Like Alice going through the looking glass, Ladybug and Chat Noir were transported to a fanciful world. The garden itself was a blend of living plants and those made of blown glass on a huge scale.
Vivid colors leapt up at them, and the glass shone, almost dazzling in the low light of the day. They wondered around the stone paths in wonder. Many of the glass pieces seemed to be organized into groupings, like a flower garden. The more they looked around, the more works of art they encountered.
The garden was encompassed by a tall, solid wood fence, blocking out much of the outside world. But one specific building would not be missed. The Seattle Space Needle sprung up beside the garden, casting his long shadow across it. The tall pinpoint of metal and glass seemed itself a fitting companion for this place.
Ember's flame reflected off the surfaces of the glass 'plants,' illuminating their translucent areas with flickering light. Ember led them to what appeared to be a tall 'greenhouse' of clear glass panels. As all kwamis, he had a way to avoid being seen when he wished. He also had no problem getting his way into secured spaces. The dim lights inside clearly indicated that this art gallery of glass was closed for the day, but Ember phased through and zipped around, before popping the lock for them. He must have turned off any security systems as well, because when they swung the door open softly, not a sound was heard. No sound that is, except the soft echo of their feet padding across the floor.
"Look up!" Chat Noir whispered.
Ladybug's head tilted back and she was amazed. Above them, framed within the clear beams of the glasshouse were delicate 100 feet of glass fragments suspended together. They seemed to be flying through the air.
Chat Noir pointed to the featured glass artwork, and then to Ember. The shape and illusion of movement of the class looked just like a Phoenix tail moving in flight. Although they knew it was glass, it seemed to resemble the fluidness of fire and water.
Within the rafters Chat Noir picked up the movement of vivid yellow wings. The handsome little bird he spotted donned a jet black cap and distinctive black marks on his lemon yellow plumage. A willow goldfinch undulated his wings in a couple beats, then folded his wings neatly and glided down to them. "Ti-di-di-di," he greeted as he hovered before them, taking his kwami form.
"So you are here to see me at last!" he sang out cheerfully. "What an honor to meet the chosen of the ladybug!" He bowed to Ladybug gracefully.
There was a bit of an awkward moment between them, before Ladybug cleared her throat and said, "…and this is Chat Noir, weilder of the black cat miraculous."
"Yes," the finch said glancing his way, "No offense cat weilder. I'm afraid Tiki and I are often more compatible. Sometimes Plagg and I don't exactly get along."
"Why not?" Chat Noir asked.
"Well, I guard the trial of inspiration in a gallery of delicate art…literally a glass house…while you are the weilder of destruction itself."
"Oh yes. I guess I see what you mean," Chat Noir said quietly.
"Not that it is not just as important for you to take part in this particular trial…maybe even more valuable," he encouraged sweetly.
"You think so?" Chat Noir asked hopefully, "Ladybug truly is the more creative between us," he said putting a hand on the small of her back.
"Just as you partners balance each other, so do creation and destruction when it comes to creativity. Look around you," The yellow bird chirped. "Within the Chihuly exhibits each piece of glass you see was melted down and dissolved into a molten liquid, before it could be formed into something beautiful. Ember may not have told you, but this is one of his favorite stations in the trials," the finch puffed up his light chest proudly.
"What is not to love," Ember shrugged, art made through the refinery of fire!"
"So we get to learn how to make glass like this?!" Ladybug asked excitedly.
The willow golden finch twittered in lighthearted laughter. "Some have used glass as their medium, but I think each of you have your own expressions of your inner inspiration." The lemon bird plucked two feathers and let each drop in front of each wilder.
Once Ladybug's feather fell before her it transformed into a large sketch pad and a pencil.
The feather before Chat Noir made both of them jump back quickly with yelps of surprise, because the feather sprouted into a baby grand piano. The piano made a shrill 'pring' noise when it settled.
"Piano huh?!" Ladybug whispered to Chat Noir. "I didn't know music was you thing!"
"What do you mean Bugaboo!" He smirked, "I've serenaded you dozens of times!"
"Like I said," she responded flatly, "I didn't know music was your thing."
"Hey!" He shot back trying to look offended, "you know you love my romantic caterwauls!"
"You have your moments," she winked, and flipped through the empty yellow pages of her sketchbook."
"So, Goldenfinch, I take it we have to create something with these, but what do we do to complete your challenge?"
"You will love it!" The finch chirped gleefully, "You must create something drawing on your greatest inspiration. Once you think you have completed your piece show me and I will evaluate whether you have accomplished your commission."
Excitedly Ladybug found her own corner along the glass walls and barely sat down before she was putting pencil to paper. Ladybug scribbled and sketched lines onto her page.
Chat Noir walked thoughtfully around the piano, letting his fingers trail along its pale yellow finish. He pulled up the bench, and his fingertips hovered lightly over top of the ivory and ebony colored keys. He had not touched a piano since the day before he had discovered the identify of Hawkmoth.
His piano lessons and practicing had always seemed like a relentless chore. His music was always picked for him, usually a classical repertoire with technical precision. The rare times his father had assessed his playing, he had always felt it was just another opportunity to disappoint him. There had been that one day he had played a duet with his father, that one day, he had felt that just maybe there was still love between them.
Chat Noir couldn't help the angry tears that sprung into his eyes. That had been the same day Captain Hardrock attacked his friends under Hawkmoth's influence. If only he had known what his father was doing the whole time.
Chat Noir hastily brushed his hand across his eyes, straightened his back, and placed his hands onto the keys. His father had never been his source of inspiration, only his task master.
He thought of other times when he and Plagg would play around on the piano. The old ragtime tunes from the old movies his mother had watched with him as a child. SO playful and different from the formal and complex pieces he had been assigned by his father. Without any sheet music in front of him, he began to play.
Ladybug looked up from her sketchpad as Chat Noir's music reverberated off the walls energetically. This certainly seemed like Chat Noir…his goofy, light hearted joking, with a little bit of brash machismo thrown in. Honestly he was a lot more talented than she expected. But she wouldn't let him know that she was impressed she told herself. He seemed so confident in his music; any compliment would surely just feed his ego.
Ladybug evaluated her own work. She had beautifully rendered a detailed sketch of the glass artwork above them. She even captured the looming Seattle Space Needle above the delicate floating form. She shaded in some final shadows of the fanned out glass within the drawing, before she proudly presented it to the finch kwami.
"Beautiful!" praised the kwami viewing her delicate use of shape and form.
"So I passed!" Ladybug grinned.
"No," the finch responded abruptly, "but you have a lovely drawing."
"So…I need to draw something else…" Ladybug folded over the next page, and rubbed the eraser of her pencil on her head leaving a slight smudge over her eyebrow.
"You must draw from your greatest inspiration," the finch confirmed.
While Ladybug returned to her corner, and started to draw again, Chat Noir presented his song to the wild kwami for evaluation.
By the end he had the little bird tapping along to his tune. The energy he gave to his piece made him sweat as he finished with a dramatic flourish. The bird flapped his wings in applause.
"It is still not quite right, is it?!" Chat Noir said sitting at the piano.
"You play with great enthusiasm and skill, but go back to the source. What motivates you?" the bird replied.
"My motivation," repeated Chat Noir. "You know what! I think I have just the piece."
He bent his head over the keys and tested out a few notes. He thought about how he always used to turn piano music on to fool his body guard and Natalie when he would escape his room to be Chat Noir. Most the time they had been deceived into thinking he was practicing. He smiled to himself remembering how this was really the first act of outright rebellion against his father's tyrannical rule (well a part from trying to go to school). Being Chat Noir. That was the ultimate release. A chance to be free. He started to play the notes of the morceau he always used from his playlist to throw off suspicious. It gradually evolved to become more dramatic and fast paced. His fingers intertwined over the keys in a series of notes, always accompanied with an underlying beat that synchronized with the beat of his heart. His hands flew across the keyboard like his feet flew over roof tops as Chat Noir.
Ladybug was concentrating intensely on a series of beautiful cityscapes and landmarks from Paris. With such a beautiful city she could not choose just one. Page after page she filled with images of the city she had lived in all her life. Each picture represented a significant memory. She sketched faster and faster, drawing her pencil across each page. It was not until one deep pencil stroke broke her lead, did she realize that Chat Noir's dramatic music had been driving her hand. Now that she was really listening, his song seemed to be the perfect soundtrack for the scenes that she had drawn of their city. Surely this was a good sign. Who could not be inspired by such a city?!
She saw Chat Noir look up hopefully at the yellow finch, but slump his shoulders when the wild kwami shook his head.
Ladybug looked back down at her collection of sketches. They were not master pieces, but they were the best she had ever done in such a short amount of time from memory.
She showed them to the golden finch and he listened intently as she described each location and every memory tied to each.
"You are getting closer, but this is still not quite right. You need to get closer to the heart of the matter. What gives you energy? Gets you to overcome obstacles? What challenges you to push further than you thought possible? What ignites your passion?" the bird prompted.
Ladybug's cheeks tinged rosy pink. She knew all too well what…or rather who, did all of that for her.
On the way back to her 'spot,' Ladybug noticed Chat Noir still slumped over his piano, toying with the keys. She sat down beside him, and he briefly acknowledged her with a nod, before running his hands frustrated through his shaggy blonde hair. "I don't know where to start or where to go from here!" he lamented, "usually I have notes to follow or have at least heard the song I'm supposed to place to replicate by ear. Inspiration was never my driving force. It was always the insistence of my father." At the mention of his father he motioned to the goldenfinch kwami. "I could never get it quite right for him either."
Ladybug had always noticed that Chat Noir had usually avoided talking about his family. She was shocked to hear someone as seemingly carefree as Chat Noir felt so restricted in something that most of her other musician friends (in Kitty Section) had always felt so empowered and liberated by; to express themselves through their music.
They sat in silence on the piano bench together.
Ladybug put her left hand on the keys. She played a simple song made up of just a few repeating notes. Chat Noir did not watch her hands; only her face. Her head was tilted slightly, and her eyes were focused, but soft…like she was far way. The notes rang clear, but were delicate, and sometimes a bit clumsy.
"What is the name of that song?" Chat Noir asked as if in a trance.
Ladybug shrugged, somewhat embarrassed by her little song, after hearing Chat Noir's impressive repertoire so far that night. "I don't know if it really has a name," Ladybug said, "it is just a little song my mother used to sing when I was little to help me go to sleep." She stopped playing awkwardly.
"Please," Chat Noir implored, "please don't stop." "Why don't you take over from where I left off," Ladybug smiled, slipping off the bench, and walking behind him. Then she leant down and put her arms around his shoulders. "It doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful. Sometimes it is more interesting with its own inpurrrfections."
Chat Noir's face lit up again. She kept getting to him with cat puns this week! If that wasn't enough, she whispered in his ear, "Anyone who can't hear how talented you are is a fool. I will take on anyone who says otherwise…even your father."
"I'm sure you would," Chat Noir replied quietly trying to keep his voice even, but couldn't hide the smile that flickered across his face.
She kissed the top of his head and walked to the wall opposite to Chat Noir.
He watched her as she started sketching. She would get that same faraway look on her face, and then start to lay down lines. Then she would get the tiniest (cute) little wrinkle over her nose, and erase a section, and then go again. He smiled watching her work. He played the little song Ladybug had showed him. He slowly added little trails onto the notes, but kept the central melody simple and clear.
She looked up at Chat now and then as he played. Of all the songs he had played that night this one was absolutely the most beautiful one…probably the most captivating thing she had ever heard in her life. Well almost, she scolded herself. Not more beautiful than Adrien's voice. She looked down at the third attempt at a portrait of Adrien she had been trying to draw, but it was not quite right. There was something missing. She could not get it to really show him the way she saw him. She flipped the page and started over again. But this drawing and even the next were no closer to doing justice to his dazzling smile, the soft fall of his hair, and his eyes…it was the eyes that were the problem. Someone had once told her the eyes were the window to the soul…so shouldn't she be able to capture those eyes that she spent so many years gazing into. She turned her pencil over, and erased the eyes that stared back at her again.
Her own eyes settled over on Chat as he played his new song. She absentmindedly wondered if he had words to his song, even just lyrics bouncing around in his head to go with the chords or if the whole composition was just driven by emotion. She couldn't help but smile as she watched him play. Her pencil trailed along her page. Chat Noir would every now and then duck his head, and toss his hair to one side. She liked the way his hair fell. Her pencil moved forward. Chat had a particularly distinct set of eyes thanks to Plagg's influence, but it was more than that. He was not so easy to read as she had first thought. She remembered the night she had stood him up as Ladybug, only to commiserate with him on her own balcony as Marinette the night Glaciator attacked. Then at the end of the night the way he had looked at her when he said her friendship meant everything to him…and then he had kissed her on the cheek. Well those were eyes…and lips she would not soon forget. Her pencil moved forward, pausing now and then.
The yellow finch kwami flew soundlessly over to Ladybug's shoulder, and sat on her shoulder watching her make her doodle. Ladybug's eyes flickered to her page, and realized she had got caught up in doing a little sketch of Chat Noir at the piano. She was about to turn the page to get back to her drawing of Adrien when the golden finch stopped her.
"You're getting there," he said, "Now you're creating from the heart."
"I wasn't really…" Ladybug stumbled, "…I was just…my actual drawing is…"
"I think this one," the bird brushed his feathers against the page, "is all you really need." As he brushed his feathers against the page the sketchbook and pencil vanished, dropping a pebble of glass into Ladybug's hand.
"But I don't understand, I wasn't finished," Ladybug looked from the marble to the finch.
"No of course not," the kwami cocked his head to one side regarding the weilder. "A masterpiece is always a work in progress, but I think you are inspired to continue on your own."
Ladybug still looked confused.
"Inspiration is just the start, Lady of creation…not the entirety of the expression," he said softly, flying over to Chat Noir.
Chat Noir was immersed in his song, lost to its melody. "You sound like one truly inspired," the golden finch trilled, and brushed his wing against the top of the piano. The whole piano disappeared out from under Chat Noir, making him stumble forward. The piano left one last resounding note hanging in the air.
"Did you like it?" Chat Noir asked, with his eyes set not on his kwami evaluator, but on Ladybug.
"It was incredible," she said, "I could listen to that song every day of my life!" she couldn't help admitting.
At this praise Chat's face lit up with joy (for of course it had been a song about the love he had for his Lady).
"Next, I don not give you a task, but some advice. Go and strengthen yourselves with food, and then you are welcome to come back here for some sleep. The one you seek tomorrow is elusive enough during the daytime to risk trying to track him at night."
Chat volunteered to pick up dinner, and meet Ladybug down by the boardwalk by the Ferris wheel.
Once out of the glass garden, Chat Noir dropped his transformation, and Plagg zoomed straight up to his face. "I know just the place!" Plagg practically shouted.
"Shhhh, keep your voice down," Adrien urged him.
"We've got to go now, or we will miss it!" Plagg screeched. "Quick transform back so we can make it in time!"
"For what?" Adrien asked (surprised by Plagg's unusual eagerness to transform again, after using so much energy throughout the day).
"Homemade Cheese Factory at Pike Place!" the little black kwami started to salivate. "Quick! Say the words already!"
"Okay, okay," Adrien laughed, "Plagg, Claws Out!"
Chat Noir sprinted across the rooftops, and the raised cement transit line toward the Pike Place market near the water front. It only took a few minutes, before Chat Noir dropped onto the roof of his destination.
"Claws in," he said in a hushed voice, and then snatched Plagg out of the air as he emerged, and tried to zoom straight into one of the factory vents.
"Listen Plagg, you've got to stay hidden in my jacket when I go in…I mean it…no jumping out because you get impatient, otherwise we will forget about this homemade cheese, and I will pop by the corner store to get you string cheese."
"You wouldn't!" Plagg gaspt with sincere horror.
"One whisker out of place in there and you'll be getting plastic covered cheese slices for a week," Adrien threatened, eyeing him down.
"I promise, I promise…oh you are so unfair…you just don't understand!"
Adrien rolled his eyes at the kwami's theatrics and held out his jacket.
Plagg zipped inside and true to his word did not budge.
Adrien slipped down the side of the building and went through the front door just as they were about to close.
Adrien graciously explained how he had just got into town from Paris and was told to specifically look up their shop. The owner smiled proudly, and quickly showed Adrien around. Through a huge glass window giant vats of cheese curds were being processed. Adrien felt Plagg quiver from within his pocket. Adrien could only imagine the greedy kwami doing laps in the pools of cheese. He tapped his pocket as a warning.
Adrien ordered a huge wedge of four year old aged flagship cheese for Plagg, as well as a sample of some of their smoked cheese. He also ordered a macaroni and cheese bowl, and a couple cheeseburgers for himself and Ladybug. The owner beamed, ringing in the large quantity of cheese, and packaged everything in a cloth bag to make it easier to transport.
After Adrien paid and walked a couple shops down the street he discretely slipped a generous wedge of cheese into his shirt pocket. "Ouch!" he hissed, yanking back his hand, when Plagg bit him.
"Sorry," Plagg whispered with his mouth full of the creamy cheese. I couldn't hold myself back any longer!"
"I shouldn't be surprised," Adrien glared down at his kwami, and then picked up a couple lattés for he and Ladybug before heading back. He knew her order off by heart, after many late night acomas and patrols.
He found her sitting on a roof overlooking the water, leaning back on her hands. Ember sat on a vent overhead. The spot gave them a great view of the cargo ships and the lights of the city. Chat Noir sat down next to her, and handed her the neatly wrapped parcels of food. Ember also accepted some, and then hunkered down within his glowing feathers, ignoring the chatty teens. "Youth," he muttered, closing his eyes as they reminisced about some of the more ridiculous acoma villains. They laughed until they almost rolled off their roof.
With their appetites sated, they leaned against each other, and looked out before them. Down below on the street a young street performer with baggy jeans and a green and blue t-shirt jersey was drumming on pails and other items of create a makeshift drum kit. He had impressive rhythm, and was able to draw so much sound from such a strange collection of odds and ends.
"Ivan would have likes this," Ladybug mumbled.
"What's that?" Chat Noir questioned.
"Oh, nothing," Ladybug covered up, "I would never have thought to use those."
"Sure you would have," Chat Noir grinned. "You always use the most obscure item from your lucky charm to do amazing things. Even I have been pretty creative in a pinch! Don't you remember 'Smelly Wolf' when I had to make a drum kit out of things on a janitors chart when Mil…that girl turned into that big slimy monster."
"Ha!" Ladybug burst, "I almost forgot about that!"
Chat Noir took her hand, pulling her up to dance. He spun her into himself and put his hand on her hip. They moved with the upbeat music, and he picked her up, spinning her around, making her laugh out.
A couple people on the street level looked up towards them, and the two of them giggled gleefully, ducking out of sight.
Rousing Ember, they bounded over the cityscape and came to the sculpture park, where they zigzagged along the path, racing each other around the tangle of over sized sculptures. A few people walking the trails caught sight of them, and Chat Noir saw the flash of a camera. He grabbed Ladybug's hand, to find a more secluded place to enjoy the city lights. Chasing each other across the buildings, they finally called a truce once they reached the top of the Pacific Science Center Arches. Their spider web of narrow beams at the top provided the perfect escape.
They sat back to back, leaning against each other. Chat Noir's ears perked up, when he heard Ladybug quietly humming the song that he had been playing earlier that night. He couldn't help the unrestrained flutter in his chest. He didn't say anything. He wondered if she'd still be humming it if she had know the words. He still held on to the hope that someday she would.