A/N: So, next chapter up. I apologize for the amount of time it took, but my computer crashed. It's still crashed. This is being written on my grandmother's computer, which is old and runs slowly. But, as I am a beggar, I cannot be a chooser. So without further ado, so beginneth the next chapter.

Chapter Six: Lucy! You Got Some 'Splanin' To Do!

Jeremy POV

My computer beeped, alerting me to an activated tower. I sat bolt upright at my computer, rubbing my forehead where the keyboard had left indentions on my skin. I righted my glasses and looked at the monitor, clicking around until it displayed to me the tower's location. Irritated that I hadn't finished the program I was working on before I fell asleep, I grabbed my mobile and called Yumi.

"Jeremy, it's three in the morning," Yumi's agitated voice greeted me. I rolled my eyes. I could read my watch. I didn't need to be told what time it was, so, verbally, I ignored the comment.

"Activated tower, Ice Sector. Get to the factory. I'll call the others," I said, almost finished dressing already. For once, I'd changed into pajamas before working at my computer last evening. I now remembered why I usually didn't. Yumi grumbled something in response, and hung up. I immediately dialed Ulrich's phone as I silently ran out of my room and down the hall. He answered as I got to the door.

"What? It's three in the morning!" Ulrich's grumpy voice welcomed me. I sighed. I was tired of time updates already.

"Get Aelita. There's an activated tower in the Ice Sector. Meet us at the factory. Yumi's already on her way." Ulrich mumbled something in response and I heard Odd yelp as he hung up. I swear, those two needed to get themselves together and focus on things that were really important in life. Between Ulrich and Yumi drama and Odd's constant parade of women, it was a wonder we ever got any work done. Really, the group of them could learn something from me. I hadn't made my move on Aelita yet, had I? Clearly, we were both crazy for the other and we were just waiting to be done with XANA before we started anything. Of course, even Aelita had her distractions, like the stupid DJ thing, but that could be tolerated, I supposed.

Ulrich POV

I pushed Odd out of bed again to wake him up as I hung up on Jeremy. I explained the situation quickly even though he wasn't listening. He knew the drill. We dressed in record time; neither of us ever moved that fast to get ready for school. We then made our way to Aelita and Faye's room. I opened the door, finding it unlocked, and peered inside. No one was there. As we made our way outside, I called Jeremy again.

"Bad news, Jeremy: Aelita's not in her room… Okay, we'll look for her first then. Odd will call her… We'll let you know when we're on our way… Okay. See ya soon." Odd had hung up by now. "No answer?" He shook his head in response, and dialed again as we ran towards the woods. "Odd, if she didn't pick up when you called two seconds ago, I doubt she'll pick up now," I said just as we cleared the tree line.

"I'm not calling Aelita. I'm calling—Faye? Are you there?" That made sense. I hadn't thought to worry about Faye at the moment. Maybe she was XANA's angle with this attack. "Faye, have you seen Aelita? It's an emergency… She's with you? Great, tell her we need her at the factory… Where are you—OWW!" He collided with Faye at that exact moment, landing smack on his butt with her splayed in his lap. Their mobiles flew in two random directions, and it would have been comical had I not worried one or both was hurt. I slowed my momentum, but not enough to stop from crashing into Aelita, who fell backwards at the force, landing flat on her back. I only barely managed to catch myself with my hands on either side of her shoulders and my knees between hers before I crushed her under my bodyweight and force. All of us just sat for a part of a second, shocked stupid, then I reacted, standing quickly and helping Aelita up as I blushed slightly at the awkward position I'd knocked her into.

"Everyone okay?" I asked, as I watched Faye disentangle herself from Odd and help him up. There was a small chorus of yes and then we made our way to the sewers, where Aelita ushered Faye after I went and Odd followed the girls. I grabbed my skateboard and jumped on quickly, not looking back to see if the others were there.

Aelita POV

As I followed behind Faye who followed Ulrich blindly at my direction, I felt an overwhelming sense of camaraderie with her. Her graceful figure leaned gently into the curves as though she did this everyday with the rest of us. Her figure… as we moved toward the factory, I replayed our post-dinner conversation in my mind.

~FLASHBACK TO SOME HOURS EARLIER~

I had run out of the cafeteria just after her, leaving my tray for someone else to dump. I searched outside, and just saw her, running off toward the woods. I ran after her, but I was naturally much slower than she, and that coupled with the fact that she had a head start made me fall hopelessly behind before she even hit the tree line. I had wandered around the woods for an hour or two before I found her, curled up against a huge maple tree trunk. I came near to her, afraid she was hurt, then realized she was alright physically, but the crying indicated otherwise emotionally. I swallowed, and gently put my hand on her shoulder.

She stiffened so much that I thought the tree would be softer and less rigid. "I'm allowed to be here. I'm not injured, so leave me alone," she said, not looking up from her hands folded over her face. Her voice was strong and fairly unwavering for someone whose lips were freeing sobs like tempests only moments before.

"I'd rather not, if that's okay," I said, sitting next to her. I hoped my voice had the calming and soothing quality I was trying to portray. I took my hand off her shoulder.

"Aelita?" she asked looking up at me. What little make up she had been wearing was smeared down her cheeks in faint black lines where tears had streaked and her cheeks, nose and eyes were red from rubbing said tears away. Her eyes looked swollen with the effort of producing so much saltwater in so little time. She wiped her face again, and cleared her throat before turning to look at me fully. "What do you want?"

"I was just worried, Faye. After that mess with Sissi, I wanted to make sure you were alright. She had no right to say those things about you," I said, gently as I possibly could. Faye laughed humorlessly.

"No one has a right to say things like those." She wiped her face again, clearing it of the last shed tears and met my eyes. "That doesn't mean that mean girls won't."

"I just mean that she shouldn't have said them, and that she's completely wrong. You're not fat," I said, trying to explain myself.

She looked away from me and laughed again, more harshly this time. "I should hope not. I've been in a hospital for the past year where they practically force-fed me to health."

I blinked in surprise at her implication, but tried to smoothe out my facial expression before my pure disgust could show through. "What do you mean?" I asked, wanting her to explain before I jumped to conclusions.

She looked up at me, and turned, settling her back against the tree trunk as she turned to look at my face. She pulled her knees up, but it looked like it was more out of an effort to be comfortable than an effort to curl in on herself and shut the world out. "I mean just what I said. I've been in a psyche hospital over the year and some months recovering from an eating disorder, or, rather, a combination of two eating disorders: anorexia and bulimia." Her eyes searched my face, looking for my reaction.

I swallowed, trying to hide it, to corral the horror I felt inside and keep it off my face. Faye? Beautiful, open, confident Faye? With an eating disorder? Two? I couldn't wrap my mind around it. She was beautiful! She had class, was open, seemed so confident and collected! There was no way she could've been in the hospital a month ago! An image appeared unbidden in my mind's eye: Faye, cheekbones and ribs protruding as she stood in a dark room with a bra and sweatpants on, staring at herself in a mirror, taking in the gaunt, ghostlike reflection, the sunken eyes ringed in dark circles that had nothing to do with makeup, the thinning, lackluster hair, the pallid skin just hanging on a bony frame, like a skeleton with a white bed sheet stretched over its bones. I swallowed back the urge to vomit as I heard her tell herself with all the harsh energy she could muster in that state, 'You're fat. You ugly, disgusting creature, why are you so fat?' I swallowed again, willing the image to vanish. I thought of the way she looked at meals, when she ate only half of her food, and always with a sort of funny look on her face, like the act of eating, not so much the taste of the food, left a bad taste in her mouth. Odd always got her leftovers.

"Sissi kind of hits home then, huh?" I asked, my voice sounding a little strange even to me as I looked at her face, her healthy face, and realized what she probably saw herself as.

She smiled, kind of halfheartedly. "Yeah, Sissi hits home, but I've been called worse things than fat. Other things. Fat was just the only one I could really change, so I became obsessed with changing it. If there's no fat to mock, they had to quit mocking right? Apparently not. They just moved on to the next thing they could call me."

"Did your parents not notice?" I asked, wondering how the wonderful people she had described her parents to be could have missed out on something as significant as an eating disorder going on in their child's life.

"Oh, they did. At first I told them it was a religious fast, but when I never started eating again and my dad noticed a shirt that was once super tight on me practically hanging off of me, they started trying to make me eat. So, I humored them. Skip breakfast, give away lunch at school, eat at dinner time, and throw up after they had gone to bed. Eventually they realized I was still shrinking and they checked me into a hospital after they had exhausted every resource they had trying to force me to eat. The hospitals, at the very least, could watch me so I didn't vomit." I bit back the urge to do that very thing as she said it. "Therapy sessions, group, family, and individual, followed. I hated it, but after a while, I guess it started to work."

"Did you have friends come to visit?" I asked, trying to see something happy, however minute, in the hunger Hell that her life had become.

"No. I had initially had friends, but once I started obsessing over my weight and skipping meals and lying about it, they sort of quit hanging out with me. You're the first friend I've had in just under two years." She looked away then. "If we're still friends, that is."

"Of course we are!" I said fiercely. "Why would you think we weren't?"

"Well, my old friends left me, and I wasn't sure if you'd be mad at me or something…" she said, looking hard at the dirt.

"We're friends, Faye. I'm shocked, but I'm not mad. It's just a big shock. I mean, you always seem so confident. You don't strike me as the type…" I let myself trail off as she hid her face again.

"Well, I hide it well, I suppose."

"So you're not recovered?" I asked, nervous.

"No, I am. I mean, they say I am. I'm still in the process, I guess. It's hard to explain," she said, forcefully yanking loose strands of hair out of her face as she stared at the ground.

"Well, we have time. It's just us," I said, scooting closer to her and putting my hand gently on her shoulder, which caused her to tense again, but not quite as much as before.

"I… I feel like I'm at a halfway point. I see where what I was doing was wrong, but when I look in the mirror, I still see a human walrus. And, when I think about myself, all I can hear are those words, the slurs about my mixed race, the fat and the slut and all of that. I do my best to make myself eat, but it's just really hard to do. I hate it. I hate the feeling of food in my mouth and knowing that when I look in the mirror I'll feel fat. I hate hearing those voices as I swallow my food. I hate Sissi coming up and pointing it out. I hate it. From the look of food to the smell of it to the rumbling in my stomach when I'm around it. But I know that even if I don't eat, skinny will never be skinny enough for me. I'll always want to be thinner, I'll never start eating again if I let myself stop again. I can't put my parents through that again. Or myself. If I do that again, I won't live past thirty. I've probably already irreparably damaged myself so that I won't live past fifty, if I'm lucky enough to make it that far." She bit her lip.

"Can I help? I mean, I really care about you, Faye. I don't want you to get that way again," I said somewhat nervously.

"I don't know how you would help. I mean, it's an internal struggle."

"Oh," I said softly, feeling dejected. "Okay. Sorry."

"It's not that I wouldn't accept help, if I knew a way you could give it. I mean, I want to let you help me." She blushed a little at the admission. "I just… I don't know how."

"You said something about hearing negative voices, right?" I asked, looking at her, as she looked back at me. She nodded. "Maybe I could help you start to replace those voices with nice voices? Voices that are worth listening to?" She frowned, thinking it over.

"That… that could be good. Whose voices should I try to replace them with?" she asked, looking at me like I was offering her water after she'd spent two years in a desert, which I guess, metaphorically, I was doing.

"Well, you could try mine, if you wanted. Replace those voices with mine telling you what I think of you. I mean, see if that helps at all." She nodded again, still frowning as she thought.

"What do you think of me? I can't replace them if I don't know that," she said, looking me square in the face.

"Oh, um… I think you're beautiful. I think that you look healthy and that your hair is shiny and soft. I think you have beautiful eyes, and your curves are… attractive," I said, stumbling over the last adjective before I said something I didn't really want to tell her at this point. "I also happen to think that you're one of the kindest, most open-minded and caring people I've ever met." She blushed, and didn't bother attempting to hide it. She swiped at a stray tear, then looked away.

"Thanks Aelita. You're even more beautiful. No one pulls off pink like you do." The compliment may have sounded sarcastic out of context, but the tone of her voice and the look in her eye suggested just the opposite. I smiled and wrapped my arm around her as we looked up at the sky. We'd spent so much time out that the sun was setting, and the sky was painted with the most vivid colors I'd ever seen, except within Faye's eyes.

~Present~

We into the factory, and I left Faye with Jeremy as we went down into the scanners. Yumi was already on Lyoko and we went to meet her. We ran in quickly, hurrying toward the tower which wasn't too far as Jeremy explained that the attack had something to do with a military satellite being hijacked by XANA. Whatever that was, it couldn't be good. I ran along behind the others, who formed the arrow point around me again as we came within sight of four Bloks.

Odd POV

"Laser Arrow!" I shouted, firing three shots before I hit on target. The Blok directly in front of me exploded, making me smile as I ran on all fours.

"Hornets behind you!" Jeremy shouted into the headset. Yumi turned, pushing Aelita behind her, and pulled out her fans, attacking the overgrown bumble bees. Ulrich whipped out his katana and did the wicked Supersprint thing he could do, stabbing one of the Bloks before things progressed much farther. I ran, dodging lasers, but got hit in the back from behind as Yumi failed to hold back one of the Hornets. Her fan glided through and hit it, effectively blowing it apart. Ulrich killed another Blok, but in my distracted state, I got hit again by the other one, squarely in the chest and got devirtualized.

I fell out of the scanner, rubbing my chest, fairly ceratain Ulrich was making a joke about me being a blockhead.

Ulrich POV

"If Odd wasn't such a blockhead, he wouldn't have gotten devirtualized," I said, smirking at my own joke as I killed the last Blok. Unfortunately, Yumi went down after killing only three of the Hornets. I launched over to Aelita's side and told her to run for it as I worked at the last two Hornets. I hit one as she took off, and I heard Jeremy say something, but I couldn't make it out. The Hornet shot repetitively at me, and it took all I had just to block the lasers. I threw my katana at it just as it fired its laser again. There was no time for me to move and we were both devirtualized by the hit. Aelita was left alone, but the monsters were gone. I tumbled out of the scanner just in time to see another one closing.

Faye POV

Some weird looking jellyfish thing stepped—er—swam out right in front of Aelita as she ran toward the tower. As Ulrich and the last Hornet faced off, Jeremy told her to watch out, but it was too late. It picked her up. "Ulrich! The Schyphozoa is taking Aelita's memory!" he yelled, but Ulrich was busy fighting the Hornet. "He's not going to make it," Jeremy said, his voice full of anguish. "He's lost too many life points already, it's too late."

"Send me." I said, turning toward the elevator before they had time to argue. I slammed my palm into the button, worrying only for Aelita. The virtualization process was weird, very weird, but it didn't faze me as I landed in an ice world flat on my butt, having fallen out of the sky after I was virtualized. I took off in the direction of the jellyfish thing, not paying much attention to myself, except to notice that I seemed to have a bow and a quiver on my back, though the quiver was empty. As I approached the jellyfish that was holding Aelita, all I could think to do in my frustration was shoot the unloaded bow. To my surprise, as I pulled the string back, an arrow appeared loaded. I just went with it at this point, and fired, hitting the jellyfish in the side, which seemed to have little effect on it. I focused a little more, and hit it again, this time in the tentacles, cutting them and freeing Aelita, who fell to the ground. The jellyfish thing seemed to disappear and I rushed to Aelita's side, pulling her to her feet.

"Faye?" she said in some confusion, then she shook her head and pointed in the direction of a large cylindrical thing. "Cover me, I have to make it to the tower," she said. I nodded, and pulled the longbow over my head as I ran with her. There were no more creatures to surprise us, and we made it to the tower just fine. Aelita ran right through the wall of it, and I waited outside, finally pausing to look down at myself to see what I looked like on here. I had the bow, and the empty quiver slung over my shoulder, cutting across my body diagonally. I had a dark green, short-sleeved tunic and darker green tights with brown boots. The best way to describe them would be maybe Medieval hunting boots. I also had a brown belt and a green cap with a feather in it. My hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail at the nape of my neck and straight. The look was completed by a pair of fingerless brown gloves and a brown padded sleeve on my left arm, since I was right handed, so the arrows wouldn't hit my arm as I released them.

"I'm Robin Hood?" I asked no one in particular.

Aelita exited the tower and hugged me. "Thank you so much, Faye," she said softly, so no one else could hear, I guess. "That was so brave."

"Was it?" I asked softly, looking at her. Then, louder, I added, "I'm still really confused."

"That's okay. Jeremy will bring us in, and we'll all explain things to you." I was about to ask her what she meant before there was another strange feeling, like the virtualization process, but reversed, and then she stepped out of the scanner across from mine. I sort of fell out of mine a little bit, and she raced forward to catch me a bit. The others then arrived in the elevator, and Odd and Ulrich stepped out, followed by Yumi and Jeremy.

"Welcome to the ranks, Faye," Odd said, grinning.

"Yeah, welcome to the fight, cousin," Yumi added, smiling widely as well.

I looked at Aelita, who looked concerned about me. What had I gotten myself into?

A/N: Okay, so a long chapter, in which a lot of stuff went down. Any comments? Concerns? Questions? Reviews warm the cockles of my heart! But I suppose if you're so busy that you can read but you have no time to review, I'll be okay with that. Hugs and virtual chocolate to those of you that do review! :)