"Lucky Charm!" Ladybug shouted for the first time since the current Tikki had used it a few weeks before a young girl named Marinette could be her only new friend.
A red paintbrush covered in black polka dots fell from above Ladybug's raised fist and dropped into her other hand. There was white paint ready on the brush.
"You need to go home soon, so do the second half of the spell that fixes everything and then I'll give you a bit of food before your dinner tonight," Tikki said as Ladybug nodded.
"Miraculous Ladybug! How do I get out of this spandex?"
"Oh, I forgot to tell you. It's called Spots Off!" Tikki began to get up and walk around for a minute while Ladybug rolled her shoulders.
"Spots Off!" A flash of pink light filled the room and Marinette collapsed to the floor. She sighed as her stomach growled.
"That's it. Here's some high protein granola bars. Up you go, keep hold of me and we can get back to the park very soon. Yes, we still have over twenty minutes until you have to be home, and guess what? It only takes ten minutes to get you home!"
"Okay," Marinette mumbled as Tikki began to drag her towards the door. "I can walk, let me go," she slurred before Tikki let her go. She promptly started to fall yet again before Tikki grabbed onto her once more.
"Nope. Eat your granola bar. It's like you're drunk and tired. If you puke on me, you are most definitely buying me new designer shoes. Maybe a Chanel purse." Tikki said as she opened the packaging of one bar and stuffed multiple bars into her hands. After gaining back some strength that she had lost, Marinette unhooked herself from Tikki and rolled her neck.
"How long do I have until I have to be home?" Marinette asked Tikki as she grabbed onto her arm in order to disappear before they left Miraculous.
"Fifteen minutes, it takes ten to get you to the park and we originally had twenty if you hadn't acted so stupidly," Tikki snapped at her and set a brisk pace. She was annoyed, Marinette could find that out herself beut she didn't understand the why. Then again, she had never understood the why from Tikki's point of view. "Meet me at the park tomorrow night right after school."
"Why?"
"Do you think I deserve to tell you my plans? I haven't told you my plans for the past nine years."
In the metro, Marinette almost let go of Tikki before realizing what that would ensue. Panic among the people around her, a girl showing up out of nowhere. Although she stepped out of a dark van that sped off quickly from a park that nobody cared about her.
In the train car, she let herself loose the time to the clicking of the tracks without being afraid of her magic taking over the sound. Tikki was right that her magic would be mostly blocked off as Marinette now, which wasn't bad. Sitting in class with a pencil writing for her would be nice, but it might scare Alya, her only friend. Unless you counted Adrien and Nino, but Marinette thought she worried them because of her stumbling through words. It was just Adrien, really, that she was worried about. Adrien, whose golden head was nicer looking practically every period throughout the day.
He had a nice head, and cute eyes, she had decided. Sure they were very green, a pleasant reminder of her kitty. Chat always had to wear these weird contacts as he got older that made his eyes look like cat eyes. He hated them, but if he took them off Plagg would have done something worse to them that beatings. Plagg would have turned off the light. Plagg could have them separated and kept in different places, alone with or without lights. Being alone in the dark was the worst fear either of them had in that place.
Tikki let her off at the park and nobody noticed a girl magically appearing out of thin air. Tikki explained that anyone who saw her before she let go couldn't see her until they saw her a second time. She was just a passing face between strangers to anyone.
Dinner was an interesting thing that night. Marinette was less hungry than she thought, and had already surprised her parents by taking so much food. It was delicious, but those protein bars that she ate had filled her up much more than she thought. Tom ate her leftovers, and he finished them quickly.
Retreating to her room after some awkward conversations between both parents about her day and appetite, she laid down on the chaise that still had dust in it. She figured it would probably stay there forever, woven into the fibers of the cloth. She ran fingers over the seams of it, and studied the embroidery. It was simple stitching, back and forth in the pattern by a machine.
She stood up and looked at the dress form she had. There was plenty of supplies to start learning and she had the computer her parents got. She looked up how to make dresses and started her first project.
After an hour, Marinette looked at what she had accomplished. It was decent, something between a dress and something unknown. The torso was there, but the sleeves were all scrunched up around where she had tried to connect them to the dress. A spot in the middle of the torso had also been messed up and was curled in on itself. She wasn't sure how she did it, but attaching a brooch to the spot made it look intentional. Marinette didn't know what to do with the sleeves, so she bunched up the collar and made it a bit wider to look like it went with the dress theme. Pleated sleeves and a pleated collar made it seem like a thing, but the pleats and brooch made it too much.
Pretending like the way she cut out the fabric wasn't the issue, it was an okay attempt. Feeling happy with doing something, she put it into the corner and got ready for bed. Her homework was mostly finished, and she finished it up before climbing up to her bed.
Marinette was ready to fall asleep, but she stayed up thinking. It was hard not to contemplate the reasons behind Tikki's methods of teaching her. To take her where Plagg was, to let her know what the place was called. She focused on Miraculous, the gym on the outside and secret… lair on the inside? If Tikki wasn't lying about the mysterious Hawkmoth, then is the secret Miraculous still a secret lair? It looked more like a den where old friends that are the only ones able to see each other drink together.
She loved the studio, though. Everything about the studio was beautiful. The dust sitting in mid air, catching the light to make it glow silver. The wooden floor that was losing its polish to age, and the mirrors. The mirrors that lined up one wall that had her love from the moment she saw them. Beautiful things, mirrors were. Marinette liked the fancy ones as a child, and didn't see them in the cage. Now, she understood that mirrors showed who she really was.
Mirrors carried her to sleep peacefully, but it was a nightmare that woke her up. She was in a room only made of mirrors. She stared in wonder that each mirror she focused on would lead to a fantastical world of myths, while mirrors around her showed her reflection. The mirrors started to break behind her until she turned, then the mirrors she had turned away from would break until there was nothing left but her and the mirror below her. Cracks formed before she woke.
She laid there until her breathing leveled out and she could sit up without a panic attack. Terrified about what it meant, she got up and went to her computer. The clock read 4:28 in the morning, and she opened up a search in Google and searched myths about mirrors. Her windows were beginning to let light through before she closed the tab and went to get ready for school. She looked at herself in the mirror and noticed a hairline crack in the mirror.
She arrived at school while the bell rang. Slipping quietly into her seat late, Mlle Bustier let it pass because of how good Marinette knew how to listen. She was lecturing on the last chapter they had to read in Les Miserables, just like the day before. The book started off quite boring, but Marinette was interested in what was going on in Fantine's life before Jean Valjean had swept into her life. There was an american movie that she heard had cut out all of Fantine's life before Cosette was in the innkeeper's care, so she didn't think she'd bother with the subtitles.
She listened to Mlle Bustier lecture endlessly, but really didn't listen to the words. Marinette did what she did on the train that day. She took background sounds and focused on them alone, in order to pick out different sounds. There was a vent above her somewhere that was making a different sound than the day before, an almost breath as it blew air out of the ceiling. She quieted her own breaths, trying to make out sounds barely there.
It was just a game to her. An old game, actually. Her mom would have her sit on the ground as a child, and listen for the quietest things she could hear and describe them to her mother and see if she could find them. Then, her mother would repeat the game back to her until one of them couldn't hear something that the other could. She played it with Chat when they were new friends and she had won most of the time.
She picked out the sounds hidden between the low whispers in the back of class and the paper rustling between page flips when students looked for a certain passage. She smiled at the sound that was just barely there, a sound she had picked out everywhere. When she was alone, eating dinner, in class, even on a busy street. A thrumming sound, beating like her heart. She had taken her pulse and measured the sound. It was faster than her heartbeat, and she had come to one conclusion. Her magic was a beast, beating with its power inside of her softer than a heartbeat, yet when she listened for it alone it could have been the only sound in the world.
She listened to the softer sound she had heard before in the classroom. I beat that was opposite her own magic. They beat in time, in turn. She didn't always hear it, but she had recognized it before. She had heard both of those beats before, in a dark room with a single lightbulb.
It was distant from the fact that the beat wasn't coming from her, but a person in the classroom. If he didn't sit near to her, she probably wouldn't have heard it. She had figured out who Chat Noir most likely was, but she wasn't going to tell him or Tikki. Or Plagg, since she most likely wouldn't see him where Tikki wanted to go tonight.
The bell rang, and she stood up with Alya, following her motions listlessly for a moment. Alya looked like she wanted to snap in front Marinette's face before Marinette smiled at her friend. She wondered why Alya liked her so much, the girl who spaced out in class and could barely keep time in order.
"Alya, remind me that I need to ask my mom for a watch, would you? With my luck, I'll forget before I even leave the next class," she said before sighing.
"Girl, with your luck, we'll be late for the next class!" Alya huffed before grabbing her arm and dragging her to Maths Class with Mme Mendeleiev.
They sat in class together, time dragging on yet again. Marinette listened to Mme Mendeleiev, and she took more notes than she expected to take. She stared at Adrien's golden head nod up and down while he looked up to listen and look down to write down his own notes. Then, she looked at the teacher again, studying her expressions when she took a pause and gave a pursed look at some students in the back.
"Nathanael, do you have any idea what the answer to this problem is?" Mme Mendeleiev was seeking a student who would have the right answer, but nobody wanted to raise their hands. He quietly answered her, with the correct answer. It was a setup problem, just how to take each variable and number out of the word problem and put it into the equation they had.
"Good, good," Mme Mendeleiev muttered while she turned to the board, "And these numbers all add up to… 273.8. That was the number we were looking for but if you would like a double check, take all of the numbers and cross check the original equation with the numbers we took from the original word problem."
She turned to the students and moved aside for students on the edge of the classroom to be able to see the full problem. Nobody seemed impressed, but it was a school classroom.
"So class, now that we have all the examples finished, the homework is page 165, numbers three through fifteen. You have the rest of class to work on that, about twenty minutes." Mme Mendeleiev went to her desk and started to check papers while the class started talking about the latest gossip.
"I heard that a girl was found, strung high from smoking, in her teacher's closet. It was across Paris of course, Daddy wouldn't let me go to such a disgusting school. There's rumors that she was even having an affair with the teacher, or she was at least doing more than just smoking in that classroom," Chloé said loudly as the chatter grew. "I can't even believe it, it could make the news it was such a huge scandal. There was a scandal I read about that made super international news from America. Some nasty boys did things to their cooking class icing nastier than their personalities."
Marinette tried to tune out Chloé, really. It was just so hard with her annoying voice that didn't know what an inside volume was. She looked at the clock and pulled out a tangled pair of headphones to help her tune out the gossip table, surrounded by more and more people wanting to be included in Chloé's elite circle.
With only five minutes left in the school day, Marinette fretted about what Tikki would want tonight. She didn't have any homework that would take too long, so Tikki's mystery activity would probably be her homework. She didn't slip into her Ladybug persona anymore, it was helpful even if she had no access to magic without it.
She left the school and ran home, depositing her backpack in her room and telling her parents a white lie that she was hanging out with some friends. She said they decided on a place and she didn't recognize the name. It wasn't a total lie, but she still felt guilty.
Finally, Marinette went to the park to find Tikki. She looked around, but could only find a blonde boy with Plagg. She didn't want to talk to Plagg, and she figured it was Chat. Chat Noir and her had never seen each other's unpainted face, and they were threatened with beatings if they exchanged names. If they saw each other, Plagg would probably threaten to have Tikki snap both of their necks.
She quietly turned around and waited for Plagg to leave with the mystery Chat. Tikki never came, so she went home when her dinner would be about ready to eat.