The Algorithm

Chapter seventeen - The Noir Twins

"So why can't you sleep?" He asked, trying to change the subject.

"Nightmares." She said plainly as she took the last sip from her glass.

"You get nightmares?" He asked.

Marinette nodded. "All the time, and when I do, I come here. It just had a warm feeling to it, you know?" Adrien agreed with her reasoning. The bar was cozy and comfortable, he was surprised he hadn't taken the time to visit it sooner. He had walked past it a few times during his insomnia-induced walks but the lights were always off and the fire extinguisher. The dim bulbs and burning oak logs gave the open space living.

"What are the nightmares about?" He asked, listening intently for slurring as she spoke. Marinette didn't want to talk about it, especially since her latest dream had been about him, but she reckoned he would never drop it since she was in a bar, alone, at night, with a glass in hand. He would probably assume the night terrors were just a cover and think she comes down here every night to drink her sorrows away while everyone is fast asleep. So she bluffed.

"Well, the one I had tonight was about this one mission that happened a little over a year ago." She began. "There was this Akuma facility at a mountain's edge. It was built to blend into the rough pikes of the mountain, kind of like the one in Australia and at first glance, it appeared to just be part of the cliffside. In front of the mountain was a large wheat field and surrounding it was a thick forest. We destroyed the facility and the remains poured out into the plains."

Marinette was tired and was trying her best to describe what had happened without giving details about the friends she had lost or the dream she had had about him. "A few of our men didn't make it out before the building collapsed so we led a search party, to make a long story short I got lost in the woods." Adrien nodded and made a small gesture with his hand for her to give more detail. "There was a man." She said, "I never got his name, but he was tall, had dark skin, and short coiled hair. He found me and helped me back to the field where the rubble laid."

Adrien looked at her puzzled. "That sounds like a good dream." He stated and Marinette noticed the flaw in her bluff. In her tiredness, she had forgotten she was supposed to describe a nightmare, not talk about the kind man who had kept her upright as she sobbed quietly in the woods.

"But we never made it back to the field." She said calmly, trying to salvage her lie. Honesty came naturally to Marinette, it was different when she went undercover, she was fed lies through her commlink, she didn't have to come up with them herself. "There was this log." She elaborated. She decided to take another nightmare she had had some time ago and twist it to fit her story. "I tripped over it, it was rotten and full of maggots. The man reached over to help me up but he stepped on the log and it swallowed him." Marinette remembered that dream vividly, the log had eaten her, not the man, and held her captive as the worms burrowed into her skin, eating away at her flesh as she tried to break free from the rotten woods grasp. It was her alarm clock that saved her from being trapped in that dream, and that fallen log forever.

"The log swallowed him?" Adrien asked.

"Yeah," Marinette answered, still spinning her finger around the rim of her now empty glass. "He was gone and I couldn't find my way back to the field alone. So I wandered in the woods forever." Her last statement did have some truth to it. In a way, she was still lost in the thick dark forest, trying to find her way to the wheat plains before nightfall, before darkness cast over her like a blanket of fear. But she could never escape. She was stuck wandering aimlessly through the woods, tears staining her cheeks, never able to leave the thicket of trees.

Adrien walked around the couch, past the carved leather chairs, and sat down on the stool next to her. They both turned to face the shelves of liquor and the firelight shining through them, making the colorful shadows dance.