#how long. did it take Jeremie to get to the factory after noticing the supercomputer had stopped responding to remote pings | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

cosmicpines · 3 years

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code july day 1 - future

au where jeremie's anti-xana program didn't work, taking place half a year after.

“Do’ya think we should start future-proofing our whole situation?” Odd was the first one to speak out loud in at least a half an hour, his voice echoing around the computer lab.

It was late. Not just “it’s a school night, we should turn off the Playstation” late, but “sunrise is in an hour” late. Ulrich, Jeremie, and Aelita were crowded on the couch – a fairly new addition to the lab that William and Odd had dragged over a mile to the factory after finding it on the street, a several-hour long affair that left them both sore for a week – blearily staring at chunky school-loaned laptop screens with piles of overdue library books on the floor in front of them. Odd and William were across the room, hunched over an oversized posterboard, surrounded by an accoutrement of Odd’s art supplies and printed out sheets of paper. What was keeping them up was potentially world-ending, but not in the usual way; instead of an evil AI, it was a history project due at 10 AM.

It wasn’t entirely their fault they didn’t start earlier – saving the world was a full-time job, afterall – but it’s not like they could give an excuse to Mr. Fumet that he would have believed. As the clock ticked over to 4, the prospect of having to pull the trigger on a return trip to finish loomed over them. They had already done it once, blearily uploading PowerPoint slides to the supercomputer to save them, giving Yumi an apologetic phone call in the morning. She was used to the disorienting resets at this point, having done them for half a year after graduating and moving across the country, but they usually texted ahead of time to warn her. She was sympathetic over the phone – she always was – but she was definitely irritated about having to retake an exam. They didn’t want to put her through that again and, besides, they couldn’t exactly keep the poster board from getting erased to time.

“Future-proofing the fact half of us might fail history?” Ulrich grumbled in response from across the room, leaning against the armrest of the couch. His eyes were glazed over in a stupor as he clicked idly around on the screen.

“Ulrich, are you done with your slides yet?” Aelita spat at him, now that the silent spell was broken, “I want to start stitching them together.”

“Uh… no.” Ulrich glanced at her, subtly turning his screen away from her piercing gaze, “Gimme ten more minutes? I’m almost there.”

Aelita clicked her tongue, probably remembering the last promise of the slides “in ten minutes.” She turned to her left and nudged Jeremie, “How about you – oh my god, Jeremie, can you focus?”

“Huh?” He looked up, and guiltly alt-tabbed back to a blank PowerPoint slide. “Sorry, I was just… I had a breakthrough about the bug in the Skid and I was…” He trailed off under her glare, “Sorry.”

Aelita clutched the side of her head, groaning. “Is it too late to go back to living on Lyoko where I don’t have to care about World War I and don’t need sleep?”

“Me too, thanks.” William muttered at Odd’s side, aggressively erasing a sentence on the poster, “Being XANA’s slave was less painful than this.”

He let out a bitter laugh, then raised his head, half smirk fading at the frozen-in-terror looks on his friend’s faces, “Sorry. Too soon?”

Odd, as he so often did, interrupted the awkward silence before people could make it worse, “Future-proofing us, is what I meant. Thanks for asking!” Nobody humored him as the typing across the room started back up and William started writing again, “Look, I’m just saying; we’re not getting any younger.” He brandished a red marker, filling in bubble letters on the top of the poster, “Yumi graduated. We’ve only got a semester left at Kadic –,”

“Could just all repeat a year like I did.” William grimaced. “And might again.”

Ulrich snorted, “Odd and I are probably on track for that.”

“Cheers,” William said, raising his pencil like a glass, without looking up, “Join the failure club.”

“BUT,” Odd interrupted, “Assuming we don’t! Because this presentation is going to be incredible,” That one earned a snort from everyone in the room (which was fair), “We’ll need someone who can do our jobs if we have to leave the good fight. Lyoko Warriors, the Next Generation! Kadic’s Next Top Lyoko Warriors!” He chuckled at himself, standing up, “We should put an ad in the paper: ‘Want a challenging, world-altering job? Come down to the abandoned factory!’” He hummed to himself, tapping his chin, “Our criteria would have to be strict. Can you imagine getting someone like, I dunno, Johnny? So, Johnny. Please, tell me: what’s your greatest fear? Giant crabs, you say? Why yes, that’s both oddly specific and also a dealbreaker. Next!”

Odd looked up, laughing, waiting for his friends to join in – Ulrich telling him he was being dumb, Aelita offering some other students and joking with him about their interviews, William making a snide remark about how he didn’t get an interview, a silent, but appreciative smirk from Jeremie – but got nothing. Jeremie’s head was buried in his laptop, and Aelita was – Aelita was glaring at him?

“What?” He asked her, but she said nothing, just raised an eyebrow in a you know what’s wrong look. Odd clearly didn’t, and turned to Ulrich for a clue, but Ulrich wasn’t giving him anything; he was just back to sulking, staring at his laptop. Odd ran through what he said again in his head, trying to find the offending phrase, when William punched him in the leg. “Hey –,” Odd started, ready to give a snappy retort, before seeing William was urgently tapping at the poster, where he’d just written something. Odd crouched down to read it.

you’re upsetting jeremie.

Odd glanced back at Einstein across the room, whose face was impassive, just typing away. Looking closer, though, he could see Jeremie had all the appearances of someone trying valiantly to pretend they weren’t upset – hunched shoulders, scrunched up face, not a single glance away from the screen. Aelita had stopped glaring to put a hand on Jeremie’s shoulder, but he shrugged it off.

Ugh. Odd sighed, wondering if he would have to apologize for just trying to lighten the mood. How was anything he said upsetting to Jeremie? He reached over for a pencil to respond to William, scribbling down on the poster.

Can’t he take a joke?

idk. Guess he thinks you’re blaming him.

Blaming him?? For what???? bro when did I even say anything like that??

you didn’t. don’t bro me bro. not my fault

Odd underlined his first bro, giving William a smile. William rolled his eyes before rubbing out their conversation with an eraser. Odd turned back to his coloring job and took a breath, surprised to see it come in shaky. It’s not your fault he’s upset, he thought to himself, pulling the cap off his marker. It’s fine. He leaned over to finish his coloring before noticing his hands were shaking. He clenched them, angrily. It wasn’t his fault Jeremie was upset. He was fine. Not his fault if Jeremie wanted to over-react. He’ll get over it and… where were the scissors?

He dug around their supplies for them, then, picking up a pile of pictures of historic figures, streaked from the bad library printer, took a pair of trembling scissors to extracting them. They were nearly done. One more section and they’d be done. One more and they could go to bed and Jeremie would get over whatever he was upset about and it was fine and it would all go away and it was fine it wasn’t his fault and –

“I’m working as hard as I can,” Odd felt a bit in his stomach open up as Jeremie spoke in a quiet, bitter voice. Odd stared pointedly down at the poster, blinking rapidly to try and assuage the pressure building behind his eyes, “I know we screwed up by not finishing before Yumi graduated, okay? I’m just… It’s a lot to figure out and I’m trying?! Is that not enough for – No. No, I know it’s not enough – I know I’m keeping us from having a normal life and it’s my fault William had to repeat a year and… and I –,” Jeremie’s breath caught, and Odd finally dared to turn his eyes to him, seeing his friend aggressively rubbing his eyes under his glasses, “I – I don’t mean to – look! It’s hard, alright?! It’s hard and I – I’m just so tired all the time and I’m sorry that we’re still awake for this too and that I –,” His voice finally broke as he started crying in earnest, his fist coming down on the side of the couch. Odd wanted to turn back to his work and brush it off, but the guilt clenching his stomach wasn’t letting go.

Hesitantly, Aelita put her hand on his shoulder again, “Jeremie…” but he shook it off again, turning away from her. She persisted. “It’s not your fault. We know you’re working –,”

“And it’s not enough! I’ve been working at this for years and I just I can’t come up with anything to defeat XANA –,”

“You had a lot of other things you needed to do first.”

He didn’t mean to, Odd was sure, but Ulrich’s eyes flickered to William for just a moment, and William’s eyes narrowed.

“Oh, are we doing this now?” William grumbled, dropping his pencil. “Jeremie, you’re fine. Look, I’m sorry. Again. You don’t think I don’t regret every moment that I didn’t listen like a fucking idiot –” Jeremie, despite being wracked with tears, winced at the swear, earning a brief hint of a smile from Odd, “ – and got myself captured? Who then was a thorn in your asses for months? No. I get it. You’d probably be rid of XANA already if it wasn’t for me; you’ve made that crystal clear.”

“That’s not what I –,” Aelita glared at him, “You of all people should understand that I would never blame you for being trapped on Lyoko.”

“It’s not you that is. It’s him.” He jerked his thumb at Ulrich, who glared back at him.

“I’m not,” Ulrich muttered, “Cut it out.”

“Oh yeah? What did that look mean then, huh?”

“I didn’t –,”

“You blame me, and we all know it. You’re just butt-hurt over Yumi still, even though you had plenty of chances –,”

“Okay, that’s it.” Ulrich sat up straighter, “Maybe you’re still using Yumi as a scapegoat in all our arguments, but I’m done with that. Maybe I was an ass to you before because of her, but I don’t blame you for XANA, William. I never have. I was over it before you even joined,” He scowled at the ground, Jeremie’s crying filling the brief silence. “It was probably my fault you got captured in the first place. I wasn’t there because I had to talk to my stupid Dad and it was my job to tell Odd and I didn’t make sure – hell, even before that! Who was it that couldn’t protect Aelita back when XANA escaped from the supercomputer in the first place? If she hadn’t been alone, the Scyphozoa wouldn’t have gotten her, and XANA wouldn’t have escaped, and we would have been done.”

“Come on,” Aelita crossed her arms, turning away from Jeremie to the boy on her other side, “You’re being ridiculous. Half of that isn’t your fault.”

Odd wanted to chime in that it was Sam’s fault she didn’t listen to Ulrich, but his voice was still missing in action, his throat tight and unresponsive.

“I should have been able to protect myself,” Aelita continued, “It wasn’t your responsibility –,”

Jeremie laughed suddenly, hurt and bitter, “Protect yourself how? You couldn’t protect yourself because I was dragging my feet on giving you a proper weapon –,”

“We’ve talked about this!” She said, “We agreed it was more worth your time to work on an antivirus!”

“For a virus that didn’t exist! If I had just double checked –,”

“Double checked what? The faulty data you were being fed? There was nothing you could have done! If you want to blame anyone, blame me. Maybe it – maybe helping me made sense at first, when things were able to be stopped at a moment’s notice. But then even when you got me to Earth it wasn’t over, and things got worse, things got more dangerous – when we realized XANA could escape? That we couldn’t just turn it off with a switch? That – that should have been it.” Her voice dropped as she took a shaky breath, “You should have just let me turn the supercomputer off.”

“You were ALWAYS worth the risk, Aelita!” Odd finally snapped, terror shooting through his heart at the broken look on her face, the implications of her words, “You… you matter to us more than anything! Look, I’m sorry for bringing this all up, alright? I thought we could just joke around about running Lyoko Warrior interviews! I didn’t mean to get everyone upset. And speaking of! Jeez! All of you are such downers on yourselves! There’s like, a billion different things that could have happened!” He held out a hand, ticking them off, “Maybe William might not have gotten captured and instead XANA got Yumi or anyone else! Maybe, I dunno, Ulrich saved Aelita temporarily but then XANA tossed him in the digital sea! Maybe Jeremie could have noticed that Aelita didn’t have a virus sooner, and XANA just made a move sooner! Maybe – maybe – maybe if you had just let Kiwi be virtualized normally and not fuse with me he would have been a great Lyoko Warrior and would have bit the Scyphozoa and killed XANA! We don’t know, alright? I’m just trying to say that – ugh, forget it! Sorry! Jeez!”

Odd rubbed at his eyes, surrendering to the frustrated and exhausted stream of tears that leaked out of them. All of them, all of this – he kept trying to play superhero, to pretend that everything was going to be alright like in the movies, but in his heart he had to admit that this was starting to feel futile. Aelita’s virus, XANA’s escape from the supercomputer, William’s capture, Jeremie’s first botched attempt at his anti-XANA program, Franz Hopper’s sacrifice, Yumi’s graduation, their failure to stop space station from falling, Jeremie’s second anti-XANA program getting stolen by the AI, and now the looming threat of their own graduation… he wanted to be joking about needing to interview new Lyoko Warriors, really, but if graduation took them away from the factory… away from each other…

A hand landed on his shoulder, he realized he didn’t need to know who it was to press his own on top of it, to squeeze it and feel loved, as more hands, more friends, found their way to his other shoulder, to his back.

“I’m sorry, Jeremie,” he said, “And everyone else. I didn’t mean to –,”

“Don’t,” came a muttered reply from Jeremie, “We’re all acting tired and stupid. I shouldn’t have yelled. I knew you didn’t mean it.”

Odd let out an exhausted laugh, rubbing his eyes of the last of the tears, looking up and seeing his friends around him, “How late is it?”

“Too late,” Ulrich replied, pulling his phone out of his pocket, “We’ve got… three hours until classes start.”

A collective groan broke the spell over the room. Odd looked under his feet to the almost-finished-poster. Silently, all of them returned to their working positions. Odd kneeled down to finish gluing down the last of the faces to the poster. As the lull of busy work started taking over his mind, William nudged him.

“Sorry, I, uh…” William looked uncharacteristically bewildered, “This must have happened while I was – did you say Kiwi fused with you?”

#i am well aware that it is long past day one LOL #we'll see what else i get to #my intent going into this was to write exactly what odd wanted to joke about but then i realized that was kinda fucked up #codejuly #codejuly21 #code lyoko #i swear ill write fluff next i promise #mary blabs

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sheepydraws · 7 years

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And So They Lived (3/6)

Part 1 Part 2

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.

A/N: Like Water for Chocolate and Romeo and Juliet are both about star crossed lovers and for both of them I spend the first 3/4 quarters laughing inappropriately and the rest crying.

The best movie version of Romeo and Juliet (in my humble opinion) is Romeo+Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s colorful and stylized and it makes you believe in Romeo and Juliet’s love, which is what a successful production must do. (It’s why i don’t like West Side Story, but that’s a rant for another day).

Part 4

#code lyoko #odd della robbia #sissi delmas #elizabeth delmas #angst with a happy ending #hurt/comfort #fanfiction #multi-chapter

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