A/N: Short entry kind of based on a weird dream I had. I just wanted to get this written so I could work on my XL Summer Santa gifts, so I'm painfully aware of how much it's not my best work. I hope you all find something to like about it anyway. For me, it was an interesting change from my usual interpretation to write an articulate/sentient XANA. I also find the fairy tale parallels in Code Lyoko really interesting.

Siphon

/

The world floated by in binary, or perhaps it was Aelita who was floating by the world. She didn't care right then for she was caught in a dream, one which sought to cling to and embellish a fading memory, and she struggled to stay asleep.

Aelita inhaled the ghost of a familiar scent, mingled cigarette smoke and coffee and fabric softener on a worn out sweater.

"Once upon a time," a voice was telling her. She drummed her feet against something soft, her heartbeat increasing in anticipation of a story coming. Large hands reached over her own to turn a page but then the crackling of paper grew suddenly deafening, until she could not hear the words. Nor could she see the face of the storyteller, though she turned her head desperately upwards. The lights were blurring and leaving spots of red and yellow in her vision, no matter how hard Aelita blinked to force them away.

The crackling and the rumbling ,indistinguishable voice combined, morphing gradually into something else. A whirring sound and then a boom, like a gunshot – several gunshots – being fired. Aelita leapt up from where she was sitting, but she lost her footing on something and then she was falling, and

with a jolt

She was awake.

She wasn't falling after all, but rather drifting, once more aware of the streams of electric blue zeroes and ones chasing one another relentlessly above her head, along the length of the black tunnel. Aelita placed one hand lightly over heart and heaved herself upright. There was no floor beneath her. If there had been once - and she was sure there had, because she couldn't remember starting here – it was gone.

She waited for a while, trying to remember the dream that the shock of falling had dislodged from her consciousness but, in the nature of dreams, the harder she tried to remember the easier it was to forget. At last she gave up, sighing as she tucked her legs beneath her. Aelita wondered where she had come from and where she was going, vaguely aware that the lack of memory should frighten her but lacking the energy to indulge the emotion.

And then the voice came.

So... it is you.

She gasped and spun around, searching for who had spoken. Now that Aelita knew she wasn't alone, the feeling of being watched overwhelmed her and she drew her arms about herself, hiding her face in them.

"Who..." she began to ask, but trailed away weakly, astonished by the sound of her own voice and how quiet it sounded. The last time she had used her voice, she thought, it had been to give rise to screams of fear.

Do not be afraid, little elf, the voice continued as though it hadn't heard her, snatching Aelita's attention from her fleeting thoughts. You are safe here.

"Where? Where are we going?"

We are on the way, was all it said. Aelita puzzled over this for a few minutes in silence before hedging another question.

"You said... it's me. What did you mean?"

You are the one I am supposed to protect.

"From what?" Her child's mind immediately began to conjure up shadowy, foreboding dangers, nameless monsters in the dark; a shiver ran surreptitiously down her spine. Then, "elf?" she asked, suddenly fully acknowledging the stranger's earlier words, reverberated back to her like an echo. She looked down at herself, took in the tunic and pointed boots, then ran her hands right the way along her elongated ears to the pointed tips, her mouth falling open in pleasant surprise.

An elf – good. Aelita had always thought fairy tale princesses disappointingly helpless, whiling away their time trapped in towers until someone came to rescue them. The elves and the nymphs and the faerie had always held her interest more; graceful, mischievous creatures that fluttered along the edges of the stories, brewing magic and embracing the freedoms of enchanted forests. Yes, she had always like elves... but that begged the question: how long was always? And how did she know about these things when all around her only digital subspace had ever existed?

Aelita didn't understand what was happening to her; it was like no fairy tale that she remembered.

She thought it was maybe connected to that dream she had been having. There was another elf too, part of the dream or no; like those spots that had flashed before her eyes she had a split-second vision of a plush smiling face crowned with a green hat.

"Mister Puck..."

Mister Puck? The voice repeated. It had been monotone and expressionless up until now, not obviously masculine or feminine, but for the first time it sounded almost as though it had asked a question.

"I don't know... I just thought, the name... who are you, anyway?" Aelita asked again. This time the voice indulged her.

I am XANA.

"XANA..." It didn't ring any bells. Not that it mattered, because the voice was luring her once more back into conversation.

Tell me more about what you remember. Tell me about your world.

"My world." She looked around at the near-nothingness and in her mind's eye strained for more, for what came before this, before the dream and the falling. "I think... there was a house in the woods," she began slowly. "There was snow sometimes... yes, I used to play in the front garden and build snowmen."

The concepts – of snow, of outside – came back to her in a flood as she recounted them. Aelita could almost feel the icy cold on her face, hear the whistle of wind through leaves and the smokiness of a burning log fire.

What else? The voice pressed.

"There was... a black car. Men in dark suits." Aelita whimpered and clutched her hands to her head, shaking it to dislodge the unpleasant memories now bubbling to the surface. "Wolves!" she gasped. "Awful grey wolves, with big yellow eyes and sharp teeth. I heard stories about them, and they scared me."

Remember.

A howl reverberated through her head. In her mind's eye the car made muddy tracks in the once-perfect snow. "No! I don't... I don't want to remember any more."

Squeezing her eyes closed, she took deep breaths, focusing on the expanding and lessening of her lungs. Then suddenly Aelita blinked and sat upright again. She knew she had been afraid of something, but what? She couldn't remember, couldn't even recall what she had spoken with XANA about minutes earlier.

"XANA?" she called softly into the stillness. Only silence responded. The entity had gone, and who knew when it would return?

There was no way to measure time but in Aelita's mind XANA appeared for the second time a day later. She decided to mark the days and nights with XANA's passing as it was the only thing that changed in the void. The days, she decided, lasted for as long as XANA spent in her company; the nights marked by when it left her and she drifted alone. In this time she tried to sift through the sand-like grains of her memories, but every time she came close to discovering something vital, XANA reappeared and she flew gladly towards the company, and the scattered trails of her thoughts were cast aside and forgotten.

"What do you look like?" Aelita asked XANA on the second day.

I do not have a physical form of my own. But if you wish, I can take one.

"Um..." she thought for a moment. She wasn't afraid of the disembodied voice, but it was hard to relate to something that she could not see, something that she didn't even know if it was a boy or a girl. "Okay," she concluded at last.

The space itself seemed to shift around her and in a blur that slowly sharpened into focus, Aelita's own face appeared before her. The other Aelita's pose mirrored her own, cross-legged with her hands resting on her knees, face tilted curiously forward. The only difference was the eyes; in the other Aelita's a three-ringed target took the place of the pupil.

"Me?"

I only know one other face. The other Aelita spoke, disconcertingly, with XANA's voice.

"Whose is that?"

A threat, was all XANA would say, despite Aelita's protests. Now let us talk about something else.

She had to concentrate harder this time to pull something out of the growing emptiness her mind. XANA waited patiently, watching as the elf girl chewed her lower lip, before her eyes lit up with some thread of recollection.

"The piano!" she smiled, the first real smile since she had woken, and began to talk excitedly and rapidly. "There was a piano. I was learning to play. I had my own sheet music and I liked running my fingers all the way along the keys, except Daddy used to say-" She gasped again. "Mother! Daddy!"

Who?

XANA took this time to siphon off these memories. The moment the words left Aelita's mouth, the moment the memories sprang to the forefront of her mind; as with all the others, XANA collected them and stowed them quietly away. Instantly Aelita's eyes glazed over and she blinked with effort, pulling herself back.

"Did I say something? I don't remember. What were we talking about?

Never mind.

"But-"

The other Aelita reached upwards, her fingers grasping for the code streaming along the tunnel and effortlessly she peeled off a strip of zeroes and ones. Aelita watched, awestruck, as XANA pressed the numbers together and then released them again as flicking shapes that fluttered towards Aelita like butterflies.

She no longer had any memory of 'outdoors' but she did for the moment remember butterflies, and somehow, vaguely, enchanted places from storybooks.

She thought again, then of fairy tales, voicing her thoughts of these for the first time to XANA.

"I always liked stories," she said. "Won't you tell me one?"

I have no stories to tell.

"Make one up!"

I would not know how.

"It's easy! You just..." but it was hard to explain the concept of imagination when she now had so little to draw on. Instead she pondered to herself how this in itself was a strange story; she, an elf, in a strange realm, and all of transforming and the conjuring would make XANA a wizard, she supposed.

"Are we almost there?" she asked aloud.

Almost. Not long now.

"Okay," she said reluctantly, crossing her arms and slouching at the non-answer. They spoke some more for a while, Aelita always forgetting a little of the old world as her spoken recollections of it left her mouth, until she had run out of things to talk about at all.

Ahead of them presently, came a small speck of white, like light at the end of a tunnel. Aelita stared at it hopefully, willing it to come closer, cheered by the prospect of something different, something changing.

"But why change..." she asked herself quietly.

Because we are done here. I have all that I need. I will take these memories, and keep you safe.

With a sickening, encroaching horror, Aelita realised what had happened. The memories that had been taken from her as she had offered them up freely; every description of her home, her life outside of his void, had fled all too gladly from her mouth and into Xana's own collection and now she stumbled blindly through the darkness, unable to recall the life where she had been a real, human girl and not a lone avatar in a digital void.

"No!" she yelled. "Please! At least leave me something! Don't leave me alone here!"

I must. I am programmed to protect you. I have eliminated all other threats to your safety. What you do not know will not hurt you. Sleep, little elf.

She felt herself being cast down onto the platform, her legs giving way beneath her and her fingers curling in slightly as they scraped across the impossibly smooth surface. Rings lit up at her touch and then faded again, and she curled her legs inwards as though to stop any more of herself escaping. Somehow she had the sense of something coming full circle, as though she had made a long journey and reappeared suddenly where she had left off.

Even as she breached the edge of the platform it had happened; the gentle thud of her body connecting with its surface may as well have been a stone thrown into a mirror for the impact it made. The transitory illusion was shattered at last and Aelita saw it all then, in startling clarity, for what it was: Not the fairy tale she had imagined but another one, something much darker, and herein its three main elements:

A princess; a dungeon; a monster.

Do not leave this place.

Something leaned down to touch her forehead, snatching this last thought fresh from her mind, and then this too faded. The most precious information in all of Lyoko, Aelita's memories, and she had placed them all too willingly into the hands of her enemy.

And of that long stretch of time, the fear and the confusion and emptiness were all she took with her to waking when the knights arrived, ten years later, to wake her from her slumber.