Sweet dreams

Warning: (silly) mentions of drug abuse in this chapter. The chapter is fun and silly. No actual drugs present in this chapter.

The four teens played a game while they sat on the beds of Ling and Ye on the train from Lhasa to Beijing. It was late at night.

The game night was stopped for the first time when the parents of Ling and Ye decided it was enough. Begging and whining won them the next fifteen minutes. But, Tom appeared at the door and tried to summon his daughter and Adrien to go into their own beds in the other compartment.

"Please, papa, can we finish this?" Marinette begged, but her plea might not have won if Tom did not see the sorrow in Adrien's eyes.

"Okay, but you will go to your beds as soon as you finish, okay?" Tom gave them not so threatening wave of the index finger on his right hand combined with one raised eyebrow and left.

Of course they were finished in half a minute, but that did not stop Ling to deal the cards again. One minute later it was Sabine at the door. The fury in her eyes, her hands on her hips and was that fume coming out from her head? The two young teens returned their cards and jumped down from the upper beds to the floor. That had startled several adults who were already almost asleep.

Sabine gave them one more stern look and moved to the side so that the kids could pass by her. Then she treated the remaining two teenagers with one more scolding look before she wished good night to everyone and left.

Marinette wished good night to all the adults and climbed up to her bed. Adrien repeated her wishes, but when he was about to climb, Tom grabbed his forearm from his bed at the middle level, just below his bed.

"I am a light sleeper. Good nigh Adrien." Tom said with a wink and let go of the boy's arm. Adrien wished him good night while he felt cold shivers go down his spine and climbed up to his bed.

"Papa!" Marinette warned from her bed as she shuffled around.

Adrien noticed Marinette sneaked another cookie in her purse and put the cover over herself. She looked at him and smiled. He smiled back. She opened her purse and showed him the content. The boy could clearly see Tikki and Plagg snuggled together. Tikki munched on the cookie while Plagg looked at Marinette with kitty eyes that begged for food before he turned to Adrien with a mischievous glint in his green eyes that glowed in the dark.

Adrien waved his head and reached for the cheese in his bag. He gave a small piece to Marinette and she put it in her purse. Tikki glared at both of them. If her blue eyes were able to kill, both teens would be dead. Because now the purse that was her mobile home smelled like the cheese that Plagg ate. The mentioned tiny black cat deity swallowed the cheese in one bite, but the smell was there all the same. Adrien shrugged, Marinette mouthed 'sorry' with her mouth. Tikki rolled her eyes. Just because she was a goddess of creation did not mean she was not able to cause any damage, quite the contrary. However, her long experience have taught her that the people feared destruction more than they ever feared creation. Which was silly. What if she created a deadly bacteria or a virus, or even worse, a fungus? What if she created a hydrogen bomb? (Plagg was particularly jealous of that concept).

Adrien pulled the cover up and put his head on the bed. He watched Marinette as she watched him. They caught each other staring and then they both smiled.

Nobody knows when they have fallen asleep. Perhaps the sleep sneaked up to them while their eyes were still open and they looked at each other. But they both definitely fell asleep.

It was Tom who woke them up. Both.

"Marinette, you were screaming. Adrien, you were crying." Tom sighed.

"Um, I do not remember the dream papa." Marinette spoke quietly.

"Huh, I forgot what was mine about." Adrien added sheepishly.

Tom suspected they were both lying. He did not understand what they cried in their sleep, they were not really talking in their sleep, it was a mixture of unintelligible screams and cries that woke him up. The man was not sure how long it took, but he woke the kids up as soon as he understood that they had nightmares.

"All right then, if you need to talk, know that I am awake now." Tom sighed and stood there for a moment. Both kids tried to clam down, or at least to appear so. Tom was sleepy so he decided to go back to his bed. He noticed Sabine stared at him. Tom shrugged. Sabine nodded. And that was it.

The next time it was Sabine who woke them up.

"Adrien, you were calling your mother." Sabine said quietly and she climbed up and sat on her daughters bed. "Marinette had a nightmare too, but I do not know what was that." She added.

Adrien looked down, he avoided Sabine's eyes. The truth was that he often dreamed about his mother and woke up crying and calling her name, even before this whole ordeal.

"Um, that is not new." Adrien admitted.

Both Marinette and Sabine stared at him with surprised eyes.

"But it is not the same dream as before." The boy added. He just looked Marinette in the eyes and hoped she understood. And the look she gave him told him she did. Because now he had new memories of his mother, the memories of Emilie's body in a sarcophagus in the large dark room somewhere in the Agreste Mansion. Memories of her in a small room in the temple. Memories of her during the battle with hawk moth.

"But these two weeks … " Marinette started to speak. During the last two weeks he was occasionally restless in his sleep, but he was not screaming and calling for his mother. But then she noticed her mother looked at her. The girl stopped talking. How could she say to a boy that he did not have that nightmare for the last two weeks in front of her mother. How was it possible for Marinette to know that Adrien Agreste did not have such a nightmare in the last two weeks? She knew it. She flushed in her face as she realized that. Everything had changed for the two of them because the two of them had changed, but everyone else was the same, mostly.

"He did not have the nightmares for the whole two weeks?" Sabine asked her daughter who nodded to confirm. Marinette did not trust her voice nor the ability to form words at that moment.

"I had a few other nightmares." Adrien said timidly. "About … Gabriel … mostly. But those were much lighter and … nobody had to wake me up."

"Hm." Sabine pondered what to do. "We woke you up twice in two hours."

"I am really sorry to wake you up with my screaming." Adrien looked down and away from Sabine.

"Oh, you have nothing to be sorry for, your screaming was not louder than some snoring we had a chance to hear." Sabine winked. "But you will get no rest like this."

Marinette slowly and tentatively extended her arm and offered her hand to the boy. He took it.

"We got some tea in the temple. Perhaps that could help?" Marinette whispered.

"Okay. Where is it?" Sabine asked quietly after she considered weather making tea after midnight on a full train was a good idea. But that was still a better option than waking up a screaming teenager once per hour for the whole night.

Marinette raised her free hand and reached the bag that was on her bed. Adrien recognized the small bundle of food fro kwami. Marinette extracted a piece of cloth that contained some green leaves.

"There, this should be it." The girl said as she offered the tea to her mother. Sabine smelled it and stared back at her daughter.

"I am not cooking you this. We will check that bag of yours to see what else have those monks given you." She said quietly.

Marinette's uncle demanded to see the leaves. He returned them with a smile.

"You can cook one leaf in a lot of water. It is not as bad as you think." The famous cook said quietly with a knowing smile on his face.

"But if we were caught entering France with this we would be arrested." Sabine's eyes were wide as she spoke.

"It is not the drug plant, it is just similar." The man smiled. "That other one would not make them sleep, in fact they would probably scream and cry even more."

"Okay, I am making you tea, but I am using only half a leaf, perhaps a quarter." Sabine relented and finally took off to the car with the kitchenette.

"She thinks that was a kind of a plant that few locals chew as a drug. It makes them hallucinate." Marinette's uncle explained. "It used to be more widespread. It was used as a medicine. Now it is illegal, but it is hard to keep it restricted. It grows in the wilderness. One just needs to find it."

"Uncle?" Marinette called timidly. "Is it correct that we would be arrested for carrying that?"

"I do not know, but you did not know what it was and you thought it was the tea." Uncle soothed the girl who was obviously shaken by what she heard.

"Okay." The girl replied.

"I can help you sort out those herbs you got in the morning." The great cook offered.

"Okay, thank you." She said and remained quiet. She looked back at Adrien. She was worried. It was true that she never even thought that some of the herbal tea she god in the temple might be considered drugs in her own country.

Adrien listened to the conversation, he made himself think of the tea and the leaves and all different sorts of plants he saw while they were walking on the Tibetan plain. He tried to remember the bushes and the types of leaves and if he saw any plant that had leaves in that particular shape.

But he remembered the flowers, all different kinds of tiny flowers that would grow just about anywhere, shyly peeking beside a rock or near a larger bush. Then he remembered how Marinette gave flowers to her uncle when he visited Paris. And her uncle used those flowers in his celestial soup. Did her uncle ever use one of those chewing plants in his famous soup? The thought made him smile and almost laugh. Perhaps he was? Perhaps that was his secret recipe? Maybe that was a reason his soups were so successful. His imagination was going wild, but that was exactly what he needed to distract himself from his gloomy thoughts.

Marinette stared at his face. Was he really giggling? She looked worried. Her eyes were narrowed, her brows furrowed. She stared at the boy bewildered by his reaction. She wanted to ask what was going on, but then her mother returned with two cups of tea.

"There you are." She gave them two cups and went back to her bed.

Both teens sat up and waited for their tea to cool down in silence. The adults were back asleep and they could hear few people snoring below them.

Adrien sipped his tea and looked at the girl on the other bed.

"What is wrong?" He asked with a smirk.

"You." She whispered.

He frowned.

"You had nightmares that made you scream in your sleep but now you are giggling to yourself." She pointed her index finger towards him to stress her words.

Adrien smiled back, but then returned to being serious.

Marinette was instantly sorry she asked.

"Marinette" he whispered, his green eyes shined in the weak artificial light. She almost shivered at the sound of his voice. But she shook the feeling away. She had to get to the bottom of this.

Once the boy saw her determined face, it was clear he was not going out of this one using his jokes.

"I used to have nightmares about my mother leaving and me confined in a tight space." Adrien spoke quietly and quickly to shed the memory of his nightmares. "This time it was about … " he looked in her eyes and took a breath. He hoped she understood what he wanted to say. "About what happened in the temple." He finished in one breath and turned away.

"Okay, but … there was something funny." She wanted to continue with 'about that?' a question, but his grin confused her so much that she stopped mid sentence.

"Um yes, totally, unrelated." He drank some tea from his cup. "You see, your mother and your uncle were talking about those leaves."

Marinette was drinking her tea.

"I mean about those leaves that cause hallucinations." Adrien continued.

Marinette almost choked on her tea.

Adrien stopped talking and reached over to pat her back, but she raised her hand, she was breathing.

"What?" She asked incredulously. "You were laughing before we drank this." She waved her cup and then stared at the cup. She flipped at the cup and saw the bottom. "It is empty."

"You are just tired." Adrien smiled. "There is nothing in those leaves."

Marinette smiled back.

"We are both tired. I was laughing because while your uncle was talking I was thinking about those leaves, I mean the real ones, that really cause hallucinations." Adrien stopped to drink more tea.

"Mhm." Marinette confirmed that she at least had an intention to pretend she was following what Adrien was trying to explain.

"And then I remembered how he used those flowers you gave him for his celestial soup." The boy continued.

Marinette squinted her eyes. Following a train of thought of another person is difficult in normal circumstances, but late at night and the thoughts are a train wreck – mission impossible.

"And I got this funny idea … " The boy paused for a better effect, as if he needed one while he talked with Marinette. "What if he used those other leaves, not these ones. " He waved his cup. "To make his famous celestial soup." And then he giggled.

Marinette looked at the boy with wide eyes. Whatever was funny to him was not reaching her. She looked at the boy who was now laughing into a pillow not to wake up everybody else. She started to laugh because Adrien was laughing, because he looked happy, because the boy was probably going nuts, as expected. She covered her mouth with her hands not to wake up everyone else around them.

Adrien sat up still laughing.

"You have no idea what I was talking about?" He asked between giggles.

Marinette giggled and looked at him with raised eyebrows.

"I know you don't, because if you did, you would have rolled your eyes and scolded me, it was so stupid." Adrien giggled some more.

Marinette waved her head and giggled anyway.

After they calmed down, they held hands and looked at each other until they have fallen asleep.

"I don't care what uncle says, whatever is in that tea can't be legal." Sabine muttered to herself on the bed below Marinette.

Later the next morning, Marinettes uncle sorted out the herbs, he explained as much as he knew about them and laughed at Adrien's idea for a soup and explained that he never used any plant that caused hallucinations in his soups. He also explained that the tea they had was a simple calming herbal tea, nothing special.

Note: what is legal in one country might be illegal in the other.