Hostage Situation
Authored by: SeeMeInTheShadows
Summary: The thing about the Della Robbia family is that they are very large and very rich. This presents a problem for Aelita when she is kidnapped and held for ransom and none of them has ever heard of her before.
Pairing: None (Odd/Aelita family interactions). Maybe a few hints of other pairings, but nothing official or worse than it is on the TV show.
Rating: T for violence and to be on the safe side
Disclaimer: I do not own neither Code Lyoko nor the definitions of the words below. I claim no ownership and this story is for entertainment purposes only.
A/N: This is brought up by a conversation at Xana's Lair, though the conversation had nothing to do with hostage situations, only Aelita's identity. Also, I feel as if this is an original fic. If you know another one that is similar to this, it is not intended to copy. I will be posting another story based off this conversation soon. This is my first story on this account, I am not the usual story poster here.
A/N2: All definitions are from dictionary . com unless otherwise stated by me. This is more like a prologue. Things start happening towards the end, and in future chapters. I just felt like establishing some background information around the Della Robbia family since they play a crucial part in this.
Hostage: a person given or held as security for the fulfillment of certain conditions or terms, promises, etc., by another.
Situation: the state of affairs; combination of circumstances.
Kidnap: to steal, carry off, or abduct by force or fraud, esp. for use as a hostage or to extract ransom.
If you asked any Della Robbia to describe his or her family as a whole, they would smile first and lose focus, as if just thought of the family brought memories of joy strong enough for the one who is remembering to lose awareness of the present.
You might wonder what they are thinking of. That depends on the person. It might be the grandfather of the person in question letting him or her sit on his lap as he read a story. It might the holiday traditions that they celebrate every year. It might be a particular game played with cousins or how they helped each other get through a hard time.
Or it might be the food, as one particular Della Robbia at a particular boarding school loved. Of course, he also loved the whole family things, but really, they made the best food.
The Della Robbias were huge, with many of them in different countries. They all had a few things in common: their love of food and their loud mouths. Most also had the tendency to not really think before acting and ended up spreading rumors without the full story.
This caused problems, as each one of them sometimes heard a different version of the same event. As a result, they really didn't know much about their ancestors. One late grandfather could have been a poor country boy who made his living by farming in one version of a story, while the same man could have been an exiled prince on a different side of the world who was lucky enough to escape the country with his fortune at nightfall in a different version. And these were both told by the same person.
If you started getting cousins and aunts and uncles involved the you couldn't tell truth from fiction.
Because they all suffered from an identity problem and lived all over the world, they just decided to be every ethnicity that they could, and they were pretty sure that by now, enough countries had mixed in for them to rightfully say so. Names changed too as people got married or decided Della Robbia was too troubling for a name. There were some people that showed up at every reunion who the majority of the family wasn't quite sure that they were really related.
They didn't really care though. They just brought all types of food, told all types of family tails and passed everything they did off as some sort of cultural tradition or another. They were a crazy family who really didn't care for rules. Some were convicts on the run, some were politicians and police. The only things that was a known fact was that they were prone to switching where they came from, they were a huge family, and somehow, they all ended up with a huge inheritance (whether or not all the money was legally gained is still a mystery).
This diversity could be a blessing or a curse. For Odd, it made it hard to figure out who his cousin was and who wasn't his cousin, which meant that he had to ask Jeremy to get a full family tree of every girl in Kadic and some of the surrounding school (thank goodness there weren't a lot of Della Robbias running around in France). But it also made it very easy to hide a new cousin in the mix, so when the question came up as to how Aelita was going to hide and create a new identity, Odd had the perfect solution.
So Aelita became Odd's cousin, even though she wasn't, and no one noticed or cared. They had it so that Odd's parents were to be contacted in emergencies and all other official business went to a box at the post office Jeremy had set up where they would take care of all business, not that there was a lot. Between the four of her friends, they had managed to somehow get enough money to pay for Kadic, though it had been relatively for Jeremy to make it look as though all the money was there, even when some of it wasn't.
It seemed like the perfect solution to a big problem, and it was. Until one day.
The day in question was a stormy, spring day.
Aelita held a jacket above her head to avoid the rain as much as she could as she ran towards the school. "Stupid notebook…" she muttered darkly to herself.
She had jotted down notes down carefully in it for the past few months, making sure that they were neat and easily readable, and now that she had a test coming up, she needed it to study she had left it sitting on the desk.
She walked into the dark, deserted school building with her eyes flicking at every sound and movement. The lightning made the shadows appear and disappear, as if they were moving. Aelita's walk turned into a sprint as she grabbed the notebook and without looking at anything but her path, turned around and ran back towards the dorms.
Odd's and Ulrich's dorm had turned into the unofficial hangout zone of the Lyoko Warriors. While Jeremy's room was great for meeting to discuss Xana since it had the computer, Odd and Ulrich had the biggest collection of things to do.
As she ran back through campus, Aelita longed for the warmth and the light that their room would provide. How it would feel cozy and secluded thanks to the storm raging outside. How being with her friends would make her wish the storm lasted forever and she never had to leave, only to be disappointed when it did.
Finally, she ducked inside the dorm building and ran up to the boys' floor. Smiling, she stood in front of the door she knew belonged to her two friends and in which the rest were inside. She raised her hand to knock, only to feel it grabbed by one hand as the other arm wrapped around her and pulled her away. Her notebook fell to the ground with a soft thunk.
Another set of arms quickly stuffed a gag into her mouth before she could scream. Aelita struggled ferociously against the people trying to capture her. She didn't know if this was Odd's and Ulrich's idea of a prank, because it was not funny. If it was them, she planned to give them a piece of her mind and maybe stop talking to them for a while.
"Aelita Stones?" a voice from someone behind her asked. Her heart sunk. She didn't recognize the voice.
He turned her around so he could look at her. He was wearing a ski mask and it would have been funny if Aelita wasn't so terrified. "Are you Aelita Stones?" he repeated.
She didn't answer, but the look in her eye was all he needed as a confirmation. "We got her," he said to his accomplice and before she could react, Aelita's eyes were blindfolded and she was lead away, still struggling unsuccessful and unable to make a sound.
A/N: Please, please, please review!
