river side of the street. But it felt less — active, maybe — over here. People walked slower, where on the shop side it seemed like everyone was both headed somewhere and late. Here, people looked around. It was strangely soothing, even though there wasn’t a single free bench, and even though she could easily walk past people without seeing them here too.But once she reached Pont Neuf, she heard a voice call out to her from one of the benches she’d just passed. She turned around, and was immediately met with —— Marinette. Sitting there, by herself, on a bench that overlooked the bridge and Île de la Cité. She must have visited home since she left school, because she was wearing a coat and a knitted hat that she didn’t have before. And she was waving, even smiling a little.Chloé walked over. She didn’t smile. It would have felt weird to.“Hey, you,” said Marinette. “Out on a walk?”“Yes.” Chloé took a seat next to her, slightly sideways to see her better. “Can’t you tell?”“I don’t know… I just didn’t figure you for the type. But I’m happy to see you.”Marinette was still smiling. Chloé frowned, though. “Are you really?”“Well —”“Because…” Well. She’d spoken without thinking again. She had a lot of pent up energy from yesterday, a lot of things she wanted to talk about, but dumping all of it on Marinette right now was a horrible idea. Her head was swirling with Alya’s remarks, with thoughts of the crush, with the shouting match with Lila, with the argument in Marinette’s room. And the strongest memory from yesterday was… how angry Marinette had seemed.But Marinette now didn’t look like that. There wasn’t a trace of anger about her. Chloé had just gotten defensive again, for no reason.“... I’m sorry. I’m a little out of it,” she finished.“Oh? What’s wrong?”Chloé sighed. “I was just… thinking about yesterday…”“Oh.” Marinette didn’t really frown, but her eyes took on a serious shine. “Lila?”“No! Just… everything. Between us. You were really mad at me.”Was that… a tiny blush on Marinette’s cheeks, at ‘between us’? No, it was probably just the light. It was just that Marinette had misunderstood, and was embarrassed about it. It was just that Chloé was actually hoping to hear something about whether the feelings Alya had talked about were real.“... Right. That. Well, I’m not really mad at you now, so it’s fine. I was just stressed out a lot and coming off a panic attack…”Chloé raised an eyebrow at that. “You’re saying yesterday was just stress?”“No. I meant everything I said.” There — Marinette’s voice hardened. There weren’t spikes, at least not any that Chloé could notice, but the tone was clear and definite. This was serious. “My friends aren’t stupid, and I’m not stupid, and I was angry. But I think the stress made it worse. So, um, I’m sorry.”“Well, that’s stupid,” said Chloé. She held up a hand to forestall Marinette’s protest. “I’m saying you were right. I hate to say it, but I deserved it. You don’t have to be sorry.”Marinette looked like she’d just been told something very surprising. “... You’re serious?”“Very serious. Utterly serious.”“Because the Chloé I know would have strangled herself rather than admit something like that,” said Marinette.She was smiling, but Chloé still felt a twinge of annoyance. Not least because it felt like Marinette was in her head, what with the strangling reference.“I didn’t say it so you could make fun of me, baker girl.”“No, you’re right,” said Marinette. “But it is pretty funny.” And then, before Chloé could open her mouth to say it wasn’t funny, she added, “But thanks. I’m glad you think that. I knew I was right to trust you.”“... What?”“I noticed, you know. When I was at your place and you prodded me about stuff. You were so gentle, just — I was really surprised. But I liked it. It felt safe.”So Chloé hadn’t been the only one to observe while they talked. “That’s… good,” she murmured. It was nice that Marinette had caught on, but also a little embarrassing.“That’s why I was so upset, you know? When you started shouting at everyone, I was scared you weren’t going to be gentle anymore. I thought maybe you were being honest every time you’d called me stupid lately. I didn’t like that.”“... Yeah,” said Chloé, who thought she had been honest each time. But… maybe not in the way she used to. Sure, she thought Marinette had done some stupid things, but saying it hadn’t felt as heavy as saying it back when she was just a bully. She meant something deeper, meaner by it then. She meant… ‘worthless’.“But then you came to apologise yesterday, and I was actually really happy. I could tell you were trying. And then you said it again today. So, thanks, I guess.”Chloé sighed. Yeah, it was true. It was strange and scary that Marinette and even Alya could read her so well, but… didn’t that also mean she was on the right path? Marinette was saying nice things about her. That was good, even if it was a little scary.She looked over at Marinette, who was smiling the same smile as before. Childish, simple, clear. The hat — it was lime green, and had a dark blue tassel on top — clashed a little with Marinette’s eyes, but it was pretty cute. “That’s a nice hat,” Chloé said.Marinette blushed for real this time. “Thanks. I just got finished with it, so I’m breaking it in…”“You knit too?” said Chloé, unable to keep the surprise out of her voice.“Y-yes,” said Marinette, clearly surprised herself. “Is that weird?”“No, it’s just… you make all kinds of things. I’m impressed.”“You don’t sound like Chloé at all.”“Oh, shut up,” said Chloé; Marinette stuck her tongue out in response. “I’m giving you a compliment. Did you make the coat, too?”It didn’t look like the messy jacket she’d made years ago, the thing Chloé had torn apart like a jealous little twerp. That one had obviously been home made, but Chloé also remembered it as good work for a twelve-year-old, despite the uneven seams. This new coat was sleek, looked factory made. But Marinette right now was making clothes for music stars, so maybe?“No, it’s from a store,” said Marinette, looking a little embarrassed. “But I guess I can take that as a compliment too, if you think I can make store-quality clothes by myself.”Chloé sighed. “Maybe. It’s a nice coat, though. It suits you. And the hat is nice,” she added, just to make sure she had actually said it — she couldn’t remember for certain.Marinette’s smile then might have been the prettiest thing Chloé had ever seen. Seeing the smile — knowing she had caused it to happen by saying something nice — was almost enough to forget the image of Marinette weeping so brokenly on her couch, and knowing she must have caused similar things to happen before. If she could make Marinette smile like this more, then maybe she could make up for herself — and do better.“Why are you out, though?” said Chloé. “By yourself?”Marinette looked out at Pont Neuf for a moment. Then she shifted her legs and cleared her throat. “Well, I put a tracking device on your phone. It lets me know exactly where you are at all times.”Chloé was about to nod, but then her brain caught up to her ears. “You what?” she said, reaching for her pocket. She hadn’t noticed anything like a tracking —— and that was when she saw Marinette’s face.“You tricked me,” she said.“Sorry,” said Marinette. “Am I still good at lying, you think?”“You tricked me!”Marinette giggled, a sound that felt a little bit like being slapped in the face. “I’ll take that as a yes,” she said. “No, I just wanted to sit outside a bit.”“Ugh. I trusted you.”“Never trust a liar,” said Marinette, still playful.But then the smile faded. “Um,” she went on. “I, I think I ought to tell you. I’m still a little scared of you, even after you apologised. I hope you’re not disappointed to hear that…”Chloé wasn’t even sure if she was disappointed or not, because the main feeling she had was just surprise. Nothing about Marinette had suggested ‘scared’ until just now. “You… you are?”Marinette nodded, a frown on her lips. “I, yes. I think that’s why I’m making jokes. It’s like… I guess it makes me feel safer. If I joke about you and you don’t blow up at me and call me stupid, then it’s safe to be around you. I’m sorry… I don’t want you to feel weird. But I think it’s only fair you know about it.”“Okay,” said Chloé. “I… see.”Now that she had heard it, had known about it for a few moments, she knew for sure that she was disappointed. Maybe this was something she ought to have realised on her own, but that didn’t make her feel any better about it.“It’s not that I think it’s for sure, I just… I’m nervous,” said Marinette.“Yeah,” said Chloé. “I got that.”Except… she hadn’t really got it. She understood that Marinette would be anxious, she accepted that she’d ruined a lot of chances in her life. But there was something about the way Marinette had said it. Yesterday, Marinette was angry, upset, tearful. But despite that, she had been in control, and Chloé only got anywhere once she accepted that and followed Marinette’s lead. Today, though, Marinette was being so submissive about everything. It was like she was asking for permission to be scared. It was horrible. Hearing this, Chloé couldn’t really understand that the girl would want to try being friends at all. It was almost like Marinette was trying to force herself — no, not almost, it was exactly like that. Chloé as a charity case for Marinette’s massive heart, when really Marinette should just hang out with Alya all the time, and feel safe and loved her whole life.And Chloé’s burning question, about whether Marinette had romantic feelings for her, was meaningless. She ought to just pull back and stay away, because otherwise she would just cause more hurt.“I’m sorry, I just…”“Don’t be sorry,” snapped Chloé. She could feel her entire face tighten as she said it, and she forced herself to be less intense as she continued: “It’s… it’s okay. Don’t worry about it.”Marinette’s eyes were wide. “Um… okay,” she mumbled.Chloé’s entire stomach was a massive knot. She didn’t want this. She didn’t want to give up on being friends with Marinette. She even… imagined, considered, felt, the idea that Marinette might have romantic feelings for her, and knew that she wanted to give it a try.But that was selfish. It was old Chloé, the one who needed to be strangled, who wanted everything, who needed to control Marinette. But the thing she really needed to do was to just — leave Marinette be and not scare her all the time. That must have been what Sabine Cheng had meant by ‘do better’ after all.She slowly got up from the bench. “I should get home,” she said. She did smile as she said it, but it took a lot of effort to. “It’s getting a little cold, sitting still…”“Oh!” said Marinette. “Do you want to borrow a coat? I live right nearby, I could go find one for you —”“No, don’t worry.” Chloé raised her palms. Ugh, this was hard. “I’ll just go home. Don’t worry.”“Okay,” said Marinette. She almost sounded… disappointed.But that was definitely Chloé’s imagination.“Let’s talk tomorrow, then,” Marinette continued. The smile reappeared on her face.Chloé thought: Let’s not. Let’s never hang out ever again, especially not just the two of us.But she nodded, and then her mouth opened on its own, and it said, “Uh. I wanted to ask you a question, actually.”“Oh, what question?”The question would have been: ‘Do you have romantic feelings for me?’ She would have asked it without even thinking. But she killed the impulse before it could even finish forming in her head, because she needed to let go. Even though she had only just now realised how nice it sounded — that she had missed Marinette so much at school today, that sitting in a room together with only Marinette had felt like nothing else, that Marinette was incredibly wonderful in every way — she would have to give it up.“... Sabrina was wondering if you and Alya would like to do a study group with her some time,” she finished lamely.“Oh,” said Marinette. “But not you?”“Hmph. I don’t study,” said Chloé. “I don’t have to.”“... Okay,” said Marinette. “Did she say when?” Chloé shook her head. “Well, I’ll talk to her tomorrow, then. And I’ll have to ask Alya first, but I’m sure she’ll be fine with it. And you could join us if you want to?”“... Yeah,” said Chloé. “G-good night.”“Good night! Have a safe walk home.”Marinette smiled again. And she waved, and had the gall to look so… Marinette. Stupid her, for being so nice all the time, so nice and lovely and forgiving and stupid and kind and warm and an idiot and a moron and giving Chloé a chance in spite of everything and ugh and Chloé wanted to go straight home and bury her face in bed and never emerge from there again. She turned around and she walked fast, and she didn’t say anything else, because the only things she could possibly have said would have been a jumbled mess.She didn’t run. But she walked as fast as she could, and when she got home she cried on her pillow until she fell asleep. |/|/|/|/|/ The next day was horrible. Or at least, school was horrible. Marinette tried to talk to her several times, and every time was like getting teeth pulled. And she had to act dismissive without being hurtful, because if she didn’t, Marinette would keep on being nice and act like nothing was wrong, and she had to excuse herself to go to the bathroom several times because Marinette just wasn’t getting it, and it was the worst day of her entire life because she just didn’t know what to do.And then she went shopping with Sabrina, and things were okay for a bit, and she got to actually do better in a different way. Sabrina seemed happy with her new hat and shoes. She said she would wear both to school tomorrow, even.And then they parted ways, and in the meantime Chloé’s parents had been akumatised. There was some to-do where they got a gift from Gabriel, and then the gift was hit by a butterfly and they flew around causing havoc for a while. Chloé barely cared about that, but she did care about avoiding their fight so she locked herself in her room the moment she got home.Until she heard a knock on the door. And whether it was because the knock was so distinct, or because she didn’t know anyone else who would knock at her door right now, or just sheer bone-headed wishing, she had an idea of who it was before she even opened the door.“Marinette,” she said, but she didn’t get to say anything else — the girl just slipped past her, with an urgency that felt almost frightening. Something was wrong.There were tears in Marinette’s eyes when she turned to look at her. Whatever had just happened, it must have hit her hard. And Chloé had a feeling what it could be, because why else would Marinette have come here?“Did something happen with Lila?” she asked. “What did she do?”Marinette fiddled with her hands for a little while. “... It’s not Lila,” she said. “It’s…”“Then what’s wrong?”Again fiddling with the hands. “Can we, um, sit down first?”Chloé nodded. If it was important enough for Marinette to come here, then there was no way Chloé could turn her away.They walked over to the sofa. The same place as always. It felt, well, like before. Even though Marinette was scared of her, and might be in love with her, and she might also be in love back, and this had nothing to do with Lila.Marinette didn’t really wait to be prompted after they’d sat down — on opposite ends, as always. Once she’d pulled her legs into the sofa and slanted herself half towards Chloé, she drew a deep breath and said, “I… really messed up today. I think maybe I hurt someone a lot, and…”Chloé frowned. “You’re coming here because you think you hurt someone?”Marinette’s stare was filled with confusion. “Um…”“It’s just… that feels like a thing you’d tell Alya about,” said Chloé. Then it struck her. “Did you hurt Alya?”“No! I didn’t hurt her at all… or at least, I don’t think so… she wasn’t there. It’s, um, it’s my grandad…”“Your grandad who disowned your dad?” said Chloé, so surprised that she forgot for a moment that Marinette might actually be upset about that for real.“No, I — it’s a different grandad,” said Marinette. She was hard to read right now: there was definitely something fishy in this story, but there also wouldn’t be any reason to lie about her grandad. It felt like there was something else going on, something that went a lot deeper…… and Chloé knew: she had no right to tell Marinette to share with her. If Marinette had secrets, then they were hers to share or not, and Chloé didn’t have a right to them any more than she had a right to Marinette. She had spent three and a half years trying to control Marinette, and so now Marinette ought to be in charge of what she told other people. And — especially her.She nodded. “Okay… so what did you do?”Marinette’s strained expression told Chloé that she couldn’t expect any details here, either. “Well… I think I caused him a lot of trouble, and I didn’t mean to but I made a huge mistake. I didn’t look properly, and I lost something important, and I haven’t seen him afterwards, and I think Hawk Moth might be doing something with him and I really don’t want him to be an akuma and I’m just — I’m really worried, and I don’t want this, and I’m so stupid and…”Chloé pushed herself closer. Marinette had started breaking into actual tears now — and while her explanation made no sense to Chloé, the thing that mattered was that she was upset. Whether or not it made sense, the feelings themselves mattered. “Hey… you’re not stupid,” Chloé said, putting her hand on Marinette’s shoulder.“I’m the worst person in the world, Chloé. I — I might have ruined something really important for… many people… everything is wrong, and it’s my fault!”“It’s not,” said Chloé. “It’s going to be okay. I’m here. Do you want to go up on the roof? Maybe some fresh air will help.”Marinette hesitated, looking into Chloé’s eyes. It was a probe, it must be — she was looking for some kind of security. But she seemed to find it quickly, and answered with a quiet nod.“Okay.” Chloé stood up and grabbed the box of tissues off the table. Then she held out her free hand. “Come with me.”“O-okay.”They walked together, Chloé half-hugging Marinette as they went through the hallway, into the elevator, up to the rooftop balcony. It was a strange walk, but in a good way this time. Marinette would sniffle, Chloé would hold up the box, and Marinette would take a tissue and blow her nose into it. Then the tissue would end up on the floor. Chloé barely even imagined protesting over that.It was in the elevator, though, that Chloé considered her promise to stay away. To stop making Marinette afraid all the time. Sure, she was failing pretty hard at that right now, but it was for a good reason. Marinette was just desperate right now — that was why she must have come here. And once she was better, Chloé would need to send her away, because everyone would be better off if Alya solved things instead.Which — ugh. It was one thing to think that. It was another thing entirely to think about actually doing it. Pushing Marinette away felt awful earlier today, and it would be even harder after this, and Chloé still had no idea what Marinette actually felt and it was all just — ugh. It was the ughiest ugh.“Does the air help?” Chloé asked when they stopped by the edge of the rooftop, though she was really just trying to distract herself from how nice it felt to hug Marinette, how she could never do this again or she would get addicted.“Kinda…” said Marinette. She sounded so small. “Yeah.”“Good,” said Chloé.The city seemed small, too. And it was quiet. Whether Marinette had told the truth about doing something that hurt her actual grandfather or not, nothing seemed to be… happening. From up here, they could see above or past everything that wasn’t Tour Montparnasse, and there were no akumas and no Ladybug and there were no buildings falling over. It was late in the afternoon still, and there was a clear view even past the borders of Paris proper, and nothing was going wrong anywhere.Maybe Marinette had noticed the same thing, and that was why she felt a little better. Just a little, though. Chloé glanced aside at her — saw her looking out across the skyline like she feared it. Maybe she had relaxed from the highest peak of anxiety, but it would be wrong to say that she became relaxed. The tension was clearly still there — in the way she had made herself tiny in Chloé’s arms, in the way she barely spoke, in the way she projected herself so little outwards.Normal Marinette took up space, not in the way that Chloé did where she pushed herself wherever she wanted to be but because when she was in the room, you noticed her. You saw her smile, you heard her voice, you noticed her awkward little klutzy moments, you really felt her. But now, she was just an anonymous wisp. Not something other than Marinette, but a version of Marinette that only came out after… things. Like with Lila.Like… with her.Chloé froze suddenly in the middle of her thoughts. She could sense something, and it wasn’t Marinette. Her spine tingled horribly, and she knew there was somebody else on this rooftop with them. Someone who shouldn’t be there.She turned around at the sound of slow, heavy footsteps. She didn’t need to look to know who it was, but she needed to be sure of what was happening: right there, walking towards them from behind the elevator, was Hawk Moth. He was smiling, but not like Marinette would; his expression was cruel instead, a dark reflection of what smiles should be.And in his hands, he held… a lacquered-wood box, with weird red symbols on it.Marinette gasped. Chloé clutched her tighter.“Chloé Bourgeois,” said Hawk Moth, and his syrupy voice almost drowned her. He came to a stop only a few feet away — enough to tower over them. “Rejection stings, doesn’t it?”“What do you want,” said Chloé, gritting her teeth.“You’re so very confused, Chloé. You don’t know how people feel about you, and so you don’t know how to feel about them.”His voice was silky. His words were carefully chosen. She knew exactly what he wanted from her, and she expected the box had something to do with it. She frowned, but she listened. “What do you want,” she repeated.“Chloé,” whispered Marinette. “Please, don’t…”“I have come to offer you a solution,” he said. His eyes glared like lanterns. He was so confident. “I can take away the anguish in your heart, and show you the path forward.”“I already know what I want,” she replied, still frowning.“But you don’t know what others want, do you?” He glanced at Marinette — Chloé pulled her even closer.“Chloé, please, don’t listen to him…”But Hawk Moth opened the box in his hands, took one more step forward. “I want you to help me, Chloé. Get me Ladybug and Cat Noir’s Miraculous, and I will give you… the power of Subjection.”He lifted the bee Miraculous out of the box. Marinette gasped again. Chloé went stiff.“Rather than wait for other people to make up their minds, I will give you the power to bend them all to your will. Whatever your honeyed words command them to do, they’ll have to listen. And at the end, you will finally have the thing you know you want.”He glanced at Marinette again. This time, she followed his eyes — and saw that Marinette looked terrified out of her skin. More than that, though, she was looking at Chloé. Her eyes were wide, open windows into a blue sky, and on that sky was written the words, ‘Please, don’t do this’.But… this was how it would have to go. There was no other way. Because she knew what she wanted, and right now, only Pollen could help her.Chloé let go of Marinette and stepped forward. “I accept, Hawk Moth. Give me the bee Miraculous.”“And in return, I want —”“Ladybug and Cat Noir’s Miraculous, yes yes, I know that. Get on with it already.”Hawk Moth smirked. “So rash… but your allegiance shall be rewarded.” He placed the hair comb in her hand, and she slipped it into her hair.“Chloé!” said Marinette. Her voice was desperate, tearing itself apart at the edges. “Please!”“I’m sorry, Marinette,” said Chloé. She turned her head and tried to smile, but it was hard. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”“I… I trusted you!”“And I didn’t deserve it.” It was so ironic, wasn’t it? She turned to Hawk Moth again, and saw the akuma waiting in his hand. “I never deserved it. Pollen, buzz on.”“Chloé!”But it was pointless. The akuma lifted up from Hawk Moth’s hand, and flew up out of Chloé’s vision range. She could feel the jolt when it settled on the comb, though, like the darkest thought she’d ever had, exploding into horrible and inevitable desire, and this was the moment, this was her last chance, and she looked Hawk Moth straight into his disgusting face and shouted, “Venom!” and his grin froze to a scowl as she jabbed him in the chest —She could feel the dark thoughts still. But they were weaker, less commanding. And they were only hers. She turned to Marinette again, and this time the smile came easy, if weak.“Chloé —”“Go and alert Ladybug. I’ll watch over him, and the box.”“... Right,” said Marinette. She opened her mouth again afterwards, like she had more to say, but closed it soon after. Her legs twitched, but didn’t move, like she hadn’t decided yet whether to listen or not.Chloé could understand it. She had just shaken Marinette’s faith in her again, worse than ever before. She probably looked terrifying, like some twisted dark version of her Queen Bee outfit. Marinette might be more scared of her than she’d ever been.But she had done it for Marinette. That was all that mattered. Now Marinette didn’t need to be afraid of akumatisations anymore, or about her grandfather.“Go on, already! Get Ladybug!” Chloé barked. And finally, Marinette loosened up. Her face turned serious, but she turned towards the elevator door and ran. Then Chloé grabbed the box from Hawk Moth’s hands.Now… what kind of powers were in this akuma? She held out her hand and focused the energy she felt inside through it. A swarm of tiny wasp-like creatures emerged from the line of her palm, then came to rest in a cloud around her head. Instinctively, from looking at them, she knew that they could each deliver a Venom sting of their own. Like an army of little queen bees at her disposal. The thought made her want to vomit.And to think Marinette had imagined that she’d caused her grandfather to be akumatised. No, she must have made some tiny mistake that had nothing to do with Hawk Moth, and then worked herself up about it.In a way, it was good that she did. Because if Chloé had been here alone when Hawk Moth turned up, she might not have been brave enough to pull this plan off. Knowing how brave Marinette was to come here, despite all the years of bullying… well, that certainly obligated Chloé to be brave in her own way.And if it had helped Marinette at all —“Hawk Moth!”The voice came out of nowhere. But it wasn’t Ladybug’s, or Cat Noir’s. Chloé escaped her thoughts and saw Mayura touch down on the far side of the roof.She held her bees back. “Mayura,” she said.“What have you done? Didn’t he akumatise you?”“He did,” said Chloé. “But I didn’t let him tell me what to do. And you won’t either. Fly, my minions!”Mayura waved her fan. A black feather appeared in the air and touched down on one of the parasols, and a wave of murky energy burst from it. It coalesced into some kind of flowy cape that lay itself in a wide range around Mayura, and every bee that touched it was zapped. The woman jumped closer, and Chloé leapt away, in case the cape would touch her too and jolt her, in case Mayura was going to go for the box —— but Mayura went straight for Hawk Moth. She grabbed him by the waist and jumped off the roof, away from the hotel completely, with the grey folds of that magical cape swirling in the wind around her.And Chloé couldn’t follow them, not now, not when she’d promised Marinette and Ladybug she would be right here waiting…Ladybug appeared less than a minute later. Chloé sighed and started to move closer — but Ladybug rushed straight for her, grabbed hold of her shoulders with fierce hands.“Are you okay? Are you hurt?”“I — I’m okay,” said Chloé, completely taken aback. “I’m not hurt at all.”“The akuma,” Ladybug insisted. “Are you… yourself? Is it hurting you?”Right. Chloé probably had eyes that looked super evil right now. “No, I’m fine. But Hawk Moth got away…”Ladybug sighed. “That’s fine. The important thing is that you’re alright.”Cat Noir showed up then, too. He yelled out and started charging at Chloé with his staff, but Ladybug stopped him.“She actually stung Hawk Moth,” she said. “She’s on our side.”He seemed surprised at that, but nonetheless he walked up to Chloé on Ladybug’s command and Cataclysmed the comb. She felt it like a tremor in her entire body, but not a painful one so much as just the vague feeling of a distant earthquake. And then Ladybug called out her Lucky Charm and cast the Miracle Cure, and the beetles swarmed and Chloé was left with… a weird magic box and her old comb.Cat Noir leapt off the roof with a greeting goodbye. But Ladybug stayed. She walked closer, and she smiled, and the smile looked so much like Marinette’s.“Marinette told me everything that happened,” Ladybug said. “Thank you, Chloé. You were really brave to do that.”“Thank you, Ladybug,” said Chloé, swallowing afterwards. “I’m… sorry I couldn’t keep Hawk Moth here. Mayura took him and ran away…”“Mayura is clever. And dangerous. All I care about,” here Ladybug put her hand on Chloé’s shoulder, “is that you’re not hurt.”“And I kept the box,” Chloé said, lifting it up. “I, uh, I don’t know what it is, but I thought you might want to have it?”“I do.” Ladybug almost laughed. “I really do. Chloé, this box is more valuable than you could ever imagine. Do you recognise the symbol on the top?”Chloé stared down at it for a bit. It took a little while for her to catch on to what Ladybug was saying — but then she saw that it looked like a bigger version of the little box where she first found Pollen’s Miraculous. The realisation hit her like a train.“... Does that mean every Miraculous is in this box?”“Not all of them, but most of them.” Ladybug took hold of it and opened the lid. Chloé could see two pieces of jewelry inside, as well as several empty spots. “Hawk Moth stole this box from the Guardian earlier today. And he wanted to use them against me. So you’ve helped us a lot today, Chloé.”“... Okay,” said Chloé, a little unsure what to do with that information. “Good.”Ladybug seemed pensive for a moment. She seemed pensive for several moments, even. Then she touched a side of the box and said, “You know, Chloé… I was reluctant to give you Pollen back for a long time. Hawk Moth knew your identity and he could use it against you, and I was scared that if I put you back in action he would make you fight on his side. I hope you understand.”Chloé nodded. She had barely ever thought about it for the past few weeks, because Marinette had taken up so much of her brainspace, but she could accept the explanation regardless.Old Chloé would not. She would have screamed and yelled about it, and cursed Ladybug’s name. But old Chloé was dead, and Chloé wasn’t going to follow her example.“So I will have to take Pollen back from you. But later, I think I will come and give you a different Miraculous, because you’ve shown today that you truly deserve my trust. There’s even another holder who needs to switch.”“... Thank you,” said Chloé. She immediately realised, upon hearing that, that old Chloé wasn’t completely dead yet. Old Chloé reared her head with pride and started yelling that everyone should bow down to the queen, but Chloé shut her out before she could become too loud. Old Chloé never earned those stripes. Instead, new Chloé handed back the comb, and smiled at Ladybug.Ladybug beamed back. “I’ll tell Marinette it’s safe to come back up. Okay?”“Yeah.” Oh heavens, was it ever okay. “I’d love that. Thanks.”Ladybug disappeared with the box. Chloé sighed, and suddenly she felt very tired. It was always stressful to be akumatised, but this time had been extra difficult. It had felt like so much was on her shoulders — Ladybug, Paris, the Miraculous, but most of all Marinette’s trust. And that was a heavy burden.A heavy burden she would have to keep carrying. Because she needed to send Marinette away now, so as not to frighten her again. Maybe she could ask for a little validation, a little bit of praise, but that was all she would take. And then, she would be Chloé again, the Chloé who avoided Marinette, but who loved her from a distance.She sat down in a sunbed and lay back on it, just to catch a little rest.Yeah…However long after, she awoke with a hand on her shoulder and bolted upright.“Whoa! Hey, hey, it’s okay,” said Marinette’s voice. “It’s just me.”“Have I been sleeping?” Chloé turned to face her, heart thumping hard.“Maybe,” said Marinette, smiling just a little. “I found you conked out. Don’t worry, I didn’t stare. I woke you up immediately.”She sounded… light. Happy.“... Right,” said Chloé. “Er… thanks.”“You look funny when you sleep.”“I do?”“Well, um,” said Marinette. “That was kind of a joke.”“Oh.” Chloé hadn’t even thought to recognise it as one. “Well… it was a bad joke, then, because I didn’t laugh.”“That’s fair.” Marinette beamed like the sunset behind her. “Chloé… thank you so much.”Chloé put her head in her hands. “What for?”“For… today. For standing up to Hawk Moth. That was — really brave of you. I really thought you were going to join him, but…”“Yeah. I was pretending,” sighed Chloé. She had scared Marinette really bad, hadn’t she? “I had to lie to both of you. Or he would have figured it out.”“Well, it was a really good lie. You definitely tricked me… I’m sorry I didn’t believe you.”“I learned from the best.” It was really all Chloé could say. The apology wasn’t even worth acknowledging.“And thank you for calming me down earlier. I really needed it, so… thanks.”Chloé pulled her fingers apart, and peered between them at Marinette. At a face that seemed so genuine and optimistic that it very nearly hurt. She needed to tell her now, or she would never be able to.“Marinette,” she said, paused to breathe in. “I… I think you should stay away from me.”Marinette’s face changed. It was still genuine, but now the genuine part was — surprise, concern, whatever. “Er… what do you mean?”“I scare you, right? You’re nervous I’m going to bully you again.” Chloé held her fingers where they were, like the bars of a cage between them. “I don’t want to bully you, ever, but if you’re going to be scared of it, I want you to go be happy and carefree with Alya instead. It’s better for you, and you don’t have to look over your shoulder all the time.”“Chloé… what are you saying?”“I’m saying I like hanging out with you, but it’s not worth it if you’re going to suffer for it.”Marinette looked confused, lost, sad, distressed. Maybe it was alright to do that to her, just one last time, just to make sure she could be happy. Chloé needed to do better than just not hurting Marinette. This was the only way —— but then Marinette’s face got grim. Serious. Maybe even angry. “Chloé, you are the stupidest idiot in the entire world,” she said, and even her voice was sharp — so very different from what it had been just a moment ago.“... What?” said Chloé.“You are a stupid idiot.”“Well, maybe I am! That’s why I need to stay away from you, because you’re smart!”“I’m not smart,” said Marinette. Somehow, that statement sounded graver than any time she’d ever said ‘I’m not stupid’. “Chloé, you have no idea what it means to be a friend, do you? Have you even had friends before?”Chloé curled her entire face into a frown. “I have! Adrien and Sabrina! I’m a great friend.”“No,” said Marinette, shaking her head. “You don’t have a clue at all. Is this why you didn’t want to be in the study group?”Chloé opened her mouth. Chloé closed her mouth.“Right,” said Marinette. “I’m going to tell you a thing about friends. Every single friend I’ve ever had has hurt me. They’ve said hurtful things, or they’ve borrowed something and then they forgot to give it back. Alya didn’t believe me about Lila, and that hurt me. One time Nino said I was ugly, and he apologised but it still hurt. Sometimes I get stressed out even being in the same room as my friends, if we’ve had an argument or whatever, but that doesn’t mean I don’t love them. I love all my friends. You know why? Because I get more back from loving them than I could ever get from shutting them out.“That’s why I want to have lots of friends. I really wanna be friends with everyone in class, even if they’ve hurt me some. Because it’s good to have more friends, and because if I can be a friend to them then they’ll also have more friends.”Chloé tried to put the pieces of that together in her brain. “So… you’re saying I’m like a prize? The more friends you have, the prettier your sticker collection?”“No! That’s stupid, and shut up! I wouldn’t want to be your friend at all if I didn’t think I could trust you! You helped me with Lila, you let me speak my mind, you helped me so much today — why wouldn’t I want to be friends with you for that? Maybe you hurt me in the past, a lot, and maybe that makes me a little jumpy around you, but I don’t care. I care about what you’re doing right now, and what you’re doing right now makes me feel happy and safe, you idiot.”Marinette sighed, pinched the bridge of her nose. Her voice relaxed. “Anyway… friends are good because it’s good to have friends. They can do nice things for you, and you can do nice things for them. That’s what friends are, and it means the more of them you have, the nicer it is for everyone, and… ugh. You know what I mean…”“Er… maybe?” said Chloé. She might have the gist of it, at least. If nothing else, she at least knew that Marinette wanted to be friends, and wanted it enough to be angry about it. And that meant she was disappointed, and that meant it was probably best to do what she said.“So don’t you dare tell me we can’t be friends,” Marinette said, ramming the word ‘dare’ in with a metaphorical sledgehammer. “You’re joining us in that study group, or I’m dragging you to it by your ankles.”“... Right. Okay, Um, thank you,” said Chloé, stumbling over every single word. She wasn’t used to anyone speaking so… authoritatively at her. Marinette was more commanding than even Hawk Moth.“I’ll make everyone in class be your friend. Um… if they want to, I mean.” Marinette added the last part almost like it was something she had forgotten. “I can’t really decide for everyone if they want to be friends… but I know Alya’s fine with it and probably Mylène, too. And Adrien. I’ll make sure you have lots of friends, and then you can stop being stupid about this and just accept it.”Chloé frowned. “I’m not stupid.”And Marinette… looked at her, with curious and bright eyes. She didn’t speak for a little while, just sat there and blinked for a few seconds.And then she smiled and said, “No, you’re right. After today, I don’t think anyone should call you stupid. You were very brave, Chloé.”“Do you have romantic feelings for me?”The words just fell out of Chloé. The sudden praise, at the tail end of a long and aggravated tirade, had made her brain-tongue connection go haywire, and now she had asked the question she had decided she never would.Marinette looked at her, again, but this time Marinette’s eyes were completely unreadable. Chloé might have expected surprise, or disgust, or — if it were true — the weird strangled babbling that Marinette always did around Adrien. But there was nothing; or if there was anything, it was just… thinking.Eternity could have passed. Chloé sat there and waited, because now that she’d asked it she might as well commit and not try to deny it. Taking the question back without an answer would look worse than asking it in the first place.“Why do you ask?” said Marinette, after the possible eternity. Her voice was completely measured, her eyes still revealed nothing.“Because… Alya said maybe you did,” said Chloé, deflating as she did so.Marinette cracked an expression then. It seemed — vaguely irritated. “Alya, I swear…”“But,” Chloé went on, forcing herself to speak more confidently. “I also wanted to know because I think I have feelings for you. And if it’s true, then I’d be open to… you know.”“Well, the thing is…” Marinette pulled on the words, like she was hesitant to say anything after but knew she had to. “I think I might have feelings for you.”Chloé’s heart leapt. “So —”“Might,” said Marinette, and the firmness was enough to make Chloé close her mouth again. “I don’t… know. Not yet, anyway. And I just don’t know if it’s right to… I think we should become friends first, no matter what. It feels weird to go from ‘bully’ to ‘girlfriend’ without a middle stage, you know?”“You mean we’re not friends?”“Not officially,” said Marinette. “I mean, we were mostly just allies until Monday, and after that we’ve been… all over the place, to be honest.” She gave an awkward smile to empty air, because she wasn’t even looking at Chloé. “I’m sorry…”“Well… I think we’re friends,” said Chloé.Marinette smiled directly at her this time. “That’s good. I want that. But would you be fine with staying just friends for a bit? And then later if it feels right, and I feel a bit more safe, and we feel kind of the same things but better, then we can be girlfriends. But not right now. Okay?”“Hm,” said Chloé, trying to sound neutral about it. But she couldn’t help feeling disappointed. She frowned at her lap. “I… don’t really want to wait,” she said.Marinette opened her mouth.“But,” Chloé added. “If it’s you, I guess it’s okay.”Marinette’s open mouth turned into a smile that was even prettier than the one from before. It glowed in the orange light behind her. “... Thank you,” she said. “That… means a lot to me. And I’ll make sure everyone gets to know the real you, starting tomorrow!”Chloé swallowed. “You mean the new me.”“No,” said Marinette, shaking her head happily. “I really don’t.” |||||||||| Just over a month later, more accurately on a Thursday, Chloé got her first ever B on a test. Specifically, in French.It was her best result ever, even though Miss Bustier didn’t know it. All her As up until now had been Sabrina’s work, so she could hardly take credit — this time, she had sat the test herself. She had studied herself, too, although the study group with Marinette and Sabrina and Alya had helped. In fact, she would have been helpless without them: even the first session they had together had thoroughly removed from Chloé any notion she could have ever had that she could outsmart them. And she had taken what they taught her and she had turned that into all passing grades since they started, but this time she’d managed a B. Not even a B minus, but a regular B.She didn’t show the result to anyone, not until she had the chance to tell Marinette in the locker room while they were packing to go home for the day. The outcome of that, which should honestly have been less surprising, was a very long hug and an ongoing stream of congratulations. Something that Marinette seemed to do without even a lick of fear.When Marinette pulled back from the hug, she kept her arms around Chloé’s waist, so that they didn’t split apart. “I’m so proud of you,” she said.“Hmph,” said Chloé. Her arms hung free for now. “Save it for when I get my first A.”“I’ll bake you something for when you get an A,” said Marinette, who had managed a B plus on this test. “Anyway, Mum says it’s good to encourage people for every step they take, so that’s what I’m going to do.”“Is holding on to me like this also encouragement?” Chloé asked, rolling her eyes.Marinette looked as warm as her arms felt. “Yes,” she said. “It is.”And… really, Chloé couldn’t complain about that. The only thing she could complain about was that they weren’t currently dating, and she was absolutely adamant that it should be Marinette’s choice when they did it — if they did it at all. Encouraging people seemed like a good approach, though. When Lila returned to school the week after Chloé did her awful tell-all speech, she had seemed off balance: her entrance was confident and bold as ever, but it was so obviously a mask. She kept glancing around, probably to assess whether or not her fibs were working.But Alya had grabbed hold of Adrien and Nino, and the three of them had gone up to Lila’s desk and told her that they knew every single thing — that everyone did by now — but that they could still be her friends, so long as she stopped trying to hurt Marinette. The entire class, apart from Chloé, had echoed the sentiment — even Marinette herself. And for whatever reason, that seemed to actually get through to Lila. There was still resentment, but things seemed to be on the mend. The truth, shockingly enough, had worked.And Marinette was working hard to encourage Chloé to keep doing better, which Chloé appreciated. She opened her mouth to say so, but before any words could get out, the door opened. In came Alya — who stopped dead in the middle of entering.“Well, I’ll be — get in, girls,” she said. “Kissing after school?”“We weren’t kissing,” said Chloé.“Yeah, right,” said Alya, rolling her eyes. “And when me and Nino are like that, we’re just preparing for a shin kicking competition.” She walked in and went up to her locker, which was a few lockers closer to the door from where Marinette and Chloé were standing.Chloé tried to step back. Marinette didn’t let her: she held on like a vice.“Glad to see you got together, though,” Alya went on. “Should I tell the girls about it?”“Yes,” said Marinette. “Please do. And maybe Nino too.”“Marinette!” protested Chloé. “We weren’t kissing!”“But I was about to kiss you,” Marinette went on. Just like that, matter-of-fact, slapping Chloé so hard in the face it made her ears ring.“Whoa!” said Alya, laughing gently. She pulled her backpack out of the locker, then pushed it shut. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Sorry to interrupt!”“Thanks for understanding, Alya,” said Marinette — brightly, carelessly.“Marinette!” Chloé repeated, through gritted teeth this time.But Marinette just smiled at her, and stayed smiling until Alya left and the door shut. And Chloé couldn’t find it in her to do anything more, so she just waited.When the door did close, though, Marinette sighed. “I’m going to give you two choices now,” she said.“... Two choices?” said Chloé.“Either I don’t kiss you, and we’ll have played a funny prank on Alya for telling you about my maybe-crush,” Marinette said. “Or I do kiss you, and we make… us… official. What do you think?”“You want to prank Alya?”“No,” said Marinette. “I love Alya and she’s my best friend. But maybe you want to prank her. Or maybe you want me to kiss you instead?”Chloé grimaced. “Am I just a pawn in some mind game for you? Did you plan this with Alya beforehand?”Marinette shook her head. “I’m being serious. I don’t know if you still have a crush on me, after all, so it would be stupid to just kiss you without asking.”“Hmph,” said Chloé. “You’re not stupid.”“I know,” said Marinette, and went back to smiling.But Chloé did ponder the question. Alya was great, something that had only become more obvious by hanging out with her for over a month now. But pranking her could be funny. Then again, kissing Marinette would also be pretty cool. Both options were solid.Even so, the answer was already there in her mind. She took a deep breath and looked into Marinette’s beautifully sky-like eyes. “Well…”