#fox!chloe

It starts with Ladybug running back from Fu’s, Fox in hand. The Akuma of the day, while not difficult, would be much easier to take down with it.

As she contemplated just who it should go to (her main picks are Juleka and Nathaniel), she felt a leather-clad bdy crash into her. Chat was thrown into her, causing Ladybug to drop the box. Before she could make her way towards the box, the Akuma charged at her. Sighing, she continued the fight.

Meanwhile, Chloe finds the box on the ground, and is compelled to take it home with her. 

When she gets there, she opens the box, she sees Trixx emerge from the necklace, and freaks out a bit. 

Once each side explains their piece (Chloe about how she found the box, and Trixx the basics of the Miraculous), the blonde gets the same idea as canon and wants to run straight out and be a hero. Trixx shuts this down, as the plan was poorly thought out and could easily fall apart.

Trixx then stated if Chloe really wanted to be a hero, then he had a better plan:

Train to use the Fox

Join Ladybug at an opportune moment, and help her win a fight

As soon as the battle is won, return the Miraculous without question, thus allowing the heroine to admit she had potential and could be trusted

While Chloe wasn’t the most fond of the idea, she really couldn’t come up with a better idea herself. So, she began to train with the little Fox.

She starts wearing the Miraculous under her shirt at school, and Trixx began to whisper thoughts of trying (not being, but trying) to be a better person. Whenever she began to protest, he points out that he can always just return to Ladybug. She always ends up agreeing.

Over the week or so they are together, the two grow very close, to the point they start to consider each other family. This stemmed from her absolutely pathetic excuse for a father.

It even comes to a head when the events of Style Queen take place, and Trixx desperately wants wants to murder her her mother. The only reason he doesn’t is that Chloe asks him not to.

Following this affair, he starts throwing some positive reinforcement and cuddles around to make the blonde feel better.

Then the moment of truth comes: finally confronting Ladybug. Donning her transformation, Chloe ran in to assist the heroine with a tricky Akuma. After beating them, she pulls the blunette away to return the necklace.

After dropping the transformation, Chloe explains the full situation. Ladybug, with her past interactions with Chloe in the front of her mind, starts to tell Chloe that she won’t use the Fox again, as she just took it without letting her know! But before she can get too far into her tirade, Trixx floats up to her eye level, and stops her.

He defends the blonde, as she proved herself in the field of battle, and if she had any evil intentions, she would had done something long before hand.

He then offers a compromise: If Chloe shows steady improvement as a person outside the mask, she will be allowed to use it again. If not, than Ladybug is allowed to take the privilege away until such time that she improves herself. 

Both girls agree to this, and Trixx snuggles against his kit one last time before retreating into the Miraculous.

The next day, Chloe could be seen making an effort to be better. It’s a bit sloppy in parts, but the effort is there, and Marinette begrudgingly accepts this.

Adrien

“Hello, Paris.” Adrien looked over the camera lens at Alya, who smiled sadly and gave him a thumbs up. He cleared his throat. “Chat Noir here. I am here today to clear something up once and for all and to apologize to both my partner Ladybug and to the people of Paris who put their trust in me. I don’t know if any of you have been caught up in the last few akuma attacks, but, in case you have, and even if you haven’t, there are a few things that I need to say.” He paused, taking a deep, somewhat shaky breath. “This isn’t easy,” a somewhat awkward, strangled chuckle, escaped, “but, it needs to be said.” He tried to wipe all traces of the nervousness he felt was swallowing him from his face, and stared straight into the camera. People had to see he was serious. “I am not proud of the way that I’ve behaved towards Ladybug recently. Without giving too much away about my personal life, suffice it to say that I grew up pretty sheltered.” A sheepish hand mussed his hair. “I’ve been homeschooled until pretty recently and don’t have much of a clue about how to interact with people. I want to make it clear that in no way does this excuse the way I’ve been behaving.” He paused.

“I’m sure that you all know the way I feel about Ladybug -- I seem to shout it from the rooftops often enough.” He smiled ruefully. “I should never have done that. The second that she told me that I was making her uncomfortable, I should have stopped. It was never okay for me to disregard her feelings like that. It’s never okay for anyone to disregard someone’s feelings like that. Ladybug, I understand if you don’t want to talk to me right now, or ever, but I want you to know that I am so, so sorry for what I’ve done. I know that I can’t take back the words that I said, and I understand if you can’t forgive me, but I want you to know that I am going to do my best to make up for the things that I did and to become a partner that you can be proud of again.”

“And, to the citizens of Paris, I apologize to you as well. It is my job to protect you and this city, and I’ve been doing a poor job of that. You deserve heroes like My Lady, strong and confident, and utterly focused on protecting this city we love and ending the threat that Hawkmoth poses to it. I promise that I will do my best to make it up to you as well -- to become a hero that you can be proud of again. For now, I urge you to look around you in your everyday lives. If you see someone behaving in the way that I’ve been behaving towards Ladybug, say something. Hawkmoth isn’t the only problem we Parisians face, but we can solve the other problems we see by being heroes ourselves. Thank you for listening to me, and, again, I’m so, so sorry.”

After he stopped talking, Adrien could hear Alya pressing the stop button on her camera, but neither of them could find the right words to say to each other. They sat in silence for what seemed like forever until Alya shook herself out of a stupor and moved to her desk. She plugged her phone into her laptop and pressed several buttons.

She paused, looking back over her shoulder at him. “Are you sure about this?” She asked softly.

He closed his eyes. “Yes.”

Marinette

Marinette stared unblinkingly at the screen of her computer, the dark rectangle of a finished video stark against her pink screensaver. Despite… everything that had happened with Alya in the past few weeks, she still followed the Ladyblog. When the notification had popped up on her computer, she wasn’t sure what she was going to see. She hoped that no one had been akumatized. What Hawkmoth did to people at their most vulnerable was awful. She’d never wish that on anyone. Then again, what was the alternative? A new interview with Lila? She had tried to hard to be the bigger person, to tell herself that she was just being dramatic or blowing things out of proportion, but the fact of the matter was that she was just a teenager, and she was hurting and that she was allowed to hurt. She didn’t know if she could take another example of her best friend choosing the word of a liar over her own.

Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t what she saw. Chat Noir’s video took her completely by surprise. She didn’t quite know what to feel. On the one hand, he’d apologized, validating feelings that only Tikki and Chloe had told her she’d been allowed to have. She felt like a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. On the other hand, he was right, she couldn’t forgive him -- not right away. He’d made her feel so small and so afraid. Especially with everything that had been going on at school, he’d shaken her faith in herself and in others.

Suddenly the screen in front of her lit up again. She moused over the notification and quirked her lips. Akuma. For better or for worse, she’d have to face Chat now. Despite the complicated feelings involved in Tikki giving the fox miraculous to someone other than Alya, she couldn’t help but be reassured by the fact that there would be another hero, another partner, who she could trust herself to work with without flinching.

“Tikki, SPOTS ON!!!”

Alya

After Chat Noir left, Alya just sat, still and quiet, her mind spinning. She dimly heard the chiming from her phone and computer as the video she’d just posted accumulated views and comments. God, what had she done? A good journalist always checks her sources, bullshit. She’d believed a stranger over her best friend. If she even deserved to call Marinette her best friend at this point. She’d never had friends at the small-town school she’d attended before Francios-Dupont. She’d been too pushy, too intense, they’d said. But Marinette and her sunshine smile had accepted her the moment they’d met, encouraging even her craziest ideas and telling her that she was brave and good and just.

She was crying, she realized. Out of the corner of tear-blurred eyes, she noticed a sticky note she'd stuck to the frame of her computer monitor days ago. That's right. She and Lila had planned to try to find Andre's Ice Cream stand that afternoon. Her jaw firmed. The gullible Alya that Lila expected wouldn't be showing up today. She grabbed her phone and threw on her favorite plaid shirt over her tank-top. She didn’t have the armor of her miraculous, but damn it all to hell, she was going into battle.

The walk to the Pont des Arts seemed much shorter than it usually was, but, then again, her mind was racing -- she was pretty sure she hadn’t noticed anything she’d passed along the way. She sat on the bench that she’d agreed to meet Lila at and tapped one foot anxiously against the pavement.

After a few minutes, she looked down at her watch. Lila was late. Honestly, Alya was almost relieved. She still didn’t know what to say to the other girl. From what Chat Noir had said, it sounded like she’d been cooperating with Hawkmoth willingly and Alya herself had seen what Lila had done to Marinette… and to Alya’s own credibility as a journalist. Before she’d left her room, she’d filmed another video -- her own apology to Ladybug for invading her privacy during the Oblivio incident, and to the people of Paris for posting false information on a news source that they’d trusted.

She hadn’t posted it though, not yet. Despite everything… Lila had been a good friend these past few weeks. Alya was hurt by the things that she’d learned about the transfer student. She felt uncertain and betrayed, but she wanted to ask Lila herself about it -- to see the truth with her own eyes and to get her closure for all the dreams that would be snuffed out with Lila’s lies, and for all the damage that she herself had done, if what Chat Noir said was true. (It was, she knew it, deep in her bones. She just didn’t want to admit it quite yet.) Did it make her a bad person if she still desperately wanted it all to be a joke?

“Hey, bestie!” Lila’s voice broke through her thoughts. “I’m so sorry that I’m late -- I was on a conference call with Prince Ali about our environmental initiative that I just couldn’t get away from. You understand, right?”

“... Yeah, of course.” Had her smile always looked so fake? “You ready to get some ice cream?”

“Of course! I’m so excited to be able to have ice cream again. I was diagnosed with severe lactose intolerance when I was younger and I haven’t had it for years, but a doctor that I met when I was traveling in England put me in a clinical study and cured me!”

Alya tried her best to hide the twitching in her eye. Sabrina had lactose intolerance -- the whole class knew that she could have ice cream just fine if she took some lactase supplements beforehand. Seriously, that wasn’t how lactose intolerance worked at all! If she’d lied about something this small…

She’d about made up her mind to say something, to shout or scream and try to get Lila to finally tell her the truth for once when the ground beneath them shook hard enough to knock her off of the bench she’d been waiting on. Looking up, she saw a woman made entirely of some sort of metal, spikes shooting out from her suit and a wickedly sharp glaive in her hand.

Shit. Of all the times for an akuma.

Chloe

Chloe sat on her bed, notebook in front of her, listening intently to Trixx as they explained more about their miraculous and what exactly a mirage could do. They were floating back and forth through the air in front of her as if pacing, every once in a while stopping to eat one of the jelly beans in the crystal bowl on the bedside table that she’d ordered from room service for them.

“The power of the mirage is limited only by your creativity. The illusion that you cast can be as small or large as you want -- it can even be fluid if you concentrate properly. Your mirages can speak, or simply make a particular sound at whatever volume you decide. It can be threatening or unassuming, something targeted to a single person or meant to touch many. For now, your mirage is also limited by the timer in your miraculous -- the illusion will vanish with your transformation five minutes after you call for it. It will also evaporate if it is touched, although, if you train properly and hard, you’ll eventually be able to cast illusions that can hold their own form temporarily.”

The tiny god turned large, purple eyes on Chloe. “What you must truly know, and take to heart, as the wielder of the fox miraculous, are people. Your power is only effective if you can read others, know what your target needs to see. Tikki seeks creativity in her bugs, that’s what they need to make the magic of the ladybug miraculous work. Plagg wants compassion to temper destruction, Noroo empathy to connect to his champions. The thing that I value above all else in a wielder isn’t cunning or cleverness or skill at lying -- on the contrary, the best illusions always have a grain of truth to them. I need a wielder who can analyze people. Someone who knows the damage that lies can cause, but can keep their feelings subdued to use their illusions however the mission requires, even if others might see the mirage as underhanded.” They smiled. “Rena Rouge was fun to work with, but she didn’t suit the fox miraculous at all. She’s too straightforward, too eager to spring physically into battle, yet not willing enough to truly hurt someone emotionally. I have a feeling you’ll do much better as my kit, Chloe.”

Chloe’s pen paused halfway across the page as a small, soft smile stole across her lips. She quickly tempered it and looked back up at Trixx. “Th-- er… Thank you Trixx.” She felt a sharp, staccato buzz against her hip and looked down at her phone. Swiping across the screen to unlock it, she saw the bright red text of an akuma alert scroll across the screen. She looked up at Trixx, who met her eyes with a smirk.

“Well, kit, are you ready.”

Chloe nodded. “Trixx, let’s pounce!”

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