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Ender's Game: "Richard the Third, Act Two, Scene Three, Line Sixteen" (2/2)
Title: Richard the Third, Act Two, Scene Three, Line Sixteen (2/2)
Author:![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
alixtii
Fandom: Ender’s Game
Rating: R
Pairings: Peter/Petra, Valentine/Petra, with overtones of Peter/Valentine and Ender/Valentine
Recipient:unrequitedangst
Request: "An AU -- remember Dink Meeker's theory? There really are no Buggers; it's all a giant conspiracy on the part of the International Fleet to control the world's population. Earth is somehow destroyed and the students are isolated on the Battle School station along with the few teachers that might be up there as well. (If you include slash or gen, go for it, but please nothing explicit -- the kids are kids, after all. Also, no chan.)"
Summary: If Valentine had to choose between world peace and her brother, she knew quite well which option she was going to choose.
Author’s Note: Passages in italics (and some dialogue elsewhere) are taken from the novel by Orson Scott Card. Thanks tofrogfarm for the beta.
Part One is here.
TWO: Battle School
Valentine Wiggin was used to being the youngest person in the room. She moved in the circles of high politics now, after all, a world of adults. And while she had earned the respect of so many of the people with whom she worked, still seldom was she ever able to forget that she was also a twelve-year-old girl.
So being loaded into a spaceship with a group of six-year-boys (with the random token girl thrown in here or there for good measure) was a strangely odd experience. It wasn’t often that she got to feel old.
And then the engines on the spaceship fired, and Valentine was jolted back in her seat, and waves of nausea washed over her. There was a terrible disorienting moment when down was no longer down. Peter, sitting in the seat next to hers, took her hand in his and gave it a light squeeze.
The rest of the flight, spent in zero-gravity, was relatively uneventful.
* * *
By the time they arrived at Battle School and were able to get to an ansible, Earth had already destroyed itself. It was a classic nuclear winter scenario: the soot and smoke created by the nuclear detonations had covered the planet almost completely, blocking out the sun and killing most life on the planet.
“It could have been worse,” Peter noted. “They could have gotten their hands on a Little Doctor. We should be able to return in a couple of years, see if anyone is still alive.”
“What about the three little boys who were left on Earth so that we could have their seats?”
“They were expendable,” Peter answered simply. “We aren’t.”
Our parents? Valentine wanted to ask, but didn’t. She already knew the answer.
Peter turned to Major Clarke, who had undergone the flight to Battle School with them in order to oversee their safety. “Did the Strategos make it off Earth?” he asked.
Major Clarke checked the desk, then shook her head. “No, sir. His spacecraft was targeted as it left Earth.”
Peter nodded. “Then that leaves us with the burden of command falling squarely on our shoulders. Come on, Val—we have a fleet to run.”
“No,” said Val, shaking her head. “There’s something I have to do first.”
* * *
Ender slammed his open hand against the wall and shouted. “I don’t care about the game anymore!” His voice echoed through the corridor. Boys from other armies came to their doors. He spoke quietly into the silence. “Do you understand that?” And he whispered. “The game is over.”
He walked back to his room alone. He had only been there for a few minutes when someone knocked on his door.
“Go away,” he said softly. Whoever was knocking didn’t hear him or didn’t care. Finally Ender said to come in.
It was Valentine. He didn’t know how or why, but it didn’t matter. It was her. “Hello, Ender,” she said.
He didn’t laugh or smile or wave or any of the other things he might have done if he were younger and less weary. He simply looked at her, never letting his eyes leave her face, and he knew that she understood that he was glad to see her.
“You’re bigger than I remembered,” she said.
“You too,” he answered. She would be—what? Twelve? Thirteen, now? Already her body had changed, taken on the graceful curves of womanhood. “I also remembered that you were beautiful.”
“Memory does play tricks on us,” she said.
Memory. So many memories, most of which he had forced himself not to remember while at Battle School; they were too painful. Getting into that car that had waited silently in the corridor, ready to take him to the first step on his way to Battle School, and hearing Valentine’s anguished cry: Come back to me! I love you forever!
“No,” he said. “Your face is the same.” He wasn’t sure he remembered what beautiful meant anymore.
* * *
“Miss Wiggin, Mr. Wiggin,” Colonel Graff greeted the two without warmth as they entered his office. “We meet again—although this time, I suppose, our positions are reversed. I wish we were meeting under happier circumstances.”
“I can think of no circumstances, Colonel Graff,” Valentine said, “under which I would be happy to meet you. I’ve just been to see Ender.”
“And you found him well, I trust.”
“You bastard,” Val said, her eyes narrowing. “You broke him. Did you enjoy running him into the ground?”
“Madame Hegemon,” Graff said. He spoke slowly, clearly carefully choosing his words as he went. “We were preparing for war—until the actions of you and your brother prematurely brought that war onto us and, in your own way, decisively ended it. Ender was to fight in that that war. We did what we considered necessary.”
“And what about what was right?” Valentine asked.
“Some things get sacrificed to the exigencies of war. I did what I thought best. Trust me to do my job, please, and I’ll let you do yours in equal peace.”
Valentine crossed her arms. “We are not accustomed to being treated like children, Colonel.”
“Believe me,” Graff said, “neither am I in the habit of underestimating children. If I were, I would not have done what I did. But that does not change the fact that you are, indeed, a little girl, Madame Hegemon.”
“And you—” Valentine stood simmering for a moment, then lost her temper. “You’re just—stupid and fat!” She walked out of the room in a huff.
Peter turned to Graff. “Don’t worry about her,” he said. “She can be a little idealistic.”
“And yet she speaks truth,” Graff noted. “I am both stupid—at least in comparison to her and yourself—and fat. And if you do not mind, Mr. Hegemon, I would rather just as well not have your moral approval.”
* * *
Valentine was taking a shower in the Officer’s Showers when Peter walked in, a towel wrapped around his waist. “What was that little tantrum about?” he asked as he turned on the showerhead next to hers and let it run.
There was nowhere to escape to, naked and wet and with her hair full of shampoo, so she had to answer his question. “You didn’t see Ender,” she informed her brother. “He was so . . . out of it. As if they had stolen his will to live.”
“Maybe Graff is right,” he said, hanging up his tower and stepping under the stream of hot water. “Sometimes war requires things that aren’t nice, but are nonetheless necessary.”
“The imaginary war against the buggers?”
“No, the real war—the one we made happen too soon. Maybe if we hadn’t intervened, Graff would have been able to train Ender into becoming the commander he needed, able to do something with the Warsaw Pact. Maybe Earth wouldn’t have been destroyed.”
We, he said, but he meant Valentine. He was blaming her for the destruction of Earth, the death of their parents. “Well, if this is who we’ve become, maybe Earth deserved to be destroyed,” she said. “Maybe there should have been buggers. I’m not sure that type of society deserves to exist.”
Peter looked at her thoughtfully. “That’s pretty close to treason, little sister.”
Val laughed darkly. “We’re the Hegemons, and Earth is destroyed. Who’s going to press charges?”
Finally having washed all the shampoo out of her hair, Valentine turned off the water of her shower. Stupid coed showers, she thought as she pulled her towel around herself.
Peter must have known what she was thinking, for he made a show of leering suggestively as she left. “Courtesy of women’s liberation, Val.”
* * *
Valentine noticed that lately Peter was spending a lot of time with Petra Arkanian, the Armenian girl who commanded Phoenix Army. Understandable, she supposed. Peter was fifteen years old now, after all, and the only people on Battle School their ages were the students.
But Val also noticed how Petra was moving more slowly of late, and would wince sometimes when she twisted a certain way. How she was sporting bruises that Val knew she hadn’t gotten in the Battle Room.
“I don’t see how what Petra and I do is any of your business, Val,” Peter told her when she confronted him.
“She’s a little girl,” argued Valentine.
“Have you looked into a mirror lately?” asked Peter. “You’re just a little girl, too, just as young as she is. And I’m just a boy—who happens to be in command of the International Fleet. And she’s the only girl who’s worth a shit around here, present company excepted. You volunteering to be my fuckbuddy, Sis?”
She had learned long ago how to ignore Peter’s vulgarity. “But you don’t have to break her like that.” Like they did Ender, she didn’t say. “You don’t have to hurt her.”
Peter sneered. “After all these years, you still don’t know me, do you Val? Don’t understand what I do or don’t have to do.”
* * *
Going to Petra didn’t work any better. She seemed to have the same opinion as Peter, worded even less delicately: what the two of them did together was none of her damned business. Understood?
“But why?” Val asked. “Why do you let him—”
Petra cut her off. “I still want to go to Command School,” she said, “and be in the fleet afterwards. I’ll be able to advance real far if I make an enemy of the Hegemon, neh?” She laughed, derisively.
“You deserve better,” Valentine insisted. “You deserve a friend.”
Petra looked at Valentine with a bemused look on her face. “This is Battle School,” she said at last. “There are no friends here.”
And Val looked into Petra’s eyes. The girl believed it, Val realized. She was yet another one of Graff’s casualties, broken and damaged by being forced to play that stupid game, continually denied even the least bit of compassion until she had finally forgotten what it had meant to feel. And before Valentine even knew what she was doing, she kissed her.
Petra, for whatever reason, kissed her back.
* * *
Next time he saw her, Peter was triumphant. He already knew, of course—whatever it was, Peter always knew. “No wonder you were so interested in what Petra and I did together. Probably just wanted to get in on the action yourself.”
He looked thoughtful. “Was that it?” he asked. “Just wanted to fuck her yourself? Well, I don’t mind sharing. You can have her too. Hell, you can join in with us if you want—but then you have to play by our rules.”
“I didn’t—” Val broke off. That wasn’t the point. “Peter, she’s a human being.”
Peter nodded. “That’s your problem, Valentine. Always afraid to hurt another human being. Well, that’s what human beings do—we hurt other human beings. Just by living, by breathing, by not being good enough or by being too good. We can’t help it.
“And some people like to be hurt. You should understand that well enough—you go for it enough yourself. Oh, suffering Valentine, always so giving of herself. You get off on it, don’t you? Why else would you have stayed with me so long?”
“I love you, Peter,” Val said. “Ender loves you. You’re our brother.”
Peter only stared back and didn’t say anything, and Valentine began to cry. Maybe Petra was right, after all.
Fin
Author:
alixtiiFandom: Ender’s Game
Rating: R
Pairings: Peter/Petra, Valentine/Petra, with overtones of Peter/Valentine and Ender/Valentine
Recipient:
unrequitedangstRequest: "An AU -- remember Dink Meeker's theory? There really are no Buggers; it's all a giant conspiracy on the part of the International Fleet to control the world's population. Earth is somehow destroyed and the students are isolated on the Battle School station along with the few teachers that might be up there as well. (If you include slash or gen, go for it, but please nothing explicit -- the kids are kids, after all. Also, no chan.)"
Summary: If Valentine had to choose between world peace and her brother, she knew quite well which option she was going to choose.
Author’s Note: Passages in italics (and some dialogue elsewhere) are taken from the novel by Orson Scott Card. Thanks to
frogfarm for the beta.Part One is here.
TWO: Battle School
Valentine Wiggin was used to being the youngest person in the room. She moved in the circles of high politics now, after all, a world of adults. And while she had earned the respect of so many of the people with whom she worked, still seldom was she ever able to forget that she was also a twelve-year-old girl.
So being loaded into a spaceship with a group of six-year-boys (with the random token girl thrown in here or there for good measure) was a strangely odd experience. It wasn’t often that she got to feel old.
And then the engines on the spaceship fired, and Valentine was jolted back in her seat, and waves of nausea washed over her. There was a terrible disorienting moment when down was no longer down. Peter, sitting in the seat next to hers, took her hand in his and gave it a light squeeze.
The rest of the flight, spent in zero-gravity, was relatively uneventful.
* * *
By the time they arrived at Battle School and were able to get to an ansible, Earth had already destroyed itself. It was a classic nuclear winter scenario: the soot and smoke created by the nuclear detonations had covered the planet almost completely, blocking out the sun and killing most life on the planet.
“It could have been worse,” Peter noted. “They could have gotten their hands on a Little Doctor. We should be able to return in a couple of years, see if anyone is still alive.”
“What about the three little boys who were left on Earth so that we could have their seats?”
“They were expendable,” Peter answered simply. “We aren’t.”
Our parents? Valentine wanted to ask, but didn’t. She already knew the answer.
Peter turned to Major Clarke, who had undergone the flight to Battle School with them in order to oversee their safety. “Did the Strategos make it off Earth?” he asked.
Major Clarke checked the desk, then shook her head. “No, sir. His spacecraft was targeted as it left Earth.”
Peter nodded. “Then that leaves us with the burden of command falling squarely on our shoulders. Come on, Val—we have a fleet to run.”
“No,” said Val, shaking her head. “There’s something I have to do first.”
* * *
Ender slammed his open hand against the wall and shouted. “I don’t care about the game anymore!” His voice echoed through the corridor. Boys from other armies came to their doors. He spoke quietly into the silence. “Do you understand that?” And he whispered. “The game is over.”
He walked back to his room alone. He had only been there for a few minutes when someone knocked on his door.
“Go away,” he said softly. Whoever was knocking didn’t hear him or didn’t care. Finally Ender said to come in.
It was Valentine. He didn’t know how or why, but it didn’t matter. It was her. “Hello, Ender,” she said.
He didn’t laugh or smile or wave or any of the other things he might have done if he were younger and less weary. He simply looked at her, never letting his eyes leave her face, and he knew that she understood that he was glad to see her.
“You’re bigger than I remembered,” she said.
“You too,” he answered. She would be—what? Twelve? Thirteen, now? Already her body had changed, taken on the graceful curves of womanhood. “I also remembered that you were beautiful.”
“Memory does play tricks on us,” she said.
Memory. So many memories, most of which he had forced himself not to remember while at Battle School; they were too painful. Getting into that car that had waited silently in the corridor, ready to take him to the first step on his way to Battle School, and hearing Valentine’s anguished cry: Come back to me! I love you forever!
“No,” he said. “Your face is the same.” He wasn’t sure he remembered what beautiful meant anymore.
* * *
“Miss Wiggin, Mr. Wiggin,” Colonel Graff greeted the two without warmth as they entered his office. “We meet again—although this time, I suppose, our positions are reversed. I wish we were meeting under happier circumstances.”
“I can think of no circumstances, Colonel Graff,” Valentine said, “under which I would be happy to meet you. I’ve just been to see Ender.”
“And you found him well, I trust.”
“You bastard,” Val said, her eyes narrowing. “You broke him. Did you enjoy running him into the ground?”
“Madame Hegemon,” Graff said. He spoke slowly, clearly carefully choosing his words as he went. “We were preparing for war—until the actions of you and your brother prematurely brought that war onto us and, in your own way, decisively ended it. Ender was to fight in that that war. We did what we considered necessary.”
“And what about what was right?” Valentine asked.
“Some things get sacrificed to the exigencies of war. I did what I thought best. Trust me to do my job, please, and I’ll let you do yours in equal peace.”
Valentine crossed her arms. “We are not accustomed to being treated like children, Colonel.”
“Believe me,” Graff said, “neither am I in the habit of underestimating children. If I were, I would not have done what I did. But that does not change the fact that you are, indeed, a little girl, Madame Hegemon.”
“And you—” Valentine stood simmering for a moment, then lost her temper. “You’re just—stupid and fat!” She walked out of the room in a huff.
Peter turned to Graff. “Don’t worry about her,” he said. “She can be a little idealistic.”
“And yet she speaks truth,” Graff noted. “I am both stupid—at least in comparison to her and yourself—and fat. And if you do not mind, Mr. Hegemon, I would rather just as well not have your moral approval.”
* * *
Valentine was taking a shower in the Officer’s Showers when Peter walked in, a towel wrapped around his waist. “What was that little tantrum about?” he asked as he turned on the showerhead next to hers and let it run.
There was nowhere to escape to, naked and wet and with her hair full of shampoo, so she had to answer his question. “You didn’t see Ender,” she informed her brother. “He was so . . . out of it. As if they had stolen his will to live.”
“Maybe Graff is right,” he said, hanging up his tower and stepping under the stream of hot water. “Sometimes war requires things that aren’t nice, but are nonetheless necessary.”
“The imaginary war against the buggers?”
“No, the real war—the one we made happen too soon. Maybe if we hadn’t intervened, Graff would have been able to train Ender into becoming the commander he needed, able to do something with the Warsaw Pact. Maybe Earth wouldn’t have been destroyed.”
We, he said, but he meant Valentine. He was blaming her for the destruction of Earth, the death of their parents. “Well, if this is who we’ve become, maybe Earth deserved to be destroyed,” she said. “Maybe there should have been buggers. I’m not sure that type of society deserves to exist.”
Peter looked at her thoughtfully. “That’s pretty close to treason, little sister.”
Val laughed darkly. “We’re the Hegemons, and Earth is destroyed. Who’s going to press charges?”
Finally having washed all the shampoo out of her hair, Valentine turned off the water of her shower. Stupid coed showers, she thought as she pulled her towel around herself.
Peter must have known what she was thinking, for he made a show of leering suggestively as she left. “Courtesy of women’s liberation, Val.”
* * *
Valentine noticed that lately Peter was spending a lot of time with Petra Arkanian, the Armenian girl who commanded Phoenix Army. Understandable, she supposed. Peter was fifteen years old now, after all, and the only people on Battle School their ages were the students.
But Val also noticed how Petra was moving more slowly of late, and would wince sometimes when she twisted a certain way. How she was sporting bruises that Val knew she hadn’t gotten in the Battle Room.
“I don’t see how what Petra and I do is any of your business, Val,” Peter told her when she confronted him.
“She’s a little girl,” argued Valentine.
“Have you looked into a mirror lately?” asked Peter. “You’re just a little girl, too, just as young as she is. And I’m just a boy—who happens to be in command of the International Fleet. And she’s the only girl who’s worth a shit around here, present company excepted. You volunteering to be my fuckbuddy, Sis?”
She had learned long ago how to ignore Peter’s vulgarity. “But you don’t have to break her like that.” Like they did Ender, she didn’t say. “You don’t have to hurt her.”
Peter sneered. “After all these years, you still don’t know me, do you Val? Don’t understand what I do or don’t have to do.”
* * *
Going to Petra didn’t work any better. She seemed to have the same opinion as Peter, worded even less delicately: what the two of them did together was none of her damned business. Understood?
“But why?” Val asked. “Why do you let him—”
Petra cut her off. “I still want to go to Command School,” she said, “and be in the fleet afterwards. I’ll be able to advance real far if I make an enemy of the Hegemon, neh?” She laughed, derisively.
“You deserve better,” Valentine insisted. “You deserve a friend.”
Petra looked at Valentine with a bemused look on her face. “This is Battle School,” she said at last. “There are no friends here.”
And Val looked into Petra’s eyes. The girl believed it, Val realized. She was yet another one of Graff’s casualties, broken and damaged by being forced to play that stupid game, continually denied even the least bit of compassion until she had finally forgotten what it had meant to feel. And before Valentine even knew what she was doing, she kissed her.
Petra, for whatever reason, kissed her back.
* * *
Next time he saw her, Peter was triumphant. He already knew, of course—whatever it was, Peter always knew. “No wonder you were so interested in what Petra and I did together. Probably just wanted to get in on the action yourself.”
He looked thoughtful. “Was that it?” he asked. “Just wanted to fuck her yourself? Well, I don’t mind sharing. You can have her too. Hell, you can join in with us if you want—but then you have to play by our rules.”
“I didn’t—” Val broke off. That wasn’t the point. “Peter, she’s a human being.”
Peter nodded. “That’s your problem, Valentine. Always afraid to hurt another human being. Well, that’s what human beings do—we hurt other human beings. Just by living, by breathing, by not being good enough or by being too good. We can’t help it.
“And some people like to be hurt. You should understand that well enough—you go for it enough yourself. Oh, suffering Valentine, always so giving of herself. You get off on it, don’t you? Why else would you have stayed with me so long?”
“I love you, Peter,” Val said. “Ender loves you. You’re our brother.”
Peter only stared back and didn’t say anything, and Valentine began to cry. Maybe Petra was right, after all.
Fin
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Thank you!
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(Anonymous) 2007-02-02 11:22 pm (UTC)(link)no subject
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Question: is there a reason this fic isn't accesible? The Whipping Girl?
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*loves Val and Peter so much*
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