The room was full of glass jars. The shelves ran from floor to ceiling. Once it had been a second bedroom in a stylish flat but now it was a vault. The walls were lined with steel and the window was sealed. The floor and ceiling were reinforced. It had been expensive and it still didn't work perfectly. Even through the layers of plaster and metal and wood, he could still hear the drone of wings. So could his neighbours. They never lasted long. They moved in and moved out again. Maybe they could feel the weight of so many bits of evil gathered into one place. He knew that it dragged on him.

He didn't know what else to do with them.

Hundreds and hundreds of black butterflies beat their wings against glass jars with carefully penciled labels. Dates and names and descriptions because he didn't know if she would need to know when she came back.

He'd been collecting them for five years. At first, he had hidden them away in the empty rooms of his father's sprawling mansion. He had had tucked them into unused cabinets and under guest beds where no one would find them. His father wasn't the sort to have friends and he hadn't been allowed to let any of his stay in the house for any length of time.

He'd packed them into cardboard shipping crates along with the few belongings he considered his own when he'd moved out at 18. A video game console. Some books. His clothing. A laptop. His set of fencing foils. Five boxes of evil butterflies. A single letter still sealed. He hadn't realized how little he owned that he actually considered his own until he put it into boxes and watched a team of movers put it into a truck.

Leaving had been a fight. For maybe the first time, in a fit of anger and frustration over more than a year of being lonelier than he could remember, he had refused to back down. His father had made threats and tried to make him feel guilty and he'd been too angry to let it work.

His final year at Lycée hadn't been over but he hadn't let that stop him from leaving. He wasn't a child model any more. He was the kind of rising star who could afford an apartment in the XVIII Arrondissement without parental support. His name was its own currency these days. A different kind of fame than his fathers. Not a designer. Not a businessman. Just a pretty face. But people liked a pretty face.

For every morning he woke up regretting it, there was a message or an email from his father about some project or other that he was required to participate in. The little flashing icon on the screen always helped wash off the regret.

He had made friends who saved him seats in lecture halls when he was rushing back from a shoot. He invited Nino over when they were both off classes and they stayed up half the night playing video games and comparing their schools. Sometimes he went on dates but they never seemed to lead to a girlfriend. He refused to admit to himself why. He took modeling contracts that made his father furious for no other reason than that they made his father furious.

"You are half naked in this magazine," his father said in a tight angry voice after the first one. They were having a business lunch. Adrien had discovered that scheduling meetings over meal actually meant he could have some semblance of a family dinner. His father had dropped the copy of the advertisement on the table beside the plate of antipasto.

"They would have paid me three times what I made if I had been naked," Adrien pointed out, "Really wearing that much was a bad business decision."

"You look like a prostitute," his father said and Adrien bit back his next comment. Even at nineteen, he was still unable to hold his own in arguments with his father. But later, when another advertising contract came across his agent's desk, he took it. It paid better. He was finally able to add a vault door to that extra bedroom full of fluttering wings.

Adrien Agreste might have been happy. Should have been. Everything was going so well. His classes at the university. His modeling contracts. His freedom. His friends. It was all going so well.

Adrien was so close to happy.

Chat Noir was not.

Chat Noir was exhausted and lonely and hadn't gotten used to it. Five years later and he hadn't gotten used to fighting evil alone. Every time he transformed. Every time he looked at the chaos on one of the boulevards of Paris. Every time. He looked for her. He turned and scanned the rooftops and the crowds in case he was going to wake up from this nightmare and find her right where she was supposed to be: at his side.

She wasn't there. Over and over, she wasn't there.

She had been seen of course. There were jokes that she was Paris's greatest export. A twenty first century version of Lady Liberty. She had been seen in Montreal and New York, once in Maine, once in New Orleans. Another time in Florida she had been seen on Disney World's Main Street USA wrapping up and fixing the villain with her yo-yo and a smile. There had been a lot of cellphone video of that one. He had downloaded every single video and had them memorized.

He missed her.

He missed her so much.