by IronRaven
My first Lyoko fic. Code: Lyoko isn't mine.
Oddity of oddities, this is going to be a PG rated fic. Why? Because I operate at a higher resolution than Cartoon Network does. You'll see what I mean as you read.
To anyone who did read this during the first 24 hours it was up, I apologise. That had to be the most craptastic editing I've ever done in my life, and I'm sorry for anyone it was inflicted on.
This version went up a few days later, at the same time as the second chapter, to fix a few minor continuity glitches.
---
"Jeremie?"
The young man's spine felt like it had been stroked with warm, soft fur. It was a sensation he was getting used to; it had happened the first time he heard her voice, and hadn't lessened each of the hundreds of times they had spoken. When she was in the real world, it was even stronger. He turned slightly, looking at the pink haired girl leaning against the tree next to him. "Hmmm?"
"It's almost time." Aelita took his hand in hers, as she lowered her cheek to his shoulder. "I'm sorry."
"Don't be. I thought I had the virus figured out this time." Closing his eyes, he brushed her temple with his cheek. Last time she was in the "real" world, they had found that they both liked the sensation, the closeness. A soft sound came from her throat, almost like a purr. Each time heard it, felt it, Jeremie's mind ran in the same direction. "Next time Aelita. I promise, the anti-virus will work."
"I know it will, Jeremie. Or it will work the time after that." She turned her head, just a little, letting her lips brush his cheek in the dimming twilight. "You were right, the sunset is beautiful."
---
"Roadside diner; you kill it we grill it." 'Punk' wouldn't have been the word he's use, but it certainly fit.
"Odd, meet us at the factory."
"What's up? Zana-"
"No. Aelita needs someone to go back with her, just in case Zana has an ambush waiting."
---
Aelita's elbows were propped against the back of the command chair, the backs of her hands pressed together. With her chin propped on the space between her wrists, she studied her world the way Jeremie saw it, while her fingers idly played with his hair. "Odd didn't need to go before me you know."
"We didn't know that the virus was possible." Jeremie studied the screens intently, with Odd's the only beacon on the main display. On a secondary, the raw data streams flew past, prior to be encoded by the virtual interpretation program. Jeremie saw it more than he did the main, looking for anomalies. In the past few months, he had begun to see when things were out of place at the highest levels, even if he didn't know what wasn't right. "Who know's what else he has up his sleeve."
In the surreal, virtual world of Lyoko, Odd sat on the very top of a tower, his tail swishing with minor annoyance. "Hey guys, nothing's happening here. Not so much as a funny looking rock." Rolling backwards, away from the edge and to his feet, Odd looked up at the eternally lit but sunless sky. "It's safe for your girlfriend to come home, Einstein."
---
Later that evening, Jeremie jumped in chair. "Come in."
The door opened just enough for the Lyoko's other two warriors to slip through. Ulrich set a bundle down next to the door, while Yumi alternated between trying not to look smug and not blush with the collar of her jacket turned up to hide her neck. Despite their happiness, there was no denying the concern in their eyes when Yumi cleared her throat. "We saw the sunset. Did you find a good place to watch it?"
"Yeah." Already, Jeremie had turned back to his screen, reading over the code of the virtualization program he had created for Aelita, comparing it to the one the other's used. The silence lasted for a long moment, while his friends watched him sadly.
"Odd says you had him go to Lyoko to make sure it wasn't an ambush" Ulrich frowned at the silence, and stepped closer to the electronics covered desk.
"Jeremie, how long have you been awake?" Ulrich moved behind Jeremie's chair, pulling him back from the computer. "Three days now?"
"Does it matter. You know why I have a single; I've never needed much sleep."
Yumi moved in between the genius and his terminal, physically blocking him from the keyboard, ticking off points with her fingers. "You aren't sleeping. You aren't eating. You aren't making it to half your classes. The only time you bother to shower is when she comes over to our side. You are going to start making mistakes, and then what will happen? Do you want to make a mistake that kills Aelita?"
Jeremie flinched as if struck, his eyes tense at the pain of such a possibility. "What if she needs help? If I sleep, I might miss it. She might get hurt."
Growling, Ulrich spun the chair around. "That is why one of us will be here or at the factory. Yumi can handle the virtualization process if we need it. When was the last time you had more than three hours of sleep?"
Looking between his friends, Jeremie knew they were right. He looked down at his hands, his fingers shaking from fatigue and too much caffeine, as he tried to think back. "I don't know. Since we found the virus."
Yumi and Ulrich looked at eachother sharply, shocked that it had taken almost a year for them to notice it.
---
"Jeremie, I hope you are having good subconscious imagery." Her voice whispered out of the speakers as he started to become aware. The phenomena called 'dreams' intrigued her, the ability of a human mind to generate sensory data even when the physical sensors were offline. "I wish you had told me what you were doing."
"Aelita?" Jeremie cracked his eyes, looking around. With a slight gasp, he rolled out of bed, looking at the computer. "Aelita? Is everything ok?"
Without his glasses, she was little more than a light-colored blur on the screen, and couldn't see her blush to the extent her virtual form allowed. In Lyoko, she looked down at her hands, before speaking. "You didn't tell me what you were doing to yourself."
"I didn't want you to worry." Fumbling on his glasses, he slid into his chair, surprised to see it there. The last thing he remembered was Odd dragging it out of his room after Yumi reported in from the factory. He knew he didn't remember taking off his shirt, and only realised it after he felt the cool leather on his back. "Yumi told you?"
"Yes. Jeremie, why did you do that?!" Sleep wasn't a concept she fully understood, but she had learned of it by scanning the internet. As near as she could figure, it had to do with memory and processor management and hardware maintence. Without it he would eventually crash completely or worese, and there was no way to make a backup of him.
"Because... Because I care about you."
"And I care about you. And I can't care about you if you do something careless, only miss you." Pressing her hand to the screen from the inside, Aelita looked at him sadly. "You don't want me to get hurt; can't you see I don't want you to get hurt??"
Jeremie pressed his fingers to the screen, feeling the LCD panel, its back panel warmed by the sun, flex under his skin like flesh. "I'm sorry, Aelita. I have to find the answer."
"And you will." Seeing his arm through the web camera, Aelita had a good idea of where is fingers were, even if she couldn't see them. She moved her fingers, as if to stroke his, as she smiled. "Jeremie, I have an idea."
---
Aelita's idea had been a vacation. She and Yumi had talked about it that night, while the dark haired girl sat curled up in the command chair. Jeremie had never really been in Lyoko, not without errors that had skewed his perception of the world around him. To him, it had been a static-spotted, confusing landscape, or a wire frame studded with status readouts. He had been the one who found her, and learned the secret of her reality. He had been the one who had gotten the scanners online after they had been abandoned for so long. And he was their eyes above whenever there was danger. He didn't let himself relax, not entirely, from what Yumi said.
A vacation in Lyoko, in her world, even if only for a few hours, would let him see what he was fighting for, just like she had learned what she was protecting only after she went to the real world the first time. Aelita talked Yumi through the procedure for mounting the external drives and then to compress the templates, clearing some space in Lyoko's memory, enough to create a stable virtualization and template for Jeremie. Only Ulrich's template remained installed, just in case, even though he was part of the back up. Both young woman laughed when Aelita said that Jeremie's worrying had rubbed off on her.
It had taken four days for them to convince Jeremie he should go. During those four days, Jeremie found himself being forced to catch up on sleep- they had threatened to take away his computers. He knew that one of his friends was watching Lyoko during those times. What he didn't know was that Lyoko's resident elf was busy with her own program while she kept "one eye" on him through the web camera. The morning he was going to step across, she woke him with a softly sung song, giving it gentle, warbling birdsong where words had never been. Odd had exposed her to several new kinds of music during his shift in the command chair, having brought his "boom box" with him.
"Good Morning, Aelita." Running a comb through his hair, Jeremie smiled to her. He had dreamed of her, sitting in his chair, watching him in his sleep. It was a common dream for him, but sometimes he was watching her sleep. "Last night, you said you had a surprise for me."
"Not yet. You can see it when you get to Lyoko."
Any further conversation was interrupted by a knock at the door. Without waiting for permission, Odd stuck his head in the room. "You ready?"
---
"Virtualization: Jeremie."
Jeremie felt a tingling sensation along every fiber of his being. He could sense everything, even the spaces between his teeth. That was when he remembered to bend his legs, as he had materialized about ten feet above the forest floor. He had barely recovered from the drop when he felt arms around him, and smelled a woodsy, earthy, clean scent, with a hint of sweetness. He couldn't remember having a sense of smell from before.
"Welcome to my world, Jeremie." Aelita looked up at his eyes through the glasses, not wanting to let him go. As much as she loved his world, this was her home, at least for now.
Jeremie's first words were far from any idea of romantic, or even intelligent. "Whoa." This was nothing like the previous times he had been in Lyoko. Everything seemed much more detailed. He could see every individual strand of Aelita's hair, the way the tip of her ear twitched when the breeze blew a pink lock across it. He could hear the rustle of the leaves in that breeze, feel it on his skin.
"Do you like my surprise? We had to move Yumi and Odd's virtualization templates into offboard storage to get enough space." Aelita had spent her 'nights' looking at the others' templates and the virtualization and materialization programs. She hadn't realized her friends couldn't complete perceive her world until she had done so. Yes, the gross sensory information was there, but not to her degree of resolution. Jeremie had expected it, demanded for it from himself. That was part of why his former virtualizations had been laced with bugs- he was pushing his own program to a degree that it couldn't maintain. Now, his program could. He could see, hear and smell everything she could, either in Lyoko or, she hoped, in the physical world. "I hope you don't mind, I made a couple small changes."
He reached up, his hand on the top of hers as she cupped his ear, feeling the pointed tip. He wiggled his toes, feeling the carpet of ferngrass and evergreen needles through the soles of his knee-high moccasins. He shivered despite the lack of chill as the breeze shifted, sliding through the armhole of the blue-grey sleeveless tunic, ruffling the whisper fine hairs that were sparse on his chest. I'm an elf. As he shifted his legs inside the loose fitting leggings, he decided he liked this. He liked it a lot. His eyes found hers easily, his soul diving into her pupils as their noses brushed, wordlessly pushing aside any doubts she had about her decision to make him one of her kind when in her world.
---
Odd and Ulrich were perched on the edges of the console, watching the screen over Yumi's shoulders. Ulrich glanced at the mission time clock in the corner of the screen. "Shouldn't he have reported in that the virtualization went according to plan?"
"Aelita would have told us if he didn't make it." Odd grinned at his friends playfully. "Look at the screen, guys. You know what they are like, they hug for fifteen, twenty minutes when she comes here."
"I wish we could see them." Yumi blushed as the boys looked at her, and aimed a gentle kick at Ulrich's shin. "Not like that. Aelita showed me the template she designed. Jeremie designed her materialization to look normal in our world. Aelita wanted him to look normal in hers."
Ulrich closed his eyes for a moment, trying to picture his friend with pointed ears, cheek makeup and something other than his usual turtleneck, then started giggling. The laughter spread to the others quickly.
---
"Aelita, I never imagined your world would be so beautiful. Everything looks as real as my world. It is beyond my wildest dreams." The two sat side-by-side, leaning against a rock in the desert region. She had shown him all of her world today, it's major zones. He was shocked when he realized that Lyoko actually had something like birds, even if they were more like two-winged dragonflies and didn't sing even though they cricket-chirped to each other. Their purpose wasn't readily perceivable, but then, neither was any of the climatic and ecological detailing of Lyoko.
"It was all I knew for a long time. I guess I got used to it, like you did with clouds." She snuggled against him, holding his hand. "I wasn't sure Lyoko would let you in."
"What do you mean?" He stroked his foot along hers softly, through the butter-soft material of their boots. "The others come here all the time."
"When Zana is trying to attack your world. None of you have ever been here to just to be here." She grinned over at him as she ran the point of her boot over the sole of his foot, making him jump slightly. She was surprised herself. She hadn't designed his template to have a scent, not really, no more than she did. But he had one; it was a soft, gentle spice she couldn't name, totally unlike anything she had found in his world or hers. A warm, protective smell she could drown in.
"If I was here just to be here, I wouldn't know why I was here." Smirking at his own twisted logic, he leaned his head to one side, feeling the flame-warmth that flooded him when the tip of his ear touched the very tip of hers.
"Jeremie, I need to tell you something. A warning." The seriousness of her tone chilled him, bringing him back to the reality of his life, being part of the only line of defense against a threat to the entire world. "When I designed your template, I didn't give you any special powers. I wanted you to have all the perception you had at home, and there just wasn't enough space left to do anything for combat."
Jeremie laughed, thinking back to the time Ulrich had tried to teach him the basics of swordsmanship, and of wacking himself in the mouth with a foam covered length of plastic pipe hard enough to draw blood. "That's ok, I think it would be best for both if us if we just run."
---
Ulrich and Yumi stepped out of the elevator, smirking at Odd's dance moves as he bounced and air guitared about the control room to his music. He had on a headset, but between that and the volume of the speakers, he hadn't heard the door glide open. The look on his face when he turned around was priceless. "Uh, hi, guys, guess my shift is over."
Yumi rolled the volume down, through a dull roar, then a soft crash, and finally to a throaty whisper. "Yep. Sam was asking where you were."
"She was?" He swallowed slightly, running his fingers through his hair. "What did she say?"
Ulrich looked at the main screen. "Just wondering where you were, and when you'd get back." They were in the desert region still. "Have they been moving?"
Gathering his gear, Odd nodded. "Some. Just wandering around."
After Odd left, the two spent a long time just lounging about, reading, talking. After a while, Ulrich broke out a deck of cards, so he could teach Yumi to play gin, only to find out she already knew it by another name. Fortunately, they hadn't been playing for money, but Ulrich's pride was badly dented. After beating him soundly by several hundred points, Yumi took pity on him announced she was going to get some sleep. Ulrich slid into the control chair, watched the screen for a while, before sleep also claimed him...
---
"Aelita? What was that?" Jeremie looked about in alarm, his new instincts telling him the most likely answer, but he wasn't sure.
"Zana. He's moving." Reaching down to take his hand, she pulled him up to the top of the boulder she had been leading him up. "Yumi! Ulrich, Odd! It's Zana!"
"What..." Before he could answer his question, he knew the time. He had been across now for almost nineteen hours, and he wasn't even the least bit tired. This was longer than Aelita had ever been able to stay in the real world, and it partially answered a question that had concerned him for a long time- how long a virtualized human could stay in Lyoko. "Guys, wake up!"
A fresh set of ripples ran across the land, louder and harder. Aelita closed her eyes, reaching into the cell phone network, but Ulrich and Yumi had turned thiers off. After all, they were in the control room. Jeremie did the same, able to follow Aelita without difficulty, shouting out at Odd's mobile.
"MMhello?"
"Odd, get the factory, right now!" Jeremie had to fight the urge to yell, knowing without knowing that if he did, he could destroy the phone and possibly hurt Odd. He sense Aelita moving up next to him inside the phone exchange. "Yumi and Ulrich's phones are off, and Zana is on the move."
"Odd, this isn't a dream. Jeremie and I are in here without defenses. You need to wake up Ulrich and get him here."
---
"OK, Kiwi, be quite." Sliding the flashlight into his pocket, Odd dropped out of the window. Normally, he would have used the stairs, but something had Jim up and moving about all night, back and forth in the hall, poor guy. He hadn't looked well earlier.
The security lights about campus gave him enough light to get to the sewer access, where he had to turn on his light. He knew he had done the run enough times to not need to be able to see where to jump his board, but rather when, but the light was needed to get into the factory. He had had to turn it off and hide, however, when he spotted a police car on patrol making it's way towards him, costing him valuable time, but less than if he had had to explain why a young man with a flashlight was sneaking about outside an empty building an hour before dawn.
Jumping from the elevator, he shook both of his friends as he went buy, shouting and reaching for the volume controls. "Guys, get up, it's an emergency."
"Wha?" Ulrich shook himself to discover the headset had slipped off in his sleep. He hadn't ment to, he had planned to wake Yumi after a few hours. "Aelita, Jeremie, what's wrong?"
Yumi yanked the headset from his head, pushing him from the chair. "Get to the scanner, now, you are the only one in the system." Dropping into the chair with a thump, she heard the elevator going down. "Have you been attacked, guys? Ulrich will be there in a minute."
"We haven't seen anything yet, but there is plenty of quaking." For his first time under attack in the virtual world, Jeremie was taking it well. He was keeping up with Aelita, and neither one was breathing very hard as they sprinted into the heart of the desert region. I hope Ulrich gets here soon, so he can take care of Aelita.
So he can take care of both of us. Aelita blinked, and glanced over with a shy smile, knowing she hadn't heard him with her ears. As their eyes met, she knew he had heard her thought as well. "That wasn't part of the program."
"We'll worry about it later." Without a grunt, Jeremie kicked off the edge of a cliff, crossing a chasm he estimated was about fifty feet wide, landing with a roll, not stopping as he and Aelita came to their feet in pace with each other.
Yumi's voice squeaked out of the sky. "Uh, guys, there is a problem."
---
"Odd, tell me if anything gets near them, I need to get the hard drive plugged in!"
Over their headsets, Aelita called to them. "What is wrong?"
Yumi didn't look up from the rack she was jamming the storage module into. "I screwed up, I'm sorry, I erased them all. We have enough drive space to load Ulrich, but it is going to take a while to move and decompress the data, I'm so sorry." Finally shoving the drive home properly, she could feel the drive motor slip into gear, spinning up, though the aluminum shell. She twisted a secondary display and it's keyboard towards her, her fingers flying over the board as she told the system to mount the drive, before summoning the program needed to extract Ulrich's data, muttering to herself. "It took over four hours to compress all three of us, move the data and wipe the drive...."
"Yumi, what was that? We didn't hear you right."
"Don't worry, Jeremie, it was just me thinking out loud, it was nothing." Nothing had to be wiped clean, and there was only one template to move. It was still going to take close to ninety minutes.
"Uh, Yumi, how long is this going to take?" Before speaking, Odd had the sense to flip his mike up, to the top of his head.
She did the same as she shook her head. "Too long." She pressed the intercom button direct to the scanner room. "Ulrich, you may as well come back up here."
"Can't you just rescan him?"
"I don't know how, and Jeremie passworded it to keep people out of Lyoko if they find this place. It is tied to his palm print."
---
It sounds like it's just us.
Jeremie looked over at her, as he let his hand brush hers. It's been like that since the beginning.
They stopped at the top of a ridgeline, crouching behind a large boulder. Below them, they could see a tower out in the open, in the middle of the valley. And between them and their destination was no cover to speak of and half a dozen crabs and a bunch of wasps, some of which buzzed by awfully close. And the tremors were picking up in frequency. Jeremie, how can we do this?
How fast can we run?
---
"How could I be so stupid?!" In her rage, Yumi drove her fist against the metal frame of the mounting rack, making the entire thing tremble in fear. They are going to die because I deleted a file. If it hadn't been so real, the surreality of it might have been good for a laugh.
"Yumi, you made a mistake, we will work around it." Odd studied the display, reading the terrain. "We've been at this tower before, I think."
Ulrich nodded, but frowning, not one hundred percent sure. "I think so. Can we signal them without giving them away?"
Yumi looked to Ulrich, then at their friend, unsure of the answer. "Odd, open a command line window, and type 'man commo."
"Nothing."
"'Man vox'." A shake of the head. "'Man voice'.... OK, how about 'man speech'."
"There!" Odd started reading, sliding his finger along the block of text that made up the manual page for voice communications. "Yumi, you know more about Unix than I do, what does this mean?"
"It means, we do this..." Her fingers danced at the keys for a moment, changing the way voice communication was handled into Lyoko. "We can key in who the message is for, and type it out. We won't be able to just speak to them, not without everything around them also hearing."
"Can we rotate this image?"
"One of the few things I know how to do." Tapping as the number pad, Odd spun the wireframe image. "Yeah, we were here once. I remember this shelf." He traced the way back down the ridge to a small ledge that would be hidden from the crabs, but not the wasps. Hopefully, they would be able to not be seen as they made their way around the side of the island, but if they were seen, there would be no place to go. "Do you think they can make it?"
Yumi glanced at the amount of time left on the decompression. "They had better, or Zana is going to win."
---
"Jeremie, don't speak, only you can hear me."
He tapped Aelita's hand to get her attention, then pressed his fingers to his lips for silence. They can talk to us, but only one of us at a time.
"Jeremie, there is a ledge around the side of this island. We had to use it about nine months ago. This tower has been activated before, Zana must be getting desperate. You need to head back down the ridge, look for the line of six or seven rocks. They will be reddish-gold in color. Around behind them, you will find a safe spot to go over the edge, and follow the ledge around to get closer to the tower. Think you can do it?"
Passing the message on, Jeremie looked back down the ridge. Aelita thought back, before smiling. I remember that. So long as the wasps don't see us, we are can get close enough to the tower to run for it.
If they do see us?
We see if I can fly outside the tower?
Slowly, moving from the shadow of one boulder to another, they crept down the back of the hill. Jeremie was desperately looking for something to make a weapon of. Even with one, he knew all he could be was a passive shield against any attacks. He stopped behind one boulder, and pointed- there were the rocks the others mentioned. Past that point, there would be no cover.
With a short, furtive sprint, they reached the edge of the island, and dropped onto the ledge. It was solid, but narrow, forcing them to creep along with their backs to the stone. Jeremie made a point to not look down. When he finally did, just short of where they were to climb up, he felt Aelita's hand on his chest, pushing him back, before cupping his cheek, gently, a reassuring thumb stroking the silvery-gold patch painted there.
It was then that they heard the buzz of a single wasp.
---
"Oh no. Yumi! Take over here!" While they normally traveled in packs, these wasps weren't. And one was following the ledge, towards Aelita and Jeremie. This was more than Odd could manage, he didn't know the system well enough to even try to manage a battle past calling up the status boards for everyone in the fight.
As she slid into place, Ulrich tapped frantically at the auxiliary keyboard now that his screen was showing the imminent battlefield. 'Aelita, you have a wasp heading your way. Hide!'
---
They pressed themselves to the wall, both of them thinking rockish thoughts, hoping the wasp wouldn't see them as it flew past them. However, while wasps were far from the most intelligent of Zana's creations, they weren't totally stupid. Two elfs clinging to the wall were as easy to see as bugs on pins.
It circled back, spitting energy bolts from it's sting as it closed in on them, the strikes temporarily derezing the landscape. Unable to run due to the narrowness of the rock, Aelita closed her eyes, reaching out to the core of her world, singing the stones into a new shape, while Jeremie could only stare at the wasp, his calm broken for the moment. His fingers clutching at the wall behind him, he could feel the stone growing, shifting, rattling pieces of itself loose.
One of those pieces slide against his hand, smooth, fist-sized, rounded. Even if he would never know what made him do what came next, his hand knew it was the weapon he had been hunting for. His fingers closed around it, as he judged the distance, before snapping his arm out, hurling the stone straight at the wasp.
He watched the beast tumble apart like a stack of bottles at the fair as the rocks obscured them from any further fire, but not before there was one last, dying shot. Jeremie gasped as his shoulder blossomed into agony. He had seen the others hit by wasps before, it was manageable. Yeah, right- it hurt, badly, the pain and fear making his pulse race like a motor revving out of control as he fell to his knees, caught by the new grown stones.
---
Ulrich cried out in triumph when he saw the wasp's beacon blink out, but sobered quickly. "Uh, guys, please tell me I'm seeing things."
"No, Jeremie's card is blue." Yumi nervously chewed her lip, on the edge of tears. It had been all her fault that Ulrich's template had been removed from the main storage volume. She hadn't even originally planned on backing it up, but had on a whim. She had done only one thing right, and it was too little, too late.
Odd scratched his head. "What is the big deal about a blue card?"
"Our cards are gold. Aelita's is blue." Yumi looked at him, feeling a single fearful tear slip free, a look of utter despair on her face. "If Jeremie gets hurt enough, he won't rematerialize like us. He will be gone."
Ulrich said nothing more as he turned to the status readout of the decompression utility, not blinking as it dragged along with glacial slowness when only light was fast enough. His hands began to type. "Jeremie, you have a problem. You and Aelita are equally vulnerable. If you loose all your points, you will die."
---
Thinking lower in his mind, were Aelita couldn't hear as the sped up their steps to the stone stairs at the end of the path, Jeremy made his choice. Then I die protecting her.
"Jeremie, keep going, we are almost there." Aelita spoke aloud for the first time since they had developed this plan. She had seen his pain, she had felt is almost as real as if it had been her flesh. Just as well as she could read the set of his face and his shoulders. "Don't think about it. We are going to make it, then go back to the forest."
He wouldn't let her go up the stairs first, insisting silently that he be allowed to scout a few paces ahead of her. The wasps were zipping about, but so far only the one he had hit seemed to know about the ledge. The crabs had taken up a perimeter around the tower, watching for intruders. It wasn't going to be easy.
Crouching behind an outcropping of rock, the took her hand, helping her up as the ground rippled again, the four parts of Zana's "heartbeat" clearly detectable. She had never felt them this strong, and said as much. "We are almost out of time. Have you got any ideas?"
Jeremie shook his head, looking into her eyes. He pulled her to him, his fingers stroking along her spine as he held her, the other hand cupping the back of her head as their lips met. They had nearly kissed many times, but not quite, not really. In the forest. At the sunset. Every memory of her flooded through his mind as felt her draw the air from his lungs, living on him. The first time she had tasted vanilla, and declared it better than chocolate. The first time she had had to go back because of the virus. The first time she came to the real world. The moment he started working on a materialization program for her. The first time he learned what she really was. The first time he heard her voice, and back furhter, back to when he found her in a chat room, a shy, slightly clueless person that something inside said he needed to talk to. To befriend. To love.
She pulled back, breaking the kiss, her hands holding his face, petting the cheek patches she had given him with her thumbs. She thought they were stunning on him. "Jeremie, if we never get to say this again, I love you."
He could feel something inside changing, struggling to get out when he heard the words for the first time. "I love you to, Aelita." Letting her go, he shifted his feet under him, feeling the energy inside building, the fear of loosing her, the anger at Xana for endangering her. "Are you ready?"
Aelita nodded, then gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. "For luck."
With a nod and the knowledge that this could be their last moment together, they dashed over the rock, sprinting for the tower, and the waiting crabs.
---
Ulrich heard the other gasp and Odd's shout of "No, you fools!! You are going to die!!!". The last thing he saw before he closed his eyes was the readout on the data transfer- he had almost an hour left.
Nothing was wrong in the real world. It had been a trap, a trap to catch Jeremie. Xana had known he was there, had known he was vulnerable. Jeremie, the leader of his opponents, Xana must have seen it as a chance to win with a single stroke. And they hadn't seen it. They should have told Jeremie and Aelita to go into the forest and hide. He flinched when heard the warning signal sound, telling them that one of those inside Lyoko had been hit.
The tone cried out in his friends' pain a second time. Then a third, before it became a nearly steady scream of agony. Unable to think of the displays any more, he turned and held Yumi's sobbing form as she made a manta of blaming herself.
---
Jeremie could do the math. He knew what these beasts were capable of. Maybe they should have waited for Aelita to get her strength back after shifting the rocks before, but the longer they had paused the better the odds of being found. This was the way it had to be.
How many nights had he dreamed of this? The knight in armour, wielding lance and sword in his duties as Princess Aelita's bodyguard. As a samurai, a detective from a pulp novel from the '30s, or as a Viking kitsune. Now it was real, now was the time to put his life where his heart was. How many mornings had he woken up, feeling guilty because the others had risked their lives while he stayed behind like a coward. Sure, he was their controller, he was a valuable part of the team. He had told himself that. But it didn't make him feel any better. Now, he was in the fight. And there was no going back.
He stumbled as a crab's blast missed him by a fraction of an inch, the ground jumping as it was ripped into. He and Aelita had both been hit too many times. The wasp's shot had left him with a few more life points than she had. He would be able to watch her die, moments before he did, and just a few meters short of the tower.
Jeremie, don't stop, we are almost there. Run, faster.
Aelita, just go! Fire blossomed at the small of his back, staggering him. He had maybe three points left, and then it would be all over.
Then something inside of him acted. He twisted, grabbing Aelita's wrist in his hands, holding tight as he spun, ripping her off her feet and into the air. His hands let go, as if she were a hammer toss, aimed right at the towers. It was a risky play, but it seemed unlikely that the crabs would anticipate it.
He gasped as he felt her weight jerk at his arm- she hadn't let go! I am not leaving you behind, my knight.
As you wish, my princess. He was flying, spinning, able to see the energy blast just as it hit her.
---
"THEY ARE IN THE TOWER!"
Yumi and Ulrich raised their heads, their vision blurred with tears. Somehow, the two had made into the tower. "How... They should be dead."
Their cards had said as much, a lethal tarot. Aelita had been down to 10 points, the crab's shot should have vaporized her, while Jeremie had been down to two points after the last crab shot because of the wasps' stings. But there they were, sitting at one point a piece. Each with one of Jeremie's points.
Yumi shoutted for joy, knocking Ulrich to the floor as she jumped excitedly. Ulrich remembered something from his childhood as he crossed himself, something he hadn't done in years, while Odd silently moved his lips, thanking someone.
Odd pulled on a headset. "Guys?! Guys?! Is anyone there? Hello? Jeremie? Aelita? Can you hear me?"
---
The two lay in a pile on the floor of the tower, pale and drawn as they tried to catch their breath. They were still holding on, hands around wrists, as they looked up at the ceiling. Aelita found her voice first. "How can you be in here? No one has been able to go into an active tower with me before."
Jeremie turned slightly, his cheek against ear, his voice hoarse and ragged. "You were holding me when we hit."
"But I should have died. The bolt should have hit me."
"It did. I knew you couldn't survive, so... I gave you some of my life?" He closed his eyes again, blocking out the sound of the enraged blasts against the tower's walls by Zana's monsters. He could remember it clearly, gathering the energy in him, pushing it down his arm, through his skin, his heart beating his being into her. "How?"
Aelita pushed herself to her feet, and pulled him up. He looked different this way. His hair was out of place, he was covered in dirt and sweat, and his glasses were missing. She didn't let go of his hand as turned towards the rings, breathing slowly, trying to calm herself as they stepped forward, each band lighting in turn. "I don't know. I made you like me, as much as I could."
Jeremy realized he didn't need his glasses to in Lyoko as he was lifted from the floor, a packet of data in a stream, being carried along. When they stopped moving, they were met by a terminal. She didn't let go of his hand as she reached for the screen as Odd called out to them. The cursor on the screen added another layer to the mystery as it split into two lines of text, spelling out:
JEREMIE
---
As they stepped from the transfer pods, they were nearly knocked from their feet as their friends hugged them tightly. Yumi was babbling her apologies incomprehensibly between sobs, shifting between French, English and Japanese as her words ran together. Odd and Ulrich weren't much better. All three had tear tracks still damp on their cheeks. It had been too close.
"Guys, it's ok. We lived, Zana's sealed up, and we didn't need to change the past. I'd say it came out alright."
Holding his hand, Aelita nodded vigorously. "Yumi, don't blame yourself. You figured out how to talk to us without Zana hearing, right?"
The taller girl nodded, as she wondered if seppuku by ballpoint was possible.
Jeremie rested his hand on her shoulder. "That saved us. If Zana had known we were on the ledge, we wouldn't have had a chance."
"He's right. The wasps would have been able to sting us until we were dead, and had no place to go. There is no way I could have warped enough stone fast enough to let us escape."
Yumi looked up, the movement turning a near sob into a hiccup as she felt her friends hug her. "But how?"
Jermie looked around at the equipment in the room. "I don't know. Lyoko was designed to adapt, to change; somehow, it changed me."
Odd couldn't take it any more, he had to lighten the mood. "So, Jeremie, Aelita, you just survived certain death and beat the bad guy unarmed, rendering the world safe for another day. What are you going to do now?"
Aelita spoke first. "A nap sounds really good right now."
---
Author's notes:
I'm a computer engineering major. I know how I would react in Jeremie's position: 120 hour days, living on sugar and caffeine while I tore the code apart, line by line.
As for my theory about why, partially, Jeremie's errors existed, it actually makes sense. Your brain gets turned into a program, and plugged into a virtual body. That body doesn't live up to the sights and sounds you expected, so you try to reprocess the data while still more data is coming in. The more you look at it, the more resolution you loose because of the degree of compression that would have to occur to make room for the new data. Free up some RAM and move the process' priority up in the resources cue, and the process can do more if it has to interoperate super complex data as a live stream. Remeber, Lyoko is a UV-node, most avatars can't deal with it. And everyone does it- when was the last time you were doing something or just spacing out, and didn't hear what someone else said to you?
And my vacations always go badly.
I do think they are risking thier lives, even if they arent' fully aware of it. They never right back after devirtualizing, and they don't look so hot when they get to the super calculator. If I had to take a guess, I'd say thier bodies aren't liking it very much, and being immediately revirtualized might end with something fun like a heart attack. There might also be the rare bit errors, which would have a very slow, steady, cumulative effect. At least until the wrong bit moves during your beam back. If you want to know more, read Criton's Timeline.
As for the song that Aelita was singing to wake up Jeremie, I'll let you pick your own. But for the record, the song that Winamp picked while I was righting that was "Goodnight Julia" from the Cowboy Bebop soundtrack. It's more of a lullaby, but since Aelita doesn't sleep per say, and Jeremie is a good geek, does it matter? It also happens to be one of my favorite songs. The sound I get in my head it is being played by an alto rather than baritone sax, with the piano backup an octave higher. Another extremely appropriate one would be another Yoko Kanno piece, "You Are Not Alone" from the Escalowne saga.
As for why they seem a little older, well, let's just say this is part of season three or four. :)
And if any fanartists are reading this, I'm willing to beg for well drawn images of Jeremie in his new virtualization, preferably when he first takes it, with Aelita hugging him. (The "I'm an elf" scene.)