A/N Hello! We changed the name of this fic! See the introduction for details. -Rai

Cold. The blankets that they had given her were warm, and the bed was soft, but Ivy was colder than she could ever remember being. She had long since run out of tears to shed, and in its place was a sort of numbness that chilled her to the very core. Again and again, she went over the evening in her mind, trying to make sense of it. Everything came after Michael had fallen she only recalled in fragments.

… She was screaming. She was not sure how long she had been calling Michael's name, every moment expecting Michael to reappear from the waves down below, and every moment terrified as he did not. She could dimly recall the roar of the Overbike, but it wasn't until Ulrich was shaking her shoulder that time had started to move again for her. How long had it been, then? It could not have been long. Aelita was still in the tower.

Ulrich's face was grim as he pulled Ivy gently but firmly away from the edge. "I was too late," he said. It wasn't until Odd responded that Ivy realized that the comment was not meant for her.

"I should have called you sooner. Jeremie's going to kill me…" Odd replied in a hushed voice.

Aelita emerged from the tower in time to hear Odd's comment. "What happened?" she asked.

"Michael," was all Ivy said…

… Ulrich's hands were on Ivy's shoulders. "No, Ivy, no," he told her in a tone that left no room for argument. "This is not your fault."

"Yes it is," Ivy sobbed. She was not sure when she had started crying, or even how this conversation had started, but now that it had started she couldn't seem to stop. "I was the one that lost control of my emotions. I was the one who pushed Michael all the way to the edge of the platform. I made him slip. It's all my fault."

"It's not your fault," Ulrich repeated. "And I'm sure that Michael knows that too. You tried to save him." Ivy remembered wondering faintly whether Ulrich had seen her reach for him or if it was just a guess. In either case, it offered her little comfort. "There was nothing anyone could have done. Now it's not too late to save him, or to save Yumi. But we have to keep moving, okay?" His voice was kind, but there was an undeniable urgency to his words. Ivy knew that they needed to keep going to help Yumi. Weakly, she nodded…

… They were in the scanner room. Ulrich and Ivy had returned home, but Aelita still waited on Lyoko. "Just in case," she had said. As if something else could go wrong today.

Thankfully when the scanner doors opened, Yumi was leaning against them, looking pale and shaky but none the worse for wear. She half-walked, half-fell out of the scanner. Ulrich caught and steadied her. "Michael screwed up, didn't he?" she rasped and gave him a half-smile that he did not return. Upon seeing their expressions, she grew sober. "Oh no. What happened now?"…

… All of them stood in the lab, with the exception of Jeremie who sat in the chair. He had a blanket wrapped around him, and his eyes were bright with fever. Every so often the chills going through him would be enough that he had to stop typing for a moment, but as soon as they passed he would resume his work with a single-minded determination. It fell to everyone else to explain to Ivy the specifics of the virtual sea.

Through her haze of shock and grief, Ivy only picked up bits and pieces. Michael was lost… they had experienced this once in the past, and had retrieved someone, but only barely… these first few hours were the best chance they had to locate him… if they could not, it might be days or weeks before they could find him. The group was too kind to say it, but Ivy sensed the truth. There was a chance that Michael would never be found...

… She was entering Yumi's apartment. The group, Ivy included, had agreed that it was best if Ivy did not return to the school tonight, since she did not have a roommate to miss her and the adults did not want her to be alone tonight. Odd and Ulrich had been the first to volunteer their apartment, but Yumi had vetoed this idea, pointing out that hers was more comfortable and closer to the factory so that they could be there at a moment's notice – not to mention the fact that she owned a couch and a futon for the three of them, as opposed to Odd and Ulrich's pair of beanbag chairs. The three of them had agreed, and while Aelita and Jeremie stayed behind to look for Michael, the three Lyoko warriors brought Ivy here.

Yumi and Odd had both insisted that Ivy should try to eat something, but she was not hungry. The plate that they had given her Ivy set on the dresser, untouched, then laid down in the bed and closed her eyes. The girl was exhausted, too tired to even cry anymore. But sleep did not come…

… Which brought her to now. Ivy lay in this unfamiliar bed, desperately wishing for the escape of sleep but failing to find it. She wished for home, for times long passed when she could just crawl into bed with her parents and nothing in the world could hurt her. A small, childish part of her wanted to do the same with the three Lyoko warriors sitting vigil in the living room. Ivy knew that she could not. They were not her parents, and nothing they could do could soothe the guilt and the fear tonight. And so Ivy waited, alone.

She must have dozed off at some point, because the next thing Ivy knew, the sound of her phone buzzing was rousing her. In her half-awake state, her first thought was that it must be Michael before she remembered that it could not be. Ivy wondered next if it was Jeremie texting her to tell her Michael had been found. This, too, was incorrect. The number the phone displayed was unfamiliar. Ivy unlocked her phone to read it.

"This is Ivy's phone, right?"

Ivy hesitated a moment before writing back. "Yes… Who is this?"

The reply was prompt. "lucas. Is Michael with you"

Ivy groaned out loud. The last thing she needed was Lucas butting in again. "No. He's not with me," was her terse response.

This time, the reply took longer. "Do you know where he is?"

"No. I don't," lied Ivy.

"brb" Five minutes passed. Ivy was starting to think that Lucas had gone to bed when the reply came suddenly "Just been to your room. Where are you?"

Ivy's heart raced. "What in the world were you doing in my room?" she demanded, anger surging through her, the first thing to break her numb shock in hours.

"Was hoping you were lying so I didn't have to worry." A paused, then another message. "So? Where are you?"

"None of your business."

A long paused. At last: "My roommate is missing. He used to talk seriously about running away, and he's impulsive. I just want to know if he's okay."

Ivy thought a long time before sending her answer. When she did, she was not certain whose benefit it was more meant for, herself or Lucas'. "He's okay."

"….. But you wont tell me where he is will you"

"I don't know where he is but I do know that he's alright." It was exactly the opposite of true.

This answer seemed to mollify Lucas. "OK. But tbh ill probably nag you about it later. Call it the price of making me worry." Another short pause, enough that Ivy had already put down her phone, before Lucas had his final word. "PS. Wouldn't worry though. Michael doesn't kiss & tell".

This last comment brought back memories of what Michael had said on Lyoko, memories that Ivy was not prepared to deal with right now. The girl changed her phone to "Do Not Disturb", placed it face down, then rolled over to look at the walls. She waited.

The clock on the wall marked the passage of time in deafening finality. Despite the fact that Yumi's apartment had specifically been chosen because it could accommodate all three of them, none of the group had made a move to sleep. Yumi had made them all strong tea when they had first taken up their spots around the table. Around 1:30, they had switched to instant coffee Yumi had dug up from the dark recesses of her pantry, as Yumi herself was not a coffee drinker. It tasted truly abysmal, but Ulrich and Odd did not complain, and all of them drank it. The three of them had enough history that no words were needed, and truly, what was there to say? Nothing. So they sat and they waited, and they tried to think of a way to tell a thirteen year old girl come daybreak that her friend had not been found.

At 2:26, Odd did what Ulrich had been considering doing for hours and put an end to that damnable clock. He simply stood, took the clock from the wall, and removed the batteries. None of them complained. It was the silence that filled the room that prompted Ulrich to speak the thought that he had been turning over and over in his mind for hours. "You were right, Yumi," he said quietly.

"Right about what?" He could tell by the way that she said it that she suspected his meaning, but wanted to be certain.

"You were right. We should never have involved them with Lyoko. We should have thought of another way."

"Do you really think so?" Odd asked, giving him an unusually serious look. "They've been doing so well. I've been training with them nearly every day, and I know you've spent a lot of time with them too."

"That doesn't matter," Ulrich replied. "They're kids. We had no right to get kids mixed up in all of this. Look what's happened. No matter what the circumstances were, we ultimately chose to train them and keep bringing them back to Lyoko. This is our fault."

"And besides," interjected Yumi, "their personalities are quite volatile together. Even if we fought back then –" she cast a quick glance at Ulrich "- it was nothing compared to how they fight. Michael's too… caustic."

"He's getting better," Odd defended. "I mean, I admit I don't know a whole lot about him, but it seems to me that he's loads better than he used to be. He was trying to apologize to Ivy when… when it happened."

"But it happened," Yumi said simply.

Silence fell for a time. Minutes ticked by, now unmarked by the disabled clock. "I don't want them to be kicked off of the team," Odd said at last. "With them around, it's more… I don't know…"

"It's more like it used to be, right?" suggested Yumi, nodding her head in agreement. "I know what you mean."

"Why is that?" Odd asked. "I mean, what happened?"

"Things changed," Yumi tried to explain. "We changed. We're not kids anymore, but when we're training them it's like… we can see the people we used to be. I used to take it seriously back then, I don't want to say that I didn't, it's just that…" She trailed off helplessly. Ulrich, who had identified the feeling weeks ago, supplied the ending.

"It's that failure is more of a real possibility, when you're an adult," he stated quietly. "Back when we were young, it was as though we could fail but we weren't going to because we wouldn't let it happen. Now… we know that it happens whether you let it or not, sometimes. The weight of all those near misses, and now what still might happen… sometimes it just gets to you."

"Especially after seeing what it did to Jeremie," Odd added in a voice that was almost inaudible. Conversation died as they all tried carefully not to think about how different Jeremie's life might have been had it not been for Lyoko. At last, Odd broke the silence again. "I still don't think that we should talk to Ivy about her leaving the team until Michael is back."

'If he comes back,' Ulrich thought, and knew that all of them were thinking the same. "I agree," he said aloud. "If it was one of us…"

"If it was one of us…" echoed Yumi, nodding her head again. "We would never be willing to just sit waiting until our friend was back. She can fight, so long as it does not become too dangerous, but if it does then she needs to let us take care of it. We will need to communicate all of this to her."

"Right," Odd said. "But not tonight."

"No, no. Not tonight."

Light was just beginning to tinge the skies when Ivy was shaken awake gently by Yumi. As she opened her eyes blearily, she heard the words that made her heart leap. "Wake up, Ivy. Jeremie and Aelita think they have found him."