Disclaimer: I don't own Code Lyoko!

Title: Someone To Talk To In the Middle of the Night

Summary: Odd and Ulrich (Odd especially) are really lucky to share a dorm.

Warnings: Mentions of blood, wounds, and bones. No shipping.

...

"Hurry up, Odd." Ulrich hisses anxiously, peering around the corner and into the schoolyard beyond, his body the picture of nonchalance.

Odd pouts, leash hanging around his wrist. "I can't help that Kiwi gets cooped up in the dorms."

"Shoulda brought a cat, then." He mumbles under his breath, amongst other horrid things, turning away. "He's tiny. Can't he just run around?"

"It's not his size; it's the closed-in factor. How would you feel, trapped in a small room with no escape?"

Ulrich gives him a blank look. "Odd, we do that every single day."

Odd remembers the scanners with a shudder. Those few seconds between entering and virtualization are always a bit on the cramped side. "Alright, you got me there. But Kiwi is lucky; he doesn't have to do that."

Speaking of, his little angel pulls on the leash with a growl, the fur on his spine rising. He starts barking.

"Odd!" Ulrich yelps, striding over, but he has him in his arms before he can do anything.

"Ssh ssh ssh." He soothes, then spares the boy a glance. "See, what I tell you? Antsy."

"Yeah, well, he's gonna get us caught." Ulrich's shoulders are hitched aggressively, but Odd knows, with deep certainty, that he won't hurt him.

"I knew you cared." He laughs, passing him into the boy's unwilling arms. "Let me go see what set him off."

"Probably just another dog." Ulrich shifts Kiwi to his side, ignoring the creature's wriggling. "If he pees on me, I'm gonna shave him."

Odd pulls aside the bushes with a cry of protest, which quiets immediately. "Oh."

"What?"

"We're close to the sewers. The smell must've tripped his trigger."

"Ah."

"I keeping telling you, Ulrich, he's smarter than he looks."

"I should hope so. Let's get inside, before Jim checks in on us."

They have a system.

Jim checks in on them by the hour, if he's in a suspicious mood. If they're not preoccupied, or stashed away in Jeremie's room, they take up the positions of slumbering boys their age and wait for him to pass. Ulrich, who's always been a bit of an insomniac, tends to fall asleep over a piece of homework that's of better use as a pillow than a grade, and Odd tends to run off coffee and adrenaline on a good day anymore, so they're usually awake. Kiwi, like the trained little pup he is, curls up in the small of one of their back's, away from the door, and tries not to make any noise.

Odd is always a little surprised when he picks his bed to hide in. Being his dog aside, a samurai is much better protection than a cat, albeit an amazing and powerful cat.

Maybe that's it, then. He knows Kiwi is at least a little aware of the virtualization process. He sneezes when they first come back from a mission; they probably reek of computer and cherry soda. And, well, whatever evil supercomputers smell like. He's not one for strangers picking him up, but Odd'll be darned if Kiwi didn't crawl right into Aelita's arms and curl up the first night, like her smell was something he'd long memorized. He barks at the sewers, when he's not racing through them in pursuit, as though they've insulted him greatly.

Odd has always said Kiwi is smarter than he looks.

Maybe he smells, on Ulrich, the sharp scent of metal; hears the clashing of steel in his words; sees the battlefields in his eyes. Maybe he finds Odd to be slightly less frightening company in the small hours of the night.

But, then, he wouldn't hide behind Ulrich when Odd is yelling at him, if that were the case. So maybe not.

Odd's letters to his family have become increasingly vague.

Oh, sure, he'll tell them about school, or a prank he pulled- omitting certain details, of course, such as just how much trouble said prank got him in-, what was for lunch. That type of thing. It's questions like "Are you okay?" and "How are you feeling?" that get him stumped.

Ulrich doesn't write to his parents. Odd can't tell if that's better or worse.

The last really long letters he remember writing were about Aelita. He remembered how guilty, and how proud, he'd felt, dropping them into the mail slot. Some of them had been written long prior, and given the time to age, as though he had been struggling for some time on whether or not he should send them. They'd told of a 'friend' he'd made, and how they had recently admitted to being a runaway from an abusive home, and how he wanted to help them. Could he claim they were related, to throw the police off the trail?

They said yes, of course. They were all about protecting those in danger. It starts rubbing off, after a while.

So Aelita is his cousin now. She might as well be his sister. But, then again, he finds he respects her more than he does his sisters.

Odd tosses and turns like a fish out of water, whereas Ulrich impatiently pets Kiwi, who's fled to the protection of his belly to escape getting rolled on. For a guy so short-tempered, he sure pets the little guy carefully.

"I can't sleep." He says finally, settling in on his back. "Do you think Yumi got home okay?"

"She's Yumi. She can take care of herself." Ulrich grunts, but it's a tad less deep-pitched than normal.

"Yeah, but it's late. And she was all by herself."

The thought of their friend getting gunned down in a neighborhood like hers is a bit far-fetched, but the life they live is far-fetched. Anything can happen. Anyone could die, anytime.

"Nobody'd be stupid enough to try it." He says, a beat too late. "She had her phone."

The relaxes him slightly. It's gotten to the point that he carries phone and charger on him everywhere. He's even gotten a waterproof bag to keep it in while he's showering.

"Hey, Ulrich? You don't this hero stuff'll drive us insane, do you?"

"If it does, it does." Ulrich replies, but there's a certain tenseness to his shoulders. "Being insane is probably the best way to be."

Ulrich's a good friend.

It may not always seem that way. Yeah, he's short and sometimes mean in how he talks, and he's not always there for him, no matter what the TV tells you; he's the best roommate Odd's ever had. He's grateful he has someone he can talk to, and even more grateful that he doesn't have to keep Lyoko on the down low in the place he's supposed to feel the most relaxed. He can only imagine how Yumi and Aelita feel; Yumi alone in her own home, with her own family, and Aelita the only one of them living in the girl's dorm. Both of whom are routinely forced to sleep in his or Jeremie's dorm when wounded, rather than just lounge around and moan in agony where they feel like it.

He's glad he was someone willing to sneak him back to their room while he's nursing a busted knee, is what he's saying.

"Pain killers?" Ulrich offers, setting him on the edge of his bed, and, yeah, those sound pretty good right now. Normally they try to avoid using them, acting as though it's some sort of manliness contest, when really it's just a useless attempt at saving supplies, but he's fairly sure he can see bone poking out of his kneecap. Pain meds sound great right now.

"Please."

Ulrich grabs a bottle out from the far back of their dresser and opens it. Much like Kiwi, they're not supposed to have them; there had been a school-wide manhunt when they'd gone missing, even, but they're crafty. All they'd had to do was memorize schedules and pass them off when the teachers went trekking through their part of the dorm. Yumi kept them the majority of the time, but had been forced to send them into the bushes via an open window when her parents began to suspect her involvement.

Once was difficult. Twice is gonna be a bit complicated. Odd has stated, on numerous occasions, that they should just hold up a pharmacy, but Jeremie says that would bring too much attention on the town.

Ulrich pulls his shirt off, exposing a mighty impressive gut wound that he takes with stride. With a pain tolerance as high as that, Odd thinks, they might just win a game of Russian Roulette.

"Pain killers?" Odd quips. Ulrich glances down, then seems to just realize it's there, despite pressing a hand against it the whole way back.

"It's shallow." He states, with the sort of tone that says it isn't.

Odd doesn't fight him on it, because they both know they'll be perfectly healed in the morning. Turning yourself into pixels once a week has its upsides; like good healing.

(Maybe that's why he sneezes, he thinks. He can tell they aren't real anymore.)

He lays down, ignoring the throbbing agony as he does so. Ulrich does the same.

"Hey, Ulrich?"

"Hmm."

"Do you think this could turn us into monsters? Being lab rats, I mean."

"'Course not. We don't have any horns or wings. Not even claws."

Always so literal, at least when he's avoiding a point. "I mean, like, X.A.N.A. Trying to take over the world. Will that be us?"

"We know we'd lose." He rumbles.

"And if we forget?"

"Then, if we're lucky, somebody'll kill us before we do any harm."

"Is that luck?"

"It's our luck."

Ulrich rolls over. Onto the wound, he notices. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight."

Odd stares at the ceiling and thinks about monsters the rest of the night. He watches as his skin visibly mends.

Author's Note: This started out as some sort of roommates and their dog sort of deal but it ended in such a weird sort of way. Sort of angst, sort of supernatural, etc. Mostly I just wanted to experiment with Odd; it's hard to get his character just right, and I see a lot of fanfics make him either stupid or a crybaby. I wanted to see if I could do a bit better.

-Mandaree1