A/N: Thanks to everyone for R&R'ing!

January 7, 2008, dawned in a flurry of snow and wind. It had been like this since the new year had started; white blankets stretched as far as the eye could see, broken up only by trails of footprints or the gleaming tarmac of cleared roads. Aelita pressed her nose to the train's window as it wound back to Paris, snippets of memory flashing before her eyes-a cottage in a white-capped mountain, a snowman with a carrot nose, her parents lovingly tucking her into bed...

When the train finally arrived at the station, it did so an hour late. She and Jeremie grabbed their suitcases and made their exit, scanning the crowd of people. The station was outdoors; attendants were valiantly trying to keep it clean, but there was still a light dusting of snow, carried in by the wind. Aelita shivered, her breath frosting before her eyes.

"There he is," Jeremie suddenly announced, and pointed. Approaching them was a wiry boy wrapped in a green quilted jacket. A dark cap with side flaps protected his ears from the wind. But most of all...

Aelita laughed. "Hey! You had a growth spurt!"

Formerly 1.56 meters, Ulrich's height had slowly begun climbing up over the past few months, centimeter by painful centimeter. But still, the last time Aelita saw him, he'd only just gained three or so. Now, in the few weeks of winter break, he'd suddenly shot up to 1.7 meters.

Ulrich smiled. "Yeah. You should have seen Odd's face when he arrived. He said I was a traitor and disowned as a friend."

Unlike Ulrich, Odd seemed doomed to forever remain a shortie, eternally hovering around the 1.46 mark. Even Jeremie'd managed to breach a meter and a half, though he likely wouldn't be a tall adult either.

"He's back, then?"

"Arrived not long after I did, yeah. He went ahead to help Yumi prepare the Hermitage, start up the boiler room and stuff."

"Oh, good," Jeremie said, rubbing his arms. They'd only been outside for a few minutes, and already the tip of his nose was turning red. "I don't even want to imagine how cold it'd be there otherwise."

Hefting up the two suitcases with ease, Ulrich shivered. "Don't think we have to imagine. C'mon, let's get a move on; the sooner we go, the sooner we can warm up."

He doesn't have to tell me twice! Gladly, Aelita followed her two friends, hurrying through the bustling station.

"Did you have a nice holiday?" Jeremie asked as they emerged onto the snowy Parisian streets.

A scowl briefly crossed Ulrich's face. "To take a leaf out of Jim's book...I'd rather not talk about it."

His two friends nodded, and Aelita patted his arm in sympathy. When XANA had been defeated, Ulrich had been hopeful that his relationship with his father would improve, now that he had more time to dedicate to his grades. Unfortunately, the man seemed impossible to please, always pushing his son to do better and never acknowledging that he was doing his best.

In a move both tactless and compassionate, Jeremie changed the subject to his own vacation. Aelita tossed in her own anecdotes when she saw opportunity, though there weren't many. Ulrich's shoulders loosened as they walked through the city, and she knew they'd made the right move.

Like the rest of Paris, the Hermitage, when they arrived, was surrounded by fields of snow. Unlike Paris, no one had shoveled it off the path winding up to the porch. There were, however, two trails of footprints leading inside; Aelita tried to place her feet exactly in them rather than get more snow in her boots.

Inside, they found Odd attaching colorful festoons to the ceiling. The blonde perked up when they opened the door, vaulting to the staircase and sliding down the bannister. He rushed to them...

...and went straight past the boys.

"Aelita!" Odd exclaimed, opening his arms and wrapping her in a hug. She laughed and pretended Jeremie's jealous glower didn't bother her. She and Odd were just friends, really and truly. "You're the only true friend here, you know! You're willing to stay with me in the short department, not like these traitors!"

Jeremie snorted and pushed his glasses up. "Don't blame me for your weird genes."

"Weird?! I'll have you know, this is one hundred percent normal."

"Yeah, because having thirds with every meal and staying that scrawny is normal," Ulrich teased.

"I'm not scrawny, I'm svelte!" But Odd laughed and slapped the other boys on the back, betraying that he wasn't really mad.

Yumi stepped into the room then, clad in her all-black ensemble as always. Aelita smiled at Ulrich's blush. It was cute how smitten he was with her. Thank goodness they'd finally gotten together last month.

The Japanese girl's eyes widened. "Wow, you got tall. I thought Odd was just being melodramatic."

"U-Uh, yeah," he stuttered. "You...look the same as ever."

There was a smack as Odd's palm met his forehead. Fortunately, Yumi seemed amused rather than offended. "I'll take that as a compliment. So tell me, how were your holidays?"

And that catapulted the group of friends into trading stories. Ulrich was quiet, Aelita noticed, but he had a small smile on his face-especially when he watched Yumi share a funny story about her skiing trip. Odd had brought his scrappy little dog, Kiwi, and the animal yowled happily, running back and forth and making a nuisance (if a beloved one) of himself.

Still, there was one person missing, she thought with a pang.

The group's relationship with William was still strained. She couldn't blame her friends; she had too many nightmares of fighting him on Lyoko to not understand what they were going through. She got how it could be hard to look at him sometimes. But she didn't blame him for it. She was the only one who tried to stay his friend, and when Ulrich and Yumi had started dating-yeah. It was hard. Add in that the others weren't really comfortable involving him in anything Lyoko-related, and it was natural he'd been excluded today.

It didn't change that she wished he could have been here, though.

Eventually, when they'd had their fill of laughter, the teens decided to finish preparing the Hermitage for their overnight stay. This had been the plan over the holiday; they each told their parents they would be sleeping at another friends' house, and Jeremie, using his old voice synthesizer, had helped the authenticity by 'confirming' each teen arrived where they should be. Yumi's mother had made a bunch of pasta for Yumi to 'bring' Aelita, while Yumi herself had purchased popcorn, drinks, pre-cooked roast, and potatoes.

Shucking off their heavy outer layers, they split up. Odd and Jeremie went to the kitchen to make lunch and prepare dinner. Ulrich and the girls took over the decorations, stringing the house with lights to make it a bit more cheerful, even if just for the day.

After they'd eaten lunch and were lounging about, contentedly rubbing their full stomachs, Jeremie rose. "It's been nice catching up," he began. "But as we all know, there was another purpose for our coming here."

The other teens nodded. "Aelita wanted to explore the house and find out more about her parents, right?" Odd asked.

"That's right," the pink-haired girl said. "And I'd just like to thank you all for-"

"No need to thank us, Princess," Ulrich said with a smile. "What are friends for?"

A cough brought their attention back to Jeremie. "If you don't mind...the Hermitage is enormous, so I think it's best if we split up to search it. Aelita and I will take the basement. Odd has the first floor, Yumi the second, and Ulrich the attic."

Nobody minded those assignments, and so they left, Jeremie and Aelita together, Odd bouncing off with Kiwi at his heels. Ulrich and Yumi walked to the stairs, and he glanced at her. Under the lights, her corvine hair gleamed like a raven's wing. He thought again about saying something complimentary.

But, like when he'd first seen her, his heart tied itself into knots and his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth.

"I, uh, I didn't mean it earlier," he managed.

She arched an eyebrow, trying to hide a smirk.

"I meant...you look really nice. Your hair's, um, pretty."

Now she was definitely laughing at him. He could see her shoulders shaking. He flushed and turned away, but her hand wrapped around his, drawing his attention back. "Ulrich, it's fine," she said. "I'm not offended. But, I think you look nice too."

He smiled at her, relieved. This dating thing was a lot harder than he thought. Neither of them were really much for public displays of affection, and he often felt turned-around, unsure of whether he was doing things right.

"Good luck in the attic," she said as she turned off at her floor. "I stuck my head in there earlier, and it's a dump."

"That's promising…"

But Yumi was right to wish him good luck, as Ulrich saw when he stepped inside the attic. Well-lit by three windows, it had been converted to a giant study. Instead of computers, though, there was a large desk covered with sheafs of paper. Three blackboards with half-erased mathematical equations stood at three separate walls. A sideboard was pushed into a corner, which held a coffee machine and an electric stove. There were some scattered briefcases and bags lying on their sides as well.

And everywhere else, everywhere he looked, every single bit of free space was covered in books. Textbooks and notebooks. Big and small, open and closed, on shelves, on the floor, stacked on top of each other, spilling out of cardboard boxes, in bookcases. Enough books to put a library to shame.

Feeling a bit lost, Ulrich started at the pile closest. He picked up and briefly flipped through each book, looking for anything that held a hint about the Schaeffers' family life or was out of place. Instead he found stuff about math. Stuff about music. Stuff about science. Stuff about history. It was like the pile was mocking him for his inability to grasp these materials. One black leather notebook stood out for being completely blank, so he slipped it in his coat pocket.

Ulrich sighed and rose when he was done, the cramped muscles in his legs burning. He turned a mournful gaze to the rest of the room. It was gonna take forever to look through it all.

"No time like the present," he sighed to himself, and headed to the next pile.

For William, sleep was never a sure thing, nowadays. Sometimes he made it through the night; others he woke up screaming, images of smoke and battle and shocked faces still dancing before his mind's eye. He couldn't quite remember what he'd done under XANA's rule in the waking hours, but at night…the memories always came back to him.

So it was that he had taken to walks and doing parkour to clear his head. He'd returned to Kadic a day early, mostly out of convenience for his parents' schedule. Last night had been a nightmare night, and so this morning, after unpacking his suitcases, William had bundled up, slipped his headphones in, and set off at a brisk walk. The blast of icy wind had quickly chased away the lingering vestiges of sleep. With the picturesque (if inconvenient) snow and the Subdigitals' latest album blaring in his ears, a sense of peace had fallen over him. He'd decided that even if it was terribly cold, he'd leave the grounds and take a walk around town.

He'd trailed though the streets of Paris, ducking into random buildings when the cold became too strong. Did window-shopping and sightseeing and exploring. Parkoured in alleys, worked up a sweat. It had felt ordinary. Normal. Nice.

And that was how he came to slip into a cafe on Rue de Provence for a late lunch.

"Hey, hold the door!" cried an indignant, muffled voice behind him, shrill enough to pierce even the Subdigitals.

"Oh, sorry," William said automatically, turning to do so.

A teenage girl staggered in, hands laden with shopping bags. Her head was covered with a cute beanie with a pom-pom, a white scarf was tugged up over her nose, and a bulky fuschia jacket completed the ensemble. Her voice had sounded vaguely familiar, but it wasn't until she set down the bags with a sigh and pulled down the scarf that William recognized Sissi Delmas.

"Thank y-." She stopped and blinked. "Well, if it isn't William Dunbar. What are you doing out here, in weather as bad as this?"

He paused his music and pulled out his headphones, eyebrows arching up at the bags. "I could ask the same of you. Is this really the time to go shopping?"

She hmphed. "Ha! You have no idea of the sale that was going on. No way I was gonna let some snow and wind stop me!"

He snorted at her boast, but his humor was offset by a thread of loneliness. Sissi wasn't particularly close with him or anything, but they'd occasionally found solidarity in their mutually unrequited loves. Then she'd grown closer to the Lyoko Warriors, and even those moments trickled away.

Thinking about them always made bitterness bubble up, and he couldn't stop it from leaking out. "I see hanging out with your new buddies hasn't changed a thing about you."

Her eyes narrowed. "And just what is that supposed to mean?"

He sighed, suddenly tired. "Nothing, nothing...no really, it's not about you," he added, when she continued to glower. "I've just got something else on my mind."

"I'll say. You've been acting like a total weirdo for what, a year? First that stunt with the Dumbo impression, then the sulking? Must be one heck of a thing."

William lifted a shoulder in a shrug and rummaged about for his MP3. Damn, the headphones were all tangled up. He began to work at the wires, trying to fix them, make them simple again.

Sissi, not getting the hint, continued to poke at old wounds. "I mean, I thought I'd be seeing you a lot more since I'm hanging with Ulrich and Yumi and them all now, but you haven't been poking your nose in at all. Weren't you the one who once said you didn't give up?"

"Yeah, but then she and her gang decided I wasn't one of them," he muttered sourly, Yumi's words about lost causes and "you aren't like us" rearing their ugly heads.

That wasn't entirely true. Aelita still considered him a friend; she'd stood up for him when he'd gotten back, and she kept making time to eat lunch or chat or hang out together. William was grateful for her friendship, really, but...he couldn't help the resentment that fostered every time her friends-who he'd once thought of as his-pointedly ignored him. And it was hard being around her sometimes, because the guilt and hurt would rise like a cresting wave. How many times had he singled her out, under XANA's control? Why was it that she, the one he'd wronged most, didn't hate him, but everyone else did?

"Really? What happened?"

Sissi asked it in her typical manner; bulldozer-subtle, searching for the truth without caring if she hit a sore spot. It rankled him. He scoffed. "I can't even tell you why."

"Oh...I get that."

To his surprise, her tone was soft, compassionate. He blinked and turned around to see sympathy in her eyes. "You do?"

"Yeah. One day, out of nowhere, Ulrich stood me up for a date, and then started being really mean to me. The rest of them followed suit, and…I still don't know why." She shook her head.

"You haven't asked?"

Sissi scowled. "I have, but they don't really give me an answer. Just vague stuff like 'we were going through a difficult time'." She looked down at her shoes, an expression of vague melancholy crossing her face, then back up. "But they've apologized, and we're friends again. I bet one day the same will happen to you."

Ah. She'd thought he meant he didn't know why they were shunning him. Of course; what else could she have meant? That she'd also been possessed, attacked, and betrayed them? Spent months a prisoner and then got blamed for it?

But he shouldn't get mad at Sissi for misunderstanding. What happened to him was like something out of a sci-fi novel; she had no way of knowing, and she was just-dare he say it-trying to be nice.

A cough interrupted his thoughts, and, starting, William realized he was now at the front of the line. The employee behind the bar was glowering at him. He mumbled an apology and placed his order.

As he moved aside to wait at the pick-up counter, several bags bumped against his body. He glanced over; Sissi had moved to place a hand on his shoulder, trying not to let go of her purchases at the same time. "Hey, hold on. If you promise not to be weird, d'you wanna eat together? You look like you could use it," she added.

He was so surprised he didn't even think before saying, "Only if you don't expect me to pay for your food. I only do that on dates."

She snorted. "Dunbar, I'm so out of your league, you aren't even up to bat."

That got a laugh out of him. It sounded rusty and creaky-but it was a laugh. "Alright. It's not a date, then."

Exploring the Hermitage's basement, Aelita thought it felt more like a warehouse. One long passage, straight from the stairs, pointed to the steam room where Ulrich and Yumi were once almost boiled alive. Going down the passage leading to the right led to an enormous room with an industrial strength-refrigerator. A smaller room to the side had a pantry, with boxes of food piled high and a cluster of metal shelves containing canned goods. A third passage opened up another room, with an old washing machine and wardrobes full of cleaning detergents.

"It's baffling how much there is down here," she told Jeremie as they turned down yet another passage. "I can't believe we never fully explored this place."

"Well, it's so huge it would probably have taken an entire day. We had other priorities," Jeremie said. "But now that we are here, I'm sure we'll find something of yours parents'."

She smiled, touched by his encouragement. Though they'd spent the break at his parents place, Aelita's mood had been weighed down by her own negativity. It was nice to get some time alone with him, without such somber thoughts in her head.

As they walked, Aelita's eye was caught by a little square room. Oddly, it seemed to contain stores of a builder's yard: sacks of lime, boxes of broken tiles, a dirty pile of mortar, a pickaxe, a trowel. All was covered by a thick layer of dust.

She stopped and stared. Something tickled her brain like a light feather. Jeremie, alerted by the absence of her footsteps, glanced over his shoulder. "Aelita? Something wrong?"

Slowly, she spoke. "We've never found the plans for the Hermitage, right?"

"Right."

"But there must have been other people working on it. Like contractors. Maybe they could tell us something." And, she thought to herself, I get the feeling there are more secrets to this place than we've found.

"Um." He blinked and looked at her in admiration. "Wow, you're right. I never thought of that."

Stepping into the room, he studied it a moment, then crouched to examine the sacks. "There's something written here, but it's illegible, completely worn out. Help me move them-maybe the ones behind them are in better condition."

Easier said than done. The sacks weighed a ton; it took the two of them several minutes to push the first row a few centimeters. But they did it! Shoulders aching, Aelita slipped into the space they'd created and stooped to read. Bingo! "B&B-Broulet and Brothers, 117 Rue De Tivoli! That's right on the other side of the city!"

"That must be the company your father hired to help get this place built. Or renovated."

A huge grin split Aelita's face as she leapt to her feet. "C'mon, let's go tell the others!"

On the other side of the world, a young boy trembled with excitement. Twelve-year-old Erik McKinsky had just received an email from an unknown forum user, promising scandalous pictures of the latest sensational singer, Gardenia. All he had to do was click a link.

But when he did, he was disappointed to find only an odd image-two circles around a dot. Three stubby lines stuck out the bottom of the outermost circle, while the top had a single line.

"A scam. Figures," he muttered, pushing his laptop away in disappointment.

He couldn't have known, but at that time, his laptop had hosted a digital being. Or rather, a lost part of one. Now it had been reclaimed by the whole.

This being had been cast out of its home, blown to pieces, left to drift, memoryless, even afraid...but it was regaining strength. It had travelled ceaselessly, jumping along electric lines and between computers and through the dark recesses of the Internet. It never stayed in one place for long, only long enough to reclaim what it had lost. By clicking that link, Erik McKinsky had just brought it...no, him, one step closer to that goal.

I have not died, the being thought.

Jeremie had been a fool when he'd used the prototype anti-XANA program to freeze the Kolossus. Did he really think XANA wouldn't recognize its purpose? Or that he wouldn't develop pre-emptive countermeasures? He'd shown his hand too early, and it had worked in XANA's favor. It had cost him his general, even cost him his Replikas...but it had saved his life.

He'd tucked small fragmented backups, little 'seekers', into various nooks and crannies, then thrown up viruses to cut off Internet access. These viruses had been programmed to self-destruct on a timer, based on his calculations for the most probable timeframe in which Jeremie would finish and launch the program. The backups would then be freed to return to the Internet, where they would seek and rebuild the flotsam of his digital corpse...as they had, over the past months.

Though much of my power has been lost, XANA thought. He'd infected every single abandoned supercomputer he'd found, and lost them all; the only ones left were under some kind of surveillance. He would need to slaughter the humans to take one, and that raised the odds of detection to unacceptable levels. The children being alerted to his presence would be bad enough; government authorities being alerted would be worse.

No. Secrecy was the key here, and secrecy he had in abundance. While manipulating Lyoko's towers was the greatest of his natural abilities, he had others the children were unaware of; he'd never had cause to use them in their little game, deeming their drawbacks outweighed the benefits. And the towers just offered so much more, powerful options. But now…

He ran a quick diagnostic on himself. Yes, his capabilities were as optimal as they would get. There was still more of him scattered about, but they were the absolute tiniest pieces; the time and effort spent reclaiming them was not worth it. It was time to move to the next step of his plan.

In this void, he had no mouth, but he would have smiled if he could.

I have not died.

And children, I'm coming for you.

A/N: Height conversions from France's metric system to America's: 1.56 meters = 5'1". 1.7 meters = 5'6". 1.46 meters = 4'10". 1.524 meters = 5'0".

XANA displays some abilities in the novels that he uses without a tower. It's implied he doesn't need a tower to use them, and that they're different from using his spectres. These are going to be expanded on further, as well as given concrete pros and cons for balance.

I imagine XANA didn't recklessly kill humans when he started creating his Replikas, if only because it would get noticed-especially if some of the factories were military or government. It's a better explanation for why none of the countries know about the super-powerful AI virus than "they know and they're just not doing anything", at least imo.