A/N: Since TechnoSam pointed out my apparent penchant for Aelita-and-everyone fics, I decided to dust off this old plotbunny. I have concluded that new-to-Earth Aelita is my absolute favourite.
A small translation note: When I say 'football', I mean 'soccer'. ;)
Afternoon Lessons
"AELITA, NO!"
Ulrich breaks into a sprint and skids across the linoleum floor, his hand reaching desperately outwards. With desperate fingers he clutches the back of Aelita's shirt and pulls her to safety in the nick of time.
She stumbles backwards into him and as she does so, the large fish that she had eagerly caught from the mall fountain flies from her hands to slap wetly against the tiles, writhing and flailing and inciting screams in the unfortunate bystanders.
"Oh man," Ulrich groans, knowing that the noise will summon security guards at any moment. He doesn't feel like spending a inevitably long time trying to convince them not to phone the school or explaining why his friend had been fishing in the mall fountain in the first place.
I'm sorry about that, Sir. Aelita here's a virtual being who's only just been materialised onto Earth you see, and she's still learning the ropes.
Thinking fast, Ulrich reaches once more for Aelita and this time his hand catches hers; small fingers squeeze hold tightly, the other hand keeping a careful grip on her shopping bags as Aelita, blinking, is pulled in hasty confusion through the crowd. They are sprinting towards the escalator and shoving past other shoppers, pointedly ignoring their grumbling and shaking fists.
They only stop running when they reach the sanctuary of outdoors, finding anonymity in the bustling crowds that meander down the streets.
Ulrich bends forward with his hands on his knees, breathing hard. When he looks up he sees that Aelita has planted herself on a nearby bench, also hunched over and trying to regain her breath, but her face is delighted and grinning.
"That was so fun!"
"Please Aelita," Ulrich grinds out between breaths, "never, ever do that again." It is far too early in the morning for him; this is only the latest mishap of many and he is already exhausted.
"I only wanted to stroke the fish," she pouts.
Ulrich just faces her with a puzzled stare before shrugging to himself and straightening up to wipe the back of his hand across his forehead. He heads off again, steering them purposefully away from the mall, and Aelita leaps up to follow alongside him, pressing herself into him as they pass a cluster of children taking up most of the pavement. She smiles and waves at them and they stare in awe at her bubblegum pink hair as they pass. Ulrich ducks from the attention and the curious stares and hurries along.
They continue on their way beneath a sky like a washed-out watercolour painting, and Aelita is talking non-stop now about computers and Lyoko and coding mechanics and how much research Jérémie will be able to do now that XANA is gone. Ulrich understands none of it and doesn't really know what to say but that doesn't matter – Aelita talks and Ulrich listens, and as he listens he stares at her in quiet fascination. He can't help finding it strange, kind of like the surreal feeling one gets, he thinks, when seeing teachers outside of school doing something entirely ordinary like going grocery shopping in their sweatpants. Ulrich still keeps expecting to see the Aelita of Lyoko, in her tunic, pointy-eared, with that little red earring dangling from one tip.
How incredible that she is finally on Earth with them.
For three days Jérémie has refused to let Aelita out of his sight, terrified that something will go wrong if he leaves her for so much as a minute, and with good reason. Yet someway or another, all three of Ulrich's other friends have found themselves preoccupied today, leaving Ulrich and Aelita to spend the day together alone. So far, though they have been interesting to say the least, things have not exactly gone well; the younger girl, armed with infinite curiosity and no common sense whatsoever, has gotten herself into one awkward situation after another.
But, so long as Aelita didn't walk into any more traffic, so long as she definitely understood that she wasn't supposed to eat the grass (yes the cows eat it Aelita, but not people), and so long as she definitely, definitely understood that there were certain items of clothing that it was not acceptable to remove if it got too warm, then Ulrich shouldn't have a problem looking after her.
Yeah, right.
Honestly, he thinks to himself, it's like caring for a child. A very cute, pretty child who understands complex coding mechanics at genius level, but a child nonetheless. After a few moments of thoughtful silence, Ulrich glances at his phone, checks the time and comes to a decision.
"I think that's enough hanging out in town today."
"Oh!" Aelita protests, bouncing agitatedly on the balls of her feet and clasping her hands together in pleading, "but we've only been here for three hours already!"
"Long enough," Ulrich mutters under his breath. He rubs his eyes in tiredness but still manages a smile for the exciteable girl before him. "Don't worry, we'll find something else to do. Come on Aelita, let's catch the next bus."
On the ride back to school they talk quietly, swapping music – something Aelita is especially fascinated by, Ulrich notices - to pass the time. Aelita garners a few amused chuckles as she presses her face up against the glass and stares out of the window in complete awe of the world rushing by, but Ulrich, always self-consciously aware of the stares, is relieved when Kadic finally rolls into view.
Here at least, Aelita can stay out of trouble, or so Ulrich hopes.
"So what now?" she asks him.
"I don't know," he admits.
They walked with little direction but now trail to a stop in the grounds where, though the sun is beginning to break through the clouds, the grass is still a little damp from dew and the morning's rain. Spotting a nearby abandoned football, Ulrich rolls it towards him and begins to bounce it, first from the tops of his feet, then his knees. Aelita takes off her jacket and spreads it on the grass like a blanket, tilting her face up to the sun.
It is a strange silence they are immersed in, and Ulrich soon loses himself in a bubble of pure focus as he concentrates on keeping the ball from hitting the ground. He feels himself relax slightly as he pours all of his thought and energy into the task, forgetting for the moment that he has a test on Monday he still hasn't studied for, homework overdue, and a visit from his parents in two weeks' time. At least with Aelita materialised there is no threat of XANA any more, though he isn't sure how he is supposed to feel about that. Instead he wonders vaguely, with a hint of panic, how he is supposed to entertain Aelita for the rest of the day.
Jérémie, obviously, has had no shortage of things to talk about with her once they had met face to face, effortlessly fielding her endless questions about the way things worked, explaining everything from cars to toasters. Odd replies on his usual charm and enthralls Aelita with jokes, music and magic tricks. Yumi of course has automatic dibs on all the girly bonding things; sleepovers, clothes, shopping... whatever else it is girls do in their spare time.
So, where does that leave Ulrich? The brown-haired boy doesn't know. Dare he say it, things between Aelita and him have been, well... a little awkward.
With a fresh burst of energy he kicks the ball wide and sprints after it, feinting before spinning around, all the while ignoring the mud that spatters up his calves. The school field melts away and the rush of blood in his ears becomes the roar of a tremendous crowd as his own breath comes in exhausted pants and gasps that ripped painfully from his throat. He starts to run again - if he runs fast enough he can outrun everything, all of the pressure, all of the people - preparing to shoulder his way through the last line of defense; behind the goalposts his father stands, clearer than any other face in the crowd, waiting quietly, expectant and yet already disappointed.
Drawing back his leg, Ulrich swings forward in a powerful kick. The crowd are chanting his name.
Ulrich, Ulrich, Ulrich...
"Ulrich!"
The crowd, the stadium and his father vanish, leaving one out-of-breath boy and a beat-up old football on a near-empty playing field. A few yards away, still calling his name, remains a single ardent admirer.
Thankfully not Sissi, he remembers. Not this time, anyway.
Flipping his ball expertly into the air to catch it nearly under one arm, Ulrich makes his way back towards her.
"Everything okay, Aelita?"
The girl in question sits cross-legged still upon her coat, smiling delightedly up at him as he approaches; it is like every single second of interaction with the world causes her complete and utter happiness. But what can you expect from a newcomer to Earth, Ulrich thinks, adding cynically, just give her a few more years.
"Everything is wonderful, Ulrich. Look what I've just made!"
Like a preschooler presenting their first ever macaroni and construction paper creation, Aelita holds out the small item spread over the soft skin of two outstretched palms. Slightly wilted white and yellow flowers, threaded together into a loop of green stems.
"A daisy chain, huh. Very nice." Ulrich nods to her, watching with amusement as her impossibly wide grin stretches even further. Sitting down beside her and not caring that he is adding more mud to his already filthy clothes, he asks, "Where'd you learn to make one of those?"
"Odd showed me!"
"Odd? Really?" Ulrich raises an eyebrow, but shrugs a moment afterwards. It is nothing new to him that his best friend is full of weird surprises.
"Yup. He said his sisters used to make them all the time. They made him go and pick the flowers for them."
"Oh," says Ulrich, for lack of anything else to say really, leaning back on his arms to examine the sky. With only the everyday sounds of life and nature to fill the quiet, Aelita leans over with her small nose almost touching the grass as she examines some unseen insect. Ulrich lets his eyes slide closed and wonders how the others are doing - Yumi with relatives over for lunch, Odd in detention and Jérémie in a meeting with Mrs Hertz - and silently congratulates himself on getting through the day so far.
He can't lie though. However much trouble Aelita has gotten them into, even from the moment they first met her, he likes having her around. Once she got used to Earth she would be more manageable. He might even be able to take her to see a movie or something, but for now just relaxing here within the school grounds seemed a much safer option.
"Aren't you cold, Ulrich?" Aelita asks as just as the breeze tugs a handful of orange-yellow leaves from their nearby branches and sends them fluttering towards the ground.
"Nah. Football practise warmed me right up. Are you?"
"A little. But I like it. I've never really been cold before. I like the wind, too." She catches one of the leaves and holds it to her ear to listen to the slight crackling sound it makes when she crumpled it to pieces in her fist. Holding out the shards and watching them scatter, Aelita asks,
"I can't eat those either right?"
Ulrich gives a half-amused, half-exasperated grin. "No Aelita. No you can't."
"Oh. I just don't get why I can eat the leaves in the... what is it, salad? And no other ones." She giggles, an infectious, innocent giggle that has Ulrich smiling along with her. Then she scrunches up her face in adorable confusion and stares out across the field, drinking the scenery in. "Earth is so weird."
Ulrich laughs then, a sound Aelita rarely hears but one which sets off a pleasant, momentary fluttering in her chest. "You don't even know the half of it," he tells her.
Once again they lapse into silence. Aelita loops her daisy chain delicately around her wrist over the sleeve of her jumper-dress and as she does so she thinks about Ulrich, wondering what plagues the mind of the quiet samurai, swift with the sword, as he shuts out the world with his eyebrows drawn down in the lightest of frowns.
Finally she becomes aware of her legs growing numb with inactivity so she stands up and shakes them. Ulrich sits up and watches her as she walks over to the ball, poking it experimentally with the toe of her shoe.
"Can I play?" she asks.
"Um," Ulrich stammers, "you don't have the right shoes."
They both look down at her feet, clad in pastel pink ballet-style pumps that refuse to stay on when she runs and which are already smudged with mud. Aelita immediately makes to take them off but Ulrich holds out a hand in warning. The last thing they need is Aelita freaking out because she has caught a cold... not to mention what Jérémie will do to Ulrich when he finds out it has happened on his watch.
Aelita tilts her head to the side. "Pleeeease?"
He is finding a strange tug inside his chest and he realises that this is how Jérémie and Odd must feel all the time, when Aelita is being too adorable to be refused anything. He grins at her and closes the gap between them, nodding as he does so and conceding,
"All right then."
He stands and kicks the ball away playfully and she chases after it, edging it along with the side of her foot as she has seen Ulrich do.
They chase one another as much as the ball, Ulrich tapping it lightly so he doesn't accidentally hurt her, Aelita laughing and throwing her arms out to the sides like a bird to catch the wind. There are times when she almost falls but Ulrich simply teases her and sidles over to expertly nudge the football just out of her reach, rather than panicking like Jérémie would have done.
The bespectacled boy is sweet, but too often he handles her like fine china and he regards the outdoors with an almost fierce animosity. Then there is Odd whose jokes, if not downright awful, fly right over her head. Yumi is fun but she goes home after school and they haven't spent any time together on Earth so far.
Aelita jumps a puddle of muddy water and brushes hair out of her eyes, laughing as Ulrich makes almost exactly the same gesture.
Jérémie is knowledge, Odd is laughter, Yumi is kindness. Ulrich is...
What is Ulrich?
She casts a glance around as though Kadic Academy and its grounds will give her the answer. And in a way it does, as the word dawns on her as clearly as the sun on her face.
With Ulrich, Aelita is free.
Finally they come to a silent agreement to stop and rest, standing together in the grass with pink cheeks and messy hair. Aelita throws up her arms in a relaxed stretch and draws a deep breath as though to fill herself up with as much of the world around her as she possibly can.
"It's so lovely to be alive," she says, a serene smile on her face.
Ulrich shrugs. "Really? I hadn't noticed."
"How can you not notice?"
He is sheepish beneath her wide-eyed incredulity. "I don't know. You just sort of... get used to it, I guess."
Aelita stares around her, craning her neck to watch a flock of birds fly in arrow formation over the roof of Kadic and out of sight. "I don't think I'll ever get used to it. Think of all the things I haven't discovered yet! There's so much to do! What if I don't get time to do it all?"
"You're free from Lyoko now. You have the rest of your life."
"That's right. All thanks to you and the others."
"Uh-huh."
Ulrich's thoughts return now to something that has been bothering him since three days ago. He feels guilty for so much as thinking it but with Aelita's materialisation comes one great source of disappoinment; XANA's end, and so an end to all of his Lyoko heroics. He knows he is going to miss it, battling monsters and exploring virtual worlds despite all the danger they have gone through. Now he is to return to a normal life of stress and schoolwork, with no secret identity to hide behind, no part-time secret warrior to take the blame for his real-world failures.
He is pulled roughly from his musing by a sudden flurry of movement that is Aelita whirling her arms, windmill-like. She slips in a wet patch of mud in her impractical shoes, her mouth forming a small soundless 'oh' of surprise and her hands instinctively reaching for something to hold on to. That thing is Ulrich, and they topple; he takes the brunt of the fall, though he's unable to help pulling Aelita down on top of him as he lands heavily on the ground where mud and damp seep uncomfortably into the back of his shirt, and Aelita's face forms a shadow over his own.
For a moment, the shadow blots out the dark bags of tiredness beneath his eyes, and the sun breaks through a small cloud-cover to beam a halo of brightness around her face, shining upon her as though to illuminate her from within.
"I'm sorry-" Ulrich begins to say but he is silenced as, entirely unprompted, Aelita leans down with half-lidded eyes and kisses him.
For almost an eternity the entire world freezes. There is only Aelita's mouth on his mouth, her soft breath, and the rapid hammering of his heart inside his ribs.
He had been saving his first kiss for Yumi, naturally, an idea that Sissi Delmas quickly - and forcefully - shot down. Where she had tasted overwhelmingly of sticky strawberry lipgloss, Aelita's kiss is soft and dry and sweet... just how he imagines Yumi's would be. He doesn't push away, not at first, and he doesn't have time to feel guilty in those few seconds that stretch out into forever. Instead he finds himself enjoying the kiss, savouring its sweetness, its simplicity. It carries no baggage or stress that every other element of his life encompassess and he finds escape in it, solace. This is another world where things are easy, a world where he met her first.
And then he makes the mistake of opening his eyes, just a fraction, and he sees pink hair not black, and reality slams back into him so hard that he reels, light-headed.
He clutches the grass so that his scrabbling fingers tear it up from the roots, yet still he holds on, so dizzy that for one terrifying moment he feels like he might float away from the very earth beneath him. The moment is over as quickly and unexpectedly as it began, leaving only confusion and conflict in its place.
Ulrich knows that this can never be, because he loves Yumi, Yumi who is guarded and quiet and makes things difficult, and Aelita is Jérémie's, and there is just too much in the way of everything that might ever make this possible.
Then Aelita draws back and Ulrich comes fully to his senses. He stares up at her wide-eyed and his mouth falls open when Aelita says, "thanks for hanging out with me today Ulrich!" as though nothing has happened, and a small part of him in the back of his mind deflates in a way he can't put his finger on.
He can't speak, horribly aware of his face burning. Slowly Ulrich pushes Aelita away and heaves himself to his feet, turning from her with an awkward cough until at last he feels able to face her once more. It is still an effort to meet her eyes, which are wide with puzzled astonishment.
"A-Aelita, what was... I mean, what were you-?" Ulrich splutters. He feels a gut-wrenching jolt of terror surge through him at a sudden realisation and whips around in the direction of the school building; if Yumi or Jérémie or anyone at all for that matter has seen what just happened, everything will be ruined.
"Like in the movies," Aelita tells him simply, unabashed, grinning.
"Uh... mind explaining that?"
"I watched a movie with Jérémie yesterday. You know, the stories on the screen. He said that people kiss because they're in love, and I love all of you."
Ulrich runs a hand through his hair. Oh boy.
"There's a difference between loving someone and being in love with them," he tells her.
"Really? What is that? You'd think they'd be the same, they sound so similar."
"Oh no. There's a world of difference."
"How so?"
"You should ask Jérémie. He could explain it better."
"Okay-"
"But whatever you do, don't tell him about the ki-... the-... that. What just happened. Actually don't tell Yumi or Odd either. Or anyone."
"How come?"
"Just don't, Aelita."
Aelita looks hurt and mumbles something about friends not keeping secrets, but trust me Ulrich says, just trust me that we keep this one moment to ourselves. He doesn't want to think about it, or talk about it, such as it feels to him like a still pool or a perfect silence, where one sound, one ripple of acknowledgement will ruin it for what it was.
It takes him another moment to make up his mind on how they will spend the rest of the day.
"Today has been so interesting," Aelita says, entirely innocently. Ulrich senses himself turning red again and, making sure to keep a space between them, motions for her to follow him inside. "I've learned a lot!" Aelita continues cheerfully, ticking off new experiences on her fingers. "Like, fish aren't very cuddly. And you can't run up the downward escalators. And it's kind of fun to be muddy. And you have very nice eyes close-up, did you know that Ulrich?"
"Uh, right, thanks," Ulrich mumbles. Aelita seems completely impervious to awkward tension, which somehow makes the whole thing that much worse. She continues to chatter along beside him as they march with increasing quickness across the grass.
"Hey Ulrich, are we going inside? But it's such a beautiful day!"
"Sorry Aelita, but I think we've had enough life lessons for one day. Do you mind helping me with my maths homework?"
As he says it, the humour of it all slowly dawns on him. The oddness of the day, the strangeness of the virtual girl next to him; the fact that a kiss of all things is what reminds him of his overdue homework, and that for one foolish moment he felt brave enough to experience a brush with the impossible.
It is Aelita's turn to be thrown off-guard; Ulrich's laughter startles all of the birds out of their trees.