A/N: This fic is for the lovely people at XL, the only place I know where you can spend pages talking about Jim being a pineapple on Lyoko. Seriously. I love you guys. I don't think this will be updated often, but I just couldn't resist.
He remembered her. Red hair in pigtails and a smile that shouldn't have been able to fit on her face. She had made him a bracelet for his thirteenth birthday and had continued until he was twentieth. He had secretly kept them all.
He had loved her. That part hadn't been a secret.
She had loved him too. And then one day, she was gone. They had searched and searched for her, but they only ever met dead ends. Aggi Morales had simply disappeared. The day before she went missing, she had been babbling about some new friend she had just made a few months previously.
But no one could find an Aelita Hopper anyway. Even her father seemed to have mysteriously vanished. Except for Jim. The last person to have seen any of them alive.
So it became a rather mysterious case with lots of theories and no facts to back them up. And Jim only thought he was fooling himself when he remembered the pair of men hanging around his apartment that day, dressed in black and showing no emotion.
As the hope of a safe return got smaller and smaller, they slowly got put out of his mind. Until two weeks later, when he saw them, hovering around the side of his neighbor's door and it all came flooding back.
Nobody could have restrained him even if they were around to try. He stalked over to them and punched the closest man in the face. "Where is my sister?" he growled.
The man smiled, even though his eye was beginning to swell up. "Monsieur….Morales, was it? I can assure you that I have no idea where your little sister is."
"How do you know my name if you weren't involved?"
The other man laughed. "We know everything that happens here, but not where your sister is. Now why don't you run along and play detective somewhere else?"
Jim grit his teeth. "You know what happened to her! You took her!" He lunged at them, which they easily sidestepped. The first man moved behind Jim's back and twisted his arm, holding him in a lock.
"What happened to your sister was a great tragedy, but we have work to do." With a shove, he pushed Jim away, who started walking away, intent on finding what the mysterious men had to do with his disappearing sister.
He had loved her. She had loved him too. He still did. She couldn't.
Jim walked through the white-washed halls, all too used to the hushed conversations and quiet sobs. The workers turned when he walked by and gave him familiar smiles and nods, both to him and what he carried in his arms.
A pineapple.
They had found Aggi. Actually, he had found Aggi, though found is a not the word he would use. She had knocked on his door, wearing different clothes than the ones she had been last seen in, a little over a month and a half earlier. But the clothes were still dirty and tattered and too big for her- especially after she had lost so much weight.
He had wrapped her in a hug and that was when he knew how much she had been shivering. When he finally pulled away (after noticing that she had done nothing to return his hug), she had looked at him with those cool, light eyes and asked, "who are you?"
He brought her inside, just as those eyes started darting back and forth, back and forth. Her breathing picked up and her hands gripped the table he had maneuvered her to so hard that Jim was surprised the table wasn't breaking.
"I don't know who you are," she said. "I don't even know who I am." Her voice was soft and sad. It made Jim's heart break.
"Your name is Aggi. I'm Jim, your brother," Jim said. "You call me Jimbo. Now do you remember?"
She shook her head. "I'm so sorry," she said and Jim ignored the tears running down her face.
He hugged her again and rubbed the back of her head. "It's fine, you've been through a lot." He pulled back to get a good look at her. One eye looked as if it had been swollen shut, she was dirty and grimy, and her face had a couple of old cuts on it.
"Is there anything I can get you? Maybe some food or something to drink?
Aggi turned around and eyed the kitchen. In a bowl, there were some fruits that her eyes hungrily latched on to. Jim got up and brought the bowl to her. She pointed to a pineapple, her favorite food.
Jim smiled and picked the pineapple out of the bowl to cut up. He hadn't had the heart to eat it while Aggi was missing, but now it was time to celebrate. He couldn't help but think that everything would be okay- go back to normal.
It wasn't going to be okay. Things would never go back to normal.
Aggi had eaten two pieces of pineapple cubes when her eyes rolled to the back of her head. Jim didn't own a car, but he gingerly picked her up, fireman style, and ran her to the nearest hospital (which admittedly wasn't far). She had been admitted and while she eventually did physically recover, mentally she never recovered to the state she had been. Even the broken state she had been in that lonely afternoon was a far cry better.
As he further neared the end of the hallway, his steps began to echo off the buildings. It was a lonely sound, but he was used to it. Aggi was, all in all, a lonely girl. Now twenty-two, she hadn't been outside for more than two hours since she was twelve years old.
Every now and again, she would remember the day she came home. They considered that good days. Sometimes, in a blue moon, she would remember something from before she was taken. They considered that a miracle. She never remembered what happened while she was gone.
All they knew is that whatever happened, she had been driven mad.
They had learned enough to know that she did not bring herself home that day. She had been driven to the apartment, and carefully guided by someone to Jim's room. She couldn't remember who had guided her, only the fact that they had never taken their hand off of her shoulder.
She still screamed whenever anyone touched her left shoulder, even just a passing brush.
Today wasn't a miracle. It wasn't even a good day. She smiled when Jim walked in, but it was because of the pineapple held in his arms. She loved pineapples. She still loved pineapples. It was the only thing about Aggi that had remained remotely the same.
She held out her arms, but Jim turned to a small table and cut it up into cubes. Then he pulled a chair closer to her bed. Her room was dark grey, with yellow items and light wood furniture. Her lamp by her bed was a light yellow, as were her comforters and sheets.
Once by her bed, he took the plate and handed her the pineapple piece by piece. She eagerly took them and ate them, alternating between carefully bite by bite and ravaging it like a piranha. When she had eaten enough to be sufficiently full (not very many, as she had just eaten earlier that day), she cautiously allowed Jim to take her hand.
He stroked it, and she seemed to relax. If she didn't recognize her brother, she did recognize the man who came once a week and always brought pineapple. "How is everything, Aggi?" he asked her.
She shook her head. "My name isn't Aggi," she said.
Jim raised his eyebrows and said, "if your name isn't Aggi, then what is it?'
"Alta," she said. She then smiled and burst into a fit of giggles. "Alta, Atla, Atla!"
Jim held out the hand he was not using. "Well I'm Jimbo. Nice to meet you, Alta."
Aggi burst into a fit of giggles and poked him on the nose. Jim smiled and poked her on the nose back, causing her to giggle even more.
This wasn't what it had been like to have a twelve year old sister. But at some time, so long ago he couldn't even remember, this had been Aggi before she had been taken. Minus the new name, of course.
The moment was nice while it lasted, but abruptly stopped when Aggi shrieked. She turned to look at Jim in fear. "They're coming after me!"
"Who's coming after you?"
Aggi ignored his words as she continued to stare into his face, her eyebrows creased together. "They're flying in the air. I don't know what they want!"
Jim reached and grabbed her arms. "Aggi," he said, "what is coming after you."
Aggi's expression quickly morphed into one of hatred. "I'm Alta. Alta Hope! Don't you see them? They're flying in the air, like bees. We've got to get away. Come on, Jim!"
"Wait, Ag- Atla, what did you say?" Jim asked.
Aggi sighed in frustration. "I said, let's go, Jim! They're coming after us, and I'm not sure what you're thinking, but you don't have your head on right. What would mom and dad say if they saw you, standing there like an idiot?"
"Alta, what's my last name?"
And Aggi rolled her eyes and sighed in a way that anyone would sigh at their older brother. "Morales. Don't tell me you have a concussion." She grabbed his hand. "Come on! We have to go!"
Jim smiled and felt hope rise up in his chest. She had never remembered his- their last name before, though her going by this 'Atla' would never be encouraging. She had gone by 'Alta' before. 'Hope' was the most common last name, with 'Surf' being a close second.
He smiled and shook his head as he watched Aggi calm down slightly, sinking back down into her bed, but not before reaching over to grab a piece of pineapple. "It tastes good," she mumbled, licking her fingers.
"I know it does," he said, ruffling her hair. That was a risky move, in and of itself, because half the time she would lean in to it and half the time she would try to eat his hand.
However, this time, she did none of the above. She stayed still, following his arm with her eyes. He leaned in a little closer, and decided to take a risk.
"Where are you right now?" he asked in a whisper.
She didn't respond at first, she continued to watch his forearm instead. Slowly, she lifted her gaze to meet his.
"Here is different."
"Now what do you mean by that?"
Aggi stared at him. "I mean it's different."
"Can you tell me some of the ways that makes here different than there?" Jim asked.
"There is air there," she said, "but you don't breath it."
Jim tried not to stare at her. He really did. She was his sister and he loved her, no matter what she said. He even knew she was crazy, she had known it for almost ten years now. But she had always been a different sort of crazy: switching between acting like the twelve year old she had been and the twenty-one year she was now, creating a new personality for herself, eating pineapple and not remembering him.
Jim could understand all of that. He was used to it, had been for years now. But now, this was different. A different type of crazy. She had never spoken in riddles before.
"What do you mean?"
She turned away. "There is water that is never wet."
She was trying, he could tell that. Her fists were clenched and there was a strain in her voice. But he wasn't wherever she was, and he didn't think she could ever be.
"I have to go now. There's a penkak silat class I need to teach. I love you, Aggi."
He walked out of the room, leaving the pineapple, before he could hear her objections to being called Aggi. Because she was Aggi. His sister. Not some Alta.
And then, as he walked, his mind wandered, and as wandering minds sometimes do, it put the pieces together. Somewhere with water that is never wet.
Water that is never wet.
Halfway down the hall, Jim stopped.
His sister was thinking about something she had never mentioned before. Somewhere that he had been but had tried to put out of his mind, and had been trying for many, many years.
Lyoko.