Things don't seem as real when I'm Adrien-even though they are crushingly, tediously real when I can bring myself to feel them. But mostly, I don't care as much. It starts with the deadening voice of Nathalie as she comes in with a clipboard at seven to go through my schedule. Then I have breakfast alone at one end of a big conference table. Then I get on with the business of being quietly fabulous. I'm very confident, but you learn to suppress a lot of thoughts and questions when you're the centre of adoring attention all the time. You have to know how to shut your brain down when you have hordes of screaming fans hanging off your coat, weeping and protesting that they'll die if you don't go out with them.

I would have gone out with them, in the pre-Ladybug days. I would have done anything to get out of the house and stop thinking about my mother's disappearance. But unfortunately, none of those things were an option.

Anyway, I go through the motions. I blink serenely at the teachers. I have been instructed in the art of keeping my face expressionless to avoid wrinkles. You have to try pretty hard-or get pretty lucky-to startle a reaction out of me.

Marinette's good at that. The clumsy chaos she brings with her, the disastrous way she phrases things--they shock me out of my stupor. She's got a special way of saying my name. It starts out strong, and then kind of trails off, as if she's had the breath knocked out of her. If I had to write it down, it would look like: 'A-drien.'

Anyway, she said it in chemistry class the next day, when Chloe, Sabrina and I were leaning over a bunsen burner, trying to get sulphuric acid to bubble.

I looked up at her and she froze, as if she'd forgotten what it was she had been about to say. I saw her open and close her hands, aimlessly, and then whisper, "Could I borrow that-?"

She was looking at the beaker, but she seemed to have forgotten the word for it. I started to say, "The bea-?" but Chloe cut me off.

"No, don't help her, Adrien, I want to see if she can get this." She fixed Marinette with a look of wide-eyed innocence and said, "You can do it, Marinette. I believe in you. He's even given you the first syllable. The bea-bea-?"

I grabbed the beaker and pressed it hurriedly into Marinette's hands. "Take it, Marinette. No problem," I added, to spare her the necessity of having to think up a 'thank you'.

I watched her fleeting, grateful, pink-cheeked smile, watched her take the beaker back to her work-station with laboured steps, as if she was having to concentrate very hard on not falling over. I heard Chloe's grating laugh and Sabrina's titter. And I realized I was completely, one hundred per cent conscious. The way Marinette must be all the time.

There I was--slap bang in the middle of my life, without a single wall in place. I could have thought anything, picked up on anything. I didn't pick up on Marinette, though. I don't know if it's coming through, but I am still--even after all these years--fucking annoyed about that.

I shuddered at Chloe's cruelty, but that was the only epiphany I was going to get. And by the time I got to fencing class, the fog of apathy had closed over my head again. If I had any shreds of sensitivity left, I just used them to think about Ladybug.

"What if we really are teaching her just so she can go to her school-dance with some jerk?" said Plagg, when I opened my locker at the end of practise. He sleeps in there, curled up around a wedge of camembert, when I'm fencing, but he must have been lying awake worrying today, because he started up with his cynical questions before the other students had even left the locker-room.

"What if we are?" I said, watching the last stragglers heading through the door for lunch. "You said you wanted to spend more time with her."

"But isn't there a better way than this?"

I spread my hands. I was feeling touchy and excitable, as if somebody had just set fire to my gloves.

"I don't have anything else, Plagg. I don't have anything else to give her."

That's the strange, sad paradox of being Adrien Agreste. I have everything and nothing. I have money, but I don't get to decide how I spend it, I have adoring fans, but I don't get to exchange more than a few words with them before I'm whisked off in a car by my gorilla-shaped bodyguard, I have a handsome face that hides who I really am, even from myself, I have a brain so atrophied and underused that I never figured out Marinette had a crush on me when she trailed off in the middle of her sentences. And I have the big, aching hole left by my mother's disappearance, that sucks in every smile or laugh or interesting observation. Until I put the mask on. Until I'm Cat Noir and I'm up on those rooftops, when everything is leaps and quips and somersaults. But Cat Noir is giving her everything he's got already and, to be honest, it doesn't seem to please.

"Besides," I said, "we've got months until the end of term. Time enough to make her forget about the jerk--if there is a jerk."

"There is always a jerk," said Plagg gloomily.

***

I found the perfect rooftop--another TV studio, long-since disused, screened from the ground on all sides by aerials and satellite dishes. It wasn't as pretty as the garden of tranquillity, but it was private. Plus, I thought tranquillity would probably not survive long periods of contact with Ladybug.

She turned up only twenty minutes late, not wearing a coat. She had been too polite to tell that guy at the after-party, but we don't get cold in our costumes. It's something to do with the magic tingling in our skin.

Besides, it didn't rain. With Cat-Noir-esque optimism, I decided to interpret this as a lucky sign.

Despite what I'd said to Plagg, I didn't have a plan. I'd given up trying to figure out who she was, and I didn't know how you'd go about trapping a woman into falling in love with you. It didn't seem right, when I thought of it like that.

I guess my plan was to just drink her in until she was wrenched away. No, that was Plagg talking. Cat Noir always believed that something would turn up. And, because he believed it, it always did.

We started with the waltz. I played the music on my phone, pointed out the rhythm threading its way through the melody, and told her she had to follow where I led. She hated it.

"Bugaboo, you're thinking too much," I said, the seventh or eighth time she stumbled over my toes. "When you're dancing, you only need to be aware of two things: the rhythm and your partner."

"Can't I lead?" she protested. "It's not natural for me to just--"

"No," I said patiently, trying to pretend I wasn't finding her hilarious. "This is a good lesson for you, Ladybug. You don't get to be in control all the time--in life or in dancing. You don't need to know where we're going. You just need to trust."

I hesitated, wondering if I dared to push the point further. But there was nothing I wouldn't dare, up here.

"Let's try this," I said. "Shut your eyes."

"What? We're on top of a roof!"

"You trust me, don't you?"

She gave me a sullen frown. "I'm not saying I don't. It's just, like, four times in the last month, you've been zapped by the akuma victim and tried to kill me."

"On at least three of those occasions, I was trying to stop the akuma victim from zapping you," I said, twirling her around, not even bothering to hide my smile anymore. She moved stiffly, grudgingly, but she followed my lead. "And I'm taking your first answer."

I waltzed her round the rooftop one more time, watching her stumble jerkily through the steps, more or less in time with the rhythm. She kept looking at her feet.

"Stop thinking," I said. And then again, after a few more reels, "Stop thinking."

"I'm not!" she protested.

"Ladybug, I can tell when you're thinking. You get that determined pout. It's very adorable, but it's not helping here. Shut your eyes."

She gave me another glare, and then lowered her eyelids.

"Right," I said, feeling excited and bereft at the same time, now she was no longer looking at me. "Let me take you through a scenario--one, two, three--don't lose the rhythm. You are up on the rooftops, listening to the sound of carnage down below. You look down, and there's the akuma victim--a big gorilla, say. He's picking up parked cars and hurling them at passers-by. You see a woman with a buggy under the shadow of a huge limousine that's hurtling through the air towards her. You get ready to leap--but wait, Cat Noir's already caught it."

I twirled her around again, watching the furrows on her eyelids. They were gradually smoothing out as she relaxed.

"You swing down on the end of your yo-yo, while the gorilla beats its chest. He's scooped up an old lady and is squeezing her in his fist. You don't have much time, you have to get her out--but no, Cat Noir's already saved her."

Ladybug gave a spluttering giggle, but didn't open her eyes.

"Now the gorilla has pushed over some traffic lights, and a kindergarten teacher in a fluffy pink cardigan is about to get pinned underneath them. No big deal, Cat Noir's pushed her out of the way." I whirled her round again, changing direction, trying to make my story fit in with the rhythm. "You have to find the akuma--Cat Noir's got it. You think you need your lucky charm--nope, Cat Noir's already got a plan."

She was laughing hard now. Her hand had tightened around mine. It was suddenly very difficult to concentrate on my story and my steps.

"Surely you at least need to use your yo-yo to capture the akuma as it flies away? No, Cat Noir's done it for you. Everything is taken care of, my Ladybug. The only thing left for you to do is fly."

And, for a moment, she did fly. She was the Ladybug of the rooftops, eyes closed and smiling, letting herself fall joyously at the crest of every swing. It was amazing. She trusted me with every step--she took the directions I gave her and embellished them with grace, as if we were just one creature. No, better than one creature--two creatures who understood and complemented each other.

I don't know how long it lasted for. I know I was out of breath by the time the music stopped, but that doesn't mean anything. She was breath-taking.

The sudden silence broke the spell. She stumbled to a halt and opened her eyes, the colour high in her cheeks, the aftermath of all that exhilaration shining in her face. She took hold of my hands and squeezed them.

"I did it--I did it! Kitty, did you see?"

I couldn't talk, but she didn't seem to need a response. She was bouncing up and down on the balls of her feet, inordinately pleased with herself.

When I had recovered enough to be Cat Noir again, I said:

"Exhausting and amazing. The way everything is with you."

She ignored this. "Now, whenever I need to not think, I'll just picture Cat Noir saving everyone from a big gorilla, and I'll be laughing too hard to be self-conscious."

"Not sure what's so funny about it," I muttered. "But I can't argue with the results."