Here's just a random little one-shot I thought about writing a couple of days ago. So I sat down and wrote it and here it is. It's a sad story (yes another tragedy). I hope you guys like it! Read and review!
Yumi exhaled contentedly, her warm breath brushing gently across the sweaty bare chest that her head rested on. They were both tired, nearly out of breath as she lay in his arms, both of them wearing nothing but the thin sheet that covered their bodies. Her leg was intertwined between both of his, and she massaged her toes against the back of his calf absentmindedly as she enjoyed the feeling of their bare bodies pressed against each other's. She was a bit sore, but she also felt so remarkably complete that it didn't seem to matter.
Ulrich held her close, breathing in the beautiful lilac scent of her hair. His hand slowly caressed the side of her slender 16-year-old body, relishing in the softness of her skin against his fingertips. He looked down at her face, brilliantly illuminated by the moonlight shining through her bedroom window. She was flawless, by far the most beautiful girl he'd ever seen. He couldn't imagine anyone ever being more perfect than she was, and after years of loving her she was finally resting in his arms.
He was completely amazed that she had let him have her, that she'd loved him so passionately. He just knew that it felt right to be with her like this, because in a moment of their passion as he kissed her and gently entered her body, he'd realized that they were soul mates. Love was no longer a strong enough word to describe how he felt for her, and at such a young age he could not yet verbalize his feelings. It was through his gentle caresses and his admiring gaze that she just knew, no explanation needed. They were perfect.
Yumi looked up into his green eyes with a small smile on her face as she heard his heart still pounding into the ear pressed to his chest. Before she'd done it, she'd known that it was wrong, that they were too young to be doing something so life-changing while her parents were out of town. Her attitude had changed completely though, because no moment in her life had ever been so peaceful. She would never love another person as long as she lived, not the way she loved Ulrich. "You're amazing," she told him in a very quiet voice.
Ulrich smiled and kissed her forehead. "I promise to love you forever Yumi," he whispered.
Yumi closed her eyes as she began to fall asleep to the rhythmic sound of his steady breathing that took her to a completely different world. However, his voice brought her back to a harsher reality. "Yumi, I have to go now."
She looked back at his face in alarm to see that it held a sad smile. "Ulrich…"
"I'm sorry, Yumi," Ulrich said. He swept a strand of her hair from her eyes with a gentle hand, grazing her cheek with his fingers as he did so. She closed her eyes and leaned into his touch.
"Oh Ulrich, stay," she pleaded as her hand cupped his to her cheek. Ulrich said nothing and Yumi opened her eyes as tears rimmed them. "I love you."
Ulrich nodded and hugged her tightly. "I know," he whispered. "And you know that I love you more than anything in the entire world."
"Then stay," Yumi begged, but he began to get up. She desperately clung to his arm. "Ulrich, don't go! This moment is perfect. Don't ruin it."
"I have to go this time," Ulrich said without looking at her as he gathered his clothing from the floor. "You can't keep clinging to this memory."
Yumi turned her head away, and her body shook with each sob. A moment later she felt two strong hands on her bare shoulders, but she refused to turn her head back towards him. He kissed the back of her neck lovingly and then tilted his head further to place a tender kiss on her collarbone. "Goodbye Yumi," he whispered into her ear before fading away.
Yumi opened her eyes to find herself staring at the ceiling of her bedroom in a cold sweat. "Ulrich," she whispered to herself as she thought of the memory of her first and only time having sex with him. She'd been having that dream often lately. It was her best and worst memory of Ulrich, because she'd had him so completely and had then lost him forever just a day later.
That night, they'd fallen asleep in each other's arms, only to be awoken the next morning by Jeremie, urgently informing them of a Xana attack. They'd rushed to the Factory to help Aelita deactivate the tower, just like any other routine day on Lyoko. However, Xana had been well prepared with a small army of monsters guarding the tower. Ulrich, attempting to create a diversion for the others, had used his clones to take on the monsters, but as his friends had run with Aelita they'd heard him shout. Yumi had turned just in time to see Ulrich slip off of the edge of the land and into the digital void.
Yumi sighed as she got out of bed and decided to take a walk. It was still the middle of the night, but her parents wouldn't care since she was eighteen and did it a lot. Deciding not to change at all, she just threw on a pair of flip-flops and a thin jacket in case the nighttime spring air was chilly. She grabbed her cell phone and walked out of her front door, heading towards the old Factory.
Sticking her hand in the pocket of her jacket, she was glad to find that she'd left her fresh box cigarettes in there earlier that day. Yumi had never been the type of person to smoke cigarettes or do drugs or anything like that, and she still wasn't. She didn't do it to rebel at all like a lot of kids her age did. She'd only started because she'd needed something to calm her nerves, and after finding no comfort in anything else she'd found cigarettes to be helpful. She didn't smoke a lot or anything, just whenever she was feeling particularly upset about Ulrich. She swore to herself that she could kick the habit whenever she wanted, but for some reason she hadn't yet tried to.
Yumi lit a cigarette and replaced the lighter into her pocket. She took a drag from the cigarette and then let her hand hold it at her side as she walked. She exhaled, finding the smell of the tobacco oddly comforting, but it still didn't keep her mind from running wild with thoughts of Ulrich's 'disappearance.' She remembered well all of the news reports and newspaper articles devoted to finding the whereabouts of the missing 15-year-old Ulrich Stern. Ulrich's wealthy parents had even offered a handsome reward to anyone who could find him. Only his best friends had known the truth about his disappearance, but they were unable to shed any light on the situation for any outsiders. After six months of searching, Ulrich had been assumed dead by the authorities.
For months, almost an entire year in fact, the rest of the gang had searched every inch of the Supercomputer for any trace of Ulrich, but everyone other than Yumi had given up hope. Jeremie's constant 'searches' of new files had become half-hearted attempts at keeping Yumi's spirits up. Jeremie had however achieved his own goals of stopping Xana and finding Aelita's antivirus. Xana had long since been deleted and Aelita finally freed. The only reason Lyoko was even still on was to humor Yumi. Deep down she knew that, and she couldn't really decide whether she loved her friends for trying to keep her happy or resented them for not having more faith.
It had been almost two years since she'd lost him, and she would be going away to college soon, leaving just the younger members of the gang at Kadic. She knew that once she was gone the efforts to find Ulrich on Lyoko would come to a complete halt, but the others would never officially end the search unless Yumi gave the 'ok.' The poor Japanese girl really didn't know if she could give up, though. However, her dream came back to her mind. Before this night it had ended exactly the way she remembered it. The bit about his having to leave had never occurred before, and Yumi knew why it had happened on this specific night.
Yumi brought her hand back up to her mouth and took a last drag from the cigarette, before dropping it to the ground and stepping on it with her black boot. The Factory was right in front of her, but she didn't go in just yet. She pulled out her cell phone and dialed the number of her genius friend. After a few rings, a tired voice answered with a 'hello.'
"Hi Jeremie," she said. "It's Yumi."
"Do you have any idea how late it is?" Jeremie's voice asked grumpily.
"Yes," Yumi replied. "But there's something we need to talk about. It's important. Can you, Odd and Aelita meet me at the Factory?"
There was a short pause and then a reluctant sigh. "Sure."
"Thanks," Yumi said gratefully.
"See you in a bit."
Odd yawned and stretched his arms sleepily as he and his other two Kadic companions approached the elevator. He was much taller than anyone would have predicted him to be, and he was much less purple than years before. His look was also definitely much less unusual than it had been in his first years at Kadic. Jeremie and Aelita, on the other hand, hadn't changed much. The two were both very ordinary looking teenagers, and they were both still very calm and quiet. "Remind me why I'm losing sleep to be here?" Odd asked Jeremie as they stepped into the elevator.
Jeremie sighed as he pressed the button and closed the door. "Yumi said that it's important that we talk to her tonight. I'm sure it's just another idea about how to find Ulrich though."
Aelita looked at her feet sadly. "Oh Jeremie," she said softly. "You know that if it were me you wouldn't have given up either."
Jeremie grabbed her hand and a sad silence filled the elevator. Odd looked away with pain in his eyes as he thought about his best friend. They'd all lost too much because of Xana.
When the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened, they all stepped out into the room that contained the Supercomputer. Yumi was sitting with her back to them in front of the computer, but to their surprise, she wasn't looking through any files at all. She was sitting there with another cigarette held up to her mouth as she drummed her fingers nervously on the arm of the chair. "Yumi?" Odd called curiously.
The older girl turned around to face them and they saw trails of tears flowing down her cheeks. Despite this, Yumi forced a small smile and stood up, letting the hand holding the cigarette fall idly to her side. "Hey." She noticed Jeremie looking at her cigarette disapprovingly, so she put it out on the lid of the nearby trashcan and threw it inside. "Sorry…"
"I keep telling you Yumi," Jeremie said sternly. "Those things are going to kill you."
Yumi ignored the comment and just forced another small smile. "Guys," she said. "We really need to talk."
"About finding Ulrich?" Jeremie asked expectantly.
Yumi, however, shook her head. "About shutting down Lyoko," she whispered.
Everyone stared at her in shock, maybe even a bit horrified, and Aelita was the first to recover. "What did you just say?" she asked, slightly confused.
"I…" Yumi took a deep breath. "I'm ready to shut down Lyoko."
"Are you sure?" Aelita asked.
Yumi nodded. "He's gone… I know that now. I need to let him go…"
There was a long silence before Jeremie finally spoke. "I think you're making a good decision," he said, placing a hand on her shoulder.
Odd shot him an angry look. "Good decision?" he snapped. "It's a good decision to give up on Ulrich forever?"
They were all confused by Odd's reaction. "You've said it yourself that we need to move on," Jeremie said in astonishment.
"I meant that Ulrich would want us to be happy," Odd explained. "You just want to stop looking because you're bored with it! You only think of it as a huge burden that you want to get rid of."
Aelita and Jeremie gaped at him. Yumi just turned her head, unable to listen to him venting. For the entire two years, Odd hadn't really voiced much of an opinion on searching for Ulrich. He'd obviously been trying to move on from the loss of his best friend, but he'd never really said that he wanted to shut down Lyoko. No one had really thought, though, that he specifically wanted to keep it on.
"Odd, you know that's not true!" Aelita said incredulously.
"It isn't?" Odd challenged her, his eyes starting to well up with tears. "You think exactly the same way! You just want to shut down Lyoko, because you have all those bad memories from it! Well, what about Ulrich? Does it even matter to you guys that he's trapped in there!"
Aelita looked at her feet. "Odd, I-"
"No!" Odd shouted. "Stop pretending that you care. Neither of you do!" He looked at Yumi and his voice softened, but he still sounded miserable. "Yumi, you weren't supposed to give up on him… How am I supposed to hope he'll come back if you don't believe he can anymore?"
Yumi bit her lip and looked back at Odd shamefully before quickly throwing her arms around him. She felt him make a weak effort to push her away, but she only held on tighter until he relaxed into her arms. She felt him sobbing and she buried her own face in his shoulder. She'd been going through a depression that had lasted for almost two years, but here was Odd, breaking down all at one moment. Maybe it was taking him just as long to cope, even though he'd been to calm to show it before. "He's gone, Odd," she whispered. "We both have to face it…"
"I miss him so much," Odd murmured. "He's supposed to come back… Ulrich wouldn't have let Xana bring him down!"
Yumi pulled away and held both of Odd's cheeks to force him to look her in the eye. "Xana could never bring Ulrich down," she told him, and maybe even herself a little bit. "We think about Ulrich every single day, and I know that we'll never stop thinking about him. But Ulrich wouldn't want us to live like this. He wouldn't want us to spend the rest of our lives coming to the Factory every day to look through files we've seen thousands of times before. I know… that it's hard to believe that I'm saying this, but… We need to move on and be happy, and to do that we need closure."
Odd sobbed a couple of times, but he nodded. Yumi smiled and released his face. She turned to Aelita and Jeremie as she wiped away her own tears. "Jeremie," she said. "I'm ready to do this…"
"And Odd?" Jeremie asked timidly.
They all looked at the boy as he dried his face with his sleeve. He gave them a somewhat hesitant nod, but he straightened himself up and looked ready. "Let's go," he said in a raspy voice.
The all rode the elevator down to the main control room in solemn silence. When it came to a stop they all glanced sideways at their companions before stepping into the room. Jeremie led them to the main switch, the one that controlled the entire system that Lyoko resided in. He looked at Yumi once again for assurance. "Are you… sure about this?" he asked with his hand on the switch.
"Jeremie, I want to do it," Yumi told him. "I need to pull the switch myself."
"Ok." Jeremie stepped away and held Aelita's hand.
Yumi raised her hand to the large lever nervously, and she felt a chill go down her spine when her fingers wrapped around the handle. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as she readied herself to pull it. A hand was set on top of hers and she looked to see that it was Odd's, offering her a grim, yet supportive smile. "We'll do it together," he whispered. "You don't have to do it alone."
Yumi nodded gratefully and began to count off slowly. "One… two… three…"
With that, Lyoko was shut down, and they finally knew that he was gone forever. Yumi didn't cry. She just didn't think that she could anymore. It was official. Ulrich was dead. And so was a little part of her for that matter. Looking at her friends, however, she knew that now at least the rest of her was free to move on.
But she would never love another person as long as she lived, not the way she loved Ulrich. She would always be his, only his.
The End.
I know.. I know. I wrote another tragedy. I guess that's just what I like to write.And I really wanted to have an implied sex scene to make thisa more mature story.I hope you enjoyed it! Please review!
