Here is why you shouldn't get upset by all the love triangles and unrequited longings--at least, on my account. I live here. This is where my soul is. In a leap or a lunge or a split-second decision--in the way my breath catches in my throat when I can see a plan emerging from nothing--in the way we anticipate each other, fit into each other, build solutions at high speed.

Honestly, I can start out touchy and sulky and nursing a handful of grudges, but after five minutes on the rooftops, living off my wits, I'm Cat Noir again. The sunshine child. My sense of optimism re-inflates and I'm unsinkable.

This is what keeps our impossible situation going--the fragile equilibrium of loving each other and not knowing that we love each other. I confess my feelings, and she rejects me, and I get upset and try to give up on her, and then I spend five minutes fighting by her side and realize that I can't give up any more than I can stop confessing my feelings. And then it starts all over again. I have a reset button, as Cat Noir, that always allows me to bounce back.

I think a similar cycle was happening on her side--similar but opposite. She couldn't start confessing her feelings. Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if she'd told me--told Adrien, that is. Would an outright confession have made it through my determined ignorance? Or would I have found elaborate ways to misunderstand her? Would I have rejected her in such a kind, encouraging way that it wouldn't have solved anything for either of us?

That's why I honestly think we like the irresolution, the suspense. She tried to keep me at arms' length as much as I did her. For a long time, she wanted to idealize me, not to know me. That's why she loved Adrien and not Cat Noir. And I--as you are shortly to discover--wanted to love a fearless badass who I never had to worry about. You have no idea how badly that backfired on me.

So if it seems like we're in pain--and I get it, we are--just remember that we live in the balance. We're not just pining fourteen-year-olds, any more than we're just superheroes. We're creation and destruction in balance. If one of us shifts our position, shuffles up too close to the other, it's all over. The whole edifice of civilization comes crumbling down. Ever seen five thousand denizens of Paris ranged along the Pont Neuf, ready to throw themselves into the Seine? You're about to, if you keep reading.

***

It comes back to me at least twice a week, the nightmare I walked through in the centre of Paris. The End. I've been happy since then--almost every moment that I'm not thinking about The End--but it never leaves me. It's like a nasty scar. I'll never forget the feeling of helplessness, the feeling of all the air being squeezed out of my lungs. The pressure of sorrow behind my eyeballs.

It wasn't a conventional but a personal nightmare. That was the worst thing about it, the idea that it had been tailored just for me--by accident, to begin with, but as soon as Hawkmoth caught on, he played up to it. He saw the bits that hurt me, and expanded on them. She did too, in the end.

That's why I'm concentrating on all this dancing--on all the happy times. They're an important set-up. I wouldn't have got through the nightmare if it hadn't been for those rooftop dancing-lessons. Neither of us would.

I don't like to think much about how it started, though I didn't technically do anything wrong.

Here's the thing. It's so unusual for me to dislike people that, when it does happen, I kind of refuse to believe it. I spend more time with them. I screen out whatever it is they're doing to make me dislike them. I've been doing that with Chloe for years.

But this was worse, because there was more panic behind it. My instincts were telling me that I didn't like Luka, but I beat them down. Plagg told me that I didn't like Luka, but I was used to ignoring him, for the sake of my sanity, by then.

So I started hanging out with Luka. I noticed all the amazing things about his character--there are a lot, but I'm not going to list them here. I noticed the way he looked at Marinette. That felt like the beginning of an epiphany, so I concentrated on it, even though I didn't, in any sense, actually think about it.

I knew that what bothered me about him had something to do with Marinette, so I assumed, in my innocent way, that they were both lonely, and they'd be much happier if they got together. Of course this weird feeling of mine had to be concern. What else could it be?

And so I walked with Marinette, and told her how convinced I was that she and Luka would hit it off. I had seen them hitting it off already, and the only reason it filled me with agitation was because it was incomplete.

"You'd be so good together," I said. "You're both smart and creative. And he's so cool."

"He's not as cool as you," she muttered. She actually said that. I mean, she said it to the ground, because she couldn't bring herself to look at me--and, once she'd said it, she shoved me in a panicky way, and added, "You know, and lots of people. Lots of people are cool--he's not the only one who's cool--I don't even know what cool means anymore."

I laughed, because it was a very Marinette thing to say, and went back to digging my own grave.

"And it would be perfect, because Luka's like my brother now, and I've always thought of you like a sister."

Marinette stopped in her tracks, but she was too polite to stop smiling.

"You have?"

I think--I'm not positive, because I never look back on this moment if I can help it--but I think I gathered up both her hands in mine and said:

"Of course. With you and Luka, it's like I finally have a family. I never want anything to get in the way of that. And you'll be best friends with Kagami too, I just know it."

"Because she feels like your sister?" said Marinette hopefully.

"No," I said. "God, no, that would be weird. I couldn't date someone who felt like my sister."

Her voice was very faint now, her smile frozen. "Yeah. Yeah, that would be weird."

She was blushing miserably. She wanted to go, but she didn't know how to get out of this conversation without hurting my feelings. She shifted from foot to foot, and then said, in a voice that wobbled,

"I have to--would you just--I'll see you later, OK?"

To be honest with you, I have said worse things to her. I have been more oblivious than that. Maybe it was just the last straw. Or maybe she didn't have time to recover--Tikki didn't have time to pour all that soothing positivity into her ears--because the akuma-victim struck five minutes after.

In my defence, if I was lying to her, I didn't know it. But there was something about it that got through my obliviousness. I didn't understand what I'd done wrong, but I understood that Marinette was upset. I had the tiniest impulse to go after her, flaring up in the dark like a little, beleaguered candle-flame. But then the akuma-victim struck.

He called himself Aftershock. A seismologist kicking his heels three hundred miles from the nearest tectonic rift. For seismologists, at least, this city is uncomfortably stable.

He made gigantic cracks and furrows run down the city streets, as if somebody was tunnelling underneath them. He shook the buildings until roof-tiles and aerials were dropping like hailstones from the sky. And when he waved his hands, you could see mad, zig-zagging squiggles in the air, like the read-out from a seismograph.

I couldn't tell you what he looked like, except that his hair stood up on end like little black spines. When I look back on him--or when he turns up in my nightmares--I have a confused impression of some kind of devilish porcupine.

I should have realized sooner that something was up with Ladybug. Her eyes were red and her voice was scratchy, but I put it down to the dust from the collapsing buildings. Besides, there was too much damage control, too many civilians about to be squashed. I had to use the Cataclysm early on. A giant advertising billboard came loose from its moorings and was about to topple onto the street, flattening everyone within a hundred yards. I wasn't strong enough to catch it, and there was no time to dodge, but I knew that, if I jumped up, claws-first, and touched it with the Cataclysm, it would disintegrate before it had a chance to squash anybody.

The billboard slammed into my hand--I felt a spasm of white-hot pain shoot down my arm--and then I fell with it, watching as the Cataclysm spread and the board turned into a cloud of black dust which showered the sidewalk--and me, as I slammed into it.

I wanted to lie there for a lot longer, but Ladybug pulled me up, flung her yo-yo, and hoisted us into the air.

Aftershock followed us, and we'd gone a few blocks before I realized that she was leading him into the warehouse district. All the buildings there were deserted, and frequently falling down anyway. She was trying to reduce the damage and the potential casualties.

God, she was clever! She knew the importance of choosing her own battleground. But she was still frowning in concentration, as if she was trying to keep something at bay.

"Are you OK, milady?" I said, cottoning on at last.

She shook her head sharply and turned to face Aftershock. He sent one of those ploughed-up furrows down the street to try and take the ground out from under us, but Ladybug leapt towards him, rather than away.

I guess the idea was to try and share the ground he was standing on, because it was the only place you could rely on to be stable, but it was still a masochistic gesture that should have rung alarm-bells in my head.

I followed her, vaulting onto Aftershock's shoulders and searching through his clothes for any likely-looking objects that might contain the akuma. He threw me off once or twice, but I'm nothing if not persistent. Ask Ladybug.

Still, I could feel my five minutes ticking away. There was only one pad left on my ring, and pretty soon it would start flashing. So when Ladybug tore a piece of paper from his pocket and shredded it--when I saw the black wings of the akuma start to emerge from the shreds--I shouted, "Good job, gotta go!" and used my stick to vault the hell out of there. I thought we'd won. It was maybe a bit easier than usual--she hadn't even used her lucky charm--but I wasn't going to argue with a quick result, especially when I needed one so badly.

It was only later, when I watched the news from my opulent prison-cell of a bedroom, when I looked out of the window and saw the jagged outline of half-collapsed buildings against the setting sun, that I realized something must have gone wrong. There had been no miraculous red rush, restoring everything to normal. Paris was still cracked and gaping open. Which meant that something had happened to Ladybug.

I called her, but there was no answer. Plagg had no advice to offer. He was settling in for the night with his camembert, and was obviously torn between laziness and gloomy pessimism, because he said, "If she's dead, there's nothing we can do about it now."

It didn't help my mental state.

Something was trying to get through to me--some memory of the way she'd looked before I left. It was squeezing all the air out of my lungs and making my fingers curl into fists.

I transformed--Plagg wasn't happy about that--and went back to the place where I'd last seen her. I searched though a mile and a half of crumbling warehouses, hyperventilating the whole time, before I found him.

He'd been crouching in the dark above a door-frame, ready to leap down on me. He knocked me into the rubble and pinned me under his feet, wrenching my stick out of my hand. And even while I struggled against the weight on my back and tried to keep myself from passing out, I thought how strange it was that he wasn't talking, wasn't bargaining, wasn't even trying to prise my ring off my finger. It dimly occurred to me that he had some bigger plan--or rather, Hawkmoth did--and Ladybug wasn't here to help me figure it out.

He made the ground shake. I could feel the shock-waves passing from his feet through my body and into the rubble of the warehouse floor. A crack opened beneath me, and I dropped through into a cellar, landing on jagged chunks of stone.

I rolled over, looked up at the fissure I'd fallen through, but he was healing it up somehow, coaxing its edges together, sealing me inside. I doubt he even got the chance to hear me yell at him. A few pebbles rained down as the stone settled, and then I was alone with the echoes of my shout.

No, not alone. There was breathing--slow and steady, if a bit ragged--coming from the room behind me.

I turned, dreading what I would see. I wasn't afraid of monsters. That breathing was too human, too soft, too familiar, for an akuma-victim or one of its minions.

Sometimes I still wake up in the night and hear that breathing--I'm flooded with panic and horror and tenderness all at once--and I have to exert every fibre of my being to keep myself from shaking her awake to make sure she's all right.