Possessive
By Cybra

A/N: A very strange idea I came up with during one of the long bus rides in Spain.

Disclaimer: Code Lyoko belongs to the French.

Badoom…badoom…badoom…

It was the first time XANA had ever actively worked a circulatory system in order to pump blood as opposed to simply allowing the body it possessed to do such things autonomously. It was also the first time it had regulated respiration though each breath sounded as if its current host was about to breathe his last.

But XANA had to save Jeremy Belpois.

It had originally come to the boy's room, planning to kill the child in the night by asphyxiating him through constricting his throat muscles again. However, the artificial intelligence had wanted to do it slowly, painfully, allowing the programmer the dignity of knowing that the only way XANA could've defeated him was by "cheating". Such a worthy opponent the child had made. Irksome and infuriating, but XANA could respect him on some level.

The child was sleeping when it arrived. Which was a rare state for Jeremy since he spent so much of his nights preparing for the next battle: coding, upgrading, slaving away before the keyboard. XANA was almost going to miss the challenge; the boy's impressive programming skills tested its flexibility considerably.

But as the artificial intelligence prepared to take the plunge into the blond's body, Jeremy stiffened, gave a shuddering gasp, and fell still. Apparently whether due to this "stress" that his friends kept warning him about or some previously unknown physical defect, his body had shut down for good.

XANA had won by default.

And the artificial intelligence felt cheated. Jeremy Belpois was its to destroy as it saw fit.

So it entered the boy's body and restarted his systems, managing every detail of life. And for hours it stayed to its task, not ceasing when the samurai warrior Ulrich entered the room—curious to see what the programmer was doing—and called an ambulance on his cell phone. Only when the child was in the hospital and connected to medical equipment did XANA abandon its self-appointed task.

It left the boy's body, pausing for only a moment to listen to the steady beep-beep, beep-beep of the heart monitor. Satisfied, it returned to the factory to replenish its energy.

It would wait for another night when the boy was back in his normal place. Then the artificial intelligence would kill him itself.