#like now after the last asshole i had a huge therapy convo with my mom to get her to pick up the paterns she did and all

[prismuffin]

OwO Anon, we need to stop sharing the same brain cell. I had it before my shift, did you take it??

Anyways, I noticed some of your tags and stuff about your snake and how crazy things have been for you. I'm not stalking your blog, I swear... I just have notifications on..

Please use this ask box message, to rant/ vent about what you are okay with sharing!

Because, you seem like the type to not bring up shit in conversation, snice you'll feel like an asshole if you took up space in a convo.

- Crow

CROW LMFAO not you calling me out perfectly with that last sentence-

yeah I practically have no one to talk to because of my current situation and I feel bad for ranting whenever but I'll take the invite and rant a bit- so with that in mind, you can ignore everything under the cut but thank you for this vent ask!

But yeah there's just a lot happening right now and it's all making me feel really bad which in turn is making me feel worse because I feel like I have no right to feel bad??

Things are pretty wild with my family right now- for some context my family is pretty big with my parents having 10 kids in total- my mom didn't have all 10 and all of my siblings are half siblings so growing up I was the only one with both of my parents present- the rest of my siblings were only related to my dad or mom. Now that mostly everyone has moved out or is living with their mom/dad they're trying to go into their retirement plan and the only problem with that is I'm still here!

my parents are trying to live in the US for certain parts of the year and in Mexico for the other parts which is totally fine but it's completely uprooting my life and I have no idea what to do. I already dropped out of my school because my depression was worsening (like it got real bad) and I couldn't take it anymore so I left it for college prep (which is online and allows me to control my hours and how much work I do) so I lost contact with most of my friends then and I'm losing time with all my other ones because I'm in a different country for half of the year- and in said country I also have no friends and the one friend I did make is leaving for Portugal so I can't hang out with them anymore.

Me moving countries/traveling often means that I have to sell most of my stuff since I won't always be in a place for too long. I already had to give away my dog and now I'm gonna have to sell my snake as well and it's terrible because I'm very attached to both of my pets. I also have to get rid of all of my clothes and throw practically everything in my room away to make moving easier and once again I'm very attached to all my stuff so it's really stressful.

I don't like to complain about all of this though because I think I sound ungrateful. Like- Wow, you get to travel the world often and at such a young age without having to worry about school? That sounds soooo hard, you're struggling sooo much. I feel like shit for hating the traveling because I know there's people that would do anything to be in my position and to see some super cool places that my parents are planning on living in for a while but the whole thing is really uprooting the comfortable life I built for myself within the comfort of my room with my snake and dog and classes that I could control. In a way it's like they're taking all of my control. I feel like I have none of it and in a way I kinda don't.

The whole thing is making my depression come back in full force- I was going to therapy for a bit but then that stopped.

Then there's the one time I was literally crying at a huge birthday dinner for one of my parents friends and no one noticed at all and at the end of the night I got yelled at in the middle of the street because I just wanted to walk home after the dinner instead of walking to the hosts house to continue the party. Random tangent I know but I think that's the night my depression fully came back and hit in the face.

Writing is a safe thing for me, I enjoy it and I enjoy making content for others and writing for myself even, at times. Recently I haven't been able to do much of that though not only because of school but also my motivation is dropping bit by bit which is why after these requests I might take break from writing while things sort themselves out in my life. I'll still be active on Tumblr and doing asks and such but writing full fics for others might take me some time!

But yeah, that's some of the things that are happening that I'm comfortable talking about. I feel like this post is too long already so I won't get into the other stuff that actually led to my depression worsening but-

thanks Crow! Even if you didn't read this I suppose it's a bit better to get this off of my chest.

[icharchivist]

i know last post is a joke and it's bc chikage clearly has issues and like i say that all the time that i have 0 standarts but also I'm joking when i say that :( he has a lot of fascinating elements to him and he's much better than that...

(fucktons of spoilers for act 2 underneath) (also it got long)

yeah chikage has a terrible start in the story and he sure has flaws but he's also like a chara who canonically tends to repress his trauma and i could argue that a lot of his bad traits come from that in particular and i have so much sympathy for it (even more so since he begs for help about being saved from it in his character song)

to me it's someone who's been thrown into an awful situation and coped as he could, the fact he considers truth a weakness is indication that he could never feel safe being truthful, and the circumstances of his grief really put the fact he has unhealthy coping mechanism on fire to burn the only person he still cared about.

not to mention i think there's something just to be said about his dedication to stay in the organization to protect hisoka because it's the acknowledgement that his hands are so dirty anyway that he can keep dirtying them if it means he can protect the people he loves, but like again, in his song he begs to "be saved from this fate" so i doubt it's something he's doing because he truly doesn't mind - August wanted to free him too after all, and he knew Chikage better than anyone.

and imo there's a layer of self hatred that comes with being dedicated in staying the monster. just like also in citron's arc he accepts to be "the villain" again and be hated if that's what Citron needs of him, Chikage has no fun at all about it and he doesn't even bother to lie about it either which imo shows how much he's throwing his life away for others.

not to mention his lies are also a reflexion of that - by denying others of knowing about him he's sacrificing a part of his identity to keep everyone's safe and imo the fact he was truthful to Tsuzuru about that ways before he considered the spring troupe family (and that the lie he tells tsuzuru to get him to protect himself is still based on half truth) show that it's not something he's doing out of joy and that even at his worst he still considered ways to protect those people (even if it was for something as simple as he projected August on Tsuzuru that time)

also i do think a few of his deeper lies are based on half truth which i find fascinating. the story he tells Tsuzuru clearly is supposed to evoke August and Hisoka. The lie he tells Sakyo about where he was with Izumi is based on, if you boil it down, "making things right for your sibling" which is still exactly what happened then.

also to anyone who called his lies gaslighting, please actually research what gaslighting is because it's not what he's doing. it's not a synonym for lying. gaslighting implies wanting to make their victim doubt their reality by enforcing that their recolection of an event was made up by them and remplacing said recolection by a lie. it's a manipulation tool to make people think they cannot even trust themselves. and it is a paterns, not a one off thing, because it's a form of long term abuse. Chikage always says he's lying about himself, not about what people think they know, he made it clear that people shouldn't trust what he's saying, the only "lie" he keeps up is about his identity and it's to protect everyone, even in the end he tells Sakyo that he wishes he could tell the truth but he can't share it. "Rather than fooling others, i'm better at fooling myself" as he says in his character song. also another indication than his lies are a coping mechanisms to set distance with his own feelings and keeping people from getting too close, not to manipulate others. (note also that as far as i can tell he never lied to Hisoka, ie the only person who actually knows him).

when people love or relate to a character who sees themselves as the villain, as the monster, there's deeper truth that can be unveilled for that.

and if he's honest about it, considering his thoughts on his mother and step dad(s) i think there is a deep cut into his ability to trust others because of that situation and it is so deep that it's probably more arguments on why he closed himself to this point. also i know ppl are mad at the direction this took and yeah i get it but it's a him problem, he just doesn't want to be touched and I'm still mhmmm at the amount of trust you must have lost from your parents to get to such a level of repulsion.

but without even going that deep a lot of Chikage's fans I've met are Gekka fans and they're especially emotional over his dynamic with Hisoka and his attempts to now make things right toward him. and imo part of the reason Chikage doesn't apologize (which i saw people being angry about) is because he doesn't even forgive himself for the things he's done, he's doing the right thing now because he wants to protect what he loves but i don't think he deserves to be forgiven, which is why he also tried to run away that one time, before he could have this one convo with Hisoka when they talked about their shared trauma.

(tbh add the lyrics to Scarlet Game where Hisoka says "but only i was forgiven" because he's the only one who got out of the organization in the end and allowed to move on while it acknowledge that as long as Chikage remains in the organization he is stuck unable to move on from the horrible things he has done and will do for it. Chikage is like trapped and he picked that fate to make sure Hisoka was safe but it's so sad.)

I'd also argue that considering act 2 acts in pair, with the spring and winter chapter foiling each other and summer and autumn doing so as well, Chikage's family mistrust and how it impacted him can and should be set in parallelism with Guy's situation, because both seem to have been coping with their mother's poor decisions in men and the neglect that followed in letting their kids being hurt and repressing themselves because of that and joining organization where both could be tools with a distance toward their emotions. tho that does rely on Chikage telling the truth about that one thing but so far I'd tend to believe it.

Chikage's copings are a dumpfire and it doesn't help that his grief was so raw that he just fucked up everything, but the amount of trauma that hides underneath is so compelling to me.

also lbr but i also don't trust someone who keeps a potion used to comit suicide on him at all time is someone who is completely at peace with his life. the organization likely wired in all gekka that their lives didn't matter and that they should throw it out for the organization and imo it gave them a unhealthy rapport to death. even the fact Chikage did threatens Hisoka that he "should not come back alive if August dies" the aftermath showed that it's not something Chikage seriously thought. imo i believe Chikage believed that, but when he learnt of Hisoka's death he must have felt partially responsible and realized the weight of his words. while it's an horrible thing to say the fact Hisoka rolled his eyes at it means, imo, that they were both wired in not setting values into their lives anyway. and considering how quickly Hisoka tRIED TO KILL HIMSELF i would actually bet that it extends to Chikage. i believe both of them were wired with suicidal thoughts they could easily act on. again, the fact August tempered with the potions imo really show he expected both brothers one day to kill themselves and he tried to prevent that blaming himself for it. so yeah while what Chikage told Hisoka was awful, they were probably both raised with that mindset, Chikage realized too late the weight of this mindset and has now an opportunity to fix it, but i also think it shouldn't be brushed off that Hisoka acted on it and tried to kill himself and that by all account, Chikage would have a similar thought process.

(also feel like it reflects in their character song of suicidal idealization but in different ways: Hisoka of not wanting to wake up, to keep living in a dream because reality frightens him and he's scared of himself, while Chikage's would probably be more about how he feels like he cannot be saved from his fate. that's overreading though but i think about it a lot)

ALSO (this is the fourth time I'm editing this post with an addition) his spice addiction is something to consider bc I've read a thread about it once and, it seems that, spices unleash specific chemicals that sends a pain reaction to the brain that is answered with andorphine to ease the pain and it is what brings joy out of it. Chikage eats an ungodly amount of spice which is already alarming, he mentions it's the only food he can bear to eat but it took him a long while to appreciate it, so the guy just needed Homemade Chemicals to be stable and ironically those involve pain. it also can product an addiction and we know Chikage feels it that way bc of his "I'm in spice withdraw" line and that in his vampire backstage when he tries to stop eating spice it reflects on his mood a lot, Hisoka gets alarmed by how much of a bad mood Chikage is in. so like... it's not healthy for Chikage to do that and while now he probably eats spice just to eat it and the chemical reactions doesn't do as much effect (like coffeeaddiction) it still is that Chikage had to find ways to cope with his life and now he can't really let go and it's super sad to me?

and it's honestly incredible because i started this post wanting to share very personal reasons Chikage's arc echoed with me but instead with the preface alone it's a character meta that just stands on its own, so like, feel that i feel all of that for him while also having deeply personal reasons to connect with him. (not relate tho, not... really, but connect and feel sympathy)

so yeah i know I'm also one to joke about my low standarts when it comes to how i love Chikage because he has glaring flaws but all i see is a wounded man and i feel so much for him and imo there's a lot, lot of reasons to feel sympathy for him.

so yeah i love Chikage bye.

[breeeliss]

[Miraculous Ladybug]: The Perks of Being a Rich Kid

short commission i did for @leoqueen082​ :) 

fun fact: people really forget that these two kids are filthy rich and probably run in the same circles all the time. which makes for some interesting convos :P

Link to Archive of Our Own: [AO3]

Title: The Perks of Being a Rich Kid Pairings/Characters: Gen fic, Chloe & Alix Summary: Chloe and Alix bond after getting sent to the principal’s office

The Perks of Being a Rich Kid

Useful bit of information that Chloé learned today: there was a limit to how much trouble her last name was capable of getting her out of.

Which, seriously, how ridiculous was that? What was the sense of being the daughter of the most powerful man in Paris if she wasn’t going to be totally immune to punishment? She tried to explain that to her teacher but he didn’t seem to appreciate it very much because here Chloé was, getting sent to the principal’s office with a bag full of extra credit homework that was going to take her hours to do.

Sabrina really picked a horrible day to be home sick with the flu. Chloé had been doing her nails during history class this entire quarter and now she had to write a whole paper by Thursday.

To be fair, Chloé kinda toed the line a little close today. Not that she’d ever admit that to anyone other than her father who was going to love an explanation for the mess she’d gotten herself into. That was going to be a fun conversation. She wasn’t sure if her justifiable hatred for Marinette Dupain-Cheng was going to be enough to let her off the hook, and that was the real travesty of the day. Because seriously, this was all Marinette’s fault.

But whatever. At least Chloé got her revenge. Definitely worth potentially losing her credit card privileges over.

M. Damocles was busy scolding a student in his office while another three sat right outside the door awaiting their own lectures. Chloé snorted when she realized that one of them was Alix who was crouched over her handheld and growling at the video game she was playing while she waited. Well, that explained why she wasn’t in class last period.

It was funny that people complained so much about Chloé (almost) never getting in trouble because of who her father was. Alix got sent to the principal’s office at least four times a week and only ever left with a slap on the wrist because of who her father was.

Figures. M. Kubdel gave a monster of a donation to the school last year.

Chloé laid her jacket down on the floor and sat down next to Alix. “You know he’s going to confiscate that when he comes back out here, right?”

“Eh, I’m already up shit creek as it is, can’t possibly get any worse.” She waited until she was finished passing the level she was on before she looked up. “The more interesting story is the fall from grace you must have suffered to be sitting out here with us.”

Chloé rolled her eyes. “Don’t rub it in.”

“I can’t believe that the one time Chloé Bourgeois gets sent to the principal’s office, I miss it. Talk about shit luck. What’d you do? Curse out Mme. Mendeleiev because the lab goggles messed up your foundation?”

“Would you let that go?” Chloé glared. “And no, that’s not why I’m here.”

“Yikes,” Alix laughed. “Who’d you kill?”

“No one. It was a brief altercation.”

“Brief my ass. You wouldn’t be here if it was brief. Spill.”

Chloé shifted. “I...may...have gotten into a fight with Marinette.”

“Yeah, dude, that happens like every five seconds.”

“No like an actual fight. Like I might have lunged over the desk and yanked at her pigtails.”

Alix’s head snapped back as she cackled loud enough for it to echo all the way down the hallway. “No you did not!! You catty maniac!!”

“She called me a soulless hag!” Chloé defended. “How was I not going to put my hands on her?”

“You need a therapist,” Alix suggested. “Like I’m talking thousands of euros in anger therapy. You’re a liability.”

“Screw you. What are you here for?”

Alix shrugged. “Rollerblading in the courtyard. Kim dared me. Couldn’t say no.”

“You mean you did it because you knew you wouldn’t get in trouble for it.”

Alix pointed in Chloé’s face. “Hey, Damocles is afraid of my father because he needs to keep the donations coming. You make him afraid of yours. Don’t lump me together with you.”

“Please, just admit it,” Chloé smirked. “You’re a rich kid with perks.”

“Of course I’m a rich kid with perks. You, on the other hand, are a rich, annoying, prissy, spoiled kid with perks. And guess who everyone hates?”

Chloé gasped. “No one hates me!”

Alix stared at her for a long moment. “Dude….do not start with me right now.”

“They don’t!” Chloé insisted. “They just….they’re jealous. Because I’m famous and Daddy gets me whatever I want.”

“God, I’m gonna vomit. Here, open your bag so that I don’t get it on the floor.”

“Gross!! Stop it!! You’re such a freak!!”

“You sat down and started talking to this freak so joke’s on you, my dude.”

Chloé pursed her lips. “Force of habit. Don’t read into it. Besides, what’s your excuse?”

Alix squinted her eyes and tilted her head. “It’s weird because you’re like ridiculously annoying and I kinda wanna run over your face about ninety percent of the time, but the other ten percent of the time you’re oddly entertaining. Like if I needed a good laugh, all I’d have to do is insult your contour.”

“My contour is immaculate!”

“See?”

“Shut up.”

Alix stuck out her tongue. “I will say: the level of shade you dish out during all those benefit parties we hate going to sustains me.”

Chloé smirked. Their fathers had been friends for years —  long before M. Bourgeois got into politics and M. Kubdel became an art curator. That meant that every art exhibition, campaign fundraiser, charity gala, and Christmas party that either man decided to hold, you could bet that Chloé and Alix were both going to be there suffering through the entire thing with no one but each other for company. Alix told her that the momentary truce was worth listening to Chloé roast all the pathetically dull boys that always asked Chloé to dance, and Chloé had to admit that watching Alix threaten to scoop out old men’s eyeballs with a melon baller was quite satisfying.

“Daddy forces me to go to those parties because he wants me to be nice to the sons of all the politicians he tries to cozy up to,” Chloé shrugged. “Not that I don’t want to see him reelected, but I only have so much patience.”

Alix shrugged. “I think my mom just wants to see me in a dress for once. Everytime I shop in the boy’s section she has an aneurism. It’s great.”

Chloé nudged her. “Remember that time you panicked and invited me over to your house because you had to get ready for our New Years’ party and you had no idea how to do your makeup?”

“Um,” Alix glared, “the whole point of that momentary lapse of judgement was that we were never supposed to talk about it. Like ever. To no one.”

“Who doesn’t know how to put on mascara? I learned that when I was ten.”

“Not everyone sleeps with a Lanc ô me palette under their pillow, Chloé . But anyway. I had a point I was arriving at before you distracted me.”

“The anticipation is killing me.”

Alix ignored her sarcasm and waved her in closer so that the other students in the hallway wouldn’t hear them. “I have to ask because sometimes I think your stupidity is genuine and not you pretending to avoid conversations that bother you. You... do know that no one in class likes you, right?”

Chloé straightened her shoulders. “That’s not true. Adrien and Sabrina like me.”

“Sabrina doesn’t count, she’ll shine your shoes if it meant getting on your good side. And Adrien likes you because that kid’s got too much faith in the world and thinks you’re gonna do a huge turn around any day now. Everyone else low key wants to smash your face through a window everytime you so much as open your mouth.”

“Gee. Thanks.”

Alix lifted her hands. “Listen, I’m being honest with you. And I’m only telling you this because I happen to know that you’re not a total brat.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when we go to those parties? You’re like...not awful. You’re kinda tolerable to be around. I think it’s because there you’re not trying to impress anybody and here you’re forcing everyone to kiss the ground you walk on because you value your school reputation over all else. You try too hard and you come off as a total pain in the ass. It’s starting to seriously piss everyone off.”

Chloé blinked. That was a disturbingly thoughtful answer, especially coming from Alix. “Since when are people pissed off at me?”

Alix’s face fell. “Are you seriously that clueless?”

“If people were so mad about my behavior, they’d tell me,” Chloé reasoned. “Marinette’s the only one who hates me as far as I can tell.”

“That’s because Marinette’s a badass who isn’t afraid to say what everyone else is thinking,” Alix pointed out. “They just don’t want to say it themselves.”

“Why wouldn’t they want to say it?”

Alix rubbed her hands down her face and groaned, slapping her cheeks a little at the end. “Ahhh, okay, okay, you’re blonde so I guess I have to dumb this down for you.”

“Oh screw you!”

She snapped her fingers. “Okay. You know that Italian art collector that my dad invites to art exhibitions all the time? M. Fellini.”

Chloe pouted. “Not ringing a bell.”

“He’s the one that always sounds like he has a sinus infection.”

Chloe face lit up. “Oh my god, yes!”

The joke was fresh in their minds because they both pinched their noses, lifted their chins, and said “Ah, buonasera mademoiselles, don’t you just look lovely this evening!” before collapsing into laughter when they heard how ridiculous they sounded. Honestly, that never got old. Chloé was half tempted to tell her father to send him some cold medicine for Christmas.

Alix rubbed away the tears from her eyes. “Anyway. We can agree he’s a total asshole, right?”

“He’s an old, skeezy, misogynistic snob. Asshole is too tame an insult.”

“Everyone and their mother is on the same page as you,” Alix explained. “But no one ever says that to him. People either ignore him or keep being nice to him no matter how much they wanna punch his face in.”

“I’m assuming there’s a point in you bringing him up.”

“People don’t confront him about being a jerk because he’s one of the richest and most successful art curators in Italy. Insult him and you can say goodbye to doing any kind of meaningful work with him in. Which, in the art world, is social suicide. It’s the same with you.”

Chloé scowled. “You’re comparing me to that wrinkled old sack of broken dreams?”

“It’s a perfect comparison. You got Alya suspended for taking a picture and you tried to get Marinette arrested for supposedly stealing your bracelet. Like, come on dude. People are terrified of you.”

Chloé crossed her arms. “They both deserved that! Alya was invading my privacy and there’s still no proof that Marinette wasn’t involved in that whole bracelet nonsense.”

“And I’m assuming Marinette also deserved you attacking her in class today and that you sitting here is an injustice to humanity. Pretty sure Damocles and your dad are gonna totally side with you when they hear you put your hands on someone because she said something a little mean.”

Chloé looked down at her nails. “You’re being sarcastic…”

“Yeah no shit, queen bee,” Alix scolded. “Here’s a wild concept: if you want to make friends, you have to actually be nice to people. Crazy, I know! Life hack of the year!”

“I try to be nice to people!” Chloé said. “But you’ve got people like Marinette who — ”

“Nope,” Alix interrupted. “Stopping you right there. Marinette has never done anything to you. Marinette’s a freaking angel. She’s nice to everyone who’s nice to her back. The only reason you hate her is because she’s more popular than you are, so you overcompensate by trying to make yourself seem like you’re better than everyone else. Except that doesn’t make anyone want to be friends with you. That makes people wanna stay away from you.”

It was only because Alix lecturing Chloé was such a bizarre occurrence that Chloé stayed quiet and let her words sink in. She wanted to brush it off and assume that Alix was just over exaggerating the situation, but then Chloé remembered a conversation she had with Adrien during his first week of school. She warned him about how hard it was to make friends when you were as perfect, beautiful, and rich as they were because everyone was automatically jealous of your success. That was why it was so important for Chloé and Adrien to stick together because she thought he’d suffer the same fate she did. But Adrien was as quiet, polite, and soft hearted as he’d always been as a kid, and that seemed to have waltzed him straight into the hearts of everyone else in the class in a matter of days. Chloé hadn’t quite figured out how he did that or how she was supposed to follow in his footsteps.

Chloé had always been more abrasive than Adrien — louder, more sarcastic, and harder to get along with. Maybe that was the problem. Although, Alix seemed to do just fine on her end.

She flipped the questions around. “Well, how did you make friends?”

Alix shrugged. “It’s not like I tried. I don’t act different depending on the situation. I just am and people just come. Kim was my first friend because we loved competing with each other. Then Kim’s friends became my friends and it just kept going.”

“That’s what Adrien said…”

“That’s pretty much how everyone makes friends,” Alix said. “Putting people down to lift yourself up doesn’t make people starstruck by you. It just makes you seem like a bitch.”

Chloé sighed. “Daddy says that in politics, in order to win, you have to show how bad the other candidates are in order to make yourself seem better. That’s why people vote for you.”

“This isn’t politics. Making friends isn’t about crushing the competition. You just….act normal and find people that vibe with your flow. Like I said. You’re chill when you aren’t trying too hard.”

“Seriously?”

Alix grinned. “You’re surprisingly hilarious. You’re also an enabler and a bad influence, but that’s a check in my book. Gotta appreciate people who talk you into stealing a thousand euros worth of silverware just to see if you can get away with it.”

“Can’t believe you actually did that,” Chloé laughed.

“Hey, like I said. I can’t turn down a challenge.” She paused for a moment and nudged her foot against Chloé’s knee when she saw her growing quiet. “Hey. I’m not telling you this stuff to make you feel bad or anything. I’m just telling it to you straight. But I also think you can do a turn around and start being nicer to people and make more friends if you cared enough to. You’re stubborn enough to pull it off.”

Alix wasn’t the type of person to put in this much emotional labor into another person, and Chloé knew that the polite thing to do was to at least thank her. But the words felt awkward on her tongue and betrayed her inexperience, so she decided it was best to just not say anything for now. Instead, she followed up with a question that was bugging her. “Why are you telling me all of this now?”

“Dude,” Alix snickered. “You got sent to the principal's office . That’s like the turning point of the century. Might as well take advantage of the momentum and use it towards something productive.”

The door to M. Damocles’s office flung open before Chloé could say anything else, and the student he’d been speaking to slunk through the hall with his head down and a slip of paper crumpled up in his hands. Probably a letter for his parents to sign. “Mlle. Kubdel!” M. Damocles’s voice rang. “It’s your turn. Please come in.”

Alix winced as she collected her bag and stood on her feet. “Womp. Time to face the music. Wish me luck.”

“You know damn well you’re not going to get in any trouble.”

“Wow, fine, I’ll wish myself luck.” She held out her fist. “Hang in there, you frilly little nightmare. If you apologize and cry a lot he’ll probably go easy on you.”

Chloé gently tapped her fist against Alix’s and have her a crooked smile. “Alright.”

Alix gave her a short salute before throwing her arms wide and skipping into M. Damocles’s office as if she were greeting an old friend. Chloé shook her head fondly and tried to think of what excuse she was going to open up with before it was her turn to go inside and explain herself. If spontaneously bursting into tears was all it would take to walk away with nothing more than a stern warning, Chloé was fully prepared to polish off all those acting lessons she took when she was little.

She hummed to herself as she pulled out her phone and started typing out her script. “Turning point, huh?” she muttered. Chloé was pretty sure Alix didn’t mean for that to be a challenge, but for some reason Chloé wanted to treat it like one. Alix’s specialty was planting seeds in people’s heads and sitting back while she watched them try to pull off the impossible. Chloé could always resent the fact that Alix was trying to get in her head, but it would be much more satisfying to exceed the girl’s expectations just so she could shove it in her face.

If Chloe could convince Alix to sit still long enough to put eyeliner on her for a party, she could handle being nice for one day, right?