2007
The courtyard Kadic Lycée, France
7:34 a.m.
The phone was ringing.
"Yumi," William said, and she felt her heart sink to her gut in one fell drop. A bit childishly, she refused to look up from the review book in her hands. She only dipped her head more, her hair falling around her face.
"Not now," she muttered, creasing her brow. To her side, William laughed a little (a little too brightly) and Yumi stifled the urge to glare. She knew as soon as she heard William's phone beeping just a second ago, but she refused to believe it. The book quivered in her grip. She righted the bookmark—a scraggly note on wrinkled paper.
Ganbatte! Bonne chance, Yumi!
No, she thought archly, not good luck.
"Yes, now," William said, as if she was being silly. He gently prised the book out of her hands, snapping it shut with a finality that left her near-fuming. "Ask Jeremy how serious it is."
"We should have turned off our phones," she said as she drew hers out. The grimace remained. "Exam rules."
"You don't mean that."
"You're just happy that we don't have to take the bac now," she accused, leveling a finger at him. The smile he flashed her was tenacious.
Yumi knew it was hardly just his reluctance to take the exam—it was, as always, William's grim desire to take on XANA at full-throttle, every chance he got. It was almost tiring to watch. It was all tiring. The recent string of attacks had occurred in rapid succession, and Jeremy was skipping every class to localize the issue, to smoke XANA's plan out. Even before that, the last few months had been plagued by close calls and near-death experiences at every turn.
The conclusion was unspoken: XANA was getting stronger. It had been a very long time since opposing him was simple adventure. Now it was crushing duty, an all-consuming void that drew the Lyoko Warriors in tight and dizzied them fiercely every time they just-barely-escaped.
It left little precious time for Yumi to study for the baccalauréat. And now, before the doors of the exam, not twenty minutes from it, Yumi and William were being pulled away again. Her fingers went straight to her mouth as she texted with the other hand, her finger-tapping borderline frenzied.
"Hey, calm down," he said easily, and she ducked her head and tapped harder. Jeremy wasn't being very reassuring on the other end. Hurry to the factory. Get U & O. Aelita's here.
Hurry.
Hurry.
"There will be another chance to take it," he went on. His hand settled on her shoulder. "It'll be fine."
She wanted to believe him very badly.
2009
An office in the underground sectors of Fort Meade, Maryland
11:51 a.m.
"So you feel you're doing well?"
"Yes." He drummed his fingers on the arm chair, restless. "We're all doing great."
"Good, good." She nodded, and made some infuriating notes, and for the fifth time the eighteen year-old boy reflected on how much he hated her accent on his native tongue.
Doctor Helen Ropford was a woman in her late thirties, her face pulled tight and her teeth laboriously dyed to shine. The limitless effort she put into her appearance reminded Ulrich of Sissi, except that Sissi's look was perky and pretty. Doctor Ropford was a sorry attempt at a motherly look, no doubt meant to throw her patients (victims) off their guard.
She was the one maternal presence in all of Fort Meade, as far as Ulrich knew, but she provided zero comfort to any of the Lyoko Warriors. Especially Ulrich, who felt like she was a more aggressive substitute for the diary-writing he had to give up years ago, something bent on eating up his every secret.
Fortunately for everyone, his feeling was more or less accurate. He much preferred the rough interrogations at the beginning of the ordeal to the padded cushions that arrested him, the perfume-filled office that oppressed his senses, the searching look in her eyes that was unmistakable accusation behind a thin veil of sympathy.
"Have you been hearing from your family?" she asked, her voice insidious silk, a poor go at kindliness. But Ulrich knew talking about his family was safer than talking about his friends, and less affecting, so he veered off with that tangent.
"Sort of. My father is still sick." Though not the most pressing matter in his life by far, his dad's sickness did cross his mind from time to time, and especially on letter Tuesdays. Dr. Ropford gave him the falsest smile of sympathy he'd ever seen, and he swallowed his distaste. She leafed through the notes attached to the clipboard, and he eyed her busy hands rather than look at her face.
"I'm sorry to hear that. If I remember correctly, you did mention at one point that you had trouble with him as you were growing up." Ulrich felt her eyes on him, and he despised the thought he knew she had. It was all ignorant psychobabble crack theories to him—she was theorizing that he'd become a terrorist because of daddy issues.
Daddy issues, he could accede, in part.
Terrorist—he was getting sick of the word.
These therapy sessions were like all the Mexican standoffs in Odd's dumb action movies. Neither side ever made any ground, but the room was rumbling with tension. They were worse in the sense that they were so dishonest; at least with a gun barrel directed at his throat, the antipathy was straightforward. Dr. Ropford and many officials in the base pretended that they all shared a side, that they were all working towards the same goal, that Ulrich and his friends were not detained for distrust.
They pretended that they wanted to help, and that things like psychotherapy sessions were ways to heal his obvious psychological scars and not artifices to filch information. After all this time, it was clear that the U.S. government still thought that Ulrich and his friends were hiding something, and that they were working against the greater good. Worse, the U.S. government still thought that they were careless enough, callow enough, child enough, to let something big slip within their walls.
In that laid the impasse, the stand-off. The Lyoko Warriors—the ones that were left—held their tongues.
They held their tongues, but they tolerated the questions, and they tolerated the military escorts, and they pretended not to notice the wiretaps and the thorough measures that the government took not to trust them. The handful of French children, at eighteen to nineteen years old, had made trust between the two groups inoperable. They'd done so since 8th grade, and they hadn't dropped the whole puzzle into plain sight just yet.
Now that their sacred ground had been burnt to a crisp,their solidarity and their secrets were all the sanctitude the Lyoko Warriors had left.
They were outmanned and outpowered in vast measure. Ulrich remembered Yumi's directions—to adopt a position of outright hostility towards their captors and sponsors, regardless of all the embittering things they've done, would be stupid and dangerous. If they hid their fangs and played nice, if not a little stupid, Ulrich and his friends would be permitted the benefits—college classes, respectable rooms, contact with each other, letters from home. Of course, all this meant they'd have to stay on guard even more. Everyone, everyone, was waiting for them to trip up.
His eyes fell on the doctor's watch. Eight minutes. He only had to suffer through these sessions for two hours every month, but the seconds creaked by at a maddening speed. The only thing keeping him settled was the thought of collecting the day's letters from home and finding Yumi.
"Ulrich?" The woman's voice rattled his ears. "Your father?"
"Uh, troubles growing up…? Yeah, I guess so."
Lacking Odd and William's breezy exuberance, or Yumi's steadfast sharpness and wit, Ulrich probably appeared to be the emotionally weak link in the group. He was always sullen and quiet, whereas Odd and William cheerfully and slyly talked circles around every person in the base.
He wasn't sure, but he could just imagine that Dr. Ropford took special pleasure in his sessions with her. Or, not quite pleasure, but the pleasing knowledge that he held answers and might spill them if she prodded just right.
"Did I mention that?" he continued. "Well, they diagnosed him. Cancer in the liver."
"How do you feel about that?"
He stared at her. What was she expecting him to say with a question like that? That he was overjoyed, so she could pin him as a psychopath, so she could classify all of his friends as more sinister a force than they were currently regarded as?
Ulrich and his friends weren't sure, but they had a feeling that in the last few months, as XANA's attacks had apparently come to a suspicious standstill, the government had stepped up surveillance on the Lyoko Warriors. First, they were enemies, terrorists, then stupid, selfish children, then begrudged allies—at that time, the blame and the suspicion had worn down just slightly—then advisors and test subjects, lab rats, and finally, all this fuss. They were going full circle.
And nobody told them anything about XANA anymore.
He stuttered with a slow response. "Devastated." Maybe there wasn't enough feeling in that. It was hard to feel when it came to his dad. Still, he didn't want to forsake the safe conversational territory.
"Devastated, of course."
He stared at her hands.
2009
The one martial arts training room in Fort Meade, Maryland
12:16 a.m.
"Hiiiiiiiiiiyah!"
Ulrich entered the room as soon as a man went whirling into one of the mats on the wall. A clean throw. Face plant. Ulrich whistled.
Maybe he didn't have to worry about himself. What would really make the government take them as foes at face value was if Yumi kept battering their soldiers in supposedly friendly spars. He snuck a glance at her, breathing heavily, stanced to kick a face in. Like him, she probably had some frustrations to work off, and they manifested on the floor of the training room.
Her sparring partner was smiling, though. He drew away from the wall and stood up with a wobble. Ulrich recognized him instantly—Staff Sergeant John Kriggs, who was the person that generally accompanied Yumi when she left the base for college. He was supposed to watch her, which made him a natural enemy, but for whatever reason, he and Yumi had become fast friends. Ulrich wondered how he was supposed to be making sure Yumi didn't do anything disingenuous if he couldn't even best her in a fight, but Ulrich knew by now that besting Yumi in a fight was… well.
Evidently, at least the spar was enough to make her work up a sweat. She was rubbing her face into a towel when she looked up and saw Ulrich standing in the doorway. John came over, too, and nodded his hello.
Ulrich didn't like him much. He was assigned to watch Yumi because of a few measly years of French classes, although he and Yumi mostly spoke English to each other. John had was a young vet, sturdy and given to his orders, and seemingly proud of the battle scars that marred the left side of his handsome face. All of Ulrich's would-be scars had vanished in the returns to the past.
Besides that, his presence meant he wasn't alone with Yumi, and how was he supposed to work off his frustrations otherwise? He took a deep breath, keeping his words casual and his tone curt.
"Aren't you guys supposed to not do this?" He said, gesturing around the room. The underlying question, directed at the American, was don't you have something else to be doing? It was enough that he followed Yumi around outside of the base.
"Don't see the harm in it," John said. "I was a little rusty, anyway."
Yumi gave him a look. "Excuses," she said, a teasing lilt to her voice.
"No, no, for a tiny Asian girl, you really pack a punch, too." He laughed and cracked his neck. He and Yumi shared a look, and Ulrich felt something ache with a diluted burn but the feeling was too fleeting to give action to it.
Yumi spoke up, then.
"Did you get the letters from upstairs?" she asked, and Ulrich nodded, handing hers over. The Americans did not permit phone calls or internet contact with anyone, but letters to and from home were allowed, so long as the officers (and codebreakers, Ulrich suspected) were allowed to go over them. So the letters had already been opened, and resealed as a formality.
Since the Lyoko Warriors hadn't been convicted as terrorists, and since they were French citizens, and since their detainers tried to construe their detainment as a partnership, they were allowed certain rights and privileges, but each one seemed fragile, as if they could be stripped away on the basis of bad behavior. So each Lyoko Warrior took the bearing of an angel, even Odd.
In the same vein, they allowed Yumi to go to a nearby college and take classes. William, Odd and Ulrich figured their lives were inexorably tied to the extraordinary now, and thus education was pretty useless. Leave it to Yumi to bravely continue on, responsible and enduring, through the school system. The boys stayed inside the base most of the time, because getting express permission to leave was a pain, as was walking around town with another, bigger man perpetually within a three-foot radius.
As a result, they were rife with free time. But it was exhausting to be; they were forever on their toes, yet unable to do anything, really. It was mind-numbing boredom. It was being sentenced to a corner to think on what they've done. Nobody asked them for their opinions on XANA, for information on XANA, for tactics on XANA. Nobody hooked them up to strange machines to test them. Though they were still seen as a potential threat or nuisance, nobody saw the use in them anymore—they just wanted the last piece of the puzzle, the trump card.
What a misguided goal.
Yumi held the letters in her hands but didn't open them. Ulrich hadn't looked at his, either, though he knew by the addresses on the envelope that it was from his mother. He held the other letters in hand, too. William's, Odd's. From what Ulrich could tell, they were strangely supportive despite the initial stigma that their children were cyberterrorists. Yumi and Ulrich's familial situations were a little more tricky. But the most important letter was in Yumi's hands.
"I was thinking we go deliver these to the resident whiners," Ulrich said, nodding his head towards the door.
"Yeah, good idea. They'll be happy." She took a step after him, paused, and turned to John as an afterthought. He'd been wiping his face with a towel, too, which now hung around his broad shoulders. He'd obviously been listening in, too—everyone was always listening in. Their conversations were always innocuous, always petty, trivial things, as if they hadn't gone to war themselves.
"Bye, sir."
"No, you can call me John. It's been over half a year now, Miss Ishiyama."
"Really?" she blinked at him. "John. Thanks for today."
"No, that was fun," he replied. He waved as Ulrich tugged Yumi into the hallway by the wrist.
( So this is Reprise de la Bataillewhich is a work in progress? Like, this is the beta 1st chapter, which was actually supposed to go farther but I wanted to post it and maybe come back to work on it later (with help?) This is a future fic, so the kids are like 18 or 19 now, and it's set without anything from Evolution except for maybe that William is back with them. I thought the ideas I had were pretty cool so I got around to writing them, but I'm not sure if the execution is right or if there are plot holes or who's ooc and whatnot. Is it repetitive? Does it make sense? I really want to write a serious CL fic!
Anyway, notes:
Kadic Lycée- the high school
Ganbatte! Bonne chance, Yumi! - "Do your best!" in Japanese and "Good luck, Yumi!" in French (it's from Ulrich ha ha ha sob)
le bac/baccalauréat- the test that you take to get into college
Fort Meade- A U.S. military base that specializes in counter cyber terrorism (I think)
Well, thanks for reading!