Inspired by Hawkmoth's closing line in Guitar Villain. Oneshot/Complete

Despite what popular media might lead the public to believe about supervillains leading exciting lives, the life of Paris' main supervillain was anything but. People upset enough to possess and upset for reasons that would make good akumas were hard to come by, and sometimes they would get over whatever had upset them before Hawkmoth could get to them. Sometimes he could spend an entire day staring at his skylight only getting minor blimps of sadness and anger on his radar, completely inconsequential and often eye-rollingly pitiful in nature.

If it weren't for the fact that his goal was right there, just barely out of reach, he would have given up by now. Listening to people's pathetic problems day in and day out grated on his nerves.

When it became apparent that the battle to get Ladybug and Chat Noir's Miraculous was maybe going to take more time than he had initially though, Hawkmoth had to think about what he could bring up into his lair to make the time pass. It started with small things, like a Nintendo DS and a laptop. The problem there was that there were no outlets in his villain lair (supervillains didn't need electricity, apparently) and his attempts to get Internet for the building resulted in a few too many probing questions, which probably had a lot to do with the fact that he may or may not have been squatting illegally in an abandoned building.

After a series of particularly embarrassing defeats, a battery-powered wine cooler joined him in the lair. He had to get rid of it two weeks later when Nooroo, in a rare bout of rebellion, got completely drunk right before he transformed.

(He wanted to wipe the memory of that akuma from the collective memory of Paris and from the Internet. He had gone home that day, unable to remember what had happened while he was transformed, and found the Internet positively teeming with gifs of the akuma of the day, shouting nonsense at the sky and flooding the streets with various alcoholic beverages. Lady bug and Chat Noir had seemed more concerned for the transformed civilian than they were about the possibility of him getting their Miraculous.)

With the wine cooler gone (destroyed in a fit of rage and tossed into a dumpster, along with all the bottles he had stocked in it and the set of fine glassware he had bought to go along with it), Hawkmoth had to get creative. He needed some way to express himself, that was what his therapist had said. Clearly the easy (and vaguely unhealthy) way of getting his emotions out was gone (he was still mourning the loss of several expensive aged wines that he had smashed on the sidewalk in the aftermath of The Drunken Akuma), so he had to think of something else.

Ways to express himself, ways to express himself...

It came to him in a flash while he was sulking in his lair. Music! It was really a fantastic idea. He had played the piano when he was younger and had even composed some pretty decent pieces, if he could say so himself (and he did). If he could wrestle a piano up here, maybe he could compose a few songs, maybe even make a little money on the side from original pieces he would compose while waiting for possible akuma victims to show up.

And of course, he couldn't just bring a simple keyboard or an upright piano. They just simply would not go with the villain's lair atmosphere he was trying to produce. He had learned his lesson with the wine cooler and Internet fiascos: if it did not go with the atmosphere of the room, it would probably cause trouble for him in the long run. Besides, a piece as grand as The Requiem of Ladybug and Chat Noir's Defeat simply could not be composed on a lesser piano.

So naturally, he had buy a grand piano and smuggle it into the abandoned building and all the way up to the attic.

It took a lot of time, sweat, blood, and tears (manly, villainous tears), but Hawkmoth finally got it up several stories and into place- only to find that it had gone utterly out of tune in the process of him wrestling it up the stairs while in costume.

"I could have told you that would happen," Nooroo said unhelpfully when Hawkmoth sourly stomped around the room, glaring daggers at the piano and nursing a throbbing finger that had gotten pinched by the piano during the moving process.

Hawkmoth scowled at him. "I can fix it."

"Uh-huh."

"I took music lessons for years, I can deal with an out-of-tune piano just fine." Huffing, Hawkmoth sat down, pulled out the tuning lever that he had bought with the piano, and started adjusting the piano's strings. "It's not that hard if you have a trained ear. I've done this before." He could. He was positive. It really couldn't be that hard.

For the next two hours, Hawkmoth fiddled, poked, plucked at strings and poked at keys, and swore.

"My G-string broke," he moaned as something gave way with a faint twang. There was a little more clatter as he tried to extract the broken string from the piano. There was another twang as the string came loose and Hawkmoth swore again. "My G-string hit me in the face!"

Nooroo snickered.

Hawkmoth pulled his head out of the piano and glared at his kwami. A red welt was starting to rise on his cheek from where the broken string had hit it. "You do it then!"

Nooroo shook his head stubbornly. "I'm not a musician! I don't know how to do that."

Hawkmoth scowled. "That was not a request, it was an order. I am your master. Tune the piano."

That day, Hawkmoth learned that his kwami was quite possibly completely tone-deaf. The piano sounded even worse than before. Ordering his kwami to do something clearly did not guarantee it being done well.

Of course, desperate times called for desperate measures. Hawkmoth scanned the streets of Paris for weeks trying to find a vulnerable piano teacher that he could turn into an akuma. He searched the newspaper and the Internet for dates and times of concerts with pianists playing, hoping that he would be able to find someone upset that he could get to tune his piano for him.

Three weeks and six days after his attempt to tune the piano himself failed, Hawkmoth found his victim. The man was a piano teacher who had been blamed for-

For-

Uh.

He had been blamed for something, perhaps wrongly and perhaps not. Hawkmoth wasn't quite certain about the details, thanks to his jubilation of finding a suitable candidate for piano-tuning. He gave the man the most bland outfit he could and ordered him to inconspicuously make his way into the building that Hawkmoth himself resided in. It didn't take long for The Pianist to arrive, completely unnoticed by any civilians. Granted, that might have been more due to the late hour and poor weather outside more than the akuma's stealth skills, but quite frankly, Hawkmoth didn't care. At this point, he just wanted the darned piano tuned so he could use it.

"Come in, come in," Hawkmoth said, summoning his very best manners and the sly sort of charm he used when persuading people to accept the akuma he had sent to them. It wouldn't do to be rude to the person who was helping him. "Here's the piano, just like I said. It's a fantastic setup, I just had some trouble with the tuning and need a fine instructor such as yourself to bring it up to its intended quality-"

The Pianist was already chest-deep in the piano, tightening and loosening strings as he worked his way along the piano. Hawkmoth watched, all the while wishing that he had a glass of wine or something to sip while the Pianist worked. It was slightly awkward to simply stand there and stare as the akuma worked. A glass of rich red wine and a convenient wall to lounge against would have allowed him to give off more of an air of a bored nobleman instead of the current awkward tension he was currently projecting.

(He didn't know how to deal with others in person while he was transformed. It was new territory and was hopefully something he would never have to do again.)

An eternity of silence devoid of awkward small talk dragged on before the Pianist was finished. Hawkmoth was all too happy to usher the akumatized civilian out of his lair with instructions to go to the Eiffel Tower and create enough chaos to get Ladybug and Chat Noir to come so that he could take their Miraculous.

Hey, the Pianist was the most productive akuma he had ever had. There was no harm in hoping, right?

Hawkmoth sat down at his piano once the Pianist had left and started to play. The first song to come to mind was Chopin's Chopsticks, followed by a quick rendition of Stinky Wolf (drat that Horrificator for getting the stupid song stuck in his head), and then a much more refined lullaby.

Hawkmoth was halfway through the part of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata that he could actually remember when he realized that the Pianist wasn't doing terribly well against Ladybug and Chat Noir. His superpowers of tuning instruments really weren't much use against the superheroes.

In retrospect, Hawkmoth perhaps should have realized that. It really was a quite obvious flaw in the Pianist's design.

He shrugged and went back to his song. The Pianist had served his purpose. While it was a pain that he couldn't also get the Miraculous from Ladybug and Chat Noir, it was nothing to sweat over. Hawkmoth could make another akuma with powers better suited to the task tomorrow, and in the meantime he could work on his song.

He was halfway through Symphony No. 5 in B-minor when he felt the ripple that meant that the Pianist's akuma had been freed. He was only a little further along when a horde of sparkly ladybugs tore through the window, spun around the piano Hawkmoth was sitting at, and left.

Stunned, Hawkmoth let his hands fall on the piano keys. The dissonant sound of out-of-tune notes met his ears.

Somehow he had forgotten that that would happen.

It took several more days, but Hawkmoth finally realized how he could get around Ladybug's Cleaning Light. He couldn't use an akuma to do it, sure, but he could use an akuma to get a piano-tuner to him.

And so he did.

It had been a risky gamble, he knew that. No one could know where his lair was (the akumas didn't count; after all, they could never remember anything that happened during their akumatization) and if anyone saw the kidnapping happen, they would likely report it straight to Ladybug and Chat Noir. Still, even after twenty-seven computer tutorials, Hawkmoth hadn't been closer to getting the piano tuned properly and he really wanted his song ready when he defeated Ladybug and Chat Noir at last.

And, like he said before, desperate times called for desperate measures. He would just have to hope that nothing went horribly wrong for him this time. And, against all odds and with a few extremely close calls, it worked. Finally, seven days, one extremely stressful kidnapping event and one finally in-tune piano later, Hawkmoth started in on composing his victory song. He was calling it The Requiem of Ladybug and Chat Noir's Defeat. More or less short, sweet, and very to the point. It was going to be the masterpiece of the decade, maybe even the century. Hawkmoth spent ages working on it, plunking out measures between focused, hard-hitting attacks. It was a lot of work and involved accidentally hitting a few funky sounding chords, but it was so worth it.

Hawkmoth played through the piece again, making certain that he had transcribed his masterpiece correctly. He had, of course (he had had far too much time on his hands to not get it perfectly transcribed), and it was amazing.

"Ha!" Hawkmoth chortled as he finished the song with a flourish. "This is perfect! It has the feeling, the emotion, the grandeur! I'll have to copyright it and blast it from every speaker in the city when I beat Ladybug and Chat Noir at last! BWA HA HA HA HA!"

Nooroo peered out from where he had been enjoying a basket of ripe grapes. "Uh, Master?"

Hawkmoth scowled over the top of his grand piano. He had to admit, it made him look quite impressive. Even with all of the trouble it had caused, grand piano had definitely been the right way to go. "What?"

"I think you may have been unconsciously been incorporating some other songs into your, uh, Requiem of Defeat."

Hawkmoth scowled. What a ridiculous accusation! "I have not. It is all 100% original content!"

Nooroo winced and buried himself in his grapes. His voice came out muffled. "Actually, measures 12 through 32 are from The Phantom of the Opera, measures 42 through 54 are only a little different from a song from Star Wars, you reference Jagged Stone's Miraculous in measures 60 through 69-"

Hawkmoth ripped his sheet music off the piano and stared at it. He grabbed his pen off the top of the piano. "Start that from the top again. Which measures…?"

He couldn't believe this. He had written from his heart, from his soul, only to find that some ridiculous pop culture music had wormed its way in. As they went through the song again, he found more and more references to completely random songs that he had played or heard over the years. Beyond the songs Nooroo had mentioned before, Mission Impossible was heavily referenced. Several of the soundtracks from Hawkmoth's favorite Bourne movies were included.

As it turned out, only the transitional measures were really Hawkmoth's own.

"It was perfect," Hawkmoth snarled as he swept the papers off the piano and prepared to crumple them up and then perhaps stomp on them a bit. Before he did, a thought struck him. Only a few weeks before, when he had been searching for piano-tuning instruction videos, he had seen several other videos of people playing covers of popular and definitely copyrighted songs. Some even had advertised their songs being sold on CDs and on iTunes.

There was something protecting them, he was certain of it. Straightening back up, Hawkmoth set his sheet music back on the stand and let a slow grin slide onto his face. He just had to remember what it was that protected those other musicians- something about a parody law, maybe, or remixes being as good as original pieces.

He could save his song after all. His Requiem of Defeat wasn't going to be defeated by something as inconsequential as copyrights.

"Nooroo," Hawkmoth said, turning from the piano and fixing his apprehensive kwami with a slightly disturbing grin. "Finish eating, and then we're going to suit up. I need to find me a lawyer."