Author's Note: Originally an Ulrich/Aelita oneshot, I realized about halfway through the writing process that this functioned much better as a brother/sister-type thing instead of an overtly romantic fic. I guess the moral of the story is that I ship these two characters in literally any capacity. Let me know how you think it turned out.
"Jeremie said I'd do what?"
The question left his mouth before he could think better of it, and he mentally kicked himself as he stood there dreading her reply. But Aelita was unfazed.
"He said that you'd show me how to swim," she chirped, her emerald eyes shimmering with glee. Her pink hair bobbed and caught on the sunlight as she hopped once in place, her bare feet spreading sand out and around her as she appeared barely capable of containing herself at the prospect.
"Good idea, princess," a blonde annoyance interjected from somewhere behind them. He didn't have to look to know that it was Odd standing there, his scrawny body stuffed into a pair of orange swim trunks and holding an unused frisbee in his hands. "Ulrich will teach you how to swim, and you can teach him how to smile every once in a while!"
Ulrich darted around in order to aim a well-placed glare at Odd, his scowl deepening as he fired back, "Hey, I know how to smile."
"You're not smiling now," Aelita countered pointedly.
Odd stifled a laugh, snorting from behind the face of his plastic disc as he avoided another life-ending stab from Ulrich's death-dark irises. Turning back around, he sighed inwardly at the sight of the young girl waiting patiently before him, her eager eyes glistening with neon-green elation like sparkling lights on a Christmas tree. It was Aelita's first time visiting a beach, and she had been obnoxiously psyched about it the whole afternoon thus far. Even on the train ride over she had been bouncing off of the walls of the car like a child on adderall, her usually wondering, wandering gaze doubly wondering and triply wandering as the day progressed. Asking questions regarding anything and everything as the city gave way to the shore, with Jeremie calmly and happily braving the brunt of her excitement for the duration of the trip. She couldn't wait to strip out of her t-shirt and shorts- much to the prodigy's flustered chagrin- so that she could exhibit the brand new one-piece swimsuit that she was wearing underneath. Yumi had helped her pick it out during one of their patented shopping-trips the weekend prior; of course it was pink.
"Not pink," she had corrected Ulrich matter-of-factly when he had decided to point it out to her. "The tag says 'fuschia.' I'm not that cliché."
"Remind me again why Einstein can't be the one to do this?"
"He's busy working on a new program," she answered, her beaming, innocent smile never-fading. "If it works, it'll increase the scanner speeds by almost five percent."
He sighed deeply- outwardly this time- and resigned himself to his fate, mulling fruitlessly over whether or not five percentage points was worth the headache that this was going to cost him later. Math had never been Ulrich's strongest subject, but it didn't take a genius to figure out that the answer was a resounding no. "Okay. Let's get this over with."
"Don't sound too excited about it," she giggled as they walked, his feet dragging as he lead her to the water.
"I'm not," he muttered mindlessly, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his cargo shorts. Catching his mistake, he bolted upright and stammered, "I-I mean I am. It's just that I was-... well, I was kinda planning on-... see, I thought I would try to spend some time with-..."
"Do you mean Yumi?"
Ulrich felt his face flush crimson, flicking his gaze off and away from Aelita in a futile attempt to regain his composure but unconsciously landing on the girl of his dreams instead. Yumi Ishiyama sat cross-legged beneath the gentle shadow of a beach umbrella, her athlete's body clad in a jet-black, form-fitting swimsuit that matched her ebony locks and contrasted starkly with her pale, golden complexion. Glancing up nonchalantly from the book that she was reading, she smiled faintly when she caught him looking and waved.
In response, his skin only burned hotter with blood. "Is it really that obvious?"
"You've only been staring at her all day," she teased, her grin widening as his blush brightened. "You may be quiet, Stern, but you're about as subtle as a brick."
"Well, who asked you, anyway?" he grumbled, kicking up mud as he stepped into the drink.
"You did," she needled slyly. "Just now."
"Look, do you wanna learn how to swim or not?"
Aelita only smirked, her silence speaking volumes as she raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms over her chest in quiet anticipation. Ulrich took it as a yes.
"We'll start off slow," he said, signalling for her to follow. Before long they were standing waist-deep in the cooling waves, and Aelita's smug confidence had begun to erode ever-so slightly as the water licked at her hips. He did his best not to repay her teasing as he took her by the arms and guided her lower. "Bend down. Let your legs float up and your arms spread out."
She hesitated, physically flinching as the wake splashed at her back, her knees rising up to meet her face as she refused to let her feet leave the ocean-floor. Just when he thought that she might finally let her chin touch the water, she suddenly shot up with a splatter. "Wait," she blurted. "Humans are buoyant, right? I won't sink, will I?"
Ulrich blinked at her like she was crazy, his hands still resting awkwardly on her shoulders. "You're not going to sink, princess."
"But what if the materialization process was incomplete?"
"I don't see what that has to do with-..."
"What if I'm still partially virtualized? What if the part of my anatomy that keeps me buoyant is still stuck in my code somewhere on Lyoko? What if XANA implanted a virus in me that-...?"
"Aelita," he cut in, shaking her out of her rambling thoughts. His dark eyes burrowed into hers. "I'm not gonna let anything happen to you, okay? I'll be right here the whole time."
She looked at him for a while, her glimmering, verdant irises clashing with his own rugged, earthen stare.
"Well?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"Oh my God."
She let out a shrill eep as Ulrich pushed her abruptly down into the water, salty droplets splashing her tightly closed eyelids as she held her breath in startled reflex. When she opened her eyes again, she was pleasantly surprised to find that she was far from underwater, her head still mostly dry even as the spray soaked her neck. Even while relishing in the knowledge that she was still very much alive, she still took the time to fire off a nasty pout in the boy's direction.
"You're mean."
"I try."
He lowered himself in after her, sitting directly before her as he continued his lesson. "Now watch what I do. Let your feet off the ground and your arms splay out beside you. Push back and forth across the water with your hands."
She did as she was told, watching and waiting for a good long moment as she seemed to ponder his movements. Then she mimicked him, painfully slow as she allowed her body to rise up and off of the sandy floor, her arms swaying as she struggled to balance. When her head began to naturally recline into the water behind her, she gasped with fright and frantically chopped the wake with her hands.
"I was sinking," she told him fearfully.
"No, you weren't," he reassured her, resisting the impulse to roll his eyes. "That's just what happens when you lean back. Your head floats."
"Are you sure?"
"Positive."
"Alright," she breathed, trembling slightly. She tried again, this time only flinching when the back of her head hit the water. She paddled clumsily in place with open hands and her legs cycling daintily beneath the surface of the waves. "This is normal?"
"Totally normal." He swam around to one side of her and pushed his hands up and underneath the blades of her shoulders, keeping her from drifting too far backwards and away from the shore. He watched her kicking clumsily from his place positioned just behind her head, craning his neck to survey her progress and smiling bemusedly at the sight. "Well, maybe not 'normal.' But at least you're not drowning."
She shot another pouty glare back over her shoulder at him when she heard him chuckle, her face tinted an admittedly adorable amber.
Ulrich felt a twinge of regret like butterflies in his stomach, and he did his best to recompose himself as he cleared his throat in order to cover for another bout of laughter. "Just relax," he coaxed, squeezing her gently between his fingertips. "Try not to thrash around so much. Do long, smooth strokes."
Aelita nodded and focused on the reflective surface of the water, squinting slightly as she monitored her motions as though she were deciphering code on Lyoko. Her movements slowed and became more fluid, less erratic, and eventually she was paddling in place without his aid.
He made a show of releasing her from his grasp as he stood, cracking a prideful smile down at her splashing figure. "Hey, you got it. Great job."
She stuck her nose up at him and confidently closed her eyes, her regal mannerisms contrasting starkly with her predicament of barely keeping afloat in waist-high water. "Naturally."
"Ready to try it in a spot that's higher than your knees?"
Her expression was incredulous. "It gets deeper?"
She collapsed onto the shore with an exasperated gasp of effort that sounded more to him like a death rattle, her limbs spaced out like she was preparing to make angels in the sand. Ulrich had to fight with every fiber of his being not to snicker at the sight, crouching down alongside her with his knees draw halfway to his chest and his hands propping the rest of him squarely upright. He watched her chest rise and fall with each panting, desperate breath, and when she saw him grinning she shot him a look that would have given Sissi a run for her money.
"You're enjoying this too much," she snarled, though in her exhaustion it came out as more of a pitiful whine.
"Nah," he countered. "Just enough."
She sighed and slumped upwards until she had curled into a wet, shivering ball, watching as the waves licked the shoreline from behind matted bangs. The small, secluded alcove of beach that they had chosen for their rest sat nestled between a half-moon of dark, sea-drenched rocks, and Ulrich couldn't help but think fleetingly of how it might have been nice to have brought Yumi here instead.
"I suppose I should thank you."
He glanced at Aelita as she spoke, catching the subtle, pinkish flutter of her lips breathing through her curtain of magenta hair. The flatline of her mouth curled lightly into a smile, her pale skin colored faintly amber with the mild chill of the encroaching evening. "Jeremie is great with explanations and definitions, but I really appreciate being able to learn something practical for a change."
He felt his heart skip a beat when her green eyes met his, her grin spreading upwards and into the warm, sparkling breadth of her irises. It never failed to impress him how Aelita could smile at someone like that, with every ounce of herself loaded behind it.
"It's no big deal," he insisted, shrugging through the heat blossoming crimson on his cheeks. He quickly dismissed it as his thinking of Yumi. "You would've had to learn eventually, anyhow. Whether it was me, or Odd, or someone else."
Her nose crinkled subtly as though disappointed in something, but when Ulrich blinked it was gone and she was smiling at him once more. "Maybe you're right. But still. I'm glad it was you."
Ulrich blinked again, confusion scrawled across his brow in the form of terse, frowning lines. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Aelita shrugged, smirking almost smugly when she caught him glaring from out of the corners of her half-lidded gaze. "It means what it means," she retorted matter-of-factly.
He looked at her ponderously for a moment before he huffed and flopped backwards onto the sand. "Whatever," he grumbled.
They didn't speak for a long, quiet while, the sound of waves chattering and gulls screeching sifting in to fill the blank of silence. Aelita watched the sun dropping into the ocean beyond as Ulrich kept his eyes on the clouds drifting above.
"How come you never learned how to swim before?"
He asked her without meaning to, his thoughts spilling out of his lungs like stinging seawater.
"Well, it's not like I could just take a dip in the digital sea whenever I wanted to."
She laughed. It was a wry, hollow sound and not like her at all.
"If you don't want to talk about it," he snapped back a little more forcefully than he meant to, "just say so."
She paused, thoughtful. The seabreeze ran its salty fingertips through her hair and the sight made him shiver.
"My parents never taught me," she admitted eventually. "We lived in mountains and forests for most of my life, so it's not like I ever really needed to know. But there were lots of things like that. It just wasn't important to them like it was to me."
Ulrich cocked his head curiously, watching her face for movement. Her tone was uncharacteristically remorseful, her eyebrows knitted together in an almost resentful scowl. It reminded him of himself when he was thinking about his own family, and the thought struck a chord with him.
"You hold it against them, huh?" he pried.
"No," she said quickly, too quickly. She softened when she met his unerring gaze, honest and reconsiderate. "Yes. Sort-of. Is that wrong of me?"
He immediately shook his head. "No way. In fact, it's kinda right."
Her irises were scribbled over with confusion. "How so?"
He sat back up on his haunches so that he could look her in the eye, crossing his arms around folded knees as he spoke. "I mean... it would be weird if you didn't feel something like that. At least some of the time. You know what I mean?"
She kept on looking at him with that same quizzical expression.
"I guess it's hard to explain."
"Try."
"Like... when you really like someone, you shouldn't like them all the time. Not that you stop caring about them; you care a lot. So much so that it eats you up sometimes, like when they do something wrong or maybe fail you somehow. Like how I might hate my dad when he comes to the academy just to chew me out about my grades, even though deep down I know he's only doing it because he cares about me. Or how your parents never got to teach you how to swim, or other normal kid-stuff."
He paused and stared hard into her evergreen eyes, her gaze flickering as she registered his silence with a start. "It's probably because they were too busy working on other things, trying to keep you safe and happy. Like your dad with Lyoko. It doesn't mean you can't still be angry at them. It just means that you're human. Like the rest of us."
Aelita didn't realize that she had been holding her breath until he finally finished speaking. Her skin glistened softly with heat and her complexion mirrored the horizon. "Yeah," she mumbled, and she felt tears pricking at the backs of her eyelids like needles. "Yeah, I guess you're right."
He noticed her swiping at her auburn cheeks with the backs of her hands and assumed that she was probably tired of hearing him ramble. "That's how I figure it is between me and Yumi," he diverted, thinking that a change of focus might reclaim her interest. "Even though she drives me crazy sometimes, I still think that-... well, you know."
She wiped her eyes and swallowed her sorrow with a subtle clearing of her throat, recovering so covertly that he never even noticed her crying. When he glanced at her again, she was flashing him a smile so devious that she had to have learned it from watching Odd. "She likes you, you know," she sneered, rolling the word across her tongue like she was sharing something intimately private with him.
He turned suddenly and dangerously red as though he was signalling for all oncoming traffic to stop dead at the sight of him. "Yeah, right," he dismissed, doing his best to avoid her verdant orbs dissecting him like one of Miss Hertz's lab specimens. "What do you know?"
Aelita snickered, reveling in his anguish. "A lot more than you do, apparently."
Suddenly she stopped, lighting up like a matchstick as the sun finally dipped its edges down into the sea. "That's an idea," she said, beaming at him as though she had just discovered a defeater for XANA. "I'll teach you something."
Ulrich shifted in his seat upon the sand, choking down his desire to retort as an undeniable curiosity sprang up inside of him. "Teach me what?" he asked.
"How to talk to a girl."
"What?"
"We'll start off slow," she encouraged, only mocking him just a little bit as she spoke. She scooted herself around on the shoreline until she was half-facing him, half-turned aloofly away with her features presented to him in a diagonal skew of reddish sunlight. "Pretend that I'm Yumi."
He shook his head fervently in reply, though his blushing face and flustered mannerisms were somehow less resolute in their delivery. "No. We are not doing this."
"Yes, we are," she argued, grabbing his hands and forcing his skin to turn an even deeper shade of red. "You helped me out, now I'm going to help you. Take the lead. Say hi to me."
His head was still shaking, though the cracks in his defenses were becoming clearer with each passing moment. "This is so stupid..."
"It is not," she shut him down, her words laced with a firm finality like a mother scolding her child. She released his fingers from her grasp and placed a hand under her chin, playing coy as she waited for him to begin. "Practice makes perfect. Start with hello."
Ulrich sat perfectly still for a good minute, his dark eyes landing on every surface besides the shimmering green of her bated stare. When he eventually realized that she wasn't budging anytime soon, he sighed and surrendered to her game. "Um... hi, Yumi."
Aelita's eyes shined and her lashes fluttered like butterfly wings. "Hi, Ulrich," she said sweetly.
He shot her a glare slick with white-hot indignation and a hint of embarrassment. "Yumi doesn't sound like that."
"She does when she talks to me," she retorted, grinning widely at the sight of his tormented expression.
For a splitsecond he was bewildered. "She does?"
She couldn't help but laugh. "I was kidding. Remember what you taught me about swimming? Relax."
Ulrich's face burned a bright amber in response. He couldn't believe how flustered he was feeling. Talking to Aelita, no less. "Uh. Hey, Yumi. How's it going?"
Aelita's smile grew somehow impossibly wider. "I'm fine. Thanks for asking. But remember that you're talking to Yumi here. Formalities are nice, but unnecessary. Talk to her like you would talk to Odd."
"I could never be that mean to Yumi."
"Then act like you're talking to me."
"Somehow I don't think that will be that difficult."
She punched his arm as he fought back a smirk. "Look who's loosening up! Time to take it up a notch. Ask her out."
Any urge that he had to smile quickly vanished, his natural scowl forming tight and easy upon his sunburnt face.
She noticed. "It doesn't have to be a date," she reassured him. "Just out. And just the two of you. You have to make her feel exclusive, like she's more than just your friend. Say you want to take her to... the mall."
He hesitated, thoroughly lost in himself as he fidgeted uncomfortably on the bank. "So... Y-Yumi... I know that we've been friends for... a while now, and I-I guess I was wondering if-..."
"Stop," she intervened, saving him from his ramblings. "She already knows all of this. Don't waste time with preamble. And try not to stutter so much. Did Clark Gable ever stutter?"
Ulrich blinked at her dumbly. "Who?"
She shook her head and dismissed his question with a wave of her hand. "Nevermind. Just be yourself. Confidence is everything."
He took pause, swallowed. His features visibly creased as he recaliberated his approach. "Yumi, I was wondering if you wanted to-..."
"Don't say 'wonder.' It belies uncertainty."
"Belies?"
"Focus, Ulrich."
"Yumi, I wanted to ask you if-..."
"Not 'want,' either. There is no want. You're asking her right now. Be purposeful."
"How do you know all of this?"
"I had a lot of free time and an internet connection while I was stranded on Lyoko. Now quit trying to change the subject."
He sighed violently and buried his face into his hands, his voice laced with a frustrated noise like a dog growling as his fingers drove across his scalp. "Just forget it, Aelita. It's not like Yumi would even want to go out with me if I did ask."
"That's not true!" she shot back, her eyes suddenly alight with righteous indignation like wildfire. She fought desperately to meet his gaze, finding only the stony walls of his clenched fists as she spoke to him in earnest. "Ulrich Stern, that is so not true. You're strong, handsome, funny, and you've got a wonderful heart."
She pried at his closed fingertips with her own, staring at him through the bars of his hands like a visitor peering into a jail-cell. Emerald saucers collided with auburn daggers. Her smile bled through the chinks in his armor as she continued, close enough to his face now that he could feel the heat of her breath seeping between his fingers. "So what if it's all buried underneath a gloomy, brooding exterior? Lots of girls are into that. Especially the ones who only wear black."
Ulrich finally broke, his frown displaced by the wry curve of a smile as he chuckled lowly and peeled his hands away from his face. "Gloomy, huh?"
Aelita smiled fondly back at him, backlit by the crimson glow of the setting sun behind her. "Like a funeral party."
He laughed, and so did she. The sound enveloped the cove and sank into their eardrums like a warm song.
When it ended, Ulrich seemed drained, and she thought that maybe she spied tears biting at the corners of his summer eyes, but in the failing sunlight she couldn't be certain. "Thanks, Aelita."
She shook her head, still smiling as the shadows overtook them. "It was nothing."
They sat quietly for a while then, listening to the soft rush of the waves washing against the shore. The makings of whitish stars like cotton plants sprouted from beneath the pink-blue blanket of the darkening sky as they spent the last moments of the day simply enjoying each other's company.
City lights swam by Ulrich's vision like fireflies darting across the glass, the windowpane glossy with the darkness of the starlit twilight. They had been lucky enough to catch the last train back to Kadic just in the nick of time, nearly running late due to Odd's insistence on trying every flavor of cotton candy available on the boardwalk before they left.
Said nuisance now sat with his hand across his stomach, moaning like a disgruntled infant. "I think I'm gonna explode."
Ulrich shrugged his right shoulder in quiet reply, his left one presently preoccupied. "Told you that you shouldn't have eaten so much."
"You could've stopped me," Odd whined.
"And risk losing one of my hands in the crossfire?" the brunette leveled, making sure to monitor his volume as he spoke. "Not a chance."
"You would not have lost a hand," the blonde argued weakly. "A few fingers, maybe, but that's it. I swear, Ulrich, you can be so dramatic sometimes."
A short burst of laughter from Yumi interrupted their exchange, muffled slightly by a hand cast daintily across her open mouth. "At the rate you were going, I wouldn't have been surprised to see you gulp an entire arm down if one of us got in your way."
Ulrich flashed her a knowing smile as Odd fumed, and she offered him a conspiratorial grin in kind. Her doe-black eyes eventually fell to his side as their snickering subsided, and she smirked warmly at what she saw.
"Is she still out?" she asked gently.
He glanced over to his left to find one Aelita Schaffer lying limp and heavy against his body, her little snores burning against his bare, sleeveless arm as she nuzzled her head unconsciously deeper into his stalwart pose.
Ulrich nodded once, careful not to move too rapidly for fear of wresting her from her slumber. "Like a light."
"Well," Odd injected with all of the tact of a swinging sledgehammer, "look who learned how to smile!"
Yumi's brow furrowed with confusion as Ulrich's expression tilted, but before either of them could say anything Jeremie swiftly intervened. "I don't think I've ever seen her sleep so soundly before," he remarked, and when Ulrich's gaze met his he quickly looked the other way, blushing as though embarrassed. "N-not to say that I watch Aelita sleep or anything, I just meant that-... you know-... w-with her nightmares and all-..."
"I know what you meant, Jer," he reassured him.
The prodigy pushed his glasses further up his nose, turned beet-red from his excursion out of the dark dorms and into the harsh sunlight. "R-right. Of course you did. I knew that. But I am curious. How did you manage to get her so tuckered out? What did you two do all day?"
Ulrich paused, considering his answer. He let his eyes scan wistfully over Aelita's sleeping, pink head before finally settling on, "Trading lessons. What about you, Belpois? Is that new program almost ready yet?"
Jeremie gaped at him for a moment, his blue eyes warped by the thick lenses of his glasses such that he looked like a goldfish staring out from behind the confines of its bowl. "What program?"
Ulrich gaped silently back at him, suddenly unsure of himself. "The... scanner program. You know, to get us onto Lyoko faster when XANA attacks."
The bespectacled boy looked at him a little while longer as though searching his eyes for truth, then he shrugged and shook his head in tactless reply. "You must have been out in the sun too long, Stern. I'm not working on anything like that right now. Granted, while it is an interesting idea, speaking from a purely theoretical standpoint it would be impossible. Even if I could somehow access the software controlling the scanner mechanisms, to modify such precise and complex coding would be-..."
Ulrich stopped listening, his stare flickering back to the girl resting on his shoulder as Jeremie began to monologue. His dark eyes frowned as his mind wandered, uncertain of exactly how he should process such a revelation.
"Did I hear that right?"
He tore from his thoughts with a start, surprised to hear Yumi speaking to him. She was looking almost direly into his auburn stare, her leg bouncing restlessly atop her knee. His heart kicked just a little bit faster in his chest watching her as she clarified, "You spent the whole day hanging out with Aelita?"
He held her gaze and unconsciously recalled what Aelita had told him about confidence being everything as he replied, "Yeah." Then- without stuttering- he thought to add, "It was fun."
Yumi's eyes widened slightly, her pupils threatening to swallow her irises in black. "Really?"
There was a pause. She seemed to be mulling over his words, teeth nibbling at the edges of her lip as she considered something quietly in her head.
Then: "That's sweet."
He blinked, dumbstruck. "Sweet?"
"Yeah," she said. A pale smile smoothed over the corners of her mouth. "You're sweet."
He flustered, his session with Aelita promptly discarded as his cheeks flared a fierce orange. "Very funny," he muttered.
"I'm not joking!" she giggled, and the sound was so delicately beautiful that he all but forgot about his previous embarrassment. "It's actually kinda cool."
The pink-haired girl at his side stirred noiselessly and entangled her fingers about his forearm, tucking him closer to herself like a teddy bear. "Define cool," he deadpanned.
She stifled another laugh. One of her jet-black locks became displaced in the midst of her liquid motions, and a slender hand reached up to her face in order to brush it away. "Don't be dense. Think about it. You're exactly the kind of person that Aelita needs in her life right now. And I think it's cool that you're there for her like that."
He blinked again, still uncertain of what she meant, but by that time the train had already rumbled to a stop and moonlight was streaming in through the open doorway. Bells chimed through crackling speakers as Yumi stood and quickly bolted for the road.
"Gotta run. My parents will flip if they hear me come in the door even a second late."
Odd lumbered to his feet as well, mumbling uncomfortably to himself about his poor stomach.
Jeremie moved to follow. "We should hurry, too," he said, glancing at Ulrich. Then, looking to Aelita: "Do you want me to wake her up?"
The brunette hesitated, choking back his usual reflexive yes. "You go on ahead. I've got her."
The blonde seemed unsure, but after a quick peek at his wristwatch he made up his mind and jogged outside. "Don't let Jim catch you on your way to the dorms," he warned from over his shoulder. "Curfew was over an hour ago!"
Ulrich waved his hand in acknowledgement as the pair vanished into the night, then set his sights squarely on Aelita. With a sigh, he jostled her softly in her seat, speaking in near-whispers so as not to accidentally frighten her from her sleep. "Ride's over, princess."
She awoke to his warm breath tickling her face, and she grumbled halfheartedly as she shut her eyes tighter and squeezed his arm in hers. "Five more minutes."
He shook his head and pried himself away from her so that she was forced to sit upright, and as his shadow departed she squinted as though blinded by the overhead lights he left blaring in his wake. "It's a long walk back to Kadic, and we've got class tomorrow. You can sleep when we get to the dorms."
Aelita pouted and outstretched her arms expectantly like a child awaiting a hug. "Carry me."
Ulrich was firm. "No."
"Please," she persisted, dragging out each syllable until it was a verse in and of itself.
He was suddenly somehow less firm.
Stepping out into the warm summer air and leaving the cool confines of the train behind them, Ulrich trudged towards the academy with Aelita on his back, her arms raveled about his neck like a cumbersome winter scarf and his hands wrapped tightly around her legs in order to keep her from sliding off of him. Street lamps lit their way as his sneakers scratched the concrete beneath them with loud, sketching sounds like a pencil crossing paper, accented by the thick chorus of crickets and cicadas singing siren songs in the darkness beyond.
"Where are the others?"
"They booked it back to campus. Yumi's probably getting chewed out by her parents right now."
"Oh."
They walked in silence for a while, her hair brushing against the nape of his neck as she shifted in his grasp.
"So," she eventually pried, her breath tickling his earlobes, "did you ask her?"
He flushed dark red, staring hard at the ground below his feet. "Not yet," he admitted.
A deflated sigh singed the back of his head like dragon's breath as she nestled herself into the crook of his shoulder.
"But we did talk tonight," he defended. "And she seemed... receptive, I think."
"Receptive?" she teased. "That's a big word for you."
He shot her a glare. "Don't make me drop you."
Aelita laughed, bubbling. "What did she say?"
He briefly considered his answer. "She said she... thought I was cool."
There was a pause. Her incredulity was as palpable as the warm night air prickling against his skin. "She really said that?"
He nodded.
She seemed to be taking it all in, the ponderous hum in her throat reverberating through his skull as he walked. "Well," she conceded, "you're no Marlon Brando, but I guess you are pretty cool."
Ulrich still didn't know who she was referring to, but his cheeks turned color all the same.
It didn't take long for them to reach Kadic, the wrought-iron gates glaring down at them as they stalled beneath the fluorescent safety of a nearby streetlamp.
"Last stop," he quipped.
She leapt down from his back and brushed herself from head to toe, diligently clearing the creases from her clothes despite knowing full-well that she would be changing into her pajamas soon enough. "Thanks for the ride, stranger," she beamed, and it lit up the night like stagelights the way that she said it.
For a brief second he stood there in marked silence, quietly uncertain.
"Ulrich?"
He glanced at her for only a breath before turning his attention to the floor, kicking up gravel as he seemed to brood over something dreadfully important.
Just as she was about to ask him again, his head shot upright and his gaze was at once decided and indecipherable. "Listen," he started, pausing only once in order to properly calculate his next words. "Let's go to the mall this Friday. After classes. Just you and me."
She froze, immobile as her green eyes bulged and her pallor complexion flushed as pink as her hair. "What?"
"There's this big indoor skate park on the ground floor," he continued, unhurried and direct. "Like seriously huge. I can show you how to ride a skateboard."
Her surprise was ill-contained beneath the crumbling layers of her practiced cadence. "I don't have a skateboard," she managed.
"You can borrow mine," he offered. "Then once you've learned a bit we can pick one out for you at the shop. I think I remember seeing one in fuschia."
She was flustered, though her irises sparkled with wondrous excitement like a child on Christmas. "I don't know what to say."
He smiled. "Say you'll go."
Her shock eventually subsided, her blush softening beneath the weight of a devilish grin. "Are you asking me out on a date, Stern?"
Now it was Ulrich's turn to fluster. "N-no! I didn't mean it like that. It's just like-... like practice, you know?"
"Practice?" she sneered, her innocent gaze suddenly fiendish and bright.
He powered through the embarrassment sporting itself on his cheeks in red splotches like sunburns. "I've been told that it makes perfect."
There was a pause so deep that it seemed to envelop the night with its silence.
"Four o'clock," she finally answered.
He glanced up from the ground to see her blushing again, her toes kneading the ground and her hands clasped tightly behind her back like a schoolgirl acknowledging a longtime crush. Her face was confident despite her mannerisms, the verdant glow of her eyes beaming with authority as she explained, "Classes end at half-past three. That gives me about thirty minutes to get ready. I think that's very gracious of me, considering."
"Considering what?" he queried.
Her elegant smile shattered in place of another grin. "You really don't know a thing about girls, do you?"
Before he could think to retort she had closed the distance between them quite suddenly, and without a hint of warning she pecked him once on the side of his jaw and repeated, "Four o'clock. And not a minute after. Being 'fashionably late' isn't really the hook that you guys think it is."
Ulrich was too busy trying to drown the fire burning in his chest and dislodge the breath hitching in his throat to be capable of a reply, and so with that she skipped off past the school's gates and into the darkness of the dormitory shadows beyond. When he eventually recovered his senses, he turned himself towards his own room and marched himself straight upstairs to bed, his mind racing with thoughts of the afternoon yet to come and his mouth strangely frozen into an irrevocable half-smirk as he finally drifted off to sleep.