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7

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Aelita mumbled in her sleep, trying to will away the thunder she was hearing in her dreams. The rumbling continued, and after a few moments she blearily opened her eyes. She found to her surprise that the "thunder" had followed her out of the dream; it was a small but audible knocking at the door of her dormroom. She glanced at the clock next to her bed; it was past two in the morning.

She yawned slightly, sitting up, her voice tired. "Who is it?"

"It's Sissi…can I come in?"

Aelita rubbed her face a bit and lightly clapped her cheeks twice to wake herself up, sliding her legs out of bed and straightening her long pink nightshirt. She moved to the door, unlocking it and pulling it open. Sissi was standing there in her dark pink pajamas and slippers, her normally straight hair a bit of a mess. She looked tired, but also more than a little nervous.

Aelita stepped aside for her to come in, motioning to the bed. "Have a seat. What's up?"

"Sorry for waking you so late…" Sissi moved to the bed and took a seat, pulling her knees up to her chest. "I couldn't sleep. I've been trying, but my brain keeps thinking things."

"I know that feeling, though not really the same way I guess." Aelita closed the door and sat down close next to her. "When I was trapped on Lyoko after Jeremie and the others found me, I actually wasn't capable of sleeping. So any time that they weren't around, I sat in towers away from any monsters and spent a lot of time just thinking." She smiled a little ruefully. "It probably wasn't the best thing for my own sanity. Our own mind can make us start doing cartwheels."

"Tell me about it." Sissi groaned, leaning forward and resting her head on her knees. "I'm getting past the whole 'this is all crazy talk' stage; Odd and you helped with that. But my brain just keeps trying to come up with more explanations, and when it's not doing that, I'm getting flashbacks to some of the bad dreams I've been having the last few weeks."

Aelita held out a hand palm-up, her voice slipping into a matter-of-fact tone. "Well, that's understandable that your brain is trying to explain it away. Our mind uses denial as a defense mechanism, trying to protect us from outside stress. It's how we don't go insane thinking about how many asteroids float around in space and how it might only take one to end civilization as we know it."

Sissi made a face at her. "Oh, thaaaanks, I reaaaally needed that in my head." But she smiled a bit saying it, showing it was a joke. Soon though, her face returned to its pensive look.

"You mentioned bad dreams?" Aelita prompted.

"Y-Yeah…ever since I started dating Odd, I started having these weird dreams. I was losing track of most of them, but since learning about all of this, bits and pieces of it have started coming back. They usually ended with Odd getting hurt somehow."

"What kinds of things were they about?"

Sissi shivered a bit, taking a breath to steel herself to talk about it. "Well…they're just…weird. Like, there's one where Odd's running from a bunch of these weird giant wasp-like potato things, and he gets stung by them. And there's one where he's falling off a cliff and disappearing into clouds below. And then there was one where…" she trailed off for a minute, before finishing, "…where I see him disintegrating."

She shook her head. "I know this probably all sounds a little silly." She looked at Aelita, then paused; the look she was getting seemed to suddenly suggest it wasn't silly at all.

"So it's happened to you too." Aelita finally said.

"Huh?"

Aelita put her hands in her lap, eyes narrowing slightly as if she was trying to think of how to say the next part. "The Time Reversion…has proven to not be complete on wiping all trace of memories in the past. Once or twice we've had an issue where someone kept small bits of memories from Returns to the Past in the form of dreams, and we've had to contend with the results in future missions. In one of those cases, it led to someone forcing their way onto the team for a while…and that ended really, really badly."

"Was that someone me?"

"Oh, no no. It's not anything we've seen with you before I think." Aelita assured her. "But since it's happened to others, it's completely believable that it could happen with you, especially if you're spending time around us more often. The presence of people from our dreams tends to bring them back out of our subconscious by memory association."

"Oh. Okay." Sissi looked at the far wall, eyes moving over some of Aelita's band posters, thinking again. "So the stuff in my dreams is, like, repressed memories or something? Past stuff?"

"It certainly sounds like it, yeah. The 'wasp-potato things' you described are one of XANA's monster types, which we call Hornets. Usually the monsters stay in Lyoko, but a couple of times XANA has managed to de-virtualize them into the real world. The cliff thing…that was probably in the mountain sector, I think you were present for something like that once. And the disintegrating thing…do you remember what the area around it looked like?"

"Ummm…" Sissi hesitated at first, reluctant to go back to the memory, but she tried to think on it. She bit her lip playing it back in her mind, trying to not look at her boyfriend fading away in the dreamscape. "It looked kind of like a desert or somethi-oh!" She looked to Aelita, her eyes widening in recognition. "It looked like the place where Yumi was yesterday!"

Aelita nodded. "You probably saw him being devirtualized. When we're on Lyoko, we have limited lifepoints. It's kind of like a health bar in a video game, it's basically how much virtual stamina we have left, or how much we can take in a fight. If we get knocked out, we're removed from Lyoko. It's not very fun at all; it drains us enormously. And once you're devirtualized, you need to regain your strength, and you can't just go back in right away. It's why it's so vital that we complete missions to stop XANA without it happening; most of the time we can't afford an entire day of rest time while XANA is doing whatever it's doing."

Sissi nodded, deep in thought again. "I see..." She groaned and put her head down again, sighing.

Aelita put a hand on her shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"I feel like such a…well, frankly, such a bitch. Here I've been running around for almost our entire time in Kadic, running you all around and giving you such a hard time, then you all decide to trust me with this whole thing, and my first response is to try and deny it all and panick and run off like a scared little child." She lifted her head just enough to drop it back down on her knees like a head-desk thump. "I mean, if it wasn't for Odd…I just about accidentally threw myself over a freaking bridge with how panicked I was. And before that whole thing, when we were all upstairs, here I was telling myself I was going to leave that mean and nasty person behind and be stronger, and the first thing I did was be a big fat stupid bitch."

"Stop that." Aelita's tone was firm and just a little angry, as she reached out and got a hand under Sissi's chin, lifting it and making the girl look right at her; the pink-haired girl's eyes were giving her the kind of look a parent might give while scolding a child. "Stop calling yourself that. You're not stupid, you're not fat, and you're not a bitch. So stop it. So you reacted badly; you're still here. You didn't run off to your father and blab, or to the police, or even to Herve or Nikolas, or anyone else. In the past, you did all three of those things. But not this time."

"Y-Yeah, but I still ran off. If not for Odd, - "

"Well then, this time you have Odd. If that's what it took, then that's what it took. But even tonight, you didn't go to Odd. You came to me. You know what that tells me?"

"...w-what?"

Aelita's eyes softened a bit and she gave a small smile. "That you trusted me. That when you were confused, you came to me, instead of running off to some authority figure for protection. It tells me you think of me as a friend."

"I...do see you as a friend." Sissi answered, starting to return the smile. "I really do now. It feels weird saying it, given all that's happened in the past…but I really do feel closer to you all now. Even with you; I know we talked online for so long, even though I didn't know it, but in the last couple weeks I still feel more like friends than I ever did before."

"Well, good. Because you're my friend too." Aelita's smile was broad now, and she took one of Sissi's hands in her own. "And I'll always be here if you want to talk."

Sissi nodded, squeezing her hand in return. She looked over at the clock; they'd been talking for a little over twenty minutes. "I should probably get back to my room and try to sleep again."

"Want to stay here instead?" Aelita suggested. "You know, like a sleepover." She stuck her tongue out, giggling. "Just with actual sleep."

Sissi smiled. "Yeah, actually, that might help." She looked around. "Uhh…so where should I sleep?"

Aelita patted the bed.

"But then where will you sleep?"

Aelita patted the bed again.

"O-Oh."

"What?" Aelita grinned mischievously. "Worried I'll make a move on you or something?"

Sissi laughed, blushing, and gave the pink-haired girl a shove. "Oh go jump in an ice bath, you."

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It wasn't that many hours later, as the morning sun was climbing, that Jeremie stood knocking at Aelita's door. It wouldn't be long until classes started, and there hadn't been any sign of her or Sissi at breakfast.

"Aelita? Are you awake yet?"

He knocked again, and heard Aelita's voice murmuring something. Hesitantly, he tried the doorknob; it was unlocked, so he slowly turned it and opened the door.

Aelita was still in bed, lying on her side facing toward him and the room. She mumbled something again, and Jeremie stepped into the room. "Come on Aelita, you slept through your alarm, it's almost eight-thirty, classes will be starting in half an hour."

His girlfriend stirred and opened her eyes, groaning a bit and rubbing them. "Morning, Jeremie…wait, how did you get in?"

"You left the door unlocked. I knocked first though."

"Oh, shoot. I must have forgotten to re-lock it." Aelita slowly made to push herself up from bed, then stopped, an odd look on her face.

Jeremie caught the look. "What is i-" He paused as he looked at the bed, and realized that the lump under the covers was a lot bigger than just Aelita's size, and black hair was poking out from the top of the comforters. At first his brain made a brief worried leap, but Aelita pushed the covers down before his thoughts could get too far, though what he saw just about train-crashed the line of thought. Sissi was laying on her side in her pajamas, fast asleep, arms around Aelita's waist, snuggling up to her back warmly.

"Uhh…" Jeremie struggled for words, his brain both conjuring images and a handful of questions, not really sure which to ask first.

Aelita giggled a bit. "Sissi came to me last night, she was having trouble sleeping." She looked up at him. "I ended up suggesting a sleepover to help her sleep. Apparently it worked."

"O-Oh, I see."

"Jeremie. Get your mind out of the gutter."

Jeremie held up his hands, cheeks reddening. "It's not in the gutter! Really!"

"Who's put what in the gutter?" Odd's voice came from the hallway, and before Aelita could pull the covers back up, he stepped into view fully dressed. "Oh, hey Jeremie, was looking for yo-" He ground to a halt, eyes focused on the bed, mouth falling open. It opened and closed a couple of times, and in that moment Odd looked for all the world like the most confused fish in all of France.

Finally he found his voice, pointing dramatically and exclaiming, looking at Jeremie now. "When did this happen?!"

At the outburst, Sissi stirred, murmuring and opening her eyes, slowly pulling her arms away from Aelita and sitting up, rubbing her eyes. "What's all the noise about…" When she looked up again, she saw the impromptu gathering that had happened in her slumber. Her eyes got wider and her cheeks redder and redder as she looked at Aelita, then at Jeremie's blushing face, then at Odd's surprised and shocked look, before growling and grabbing up a pillow.

"GET OUT!"

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