In Between
/
He's in the stacks of Kadic's student library, deep in thought with his arm bent around a pile of tattered books. His mind is a million miles away as he runs his fingers along worn the spines of those still on the shelves, perused hundreds of times already by so many students before him.
The elbow that grazes his side is accompanied by a flash of pink; suddenly Aelita is there, her eyes cloudy with sleep, it still being morning, and her hair a little messier than usual.
William staggers, his arm tightening around the books as her appearance pulls him abruptly out of his thoughts. He looks around, hoping they're alone, or perhaps that they're not. She sees all of this in the minute change in his expression and offers him an apologetic smile.
"Sorry if I startled you."
"It's okay."
"How are you doing?"
It's the same every time; that one quiet, sincere question that he now trusts her enough to answer honestly.
"Tired. And..." He shrugs, but she seems to understand the gesture and her hands tighten slightly on the straps of her bag. They can't talk much here but it's enough for a while to browse in silence. William goes back to selecting books and Aelita tilts her head to the side to inspect the ones he's picked already. It's a second before the connection strikes her, realisation lining up neatly in her mind.
Science fiction and books about loneliness, novels about emotional scarring and loss of control, a horror story about parasites; even a self-help book tucked carefully amongst them.
No one else would put together the clues and understand what these collectively mean, but Aelita does - in folded-over corners and yellowed pages she sees reflections of William's story, so similar to her own, and the revelation forms a painful lump in her throat.
"Here," she says, with difficulty, turning from him and setting her bag on the floor so she can rummage through it.
In a moment she has her hands clasped around the object she's looking for and pockets the bookmark that resides three-quarters of the way through, before standing and pressing the book into his free hand. Aelita closes William's fingers around it, allowing her warm touch to linger.
"It's a good book," she says, trying to keep her tone light. "You'll probably like it."
They exchange a long look and he knows that she knows, and his mouth curves up at one corner in the tiniest of lopsided smiles as he holds the book in his hand.
"Thanks."
/
Late at night in a room that isn't her own - a gradually familiar place of musky smells, boys' deodorant and an undercurrent of takeaway pizza - is where she feels most safe.
Surrounding them are all the textbooks he didn't read. A year's worth of knowledge, unabsorbed, untouched.
"He didn't even open these." William's voice is a little strained, torn between despair and amusement. "You could at least have made a clone with a little more work ethic." His words become more muffled as he slumps over the open book on his desk. Aelita lies beside him and her drooping eyelids are every indication that she is as tired as he is.
"He wasn't exactly the studying type," she replies softly, remembering with little fondness the carefree clone that had replaced William. "I never really knew him, but you'd have to see it to..."
She drifts, breathing a little deeper.
"Don't fall asleep," William begs, suddenly alert, and Aelita forces her eyes open. He's so close that his face crowds her vision and she is drunk on tiredness as her mouth shapes a lazy smile.
"You look funny up close."
William laughs a sudden sharp burst of laughter and her heart skips a little at the sound, at the way it lights up his face and makes his eyes sparkle, just for a moment, until it fades with a long exhale and the weight of the world settles upon him again.
"So do you," he teases.
She wakes up in his bed the next morning to drowsy comfort which gives way to flitting panic that heaves her suddenly upright. Then she remembers, the brushing of their hands as they drifted to sleep, and there is William on the carpet with his limbs splayed across an improvised bed of spare pillows and blankets. When he wakes a little later she offers him slices of pilfered toast wrapped in napkins, stolen boldly from the cafeteria under of the nose of Jim Moralés and her sceptical friends.
They are companionable rebels wiping butter from their fingers and debating the merits of the Subsonics latest album, until William acknowledges the textbooks piled in the corner and groans. His words are muffled by his hands running despairingly down his face.
"What time is it?"
"Eleven thirty, just gone," Aelita supplies.
"I have so much to do today." He's been naive to think that six months' worth of lost knowledge would make itself up over the course of an evening or two. As he's contemplating this, Aelita's pushing herself up from the bed and picking up a Biology textbook bookmarked with flash cards.
"Well, between the two of us we'll get you back on track."
"You don't mind helping?" His face breaks into a smile. "Thanks, Aelita."
"Any time."
Except when her phone rings a few minutes later, Odd's voice overly cheerful as always on the other end, brimming with curiosity and impatience.
"Aelita where are you?" he's talking a mile a minute before she can even get a word in. "Did you forget? It's time to celebrate another XANA-free weekend! Yumi has a free house so we're all going to-"
"Odd, Odd," she cuts in, causing him to stammer to a halt. "I can't. I'm busy today."
"Aw c'mon Aelita! It feels like I haven't seen you in forever."
"You saw me at breakfast. Besides, I'm studying."
Odd laughs.
"Well, we'll come prise you away from your books if we have to Princess. I'm on my way to your room right now, Ulrich and the others are waiting for us."
Odd hangs up, quite unintentionally, on her excuses.
William's highlighter pen skims across an entire paragraph with too much diligence, his body poised unnaturally still as he focuses on listening. He won't catch her eye however, so her unspoken apology, written all over her face, goes unheeded.
"Go on," he says.
"But-"
"No, I'll be fine."
The conflict in her head plays itself out in how frozen she is, poised between sitting and standing, between William and the others, between wanting them all to be friends and wanting them all to just go away so she can stop living this stupid double life.
"If you're sure," she says eventually.
His mouth is set in a grim line.
"I am."
"I'll come and check on you later."
But when she does, returning giddy and breathless from a surprisingly fun day, William's door is locked and refuses to open no matter what she says.
It hurts, being shut out, she whispers against the frame.
But then, he's known for a long time how that feels.
/
They're fighting, she thinks, but quietly; William and Aelita have stepped backwards in one another's lives, leaving a space at once blank and empty and purposefully busy; filled with tears and guilt and yelling at oneself and throwing punches into pillows but all the while heavy with silence.
Their usual haunts, empty. Study sessions adjourned. She hides herself amongst friends and he in books.
She steals glances at him across the schoolyard when he's not looking, and he sits on a bench in the grounds and misses her.
/
Their way back is the book she lent him, place reverently on his shelf with the rest after the tenth read-through. It's helped. They've all helped, these pages of printed word that piece by piece make up something that speaks of his own experience, but in the end they're not green eyes beneath pink hair that soften as they ask how he is, and that's what makes them not enough.
William is sprawled out in his room, arms across beneath his head, contemplating. A moment's hesitation, then he snatches up the book and shrugs on his jacket, and strides with purpose down the corridor. She's with Jérémie in the computer lab. Jérémie sees him then turns back to his screen a second later, and Aelita signals something with her eyes that William can't read.
He could turn and walk away, he thinks, or he could not let anything, let alone fear, or resentment, dictate his life any more.
William strikes a balance; crossing the room in carefully-casual strides, he slips the returned book onto the edge of Aelita's desk, doesn't look, walks right past.
Jérémie looks up again.
"Did he just-?"
"Huh?" - as she stows the book safely beside binder and pencil case - "I didn't notice anything."
"Oh. Is everything okay, Aelita?"
"Fine," she lies smoothly, with practised ease and increasingly less guilt. Jérémie, eager to avoid conflict as his eyes stray back to his computer screen, shrugs.
The soft click-clicking of fingers on keyboards resumes.
In the safety of Aelita's room she opens her book and finds the note that she somehow knew she would. The paper crinkles pleasantly in her hands and Aelita runs her index finger beneath the words as she reads them over. An honest invitation in a scrawled hand which makes her think of that morning in the library where she realised she couldn't abandon him.
Would the old William have reached back out to her this way? The brash William she never really knew from way back when, who pursued Yumi with such relentlessness, whose ego placed him on top of the world. Probably not, but Aelita can't say for sure since she never really knew him. This William, the one who eases his loneliness by immersing himself in other people's worlds, a refugee in hiding on printed pages, is someone almost entirely different. This William... no matter the conflict, the hiding, the double-life, Aelita can't do without him.
Cross-legged on the floor of her room with the curtains thrown wide, her chest swells with relief and Aelita stretches out and sighs.
When she sees him next and presses another book into his hands, her mumbled apology and his thanks breaks the long silence.
/
Even when they welcome him back, the final piece of the puzzle that is the Lyoko warriors, William is still most comfortable for a long while around Aelita. He borrows Ulrich's manga sometimes, Odd and Jérémie's comics. Occasionally he'll find something in Yumi's personal library that he likes - she reads a bit of everything. Mostly William busies himself with the slow, careful process of reintegration, resolving himself to take up the fight again, earning their trust, hiding his resentment.
Sharing books will always be something for him and Aelita, but with the others it makes the transition easier.
/
She's in her university dorm room with her mind flooded full of ways to spend the upcoming summer, and the books on her shelves these days are associated only with studying and tests, when the roar of a motorbike engine beckons her to the open window. It's a split second before Aelita realises who it is but then she does and she's taking the stairs two at a time, taking the campus courtyard at as much of a sprint as she can in the shoes she's wearing. William takes his helmet off to meet her. His hair is messy over his forehead, his denim jacket fully buttoned up against the wind. He's got a rucksack slung over both shoulders and a grin a mile wide on his face.
"You passed!" Aelita walks around the bike in a slow circle. She nods impressively at the gleaming metal, rests one hand lightly on the back passenger seat. "Congratulations!"
"Thanks." He's childlike in how he tries to contain his pride, and she adores him. For a long moment they can't do anything besides smile at each other. "So," he says suddenly. "You're not busy or anything right now, are you?"
It's then that Aelita notices the luggage box attached to the rear end of the bike. William nods for her to open it and she lifts out a helmet, resting on a folded picnic blanket, resting on something hidden beneath. The helmet's black with splashes of pink. She turns it over in her hands, amazed.
"I'm not busy."
"How about for the next few days?"
"Classes are over, I just need to study."
"Well, the weather's supposed to stay nice..."
He outlines his plan to her and it's blissfully simple - travel the countryside for a while, let details like hotels and meals sort themselves out along the open road. She has a bag ready within minutes; soon she's pulling the helmet over her head and he's fastening it easily under her chin. She pulls the visor down, scrambles clumsily onto the seat behind him and wraps her arms tightly around his waist.
The world rushes by them in a green blur, sandy ribbons of country road winding ahead beneath a cloudless sky. They set up a picnic on a field where Aelita lifts the blanket to find beneath it a pile of novels she hasn't read. They fill in the time between his last visit with stories, detailing excitedly the minutiae of their lives.
The uncut grass tickles their arms. Ants colonise a smattering of sandwich crumbs. Aelita and William grow drowsy, retreat companionably into their own worlds, reading as their skin gradually pinkens in heat of the sun.
/
"I was thinking of writing a book."
The confession, from William to Aelita, comes suddenly during a quiet autumn afternoon a few years later. They're painting his new apartment, windows thrown open to combat the smell of fresh paint even though it's threatening rain.
Aelita sets down her brush and blinks at him.
"Really?"
He runs a hand through his hair, keeps his eyes fixed on the paint rolling over the wall with an over-abundance of concentration. "Yeah. I thought it might be good, you know?"
"What would it be about?"
"Lyoko, maybe. And us. All of us. With all the details changed, a fictional version. It'd be just something to do in my spare time, I haven't even really thought about it until just now and-"
"Do it."
He turns to her. His shoulders, hunched defensively, begin to relax.
"I really think you should do it," Aelita says again.
He looks sheepish. "I may have started writing a chapter. Or two."
/
The first ever copy of two years' worth of hard work arrives wrapped in brown paper on Aelita's doormat. She opens the parcel and the novel has barely had time to fall onto her lap before she's on the phone, pouring congratulations into the mouthpiece almost as soon as William picks up. They talk for a while, her flicking through the pages and noting paragraphs she'd received in email form on her lunch breaks during the writing process, admiring the improvements.
When the call ends she takes a drink and the novel with her to the sitting room. She reads it, and it's brilliant.
In her eagerness she's bypassed one important detail. It's Aelita's third read-through before she notices the page right near the beginning and the single line of text that dedicates it all to her.
/
Six decades, four novels and four subsequent movies later.
He didn't need those grades he never quite made back; his life took the unexpected turn of a novelist turned publishing phenomena. Hers took the less surprising but entirely gratifying path of musical prowess and business success. They'll both agree - do so, frequently - that it's been a good run.
Now, the years draw themselves out slowly, all the greatest and worst events of their lives enjoyed and endeavoured through, a treasured collection of anecdote and memory. The nightmares barely bother him at all. His last one was years ago. The rest made their way into stories, released into the world where a billions-strong readership unknowingly shared his pain and set him free.
Aelita's house is too empty so she spends hers days out on the porch, content to perch alongside William on the periphery of other people's lives. There are often books held open in their laps and wrinkled hands tremble slightly with each turning of their pages until the daylight fades and the twilight grows too dim to see by.
He'll reach out to her, trace the spidery map of veins across the back of her hand and the worn-smooth gold of her wedding ring. She'll say something to make him laugh, like how he looks funny up close. He say something hopelessly romantic, like how he thinks somewhere in between their first meeting in Kadic's school library and the time she encouraged him to write a novel, he may have fallen in love with her.
In the gathering dark they'll recite to each other stories, poems, words they know by heart, amidst long and thoughtful pauses.