The Algorithm

Chapter twenty-one - I Love You

 Marinette sat in front of the snake-eyed man, she hardly said a word in the past hour that had gone by. He asked her questions, and she replied giving as little information as possible. She was being difficult, she knew, but she didn't want to be here so why act like she was enjoying herself?

"Alright," Sass said. A slight sibilant seemed to fill his voice, making a hissing sound accompany most of his words. "Let's play a small game. I say a word and you say what emotion comes to mind."

Marinette nodded. No harm in this, she thought.

"The meadow above us," Sass said. Marinette thought for a moment of the puffy white clouds against the perfect blue sky, the soft grass that deer would graze on, and the forest that protected it.

"Tranquility," Marinette answered.

"Very good." Sass seemed to have a habit of saying things like 'great job' or 'well done' when someone did the smallest of tasks. "Next word, water."

"Water?" Marinette asked, puzzled. Somehow her answer would give something about her mental state away to him but she could not see what. "I don't know, cold?"

"Not what you feel physically, emotionally Marinette."

"Okay, steady."

"Water makes you feel steady?"

"Yeah," Marinette answered. "The waves and the tide going in and out. It's repetitive and stable."

"So you like things to be stable," Sass said while clicking a pen open and jotting down something. "So how did it make you feel when you lost the other Guardians and things weren't as stable as they used to be?"

Marinette wanted to kick herself... and Sass. He always saw through words and found a hidden meaning, sometimes Marinette didn't even realize they were there, and he was always right. But still, she would not answer any questions that included the words 'how did it make you feel'.

Sass waited a moment before giving up. After an hour of nothing but stubbornness it was clear she would not open up to him, and for good reason. She had no reason to trust him and she clearly did not trust many.

He sighed. "Alright, next word, Death." Marinette merely shrugged, the word meant nothing good to her. "Death scares a lot of people, does it scare you?" Marinette scoffed.

"I'm not afraid of dying. Pieces of me die all the time. Besides, dying is the easy part. The dead don't know the pain of being the only one left standing in a room full of bodies. Especially when the bodies belong to people you care about." The words spilled out before she could catch them.

"I think you are suffering from a common case of survivor's guilt."

Survivor, huh? Marinette never thought of herself as a survivor. Just a coward. It should have been her. Every mission, every assignment, she was ready to take a bullet for any of them. She would have laid down on the wire and let them walk across her. She would have run into a burning building for them. But now they're gone and she was left carrying the guilt. Marinette thought that if she ever had to make that kind of sacrifice she would do it without hesitation. But she couldn't, she was a coward.

The only three people that could honestly understand what she had been through were gone. The three people she saw as a family were dead. She was alone.

"You're not alone," Sass said.

Uncanny. Since the beginning of this appointment, Marinette wondered if he could read her thoughts based on how well he understood her. She was a spy, she was trained to be hard to read, but he seemed to have no difficulty in the matter.