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Chapter Text

There were rumors about Kadic Academy. Schools attract rumors like young starlets, or sudden deaths. Not quite as well as the sudden deaths of young starlets, but schools built out in the suburbs of France can come close. If you ask some people about it they’ll haul out their psychology textbooks. They’ll talk about innocence and fear and transgression. They’ll point out the seemingly endless list of spooky stories surrounding the various Disneyland parks. They’ll mention liminal space and that the human brain isn’t finished developing until one’s early twenties.

Some people will ask those scientists, or realists, or whatever name they use that they think sounds smartest, why it is that the stories all share the same threads. These aren’t your standard, ‘a girl committed suicide there and now her spirt haunts the bathroom’ schoolyard yarns, or the tall tales spun around architectural quirks. Something mind altering went on at Kadic Academy. Something that brought on psychic dreams and deja vu. Both quite common in their own right, but psychic dreams in tandem? Dreams that were exact tellings of the future, but then something would go horribly wrong, something that wouldn’t really happen? Deja vu that wasn’t the run of the mill thought skip, where the past and present seem to merge, tripping over each other for a second, nor the just as regular, ‘I have written three hundred essays in my life and this one feels no different’. No, the deja vu at Kadic Academy was legendary. 

You would be minding your own business, walking into the courtyard, say, and it would hit you in a wave that rooted you to the ground. For a moment you would become unstuck in time as you mind replayed the moment as it happened. As though someone had rewound you.

How do you explain that?

A bunch of kids living together, eating the same food together, studying the same things at the same times…Why wouldn’t they have similar psyches? Why wouldn’t some days feel like an endless refrain?

Then why did it stop?

No warning, no concrete ending. They all noticed, but not together. Every one of them looking up individually and saying ‘oh.’ before their world carried on exactly as it had before. Life was normal, and then, suddenly, it was more normal.  

This was the reason the creepypasta enthusiasts and horror story connoisseurs remembered Kadic Academy. Not for what happened there, but for the fact that it stopped. There was a mystery there. This wasn’t one class getting infected with mass hysteria. This wasn’t a simple haunting, your everyday paranormal activity. Something happened at Kadic. Something with a distinct beginning, middle, and end.

Perhaps some stranded aliens set up camp there, and they were finally rescued. 

Perhaps someone cursed the place, and the curse was broken. (No one would believe that the curse broke itself. A four year curse wasn’t properly auspicious).

Maybe a group of teenagers sacrificed their hearts, minds, and bodies keeping the earth safe from an overly advanced A.I. bent on world domination. 

Odd Della Robbia checked his phone for the third time that minute. He forgot his pop rocks in the room and now he had to wait out his sexile in the library with no high fructose corn syrup to keep him company. Ulrich swore he would text as soon as he and Yumi were finished and decent again, and that they would not fall asleep like they had last time. 

He was staring out the window at the rapidly darkening sky when his phone buzzed, and his heart jumped into his throat. Adrenaline shot through him and then drained away, leaving him flushed and dizzy. 

U kn com bk now. 

It didn’t say XANA. It never does anymore. Now all his phone screen ever tells him is: You are a normal teenager, Odd Della Robbia. We’re sorry for any inconvenience that war over the entire planet might have caused you. Please get back to your regularly scheduled programming of being a dork with roommate problems.

Another message popped up on his screen, a real one:

Buy twinkies.

They defeated XANA two months ago, and last week Ulrich and Yumi finally got together. Odd had been kind of expecting it now that William had straight up skipped town. He was in class with them last year, but summer break had come and gone, and he hadn’t come back. He wrote Jeremie an e-mail, promising he wouldn’t tell anyone about Lyoko. Actually, all I want to do is forget.

At first they had worried, but William assured them he was fine, and that he wasn’t involved in XANA’s plans. Which was good, since last semester XANA went nuts. A constant onslaught of attacks as Jeremie whittled down Aelita’s code, till he finally realized that it wasn’t Aelita who was encrypted.

Or something like that. Odd hadn’t been able to understand whatever epiphany Jeremie had been having over his speaker while lasers were burning through his own skin. 

The five of them stayed at school all summer, or at the factory more like, jumping into Lyoko every time Aelita felt the slightest vibration. Jeremie worked double and then triple time at the supercomputer. Days slid into days. Not in the soft, warm way summer vacation was supposed to, but the overlap that happens when your day has three breakfasts and two dinners because you still haven’t gone to sleep.

And then it was over.

Odd felt like a train that had run out of track. His momentum kept him sliding forward, sending up sparks and scoring lines into the earth, but he was no longer going anywhere.

Odd paused just outside his dorm and took a deep breath. There is a quality to the air in autumn, as though you could hit it with a tuning fork and it would sing. He tried to focus on it, tired to banish the sense that he was utterly lost in a foreign city. A slow rise of panic that you try desperately to hold down, because there is nothing you can do if you panic-no one you know you can go to for help-which only makes the panic worse.

Honestly, it was probably just because he had been kicked out of his room with nowhere to go. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t have a girlfriend to canoodle now that he wasn’t fighting for his life. Unfortunately, most girls remembered him as that guy that they dated for like two weeks in the eighth grade, who dumped them after they kissed. His high school dating life couldn’t even boast the long term rivalry dripping with pining and sexual tension that at least Yumi and Ulrich had at one point.

Bzzz Bzzz Bzzz

Odd fished his phone out of his jacket pocket. He started to type, Got yr darn twinkies, before he registered what the text actually was.

Ulrich, I need to talk to you. I’m in my room. 

The name at the top of the screen: Sissi.

It took Odd another minute to figure out why Sissi’s phone number was even in his contact list to begin with. 

Sissi had always had Ulrich’s number, but last year, before all XANA broke loose, she began texting him all the time. Ulrich shared the messages with them, but he never replied. Which meant Sissi kept trying. I’ve got cookies-and-cream pocky, want some? Is this a cute cat or what? What was the Calc homework for tonight?

Odd had to admit, he admired her tenacity. 

Maybe that was why, a month later when XANA hacked their phones and they had to steal other people’s to communicate, Odd found himself with Sissi’s phone in it’s huge pink teddy bear case, and he happened to change Ulrich’s phone number to his in her contacts. Maybe it was because there was a fifty percent chance that they would Return To The Past and it wouldn’t stick.
It was probably just cause he found it funny and Ulrich was getting ready to block her.

He wasn’t sure what his excuse was for slipping into the Kendrick dorm instead of Cohen. If Ulrich had actually received that text he wouldn’t have given a fuck. He might even have dragged Yumi down to Sissi’s room and explained to her in no uncertain terms who his girlfriend was. Odd, on the other hand, was probably looking forward to a night of getting a sugar high and crashing as he watched surrealist films. At least Sissi might prove entertaining. 

Sissi was clearly taken aback when she realized it was Odd at her door. Odd was surprised: Did she actually believe that Ulrich would come when she called? After all the evidence to the contrary? Never mind the fact that he was here at all might be a little confusing.

“What are you doing here?” She asked, but her tone was flat, without the disgust Odd was expecting.

“Got your text.” Odd said, wiggling his phone in front of her, though it was a halfhearted wiggle at best. It was strange. He didn’t really have the energy to be cheeky, and she didn’t seem up to being a total brat. Maybe they were both coming down with something.

“I texted Ulrich.” She said, and her voice broke on his name.

It pissed Odd off. It wasn’t like they had been a couple and he had dumped her. As far as Odd knew Ulrich had never had genuine interest in Sissi, but here she was, acting like she was the victim in all this, and not the asshole who just spent his last ten bucks at a vending machine. 

“Yeah, well, as his fucking lackey, he sent me to tell you to leave him alone.”

Sissi’s nose wrinkled, but her grip on the frame of her door turned her knuckles white. “I don’t see why he couldn’t come tell me that himself.” 

Odd shrugged, “I guess he didn’t feel like pulling out of Yumi long enough to come down.” His stomach twisted, his anger folding in on itself. He wasn’t sure if he meant to upset Sissi or Ulrich with those words.

At least they got Sissi to recoil. “You’re disgusting. You all think you’re so tough, teasing people, doing god-knows-what in the woods all the time, but when you’re alone you’re just stupid kids.”

“Trust me, Sissi, you do not want to get into a fight with me.” But Odd leaned forward, got into her space. Dared her. 

“You’re the one who’s looking for a fight.” Sissi said, not leaning towards him, but holding her ground. “I just wanted to talk to Ulrich.”

“When are you going to understand that he doesn’t want to talk to you?”

“When are you going to understand-“ Sissi began, jabbing her pointer finger into Odd’s chest. He grabbed her wrist on reflex, so fast his skin made a slapping noise against hers.

She gasped, which he expected, and he almost laughed before the nails of her other hand tore down his cheek. Pain exploded behind his eyes as he felt his skin give way to her manicure. It was just a scratch. One that drew blood, but a scratch nonetheless.

If they had had that stupid conversation the year before Odd would have shrugged it off, or threatened to tell her father, or, yeah, maybe he would have just given her one clean slap across the face and walked away. 

But that was last year when he more than knew the difference between life and death. This year all he knew was that adrenaline was coursing through him, his cheek throbbed, and he could feel his heartbeat in his ears for the first time in months. He didn’t stop to consider all his options. He slammed his fist knuckles first into the side of Sissi’s face. 

She staggered back in shock. Odd’s brain caught up with him, and began blaring kill bill sirens. 

“Fuck you!” Sissi screamed, “I don’t want your stupid boyfriend!”

“You nearly gouged my eye out for him!”

“You-you-“ Sissi’s hand trembled as she touched her cheek. Odd saw tears well up in her eyes, and the anger in him faded. This was fucked up. 

“I don’t want your stupid, fucking-“ She began to cry.

Odd stood in her doorway, guilt making him desperate to leave and unsure if he should. He wiped blood off his cheek and was surprised when he pulled his hand away. He had forgotten how vibrant it was, how it stained skin with thick, rusty streaks.

Sissi had curled in on herself, putting her head level with his stomach. It was strange being this close to her when she was crying her eyes out. He wanted to close the door and leave her alone, but he couldn’t abandon her. 

Odd heard the click of a door opening down the hall and Sissi stood up with a gasp. She grabbed the front of Odd’s jacket and hauled him into her room, closing the door behind him. 

Odd was overwhelmed by the scent of girly things. Shampoo and lotion and perfume, and who knew what else, fruit and floral and sweetness so strong he could taste artificial flavoring. It almost distracted him from the fact that this might be the first time he was in Sissi’s room with her permission.

Sissi pressed her ear to the door, still clutching the front of his shirt. Her hand shook as she listened, bumping against his chest. Odd pried her fingers off, but once he dropped her hand he made the mistake of looking at her. Tears continued to flow down her face though she seemed completely focused on straining her ears past the cheap plywood. Something about the image made Odd lean against the door too, just so he would have an excuse to close his eyes.  He heard someone knock at someone else’s room. He could make out voices, but not words. The other person’s door closed and there was silence. 

“Okay,” Sissi said, peeling herself off the door, her voice still thick. “I don’t think anyone’s going to come check.”   

Odd nodded as though conspiring with Sissi felt perfectly natural. 

Sissi opened her door a crack, but then turned back to Odd. “Tell Ulrich that the only reason I wanted to see him was because I don’t care about him anymore, and Yumi can stop glaring at me like she thinks I’m going to rip my clothes off every time I talk to him.” She flicked moisture from the corners of her eyes and and in a moment became the same cold, shiny Sissi Odd knew and understood. All poise and selfishness. 

“Kay.” Odd said, because this was good. The world has returned to order. He felt like he was on solid ground again after that sudden white-water rafting interval.

But the image of Sissi crying, her face as red and crumpled as any other person’s, continued to shake him as he walked back to his room, like he had been at sea for months and couldn't adjust to the fact that the world had stopped moving beneath his feet.

Chapter Text

On Monday Odd still had a bandage on his cheek. Not because the scabs hurt, but because he had made up an outlandish story about standing up too fast after retrieving his armful of junk food, losing his balance, and smashing his face on the side of the vending machine. It was better to have everyone laughing then asking questions. 

“Do you think someone hit her?” Yumi said when they saw Sissi that morning, stalking across the quad to the science building. She was wearing huge, tan sunglasses with gold tinted lenses. They were perfectly coordinated with her camelskin coat and light brown calf high boots, unlike the enormous bruise on her cheek. It was quite a sight, dark purple in the center, radiating outward into overlapping shades of green and yellow. She looked like she had fallen face first into a plate of moussaka and not bothered to wipe it off.

“If they had we’d have heard about it.” Aelita said, “She would have gone straight to her father and had them expelled.” 

Ulrich shrugged. “Maybe she leaned into the mirror to kiss herself and slipped.”

“Wouldn’t she have covered it up if she got it doing something stupid?” Jeremie said. “She’s been wearing makeup since the sixth grade.”

“Sixth?” Odd asked idly.

“I think so. Ulrich, when was the first time she got lipgloss on your face?”

Ulrich gave Jeremie a shove, and they laughed, remembering how sometimes Sissi would throw her arms around Ulrich and leave a shiny smear on his cheek, or mascara smudges on his temple. Of course, Sissi wouldn’t remember that since it was usually after he had saved her life. 

“Odd?” Yumi said, snapping him out of his thoughts. “You okay?”

“I just don’t think we should kick a dog while it’s down.” 

There was laughter again, and Odd heard what he had said. He opened his mouth, flustered, wanting to correct them, but he decided not to. He had gotten the phrases mixed up. He wasn’t sure where his head was these days. He was thinking of ‘Let sleeping dogs lie’. Something he desperately needed to learn before he wound up at Sissi’s room again, holding a movie and candy.

Oops.

He knocked. 

“Who is it?”

“I wanted to apologize.”

Silence. 

Silence was good, Odd told himself, it meant she was thinking. 

There was the sound of a chair being pushed back and she appeared at the door. 

“Oh.” She said, looking at the gifts in his hands. “You’re serious.”

“Yeah. I didn’t know what kind of stuff you liked, so I just got these.” He held out the glass canister full of chocolate candies. They shined like pearls, or at least plastic beads. They were just fancy m&ms, but he had a feeling she might appreciate them. Also, going into town had given him an excuse to leave Yumi and Ulrich alone, so now they owed him a little. 

“I’ve had them before.” Sissi said as she took them. “They’re good.”

“And this.” He handed her the dvd case.

She studied it for a moment. “Eraserhead?”

“It’s a classic.”

“Kind of looks like a horror.”

“It’s more surrealist, really.” Odd was about to explain the work’s history, but her face was already screwed up. 

“Definitely a horror, then.”

“Only if you find unplanned pregnancy horrific.”

They stood there for a moment, listening to the deafening silence that comes after a terrible joke. Odd shifted from foot to foot. He had been expecting her to say something like ‘apology accepted’ so that he could leave and things could go back to normal between them. 

“You have to watch it with me.”

Odd’s train of thought came to a screeching halt. 

“And if it is a horror, then I get to punch you or something.”

Odd touched his cheek. “I think we’re already fair on that account.”

Sissi rattled the candies inside their glass box. “I said, ‘or something’. We’ll decide once I tell you that this is a horror movie.”

Once they were in her room Sissi took her laptop off her bed and set it on the floor, so that she could sit with her back against her bed. Odd looked around as she set up the movie. He had been in here a few times over the years, but he was usually snooping through her things or trying to save her from being murdered by her own curling iron, so he never really remembered the decor aside from the scent of a million different beauty products and an overwhelming sense of pink.

Odd had thought pink was something you grew out of, but Sissi stuck with it as stubbornly as her nickname. It wasn’t the monotone of a baby girl’s room, but almost everything had a pink accent. The handles on her desk, the trim of her dresser, the tassels on the drawstring of her blinds. Her comforter was a pale shade, her pillow cases hot, along with a few throw pillows ranging from red to almost orange. They could have sat on the bed instead of the floor, come to think of it, but then they’d be sitting on her bed together. Too weird.

As though voluntarily watching a movie with her wasn’t weird enough. 

Sissi hit play and muscled the lid off the candy. The smell of chocolate wafted towards them and Sissi smiled.

“You can have some if you want.” She said, holding them out to him.

“Thanks.” He took a few and popped them into his mouth. She watched him carefully. “They aren’t poisoned, y’know.” He said through his mouthful of chocolate.

“Actually I was thinking maybe you swapped them out with beads.”

“Yeah, poison’s a little extreme.”

Sissi frowned at him and turned to the movie.

“Did I miss something important just now?” She said, as a man The Man in the Machine worked his was across the screen. “What the fuck is going on?”

Odd bit back a smile. “Just go with it.”

To Sissi’s credit, she really tried. She was green by the man-made chicken scene, but she just clutched the candy container and soldiered on. It was when the baby was revealed that she lost it.

“No, no, nononononono.” She said, bashing the eject button. “Jesus christ, no. Oh god.” She shuddered. “Why does surrealism always have to be disgusting? Why can’t it be happy and fun and weird?”

“Oh, come on,” Odd had been kind of hoping she would make it through the whole thing. That or actually throw up. “It’s not that bad.”

Her look of horror was almost better than seeing her vomit. 

“You are a sick, sick man Odd Della Robbia.” She said as she pulled the dvd from her computer and put it back in its case, snapping it shut like she wanted to snap the disk instead.

“Okay, you won. Guess I better be going.” Odd started to stand, but Sissi grabbed him by the sleeve and yanked him back down.

“Oh no you aren’t. You owe me.” 

Odd couldn’t stop from wincing. “You know what you want?”

“Yup.” Sissi threw open her dresser and ran her finger down a stack of dvds. Odd vaguely remembered seeing them before, but the pile had been a lot smaller then. She selected something, twirled on her heel, and plopped back down next to him.

“You have to watch something I want to watch.” She said, holding up the dvd case. “Have you ever seen, When Harry Met Sally?”

“No.”

“I figured.” She slid the dvd in and tapped her computer as it hummed and whirred.

“What’s it about?”

“Two people.”

Odd laughed. “Oh god, it’s a chick flick, isn’t it?”

Sissi looked him right in the eye, “That’s right. It’s in color, and it’s happy and funny, and two people fall in love. It doesn’t even make you want to vomit.”

Odd bit his tongue. She was so serious. It was like he called her mother a whore, and her response was that yes, she was, and she made very good money. Her expression dared him to make a comeback. It said that she would crush him if he did.

Odd fidgeted against the bed and picked up a handful of candy, rolling the little balls in his palm as a couple appeared on screen, talking about how they met. It occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to cut this short by saying the movie sickened him. No way he could convince Sissi that drivel made him physically ill. At least he had the chocolate to comfort him. 

And then something bizarre happened. The stupid little 90’s rom-com, it was…Good. Odd found himself laughing. He hadn’t even realized that he was enjoying himself until he looked at Sissi and saw that she was watching him instead of the movie. And she was smiling again.  

It wasn’t a song that stuck in Odd’s head that night as he tried to sleep, it was that smile. He traced the scratches on his cheek, trying to conjure the image of the girl who had inflicted them. They throbbed after being stretched out from all the laughing, but Sissi’s bruise must have ached to the bone just from smiling at him. 

It took Odd a moment to remember how bruises like that felt. Jeremie still had electrical burns on his arms from XANA’s last effort to stop them, but all the injuries Odd had sustained that day were well healed. The only marks left was puckered, dusky-pink skin that he knew would take ages to disappear. They would be there long after he forgot the pain of shrapnel slicing into him, or an elevator door slamming shut on his leg. 

Odd’s fingers were locked around the edges of his blanket. He forced himself to relax them. His mind drifted back to the color of Sissi’s sheets. He closed his eyes and tried to remember how many throw pillows she had and what color each one was. It was better than staring into the dark seeing the burn scar that now curled down the side of Aelita’s face, framing her left eye. His chest tight and his breath short, all he could think too close too close tooclose

He woke panting, but he slept through the night.

Chapter Text

Odd sat down in the stairwell and put his head in his hands. He said he would just go over to Jeremie’s and hang out, but he couldn’t. He avoided that entire side of the dorm.

He understood. He really did. If he had someone to make out with he’d be at it every chance he got. But maybe he’d get with someone with a single? Or had more neglectful parents? Besides, if he didn’t leave he would have to watch them sitting on Ulrich’s bed, cuddling and chatting or watching dumb videos. No amount of trashy electronica in his headphones or bizarre and vivd imagery across his computer screen could block that out. 

So he said he’d go hang at Jeremie’s since it was getting too cold at night to go on long walks in the woods. He wished Kiwi was still around. Not so Odd had and excuse to be out of the room, but so that he could leave Kiwi there and he would stare at them while they hooked up till they got uncomfortable.

All the things he did to keep that dog safe from the school board and XANA killed him. It wasn’t even calculated as far as anyone could tell. Just a bad mix of exposed wiring and an overly inquisitive snout. Jim caught them burying him and blustered over, asking what on earth they thought they were doing with those shovels, but then he noticed that Odd was crying so hard he was shaking. He stood there while Odd and Yumi dug, head bowed. When the headmaster passed by Jim jogged over to him and they talked for a while before leaving. No one bothered the five of them after that. Jeremie read a bible passage he had printed out, something simple about putting a soul to rest. Aelita carved a sigil into the freshly turned earth and left marigold seeds in it.

It was the nicest send off that turd of a dog could have asked for.

XANA’s parting had been less ceremonious. Odd had thought it was over when they shut the supercomputer off for the last time, but about a week later Jeremie called him.

“I keep having these dreams where it lights up again all on it’s own.”

“Aelita’s the one who has visions, Einstein.” Odd mumbled into his pillow. Besides the abrasions and sprained ankle he felt like he was coming down with a low grade cold. It didn’t help that Jeremie had called him at five in the morning.

“I know. I know. We cut all the power cords, we smashed the circuit boards, but I can’t help but wonder if she’s still in there somewhere.”

Odd rolled over on to his back and squinted in the early morning sunlight. “So? You want us to take the whole thing apart?”

“Yes.”

Odd groaned. “Why don’t we figure out why the building’s been abandoned all this time while we’re at it, eh?”

At least Yumi was put on that job, tracking down the deed. Odd preferred working with the welding torch or prying wires apart. Their last few weeks of summer fell into a pattern: Wake up early, walk down to the factory, take things apart for a few hours, lunch, a little more work, and then goofing off for a while before heading to bed. Occasionally Odd would think to ask why they were never in the factory after sundown, but then he would shudder and the urge would pass.

Jeremie was even more obsessed with tearing everything down than he had been with resurrecting Aelita. He filled journal after journal with drawings and pictures and notes as they took the transfer tubes apart. 

“Do you think you’ll ever build them again?” Ulrich asked once they had taken apart the first tube and Jeremie was satisfied that he didn’t need to monitor the dismemberment of the other three as closely. “I mean, you took all those notes cause you want to reverse engineer it, right?” He made grabby fingers and Jeremie passed him the large screwdriver, the one they used as a small crowbar.

“I think the knowledge is worth having, but I don’t know if there will ever be a real use for them.”

“Are you kidding?” Odd said, grunting a little as the panel Ulrich had been working off the tube came free and it’s full weight landed in his arms. He heaved it to the side and Aelita hauled it off to add to the pile of scrap metal upstairs. 

“What?” Jeremie said.

“There are like a million things you could do with these! A fully immersive gaming experience aside, the army funded them the first time, they’d probably pay for them again.” 

“Odd’s right.” Yumi said from where she had set up camp at the side of the transfer room. Even with her fractured arm she was doggedly typing away, trying to figure out who had the deed for the factory, and if they had, in fact, been paying the power bills. She didn’t have to, but she was there every day with the rest of them, sitting out of the way with Aelita’s laptop. “If you got the patent on these you could be a billionaire.”

Jeremie made a face. “But I didn’t build these. I’d be profiting off someone else’s work.”

“Aelita could submit it, then.”

“Aelita could submit what?” Aelita asked as she walked back in.

Jeremie passed her a pair of wire cutters. “Yumi was just saying that if we patented the transfer tubes, and the coding behind them, we could make a lot of money.”

Aelita turned to the massive cables that covered the inside of the tube like arteries and snipped the cutters absently. As they had done the last time, Odd and Ulrich would get all the panels off the tube, while Jeremie and Aelita started on the wiring inside. Then they would get out the ladder, rip out the chunks of metal that held the tube to the ceiling, and work their way down until there was nothing left except for a few bolt holes in the floor.

“We are the only people in the world who know how to work it.” Aelita said as she cut the top of a bundle of cables. “And it’s my father’s invention. I probably would have gotten the money one way or another.”

Odd took another sheet of metal from Ulrich and dragged it to the elevator. By the time he got back Yumi had been asked to open a new word document and was taking dictation on possible uses for the transfers. 

Of course that had been summer vacation. Now it was the middle of October and what was left of the super computer and the tubes were in boxes in Jeremie’s room. They had sold a lot of it as scrap metal, the rest Jeremie wanted to repurpose. Maybe it comforted Jeremie, or gave him a sense of closure to put XANA’s pieces back together as useful, normal computers, but Odd still didn’t know the first thing about technology, and all he saw was XANA slowly invading the world again. Jeremie explained to him over and over that it was like using the organs of a cadaver to give new life, but Odd’s fear was just getting worse. He couldn’t be in Jeremie’s room anymore without feeling like the boxes were breathing, spilling the same dark smoke-nanoparticles, he now knew-that trailed through the last four years of his life.

“Are you going to throw up?”

Odd jumped. He had his head buried in his hands for so long the fluorescent lights seared his eyes and he had to blink rapidly before Sissi’s face came into focus. 

“What are you doing here?”

She shrugged. “Nicholas was sick. I brought him some vitamin C and stuff.”

“I thought you two weren’t friends anymore.” Ever since Nicholas finally started his own band.

“Yeah, but we were. And he’s sick.”

This isn’t the kind of logic Odd would have expected from Sissi. It’s shockingly nice. But then, more than one thing about Sissi had been shocking lately. 

“You wanna watch a movie?” Odd asked.

Sissi shifted the weight on her hips and he couldn’t help but notice A. she had hips, and 2. the way the fabric of her jeans stretched across them was mouth watering.

“Which one?” She asked, rightfully suspicious of his taste after last time.

“You choose.”

“Like Water For Chocolate.” She said, with a decisive nod. 

Odd stood up and felt light headed for a second as all the blood rushed to his feet. “It’s another romance, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but then you cry.” She looked him up and down. “You look like you’re in the mood for that.”

Odd didn’t respond, just followed her to her room. There was still candy left over from last time, but it paled in comparison to the food porn on screen. And the actual porn.

“Jesus.” Odd muttered about halfway through. It was embarrassing enough watching two people make out with Sissi next to him, now he had to see bare breasts too?

“That’s completely non-sexual, Odd. Grow up.”

Odd smacked the space bar. “I’m sorry, you want me to rewind it? Did the narrator lady not just say, ‘The passion of his lover’s gaze transformed-‘“

“It’s a metaphor.”

There was an extended stare down, which Sissi won by pressing play. 

“I don’t know how I’m going to cry about this.” Odd said.

“It’s like Romeo and Juliet. It sneaks up on you.”

Odd considered this, but, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen Romeo and Juliet.”

Sissi paused the movie again, just so she could look at him aghast. 

“Okay,” She said, slapping the space bar, “We’re watching that next.”

Odd did not appreciate the assumption that he was ever going to do this again. But he did cry at the end. It was beautiful. He tried to explain exactly what was so beautiful about the last scene even as he watched it, but he choked on the words and just cried. Something about that made Sissi laugh, though tears rolled down her cheeks too.

“I always cry at the end.” She managed. “Every time. Same with Romeo and Juliet.”

Odd tried to say something back, but he was crying too hard. He kept it up right through the credits. Sissi sat with him till he finished. She didn’t say much, or rub his shoulders or anything like that, but she walked him back to to his dorm. Odd wasn’t sure how that might look, but it felt good to have a buffer against anyone he might run into, even if Sissi might have been one of the people he dreaded seeing under other circumstances.

“Good night.” She said as he opened the dormitory’s front door.

“Night.” He replied, his voice shaky and spent.   

Ulrich was still up when Odd kicked his way into the room, but Yumi was long gone. “Where have you been?” He asked.

“Out.” Odd said as he sat down on his bed and wrestled his boots off.

Ulrich looked up from his laptop. “Were you crying?”

Odd touched his cold cheeks. He considered telling Ulrich the truth, but ‘I was having a heart to heart with Elizabeth Delmas’ sounded like sarcasm. “Nah. Just kind of drippy from the wind.”

“I’m sorry about that. We probably shouldn’t be sending you out when it’s this cold.”

“No, I-I was in the library. Watched some stuff in the media room. It was fine.” That was when Odd decided not to say anything about Sissi. It wasn’t a big deal. Not like he was going over to her place all the time, slowly working his way through her massive movie collection. They were almost all romances, many of them rom-coms. She always warned him if he would cry at the end, and he was surprised the first time he told her he wasn’t in a crying mood. 

Chapter Text

Odd couldn’t say for sure when he graduated from the floor to Sissi’s bed, bumping shoulders when they laughed, or leaning in ever so slightly when they cried. Was it before or after they started planning movies and snacks in advance? Well, that had to be after Sissi gave him her number and was always texting him about new things to watch, or sometimes, yes, just cute cat videos, but after Odd changed her to ‘Elizabeth’ in his contacts, so he could claim she was someone else, and set her texts to a tone he never used otherwise, so he wouldn’t pick up his phone in front of his friends. 

He couldn’t explain exactly why he had to do that, but this whole thing with Sissi—whatever it was—was like spun sugar. If Odd breathed a word, the moisture from his breath would destroy it. Or, more likely, he would be made to tell everything about it. At some point that went from uncomfortable to the spilling of secrets. Odd Della Robbia would be nothing if he couldn’t be trusted to keep secrets. 

He couldn’t tell someone about the time Sissi snapped at him, “You’re not even watching the movie, you’re just staring at me!” without betraying her confidence. At least, not if he told the whole story.

Odd had panicked and said what he had actually been thinking, “Why do you go by Sissi?”

Sissi pulled back, surprised. She thought about it for a moment before saying, “If I tell you, can I ask you a question?”

“Sure.” He said, already preparing his lie for when her question came too close to being about Lyoko. 

“You have to answer honestly.”

See, the truth is we all got a little too obsessed with this D-and-D campaign we were doing… “I will.”

Sissi pulled her blanket a little tighter around her. “I’m an idiot.”

Odd bit his lip before he could say something stupid. The possibilities were endless.

“I saw this movie one year, about this girl who became empress of Austria when she was sixteen, and I thought, that’s what I want to be when I’m sixteen. ”

Odd laughed automatically, and Sissi looked startled for a moment, but then she laughed too. 

“I don’t think that makes you an idiot.” Odd said, but somehow it was the wrong thing to say and Sissi’s laughter turned into a nasty cackle.

“She went crazy.” She said before he could ask. “She wasn’t even a great ruler, and then her son killed himself, so she basically ran away from court and didn’t do anything but obsess over her looks. She was-she just-” Sissi’s words tripped over themselves for a second and she coughed. Odd smacked her back and a minute later she continued, although slightly more clear headed. “If I had bothered to look up literally anything else about her besides that movie I would have realized how stupid taking her name was, but I thought it would make me glamorous and powerful.”

“You didn’t need the name for that.” Odd said without thinking.

Sissi rolled her eyes. “Please.”

“No, seriously.” Odd almost reminded her of the time she went to Lyoko, how everyone was watching her as she seized up the scanner. ‘What are you all staring at?’ She asked, flipping her hair over her shoulder before stepping inside. ‘If you guys can do it then I certainly don’t have anything to worry about.’ She had turned to face them before the doors slid shut and her eyes had been bright, her jaw set with defiance. Odd could still feel the tingle of fear at the base of his spine when he realized that Sissi was braver than he was, willingly throwing herself into what could be just a virtual void.  

Then he remembered that she didn’t remember and his mouth shut with a click.

“So do I get to ask you a question or what?” Sissi said, shrugging off the few words he had said.

“Sure.” Odd mumbled.

“Why did you bring a fucking dog to school with you?”

A snort of laughter escaped Odd. It was the absolute last thing he had expected her to ask, after Ulrich’s shoe size.

“I’m serious!” She said, shaking him by the shoulder. “It must have been so much work! First you had to get the dog up here, then you had to get it past the school, then you had to keep it a secret for years. Like, I thought you were a slacker!” They were both laughing in ernest now, and it was several minutes before they could stop. It really was absurd, when Odd thought about it, how much trouble Kiwi had caused him. If it weren’t for Return To The Past he wouldn’t have managed to keep him a month. 

Odd let his head fall back with a clunk against the wall. “You want the angsty, thirteen year old me reason?” He asked.

“Why not?”

“I was worried I wouldn’t have any friends. That’s it. I was willing to smuggle Kiwi through airport security and risk getting expelled for that.”

“Well, I guess you shouldn’t have worried.”

Odd opened his mouth to correct her, but of course he couldn’t. If it hadn’t been for Kiwi getting kidnapped, and his own lack of spacial awareness, he might not have had any friends at all. He might never have known about Lyoko or learned to fight properly, or watched his life flash before his eyes over and over, a larger chunk of it being XANA attacks every time.

“Odd?” Sissi’s head was on one side. “You’re getting all far away again.”

Odd shook himself. “Sorry. I miss the little bugger.” Although when he was with Sissi he usually managed not to think about that sort of thing. He didn’t break out in a cold sweat when she texted him, nor did he have dreams where she was dead, even though they must have almost killed her a hundred different times. 

“Do you want to finish watching this?” Sissi asked in a soft voice. 

“I’m kind of tired. Maybe tomorrow.”

Sleep was coming to Odd more easily every day. Though he was sluggish getting up. It was like he wasn’t doing anything but the world kept moving around him. Ulrich was already up, and Odd found him in the quad, standing around a bench with the rest of their friends. 

“Good thing you’re here.” Yumi said when she saw him, “XANA’s at it again.”

“What’s up with her, it’s like every other day now.” Odd said.

“She’s getting desperate.” Aelita said. “We’re so close now all she can do is try to slow us down.”

Yumi nodded. “Maybe you should all stay here over summer break too keep an eye on her.”

“Oh, it’ll be over by summer.” Jeremie said. He stretched, tilting his face towards the early morning sun, and smiled.

And the war’ll be over by christmas.

Ulrich and Odd had been out getting lunch when Jeremie had cracked a code, or coded something that hit XANA’s last nerve. Yumi’s text had been mostly gibberish, but to them gibberish meant drop everything and run. 

They could hear metallic banging and screams as soon as they were on the factory floor. Odd pounded the elevator button, not sure if it would work, if it was safe, but Ulrich jumped in, and Odd followed.

The elevator doors slammed shut around his ankle. Odd’s vision shook wildly, black spots burst before his eyes. He screamed as the elevator started down and his leg went up.

Ulrich grabbed Odd’s thigh and pulled, wrenching him free. For a second they lay on the ground, panting, before the elevator plummeted. Unfortunately for XANA spending less than a story in free fall couldn’t kill a human. The doors opened at the bottom floor and stayed that way, the better to kill them with. 

Cables danced around the super computer’s mainframe, shooting sparks across the room. For a moment it was hard to tell which were sentient and which were merely cut. Odd’s ankle  ached and was encircled by scrapes and red spots that would be bruises soon. When he tried to stand pain shot up his spine, but he ignored Ulrich’s outstretched arm and charged into the room, towards the mass of cables wrapped around Aelita.

Someone screamed, bright blue sparks flew through the air and the world shattered.

Ulrich was shaking him. 

“Odd? Odd? Odd!”

Odd flailed, landing several blows on Ulrich until he turned on the overhead. Light flooded the room and Odd felt his memory slide back into place. He panted, studying the familiar surroundings of their room, squinting at shadows until he was sure nothing was lurking in them. 

“Are you okay?” Ulrich asked.

Odd almost laughed. 

Ulrich sat on the bed next to him and threw an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay. We’ve all had them.”

Words spun through Odd’s mind. Don’t say that, don’t say this is normal, it’s not normal, god, no, I just don’t want to think about this, I just want to leave it all behind.  

Why wasn’t it comforting to hear that someone understood?

Odd wasn’t going to sleep that night. He told Ulrich he was fine, and somehow the boy got back into bed, rolled over, and was out cold, but Odd knew he would be staring at the ceiling till dawn.

He picked up his phone, thinking maybe he would find a stupid comic to read, but when he opened it it was still on his texts with Sissi.

We should watch West Side Story. He typed, before settling in to wait out dawn.

Her reply came just before breakfast. Is it good?

It’s awful. (But not gross)

??? k.

They bootlegged it, and from the opening credits to Nardo’s death Odd ripped it to shreds. He didn’t realize that Sissi wasn’t joining in till she pressed the space bar and said, 

“Odd, can I ask you a question?”

“Only if I can ask you one.” He replied. They had had this exchange more then twice by now. 

“Why did you decide to kiss every girl in our grade that one time?”

Odd threw his arms out melodramatically. “I was looking for love.”

“If you’d actually been looking for love you wouldn’t have made it into a game.” Sissi’s eyes were dark and serious and Odd swallowed his mirth.

“Come on, Sissi, it’s not like anyone actually expects to find love in middle school.”

Sissi twisted her fingers around each other. “I know, I know. That’s why sometimes I would wonder if you were going to try and kiss me.”

Odd’s heart tripped over itself in his chest, but as he tried to process these sudden palpitations, she continued.

“I used to think about how funny it would be. You trying to woo me or something.” She laughed, but it was short and sharp, like she’s just trying to prove how hysterical the whole thing is. “I thought it would be kind of interesting to see how far you were willing to go for that little challenge.”

“What, like you were going to make me buy you dinner? Flowers and stuff?” 

They both laughed. Because it’s funny, damnit. The idea of Odd being nice to Sissi, taking her on a date, it’s laughable. Ha ha ha ha ha.

“So,” Odd said, scrambling for a question that would bring things back to normal, “Were you really in love with Ulrich back then?”

Sissi flushed. “What? Why?”

“I get a question now. That’s my question.”

“I mean, he’s cute. And in middle school where there are like three cute guys that’s like gold.”

“I just can’t believe you really liked him enough to go through all that trouble.”

“Dog. Airport security.” Sissi deadpanned.

“ But Kiwi looooved me,” Odd crooned, rubbing his shoulder against hers until she laughed and shoved him away. 

“But middle school.” She said. “I mean, yeah, no one finds love in middle school, but they definitely don’t if they aren’t willing to chase it.”

“Again, love is not something you should chase.”

Sissi shrugged. “When I was little my dad used to say, ‘You want that, Elizabeth? Well then you’d better think of a way to get it.’”

“Yeah,” Odd said, leaning towards her so she had to look at him and listen to his point, “But Ulrich isn’t an ‘it’.”

Sissi’s eyes went wide, and Odd realized that he had slightly miscalculated the distance between their faces. She was so close he could feel her breath on his lips. The silence continued long enough for Odd to brace himself for a shriek, or to get shoved right off the bed.

He wasn’t expecting her fingers on his collarbone, just enough pressure to push him back into place.

A beat. Then, “So you don’t like West Side Story.”

“No. Not really.”

Sissi scooted off the bed and stretched her arms over her head. “Let’s watch something else, then. I don’t have time for movies even you don’t like.” She opened her dresser and rooted around her dvd collection.

“Sissi? Can I ask you a question?”

She was bent over, halfway in the dresser, but Odd could tell she froze for a second. 

“Yeah?”

“Why do you still go by Sissi? When we talked about it, it kind of sounded like you don’t like it anymore.”

Sissi stood up with an armful of dvds, and sighed. “I think I’m stuck with it now. I’ll just wait till I can reinvent myself in college.”

“Should I call you Elizabeth, though?” Odd wasn’t sure why the request sounded so intimate, but he felt the urge to follow it up with, “So you can get used to it again, I mean.”

Sissi traced the spines of the dvd cases she was holding, then she looked up, caught his eyes, and smiled. “You should.”

A firework exploded in Odd’s heart. He asked another question, trying to ignore his sudden palpitations. “You’re going to college?”

“Yeah, I sent off a bunch of applications already.” Elizabeth perched on the edge of her bed, just below Odd. “I’m not sure which I’ll chose till I get the answers back. You?” 

“I dunno. I applied to some art schools, but I’m not sure I’ll go, even if they take me.” His tongue got thick for a moment, that pull he gets at the back of his throat when he’s about to say something he shouldn’t, but he shook it off. “Either way I’ll probably wind up back in Italy.” He watched Elizabeth’s profile, gauging her reaction to his words. She didn’t seem to have one. She studied the movie cases again before setting the stack on the ground.

“What about Casablanca?” She said. “Have you seen that?”

He had, but if she had too he had a feeling she would just say ‘oh.’ and he’d have to leave. He shook his head.

“It’s good. Sad, but…Yeah, it’s good.” She climbed over him to get back to her rightful spot on the far side of the bed, her shoulder against the wall, and pulled her computer into her lap. A few minutes later title music poured from her speakers.

It was already late when they started the movie, and at some point Odd noticed that he was slowly sliding down the wall onto Elizabeth’s bed. 

“Elizabeth,” He whispered, “I think I’m gonna fall asleep.”

“It’s not-“ Elizabeth yawned for a minute straight, “-that bad.” She finished. 

“No, but I’m gonna fall asleep anyway.”

“Here.” Elizabeth sat up, picked up the laptop, and put it between herself and the wall. She lay back down and turned onto her side. Odd wasn’t sure what that was supposed to accomplish, so he shut his eyes for a moment to carefully consider the problem. 

He woke to the credit music playing.

“Elizabeth.” He said.

Elizabeth made a noise that might have been acknowledgement. Odd reached over her and closed her laptop before setting it on the floor. He fished his phone out of his pocket and squinted at the screen. Almost two in the morning. He pretended to consider leaving the warm, cozy bed so he could walk through the freezing night to a bed that was just as standard issue uncomfortable, along with being cold and unslept in.

“Can I stay here?” He mumbled as he switched off the lights. 

“Yeah.” Elizabeth replied, surprising him slightly. However, his brain was already shutting down again. Heaviness rose in his limbs as he slid back towards sleep.

Chapter Text

Hair. That’s what it was. Soft dark hair that smelled like citrus and baby powder. 

Odd felt like a fancy coffee maker, awareness dripping back into him one thought at a time. His face was buried in Elizabeth’s hair, one of his arms looped around her waist. He couldn’t feel the other one, so he assumed it was crushed between them somewhere. Pinkish-grey light filtered in around them, and eventually Odd remembered that it was a Tuesday morning and that he would have to get up at one point or another. He took a deep breath before detaching himself from Elizabeth to find out what time it was.

She stirred and then rolled over onto her back, blinking up at him sleepily. Her hair was everywhere. In her eyes, curled around her shoulders, spread over her pillow case. She stretched and Odd realized that at some point in the night she had divested herself of her bra. She smiled at him, and she looked so soft and warm that Odd felt himself leaning back towards her. He didn’t want to know what time it was. He wanted to stay like this.

Odd found himself directly over Elizabeth, their noses almost touching.

She kissed him.

It was the longest, gentlest kiss of Odd Della Robbia’s life. He might have stopped breathing in an effort to prolong it. It was worth it to feel the softness of her lips, the way she cradled the back of his head in her hand, keeping him close. Later he would be able to recall her room slowly getting brighter as the sun rose further in the sky, turning the room from grey to gold. 

Odd wasn’t sure when they stopped, just that at some point he was gazing into Elizabeth’s eyes instead of kissing her.

“I guess you should go.” She whispered.

“Yeah.”

Their lips met again, and hers slid open. Her tongue tentatively touched his, and then shied away. She broke the kiss, laughing slightly. Odd laughed too. Neither of them wanted to admit that they had no idea what they were doing—Kissing wise, or in the grand scheme.

Odd kissed her cheeks, her forehead, her jaw. She caught his face and kissed him one last time before he slowly extracted himself. His feet took him back to his room to change and start the day, but his mind stayed with her. He went through his classes in a daze, the scent of her skin still on his. 

“Has Yumi texted you?” Ulrich asked in the hall between bio and math.

Odd checked his phone. “No. Why?”

Ulrich waved his hand in front of Odd’s face. “Hello? Anybody home? Did you not notice that she isn’t at school today?”

Odd blinked once, slowly. “Oh. Yeah. Huh. Maybe she’s sick.”

“I guess.” Ulrich looked down at his phone one more time before it exploded into vibrations and singing. He jumped and nearly dropped it, fumbling as Odd’s phone began to do the same. 

It was a group text, and they skipped math, as advised, to go meet in the woods by the manhole that hid the tunnel to the factory. Ulrich and Odd were the first ones there, and they fidgeted in the cold for a few minutes, rubbing their arms and stamping their feet to keep warm.

“You think we should block these up?” Odd asked, tapping the manhole cover with his foot. 

Ulrich shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. It’s not like any kids could go down there and get into any more trouble then we did.”

Odd shuddered, suddenly glad that the supercomputer was in pieces in Jeremie’s room and not where a couple of bored kids could find it.

“Hey,” Jeremie said as he jogged up to them, “What’s going on?”

“No idea.” Ulrich scrolled back through the texts. “I guess something really good happened?”

“Hope so.” Jeremie said. 

For a split second panic slammed into Odd, but then disappeared. XANA is dead.

A few minutes later Aelita arrived. “I think it has to do with the factory.” She said, and dread pooled in Odd’s stomach again. He laughed so loudly everyone stared at him. 

“It can’t have to do with the factory.” He said, as though the were the crazy ones.

Jeremie opened his mouth, but then they heard someone running towards them, the thud thud thud of their footsteps slowly getting louder.

“You won’t believe what just happened.” Yumi said as she skidded to a halt in the clearing. “My mom just sold the factory.”

Aelita laughed. A short, normal laugh. “Really?”

Just before summer ended Yumi had finally managed to track down the deed to the factory. It had taken two trips to city hall and a lot of chatting up the secretary there, but she didn’t stop until the information was hers. Aelita had thought that it was owned by the government rather than her father, and she had been almost right. Perhaps to bury their tracks, perhaps because it was easier, the deed for the factory, or, more accurately, the land it stood on, was owned by the school board. They had either forgotten about it or been made to, but Yumi convinced her mother to send them an e-mail, stressing how dangerous it was to have an abandoned factory, probably full of rusty metal and asbestos, so near a school. Someone might be prompted to sue someday. The board had e-mailed her back, asking her opinion on the matter as a real estate agent and concerned parent. Her opinion had been to sell.

“Who bought it?” Jeremie asked.

“Hotel people. It’s right by the water in a pretty secluded area. They think they could make a resort out of it or something.”

“Yeah,” Odd said, “In 2025, right?”

Yumi ignored his sarcasm. “Maybe, but they said they want the factory torn down by the end of the year.”

“You’re kidding.” Jeremie said.

“They don’t exactly need a through inspection to demolish it.” Yumi said with a shrug, before noticing the shock on everyone else’s face. “What?”

“I guess I feel kind of like they’re tearing down Kadic.” Jeremie said. Odd could see that his thumb was working circles into one of the scars on his wrist. “I mean, school sucks, XANA sucked, but it’s hard to imagine it just being over.”

“Well, it will be.” Yumi said, though her tone was more solemn now. “Next semester they’re gonna hand us a diploma, and shake our hands, and that’ll be it. It’ll just be over.”

No one mentioned that for Yumi it was already supposed to be over, though it was at the forefront of their minds. When XANA went nuts last year they all let school slide, and that would have been fine if not for one scheme of XANA’s that involved earthquakes. A teacher died before they even reached Lyoko, and Jeremie knew as he virtualized Odd, Ulrich, and Aelita that he wouldn’t have the heart to input Return to the Past. They had learned the hard way that the dead stayed dead, no matter what. Worse, to outsiders they just seemed to drop dead without any explanation. Everyone would say that one moment they were fine, the next dead. 

Yumi was left to deal with things at Kadic, and having so much experience with disasters she was the calmest one on campus till a shelf full of textbooks fell on her leg. As she was brought into an ambulance she never imagined that she would actually make it to the hospital. She watched the window, calmly waiting to be engulfed by white light. At least as she told it. She may have been calm because they had already given her something for the pain, and not because she had so much faith in Jeremie.

Either way she spent five full minutes cursing him out while she was still in the hospital, siting up in her bed, hooked up to two different machines. After that she refused to see him again until she could stand up and punch him in the face. Their friendship and her leg eventually recovered, but her massive absence, plus the classes she had already missed and the tests she had failed added up to the school telling her parents that they couldn’t, in good faith, let her graduate. 

Odd remembered going to visit her in the hospital with Ulrich. The door to her room had been open and they had been just about to turn into it when they heard what her mother was saying.

“I suppose you feel smart now.” She said, her tone not joking, but not accusatory either. Resigned. 

“I saved us some money.” Yumi replied. Her voice was weak, probably from yelling at Jeremie a few days earlier. 

There was a pause, but the two boys hung back.

“I’m sure there’s an idiom about this that I can’t remember. Doing something stupid, and then it turns out to be a great idea.”

“I told you I might want to take a year off after high school.”

“Might.” Her mother snapped. “I was hoping you’d get accepted somewhere, get excited about it, and run right off.” She took a deep breath which might have been meant to calm her, but it came out as a sigh. “I just didn’t want you bumming around home with those kids anymore.”

Ulrich and Odd both startled when angry Japanese began spilling out of the room. Odd had no idea if Yumi was defending them, or just cursing her mother out as badly as Jeremie.

Either way he whispered, “Why don’t I wait for you in the cafeteria.” To Ulrich and tried to bail.

Ulrich grabbed him by the wrist. “I am not facing that alone.” He said as he dragged Odd into the room with him.

“Would you have stayed behind if you hadn’t broken your leg?” Odd asked Yumi.

She looked surprised at the abrupt topic change. “I don’t know.”

“Why do you ask?” Aelita said.

Odd tried to think of a reason, because he knew there was one. There was a weight on his tongue, something both important and impossible to say. 

“I don’t know.” He managed after an eternity of being stared at. “I was just wondering.”

“Ignore him.” Ulrich said to Yumi, “He’s been weird all day. I don’t think he slept last night.”

“I slept.” Odd said.

Ulrich’s eyes narrowed. “Where?”

“He wasn’t in your room?” Aelita asked, the picture of innocence. As though the only time she was in Jeremie’s room all night was when she had passed out over a circuit board.

“He waltzed in just before breakfast. To change his clothes.”

Odd Della Robbia was an amazing liar. Flawless. He could tell his teachers one thing, his parents another, and underclassmen a completely different tale and keep them all straight while still being believable. 

As his friends stared at him his mind went so blank he forgot how to breathe.

“He’s been doing that a lot lately.” Ulrich continued.   

“Only because you have Yumi over all the time.” Odd sputtered. 

“Not only then.”

“That’s not true.” Odd said as he shuffled through his memories. Was there a cohesive explanation for his absences? He tried to put the days together in a straight line, but he couldn’t even remember when he had first started hanging out with Elizabeth. Okay, that would be when he brought her the apology gifts. Not the day they fought each other, that didn’t really count, and he had since deleted the text she sent him that day, so he wasn’t sure where he would find the date. 

His days were a blur. He went to school every day, did his homework, and then a weekend would happen. Rinse with snarky comments swapped with his friends. Repeat. This was the first time he had skipped class in months. Not that some days he didn’t want to, but there wasn’t a reason anymore. There never seemed to be a reason to do much of everything. 

Silence settled around Odd, the kind that happens after someone asks a question and fails to get a response.

“What?” He said.

Ulrich put his hands up. “I just asked what you’d been doing.”

“The library.” Odd said, and even to him it was a pathetic lie. “I go to the library.”

“Doesn’t it close at midnight on Mondays?” Yumi asked. 

“Yup.” Jeremie said.  

Odd tried to laugh in a way that would diffuse the situation, so of course it came out off-pitch and hysterical. “You’re all acting like I’m doing drugs or something.”

Aelita, sweet, gentle Aelita, said, “We were just wondering what you’ve been doing, we’re not trying to interrogate you.” 

Was he overreacting? Oh god, did he looked guilty?

Judging by the looks on everyone’s faces: Yes.

“Are you doing drugs?” Jeremie asked, reaching for Odd tentatively. 

Odd’s mind filed with the scent of Elizabeth’s hair. He shook Jeremie off. “This isn’t an after school special.” He snapped. “There aren’t even any alleys for dealers to jump out of.” He wasn’t sure if that was meant to be a joke, but nobody laughed. 

Odd turned as though he was going to head back to school. “I have to get to math.” He said.

“She won’t let you in twenty minutes late,” Ulrich said, grabbing Odd by the arm. “We just want to know if you’re okay.”

“I’m fine!” Odd said, in the least fine way anyone has ever said those two words, and broke into a run. He wasn’t sure if he expected them to chase him or not, but he ran like a pack of wolves might be on his tail and not his friends. 

His friends for fucks sake. The best friends he’d ever had. He’d fought wars with these people, and suddenly he couldn’t even tell them about kissing a girl he liked? 

What did it matter? It wasn’t like his last name was Montegue. They wouldn’t crucify him for it. Probably. Maybe.

It wasn’t Elizabeth who was the problem, it was the fact that he had felt safer going to her than his friends. That he felt safer with her period. He’d known her the exact same amount of time, but she wasn’t tied up in all his memories of XANA, wasn’t tainted by them. She bore no scars. As far as she knew, she had never feared for her life. She was just another girl trying to make it through high school and then be an adult.

It was intoxicating. Odd couldn’t remember being that carefree. He couldn’t remember what used to scare him most before it was a few rings with some lines coming out of them. When he was with Elizabeth he didn’t worry about death, he worried about which movie they would watch, and if he would be able to make any decent jokes about it. Memories of her face screwed up in pain didn’t hang around like a dark cloud whenever he talked to her. 

He didn’t realize where he was headed till he was on the bridge. He almost stopped to laugh, but he wasn’t sure what would come out of him if he opened his mouth. It was probably a pavlovian reaction. Scared and full of adrenaline? Go to the factory. As though a solution would be there, as simple as a wash of white light. 

He pulled up short when he saw the chains. 

They crisscrossed the main entrance, which was now covered by a sheet of plywood. Odd weighed the padlock in his hand. It left grime marks on him when he dropped it. He had been thinking that the new owners put it up, but it had to have been Yumi’s mother. Of course, he could just bash the wood in, but that would be trespassing.

The earth shifted under Odd’s feet. The factory wasn’t theirs anymore.  

Time moved so fast. Odd wasn’t sure when the sun set, or how he got back on campus, or what on earth he was doing in the woods, but there he was. Spread out under a tree. He was trying to think, but he had been thinking for hours. His gaze was on the stars, but there was nothing mystical about them. They were just a tangle of shitty old christmas lights. He could see his breath and feel the cold seeping through his clothes, but he didn’t want to move. His feet hurt. He knew he had been walking this whole time, just trying to put it all together. 

He had forgotten what ‘it’ was. 

He woke to someone calling his name. He lifted his head, but then sank back down. He was groggy and aching, as though he had only slept for a few moments. He couldn’t feel his face.  His whole head could have fallen off and he wouldn’t have notice. He twitched his fingers to make sure they were still attached.

He heard his name again, louder. He considered answering, but he didn’t want to deal with it. Whoever it was was probably real pissed at him.

Elizabeth burst through a clump of bushes and nearly tripped over Odd. She didn’t fall, but she did accidentally give Odd a solid kick in the ribs. He yelped and scrambled to a sitting position.

“Odd!” She screamed. She fell to her knees and grabbed him by the shoulders. “Are you alright?” She peered into his face, trying to asses his condition in the low light.

“I’m fine. I was taking a walk.”

Elizabeth’s hands fell from his shoulders, and he immediately missed their warmth. “A walk.” She deadpanned. “For eight hours. With nothing but a sweatshirt in this weather.”

“I wasn’t cold. I was walking.”

“You were lying down!” Elizabeth took a deep breath and managed to calm down. “Odd, everyone’s been looking for you. I found your phone by the front gate and gave it to Ulrich. He got really freaked out and told me you just ran off before third period.”

“We were all skipping third period!” Odd said. “Yumi’s mom sold the factory and she dragged us out of class to tell us.”


“Yumi’s mom?” Elizabeth held up her hand and shook her head, “Wait, what factory?”

Odd stared at her. “The one across the bridge by the river.”

Silence.

“The huge abandoned one.”

Elizabeth blinked. “Is that what that is? A factory? I always kind of thought it was a gutted mall or something.”

Images of Elizabeth standing in the factory flashed through Odd’s mind. Sneaking around, screaming her head off, stepping into a scanner pod.
Suddenly envy struck and burned white hot in his belly. She knew, she’d seen it, but she didn’t remember. And he had felt sorry for her. Poor Sissi, walking around in a fog, unaware of how the world really worked, cursed to always be on the cusp but never have a true grip on her reality. As though she—the thought flew through his mind before he could stop it—as though she thought her life consisted of being downloaded to a computer to fight super villains.

“What’s so important about the factory?” Elizabeth asked. 

Words clogged Odd’s throat. XANA—end of the world—my best friends—

“I’m scared.” He whispered. It was the only thing that would make sense to her.

“Of what?” Her voice was surprisingly soft. She moved her arm and for a moment Odd thought she would touch him, but she only set her hand a little closer to his.

“I don’t know what to do anymore.”

“None of us do. Anyone who says so will have different plans within a year. That’s what my dad says.”

It was Odd’s turn to be confused. “What?”

“I mean it, he says that like eighty percent of the seniors have plans, and about half of those have big plans, and they almost all end up doing completely different things.”

“Are you talking about fucking graduation?” Odd asked, the words bitter in his mouth.

“Yeah, I-“

“This has nothing to do with graduation! I-my life-I don’t know how to live like this!” Odd was on his feet, too much energy coursing through him to remain still. “I don’t know how to live every day one after the other! I don’t know what to feel when I’m not scared! I don’t know how to be normal and not trying to save the world.” His voice caught but he talked past the lump in his throat. “I have no idea how to be around my best fucking friends because the five of us aren’t constantly ready for an attack!”

Elizabeth was standing too. “What are you talking about?!” She screamed. “What did you guys do at the factory?!”

Odd grabbed Elizabeth by the shoulders and shook. “I can’t tell you! I can’t! Cause even if I did-“ He began crying in ernest, “You wouldn’t believe me. And there’s nothing there to prove it. Pretty soon there won’t even be a factory. Just a bunch of people vacationing somewhere I can’t even look at without wanting to throw up.”

Elizabeth put her hands on Odd’s cheeks. “Tell me.” She said. It was an order, but it was calm, as though she knew he could do it if he just took a deep breath. 

“I can’t.” He whispered around a sob. His body was shaking and he started curling in on himself, putting him even closer to Elizabeth. He could smell oranges and lemons again, the scent made stronger by her sweat. She put only one arm around him, refusing to hug him, but she crushed him to her chest and waited out the tears. 

“Okay, I might never understand,” She said after a while. “And you might never tell me. And I guess I can live with that. But I was right. Maybe it’s not exactly the same, but I think everyone in our class has felt like that this year.”

“No.” Odd mumbled into Elizabeth’s neck, now damp with tears. 

“Let me finish. I know it’s something different for you, but it’s change right? Things have changed and you don’t know what to do, because you didn’t choose it. High school sucks, but none of us know how to be otherwise. What are we gonna do, who are we gonna be, how are we gonna live? Suddenly we all have to ask and we’re scared.” She ran her fingers through Odd’s hair, brushing out dirt and grass. “But, y’know, for me, the best change this year was hanging out with you. Whenever I was freaking out you would show up and we would talk and watch movies and cry and I’d think, ‘maybe change is good’.” Her arm drops back to her side. “For a few minutes, anyway.”

Odd stood up. His back hurt, his eyes burned and his whole face throbbed.

“I want to tell you.” He said. “I wish I could tell you. Maybe you’d say something like that and it would all make sense. But even I can’t get it to make sense long enough to say it.”

In the distance Odd heard his name. Elizabeth froze. It sounded like Ulrich.

“Ulrich still has your phone.” Elizabeth said. She was backing away from the direction of the voice. “He’ll be happy to see you.”

“Wait,”

“Have you thought of writing it all down? Maybe that would keep it in order.”

“Odd!” Ulrich called. It was a short bark of recognition, not the long, drawn out screams of search.

“I think he’s okay.” Elizabeth yelled back. “I was just about to text you.”

Ulrich ran up to Odd and slammed into him for a hug, spinning him around with the force of it. He started talking a mile a minute, apologizing, asking questions, hugging him tightly while also fishing out his phone so everyone would know Odd was okay. 

By the time Odd had a chance to check, Elizabeth was gone.

Chapter Text

Ulrich pretty much just dropped into bed by the time they got back to their room, but after his mid-freak out nap earlier and the late dinner that Jeremie had squirreled away for him Odd was too wired for sleep. He sat down at his desk and rummaged around for his favorite pen and a fresh notebook. It was spiral bound with a flimsy cardboard cover. Odd dicked around for a few minutes, scratching his name into the purple cover and then the eye of XANA under it, but he was stalling. He knew where he had to begin.

I brought my dog to school with me because I was afraid that I wouldn’t have any friends here. I have plenty now, but only because I brought Kiwi and Ulrich had the balls to dognap him.

Odd wrote all night. He kept expecting to reach a stopping point, but the words kept coming. Perhaps it was because he didn’t just include XANA attacks. He wrote what the world thought really happened, too. He wrote about Sissi, and the shitty things she did to them, and the shitty things they did to her. He spent more ink than he would care to admit on Yumi and Ulrich’s ‘let’s fight-let’s fuck’ relationship. He wrote about William and his betrayal. He wrote right through Lyoko’s final summer as they took everything apart piece by piece. 

Something strange happened. A narrative emerged. Events took on a shape. Days didn’t just end, arcs did. Things didn’t just change, they grew. When he stopped to explain what he thought were simple things to someone who might not understand, stuff he had never stopped to think about finally made sense to him. He knew it all sounded crazy, but as a story it was a pretty cool one. He remembered that it had been an adventure. 

He finished the dismantling of the supercomputer and the scanners sometime around one in the morning. Then he kept going. He wrote about school, and Elizabeth, and trying to live without Lyoko, and how it should have been easy. He got a bit disgusting and sappy, and may have made some terrible metaphors about Elizabeth’s eyes and the night sky, and he might have cried a bit about how it was never going to be the same between him and his best friends, but they were always going to be his best friends, whether anyone else remembered all they had done for him or not. 

Ulrich woke him at seven. He was hunched over his desk, drooling on his own hand. 

“I have to give this to Elizabeth.” He said before he had even sat up, although it probably came out more like, “I hafta givisss t’Lizze.”

“What?” Ulrich said as his head popped out the neck of the sweater he was pulling on.

“I said, ‘I love you’.”

Ulrich had just kicked off his pajama pants and stood there in his boxers for a minute, staring at Odd. Then he smiled. “Yeah. I love you, too.”

In the cafeteria Odd wolfed down two bowls of cereal and a hot chocolate before Elizabeth arrived. He got up and caught her before she had even gotten in the food line.

“Here.” He said, and he placed the notebook in her hands. “It’s everything.”

She idly flipped through the first few pages and then kept flipping. “Whoa.” She said. “It-“ She stopped on a certain page. “Am I in this?”

“Of course.” Odd said.

She closed the notebook and clasped it to her chest for a minute. She had this little smile that Odd though was going to turn into a laugh, but it became a kiss instead. Not a long kiss, not when Elizabeth was blocking the cafeteria door, and Ulrich, Jeremie, and Aelita needed to be kept from cardiac arrest, but a good one.

“Is that why you’ve been so crazy?” Ulrich said the second Odd was sitting down again. “You’ve been falling for Sissi?”

Odd gave him a mysterious smile. Then, because he hated that kind of bullshit, he said, “It’s why I wasn’t in our room last night.”

Ulrich’s eyes bugged out while Jeremie and Aelita laughed. 

“You realize,” Jeremie said, “That once Yumi gets here, you’re going to have to tell us everything.”

“Yeah. I think I can manage that.”

It is impossible to separate this movie from the chaos caused by its trailers. Last year instead of the laughably bad slew of christmas movies everyone seemed to be talking about a trailer that had premiered along side “To The Top” (a movie whose only discerning feature is having ten percent on rotten tomatoes). It was rather tricky to discuss, though, since the trailer did not reveal a plot, title, or release date. It seemed like an advertisement for a boarding school, complete with bored student volunteers, bad lighting, and bland pop songs. The camera recording this waste of tuition runs low on battery and is shuffled around before being plugged in, at which point the screen slowly goes white and a symbol flickers across it before disappearing. Aside from a slide with the words ‘coming soon’ that was the trailer in it’s entirety.

People started talking, but thanks to hefty non-disclosure agreements, no one came forward to explain what was going on. The second and third trailers appeared almost simultaneously a month later, and caused even more confusion. One looked like a sci-fi thriller, the other a young adult romance. However, they shared the same title, Code Lyoko, and the setting and symbol from the first trailer. 

Finally, writer and director Odd Della Robbia casually mentioned that he was behind the project while doing an interview with Teen Vouge. The director is best known for his work on Buried in Stars the sleeper hit of the summer movie season two years ago, best described as the surrealist, most vividly technicolor rom-com to ever grace the big screen. When the interviewer asked about the discrepancy between all three trailers, as well as the secrecy that surrounded filming, Della Robbia responded with,

“When I pitched Code Lyoko the first thing they said was, ‘How are we gonna market this? Is it a heartwarming coming of age story or a YA sci-fi thriller?’ and I said, ‘If I can’t convince you it’s both by the end of this, then we might as well scrap the whole project.’ I guess audacity still counts for something.”

‘Genre defying’ is a greatly overused compliment, and in my opinion, it dismisses the importance of genre. There’s something to be said for going into a horror movie and getting a horror. Of course playing too tightly to a genre’s guidelines without shaking something up can be dull, but so can a movie that tries too hard to include many different elements without properly following through on any of them. Code Lyoko, however, does manage to step outside genre lines without over-burdening itself trying to be three stories at once.

Della Robbia deftly mixes over the top action and teenage drama with the keen eyes of someone who has been there before. Though the movie follows several different threads, the core of the story is the small group of friends it follows, and Della Robbia never forgets that. Unlike Della Robbia’s work so far the style is simple and sharp, the colors muted and the lighting high contrast. Even the virtual world of Lyoko, which is a bit brighter and more cartoony, has graphics simplified to the point where they are almost cubist in feel.

This serves the plot well. The main conflict at the beginning of the movie is that Walter (played by John Beck) finds an abandoned computer, which contains a virtual world and Gemma (Gina Pedroza), a young girl who claims that she is a real person who is unable to devirtualize. Walter makes it his mission to fix this, and accidentally begins recruiting people to help his cause. Unfortunately, keeping the computer on so that Walter can attempt to understand the code that will free Gemma allows another program in the computer known as ZENAT to wreak havoc on the outside world. While this could be a movie all on it’s own, the group’s interactions with each other, as well as their parents and other students, along with several satisfying twists, completely fill out the story and make it unforgettable. 

Interestingly, the technology examined in Code Lyoko bears a striking resemblance to advances in virtual reality being proposed by Nintendo that are currently being developed in a team with Aelita Schiffer and Jeremie Belpois [ Article Here ], and though the technology isn’t the  showcase here, it is rather shocking to think that this film could theoretically happen in five years time. Although that is not the only element that lends Code Lyoko uncanny realism.

The mixture of high school drama and thwarting an evil invasion shouldn’t work this well outside of an after school cartoon, and it’s not just the depth that Della Robbia gives all the story lines, as well as the fantastic acting, which allows these seemingly dissonant themes to gel. In a subsequent interview with The New Yorker after the film’s release Della Robbia said, “I remember when I first asked my wife to read a draft of the story. As soon as I gave it to her I started to overthink. She told me she liked it, but I said, ‘There’s kids fighting giant robots!…Are you sure I shouldn’t take it out? Or make it a metaphor for standardized testing or something?’ and she said, ‘When I think about high school I don’t think about taking standardized tests, I think about fighting monsters.’ so she saved the monsters.”

By injecting it with sci-fi terror Della Robbia has stripped the fantasy from teenage coming of age stories, allowing it to resonate long after you leave the theater. Five stars.