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souljellied · 6 years

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(dear @floorlimes - happy christmas my dear! Sorry this is late, I somehow forgot how to write /laughs/ please enjoy this as is, and accept the polished version sometime in the new year! as I realised there was a lot more I wanted to explore with this idea. Hope it’s somewhat to your liking! Set sometime after CL, at Christmas because WHY NOT.)

i kissed a girl (and i may do it again)

When a classmate comes out, Sissi Delmas is forced to reconsider some things about herself. (Sissi/Emilie, Sissi/Yumi)

Snow is falling fast outside, past the tinsel that decorates Sissi’s bedroom window. The digital clock on her bedside table reads 00:24 AM.

They are all sprawled – Sissi, Noemie, Heidi, Anais, Emilie and Julie - across the bed and floor in Sissi’s room, with only the light of her bedroom lamp to see by. Sissi’s back is against the bed and she idly throws a piece of candy, still in its wrapper, up and down in the air. The remains of half-opened food packages extend into the shadowed corners, and several empty mugs, hot chocolate drying around their rims, are piled around them.

There is the faint hiss of air behind her, as Heidi, cross-legged on the bed, opens another bottle of soda. Sissi, noticing the time, absently reaches for her advent calendar and opens the next day’s window.

Noemie watches and grins. “It’s so close to Christmas!” There is a flurry of excited chatter as everyone discusses for the hundredth time how much they have or haven’t succeeded in completing their Christmas shopping.

“Did I tell you, I saw the funniest thing,” Heidi says, “I can’t believe I forgot to tell you! Jim was shopping in town this morning, wearing a Santa hat, but I felt kind of bad for him, you know – he had a shopping list and a whole bunch of bags and he seemed kinda stressed.”

“At least he’ll be too tired to patrol the corridors and bother us tonight,” said Julie. “And this is the first time we’ve got together in ages.”

Sissi crumples the foil window of her advent calendar into a ball. In truth, she’s only here partly because she offered to host (“I have the biggest dorm room after all”), and she still feels a little out of place in this new group of female friends.

There is something to be said for getting older, for really reaching out and making new friends. Sissi feels far removed from the events of the past few years. If she’s honest with herself, she barely really thinks about Ulrich and his friends any more; when she hangs out with them, it’s fun, but it isn’t the wild adventure she expected. When they sneak off, it’s usually into town or to play video games in Jeremie’s room. (“About exactly what everyone expected,” the other girls had told her. “It was only ever you and Jim all paranoid that they were up to something.”) Part of her still thinks that they save all the cool, exciting things for when she isn’t there.

They have been sitting here in Sissi’s room for hours, too wired on sugary snacks to sleep, watching Christmas movies with the television turned down low. Now with a lull in activity and talk of Christmas shopping finally exhausted, the conversation turns to gossip of the usual fare; schoolwork, teachers and, of course, boys.

Anais is incredibly cheerful, having recounted in great detail her latest stolen kiss with Christopher from History class, and Julie has a mysterious suitor from the boys’ school across town that she’s meeting up with this week. Anais lies prone on her stomach, chin propped up with a cushion. A thought comes to her and she pipes up with a wicked grin.

“Hey Noemie!”

Noemie looks wary. “What?”

“You know, I was just remembering that whole thing with you and Della Robbia last year. I hear he’s single again, what do you think about a little Christmas romance?”

Noemie blushes and scowls at the reminder. “All right, for the last time, that was a terrible mistake and I’d like to not think about it ever again, thanks.” She crosses her arms, hunches inwards against the good-natured teasing of the other girls.

Finally, in a last bid to deflect attention away from herself, she rounds on the nearest girl. It is Emilie, unsuspecting and picking a lose thread on the hem of her pyjama bottoms.

“What about you Emilie?” Noemie leans in, smirking, eyes shining with the promise of further gossip. “What ever happened with you and Ulrich? He seemed pretty sweet on you, I thought you actually had a chance for a minute.”

“Oh yeah!” are the various exclamations across the room, while Sissi leans back against the bed and scowls, and the other girls pretend not to notice.

“Well, go on!” Heidi says. She pokes her gently. “Did anything happen? A kiss or anything like that at all??”

Sissi steels herself for something she doesn’t want to hear. She thinks about Emilie kissing Ulrich, being invited to hang out with him and his friends, and clenches her jaw.

Emilie juts out her chin and she casts her eyes around the room. She opens her mouth, just slightly, and there is a long pause.

“Actually, I’m-“ she says, then stops. The others watch expectantly, studying the play of emotions on her face; pensiveness, defiance, and the beginnings of a slow blush creeping over her cheeks. Sissi is as confused as the rest of them and can’t help but notice the way Emilie’s fingers curl into fists against the thin carpet.

“Actually,” Emilie says again, inhales deeply, then releases the rest of her sentence in one hurried breath, “I realised I’m not really into boys. At all. As in, not like that.”

Heidi frowns. “You mean you’re…?”

“Gay?” Sissi finishes.

Emilie is staring at the floor now, drawing her knees up into herself. From beneath a curtain of dark hair, she casts her gaze up at Sissi, still with that defiance, mouth set in a firm line, pride mixed with relief.

“I mean. Uh. Yeah. That. Gay.”

Saying the word seems to instill even more confidence in her, and Emilie shrugs, straightening up. With deliberate casualness she reaches for a plastic cup and pours herself another drink.

“All right, well,” says Noemie presently. “Uh.. that’s… fine.”

“Yes,” replies Emilie. “Yes it is.”

“I mean it’s a bit... you know… unexpected?” Heidi is tying her hands into awkward knots, biting her lip as she trails off. “Not that that’s… I mean, it’s… you’re still our friend, you know, Emilie.”

“Yeah,” adds Julie. “Just with the whole thing with Ulrich… I guess we’re just a bit surprised, that’s all.”

Sissi notices the way the other girls watch with a mixture of expressions from surprised to curious.

“Yes, well,” Emilie says. The blush is still there on her cheeks and she hides behind a long sip of her drink before she speaks once more. “Sometimes you just think you want something because you don’t really understand that you actually want something else. But this is me, and if you don’t like it-“ she casts a pointed look around the room “-that’s your problem.”

“Fair enough,” says Anais, entirely unfazed. “Congrats, Emilie.” The smile she casts is so warm, and Sissi remembers why this girl is as popular as she is, and why Christopher M’Bala is always staring at her wistfully from across the room in class.

“I mean,” says Sissi, stretching out her legs. “It’s not that big of a deal. Besides-“ she wants to say, this is one less person in competition for Ulrich but whilst it is true, and she supposes she is immensely relieved at the fact, she’s mostly confused that the others have such a problem with it. “It’s fine to think girls are pretty. I mean, there are lots of pretty girls at Kadic...” A wave of something washes over her and she feels a bit faint suddenly. Like a switch has been flipped, imperceptibly, in the back of her head.

Recovering herself quickly, she coughs.

“This is dumb anyway,” Sissi says dismissively. “I’m getting bored of gossip.” She stands up and reaches for her DVD collection. “Come on, let’s watch another movie or something. This one has Pierre Perrier in it. He’s so cute,” she adds pointedly.

Everyone seems eager to change the subject and they scramble to rearrange themselves side by side on Sissi’s bed.

“Maybe there’s some cute girls in it for Emilie too,” says Julie, helpfully, and Heidi nods, Emilie beams at them gratefully, and with that the tension is broken.

The DVD is recovered and placed in the player, the movie starts. They fall asleep one by one, and Sissi wakes on Sunday morning pressed between Emilie and the wall, the others in various crumpled sleeping forms across her bedroom.

Emilie’s hair is all silky soft dark strands almost indistinguishable from her own. She smells like strawberry shampoo. There is a slight mark across the bridge of her nose from her recently-removed glasses.

She looks very pretty when she’s sleeping.

“Oh,” says Sissi, staring up at the ceiling. “Oh no.”

What was it Emilie had said?

You thought you wanted something and then realised you didn’t want it.

Sissi spends most of the next few days in a confused haze. During Chemistry on Monday first period, she doesn’t make a single note – which is not in itself unusual – but instead stares at the back two pages of her notebook wherein variations of her and Ulrich’s name are intertwined elaborately in glitter gel pen.

She blames being tired, but truthfully, staring wistfully at Ulrich and writing their names in his notebook just doesn’t feel the same, hasn’t really for some time if she’s perfectly honest with herself, but now she is thinking about it and overthinking it, and Sissi Delmas hates feeling like she’s overthinking. She tries to lose herself in festive celebrations, and to an extent it works, but still. Still.

It feels like something has been switched in her brain, and now it won’t switch off.

Finally, with a few days left until the end of the term, Sissi steels herself and seeks out Emilie across the snowy schoolyard one Wednesday afternoon.

In her head she’s rehearsed a million ways to lead into this conversation, subtle suggestions of how to ask what she wants to ask, without actually appearing so. But, Sissi being Sissi, before she knows it she is standing in front of Emilie with her hands on her hips and a defiant expression and the first words out of her mouth are-

“How did you know?”

Emilie, gloved hands wrapped around a hot chocolate from the vending machine, blinks at her from behind her large glasses.

“Hello to you too, Sissi. How did I know… what?”

“Um-“ stammers Sissi. “That you. You know. Liked girls.”

Emilie’s eyes alight in recognition. “That’s kind of a personal question, you know,” she says, but there’s something in Sissi’s expression that speaks to her, and she beckons the other girl to sit beside her on the nearby bench. They sit there like that, huddled in their winter coats, angled into each other. Emilie appears thoughtful as she mulls over Sissi’s question.

“It’s one of those things that didn’t make sense until it clicked into place, and then my whole life sort of made more sense,” she says finally. “I mean… take that whole thing with Ulrich for example. I liked Ulrich because I thought he was cool, and because he was really nice to me. When I thought about us being together, it was a nice idea to think that a cool guy like him would like someone as dorky as me.” Emilie laughs.

“Yeah but he’s cute right?” Sissi presses, insistently.

Emilie shrugs. “I guess? You don’t talk about him half as much as used to. Do you still think he’s cute?”

“Yes!” Sissi exclaims. “He’s handsome, everyone says so.”

Sissi thinks about the floppy brown hair, the brooding look, the idea of them holding hands and Sissi sitting down at the table with Ulrich and his friends. Conversation, laughter. Odd teasing her, but not in an annoying way. Jeremie helping with homework. Yumi and Aelita playing video games and shopping. The rest of the fantasy has been fulfilled, in some small ways. She’d almost forgotten the appeal of Ulrich himself.

“How strange,” she mumbles.

“What’s that?” asks Emilie, watching the emotion play out on Sissi’s face with interest.

“Nothing, nothing. I guess that I just always took Ulrich and my crush on him for granted. I still get mad when he hangs out with just Yumi, but it’s almost like habit.”

“If I might make a suggestion,” says Emilie. “What are you mad about? In those situations, who are you thinking about, really? Is it Ulrich... or Yumi?”

Sissi flinches back along the bench. She scowls, not sure if she likes what Emilie is implying or even if she quite understands, and so she does what she does best - rashly changes the subject.

“So.. did anything happen with you and Ulrich?”

Emilie raises an eyebrow. “Actually, no. Looking back I’m glad it didn’t. I didn’t really think about kissing him. I didn’t really like the idea to be honest, but I thought if we became boyfriend and girlfriend, I’d start to like it then. Like maybe I just wasn’t ready.”

Sissi blinks at her. “Isn’t that how it’s supposed to be?”

Emilie looks at Sissi for a long, long moment, the corner of her mouth twitching. At last, she breaks into a full on smile. Shaking her head, she places a gentle hand on Sissi’s shoulder. She opens her mouth like she wants to say something, so close to Sissi that Sissi can see the hazel flecks in her eyes, but then she just releases Sissi’s shoulder and walks away.

Sissi sits down on the steps in the courtyard, twining her hands in her scarf, and remains there lost in thought for a very long time.

It turns out Emillie isn’t actually going home for the holidays, a thing Sissi finds out when she bumps into her in the otherwise empty library a few days later after the mass exodus of students to their families. Kadic feels empty and lonely without them all there, the decorations strewn everywhere losing some of their cheer with no one to enjoy them.

“Too much family drama,” Emilie says, carefully casual. “One phone call to my mother and I remembered how stressful things can get. I told them I’ll just stay here, chill out and study.”

“You should have said sooner,” says Sissi. “We could have been hanging out. Instead I’m just getting roped into fixing Christmas lights with Jim.”

She rolls her eyes. Emilie laughs.

They take a seat with a pile of books and magazines - Sissi doesn’t mind the library so much when she doesn’t actually need to use it to study - and chat aimlessly about past holiday traditions. Emilie looks like she’s thinking about saying something, with long thoughtful pauses between conversation topics, and it’s making Sissi impatient.

“All right,” she says at last, clenched fist on the table. “Whatever you’re wanting to talk about, out with it, because you’re really winding me up.”

Emilie holds her hands up defensively. “All right, all right. I just wanted to ask how things were going, with that whole, what should I call it? That journey of self-discovery you seem to have been on lately.”

“What do you mean?” There’s a slight tremble in Sissi’s voice, even though she kind of guessed what this was about, she supposes, deep down.

“The questions you’ve been asking me. The way you’ve kind of been avoiding Ulrich and Yumi when you used to fall all over yourself to hang out with them-”

“I’m not!”

“Okay, okay. If you say so.”

“I do,” Sissi huffs indignantly. “What makes you so wise and all-knowing anyway?”

Emilie smirks a little. “I never claimed to be any such thing. I just started paying attention.”

Sissi sighs, slumps over the table and pushes the books aside so there’s room for her head to collapse into her folded arms.

“I just thought... when I was finally at a place where my life was starting to sort itself out, ever since you said you were... you know.. it got me thinking about all these stupid things, and now it’s in my head and I’m-” she slams a fist lightly into the table, groaning. “Argh, I’m just so confused about everything!”

“So what you’re saying is...” says Emilie, slowly. “That you think you’ve realised you might like girls, but you don’t know for sure.”

Sissi freezes. It’s the first time anyone’s said it out loud and it rings in her ears and makes her heart race, the words given a unique power when spoken aloud. She wants to shake her head, say this isn’t it at all and storm out of the room, but then she’ll start the new year with even more confusing problems and this was supposed to be her fresh start.

She rises her head from her arms, but can’t bear Emilie looking at her with sympathy like that, so stares down at her lap instead. Taking a slow, shaky breath, Sissi nods.

“You got it in one.”

Emilie doesn’t look smug, just nods as though confirming something she’s known all along - which, Sissi supposes, she seems to have. Somehow. Before the past few weeks, they hadn’t even spoken that much, so Sissi can’t guess how other than some weird supernatural power of perception that Emilie possesses. Some people were just observant to the point of creepy.

“So... what now?” If Emilie is so perceptive, Sissi thinks, she might have the answer to this one too.

Emilie leans back slightly in her chair, never taking her eyes off Sissi.

“Maybe if you want to try it, you should.”

Sissi scoffs. “How? It’s not like I can just go around finding girls to – Oh. Ohhhh.”

Emilie tilts her head and gives Sissi this awkward kind of grin.

“Sorry, I’m not very smooth, I know. Ideally there’d be mistletoe, or alcohol, or something, just to make this a bit less weird.”

Sissi isn’t exactly thinking about the delivery, just the words themselves.

“You thought about me… like that?”

Emilie shrugs. “You’re really pretty. And you’ve been asking a lot of questions about things lately. And you know, Sissi, when I started telling everyone this particular thing about myself, it made lots of other things seem less difficult. Like I got braver all over, just by having the courage to be myself.”

Sissi absorbs this information slowly, nodding her head.

“Right. I just… there was Ulrich, and that was what I was supposed to want, and I really thought that I did-“

Emilie waits, but Sissi just trails off, arms dangling at her sides helplessly. “It feels like a mess. Not the kind of Christmas revelation I was expecting.”

“Like I say, if you wanted to know for sure… No pressure though. It can be whatever you want it to be. Sometimes a kiss can just be a kiss. You know, just to see.”

Sissi is painfully aware of the blush on her face.

“Soooooo....” Emilie draws out the words in one long syllable. “Would you like to?”

Sissi squints at her, tilts her head. Realises how pretty she is, with her bookish look and glasses and long, dark hair and slender hands.

And she wants to.

She really, really wants to.

Just to see.

So she does.

When they pull away, Sissi has a fire in her stomach like she’s just drunk a glass of something warm and alcoholic and Christmassy; there is a trembling in her breath and her hands have somehow found their way to Emilie’s waist.

She almost laughs, because she’s never thought about Ulrich this way, not once, not ever, and her intense non-dislike towards Yumi Ishiyama also suddenly makes a lot more sense. Her head spins with the weight of everything that’s falling into place.

If the expression on Emilie’s face is anything like her own, they must look like a ridiculous pair, leaning into one another, flushed, grinning.

Emilie doesn’t say anything else except, “Merry Christmas, Sissi Delmas.”

Sissi just impatiently brushes her hair from her face, plants her hands on Emilie’s shoulders and pulls their lips together again.

#code lyoko #code ss17 #sissi delmas #emilie de luc #my writing #I'M SORRY THIS IS SO UNPOLISHED #i had this whole thing with her father and closed-off boarding-school homophobia #which got in the way of the xmas fluff bits #also emilie seemed way more of a plausible character #for sissi to have this relevation with #than Yumi??#but i got the Yumi-crush bit in there kind of #UH ANYWAY WHEN THIS IS EDITED IT'S GOING TO NOT SUCK AS MUCH #happy holidays bb #floorlimes #code lyoko secret santa

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