Room 324, Saturday Early Evening

[wwiii]

Warren had just about had enough of... everything. After heading Karla off at the Causeway, after getting his bearings and picking himself off the ground and trudging back to his room, he'd done more... well, more moping with the rabbit. It wasn't until a few hours wore on that he reached for his phone, thinking maybe he'd call someone, or check to see if maybe there was new news about... anything at all, that he realized that there was a message waiting for him.

Not five minutes later, Warren's wings were pressed up solidly against either wall, his chest was heaving, and he was staring blankly at the remains of his phone, punctured clear through by his claws, and sitting splintered on the floor.

It wasn't like there was anybody left who was going to call him, after all.

Warren was done, damn it. He was just... fucking done with it.

[Open with some slight SP heads-up, since I'm still animating and running largely on energy drinks.]

Comments

[wwiii]

He hadn't, not really. His phone had suffered. Earlier in the day he'd cracked his knees against the ground pretty hard, and his shoulder had probably been busted when he'd tackled Karla to the ground. But it hardly mattered. He was in one piece now, and the only hurt he was feeling was that loss and guilt.

"I don't know if she'd... want to hear it put that way."

While at the same time he was pretty certain that she needed to.

[endsthegame]

Ender snorted.

"What Karla wants to hear and what she needs to hear are two fundamentally different things," he said, "But if you did go out and stop her, then you know this already."

And he was more than ruthless enough to go up to her and tell her this to her face until she got it through to her skull; poor girl if he caught her wallowing in self-pity.

[wwiii]

Part of Warren was kind of counting on that. Ender seemed, if not okay, then at least with it enough to be able to assess a situation and do what needed to be done.

He kind of envied him for that ability.

"Yeah. I know that... pretty intimately."

I hate you I hate you I hate you.

Deep breath.

"I just hope that now that she's safe, she can pull it together and make something of it."

[endsthegame]

Warren wouldn't envy him if he'd known what it had taken for Ender to master this ability.

But that was unimportant.

"I hope so too," Ender said, "And I'll check in with her about it later."

He watched Warren for another beat.

"I had been coming here to give you something to do," he said.

[wwiii]

Warren bit the inside of his cheek, tiredly looking up at Ender at that.

"If... if you have something. I mean... I've been just kind of..." He glanced around his room. It looked very thoroughly moped-about in. "Please?"

Distract him, Ender. Distract the hell out of him.

[endsthegame]

"It depends on what you want," Ender said. "If you want to pitch in with the rest of the researchers, we've mostly been poking around the magic section. Feats of biological mutation, on the other hand, remain largely undocumented."

He'd heard enough here and there about Warren's world - seen enough people from Warren's world - to know that in their world, mutated genetics didn't just mean extra appendages.

"If not, we can talk," he noted, "Or I can sic Ben on you. God knows he needs a distraction, too."

Whereas distractions would just drive Ender even further around the bend, especially with Jane gone and leaving him feeling extremely unbalanced.

[wwiii]

"I... wouldn't mind researching," he said, pausing for a moment to bite his lip. "I'd be looking at mutations that we have access to, I guess? With the portals down and the causeway busted, there... probably wouldn't be much of a point otherwise."

He tried again, uselessly, to sweep some of that phone aside with his foot again.

"Or I could talk. To you or to Ben or... whatever."

[endsthegame]

"There's probably some documentation on mutations in the library," Ender said. "But-- you also have your own expertise on the subject. Either could be a help."

He glanced down at Warren's feet, and the phone. "How about you start in on that tomorrow morning," he said, "And we clean that up right now, and we'll see what comes up. I'm told I"m not an entirely rotten conversationalist, though that's coming from Ben, so don't quote me on that."

[wwiii]

Looking into mutations. Warren had lost any and all access to his dad's massive amounts of information on the topic, but that didn't mean that he couldn't contribute something. Maybe if he expanded that research into other powers that were a result of physical alterations that didn't encompass magic or mutations in the most conventional sense...

"I'm not too worried about Ben being biased," he replied, shrugging as he crouched down and started picking up the bigger chunks of phone.

Yeah. Ruining his phone while he had no money to his name to replace it with had probably been a poor course of action. "The company is appreciated, though."

[endsthegame]

Ender joined him, picking up bits and pieces here and there.

"Good," he said, "I hate to outstay my welcome anywhere." He looked very faintly amused by that assertion. "How did it happen?"

He wasn't touching the subject of Sookie and Bobby right now. He was of the opinion that right now was the time to stay functioning, to work towards a solution, and when that solution came they'd see what there was to mourn.

He spent enough time thinking of Valentine anyway to know that enabling any more of it was a bad thing.

[wwiii]

"The phone?"

Warren had to clarify. He was still a little bit on the scatterminded side, his head swimming with Karla screaming vitriol at him, with Bobby's voice telling him not to let Thor eat too many carrots, with that damn recording on the phone telling him again and again and again, home was gone.

"Or..."?

[endsthegame]

"Karla," Ender supplied. "Unless you'd rather talk about the phone."

That wasn't a joke.

[wwiii]

That was probably for the best, really.

"I... She left the note, and I woke up and flew to the causeway just as she was about to step through," Warren explained, softly. "I asked her for one last hug. And I didn't let go until the portal was nearly shut."

Which had been all he could think of at the time. And it had cost him Karla. And that tore at his heart, but it was worth the cost. Absolutely.

[endsthegame]

Ender nodded, dropping a small pile of phone parts in the trash. "That can't have been easy."

[wwiii]

Warren shrugged a little. It hadn't been.

"She fought," he murmured as he followed Ender's lead, throwing his own handful of phone bits out. "Kicked and clawed and went for blood and cried and screamed."

[endsthegame]

"The unstoppable force meets the unmovable object," Ender mused. He went right back to picking up more scraps. "I take it the wounds on the outside are already gone."

Just checking. Honest.

[wwiii]

"I'm a fast healer," Warren replied, the wry twist to his lips not quite meeting his eyes. "Most of them were gone before I let go."

He'd been mostly unaware of just how viciously she'd been attacking him until he got back to the dorms and got a good look at himself.

[endsthegame]

Ender's mouth quirked right back. "Fast healer? I don't know about that," he said. "I can see the hammer you took to the face pretty clearly from here."

[wwiii]

So much for the attempt at a smile. His gaze fell, too, and his shoulders hitched slightly in a half-hearted shrug.

"Hammers are my secret weakness, I guess."

[endsthegame]

"I don't have to tell you that she's stubborn," Ender said, casting another handful of phone parts into the trash. "But I can tell you that she's wrong."

He slanted a look at Warren. "She's going to cool down eventually."

[wwiii]

"Eventually," Warren echoed, sighing and watching those phone bits scatter in with the rest of the garbage. "Maybe she'll even understand why I did it, how much of a waste it would have been if she'd gone."

Understanding and forgiveness weren't really the same thing, though.

[endsthegame]

"Might take a good blow to the head," said Ender, who had a track record of smacking Karla verbally over the head. "I can understand she's angry you took her choice away--"

Ender himself wouldn't have been too happy about that, either.

"--but her reasoning has frankly been stupid."

[wwiii]

Warren glanced back at Ender, chewing on his lip and looking fairly thoughtful before speaking up again.

"Do you think she would have listened, if I'd tried reason?"

He... doubted it. He really, really sincerely did. He'd attempted reason, and she'd been so strapped for time that she'd been hell-bent on ignoring anything he could think of to say.

"I could have handled it better, but I couldn't think. If... if she's going to keep holding that against me, I can't really blame her. She's alive, though. If she never looks at me again, it was still worth it."

[endsthegame]

Ender smiled a little at that; he couldn't quite help it.

"Sometimes, you just have to make a call," he said. "To take a risk to achieve an objective--" sometimes, he had trouble wiping the military from his vocabulary, don't mind him, "--or protect something worth protecting. And we can't all be so lucky to have that risk be something as simple as potential death or maiming."

[wwiii]

That got a little nod out of Warren, who was now resorting to picking the odd chip bag off the floor, or emptied water bottle, since he was already down there.

"I think it actually hurts more when I realize how little she thinks her life is really worth," he admitted. "She probably thinks I did this for myself, and... that's not... not quite what... I mean..."

Dammit, words.