#...well obviously i'm recreating it next month. duh

[whitespringbunker]

one of the first ten screenshots in the folder. Cool

[raeuberprinzessin]

Making Amends - History - Prompt 14, Chapter 14

@felixmonth

This is the last chapter I have already finished. I'm still writing, don't worry, but from now on, it will take longer, because I will have to write them before I can post them (obviously) XD

Summary: For Felix Month 2021 - beware, the chapters are not in chronological order^^

When Felix loses a bet with his cousin, he has to make amends with Adrien’s friends. Well, at least this provides a good excuse to spent a lot of time with Adrien’s “very good friend”, a certain designer, who may or may not be described as tolerable … or cute. This may not be so bad. Yeah, not bad at all.

AO3 | Masterlist

Prompts: First | Previous | Next

Chapters: First | Previous | Next

“I would never have thought of the library at the Louvre,” Alix admitted as they climbed the steps to the reading room. The concierge had recognised his companion immediately. It seems as if the skater was a regular visitor. Which made her statement just more confusing.

“The concierge seemed to recognise you,” he commented when she didn’t explain further. Alix just shrugged and waited for him at the top of the stairs. “Well, you have to have been here before, how could he have known who you are otherwise?” he huffed as he reached the top to stand next to her.

“I never said I haven’t been here before, duh!” The girl rolled her eyes. “My Dad and my brother both work here. And the library here is something like my secret weapon whenever I have to do a history presentation. Sure, Google is nice and stuff, but there is this adoration you get from your teacher if you have books and articles as sources and maybe a picture from a digital copy of an old manuscript if it fits. But I wouldn’t have thought we would find anything about something like fashion here.”

“Why not? There is a costume and textile collection, so there are also historians who obviously research them. And a museum as big as the Louvre has to have their own restoration workshop. The people there need to be able to look up what might be special about some textiles and fibers so they won’t accidentally destroy them further. And they might need to recreate costumes once in a while for certain exhibitions. They’d need reference material for this.” Felix stopped himself before he could continue. He was lecturing her and he was pretty sure she wouldn’t appreciate that, even though he volunteered to help her with the search for some reference pictures. “So … the reading room is up ahead?”

Alix sighed and shook her head. “I mean, yes, it is, but first we need to go in the other direction. The library might be my secret weapon, but every library has their own secret weapon as well.”

She led him the other way down the corridor into another big room. There were catalogue computers, computers to read the digital copies of historic scripts and reading devices for microfiche, as he knew thanks to his own extensive experience with libraries. In the middle of the room were some desks with reading lights. Felix assumed that this was where the historians might get to look at the original historic scripts if the digital copies weren’t enough, because on the left side of the room almost at the middle of the wall on some sort of platform or podium was an information desk with a young librarian able to oversee the room and help if needed. From there she would be in a better position to keep an eye on the invaluable treasures of the collection than her colleagues in the reading room who probably had to keep an eye on more people and had to leave to get books and magazines and whatnot from the stack-room.

Alix headed straight for the information desk, not even bothering trying to look for something on the catalogue computers first. The woman behind the desk had light brown wavy hair pulled back into a high ponytail. A pair of semi-rimless glasses sat low on the bridge of her nose. As they came closer he watched her narrow her eyes at something on one of the screens in front of her and push her glasses up her nose.

Felix felt his lips twitch. This wasn’t his first visit at a library and he didn’t need to know this woman to know this very typical behavior. It was something many librarians seemed to have and it meant: “Alright, I’m done playing around, now I’m talking business, pal!” He didn’t envy the poor soul who invoked this look.

They were still a few meters away from the desk when they crossed an invisible line or something like that, because the librarian abruptly looked up right at them. She seemed to recognise Alixe because only a short moment later her determined face was replaced by a beaming smile.

“Alix, that’s a nice surprise! How are you? I haven’t seen you in ages!” she greeted her with a hushed voice as they stopped in front of the desk. With a small gesture she let them know to sit down in the visitor chairs.

“Hi Solange, everything’s fine. What about you? Is Jalil still trying to convince you that the pyramids are ancient spaceships?” Alix asked which only ended up confusing Felix. Didn’t she tell him on the way here that her brother was a research assistant at the Louvre? How could this be the case if he believed such nonsense? The librarian, Solange Chevalier, her name tag revealed, tried to give them a smile, but she looked so helpless and frustrated, it turned out more like a grimace.

“Well, he gave up on the pyramids but now he’s trying to convince me that werewolves and dragons are real. I don’t know what happened to him. When we went to school together, he had a very rational mindset. He would never believe in a theory just because it sounded interesting. He always looked for proof for his theories. But when he started with this I … I might have been a bit harsh. Please don’t tell me he sent you to give me a message, because he’s still angry that I told him that I literally have a full library with scientific facts he should take a look at before this nonsense destroys every last brain cell he still has?”

“That’s not harsh, that actually sounds pretty tame,” Felix remarked before he could stop himself. He would have been a lot meaner if Alix’ brother had tried to bother him with that nonsense.

“Oh, this is Felix Graham de Vanily, we’re classmates. Felix, this is Solange Chevalier. She was in the same class as Jalil and came back to Paris recently to work here after she graduated … what was it again?”

“Library and information sciences” the librarian answered with an indulgent smile. Felix guessed people regularly asked that. Not because it was hard to remember, but because people didn’t bother to remember. It wasn’t as common as medicine or law and didn’t have some sort of romantically tragic connotation like any art degree. Most people wouldn’t have an idea what to visualise, so they didn’t understand it. And what they couldn’t understand, they would deem unimportant or boring. Maybe to most people it was boring, but Felix preferred pragmatic. He liked libraries, he enjoyed the vibe and all the resources they offered him at his fingertips and he knew that a good librarian was a godsend. They were like guides in a foreign country. Most of the librarians he met in his life were pragmatic and patient people and since he liked to think that he was quite the pragmatist himself, albeit not quite as patient, he felt connected to them.

Not as patient, because he once observed a librarian patiently help a not-so-old patron that this could have been excused, add an attachment to an email and send it. It took them almost twenty minutes because the patron couldn’t remember their password at first and then clicked on the wrong buttons all the time, constantly scolding themselves how stupid they were and this librarian, with the patience of an ancient and divine being, constantly tried to calm them down and assure them that they were not stupid, not everyone had to be good with technology and there were probably a ton of things they were great at and how difficult life would be if everyone was good at the same things.

He wasn’t surprised Jalil Kubdel would try to impress this woman. No one else would have the patience to put up with him. At least after everything he heard.

“Actually we’re here for research,” he tried to guide them back on topic. Interest sparked to life in the woman's eyes and she sat up a bit. “Sure, I can show you how to search in the online catalogue or I could write you a list down, if you like. Right now nobody needs my assistance, so it’s actually a good time. What do you need? Oh and you can sit down, this might take a while,” she told them and gestured to the chairs again. This time they both sat down.

“It would be awesome if you could help us. We need something on the history of fashion, especially something with pictures,” Alix explained. Mrs. Chevalier pulled up her eyebrows and gave her a deadpan look over her glasses and Felix pressed his lips together. He didn’t know if he would sigh or chuckle otherwise.

“Well, I think we might have one or two thousand titles that could be helpful, based on this alone,” she answered with barely veiled amusement. “How much time do you have?”

“So many?” Alix looked a bit pale. Felix thought she might exaggerate a bit, but not by much. On the other hand, he had a hard time estimating how many books they actually had on fashion. And that was without considering the magazines. Maybe she wasn’t actually that far off? “But it’s just fashion!”

The woman huffed a laugh and clicked something on her screen before she leaned to one side flipped a switch and the screen facing the chairs flared to life. “Remember, this is Paris and fashion is considered a form of art.” On the screen they could see an opened program in muted grey and blue colours and an almost ancient interface. It felt like some sort of relic from the early days of modern computers, when a high end computer had only a fraction of the processing power of his smartphone now. “Are you looking for a special period?”

When Alix looked at him he sighed and pulled his smartphone out to look at the messages Marinette had sent them. At 3 am last night. She was lucky it was Saturday and he hadn’t seen her yet since he accompanied Alix to the library and he didn’t want her to be able to blame him for waking her up in the morning. But she would hear his opinion about her being awake at such an ungodly hour and texting.

“Rococo dresses, Italian Renaissance, dresses again, 1920s suits and dresses,” he stopped and turned the display around and placed it on the desk, so Mrs. Chevalier could read the increasingly rambling messages herself. He would only confuse her if he read them out and she couldn’t reread them. Hell, he had to read them several times and he still wasn’t convinced he understood exactly what Marinette had been going on about. That’s why she shouldn’t text at 3 am. “The pictures are important, she needs reference pictures.”

Her eyebrows knitted together as she read the messages. After a while she gave a thoughtful hum and started to type away on her keyboard starting search after search. Sometimes she clicked at a title and seemed to look for something, but he wasn’t sure what she was looking for. Sometimes she copied a title and added it to a growing list. Finally she printed that list.

“Here, I tried to find titles with many illustrations,” she explained and gave them the piece of paper. “The easiest is probably the 1920s stuff. You should find what you need in one of the fashion magazines of that time. Alix, you know what to do, I wish you luck and hope you’ll find what your friend needs.”

They bid the librarian goodbye and went to the reading room where they gave one of the librarians there their list to get the books and magazines from the stack-room while they sat down at a desk. Alix placed a small, boldly coloured box she had pulled out of her bag when they had put them away in the middle between them. When she noticed Felix’ questioning glance she rolled her eyes and opened the box. Inside sat an assortment of laminated cards, most of them just as bright and boldly coloured as the box. “Are these … bookmarks?” he asked surprised as he took one card out and eyed it critically. It looked like a piece of graffiti. Or street art, as Alix liked to call it.

“Yeah, Marinette gave me the idea,” the skater answered. “There is only so much wall in the art room at school and I have to paint over my old works regularly. So, she suggested I could take photos of my pieces and create concept art first, like she creates her designs on paper and only sews the designs that she likes. So, I only spray the concepts that work out. And since I have all these photos and concepts, I turned them into bookmarks, so when I’m here I can mark the parts I need and then scan or copy them after that. I’m faster that way.”

Curiously Felix took a few more of the bookmarks and looked at them. It wasn’t exactly his favourite art. Actually, he detested most of the graffiti he saw in London and Paris and other cities. That was, because they usually reminded him more of vandalism than art, although he agreed with all the graffiti insulting Hawk Moth. But these weren’t that bad. They actually looked like art. There was one that stood out to him. It was mostly muted colours, greys and dull blues and greens and in between all of that a dash of bright, defiant red.

Alix noticed how long he was looking at the card. “I did that after Ladybug declared war on Hawk Moth, as he tried to sway the public's opinion against them. It didn’t work out for me. One, it’s not my usual style, two, it ignores Chat Noir’s importance.”

Felix scoffed. “Ladybug could do way better than that cat,” he muttered. He remembered pretty clearly the condescending tone of the so-called hero. He didn’t know him at all! Fine, it hadn’t been one of his best days … Sure, Marinette had punched him, but he knew that he kind of deserved that. But he did not deserve Chat Noir’s holier-than-thou attitude.

Before Alix had a chance to reply they were interrupted by the librarian coming back with a cart with the books and magazines they had on their list. They put everything on the desk and started to look for reference pictures and anything Marinette might need.

A few hours later they were finally done. Indeed, the original fashion magazines had been very helpful, but there were also several exhibition catalogues with very good illustrations and photos of the exhibits and special details.

They switched to one of the computers with a scanner, started to scan what they needed and saved the scans in the cloud their school offered. After they were done, he sent a short message to Marinette, reminding her that she shouldn’t stay up the whole night, no matter how important it was to finish the design.

Alix had already started to place everything on a cart and now that he was done with the message, Felix logged them off the computer and started to help her as he noticed something hard in one of the magazines. When he opened it, something fell out but thanks to his improved reflexes - training with Ladybug really worked miracles, although his reflexes had been good from the start - he caught the laminated card. It was the bookmark with the muted colours he had noticed earlier.

“Keep it.” Felix looked up and saw the skater smirking at him. “You like it, don’t you? I have enough and as I said, it didn’t work out for me, but if you like it, it at least makes one of us happy.”

Felix didn’t know what to say, but finally he nodded. “Thank you,” he said awkwardly. “I appreciate it.”

Alix just smiled and shrugged. Maybe she didn’t know how to act in this situation, either? She pushed the cart to the counter and waited for the librarian to confirm that everything they got was there. When they were done, they returned to the concierge where they had put their bags in a locker.

Alix bid him goodbye when they left the building. She put on her skates and raced away. Felix stayed back for a moment to place the bookmark in the book he was reading. He always had a book in his bag. You never knew when you needed to distract yourself or when you had to kill some time.

He looked down at the colourful card. It didn’t work for her, Alix had told him. He could see that. But ... well, for him it worked just fine.

With a satisfied nod and a small smile he closed the book and put it back into his bag before he started his way to the next metro station.