It couldn't always be like that, of course. Being an over-thinker must be a lot like being an alcoholic. Every day is a new fight.

I kept her at the waltz for the next couple of weeks, much to her annoyance.

"Kitty, I know these steps so well that I'm literally falling asleep," she grumbled, as we twirled sedately around our sheltered rooftop.

"There's a saying in dance, Ladybug," I told her. "'Don't practise until you can get it right. Practise until you can't get it wrong.'"

She groaned. "Talk to me, then. Keep me from falling asleep. What's your Kwami's name?"

"Plagg," I said. "Yours?"

"Tikki." I could see the enthusiasm kindling in her cheeks--her eyes widening and softening as if she'd just seen an adorable kitten. "She's amazing. She's the only one I can talk to about everything--you know, superhero life and civilian life. She always understands, and she's always positive, and she always sets me straight whenever I'm going wrong."

I didn't know what to say to this. I had never heard her gushing about someone so unreservedly.

"What's Plagg like?" she said, her voice still honeyed with enthusiasm.

"He likes camembert," I said.

"No, not what does he like--what is he like?"

I shrugged. "That's the full extent of his personality. He likes camembert."

This got a smile out of her, so I elaborated. "The ripest, stinkiest kind of camembert. Which I have to carry around with me all day long to revive him after a transformation. Which means I have to go everywhere smelling of camembert."

"Well, I like the smell of camembert," she insisted.

"Yet another reason why we were made for each other, milady."

She gave me a dubious smile. "It's the first I've seen."

I think Master Fu put a lot of thought into it when he chose Plagg to be my Kwami. Though it wasn't necessarily a kind thought.

He once told me that when he first saw Marinette--when she saved his life on that crossing--she said she was no stranger to disaster. That must have rung alarm-bells in the head of someone who was measuring her up to be Cat Noir. Or maybe he always intended her for Ladybug. Maybe the woman is always creation and the man is always destruction. That would certainly fit. And she does look good in the costume--not that she isn't also gorgeous as Lady Noir.

Anyway, I think when he saw me, he must have thought I was all sunshine, buttercups and rainbows. Maybe he'd seen one of my ad campaigns. So he paired me up with Plagg, because Plagg needs a constant source of positivity to temper his destructive nature.

It works, most of the time. I think the best of people, he thinks the worst, and together we end up getting somewhere near the truth. If either of us were more interested in what was going on around us, we could be detectives. A good cop and a bad cop. We'd stop being Cat Noir and just be Noir. We were like that once, after The End. But that's another story. For the purposes of this story, all you need to know is that our relationship works well, but it comes at the price of constant exasperation on both sides.

I'll give you a case in point. It's been preying on my mind recently.

We had a couple more weeks of dancing lessons, we saved the world in some pretty spectacular ways, and then Heroes' Day happened.

I suppose I was grinning a lot in the car on my way from Marinette's picnic to the charity dinner--maybe I was even staring into space in a happy, concussed kind of way--because Plagg crawled out of my pocket and nudged me with his nose.

"So... are we going to talk about it?"

I blinked. "What?" I saw him bury his face in his hands, and added, "You mean the fact that Marinette kissed me? What is there to talk about?"

"I don't know," he said tentatively. "Anything coming into your head?"

I sighed. "Plagg, she's a very dear friend--she's an angel--but she's not my Ladybug."

"Someone is."

"What?"

He nodded at the rain-lashed windows, which gave a half-melted look to the city outside.

"Someone in Paris right now is your Ladybug," he said patiently. "And by ignoring every woman you feel drawn to, you're reducing your chances of finding her."

I rested my chin in my upturned palm. "So you want me to ask out every girl in Paris?"

"Well, you're a handsome teen model. You've got a better chance than most."

"Plagg!" I whispered, shocked. "That's reprehensible."

"That's a big word," he replied, still staring out of the window. Sometimes I really can't place him. I can't decide whether he's a whiny, joyful child or an evil genius. I guess maybe the personification of destruction would be a bit of both.

"Where do you think she is now?" he said. "Out in the rain without an umbrella? Do you think she lives in a mansion, or a one-bedroom apartment? Do you think she has a family? Do you think people are kind to her?"

"Stop it," I said--as loud as I dared, with my bodyguard sitting up front, drumming his fingers on the steering-wheel. We were sitting in traffic on the Champs Elysees, and there was only the damp squeak of the windscreen-wipers to drown out my voice. "If I start worrying about things like that, I'll never stop. Whatever her situation is, no-one is better equipped to deal with it. She's Ladybug."

Plagg fell silent. I started to wish I had brought more cheese to distract him with.

"I've given up trying to figure out who she is, Plagg," I said, in a softer voice. "But I see her and help her almost every day, and one day, maybe, if I'm really patient and really lucky, she'll feel the same way about me as I do about her."

Plagg half-closed his eyes. I couldn't tell whether he was scowling or pondering.

"As plans go..." he muttered.

"What?"

"Well, it's admirable in its directness--you're always admirable in your directness. It's just not the smartest plan I've ever heard."

I narrowed my eyes, and said coolly, "Well, you're the one who knows who she is. You could just tell me."

"No, I couldn't."

"Because you promised her kwami?"

Plagg curled up sulkily on the seat beside me. "It's not just that. You know what I've come to realize--no, that's not right--you know what's been gradually beaten into my head over thousands of years of being the spirit of destruction? Creation and destruction have to stay balanced. Like opposite ends of a scale. That means never coming together."

"Oh come on," I said, because I hadn't liked the sound of 'never coming together'. "We're people, not abstract principles!"

"It's worse at the start," he went on, ignoring me. "The tipping-point--where you each start to figure out who the other is, and how you feel about them. That's when bad things happen." He waved his tail once or twice, in a fitful, unsettled kind of way. "The problem is, I'm too involved now. I don't want you to succeed as Cat Noir and Ladybug--I want you to succeed as Adrien and--"

He broke off and glanced up at me.

"Wow," I said. I couldn't quite keep the longing out of my voice. "You even know her name."

He put his chin back down on his paws. "So what? I wish I didn't. Can't do either of us any good."

"Has it ever happened before? That Cat Noir and Ladybug fell in love?"

"It happens pretty regularly," said Plagg, with a hint of bitterness. "They start to care about each other more than they care about the mission, and then it's 'Bye-bye, Plagg', 'Bye-bye, Tikki.'"

"We'd never do that," I said.

"Oh yeah? What would you do if you had to choose between Ladybug's life and Hawkmoth's defeat?"

My smile didn't falter for a second. "I'd choose Ladybug's life, and then we'd come back and defeat him later."

"All right. What would you do if you had to choose between her life and surrendering your Miraculous?"

"Ladybug would never let that happen."

Plagg rolled his eyes. I shouldn't have been able to tell that he was rolling his eyes, because his head was still leaning gloomily on his paws, but I could read him pretty well by now. Especially his exasperation. "You're the worst," he muttered.

He says this whenever he thinks I'm being naïve or out of touch--whenever, as he puts it, 'you're being impossibly nice and making everyone else feel like a jerk for having normal feelings'.

He said it when Chloe's mother was praising Marinette to the skies, offering to take her to New York and make her a world-famous designer, and I turned happily to Chloe and said, "Isn't this great for Marinette?" He said it when I refused to celebrate Chloe's imminent departure with the rest of the school, and made Marinette feel like a monster for experiencing a pang of happiness that her childhood persecutor would finally be leaving her alone.

I see his point now, but back then--all those times, including this one--I put it down to the fact that he was feeling cranky because we'd run out of cheese.

"What happened before?" I said. "All the other times that Cat Noir and Ladybug fell in love? Did the world end?"

"From my perspective," he said, his voice muffled because he refused to look up at me.

I nudged him with the tip of my finger. "I'll never give you up. You found me at the loneliest time of my life and got me out in the fresh air, socializing."

I don't have the disposition for moping, but it was important, the moment Plagg found me. Everything started to happen after that. I met Ladybug, I got to go to school, I got close to Nino and Alya and Marinette. I don't think I would have done any of it without Plagg's rebellious spirit. He was like a breath of fresh air--which is pretty ironic, given the odour of stale camembert he normally radiates.

Plagg chuckled darkly. "Socializing? With super-villains and akuma-victims and--"

"And her," I said. I couldn't stop myself. We were nearing our destination now. Soon someone would open the car-door for me, hold an umbrella over my head, tell me how honoured they were by my visit. There would be flash-bulbs and canapes and speeches. Maybe my father would do some kind of remote broadcast from his office, praising the charity and the wonderful work it was doing with--what was it? War veterans? Political prisoners? I had literally no idea. I just knew that I would spend the whole evening fantasizing about some kind of emergency that would make it necessary to transform into Cat Noir again. And if I had something to look forward to--some kind of hint, some kind of hope, something more than the strangely persistent tingle of Marinette's kiss on my cheek--I wouldn't be swallowed up by it all.

"You could tell me who she is," I said, talking fast now, as the car pulled up. "The world wouldn't end. Just give me a hint."

Plagg looked up at me with one of his sunny, ingratiating smiles. "You stopped asking her because you love her. And I know you love me..."

I leaned my head against the window-pane. I could feel all that apathy teeming on the other side of the glass, as persistent as the paparazzi, waiting to swallow me up. Marinette's kiss was evaporating. The last proper emotion I felt before the car door was wrenched open was exasperation.

"You're the worst," I said.