2Disclaimer: I don't own Ender's Game or any similar stories, or The Hunger Games.
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See Ender—brilliant, beautiful in the classical sense of sharp edges and haunting eyes, unbeaten.
Or so they say in the Capitol these days, when he passes in the corridors with all the substance of a ghost, flitting from room to room with his eyes seeing everything others miss.
I'll tell you the truth, the true story of when Ender broke beyond repair, of the days when the fractures split down his skin and his mind and his heart, and they used weak putty to bind together the broken pieces of boy.
But the Capitol doesn't ask it's Victors to be whole or sane, only present and pretty. It asks them to endure and survive at any and every cost.
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So let's start at the beginning, when Ender's sister Valentine buttons his shirt from the bottom up and ends with a kiss on his forehead.
"They won't pick you." She whispers. He's so young and so slight, but he's been dreading this day since the day his bright eyes watched Peter walk, stiff-backed, up the stairs that lead to the stage and then beyond into the train that would take him to the Capitol. For weeks he sat, curled around Valentine's side, watching Peter fight in the ring, killing people. Eventually he won, snapping another child's neck with both hands and a cold glance backwards, and Ender didn't know whether to be happy or not that Peter had survived, family or not.
"The arena does that to people," his father said loudly over dinner that night, as if talking about a change in diet or habits.
Valentine smashed a pea under her fork because she knew, and Ender knew, that Peter had been a monster since long before the ring, and she knew that she would do everything she could to avoid ending up in that ring herself because she would slip down that slippery trail of blood and instinct just as quickly.
Not Ender, though, she whispered to herself as she lay down in her thing, cold bed. Ender's better than either of us.
And he was, Ender, but that didn't make him good.
"They might pick me." Ender responded. So young, and already he knew how the system worked—while it was still the childhood years of the Hunger Games, all the children themselves were beginning to understand what this meant for them, and Ender was far from ordinary. Even amongst the District III children, he was advanced enough to see that the District was small enough and the government corrupt enough to pick the small, clever boy who'd give a good show in the arena.
The air rang with an unusual tenor, a tremulous shiver cast through the smoky atmosphere, immediately after the announcement.
"Ender Wiggins." The man, skin emboldened with patterns of zigzags as harsh as his expression, read off the cleanly folded paper.
Ender became acutely aware of everything in that moment. He heard the breathing of the crowd of boys around him, of the distant churning of the smokestacks, of his own heartbeat pounding a trapped-bird's wing beat in his ribcage.
This is it. This is Ender's first choice, and he sees it as clearly as the back and forward buttons on his computer at home.
Rather than let himself be dragged up on the stage, crying like the child he is, he braces his back in a rod-straight line and swallows hard, and walks up to the presenting area with as long of strides as he can reasonably take.
The metal of the stairs creaked under his boots, and one of those boots was coming untied.
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"This is where you will learn, and train." After a day and a half of traveling on a train that Ender wasn't allowed to investigate, of not speaking to the tall, older girl who represented the other half of III's Tribute, he arrived in the Capitol. Peter was his mentor, of course, but Peter couldn't manage to teach Ender the coldness that he had let soak into his heart for self-preservation.
It was clean, and startlingly white. It was rigorous and defined and starkly edged, like blades in the corners and the stars and the other children who sized him up and wrote him off as Not-A-Threat, and he drank it up like nourishment. It fueled his desire to win, the desire that surrounded every nerve in his body.
That first day, he did nothing but watch the other Tributes. He saw them train and learned how to do things like shoot, swing a sword, throw a knife, by nothing more than watching the way they tensed their muscles. Also—and more importantly—he learned how they worked, the Tributes. He memorized their faces (not their names, never their names) and what they were good at, what they were bad at. There were a couple who tried to be sneaky by pretending to be bad at stuff, but the way they held themselves and twitched betrayed them as better than that.
"What are you doing?" He approached Ender, leaning on the wall that seeped the warmth out of his body, and crossed his arms. His name was Bonzo, with a long 'o' like the word 'bone', and he asked not like he was curious, but like he wanted Ender to affirm his idea that he was harmless.
"Giving up." Ender lied calmly.
Ender didn't give up. He spent a total of ten minutes feeling the way a knife tugged at his fingers and determined that he could use it, lethally, if the need the arose. He didn't think it would. The problem—always the problem—was that he was smarter than these others, but couldn't beat them physically.
He didn't need to.
Ender's fight in the arena was bloody and brutal. If you are that interested in it, you can see it in the archives they keep of each year's Hunger Games, tucked in the upper back of a shelf and covered in a fine layer of dust like all the other earlier Games.
I won't tell that story here, as that would take a lot more time than I have now to do it justice, to make you understand the terror that hovers in the back of children's brains, the lives lost in painful, horrible ways, the stories that tear at the back of my throat as I speak them. I'll be brief, for your sakes and mine, and tell you only what you need to know. If you want to indulge this sacrilege on what it means to be human, then go get the clearance to see the recorded version.
Right off the pedestal in the arena, Ender was recruited, and started out in the Career pack as something of the brains behind the operation. His first kill was one Stilson, and that was the only name he remembered from the Games. He worked with the careers until they realized that they didn't need him anymore, and tried to get rid of him, not realizing that Ender always knew their plans before they did. He took off like a thief into the night, and they were left to do what they did best—kill.
Then came the day that nearly every other person was dead except for Ender and two careers, and it finally struck those two right between the eyes that Ender's face had yet to appear in the sky with the sound of a cannon, and that they had made a mistake.
By that point, a grizzled man with a belt of softness around his middle turned to his underlings in the Gamemaker's Headquarters and ordered one bottle to be dropped into the ring.
Ender Wiggins broke his arm retrieving that bottle, but it was something he desperately needed. As he sat with his back to the most obvious camera and slowly worked out a plan in the dirt, another camera fixed on his unhappy eyes, and Head Gamemaker Graff felt his stomach turn and his mouth twitch up in a smile, and hoped those Careers knew how to run.
It was too late for running. With a small, unused knife and a bottle of nitroglycerine compound, he took out both careers in their slumber.
Of course, it cost him some shrapnel in his stomach, but at that point he was a Victor and Victor's get taken care of once they're out of the Games.
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That was the first night he discovered he couldn't sleep, when he gnawed on his hand in the dead of night until it was bloody, and he shook with the realization that he couldn't leave the arena, even after all he'd done to escape.
He wandered the corridor for a while. He was just twelve, still a child, and he was still shaking down to his bones for the fear that had begun to root.
That year was a year of emptiness.
Months of not thinking, not feeling. Ender let the despair fall through his legs and his feet into the ground where he walked, into the stages of various Districts who had lost loved ones he had never bothered to learn the names of.
In one of those Districts he met Petra, of District II, and Dink, of District V. Petra was tall and stately and not even especially pretty, which is unusual for that district, but he likes her. She didn't talk a lot and she shot straight, which is how she won the title of Victor that everyone hoped she would (but didn't expect). Dink was tall, too, and if he wasn't as stately as Petra he was surely more intimidating at first glance. That's what made them a good team and a good shoulder to lean on, in as much as Ender could ever lean on another human being.
In that year, Ender learned he could never lean on another human being.
Peter would hurt him with sharp eyes and fingers whenever they passed, having to stay and watch his brother on all days, watch the cameras pan over the 'brilliant' Tribute from III and feel the jealousy and hurt curdle within him.
Valentine wanted to love him, and wanted to help, but she was never Reaped and never had to fight like he did, or at least he thought at that point. It was like she wanted to brush back his ever-growing hair with one tender hand, while typing on the keypad she always kept with the other, looking down at it concernedly.
Eventually there came Alai, who was the Victor the year after Ender, and he was a shoulder to lean on the first time Ender fully broke down, breaking walls, screaming in fury and anguish for the life that was being twisted beyond recognition around him.
'Salaam.' Alai whispered softly to Ender, and the pressure that was building like an overloaded socket in him broke and began to seep away.
Alai died that summer of a fallen tree in the middle of the road, one of the first of many accidents over the years that were triggered by someone up high disagreeing with a misplaced word and deciding that the world would not overly-mourn the loss of one Victor.
And maybe the world didn't. Maybe it was only Ender who locked himself away with the flimsy faxed note telling him what had (supposedly) happened, crying salt stains into the paper and the sheets. Maybe Ender was the only one who mourned, repeating the word 'salaam, salaam, salaam' in his head until the word lost all meaning, until it was nothing but a string of noises.
Bean won the year after that, the year Ender didn't watch. The Tribute he trained died very early, but later than Peter's, as if it was a competition to see who suffered the most before the killing blow.
Ender did notice the waste-thin shred of a boy, wandering the halls like he once did.
He survived, one part of Ender noted in an uncharacteristically slow manner. Not really, he added, as his brain sped back up.
"Here." Ender stepped out from behind the wall and led the shorter boy back down the hallway. "Let me show you something."
Ender took Bean out past the bathrooms filled with acidly-bright walls, to a foot length-thin balcony with an icy railing.
"Stars." Bean said quietly, wonderingly, and Ender didn't nod because Bean would have to say something a little more impressive.
"Stars." He agreed anyway after seeing the way the kid looked at the sky like it was a miracle he never though he'd be afforded.
Bean, from District II, never had a mentor worth anything as the only other living Victor was entirely insane. Ender took it upon himself to teach Bean the ropes of being a Victor, which was a lot more difficult than the ropes of being a Tribute.
Say this. Don't say this. Be handsome. Don't be too handsome, because while we are still young the Capitol doesn't consider age to be a shield. Don't get attached. Don't fall apart.
Ender was very careful not to break the rules, and it didn't help him.
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Petra was the first to go, falling to pieces when her Tributes slaughtered each other, one of them her own child.
Ender visited her, once. Bean visited her more frequently, mourning the loss of both his child and his friend, the friend he loved less than he should have and hated himself for. Peter visited her most of all, leaving Ender and Valentine gaping in his wake when he held her hand and talked her away from the dark, towards his dark.
Dink stopped interacting with them, any of them. He came, he taught his Tributes, he watched them either live or die, and he vanished until the next year. Ender tried to find him, to find the invisible man in the world of cubbyholes, but Dink knew Ender well enough by then to know where to hide from him.
Bean turned up every year, and he would stand, arms crossed, on the train platform for when Ender turned up a couple of hours later. Nods exchanged and off to try to keep children alive, in the worst possible way, in a way that ate at their hearts and souls and minds.
In a way, it made sense that Bean would be the one to find Ender on the 'last day'.
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"Ender?" Bean reached out one hand—skin stretched over knuckles, belaying how many years had spent since the day he'd arrived at the Capitol as a Tribute himself—to push open the door with a well-devised hissing noise of hinges designed to avoid sharp pieces.
Ender was curled in a ball, so tiny that it took Bean a moment to find. He was tucked behind the door and hiding, like a lost deer in the woods, like a lost child even though he had left that age behind a long time ago.
"Oh, Ender." Bean muttered breathily as he leaned down and tugged all of Ender's long, thin weight onto his side, so he could drag him back towards the bed.
Bean carefully lowered Ender's head towards the bed, pulling the pillows down instead of trying to slide Ender farther up. Ender kept clenching and unclenching his fists, staring at the ceiling unseeing, and Bean could only wonder what it was, at long last, that broke the camel's back. He pressed a gentle kiss to Ender's mouth, just a brush as a reminder that there were still humans among them who cared.
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Three weeks was how long Ender was like that. Then, he started to get better, to walk around, to speak and move and smile at little things, inside jokes with himself, but then something would set him off and he'd tuck himself into a corner and write complicated equations on the walls. It was an endless loop of better, not better, better, that Bean treaded along with him.
Not to say Bean didn't have his own struggles, his own endless trip up a mountain with a rock in front of him, his own indoctrination as a modern-age Sisyphus. Every year he taught children whose faces began to blur, and every day they haunted him with whispers in the shadows, unrelenting ghosts that he fought off by reciting poetry.
After that year's Games, Bean had to practically fight off the officials who wanted Ender 'relocated', like Petra, to somewhere where he'd be 'safe'.
Ender was a Victor. He was never safe. Bean didn't say as much, but it was clear the men read it in his stance and they backed off, arms raised, with tense jaws and warning looks.
Ender came back to II, with Bean. They shared a house there, a house filled with pigeon-holes for hiding with wall carved up with strings of numbers and formulas, and air filled with strings of words that lost meaning as Bean recited them.
It was enough, for those two, for that time.
Victors didn't get happy endings, but they got to see the miracle of stars occasionally, and that's a life for a pair of pawns in a game.
See Ender, broken pawn, still brilliant and beautiful.
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A/N: Like the miracle of words that speak images into your mind? Let me know.
Tobi.